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THE WEB OF LIFE

BY

ROBERT HERRICK

AUTHOR OF "THE GOSPEL OF FREEDOM," "THE MAN WHO WINS," "LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS AND OTHER STORIES"

TO G. R. C.

"Hear from the spirit world this mystery:
Creation is summed up, O man, in thee;
Angel and demon, man and beast, art thou,
Yea, thou art all thou dost appear to be!"

THE WEB OF LIFE

PART I

CHAPTER I

The young surgeon examined the man as he lay on the hospital chair in which ward attendants had left him. The surgeon's fingers touched him deftly, here and there, as if to test the endurance of the flesh he had to deal with. The head nurse followed his swift movements, wearily moving an incandescent light hither and thither, observing the surgeon with languid interest. Another nurse, much younger, without the "black band," watched the surgeon from the foot of the cot. Beads of perspiration chased themselves down her pale face, caused less by sympathy than by sheer weariness and heat. The small receiving room of St. Isidore's was close and stuffy, surcharged with odors of iodoform and ether. The Chicago spring, so long delayed, had blazed with a sudden fury the last week in March, and now at ten o'clock not a capful of air strayed into the room, even through the open windows that faced the lake.

The patient groaned when the surgeon's fingers first touched him, then relapsed into the spluttering, labored respiration of a man in liquor or in heavy pain. A stolid young man who carried the case of instruments freshly steaming from their antiseptic bath made an observation which the surgeon apparently did not hear. He was thinking, now, his thin face set in a frown, the upper teeth biting hard over the under lip and drawing up the pointed beard. While he thought, he watched the man extended on the chair, watched him like an alert cat, to extract from him some hint as to what he should do. This absorption seemed to ignore completely the other occupants of the room, of whom he was the central, commanding figure. The head nurse held the lamp carelessly, resting her hand over one hip thrown out, her figure drooping into an ungainly pose. She gazed at the surgeon steadily, as if puzzled at his intense preoccupation over the common case of a man "shot in a row." Her eyes travelled over the surgeon's neat-fitting evening dress, which was so bizarre here in the dingy receiving room, redolent of bloody tasks. Evidently he had been out to some dinner or party, and when the injured man was brought in had merely donned his rumpled linen jacket with its right sleeve half torn from the socket. A spot of blood had already spurted into the white bosom of his shirt, smearing its way over the pearl button, and running under the crisp fold of the shirt. The head nurse was too tired and listless to be impatient, but she had been called out of hours on this emergency case, and she was not used to the surgeon's preoccupation. Such things usually went off rapidly at St. Isidore's, and she could hear the tinkle of the bell as the hall door opened for another case. It would be midnight before she could get back to bed! The hospital was short-handed, as usual.

The younger nurse was not watching the patient, nor the good-looking young surgeon, who seemed to be the special property of her superior. Even in her few months of training she had learned to keep herself calm and serviceable, and not to let her mind speculate idly. She was gazing out of the window into the dull night. Some locomotives in the railroad yards just outside were puffing lazily, breathing themselves deeply in the damp, spring air. One hoarser note than the others struck familiarly on the nurse's ear. That was the voice of the engine on the ten-thirty through express, which was waiting to take its train to the east. She knew that engine's throb, for it was the engine that stood in the yards every evening while she made her first rounds for the night. It was the one which took her train round the southern end of the lake, across the sandy fields, to Michigan, to her home.

The engine puffed away, and she withdrew her gaze and glanced at the patient. To her, too, the wounded man was but a case, another error of humanity that had come to St. Isidore's for temporary repairs, to start once more on its erring course, or, perhaps, to go forth unfinished, remanded just there to death. The ten-thirty express was now pulling out through the yards in a powerful clamor of clattering switches and hearty pulsations that shook the flimsy walls of St. Isidore's, and drew new groans from the man on the chair. The young nurse's eyes travelled from him to a woman who stood behind the ward tenders, shielded by them and the young interne from the group about the hospital chair. This woman, having no uniform of any sort, must be some one who had come in with the patient, and had stayed unobserved in the disorder of a night case.

Suddenly the surgeon spoke; his words shot out at the head nurse.

"We will operate now!"

The interne shrugged his shoulders, but he busied himself in selecting and wiping the instruments. Yet in spite of his decisive words the surgeon seemed to hesitate.

"Was there any one with this man,—any friend?" he asked the head nurse.

In reply she looked around vaguely, her mind thrown out of gear by this unexpected delay. Another freak of the handsome surgeon!

"Any relative or friend?" the surgeon iterated peremptorily, looking about at the attendants.

The little nurse at the foot of the patient, who was not impressed by the irregularity of the surgeon's request, pointed mutely to the figure behind the ward tenders. The surgeon wheeled about and glanced almost savagely at the woman, his eyes travelling swiftly from her head to her feet. The woman thus directly questioned by the comprehending glance returned his look freely, resentfully. At last when the surgeon's eyes rested once more on her face, this time more gently, she answered:

"I am his wife."

This statement in some way humanized the scene. The ward tenders and the interne stared at her blankly; the nurses looked down in unconscious comment on the twisted figure by their side. The surgeon drew his hands from his pockets and stepped toward the woman, questioning her meanwhile with his nervous, piercing glance. For a moment neither spoke, but some kind of mute explanation seemed to be going on between them.

She kept her face level with his, revealing it bravely, perhaps defiantly. Its tense expression, with a few misery-laden lines, answered back to the inquiry of the nonchalant outsiders: 'Yes, I am his wife, his wife, the wife of the object over there, brought here to the hospital, shot in a saloon brawl.' And the surgeon's face, alive with a new preoccupation, seemed to reply: 'Yes, I know! You need not pain yourself by telling me.'

The patient groaned again, and the surgeon came back at once to the urgent present—the case. He led the way to one side, and turning his back upon the group of assistants he spoke to the woman in low tones.

"This man, your husband, is pretty badly off. He's got at least two bullets in bad places. There isn't much chance for him—in his condition," he explained brusquely, as if to reconcile his unusual procedure with business-like methods.

"But I should operate," he continued; "I shall operate unless there are objections—unless you object."

His customary imperious manner was struggling with a special feeling for this woman before him. She did not reply, but waited to hear where her part might come in. Her eyes did not fall from his face.

"There's a chance," the surgeon went on, "that a certain operation now will bring him around all right. But to-morrow will be too late."

His words thus far had something foolish in them, and her eyes seemed to say so. If it was the only chance, and his custom was to operate in such cases,—if he would have operated had she not been there, why did he go through this explanation?

"There may be——complications in his recovery," he said at last, in low tones. "The recovery may not be complete."

She did not seem to understand, and the surgeon frowned at his failure, after wrenching from himself this frankness. The idea, the personal idea that he had had to put out of his mind so often in operating in hospital cases,—that it made little difference whether, indeed, it might be a great deal wiser if the operation turned out fatally,—possessed his mind. Could she be realizing that, too, in her obstinate silence? He tried another explanation.

"If we do not operate, he will probably have a few hours of consciousness—if you had something to say to him?"

Her face flushed. He humiliated her. He must know that she had nothing to say to him, as well as if he had known the whole story.

"We could make him comfortable, and who knows, to-morrow might not be too late!" The surgeon ended irritably, impatient at the unprofessional frankness of his words, and disgusted that he had taken this woman into his confidence. Did she want him to say: 'See here, there's only one chance in a thousand that we can save that carcass; and if he gets that chance, it may not be a whole one—do you care enough for him to run that dangerous risk?' But she obstinately kept her own counsel. The professional manner that he ridiculed so often was apparently useful in just such cases as this. It covered up incompetence and hypocrisy often enough, but one could not be human and straightforward with women and fools. And women and fools made up the greater part of a doctor's business.

Yet the voice that said, "I am his wife," rang through his mind and suggested doubts. Under the miserable story that he had instinctively imaged, there probably lay some tender truth.

"There's a chance, you see!" he resumed more tenderly, probing her for an evidence. "All any of us have, except that he is not in a condition for an operation."

This time her mouth quivered. She was struggling for words. "Why do you ask me?" she gasped. "What—" but her voice failed her.

"I should operate," the surgeon replied gently, anticipating her question.
"I, we should think it better that way, only sometimes relatives object."

He thought that he had probed true and had found what he was after.

"It is a chance," she said audibly, finding her voice. "You must do what you think—best. I have nothing to say to him. You need not delay for that."

"Very well," the surgeon replied, relieved that his irregular confidence had resulted in the conventional decision, and that he had not brought on himself a responsibility shared with her. "You had best step into the office. You can do no good here."

Then, dismissing the unusual from his mind, he stepped quickly back to the patient. The younger nurse was bathing the swollen, sodden face with apiece of gauze; the head nurse, annoyed at the delay, bustled about, preparing the dressings under the direction of the interne.

The wife had not obeyed the doctor's direction to leave the room, however, and remained at the window, staring out into the soft night. At last, when the preparations were completed, the younger nurse came and touched her. "You can sit in the office, next door; they may be some time," she urged gently.

As the woman turned to follow the nurse, the surgeon glanced at her once more. He was conscious of her calm tread, her admirable self-control. The sad, passive face with its broad, white brow was the face of a woman who was just waking to terrible facts, who was struggling to comprehend a world that had caught her unawares. She had removed her hat and was carrying it loosely in her hand that had fallen to her side. Her hair swept back in two waves above the temples with a simplicity that made the head distinguished. Even the nurses' caps betrayed stray curls or rolls. Her figure was large, and the articulation was perfect as she walked, showing that she had had the run of fields in her girlhood. Yet she did not stoop as is the habit of country girls; nor was there any unevenness of physique due to hard, manual labor.

As she passed the huddle of human flesh stretched out in the wheel-chair, a wave of color swept over her face. Then she looked up to the surgeon and seemed to speak to him, as to the one human being in a world of puppets. 'You understand; you understand. It is terrible!'

The surgeon's brown eyes answered hers, but he was puzzled. Had he probed her aright? It was one of those intimate moments that come to nervously organized people, when the petty detail of acquaintanceship and fact is needless, when each one stands nearly confessed to the other. And then she left the room.

The surgeon proceeded without a word, working intently, swiftly, dexterously. At first the head nurse was too busy in handling bowls and holding instruments to think, even professionally, of the operation. The interne, however, gazed in admiration, emitting exclamations of delight as the surgeon rapidly took one step after another. Then he was sent for something, and the head nurse, her chief duties performed, drew herself upright for a breath, and her keen, little black eyes noticed an involuntary tremble, a pause, an uncertainty at a critical moment in the doctor's tense arm. A wilful current of thought had disturbed his action. The sharp head nurse wondered if Dr. Sommers had had any wine that evening, but she dismissed this suspicion scornfully, as slander against the ornament of the Surgical Ward of St. Isidore's. He was tired: the languid summer air thus early in the year would shake any man's nerve. But the head nurse understood well that such a wavering of will or muscle must not occur again, or the hairbreadth chance the drunken fellow had——

She watched that bared arm, her breath held. The long square fingers closed once more with a firm grip on the instrument. "Miss Lemoris, some No. 3 gauze." Then not a sound until the thing was done, and the surgeon had turned away to cleanse his hands in the bowl of purple antiseptic wash.

"My!" the head nurse exclaimed, "Dr. Trip ain't in it." But the surgeon's face wore a preoccupied, sombre look, irresponsive to the nurse's admiration. While she helped the interne with the complicated dressing, the little nurse made ready for removal to the ward. Then when one of the ward tenders had wheeled the muffled figure into the corridor, she hurried across to the office.

"It's all over," she whispered blithely to the wife, who sat in a dull abstraction, oblivious of the hospital flurry. "And it's going to be all right, I just know. Dr. Sommers is so clever, he'd save a dead man. You had better go now. No use to see him to-night, for he won't come out of the opiate until near morning. You can come tomorrow morning, and p'r'aps Dr. Sommers will get you a pass in. Visitors only Thursdays and Sunday afternoons usually."

She hurried off to her duties in the ward. The woman did not rise at once. She did not readjust her thoughts readily; she seemed to be waiting in the chance of seeing some one. The surgeon did not come out of the receiving room; there was a sound of wheels in the corridor just outside the office door, followed by the sound of shuffling feet. Through the open door she could see two attendants wheeling a stretcher with a man lying motionless upon it. They waited in the hall outside under a gas-jet, which cast a flickering light upon the outstretched form. This was the next case, which had been waiting its turn while her husband was in the receiving room,—a hand from the railroad yards, whose foot had slipped on a damp rail; now a pulpy, almost shapeless mass, thinly disguised under a white sheet that had fallen from his arms and head. She got up and walked out of the room. She was not wanted there: the hospital had turned its momentary swift attention to another case. As she passed the stretcher, the bearers shifted their burden to give her room. The form on the stretcher moaned indistinctly.

She looked at the unsightly mass, in her heart envious of his condition. There were things in this world much more evil than this bruised flesh of what had once been a human being.

CHAPTER II

The next morning Dr. Sommers took his successor through, the surgical ward. Dr. Raymond, whose place he had been holding for a month, was a young, carefully dressed man, fresh from a famous eastern hospital. The nurses eyed him favorably. He was absolutely correct. When the surgeons reached the bed marked 8, Dr. Sommers paused. It was the case he had operated on the night before. He glanced inquiringly at the metal tablet which hung from the iron cross-bars above the patient's head. On it was printed in large black letters the patient's name, ARTHUR C. PRESTON; on the next line in smaller letters, Admitted March 26th. The remaining space on the card was left blank to receive the statement of regimen, etc. A nurse was giving the patient an iced drink. After swallowing feebly, the man relapsed into a semi-stupor, his eyes opening and closing vacantly.

As he lay under the covering of a sheet, his arms thrust out bare from the short-sleeved hospital shirt, his unshaven flushed face contrasting with the pallid and puffy flesh of neck and arms, he gave an impression of sensuality emphasized by undress. The head was massive and well formed, and beneath the bloat of fever and dissipation there showed traces of refinement. The soft hands and neat finger-nails, the carefully trimmed hair, were sufficient indications of a kind of luxury. The animalism of the man, however, had developed so early in life that it had obliterated all strong markings of character. The flaccid, rather fleshy features were those of the sensual, prodigal young American, who haunts hotels. Clean shaven and well dressed, the fellow would be indistinguishable from the thousands of overfed and overdrunk young business men, to be seen every day in the vulgar luxury of Pullman cars, hotel lobbies, and large bar-rooms.

The young surgeon studied the patient thoughtfully. He explained the case briefly to his successor, as he had all the others, and before leaving the bed, he had the nurse take the patient's temperature. "Only two degrees of fever," he commented mechanically; "that is very good. Has his wife—has any one been in to see him?" The head nurse, who stood like an automaton at the foot of the bed, replied that she had seen no one; in any case, the doorkeeper would have refused permission unless explicit orders had been given.

Then the doctors continued their rounds, followed by the correct head nurse. When they reached the end of the ward, Dr. Sommers remarked disconnectedly: "No. 8 there, the man with the gun-shot wounds, will get well, I think; but I shouldn't wonder if mental complications followed. I have seen cases like that at the Bicetre, where operations on an alcoholic patient produced paresis. The man got well," he added harshly, as if kicking aside some dull formula; "but he was a hopeless idiot."

The new surgeon stared politely without replying. Such an unprofessional and uncalled-for expression of opinion was a new experience to him. In the Boston hospital resident surgeons did not make unguarded confidences even to their colleagues.

The two men finished their inspection without further incident, and went to the office to examine the system of records. After Sommers had left his successor, he learned from the clerk that "No. 8" had been entered as, "Commercial traveller; shot three times in a saloon row." Mrs. Preston had called,—from her and the police this information came,—had been informed that her husband was doing well, but had not asked to see him. She had left an address at some unknown place a dozen miles south.

The surgeon's knowledge of the case ended there. As in so many instances, he knew solely the point of tragedy: the before and the after went on outside the hospital walls, beyond his ken. While he was busy in getting away from the hospital, in packing up the few things left in his room, he thought no more about Preston's case or any case. But the last thing he did before leaving St. Isidore's was to visit the surgical ward once more and glance at No. 8's chart. The patient was resting quietly; there was every promise of recovery.

He left the grimy brick hospital, and made his way toward the rooms he had engaged in a neighborhood farther south. The weather was unseasonably warm and enervating, and he walked slowly, taking the broad boulevard in preference to the more noisome avenues, which were thick with slush and mud. It was early in the afternoon, and the few carriages on the boulevard were standing in front of the fashionable garment shops that occupied the city end of the drive. He had an unusual, oppressive feeling of idleness; it was the first time since he had left the little Ohio college, where he had spent his undergraduate years, that he had known this emptiness of purpose. There was nothing for him to do now, except to dine at the Hitchcocks' to-night. There would be little definite occupation probably for weeks, months, until he found some practice. Always hitherto, there had been a succession of duties, tasks, ends that he set himself one on the heels of another, occupying his mind, relieving his will of all responsibility.

He was cast out now from his youth, as it were, at thirty-two, to find his place in the city, to create his little world. And for the first time since he had entered Chicago, seven months before, the city wore a face of strangeness, of complete indifference. It hummed on, like a self-absorbed machine: all he had to do was not to get caught in it, involved, wrecked. For nearly a year he had been a part of it; and yet busy as he had been in the hospital, he had not sought to place himself strongly. He had gone in and out, here and there, for amusement, but he had returned to the hospital. Now the city was to be his home: somewhere in it he must dig his own little burrow.

Unconsciously his gait expressed his detachment. He sauntered idly, looking with fresh curiosity at the big, smoke-darkened houses on the boulevard. At Twenty-Second Street, a cable train clanged its way harshly across his path. As he looked up, he caught sight of the lake at the end of the street,—a narrow blue slab of water between two walls. The vista had a strangely foreign air. But the street itself, with its drays lumbering into the hidden depths of slimy pools, its dirty, foot-stained cement walks, had the indubitable aspect of Chicago.

Along the boulevard carriages were passing more frequently. The clank of metal chains, the beat of hoofs upon the good road-bed, sounded smartly on the ear. The houses became larger, newer, more flamboyant; richly dressed, handsome women were coming and going between them and their broughams. When Sommers turned to look back, the boulevard disappeared in the vague, murky region of mephitic cloud, beneath which the husbands of those women were toiling, striving, creating. He walked on and on, enjoying his leisure, speculating idly about the people and the houses. At last, as he neared Fortieth Street, the carriages passed less frequently. He turned back with a little chill, a feeling that he had left the warm, living thing and was too much alone. This time he came through Prairie and Calumet Avenues. Here, on the asphalt pavements, the broughams and hansoms rolled noiselessly to and fro among the opulent houses with tidy front grass plots and shining steps. The avenues were alive with afternoon callers. At several points there were long lines of carriages, attending a reception, or a funeral, or a marriage.

The air and the relaxation of all purpose tired him. The scene of the previous evening hung about his mind, coloring the abiding sense of loneliness. His last triumph in the delicate art of his profession had given him no exhilarating sense of power. He saw the woman's face, miserable and submissive, and he wondered. But he brought himself up with a jerk: this was the danger of permitting any personal feeling or speculation to creep into professional matters.

* * * * *

In his new rooms on Twenty-Eighth Street, there was an odor of stale tobacco, permeating the confusion created by a careless person. Dresser had been occupying them lately. He had found Sam Dresser, whom he had known as a student in Europe, wandering almost penniless down State Street, and had offered him a lodging-place.

"How did it come out?" Sommers asked the big, blond young man with a beer-stained mustache.

The big fellow stopped, before answering, to stuff a pipe with tobacco, punching it in with a fat thumb.

"They'll give me a job—mean one—three dollars a day—nine to five—under the roof in a big loft, tenth story—with a lot of women hirelings. Regular sweatshop—educational sweatshop."

Sommers took up some letters from the table and opened them.

"Well, I've got to scare up some patients to live on, even to make three dollars a day."

"You!" Dresser exclaimed, eying the letters with naive envy. "You are pals with the fat-fed capitalists. They will see that you get something easy, and one of these days you will marry one of their daughters. Then you will join the bank accounts, and good-by."

He continued to rail, half jestingly, half in earnest, at McNamara and Hills,—where he had obtained work, thanks to a letter which Sommers had procured for him,—at his companion's relations with the well-to-do, which he exaggerated offensively, and at the well-to-do themselves.

"It was lucky for you," Sommers remarked good-humoredly, "that I was thick enough with the bloodsuckers to get you that letter from Hitchcock. One of us will have to stand in with the 'swilling, fat-fed capitalist.'"

"Are those Hitchcocks rich?" Dresser asked, his eye resting wistfully on a square note that the young doctor had laid aside.

"I suppose so," Sommers answered. "Shall we go and have some beer?"

Dresser's blue eyes still followed the little pile of letters—eyes hot with desires and regrets. A lust burned in them, as his companion could feel instinctively, a lust to taste luxury. Under its domination Dresser was not unlike the patient in No. 8.

When they turned into the boulevard, which was crowded at this hour of twilight, men were driving themselves home in high carts, and through the windows of the broughams shone the luxuries of evening attire. Dresser's glance shifted from face to face, from one trap to another, sucking in the glitter of the showy scene. The flashing procession on the boulevard pricked his hungry senses, goaded his ambitions. The men and women in the carriages were the bait; the men and women on the street sniffed it, cravingly, enviously.

"There's plenty of swag in the place," Dresser remarked.

CHAPTER III

The Hitchcocks and the Sommerses came from the same little village in Maine; they had moved west, about the same time, a few years before the Civil War: Alexander Hitchcock to Chicago; the senior Dr. Sommers to Marion, Ohio. Alexander Hitchcock had been colonel of the regiment in which Isaac Sommers served as surgeon. Although the families had seen little of one another since the war, yet Alexander Hitchcock's greeting to the young doctor when he met the latter in Paris had been more than cordial. Something in the generous, lingering hand-shake of the Chicago merchant had made the younger man feel the strength of old ties.

"I knew your mother," Colonel Hitchcock had said, smiling gently into the young student's face. "I knew her very well, and your father, too,—he was a brave man, a remarkable man."

He had sympathetically rolled the hand he still retained in his broad palm.

"If Marion had only been Chicago! You say he died two years ago? And your mother long ago? Where will you settle?"

With this abrupt question, Dr. Sommers was taken at once into a kindly intimacy with the Hitchcocks. Not long after this chance meeting there came to the young surgeon an offer of a post at St. Isidore's. In the vacillating period of choice, the successful merchant's counsel had had a good deal of influence with Sommers. And his persistent kindliness since the choice had been made had done much to render the first year in Chicago agreeable. 'We must start you right,' he had seemed to say. 'We mustn't lose you.'

Those pleasant days in Paris had been rendered more memorable to the young doctor by the friendship that came about between him and Miss Hitchcock—a friendship quite independent of anything her family might feel for him. She let him see that she made her own world, and that she would welcome him as a member of it. Accustomed as he had been only to the primitive daughters of the local society in Marion and Exonia, or the chance intercourse with unassorted women in Philadelphia, where he had taken his medical course, and in European pensions, Louise Hitchcock presented a very definite and delightful picture. That it was but one generation from Hill's Crossing, Maine, to this self-possessed, carefully finished young woman, was unbelievable. Tall and finished in detail, from the delicate hands and fine ears to the sharply moulded chin, she presented a puzzling contrast to the short, thick, sturdy figure of her mother. And her quick appropriation of the blessings of wealth, her immediate enjoyment of the aristocratic assurances that the Hitchcock position had given her in Chicago, showed markedly in contrast with the tentativeness of Mrs. Hitchcock. Louise Hitchcock handled her world with perfect self-command; Mrs. Hitchcock was rather breathless over every manifestation of social change.

Parker Hitchcock, the son, Sommers had not seen until his coming to Chicago. At a first glance, then, he could feel that in the son the family had taken a further leap from the simplicity of the older generation. Incidentally the young man's cool scrutiny had instructed him that the family had not committed Parker Hitchcock to him. Young Hitchcock had returned recently to the family lumber yards on the West Side and the family residence on Michigan Avenue, with about equal disgust, so Sommers judged, for both milieux. Even more than his sister, Parker was conscious of the difference between the old state of things and the new. Society in Chicago was becoming highly organized, a legitimate business of the second generation of wealth. The family had the money to spend, and at Yale in winter, at Newport and Beverly and Bar Harbor in summer, he had learned how to spend it, had watched admiringly how others spent their wealth. He had begun to educate his family in spending,—in using to brilliant advantage the fruits of thirty years' hard work and frugality. With his cousin Caspar Porter he maintained a small polo stable at Lake Hurst, the new country club. On fair days he left the lumber yards at noon, while Alexander Hitchcock was still shut in behind the dusty glass doors of his office. His name was much oftener in the paragraphs of the city press than his parents': he was leading the family to new ideals.

Ideals, Sommers judged, that were not agreeable to old Colonel Hitchcock, slightly menacing even in the eyes of the daughter, whose horizon was wider. Sommers had noticed the little signs of this heated family atmosphere. A mist of undiscussed views hung about the house, out of which flashed now and then a sharp speech, a bitter sigh. He had been at the house a good deal in a thoroughly informal manner. The Hitchcocks rarely entertained in the "new" way, for Mrs. Hitchcock had a terror of formality. A dinner, as she understood it, meant a gathering of a few old friends, much hearty food served in unpretentious abundance, and a very little bad wine. The type of these entertainments had improved lately under Miss Hitchcock's influence, but it remained essentially the same,—an occasion for copious feeding and gossipy, neighborly chat.

To-night, as Sommers approached the sprawling green stone house on Michigan Avenue, there were signs of unusual animation about the entrance. As he reached the steps a hansom deposited the bulky figure of Brome Porter, Mrs. Hitchcock's brother-in-law. The older man scowled interrogatively at the young doctor, as if to say: 'You here? What the devil of a crowd has Alec raked together?' But the two men exchanged essential courtesies and entered the house together.

Porter, Sommers had heard, had once been Alexander Hitchcock's partner in the lumber business, but had withdrawn from the firm years before. Brome Porter was now a banker, as much as he was any one thing. It was easy to see that the pedestrian business of selling lumber would not satisfy Brome Porter. Popularly "rated at five millions," his fortune had not come out of lumber. Alexander Hitchcock, with all his thrift, had not put by over a million. Banking, too, would seem to be a tame enterprise for Brome Porter. Mines, railroads, land speculations—he had put his hand into them all masterfully. Large of limb and awkward, with a pallid, rather stolid face, he looked as if Chicago had laid a heavy hand upon his liver, as if the Carlsbad pilgrimage were a yearly necessity. 'Heavy eating and drinking, strong excitements—too many of them,' commented the professional glance of the doctor. 'Brute force, padded superficially by civilization,' Sommers added to himself, disliking Porter's cold eye shots at him. 'Young man,' his little buried eyes seemed to say, 'young man, if you know what's good for you; if you are the right sort; if you do the proper thing, we'll push you. Everything in this world depends on being in the right carriage.' Sommers was tempted whenever he met him to ask him for a good tip: he seemed always to have just come from New York; and when this barbarian went to Rome, it was for a purpose, which expressed itself sooner or later over the stock-ticker. But the tip had not come yet.

As Sommers was reaching the end of his conversational rope with Porter, other guests arrived. Among them was Dr. Lindsay, a famous specialist in throat diseases. The older doctor nodded genially to Sommers with the air of saying: 'I am so glad to find you here. This is the right place for a promising young man.'

And Sommers in a flash suspected why he had been bidden: the good-natured Miss Hitchcock wished to bring him a little closer to this influential member of his profession.

"Shall we wait for them?" Dr. Lindsay asked, joining Sommers. "Porter has got hold of Carson, and they'll keep up their stories until some one hauls them out. My wife and daughter have already gone down. How is St. Isidore's?"

"I left to-day. My term is up. I feel homesick already," the young doctor answered with a smile. "Chicago is so big," he added. "I didn't know it before."

"It's quite a village, quite a village," Dr. Lindsay answered thoughtfully. "We'll have some more talk later, won't we?" he added confidentially, as they passed downstairs.

The Hitchcock house revealed itself in the floods of electric light as large and undeniably ugly. Built before artistic ambitions and cosmopolitan architects had undertaken to soften American angularities, it was merely a commodious building, ample enough for a dozen Hitchcocks to loll about in. Decoratively, it might be described as a museum of survivals from the various stages of family history. At each advance in prosperity, in social ideals, some of the former possessions had been swept out of the lower rooms to the upper stories, in turn to be ousted by their more modern neighbors. Thus one might begin with the rear rooms of the third story to study the successive deposits. There the billiard chairs once did service in the old home on the West Side. In the hall beside the Westminster clock stood a "sofa," covered with figured velours. That had once adorned the old Twentieth Street drawing-room; and thrifty Mrs. Hitchcock had not sufficiently readjusted herself to the new state to banish it to the floor above, where it belonged with some ugly, solid brass andirons. In the same way, faithful Mr. Hitchcock had seen no good reason why he should degrade the huge steel engraving of the Aurora, which hung prominently at the foot of the stairs, in spite of its light oak frame, which was in shocking contrast with the mahogany panels of the walls. Flanking the staircase were other engravings,—Landseer's stags and the inevitable Queen Louise. Yet through the open arch, in a pleasant study, one could see a good Zorn, a Venom portrait, and some prints. This nook, formerly the library, had been given over to the energetic Miss Hitchcock. It was done in Shereton,—imitation, but good imitation. From this vantage point the younger generation planned an extended attack upon the irregular household gods.

Sommers realized for the first time how the Aurora and the Queen Louise must worry Miss Hitchcock; how the neat Swedish maids and the hat-stand in the hall must offend young Hitchcock. The incongruities of the house had never disturbed him. So far as he had noticed them, they accorded well with the simple characters of his host and hostess. In them, as in the house, a keen observer could trace the series of developments that had taken place since they had left Hill's Crossing. Yet the full gray beard with the broad shaved upper lip still gave the Chicago merchant the air of a New England worthy. And Alexander, in contrast with his brother-in-law, had knotty hands and a tanned complexion that years of "inside business" had not sufficed to smooth. The little habit of kneading the palm which you felt when he shook hands, and the broad, humorous smile, had not changed as the years passed him on from success to success. Mrs. Hitchcock still slurred the present participle and indulged in other idiomatic freedoms that endeared her to Sommers. These two, plainly, were not of the generation that is tainted by ambition. Their story was too well known, from the boarding-house struggle to this sprawling stone house, to be worth the varnishing. Indeed, they would not tolerate any such detractions from their well-earned reputation. The Brome Porters might draw distinctions and prepare for a new social aristocracy; but to them old times were sweet and old friends dear.

As the guests gathered in the large "front room," Alexander Hitchcock stood above them, as the finest, most courteous spirit. There was race in him—sweetness and strength and refinement—the qualities of the best manhood of democracy. This effect of simplicity and sweetness was heightened in the daughter, Louise. She had been born in Chicago, in the first years of the Hitchcock fight. She remembered the time when the billiard-room chairs were quite the most noted possessions in the basement and three-story brick house on West Adams Street. She had followed the chairs in the course of the Hitchcock evolution until her aunt had insisted on her being sent east to the Beaumanor Park School. Two years of "refined influences" in this famous establishment, with a dozen other girls from new-rich families, had softened her tones and prolonged her participles, but had touched her not essentially. Though she shared with her younger brother the feeling that the Hitchcocks were not getting the most out of their opportunities, she could understand the older people more than he. If she sympathized with her father's belief that the boy ought to learn to sell lumber, or "do something for himself," yet she liked the fact that he played polo. It was the right thing to be energetic, upright, respected; it was also nice to spend your money as others did. And it was very, very nice to have the money to spend.

To-night, as Sommers came across the hall to the drawing-room, she left the group about the door to welcome him. "Weren't you surprised," she asked him with an ironical laugh, "at the people, I mean—all ages and kinds? You see Parker had to be appeased. He didn't want to stay, and I don't know why he should. So we gave him Laura Lindsay." She nodded good-naturedly in the direction of a young girl, whose sharp thin little face was turned joyfully toward the handsome Parker. "And we added our cousin Caspar, not for conversation, but to give an illusion of youth and gayety. Caspar is the captain of the polo team. By the way, what do you think of polo?"

"I never had occasion to think," the young doctor replied, scrutinizing a heavy, florid-faced young man whom he took to be Caspar Porter.

"Well, polo is with us at breakfast and dinner. Papa doesn't approve, doesn't believe in young men keeping a stable as Caspar does. Mamma doesn't know what she believes. I am arbitrator—it's terrible, the new generation," she broke off whimsically.

"Which has the right of it?" Sommers asked idly. "The fathers who made the money, or the sons who want to enjoy it?"

"Both; neither," she laughed back with an air of comfortable tolerance. She might have added, 'You see, I like both kinds—you and Parker's set.'

"Do you know, Dr. Lindsay is here?"

Sommers smiled as he replied,—

"Yes; was it arranged?"

The girl blushed, and moved away.

"He was anxious to meet you."

"Of course," the doctor replied ironically.

"I could tell you more," she added alluringly.

"I have no doubt. Perhaps you had better not, however."

Miss Hitchcock ceased to smile and looked at him without reply. She had something on the tip of her tongue to tell him, something she had thought of pleasantly for the last three days, but she suspected that this man was not one who would like to take his good fortune from a woman's hand.

"Dr. Lindsay is an old friend; we have known him for years." She spoke neutrally. Sommers merely nodded.

"He is very successful, very," she added, giving in to her desire a little.

"Chicago is a good place for a throat specialist."

"He is said to be the most—"

"What?"

"You know—has the largest income of any doctor in the city."
Sommers did not reply. At length the girl ventured once more.

"I hope you will be nice to him."

"There won't be any question of it."

"You can be so stiff, so set; I have counted a great deal on this."

"Politics, politics!" Sommers exclaimed awkwardly. "Who is the man with Mr.
Porter?"

"Railway Gazette Carson? That's what he is called. He swallows
railroads—absorbs 'em. He was a lawyer. They have a house on the North
Side and a picture, a Sargent. But I'll keep the story. Come! you must meet
Mrs. Lindsay."

"Politics, politics!" Sommers murmured to himself, as Miss Hitchcock moved across the room.

CHAPTER IV

At the table there were awkward silences, followed by spasmodic local bursts of talk. Sommers, who sat between Miss Hitchcock and Mrs. Lindsay, fell to listening to his host.

"I was taken for you to-day, Brome," Mr. Hitchcock said, with a touch of humor in his voice.

Porter laughed at the apparent absurdity of the accusation.

"I was detained at the office over at the yards. The men and the girls had pretty nearly all gone. I was just about to leave, when a fellow opened the door—he looked like a Swede or a Norwegian.

"'Is the boss here?' he asked.

"'Yes,' said I; 'what can I do for you?'

"'I wants a yob, a yob,' he shouted, 'and no foolin'. I worked for de boss ten years and never lost a day!'

"I thought the man was drunk. 'Who did you work for?' I asked. 'For Pullman, in de vorks,' he said; then I saw how it was. He was one of the strikers, or had lost his job before the strike. Some one told him you were in with me, Brome, and a director of the Pullman works. He had footed it clear in from Pullman to find you, to lay hands on you personally."

Porter laughed rather grimly.

"That's the first sign!" Carson exclaimed.

"They'll have enough of it before the works open," Porter added.

Parker Hitchcock looked bored. Such things were not in good form; they came from the trade element in the family. His cousin Caspar had Miss Lindsay's attention. She was describing a Polish estate where she had visited the preceding summer.

"Did you send him round to our office?" Porter asked jokingly.

Sommers's keen eyes rested on his host's face inquiringly.

"No-oh," Alexander Hitchcock drawled; "I had a talk with him."

"They are rather dangerous people to talk with," Dr. Lindsay remarked.

"He was a Norwegian, a big, fine-looking man. He was all right. He couldn't talk much English, but he knew that his folks were hungry. 'You gif me a yob,' he kept saying, until I explained I wasn't in the business, had nothing to do with the Pullman works. Then he sat down and looked at the floor. 'I vas fooled.' Well, it seems he did inlaying work, fine cabinet work, and got good pay. He built a house for himself out in some place, and he was fired among the first last winter,—I guess because he didn't live in Pullman."

"That's the story they use," Brome Porter said sceptically. "You should call the watchman; they're apt to be dangerous."

"A crowd of 'em," put in Carson, "were at the Pullman office this morning; wanted to arbitrate."

He spoke deprecatingly of their innocence, but Porter's tones were harsh.

"To arbitrate! to arbitrate! when we are making money by having 'em quit."

Miss Hitchcock turned apprehensively to her companion. Her handsome, clear face was perplexed; she was distressed over the way the talk was going.

"It's as bad as polo!" she exclaimed, in low tones. But the doctor did not hear her.

"Is it so," he was asking Colonel Hitchcock, "that the men who had been thrifty enough to get homes outside of Pullman had to go first because they didn't pay rent to the company? I heard the same story from a patient in the hospital."

By this time Caspar Porter had turned his attention to the conversation at the other end of the table. His florid face was agape with astonishment at the doctor's temerity. Parker Hitchcock shrugged his shoulders and muttered something to Miss Lindsay. The older men moved in their chairs. It was an unhappy topic for dinner conversation in this circle.

"Well, I don't know," Colonel Hitchcock replied, a slight smile creeping across his face. "Some say yes, and some say no. Perhaps Porter can tell you."

"We leave all that to the superintendent," the latter replied stiffly. "I haven't looked into it. The works isn't a hospital."

"That's a minor point," Carson added, in a high-pitched voice. "The real thing is whether a corporation can manage its own affairs as it thinks best or not."

"The thrifty and the shiftless," interposed Dr.

Lindsay, nodding to his young colleague.

"Well, the directors are a unit. That settles the matter," Porter ended dogmatically. "The men may starve, but they'll never get back now."

The young doctor's face set in rather rigid lines. He had made a mistake, had put himself outside the sympathies of this comfortable circle. Miss Hitchcock was looking into the flowers in front of her, evidently searching for some remark that would lead the dinner out of this uncomfortable slough, when Brome Porter began again sententiously:

"The laborer has got some hard lessons to learn. This trouble is only a small part of the bigger trouble. He wants to get more than he is worth. And all our education, the higher education, is a bad thing." He turned with marked emphasis toward the young doctor. "That's why I wouldn't give a dollar to any begging college—not a dollar to make a lot of discontented, lazy duffers who go round exciting workingmen to think they're badly treated. Every dollar given a man to educate himself above his natural position is a dollar given to disturb society."

Before Sommers could accept the challenge in this speech, Miss Hitchcock asked,—

"But what did you do with your visitor, papa?"

"Well, we had some more talk," he replied evasively. "Maybe that's why I missed you, Brome, at the club. He stayed most an hour."

"Did he go then?" the girl pressed on mischievously.

"Well, I gave him a 'yob' over at the yards. It wasn't much of a 'yob' though."

This speech aroused some laughter, and the talk drifted on in little waves into safer channels. The episode, however, seemed to have made an undue impression upon Sommers. Miss Hitchcock's efforts to bring him into the conversation failed. As for Mrs. Lindsay, he paid her not the slightest attention. He was coolly taking his own time to think, without any sense of social responsibility.

"What is the matter?" his companion said to him at last, in her low, insistent voice. "You are behaving so badly. Why won't you do anything one wants you to?"

Sommers glanced at his companion as if she had shaken him out of a dream.
Her dark eyes were gleaming with irritation, and her mouth trembled.

"I had a vision," Sommers replied coolly.

"Well!" The man's egotism aroused her impatience, but she lowered her head to catch every syllable of his reply.

"I seemed to see things in a flash—to feel an iron crust of prejudice."

The girl's brow contracted in a puzzled frown, but she waited. The young doctor tried again to phrase the matter.

"These people—I mean your comfortable rich—seem to have taken a kind of oath of self-preservation. To do what is expected of one, to succeed, you must take the oath. You must defend their institutions, and all that," he blundered on.

"I don't know what you mean," the girl replied coolly, haughtily, raising her head and glancing over the table.

"I am not very clear. Perhaps I make a great deal of nothing. My remarks sound 'young' even to me."

"I don't pretend to understand these questions. I wish men wouldn't talk business at dinner. It is worse than polo!"

She swept his face with a glance of distrust, the lids of her eyes half lowered, as if to put a barrier between them.

"Yes," Sommers assented; "it is harder to understand."

It was curious, he thought, that a woman could take on the new rights, the aristocratic attitude, so much more completely than a man. Miss Hitchcock was a full generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing to an end.

"I hope you will talk with Dr. Lindsay. He is a very able man. And," she hesitated a moment and then looked frankly at him, "he can do so much for a young doctor who has his way to make."

"Don't you think that might make it harder for me to talk to him?" Sommers asked, irritated by her lack of tact.

The girl's face flushed, and she pressed her lips together as if to push back a sharp reply.

"That is unfair. We are going now—but sometime we must talk it out."

The men stretched themselves and rearranged their chairs in little groups. Parker Hitchcock, Carson, and young Porter—were talking horses; they made no effort to include the young doctor in their corner. He was beginning to feel uncomfortably stranded in the middle of the long room, when Dr. Lindsay crossed to his side. The talk at dinner had not put the distinguished specialist in a sympathetic light, but the younger man felt grateful for this act of cordiality. They chatted about St. Isidore's, about the medical schools in Chicago, and the medical societies. At last Dr. Lindsay suggested casually, as he refilled his liqueur-glass:

"You have made some plans?"

"No, not serious ones. I have thought of taking a vacation. Then there is another hospital berth I could have. Head of a small hospital in a mining town. But I don't like to leave Chicago, on the whole."

"You are right," the older physician remarked slowly. "Such a place would bury you; you would never be heard of."

Sommers smiled at the penalty held out, but he did not protest.

"There isn't any career in hospital work, anyway, for a steady thing. You get side-tracked."

"I like it better than family practice," Sommers jerked out. "You don't have to fuss with people, women especially. Then I like the excitement of it."

"That won't last long," the older man smiled indulgently. "And you'll have a wife some day, who will make you take a different view. But there are other things—office practice."

He dilated on the advantages of office practice, while the younger man smoked and listened deferentially. Office practice offered a pleasant compromise between the strenuous scientific work of the hospital and the grind of family practice. There were no night visits, no dreary work with the poor—or only as much as you cared to do,—and it paid well, if you took to it. Sommers reflected that the world said it paid Lindsay about fifty thousand a year. It led, also, to lectureships, trusteeships—a mass of affairs that made a man prominent and important in the community.

Sommers listened attentively without questioning the agreeable, tactful doctor. He could see that something was in the air, that Lindsay was not a man to talk with this degree of intimacy out of pure charity or vanity. But the great specialist said nothing very definite after all: he let fall, casually, the fact that good men for office work—men of experience who were skilful and tactful—were rare. He had just lost a valuable doctor from his staff.

When the men returned to the drawing-room, Parker Hitchcock and his cousin took themselves off. The Lindsays went soon after. Sommers, who had regained his good sense; tried to make his apologies to Miss Hitchcock.

"Don't go yet," she answered cordially. "They will all be disposed of soon, and we can have that talk. Go and look at my prints."

In a few moments she came up behind him as he was studying the brush work of a little canvas. "I have been thinking of what you said at the table, Dr. Sommers. I have tried to think what you mean, but I can't."

Her eyes opened in frank, tolerant inquiry. Sommers had seen her like this a few times, and always with a feeling of nearness.

"I don't believe that I can make you understand," he began.

"Try!"

"The feelings that make us act are generally too vague to be defended. All that I could do would be to describe a mood, a passion that takes me now and then, and makes me want to smash things."

She nodded her head comprehendingly.

"Yes, I know that."

"Not from the same reason," Sommers laughed.

"I will tell you what it is: you think the rich are unfair. You didn't like
Uncle Brome's talk about the Pullman people."

"No, and more than that," he protested; "I don't know anything about the
Pullman matter; but I hate the—successful. I guess that's about it."

"You think they are corrupt and luxurious and all that?"

As she spoke she waved one hand negligently toward the Aurora in the hall.
They both laughed at the unspoken argument.

"If you feel like that here—"

"I feel that way pretty much all the time in America," he said bluntly. "It isn't this house or that, this man's millions or that man's; it's the whole thing."

Miss Hitchcock looked nonplussed.

"Life is based on getting something others haven't,—as much of it as you can and as fast as you can. I never felt that so constantly as I have the last few months. Do you think," he went on hastily, "that Lindsay, that any doctor, can earn fifty thousand a year?"

"I don't know. I hate views." Her voice sounded weary and defeated.

Sommers rose to his feet, exclaiming, "I thought there were some pretty definite ones, this evening."

Miss Hitchcock started, but refused to take the challenge.

They faced each other for a moment without speaking. Sommers could see that his blundering words had placed him in a worse position than before. At the same time he was aware that he regretted it; that "views" were comparatively unimportant to a young woman; and that this woman, at least, was far better than views.

"Good night," she murmured, lowering her eyes as she gave him her hand. He hesitated a moment, searching for an intelligent word, but finally he turned away without any further attempt to explain himself.

It was good to be out in the soft March night, to feel once more the free streets, which alone carry the atmosphere of unprivileged humanity. The mood of the evening was doubtless foolish, boyish, but it was none the less keen and convincing. He had never before had the inner, unknown elements of his nature so stirred; had never felt this blind, raging protest. It was a muddle of impressions: the picture of the poor soul with his clamor for a job; the satisfied, brutal egotism of Brome Porter, who lived as if life were a huge poker game; the overfed, red-cheeked Caspar, whom he remembered to have seen only once before, when the young polo captain was stupid drunk; the silly young cub of a Hitchcock. Even the girl was one of them. If it weren't for the women, the men would not be so keen on the scent for gain. The women taught the men how to spend, created the needs for their wealth. And the social game they were instituting in Chicago was so emptily imitative, an echo of an echo!

There was Carson: he was your image of modern power—the lean, hungry, seamed face, surmounted by a dirty-gray pall. He was clawing his way to the top of the heap.

Sommers stopped to laugh at himself. His fury was foolish, a mere generalization of discontent from very little data. Still, it was a relief to be out in the purring night sounds. He had passed from the affluent stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street. His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and squalor. The public part of it—the street and the sidewalks—was equally dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. The cool lake wind was piping down the cross streets, driving before it waste paper and dust. In his preoccupation he stumbled occasionally into some stagnant pool.

Should he take Lindsay's job, if he had the chance? Obstinately his mind reverted to a newspaper paragraph that had caught his eye months before: on the occasion of some disturbance over women students in the Western Medical College, Dr. Lindsay had told the men that "physicians should be especially considerate of women, if for no other reason, because their success in their profession would depend very largely on women." Certainly, if he had to decide to-night, he would rather return to Marion, Ohio, than join his staff. Such a retreat from the glories of Chicago would be inconceivable to old Hitchcock and to the girl. He reflected that he should not like to put himself away from her forever.

St. Isidore's loomed ahead in the quiet street, its windows dark except for the night light in the ward kitchens. He should like to turn in there for a few minutes, to see how the fellow was coming on. The brute ought not to pull through. But it was too late: a new regime had begun; his little period of sway had passed, leaving as a last proof of his art this human jetsam saved for the nonce. And there rose in his heated mind the pitiful face of a resolute woman, questioning him: "You held the keys of life and death. Which have you given me?"

CHAPTER V

The Athenian Building raises its knife-like facade in the centre of Chicago, thirteen stories in all; to the lake it presents a broad wall of steel and glass. It is a hive of doctors. Layer after layer, their offices rise, circling the gulf of the elevator-well. At the very crown of the building Dr. Frederick H. Lindsay and his numerous staff occupy almost the entire floor. In one corner, however, a small room embedded in the heavy cornice is rented by a dentist, Dr. Ephraim Leonard. The dentist's office is a snug little hole, scarcely large enough for a desk, a chair, a case of instruments, a "laboratory," and a network of electric appliances. From the one broad window the eye rests upon the blue shield of lake; nearer, almost at the foot of the building, run the ribboned tracks of the railroad yards. They disappear to the south in a smoky haze; to the north they end at the foot of a lofty grain elevator. Beyond, factories quietly belch sooty clouds.

Dr. Lindsay coveted this office, but Dr. Leonard clung tenaciously to his little strip, every inch that he could possibly pay rent for. He had been there since that story was finished. The broad view rested him. When he ceased to peer into a patient's mouth, he pushed up his spectacles and took a long look over the lake. Sometimes, if the patient was human and had enough temperament to appreciate his treasure, he would idle away a quarter of an hour chatting, enjoying the sun and the clear air of the lake. When the last patient had gone, he would take the chair and have the view to himself, as from a proscenium box.

The little office was a busy place: besides the patients there were coming and going a stream of people,—agents, canvassers, acquaintances, and promoters of schemes. A scheme was always brewing in the dentist's office. Now it was a plan to exploit a new suburb innumerable miles to the west. Again it was a patent contrivance in dentistry. Sometimes the scheme was nothing more than a risky venture in stocks. These affairs were conducted with an air of great secrecy in violent whisperings, emphasized by blows of the fist upon the back of the chair. The favored patients were deftly informed of "a good thing," the dentist taking advantage of the one inevitable moment of receptivity for his thrifty promotions. The schemes, it must be said, had never come to much. If Dr. Leonard had survived without any marked loss a dozen years of venturing, he might be said to have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this was his poker. They were always the schemes of little people, very complex in organization, needing a wheel here, a cog there, finally breaking down from the lack of capital. Then some "big people" collected the fragments to cast them into the pot once more. Dr. Leonard added another might-have-been and a new sigh to the secret chamber of his soul. But his face was turned outward to receive the next scheme.

This time it happened to be a wonderful new process of evolving gas from dirt and city refuse. He had been explaining it gently to a woman in the chair, from pure intellectual interest, to distract the patient's mind. He was not tinkering with teeth this time, however. The woman was sitting in the chair because it was the only unoccupied space. She had removed her hat and was looking steadily into the lake. At last, when the little office clerk had left, the talk about the gas generator ceased, and the woman turned her wistful face to the old dentist. There was a sombre pause.

"Yes," the dentist muttered finally, "I saw it in the paper Tuesday, no,
Monday—it was Monday, wasn't it? and I hoped you'd come in."

The woman moved her hands restlessly, as if to ask where else she could go.

"They most always do turn up," he continued bluntly; "them that no one wants, like your husband. What are you going to do?"

The woman turned her face back to the lake; it was evident that she had no plan.

"I thought," the dentist began, recalling her story, "I thought when you'd started in the schools—it was a mighty hard thing to do to get you in; it took all my pull on Mahoney."

The woman's face flushed. "I know," she murmured. "They don't want married women. But if it hadn't been for Mahoney—"

"Then," interrupted the dentist, "he'd been good enough to let you alone for most a year, and I thought you were out of your troubles."

"I knew he would come back," she interposed quietly.

"But now he comes back just as everything is nice, and worse, you come across him when he is nigh bein' shot to death. Then, worse yet, by what the papers said, you went to the hospital with him and gave the whole thing away. When I saw the name, Alves Preston, printed out, I swore."

Mrs. Preston smiled at his vehemence.

"Tell me, Alves," the old man asked in a rambling manner, "how did you ever come to marry him? I've wanted to ask you that from the first."

Mrs. Preston rose from the chair and pulled her cloak about her.

"I couldn't make you understand; I don't myself now."

"D'yer love him?" the dentist persisted, not ungently.

"Should I be here if I did?" she flashed resentfully. "I was a country girl away at school, more foolish than one of those dumb Swedes in my class, and he—"

But she turned again to the window, with an impatient gesture.

"It is something wrong in a woman," she murmured. "But she has no chance, no chance. I can't tell you now all the things."

"Well," the dentist said soothingly, "let's see just how bad it is. Has your boss, the superintendent, or the principal spoke to you, turned you out? I see the reporter went around to the school, nosing after something."

"They'd just transferred me—miles south," she answered indifferently. "I was glad of it. I don't have to meet the spying, talking teachers, and think all the time the pupils know it from their parents. They're all foreigners where I am now. They say the Everglade school is the next thing to the last. It's a kind of Purgatory, where they keep you for a few months before they dismiss you."

"I didn't know any one was ever dismissed from a Chicago school," the dentist remarked.

"Oh, sometimes when the superintendents or the supervisors don't want you. There is a supervisor in the Everglade district—" she stopped a moment, and then continued tranquilly—"he was very intimate at first. I thought he wanted to help me to get on in the school. But he wanted—other things. Perhaps when he doesn't—succeed—that will be the end."

"It'll blow over," the dentist said encouragingly. "If the supervisor troubles you much, I'll see Mahoney. You've changed your boarding-place?"

"Yes—but," she admitted in a moment, "they know it at the hospital."

Dr. Leonard rubbed his bristly face irritably.

"I've been to see him—it seemed I ought to—I was the only one who
WOULD in the whole world—the only one to speak a word to him."

"That makes it worse," the dentist commented depressingly. "I don't know as you could get free now if you wanted to. You've put your hand to the plough again, my girl, and it's a long furrow."

"What do you mean?"

"The hospital folks know you're his wife, and they'll expect you to take him in when he gets better."

"I suppose so," Mrs. Preston admitted. "But I suppose, anyway, I should take care of him until he can go away."

Dr. Leonard threw up his hands in disgust.

"Alves, why don't you go straight off and get a divorce—for desertion?"

Mrs. Preston opened the heavy lids of her eyes; her face slowly flushed.

"That would be the end of it?" she asked, in a low voice.

"Of course! I'll give you the money, and testify for you. Go right ahead, now he is laid up, and have it all ready when he gets out."

"I couldn't do that," Mrs. Preston answered, the color fading from her face, and the white lids closing over the eyes. "Besides, he may never recover fully. I don't think they expect him to at the hospital."

"All the more reason," protested the dentist. "It's mighty hard," he added sympathetically. "Women are mostly children, the better sort, and you feel bad, even when they're in trouble through their own foolishness."

"There is no release, no divorce," Mrs. Preston continued. "A thing is done, and it's done. There's no ending it in this life. You can run away, or close your eyes, but you don't escape. He has been—my husband."

"That's silly! Now let me tell you what I'll do." The dentist squared himself and raised the little lignum-vitae mallet, which he used to drive home his fillings.

"Don't you fool round any more. You can't love that fellow,—think you never did now,—and he's given you no reason to be very nice to him. You just drop him where you are, and start out alone and make the best of it. You can't do that in Chicago now. Get out of Chicago to-morrer. Go east. Take your maiden name; no one is goin' to be hurt by not knowin' you're married. I guess you ain't likely to try it again."

He paused for objections, and evidently found one himself.

"If you ain't got the money handy, I'll just fix you up. That gas generator I was talking to you about is going to make me mints of money. You can go right away to my sister-in-law in Worcester, Ohio. Guess he won't trouble you much there. What do you say?"

She had nothing very cogent to say, but the dentist felt an impalpable obstruction of will, unintelligible and persistent. His enthusiasm grew as he perfected the details of his plan. It was a new kind of scheme, in which he took the artistic delight of the incorrigible promoter. His imagination once enlisted for the plan, he held to it, arguing, counselling, bullying. "If it's the money," he ended, "you needn't bother. I'll just put it on the bill. When I am rich, it won't make no difference, nor when you are, either."

Mrs. Preston took one of his furry hands in hers, and pressed it. She knew that the ventures had not yet made him rich. Thirty years in Chicago had not filled his purse.

"I'd do it for you, same as for one of my daughters. It's just as easy as having a tooth out, and you start over as good as new."

"It isn't that," she smiled. "You can't start over as good as new if you are a woman. I couldn't run away. I've put myself into it a second time, without thinking. I chose then just as before, when I followed him to the hospital. When the doctor asked me if he should try to save his life, I wanted him to die—oh, how I longed that the doctor would refuse to try! Well, he's alive. It is for life."

She seemed to see before her a long, toilsome ascent, to which she had been driven to put her feet.

"Think it over," the dentist counselled at last, despondently. "Sleep on it. There's Worcester, Ohio, and my sister-in-law."

Mrs. Preston smiled, and put on her hat.

"I've taken a lot of your time."

"That's no account, but I can't see what you came for. You won't let a feller help you."

"There wasn't any good reason. I came because I was awfully lonely. There isn't a soul that I can speak out to, except you. You don't know what that means. I go about in the schoolroom, and up and down the streets, and see things—horrible things. The world gets to be one big torture chamber, and then I have to cry out. I come to you to cry out,—because you really care. Now I can go away, and keep silent for a long time."

"You make too much of it," the dentist protested. He busied himself in putting the little steel instruments into their purple plush beds and locking the drawers.

"Yes, I make too much of it," Mrs. Preston acknowledged quietly, as she opened the door. "Good night."

"I guess she loves him still and don't like to own it. Women are generally so," the dentist commented, when he was left alone. He picked up a sheaf of stock certificates and eyed them critically. "They're nicer than the Placer Mining ones. They just look fit to eat."

He locked the certificates of stock in the new company into a tiny safe, and prepared to pull down the shade. In the railroad yards below, the great eyes of the locomotives glared though the March dusk. As the suburban trains pulled out from minute to minute, thick wreaths of smoke shot up above the white steam blasts of the surrounding buildings. The smoke and steam were sucked together into the vortex of a cross street.

'I wished I hadn't let her go alone,' the dentist mused. 'Some day she'll just go over there into the lake.'

When Mrs. Preston shut the dentist's door behind her, an office door on the opposite side of the hall opened abruptly, and a young man strode into the hall. She recognized him as the young surgeon who had operated upon her husband at St. Isidore's. She stepped behind the iron grating of the elevator well and watched him as he waited for the steel car to bob up from the lower stories. She was ashamed to meet him, especially now that she felt committed to the sordid future.

The little car arrived; the doctor stepped in and disappeared. The door from which he came was covered with a long list of names. She read the name freshly painted in at the bottom,—Dr. Howard Sommers.

CHAPTER VI

For Sommers had joined the staff of the great specialist, and resorted daily to the busy offices in the Athenian Building. A brief vacation had served to convince him of the folly that lay in indulging a parcel of incoherent prejudices at the expense of even that somewhat nebulous thing popularly called a "career." Dr. Lindsay made flattering offers; the work promised to be light, with sufficient opportunity for whatever hospital practice he cared to take; and the new aspect of his profession—commercial medicine he dubbed it—was at least entertaining. If one wished to see the people of Chicago at near range,—those who had made the city what it is, and were making it what it will be,—this was pretty nearly the best chance in the world.

When he had mentioned Lindsay's offer to Dresser, who was rising at laborious hours and toiling in the McNamara and Hill's offices, he realized how unmentionable and trifling were his grounds for hesitation. Dresser's enthusiasm almost persuaded him that Lindsay had given him something valuable. And if he found it difficult to explain his distaste for the thing to Dresser, what would he have to say to other people—to the Hitchcocks? Yet he made his reservations to himself at least: he was not committed to his "career"; he should be merely a spectator, a free-lance, a critic, who keeps the precious treasure of his own independence. Almost at the start, however, he was made to realize that this nonchalance, which vindicated himself in his own eyes, could not be evident to others. As he was entering the Athenian hive one morning, he passed the Hitchcock brougham drawn up by the curb near a jeweller's shop. Miss Hitchcock, who was preparing to alight, gave him a cordial smile and an intelligent glance that was not without a trace of malice. When he crossed the pavement to speak to her, she fulfilled the malice of her glance:

"You find Dr. Lindsay isn't so bad, after all?" There was no time for explanation. She passed on into the jeweller's with another smile on her mobile face. He had to do his stammering to himself, annoyed at the quip of triumph, at the blithe sneer, over his young vaporings. This trivial annoyance was accentuated by the effusive cordiality of the great Lindsay, whom he met in the elevator. Sommers did not like this camaraderie of manner. He had seen Lindsay snub many a poor interne. In his mail, this same morning, came a note from Mrs. E. G. Carson, inviting him to dinner: a sign that something notable was expected of his career, for the Carsons were thrifty of their favors, and were in no position to make social experiments. Such was the merry way of the world, elsewhere as here, he reflected, as he turned to the routine of the day.

The office was in full blast: the telephones rang sharply every few minutes, telling in their irritable little clang of some prosperous patient who desired a panacea for human ailments; the reception-room was already crowded with waiting patients of the second class, those who could not command appointments by telephone. Whenever the door into this room opened, these expectant ones moved nervously, each one hoping to be called. Then, as the door into the private offices closed, the ones left behind fell back with sighs to the magazines and illustrated papers with which they sought to distract their fears or their ennui.

The thin, tall building shivered slightly at the blows of the fresh April wind. The big windows of the reception-room admitted broad bands of sunlight. The lake dazzled beneath in gorgeous green and blue shades. Spring had bustled into town from the prairies, insinuating itself into the dirty, cavernous streets, sailing in boisterously over the gleaming lake, eddying in steam wreaths about the lofty buildings. The subtle monitions of the air permeated the atmosphere of antiseptics in the office, and whipped the turbulent spirits of Sommers until, at the lunch hour, he deserted the Athenian Building and telephoned for his horse.

This saddle horse was one of the compensations for conformity. He had been too busy lately, however, to enjoy it. From the bellow of the city he cantered down the boulevards toward the great parks. As he passed the Hitchcock house he was minded to see if Miss Hitchcock would join him. In the autumn she had ridden with him occasionally, waiving conventionalities, but lately she had made excuses. He divined that Parker Hitchcock had sneered at such countrified behavior. She was to go away in a few days for a round of visits in the South, and he wanted to see her; but a carriage drew up before the house, and his horse carried him briskly past down the avenue. From one boulevard to another he passed, keeping his eyes straight ahead, avoiding the sight of the comfortable, ugly houses, anxious to escape them and their associations, pressing on for a beyond, for something other than this vast, roaring, complacent city. The great park itself was filled with people, carriages, bicycles. A stream of carts and horse-back riders was headed for the Driving Club, where there was tennis and the new game of golf. But Sommers turned his horse into the disfigured Midway, where the Wreck of the Fair began. He came out, finally, on a broad stretch of sandy field, south of the desolate ruins of the Fair itself. The horse picked his way daintily among the debris of staff and wood that lay scattered about for acres. A wagon road led across this waste land toward the crumbling Spanish convent. In this place there was a fine sense of repose, of vast quiet. Everything was dead; the soft spring air gave no life. Even in the geniality of the April day, with the brilliant, theatrical waters of the lake in the distance, the scene was gaunt, savage. To the north, a broad dark shadow that stretched out into the lake defined the city. Nearer, the ample wings of the white Art Building seemed to stand guard against the improprieties of civilization. To the far south, a line of thin trees marked the outer desert of the prairie. Behind, in the west, were straggling flat-buildings, mammoth deserted hotels, one of which was crowned with a spidery steel tower. Nearer, a frivolous Grecian temple had been wheeled to the confines of the park, and dumped by the roadside to serve as a saloon.

Sommers rose in his stirrups and gazed about him over the rotting buildings of the play-city, the scrawny acres that ended in the hard black line of the lake, the vast blocks of open land to the south, which would go to make some new subdivision of the sprawling city. Absorbed, charmed, grimly content with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar dumped at random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut down on the illimitable, tawdry sweep of defaced earth.

The horse started: a human figure, a woman's dress, disturbing here in the desert expanse, had moved in front of him. Sommers hit the horse with his crop and was about to gallop on, when something in the way the woman held herself caught his attention. She was leaning against the wind, her skirt streaming behind her, her face thrust into the air. Sommers reined in his horse and jumped down.

"How is your husband?" he asked brusquely.

Mrs. Preston looked up with a smile of glad recognition, but she did not answer immediately.

"You remember, don't you?" the doctor said kindly. "You are Mrs. Preston, aren't you? I am the doctor who operated on your husband a few weeks ago at the hospital."

"Yes, I remember," she replied, almost sullenly.

"How is he? I left St. Isidore's the next day. Is he still in the hospital?"

"They discharged him last Monday," Mrs. Preston answered, in the same dull tone.

"Ah!" The doctor jerked the bridle which he held in his left hand and prepared to mount. "So he made a quick recovery."

"No, no! I didn't say that," she replied passionately. "You knew, you knew that couldn't be. He has—he is—I don't know how to say it."

Sommers slipped the bridle-rein over the horse's head and walked on by her side. She looked down at the roadway, as if to hide her burning face.

"Where is he now?" the doctor asked, finally, more gently.

"With me, down there." Mrs. Preston waved her hand vaguely toward the southern prairie. They began to walk more briskly, with a tacit purpose in their motion. When the wagon road forked, Mrs. Preston took the branch that led south out of the park. It opened into a high-banked macadamized avenue bordered by broken wooden sidewalks. The vast flat land began to design itself, as the sun faded out behind the irregular lines of buildings two miles to the west. A block south, a huge red chimney was pouring tranquilly its volume of dank smoke into the air. On the southern horizon a sooty cloud hovered above the mills of South Chicago. But, except for the monster chimney, the country ahead of the two was bare, vacant, deserted. The avenue traversed empty lots, mere squares of sand and marsh, cut up in regular patches for future house-builders. Here and there an advertising landowner had cemented a few rods of walk and planted a few trees to trap the possible purchaser into thinking the place "improved." But the cement walks were crumbling, the trees had died, and rank thorny weeds choked about their roots. The cross streets were merely lined out, a deep ditch on either side of an embankment.

"My God, what a place!" the young doctor exclaimed. "The refuse acres of the earth."

The woman smiled bitterly, tranquilly, while her glance roamed over the familiar landscape.

"Yet it is better than the rest, back there," she protested, in a low voice. "At least, there is something open, and a little green in spring, and the nights are calm. It seems the least little bit like what it used to be in Wisconsin on the lake. But there we had such lovely woodsy hills, and great meadows, and fields with cattle, and God's real peace, not this vacuum." Her voice grew faint.

"You liked it there?" the doctor asked musingly.

"It's all that I have ever known that was—as it should be. My father had a farm," she explained more easily, "and until he died and I was sent to Rockminster College to school, my life was there, by the lake, on the farm, at the seminary on the hill, where my brother was studying—"

The visions of the past developed with endless clews, which she could not follow aloud. After waiting for her to resume, Sommers asked tentatively:

"Why don't you go back, then?"

She flashed a rapid, indignant glance at him.

"Now! Go back to what?—With him!"

Her lips set tight. He had been stupid, had hit at random.

"No, no," she continued, answering her own heart; "they would never understand. There is never any going back—and, sometimes, not much going ahead," she ended, with an effort to laugh.

They stopped while the horse nibbled at a tall weed in the roadway. They had got fairly into the prairie, and now at some distance on left and right gawky Queen Anne houses appeared. But along their path the waste was unbroken. The swamp on either side of the road was filled with birds, who flew in and out and perched on the dry planks in the walks. An abandoned electric-car track, raised aloft on a high embankment, crossed the avenue. Here and there a useless hydrant thrust its head far above the muddy soil, sometimes out of the swamp itself. They had left the lake behind them, but the freshening evening breeze brought its damp breath across their faces.

"How came you to get into this spot?" the doctor asked, after his searching eyes had roamed over the misty landscape, half swamp, half city suburb.

"I was transferred—about the time of the operation. My school is over there," she pointed vaguely toward the southwest. "I could not afford to live any distance from the school," she added bluntly. "Besides, I wanted to be alone."

So she taught, Sommers reflected, yet she had none of the professional air, the faded niceness of face and manner which he associated with the city school-teacher.

"I haven't taught long," she volunteered, "only about a year. First I was over by Lincoln Park, near where I had been living."

"Do you like the teaching?" Sommers asked.

"I hate it," she remarked calmly, without any show of passion. "It takes a little of one's life every day, and leaves you a little more dead."

They walked in silence for a few minutes, and then Mrs. Preston suddenly stopped.

"Why do you come?" she exclaimed. "Why do you want to know? It can do no good,—I know it can do no good, and it is worse to have any one—you—know the hateful thing. I want to crush it in myself, never to tell, no,—no one," she stopped incoherently.

"I shall go," the doctor replied calmly, compassionately. "And it is best to tell."

Her rebellious face came back to its wonted repose.

"Yes, I suppose I make it worse. It is best to tell—sometime."

CHAPTER VII

As they proceeded, more briskly now, she talked of her life in the Chicago schools. She had taken the work when nothing else offered in the day of her calamity. She described the struggle for appointment. If it had not been for her father's old friend, a dentist, she would never have succeeded in entering the system. A woman, she explained, must be a Roman Catholic, or have some influence with the Board, to get an appointment. Qualifications? She had had a better education in the Rockminster school than was required, but if a good-natured schoolteacher hadn't coached her on special points in pedagogy, school management, nature-study, etc., she would never have passed the necessary examinations.

In an impersonal way she described the life of a teacher in a great American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as many years as it was necessary to obtain a pension. There were the superintendents, the supervisors, the special teachers, the principals—petty officers of a petty tyranny in which too often seethed gossip, scandal, intrigue. There were the "soft places"; the deceitful, the easy, the harsh principals; the teachers' institutes to which the poor teacher was forced to pay her scanty dollars. There were bulletins, rules, counter-rules. As she talked, Sommers caught the atmosphere of the great engine to which she had given herself. A mere isolated atom, she was set in some obscure corner of this intricate machine, and she was compelled to revolve with the rest, as the rest, in the fear of disgrace and of hunger. The terms "special teachers," "grades of pay," "constructive work," "discipline," etc., had no special significance to him, typifying merely the exactions of the mill, the limitations set about the human atom.

Her manner of telling it all was unpremeditated, incoherent, and discursive, and yet strangely effective. She described the contortions of her kaleidoscope as they came to mind haphazard, with an indifference, a precise objectivity that made the picture all the more real and universal, not the special story of the special case.

"The first weeks I was nearly lost; the drawing teacher didn't like me, and reported my room for disorder; the 'cat'—that is what they call the principal—kept running in and watching, and the pupils—there were seventy-five—I could barely keep them quiet. There was no teaching. How could one teach all those? Most of our time, even in 'good' rooms, is taken up in keeping order. I was afraid each day would be my last, when Miss M'Gann, who was the most friendly one of the teachers, told me what to do. 'Give the drawing teacher something nice from your lunch, and ask her in to eat with you. She is an ignorant old fool, but her brother is high up in a German ward. And give the cat taffy. Ask him how he works out the arithmetic lessons, and about his sassing the assistant superintendent, and make yourself agreeable.'

"I did as I was told," she ended with a smile, "and things went better for a time. But there was always the married teachers' scare. Every month or so some one starts the rumor that the Board is going to remove all married teachers; there are complaints that the married women crowd out the girls—those who have to support themselves."

They both laughed at the irony of the argument, and their laugh did much to do away with the constraint, the tension of their mood. More gayly she mentioned certain farcical incidents.

"Once I saw a principal hurl a book at a sleepy teacher, who was nodding in his lecture at the Institute. Poor woman! she is so nearly deaf that she can hear nothing, and they say she can never remember where the lessons are: the pupils conduct the recitations. But she has taught in that school for twenty-three years, and she is a political influence in the ward. Imagine it!"

They laughed again, and the world seemed lighter. Sommers looked at his companion more closely and appreciatively. Her tone of irony, of amused and impartial spectatorship, entertained him. Would he, caught like this, wedged into an iron system, take it so lightly, accept it so humanly? It was the best the world held out for her: to be permitted to remain in the system, to serve out her twenty or thirty years, drying up in the thin, hot air of the schoolroom; then, ultimately, when released, to have the means to subsist in some third-rate boarding-house until the end. Or marry again? But the dark lines under the eyes, the curve of experience at the mouth, did not warrant that supposition. She had had her trial of that alternative.

She did not question him, and evinced no curiosity about his world. She had touched it on the extreme edge, and she was content with that, satisfied probably that this unexpected renewal of their connection was most casual—too fortunate to happen again. So she took him into a perfectly easy intimacy; it was the nearness that comes between two people when there is slight probability of a common future.

At last she turned into one of the streets that crossed the avenue at long intervals. This one was more developed than those they had passed: a row of gigantic telephone poles stretched along its side; two car tracks in use indicated that it was a thoroughfare. At the corner there was an advertising sign of The Hub Clothing House; and beneath, on one spoke of a tiny hub, This is Ninety-first Street; and at right angles on another spoke, This is Washington Avenue. He remembered vaguely having seen a Washington Avenue miles to the north. The thing had been drawn on the map by a ruler, without regard to habitations; on the map it probably went on into Indiana, to the Ohio River,—to the Gulf for all he knew.

Yet the cross-road was more promising than anything they had met: a truck farm bordered one side; a line of tall willows suggested faintly the country. Just beyond the tracks of a railroad the ground rose almost imperceptibly, and a grove of stunted oaks covered the miniature hill. The bronzed leaves still hanging from the trees made something like shade beside the road.

"That is better," Sommers exclaimed, relieved to find a little oasis in the desert of sand and weeds.

The woman smiled. "It is almost a forest; it runs south for a block. And beyond there is the loveliest meadow, all tender green now. Over there you can see the Everglade School, where I spend my days. The people are Swedes, mostly,—operatives in the factories at Grand Crossing and on the railroads. Many of the children can scarcely understand a word of English,—and their habits! But they are better than the Poles, in the Halsted Street district, or the Russians in another West Side district. And we have a brick building, not rooms rented in a wooden house. And the principal is an old woman, too fat to climb all the stairs to my room. So I am left alone to reign among my young barbarians."

When they reached the grove, Mrs. Preston crossed the car tracks and entered a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney Island Avenue,—the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding villages with Chicago.

An old German had lived in it, Mrs. Preston explained, until his death a year or two ago. He had a little chicken farm. As no one else wanted to live in such a desolate place, so far from the scattered hamlets, she had got it for a small rent. The house was a tiny imitation of a castle, with crenelated parapet and tower. Crumbling now and weather-stained, it had a quaint, human, wistful air. Its face was turned away from the road toward a bit of garden, which was fenced off from the lane by arbors of grape-vines.

Sommers tied his horse to the gate post. Mrs. Preston did not speak after they reached the house. Her face had lost its animation. They stood still for some time, gazing into the peaceful garden plot and the bronzed oaks beyond, as if loath to break the intimacy of the last half hour. In the solitude, the dead silence of the place, there seemed to lurk misfortune and pain. Suddenly from a distance sounded the whirr of an electric car, passing on the avenue behind them. The noise came softened across the open lot—a distant murmur from the big city that was otherwise so remote.

The spring twilight had descended, softening all brutal details. The broad horizon above the lake was piled deep with clouds. Beyond the oak trees, in the southern sky, great tongues of flame shot up into the dark heavens out of the blast furnaces of the steel works. Deep-toned, full-throated frogs had begun their monotonous chant.

CHAPTER VIII

"Shall we go in?" the doctor asked at last.

Mrs. Preston started, and her hand closed instinctively upon the gate, as if to bar further entrance to her privacy. Then without reply she opened the gate, led the way across the tiny lawn, and unlocked the cottage door. They entered a large room, from which some narrow stairs led to the chambers above. Floor and walls were bare, and the only furniture consisted of two wooden chairs, a small coal-stove, and a pine table of considerable size. This was covered with books, school exercises, and a few dishes. Mrs. Preston brusquely flung off her cape and hat, and faced the doctor.

"I might as well tell you the main thing before you see him. He—"

"That is scarcely necessary," Sommers replied gently. "I probably know what you are thinking of."

A flush, caused by the revealed shame, crept over her face, lighting it to the extreme corners under the temples and ears. As she stood there, humiliated, yet defiant of him and of the world, Sommers remembered the first time he had seen her that night at the hospital. He read her, somehow, extraordinarily well; he knew the misery, the longing, the anger, the hate, the stubborn power to fight. Her deep eyes glanced at him frankly, willing to be read by this stranger out of the multitude of men. They had no more need of words now than at that first moment in the operating room at St. Isidore's. They were man and woman, in the presence of a fate that could not be softened by words.

"You are right," she said softly. "Yet sometime I want to tell you things—not now. I will go and see how he is."

When she had left the room, Sommers examined the few objects about him in the manner of a man who draws his conclusions from innumerable, imponderable data. Then he took a chair to the window and sat down. She was very real to him, this woman, and compelling, with her silences, her broken phrases. Rarely, very rarely before in his life, had he had this experience of intimacy without foreknowledge, without background—the sense of dealing with a human soul nakedly.

"Will you come now?"

Mrs. Preston had returned and held the stair-door open for him. Sommers looked at her searchingly, curious to find where this power lay. Her face had grown white and set. The features and the figure were those of a large woman. Her hair, bronzed in the sunlight as he remembered, was dark in the gloom of this room. The plain, symmetrical arrangement of the hair above the large brow and features made her seem older than she was. The deep-set eyes, the quivering lips, and the thin nostrils gave life to the passive, restrained face. The passions of her life lay just beneath the surface of flesh.

"He is very talkative, and wanders—"

The doctor nodded and followed her up the steep stairs, which were closed at the head by a stout door. The upper story was divided about equally into two rooms. The east room, to which Mrs. Preston opened the door, was plainly furnished, yet in comparison with the room below it seemed almost luxurious. Two windows gave a clear view above the little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake. Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon. Near this window on a lounge lay the patient.

Preston's personal appearance had not improved during his illness: his face, over the lower half of which a black beard had grown rankly, was puffy with convalescent fat. His hands that drummed idly against the couch were white and flabby. As he half rose and extended his hand to the doctor, he betrayed, indefinably, remote traces of superior breeding.

"Excuse me, doctor," he said apologetically. "Mrs. Preston keeps me a close prisoner. But she won't have the whip-hand very long."

He laughed boisterously, as Sommers shook hands and sat down.

"Women know they've got you while you are sick. They like to keep an eye on a man, eh?"

He laughed again, confidentially, as if the doctor, being a man, would appreciate the point. Then he continued, nervously, without pause:

"But I have some business to attend to. I must get out of this as soon as you can patch me up so I can walk straight. I ought to have been in Denver a month ago. There's a man out there, who comes in from his ranch two hundred miles to see me. He is a fine fellow, strapping, big six-footer. He knows how to put in his time day and night, when he gets to town. I remember one time we were in Frisco together—ever been in Frisco? It's a great place for a good dinner, and all you want to drink. Drink—my! I've seen the time—"

He rambled on, now and then pausing to laugh boisterously at some recollection. As his whirligig tale touched upon indecent episodes, his voice lowered and he sought for convenient euphemisms, helped out by sympathetic nods. Mrs. Preston made several attempts to interrupt his aimless, wandering talk; but he started again each time, excited by the presence of the doctor. His mind was like a bag of loosely associated ideas. Any jar seemed to set loose a long line of reminiscences, very vaguely connected. The doctor encouraged him to talk, to develop himself, to reveal the story of his roadside debaucheries. He listened attentively, evincing an interest in the incoherent tale. Mrs. Preston watched the doctor's face with restless eyes.

Finally Preston ended his husky monotone in a querulous entreaty. "I need a little whiskey to keep me going. Tell her, won't you?—to let me have a little drink. My regular allowance was a pint a day, and I haven't had a drop for four weeks. Your Chicago whiskey is rotten bad, though, I tell you. I just stepped into a place to get a drink with Joe Campbell—his father owns a big pulp mill in Michigan—well—we had one or two drinks, and the first thing I knew there was shooting all over the place, and some one grabbed me, and I was thrown into the street—"

Mrs. Preston exclaimed, "Do you want to hear more?"

Sommers rose. "I'll come again to see you, Mr. Preston, and I will leave something that will help you. Good night."

"It was good of you to take this interest, doctor. I am glad to have met you, Doctor—?"

"Sommers," suggested the doctor, smiling at the evidences of forgotten breeding that cropped out of the general decay.

"Well, Dr. Sommers, I hope we shall meet again when I am more myself."

When they returned to the room below, Mrs. Preston lit a lamp. After some minutes Sommers asked, "How long has this been going on?"

"For years—before he left college; he was taken out of Yale because of it.
All I know is what he tells when he is not—responsible."

"Ah!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily.

"I never knew," Mrs. Preston added quickly, "until we had been married a year. He was away so much of the time, and he was very different then—I mean he didn't ramble on as he does now. He was not flabby and childish, not before the operation."

The doctor turned his face away.

"About two years ago some of the men he was with brought him home, drunk. Afterward he didn't seem to care. But he was away most of the time, travelling, going from place to place, always living in hotels, always drinking until some illness brought him back."

"And this time?" the doctor asked.

Mrs. Preston shut her lips, as if there were things she could not say yet.

"I was not living with him." In a few moments, she continued quietly: "I suppose I should have been but for one thing. He told me he was going to New York, and I found him with another woman, living in a hotel not a mile from our home. I don't know why I should have made so much of that. I had suspected for months that there were other women; but seeing it, knowing that he knew I had seen it! I nearly starved before I got work."

Confession, the details, the whole story, appealed to her evidently as obvious, typical, useless. She tried to select simple words, to leave the facts undimmed by passionate speech.

"As I told you, an old friend of my father's helped me to get work. That kept me from ending it just there. As the months went on and he did not try to find me, I got used to the round, to the school, the living on, dead and alive. I thought of getting a divorce, of finding some country school in another state. Dr. Leonard urged me to. I might have—I don't know. But accidentally he was brought back. I was going home from a teachers' meeting that night. I saw him lying on the pavement, thrown out of the saloon, as he told you. A crowd gathered. He was unconscious. I wanted to run away, to leave him, to escape. He groaned. I couldn't—I couldn't."

She sighed wearily at the memory of her illogical act. The doctor nodded sympathetically. It was a fatal moment, the point of decision in her life. He understood what it meant to her.

"There was no one else to take him—to be responsible. He had been mine. After all, the divorce would have made no difference; it never can. You have to take your failures; you have to endure."

"Has he any relatives?" Sommers asked.

"A few; they were done with him long ago. They had money, and they wanted to get rid of him. They put him into a business that would keep him away from them; that would give him the best chance to kill himself—going about everywhere, always travelling, always with men who drink and live in hotels as he has. They shoved him into the world to let the world, or any one who would, take care of him."

It had been her lot, because of the error of her incompetent heart, to take charge of this flotsam. That was so evident that she had given up seeking for escape.

"He is helpless now," she added, as for excuse. "It would be cruel."

For a moment the doctor's face looked hard. Was it, he seemed to be turning over in his mind, that she loved him a little in the depths of her heart? That was an irritating trait of feminine stupidity. But one intelligent glance at her calm face rendered that supposition impossible. She was merely largely human, with a sense of remote claims.

"And now what will you do?" he asked.

Her eyes were brooding on that now. Finally she exclaimed with an impatient gesture:

"How can I tell! He may get strong enough to leave me—in peace. He may come back again to rest and get well. And that may go on and on until one of us dies, or I am discharged. As I told you, they are trying now to exclude married teachers from the schools. And I am married!"

Sommers saw that she had faced the sordid situation; that she expected no relief from the clouds. He got up and looked at his watch.

"I shall come again. We will see what can be done."

This was a convention of the profession. Nothing could be done for that man, and he knew it. She knew it also. She smiled mournfully as they shook hands. Yet as he moved toward the door she asked in a low tone:

"Won't you tell me what you call it? There is no use in not telling me."

"Paresis," Sommers replied shortly. As her face was still inquiring, he added: "Brain trouble. In his case a kind of decay of the tissue; perhaps inherited, certainly hastened by his habits, probably precipitated by the operation."

His glance met hers, and they both fell silent before the common thought. In the practice of his profession he had done this for her, in obedience to the cowardly rules of that profession. He had saved life—animation—to this mass of corruption. Except for his skill, this waste being would have gone its way quietly to death, thereby purifying all life by that little. He added at last in a mechanical tone:

"That results sometimes from such an operation. You can't tell how it will affect the brain, especially when the history of the case is a bad one. He will have to be sent away to an institution if—; but the only thing now is to wait to see what will happen. Good night. I shall see you in a few days," he concluded abruptly.

He was determined to speculate no more, to give her no hopes that might prove groundless. The future was uncertain: the patient might have convulsions, paralysis, locomotor ataxia, mere imbecility with normal physical functions, or intermittent insanity. It was highly unprofessional to speculate in this loose fashion about the outcome of an operation.

Mrs. Preston watched him as he crossed the lawn and untied his horse. She had not thanked him for coming, for promising to come again, he reflected with relief. She was no weak, dependent fool. He rode down the sodded lane, and as his horse picked his way carefully toward the avenue where the electric cars were shooting back and forth like magnified fireflies, he turned in his saddle to look once more at the cottage. One light gleamed from the room he had just left. He could see the outline of the woman's form standing by the open window. The place was lonely and forbidding enough, isolated and withdrawn as the life of the woman within it. She was set apart with the thing that had been man stretched out above in stupor, or restlessly babbling over his dirty tale. God knew why! Yet, physician and unsentimental thinker that he was, he felt to a certain degree the inevitableness of her fate. The common thing would be to shake the dirt from one's shoes, to turn one's back on the diseased and mistaken being, "to put it away where it would not trouble,"—but she did not seek to escape.

And he had been the instrument to execute for her this decree of fate, to bind it permanently, a lifetime curse.

The frogs were making merry in the marshy fields along the avenue. Their robust chorus mingled with the whir of the cars. Soft, dark clouds were driving lakeward. The blast furnaces of the steel works in South Chicago silently opened and belched flame, and silently closed again. A rosy vapor, as from some Tartarean breathing, hovered about the mouths of the furnaces. Moment by moment these mouths opened and belched and closed. It was the fiery respiration of a gigantic beast, of a long worm whose dark body enveloped the smoky city. The beast heaved and panted and rested, again and again—the beast that lay on its belly for many a mile, whose ample stomach was the city, there northward, hid in smoke.

CHAPTER IX

Long after the horse's hoofs had ceased to beat in the still evening, Mrs. Preston sat by the open window in the bare cottage room, her head resting on her arms, her eyes peering into the soft darkness in the path of the shadowy figure that had passed down Stoney Island Avenue into the night beyond her ken. She had not asked him to return. But he had promised to. Indeed, he did not seem to be far away: she could feel his gentle eyes, his imperious face, his sympathetic voice. It was not much that she could make of him; but her imagination built gratefully on his few words and simple acts, until he became—as when he had spoken to her at the hospital—a masterful spirit, dominating that vague, warm land of dreams in which she took refuge during waking hours.

She should see him again—she must see him again, that was all. And yet what was the good of it? Only a new pain in thus revealing her sores—a pain mixed with a subtle anaesthetic, sweeter than anything she had known in this life. In the end she would have to do without this anodyne; would have to meet her hard and brutal world. Just now, while the yoke was hot to the neck, she might take this mercy to temper the anguish. On the long hill road before her it would be a grateful memory. It seemed now that she had put herself to the yoke, had taken the hill road very lightly. She had not thought of accepting the dentist's advice. With the fierce energy of her crushed, spoiled youth, she had taken her measures: had found this little cottage, hid in the oak copse; had prepared it with her own hands; had gone to the hospital to fetch her husband. That never ending journey from the hospital to the cottage! His ceaseless babble, the foul overflow from his feeble mind, had sapped her courage.

Her head dropped weakly upon her arms; useless tears started. Before that day she had had some joy in this cottage. There were glorious sunrises from the lake and sunsets over the desolate marshes. The rank swamp grasses were growing long, covering decently the unkempt soil. At night, alone, she had comfort in the multitudinous cries from the railroads that ribbed the prairie in this outskirt of the city. The shrieks of the locomotives were like the calls of great savage birds, raising their voices melodiously as they fled to and fro into the roaring cavern of the city, outward to the silent country, to the happier, freer regions of man. As they rushed, they bore her with them to those shadowy lands far away in the sweet stillness of summer-scented noons, in the solemn quiet of autumn nights. Her days were beset with visions like these—visions of a cool, quiet, tranquil world; of conditions of peace; of yearnings satisfied; of toil that did not lacerate. Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed even to herself, this perpetual obsession by the desire for happiness,—inarticulate, unformed desire. It haunted her, night and morning, haunted her as the desire for food haunts the famished, the desire for action the prisoned. It urged on her footsteps in the still afternoons as she wandered over this vast waste of houseless blocks. Up and down the endless checker-board of empty streets and avenues she had roamed, gleaning what joys were to be had in the metallic atmosphere, the stunted copses, the marshy pools spotted with the blue shields of fleur-de-lys. For even here, in the refuse corner of the great city, Nature doled out niggardly gifts of green growth—proofs of her unquenchable bounty.

This hunger for joy had included no desire for companionship. When her child died, the last person had slipped out of her world. To-night there was a strange, almost fearful sense that this vacant, tenantless life might change. Was there some one among these dull figures that would take life, speak, touch her?

There was a movement in the rooms above. She started. Had she locked the door securely? Preston had tried before to drag himself out of the cottage, across the intervening lot, to the saloon on Stoney Island Avenue, whose immense black and gold sign he could see from his chamber. That must not happen here, in the neighborhood of the Everglade School. She must keep him well concealed until he should be strong enough to go far away, on the old round of travel and debauch, from city to city, wearing out his brutishness and returning to her only when spent.

The movements above increased. He was pounding at the door.

"Are you going to let me starve? Where are you?" the sick man called out querulously.

She sprang up; she had forgotten to get supper. When she took the food upstairs, Preston was dragging himself about the room. He was excited, and anxious to talk.

"Did that doctor fix me up? I don't remember seeing him in the hospital."

"He operated when you were received. He left the next day," she answered.

"It must have been a neat job. I guess I was in a pretty tough state," he mused more quietly. "How did he happen to look me up?"

"I met him accidentally in the park," she explained briefly, anxious to have done with the subject. "He offered to come back with me to see you. Perhaps," she added more bitterly, "he wanted to see what he had done."

"I suppose he knows?"

She nodded.

"Well, I can't see why he bothers around. I don't want his attentions."

As she prepared to leave the room, after pulling down the shades and opening the bed, he said apologetically:

"It was pretty good of you to take me in after—I have treated you badly,
Alves. But it's no use in going back over that. I guess I was made so.
There are lots of men like that, or worse."

"I suppose so," she assented coldly.

"Why are you so stiff with me? You hardly look at me, and you touch me as if I were a piece of dirt. Supposing I take a brace and we start over, somewhere else? I am tired of knocking round. Come over and kiss me, won't you?"

Mrs. Preston paused in her work, the color mounting in her face. At first she made no reply, but as she crossed to the door, she said in a cool, distant tone:

"I don't think I shall ever kiss you again or let you touch me, if I can help it. Do you happen to remember where I saw you last—I mean before I found you in the street—six months ago?"

His face grew troubled, as if he were trying to recollect.

"Oh! that woman? Well, that's past."

"Yes, that woman. I took you here," she continued, her full voice gathering passion, "because you are helpless and an outcast. And because I had taken you before, ignorantly, I feel bound to defend you as you never defended me. But I am not bound to do more, and you have sense enough—"

"You were ready enough to bind yourself, if I remember."

She answered meekly:

"I can't think it was the same woman who did that—who was blind and cheap enough to do that. Something has shown me that I am other than the foolish creature you took so easily with a marriage ring, because you could not have her in an easier way! But the old, silly country girl has gone and left me this——Why did it have to be?" she exclaimed more incoherently. "Why did you not let me read what you are? I had only a few wretched weeks to learn you—and I was ignorant and foolish and young. You had me helpless at Barrington! Was it such a clever thing to cheat a girl from a Wisconsin village?"

Preston answered apologetically,—

"Well, I married you."

"Married me! You make a good deal of that! Perhaps it would have been better if you had not married me. My child and I could have died together then. But I was married, and so I struggled. The child died, died, do you hear, because you had left me without money to get it what it needed. I sat and saw it die. You were—"

She closed her lips as if to repress further words. As she reached the door, she said in her usual neutral tones:

"So long as you are decent, keep from drinking, and don't get me into trouble at the school, you may stay and take what I can give you."

"'May stay!'" Preston roared, getting to his feet and making a step to intercept her before she closed the door. His legs trembled, and he fell. She knelt over him to see if he had injured himself, and then satisfied that he was not hurt, she left the room, barring the door from the outside. She was none too soon in taking this precaution, for as she swung the heavy oak bar into its socket,—a convenient device of the old German, who had the reputation of being a miser,—she could hear Preston dragging himself toward the door, cursing as he stumbled over the furniture. She crept wearily downstairs into the bare room. Some one was moving in the tiny kitchen beyond.

"Is that you, Anna?" Mrs. Preston called.

"Ye-es," a slow voice responded. Presently a young woman came forward. She was large and very fair, with the pale complexion and intense blue eyes of the Swede.

"I came in and found no one here, so I was cleaning up for you. I have time. John has gone to a meeting—there are many meetings now and not much work. You will eat something?"

She went back to the kitchen and returned with warm food.

"Yes, I am faint." Mrs. Preston's arms trembled. She laughed nervously as she spilled her tea.

"You are not well? You cannot live so—it's no use," the strong Swede continued monotonously. "The men are bad enough when they are good; but when they are bad, a woman can do nothing."

"Tell me about the strike."

Anna Svenson laughed contemptuously, as if such affairs were a part of men's foolishness.

"They're talking of going out, all the railroad men, if the roads use the Pullmans. That's what John has gone to see about. Work is hard to find, so they're going to make less of it."

She stood easily, her arms by her side, watching Mrs. Preston eat, and talking in an even, unexcited tone.

"Father likes the job I told you about—over at the lumber yards. He came in last Sunday. He says the folks out his way are near starving. Svenson thinks of quitting his job."

She laughed gently.

"Life is like that," Mrs. Preston assented. "You can't manage it."

"No, why should one?" Anna Svenson replied coolly. "Children come, they die, they grow up, they fight, they starve, and they have children. It was so over there; it is so here—only more pay and more drink some days; less pay, less drink other days. I shall wash the dishes. Sit still."

She came and went quickly, noiselessly. When everything had been done, she opened a window and leaned out, looking into the darkness. The fact of her presence seemed to bring peace to the room.

"It is a good night," she said, drawing her head in. "There, Svenson has lit the lamp. I must go."

"Good night, Anna." Mrs. Preston took her hand. It was large and cool.

"You shake hands?" Mrs. Svenson asked, with a smile. "When I was working out, people like you never shook hands."

"People like me! What have I that makes me different from you?"

"Oh, nothing; not much," she replied tranquilly.

With a sigh Mrs. Preston took up a bundle of grammar exercises and sorted them. She was too weary for this task: she could not go on just yet. She drew her chair over to the window and sat there long quarter hours, watching the electric cars. They announced themselves from a great distance by a low singing on the overhead wire; then with a rush and a rumble the big, lighted things dashed across the void, and rumbled on with a clatter of smashing iron as they took the switches recklessly. The noise soothed her; in the quiet intervals she was listening for sounds from upstairs. The night was still and languorous, one of the peaceful nights of large spaces when the heavens brood over the earth like a mother over a fretful child. At last no more cars came booming out of the distance. She shut the windows and bolted the door; then she prepared slowly to undress.

For the first time in months she looked at herself curiously, taking an impersonal, calm survey of this body. She sought for signs of slovenly decay,—thinning rusty hair, untidy nails, grimy hands, dried skin,—those marks which she had seen in so many teachers who had abandoned themselves without hope to the unmarried state and had grown careless of their bodies. As she wound her hair into heavy ropes and braided them, it gave her a sharp sense of joy, this body of hers, so firm and warm with blood, so unmarked by her sordid struggle. It was well to be one's self, to own the tenement of the soul; for a time it had not been hers—she reddened with the shame of the thought! But she had gained possession once more, never, never to lose it.

She listened carefully for noises from above; then flung herself on the couch, utterly wearied. In a moment she was asleep, having shed the years of pain, and a frank smile crept over the calm face.

CHAPTER X

After giving the invalid his breakfast, and arranging him on his couch where he could see the cars pass, Mrs. Preston hurried over to the Everglade School, which was only two blocks west of Stoney Island Avenue. At noon she slipped out, while the other teachers gathered in one of the larger rooms to chat and unroll their luncheons. These were wrapped in little fancy napkins that were carefully shaken and folded to serve for the next day. As the Everglade teachers had dismissed Mrs. Preston from the first as queer, her absence from the noon gossip was rather welcome, though resented.

The recess hour gave Mrs. Preston enough time to carry upstairs a cold meal, to take a hasty nibble of food, and to hurry back across the vacant lots before the gong should ring for the afternoon session. At the close of school she returned to the cottage more deliberately, to finish her house work before taking her daily walk. Occasionally she found this work already performed; Anna Svenson's robust form would greet her as she entered the cottage, with the apologetic phrase, "My fingers were restless." Mrs. Svenson had an unquenchable appetite for work. The two women would have a silent cup of tea; then Mrs. Svenson would smile in her broad, apathetic manner, saying, "One lives, you see, after all," and disappear through the oak copse. Thus very quickly between the school and the cottage Mrs. Preston's day arranged itself in a routine.

Three days after the unexpected visit from the doctor, Mrs. Preston found on her return from the school a woman's bicycle leaning against the gate. Under the arbor sat the owner of the bicycle, fanning herself with a little "perky" hat. She wore a short plaid skirt, high shoes elaborately laced, and a flaming violet waist. Her eyes were travelling over the cottage and all its premises.

"Miss M'Gann!" Mrs. Preston exclaimed.

"My!" the young woman responded, "but they did send you to kingdom come. You're the next thing, Alves, to Indiana. I do hope you can get out of this soon."

Mrs. Preston sat down beside her in the little arbor, and made polite inquiries about the school where they had taught together, about Jane M'Gann's "beaux," the "cat," and the "house" where she boarded.

"It was good of you to come all this way to see me," she concluded.

"I wanted a ride. We had a half day off—infectious disease in Rosa Macraw's room. Besides, I told the girls I'd hunt you out. How are you? You look rather down. Say, you mustn't shut yourself off here where folks can't get at you. Why don't you live up town, at the house?"

"I can't," Mrs. Preston answered briefly.

"Do you know the news? The 'cat' has gone up higher. They made him supervisor, 'count of his sly walk, I guess. And we've got a new principal. He's fine. You can just do what you want with him, if you handle him right. Oh, do you know Rosemarry King, the girl that used to dress so queer, has been discharged? She lived in bachelor-girl apartments with a lot of artists, and they say they were pretty lively. And Miss Cohen is going to be married, ain't coming back any more after this year. Some of us thought we could work it so as the new principal—Hoff's his name—would ask to have you transferred back to one of those places. There's just a chance. Now I've told all my news and everything!"

At that moment a man's figure appeared at an upper window. He was in a dressing-gown, and unshaven. Miss M'Gann's keen vision spied him at once.

"You'll get queer, if you stay here!" she said falteringly. "I guess I am queer already," Mrs. Preston answered with a smile. "Let us go inside and have some tea."

Miss M'Gann looked the room over critically.

"You must come down to the house some night soon and meet the principal. He rides a wheel, and we girls see considerable of him. If you are nice to him, he'll do anything—he is one of the soft kind, sweet on all women, and likes a little adoration."

"No, I don't believe I can." Mrs. Preston listened. There was noise in the chamber above. "Besides, I like it out here. I like the quiet," she added.

Miss M'Gann looked at her incredulously, as if she were waiting to hear more. As nothing came, she went on:

"We are having high times over the new readers. The 'cat' has done a set of readers for the fourth and fifth. McNamara and Hills are bringing 'em out. The Express Book Co. has a lot of money in the old ones, and they are fighting hard to keep the cat's out of the schools. They're sending men around to get reports from the teachers. There's a man, one of their agents, who comes over to the house pretty often. He's a college man, was a professor at Exonia."

"Excuse me," Mrs. Preston interrupted. The continued noise in the room overhead had made her more and more nervous. She had not heard Miss M'Gann's story, which would probably be the preface of a tender personal episode. "I will be back in a moment," she said, closing the sitting-room door carefully.

Miss M'Gann sat forward, listening intently. She could hear the stairs creak under Mrs. Preston's quick steps; then there was silence; then an angry voice, a man's voice. Excited by this mystery, she rose noiselessly and set the hall door ajar. She could hear Alves Preston's voice:

"You must not come down. You aren't fit."

"Thank you for your advice," a man's voice replied. "Who's your visitor?
Some man? I am going to see. Don't make a scene."

There was the sound of a scuffle; then the cry of a woman, as she fell back exhausted from her physical struggle.

"P'r'aps he's murdering her!"

Miss M'Gann opened the door at the foot of the stairs wide enough to detect a half-clothed man trying to pry open with one arm a heavy door above. She hesitated for a moment, but when the man had shoved the door back a little farther, enough for her to see Mrs. Preston struggling with all her force, she called out:

"Can I help you, Mrs. Preston?"

"No, no, go back! Go out of the house!"

"Well, I never!" Miss M'Gann ejaculated, and retreated to the sitting room, leaving the door ajar, however.

The struggle ended shortly, and soon the man appeared, plunging, tumbling over the stairs. Wrenching open the front door he stumbled down the steps to the road. He was hatless, collarless, and his feet were shod in slippers. As he reached the gate he looked at himself as if accustomed to take pride in his personal appearance, drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wound it negligently about his neck. Then, gazing about to get his bearings, he aimed for the road. Just as he crossed the car tracks, heading for the saloon with the big sign, Mrs. Preston entered the room. Her face was pale and drawn. Miss M'Gann was too embarrassed to speak, and she pretended to look into the kitchen.

"You will see now why I don't want a transfer," Mrs. Preston began, to break the awkward silence. "I must look after my husband."

"My!" Miss M'Gann exclaimed, and then restrained herself. She nodded her head slowly, and crossed to where Mrs. Preston had seated herself.

"But it's terrible to think of you here alone," she remarked gently. She had intended to put her arm about Mrs. Preston's waist, but something deterred her. "I wish I could come out and stay right on. I'm going to spend the night, anyway. Father was that kind," she added in a lower voice.

Mrs. Preston winced under her sympathy and shook her head. "No, no! I am better alone. You mustn't stay."

"You'd ought to have some woman here," the girl insisted, with the feminine instinct for the natural league of women. "At least, some one to look after the house and keep you company."

"I have thought of trying to find a servant," Mrs. Preston admitted. "But what servant—" she left the sentence unfinished, "even if I could pay the wages," she continued. "Anna comes in sometimes—she's a young Swede who has a sister in the school. But I've got to get on alone somehow."

"Well, if that's what getting married is, it's no wonder more of us girls don't get married, as I told Mr. Dresser."

There was a knock at the outside door. Miss M'Gann quickly barricaded herself behind the long table, while Mrs. Preston opened the door and admitted the visitor. Miss M'Gann came forward with evident relief, and Mrs. Preston introduced her visitors, "Dr. Sommers, Miss M'Gann."

Miss M'Gann greeted the doctor warmly.

"Why, this must be Mr. Dresser's Dr. Sommers." The young doctor bowed and look annoyed. Miss M'Gann, finding that she could get little from either of the two silent people, took her leave.

"I'll not forget you, dear," she said, squeezing Mrs. Preston's hand.

When she had ridden away, Mrs. Preston returned to the little sitting room and dropped wearily into a chair.

"He has just gone, escaped!" she exclaimed. "Just before you came."

The doctor whistled. "Do you know where he's gone to?"

She pointed silently to the low wooden building across the neighboring avenue.

"If he makes a row, it will all get out. I shall lose my place."

The doctor nodded.

"Has it happened before?"

"He's tried of late. But I have kept him in and barred the door. This time he forced it open. I was not strong enough to hold it."

The doctor hesitated a moment, and then, as if making a sudden resolve, he took his hat.

"I'll try to bring him back."

From the open window she could see him walk leisurely down the lane to the street, and pick his way carefully over the broken planks of the sidewalk to the avenue. Then he disappeared behind the short shutters that crossed the door of the saloon.

For some reason this seemed the one thing unbearable in her experience. The bitterness of it all welled up and overflowed in a few hot tears that stung her hands as they dropped slowly from the burning eyes. It was a long time before the little blinds swung out, and the doctor appeared with her husband. Preston was talking affably, fluently, and now and then he tapped the doctor familiarly on his shoulders to emphasize a remark. Sommers responded enough to keep his companion's interest. Once he gently restrained him, as the hatless man plunged carelessly forward in front of an approaching car. As the pair neared the house, the woman at the window could hear the rapid flow of talk. Preston was excited, self-assertive, and elaborately courteous.

"After you, doctor. Will you come upstairs to my room?" she caught as they entered the gate. "My wife, doctor, is all right, good woman; but, like the rest of them, foolish."

And the babbling continued until some one closed the heavy door at the head of the stairs. Then there was noise, as of a man getting into bed. In time it was quiet, and just as she was about to make the effort of finding out what had happened, Sommers came downstairs and signed to her to sit down.

"I have given him a hypodermic injection. He won't trouble you any more to-night," he said, staring dreamily out into the twilight.

CHAPTER XI

"This is too much for you," Sommers observed finally.

After his meditation he had come to much the same obvious conclusion that
Miss M'Gann had formed previously. The woman moved wearily in her chair.

"It can't go on," the doctor proceeded. "No one can tell what he might do in his accesses—what violence he would do to you, to himself."

"He may get better," she suggested.

Sommers shook his head slowly.

"I am afraid not; the only thing to be hoped for is that he will get worse, much worse, as rapidly as possible."

Mrs. Preston stood his questioning eyes as he delivered this unprofessional opinion.

"Meantime you must protect yourself. The least harm his outbreaks will do will be to make a scandal, to make it necessary for you to leave your school."

"What can I do?" she asked, almost irritably.

"There are institutions."

"I have no money."

"And I suppose they would not do, now, while he is apparently getting better. They would not help him, even if we should get him confined. His is one of those cases where the common law prescribes liberty."

There was nothing further to say in this direction. Sommers seemed to be thinking. At last, with an impulsive motion, he exclaimed:

"It should not have been! No, it should not have been."

He paused. Her eyes had lowered from his face. She knew his unexpressed thought.

"And more than that, if you and I and the world thought straight, he would not be here now."

"No, I suppose not," she acquiesced quietly, following his thought word by word. "Well, as it is, I guess it's for life—for my life, at least."

"If one could only love enough—" he mused.

"Love!" she exclaimed passionately, at this blasphemous intrusion. "Does one love such as that,—the man who betrayed your youth?"

"Not you and I. But one who could love enough—"

Her disdainful smile stopped him.

"I followed him to the hospital. I took him here, I don't know why. I guess it's my fate. He was once mine, and I can't escape that—but as to love—do you think I am as low as that?"

"You have no duties except the duties love makes," the doctor suggested. "He is no longer even the man you married. He is not a man in any sense of the word. He is merely a failure, a mistake; and if society is afraid to rid itself of him, society must provide for him."

"Yes, yes," she murmured, as if all this were familiar ground to her mind. "But I am the nearest member of society—the one whose business it is to attend to this mistake. It's my contribution," she ended with a feeble smile.

"Society has no right to expect too much from any one. The whole sacrifice mustn't fall where it crushes. I say that such a case should be treated by the public authorities, and should be treated once for all."

She rose and looked into his eyes, as if to say, 'You were society, and you did not dare.' In a moment she turned away, and said, "Don't you believe in a soul?"

"Yes," he smiled back. "And that poor soul and others like it, many, many thousands, who cannot grow, should be at rest—one long rest; to let other souls grow, unblasted by their foul touch."

"I have thought so," she replied calmly, taking his belief as an equal. "To let joy into the world somewhere before death." Her wistful tone rang out into the room. "But that would be murder," she continued. "We should have to call it murder, shouldn't we? And that is a fearful word. I could never quite forget it. I should always ask myself if I were right, if I had the right to judge. I am a coward. The work is too much for me."

"We will not think of it," Sommers replied abruptly, unconsciously putting himself in company with her, as she had herself with him. "We have but to follow the conventions of medicine and wait."

"Yes, wait!"

"Medicine, medicine," he continued irritably. "All our medicine is but a contrivance to keep up the farce, to continue the ills of humanity, to keep the wretched and diseased where they have no right to be!"

"And you are a doctor! How can you be?"

"Because," he answered in the same tone of unprofessional honesty that he had used toward her, "like most men, I am a coward and conventional. I have learned to do as the others do. Medicine and education!" Sommers laughed ironically. "They are the two sciences where men turn and turn and emit noise and do nothing. The doctor and the teacher learn a few tricks and keep on repeating them as the priest does the ceremony of the mass."

"That's about right for the teacher," she laughed. "We cut our cloth almost all alike."

Unconsciously they drifted farther and farther into intimacy. Sommers talked as he thought, with question and protest, intolerant of conventions, of formulas. They forgot the diseased burden that lay in the chamber above, with its incessant claims, its daily problems. They forgot themselves, thus strangely brought together and revealed to each other, at one glance as it were, without the tiresome preliminary acquaintanceship of civilization. It had grown dark in the room before Sommers came back to the reality of an evening engagement.

"You can get a train on the railroad west of the avenue," Mrs. Preston suggested. "But won't you let me give you something to eat?"

"Not this time," Sommers answered, taking his hat "Perhaps when I come again—in a few days. I want to think—what can be done."

She did not urge him to stay. She was surprised at her boldness in suggesting it. He had assumed the impersonal, professional manner once more. That precious hour of free talk had been but an episode, a relaxation. He gave directions as he went to the door.

"The patient will sleep till to-morrow. It will take two or three days to get over this relapse."

Then he took a pad from his pocket and scribbled a prescription.

"Should he grow unmanageable, you had better give him one of these powders—two, if necessary. But no more; they are pretty strong."

He placed the leaf of pencilled paper on the table. The next minute his rapid footsteps crunched on the gravel path. Even after he was gone and she was left quite alone in her old condition, the dead, nerveless sense of despair did not return. An unreasonable lightness of spirit buoyed her—a feeling that after a desolate winter a new season was coming, that her little world was growing larger, lighting indefinably with rare beauty.

CHAPTER XII

The engagement was not one to be missed, at least by a young professional man who had his way to make, his patients to assemble, in the fierce struggle of Chicago. The occasion was innocent enough and stupid enough,—a lecture at the Carsons' by one of the innumerable lecturers to the polite world that infest large cities. The Pre-Aztec Remains in Mexico, Sommers surmised, were but a subterfuge; this lecture was merely one of the signs that the Carsons had arrived at a certain stage in their pilgrimage.

They had come from Omaha five years before; they were on their way to New York, where they would be due five years hence. From railroad law, Carson had grown to the business of organizing monopolies. Some of his handiworks in this order of art had been among the first to take the field. He was resting now, while the country was suffering from its prolonged fit of the blues, and his wife was organizing their social life. They had picked up a large house on the North Boulevard, a bargain ready for their needs; it had been built for the Bidwells, just before the panic.

A rapid glance over the rooms proved to Sommers that Mrs. Carson was as clever a manipulator of capitalists as her husband. There were a few of the more important people of the city, such as Alexander Hitchcock, Ferdinand Dunster, the Polot families, the Blaisdells, the Anthons. There were also a few of the more distinctly "smart" people, and a number who might be counted as social possibilities. Sommers had seen something in a superficial way of many of these people. Thanks to the Hitchcocks' introduction, and also to the receptive attitude of a society that was still very largely fluid, he had gone hither and thither pretty widely during this past year. There were quieter, less pretentious circles than this in which the Carsons aspired to move, but he had not yet found them. Anything that had a retiring disposition disappeared from sight in Chicago. Society was still a collection of heterogeneous names that appeared daily in print. As such it offered unrivalled opportunities for aspiration.

Sommers had not come to the Carsons in the fulfilment of an aspiration. Mrs. R. Gordon Carson bored him. Her fussy conscious manners bespoke too plainly the insignificant suburban society in which she had played a minor part. He came because Dr. Lindsay had told him casually that Louise Hitchcock was in town again. He arrived late, when the lecture was nearly over, and lingered in the hall on the fringe of the gathering.

Carson had some reputation for his pictures. There was one, a Sargent, a portrait of the protagonist in this little drama of success, that hung in a recess of the hall at the foot of the stairs. R. Gordon Carson, as the great psychologist had seen him, was a striking person, an embodiment of modern waywardness, an outcropping of the trivial and vulgar. In a sacque coat, with the negligent lounging air of the hotel foyer, he stared at you, this Mr. R. Gordon Carson, impudently almost, very much at his ease. Narrow head, high forehead, thin hair, large eyes, a great protruding nose, a thin chin, smooth-shaven, yet with a bristly complexion,—there he was, the man from an Iowa farm, the man from the Sioux Falls court-house, the man from Omaha, the man now fully ripe from Chicago. Here was no class, no race, nothing in order; a feature picked up here, another there, a third developed, a fourth dormant—the whole memorable but unforgivably ordinary.

Not far away, standing in the doorway of the next room, was Carson himself. The great painter had undressed him and revealed him. What a comment to hang in one's own home! The abiding impression of the portrait was self-assurance; hasty criticism would have called it conceit. All the deeper qualities of humanity were rubbed out for the sake of this one great expression of egotism.

When the lecture was finished, a little group formed about the host; he was telling his experience with the great master, a series of anecdotes that had made his way in circles where success was not enough.

"I knew he was a hard customer," Sommers overheard him saying, "and I gave him all the rope he wanted. 'It may be two years before I do anything on your portrait, Mr. Carson,' he said.

"'Take five,' I told him.

"'I shall charge five thousand.'

"'Make it ten,' said I.

"'I shall paint your ears.'

"'And the nose too.'

"Well, he sent it to me inside of a year with his compliments. The fancy struck him, he wrote. It was easy to do; I was a good type and all that. Well, there it is."

He turned on an additional bunch of electric lights before the picture.

"Good, isn't it?" Miss Hitchcock exclaimed behind Sommers.

"Too good," he muttered. "I shouldn't have dared to hang it."

The girl's smooth brow contracted.

"Don't you think it was fine, though, his making up his mind out there in Sioux Falls that what he wanted was pictures, and the best pictures, and that he'd have Sargent do his portrait?"

"No more than it's fine for all the rest of these well-dressed men and women to make up their minds that they want to be rich and luxurious and important and all that."

Her face became still more puzzled.

"But it is fine! And the successful people are the interesting people."

"That has nothing to do with the matter," he returned dogmatically.

"Don't you think so?" she replied distantly, with a note of reproof in her voice. He was too young, too unimportant to cast such aspersion upon this comfortable, good-natured world where there was so much fun to be had. She could not see the possessing image in his mind, the picture of the afternoon—the unsuccessful woman.

"There is nothing honorable in wealth," he added, as she turned to examine a delicate landscape. Her eyes flashed defiantly.

"It means—"

"All this," he moved his hand contemptuously. "Ah, yes, and a lot more," he added, as her lip trembled. "It shows power and ability and thrift and purpose and provides means for generosity and philanthropy. But it rots."

"What do you mean?"

"Because it turns the people who have it into a class that come to feel themselves divinely appointed. Whereas it is all a gamble, a lucky gamble!"

"Not all wealth is a lucky gamble!" she retorted hotly.

Sommers paused, discomfited at the personal turn to the thought.

"I think the most successful would be the first to admit it," he answered thoughtfully.

"I don't understand you," the girl replied more calmly. "I suppose you are a socialist, or something of that sort. I can't understand such matters well enough to argue with you. And I hoped to find you in another mood when I came back; but we fall out always, it seems, over the most trivial matters."

"I am afraid I am very blunt," he said contritely. "I came here to find you; what do you want me to talk about,—Stewart's engagement to Miss Polot? It was given the chief place in the newspaper this morning."

"Sh, sh!" Miss Hitchcock exclaimed cautiously. Little groups were moving in and out of the rooms, and at that moment a pale-faced, slight young man came up to Miss Hitchcock.

"May I offer my congratulations?" she said, turning to him with the smile that Sommers's remark had caused still on her lips. The young man simpered, uttered the requisite platitude, and moved away.

"Did you congratulate him on the Polot connection or on the girl?" the young doctor asked.

"You don't know Estelle Polot! She is impossible. But Burton Stewart has got just what he wanted. No one thought that he would do as well as that. You know they are fearfully rich—she can't escape having a number of millions. Don't you think a man of forty is to be congratulated on having what he has been looking for for twenty years?"

Miss Hitchcock's neat, nonchalant enunciation gave the picture additional relief.

"I don't see how he has the face to show himself. All these people are laughing about it."

"It is a bad case, but don't you believe that they are not envying him and praising him. He is a clever man, and he won't let the Polot money go to waste. He has taken the largest purse—the rest were too light."

Miss Hitchcock seemed to find infinite resources of mirth in the affair. Other people drifted by them. Several of the younger women stopped and exchanged amused glances with Miss Hitchcock.

"He's been attentive to all these," Miss Hitchcock explained to Sommers.

"The Polot money is very bad, isn't it?"

Miss Hitchcock shrugged her shoulders.

"It is current coin."

"The system is worse than the dot and mariage de convenance. There is no pretension of sentiment in that, at least. See him hanging over the girl—faugh!"

"You are crude," Miss Hitchcock admitted, candidly. "Let us move out of this crowd. Some one will overhear you."

They sauntered into the dimly lighted hall, where there were fewer people, and he continued truculently:

"I remember that side by side with the report of Miss Polot's engagement was a short account of the starvation at Pullman, and another column was headed, 'Nothing to arbitrate: Pullman says he has nothing to arbitrate.' Did you see that the reporters carefully estimated just how much Miss Polot's share of the plunder would be?"

"What you need is golf. I have been teaching papa at the Springs. It is a great resource, and it increases your sense of humor."

"It doesn't seem to have rested you," Sommers answered. "You are tired or worried."

"Worse yet!" she laughed nervously. "Clearly, you won't do. You must go back to Marion."

She looked up at him from her low seat with brilliant, mocking eyes.
"I have thought of that. It would not be the worst thing that could happen.
Would you think it possible—Marion?" he asked clumsily.

Her eyes did not fall, but rested steadily on his face. Under this clear gaze his remark appeared to him preposterous. She seemed to show him how precipitate, unformed,—crude, as she said,—all his acts were. Instead of answering his question, she said gently:

"Yes, you are right. I am worried, and I came here tonight to escape it. But one doesn't escape worries with you. One increases them. You make me feel guilty, uncomfortable. Now get me something thoroughly cold, and perhaps we can have that long-promised talk."

When Sommers returned with a glass of champagne, a number of men had gathered about Miss Hitchcock, and she left him on the outside, intentionally it seemed, while she chatted with them, bandying allusions that meant nothing to him. Sommers saw that he had been a bore. He slipped out of the group and wandered into the large library, where the guests were eating and drinking. A heavy, serious man, whom he had seen at various places, spoke to him. He said something about the lecture, then something about Miss Polot's engagement. "They'll go to New York," he ventured. "Stewart has some position there, some family." He talked about the Stewarts and the Polots, and finally he went to the dressing room to smoke.

Sommers had made up his mind to leave, and was looking for Mrs. Carson, when he came across Miss Hitchcock again.

"The man you were talking with is quite a tragedy," she said unconcernedly, picking up the conversation where she had dropped it. "I knew him when he left college. He was an athletic fellow, a handsome man. His people were nice, but not rich. He was planning to go to Montana to take a place in some mines, but he got engaged to the daughter of a very wealthy man. He didn't go. He married Miss Prudence Fisher, and he has simply grown fat. It's an old story—"

"And a tragic enough one. We ought to change the old proverb, 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a poor man to marry a rich man's daughter.'"

"It ought not to be so, if the man were a man."

She dwelt upon the last word until the young doctor's face flushed. Then with the sudden transition of mood, which so often perplexed Sommers, she said gently, confidently:

"You are quite right. My journey did me no good. There were worries, and we can't go away this summer. The business situation will keep papa here, and he is so lonely without me that I hadn't the heart to suggest leaving him. So we have taken a house at Lake Forest. I shall teach you golf at the new Country Club, if you will deign to waste your time on us. You will see more of these good people."

"You must think me—" Sommers began penitently.

"Yes, they would say 'raw' and 'green.' I don't know. I must go now."

A few minutes later, Sommers met Colonel Hitchcock in the dressing room. As he was leaving, the old merchant detained him.

"Are you going north? Perhaps you will wait for me and let me take you to the city. Louise is going on to a dance."

Sommers waited outside the room. From the bedroom at the end of the hall came a soft murmur of women's voices. He hoped that Miss Hitchcock would appear before her father took him off. He should like to see her again—to hear her voice. Every moment some one nodded to him, distracting his attention, but his eyes reverted immediately to the end of the hall. Men and women were passing out, down the broad staircase that ended in front of the intelligent portrait. The women in rich opera cloaks, the men in black capes carrying their crush hats under their arms, were all alike; they were more like every other collection of the successful in the broad earth than one might have expected.

Sommers caught bits of the conversation.

"Jim has taken the Paysons' place."

"Is that so? We are going to York."

"—Shall join them in Paris—dinner last Friday—did you see The Second
Mrs. Tanqueray—our horses are always ill—"

It sounded like the rustle of skirts, the stretching of kid. There was dulness in the atmosphere. Yet if it was dull, Sommers realized that it was his own fault—a conclusion he usually took away with him from the feasts of the rich which he attended. He lacked the power to make the most of his opportunities. The ability to cultivate acquaintances, to push his way into a good place in this sleek company of the well-to-do,—an ability characteristically American,—he was utterly without. It would be better for him, he reflected with depression, to return to Marion, Ohio, or some similar side-track of the world, or to reenter the hospital and bury himself in a quite subordinate position.

There was still an eddy of guests about the host and his wife near the great portrait. They were laughing loudly. Carson's thin face was beaming. Even Mrs. Carson's face had lost some of its tension. Sommers could watch her manner from his position in the upper hall. She was dismissing a minor guest with a metallic smile. 'To aspire to this!' he murmured unconsciously. 'This, the triumph of success!'

"Still waiting?"

Miss Hitchcock was passing, her long wrap trailing lightly behind. Her eyes glowed underneath a white mantilla.

"I am ready to go now," Sommers replied. "You are too tired for the dance."

"I must go—I can't bear to miss anything. It is stupid—but it is exciting at the same time. Good-by. Remember, Lake Forest in a fortnight. And learn to take it easily!"

She smiled and disappeared in the wake of Mrs. Porter. How easily she seemed to take it! The man she married would have to be of the world, as large a world as she could contrive to get. She would always be "going on." Imaginatively, with the ignorance of a young man, he attributed to her appetites for luxury, for power, for success. He was merely an instance of her tolerance. Really he was a very little thing in her cosmos, and if he wished to be more, he would have to take an interest in just this.

Colonel Hitchcock came out at last, in close conversation with old Blaisdell. They were talking business. Hitchcock's kindly face was furrowed and aged, Sommers noticed. The old merchant put his arm through the young doctor's, and with this support Sommers received the intimate farewell from Mrs. Carson.

Colonel Hitchcock ordered the driver to take them to the Metropolitan Club.

"Our talk may take us some time," he explained. "I have been trying to find you for several days. I have something to ask you to do for me. You may think it strange that I should go to you instead of to one of my old friends. But it is something Isaac would have done for me. It is for my boy."

The weariness of years was in his voice. As briefly and as simply as he could, he stated the matter. Parker had disappeared; he had gone to New York and there drawn heavily on his father. The journey which Colonel Hitchcock had made with his daughter had been largely for the purpose of finding Parker, and had failed. The boy was ashamed to come back. Now there was a clew, but it seemed unwise for the father to follow it up himself.

"I don't understand the boy," Colonel Hitchcock concluded. "I'm afraid everything I do is wrong. I get angry. I have no patience with his polo, his spending so much money uselessly—he spends ten times as much money as any man among my friends did at his age."

"You have ten times as much as any one of their fathers had," Sommers protested with a smile.

"Well, then, I guess I had better stop, if that's what it means. He may find there isn't so much after all. This panic is pushing me. I can't leave Chicago another day. He should be here fighting with me, helping me—and he is sneaking in some hotel, with his tail between his legs."

He breathed heavily at the bitterness of the thought. Everything in his life had been honorable, open to all: he had fought fair and hard and long—for this.

"If it weren't for Louise and his mother, I would let him starve until he was ready to come home. But his mother is ill—she can't be troubled."

"And you can't let him disgrace himself publicly—do something that would make it hard for him to come back at all," Sommers suggested.

"No, I suppose not," the older man admitted, with a grateful glance. "I can't refuse to help him, poor boy; perhaps I have made him weak."

Sommers offered to do what he could,—to hunt Parker up, get him on his feet, and bring him back to Chicago. He would leave that night. They had stopped at the club to finish their talk, and while Colonel Hitchcock was writing some letters, Sommers drove to his rooms for his bag. It was nearly midnight before he returned. As they drove over to the station, Colonel Hitchcock said:

"I have told him the whole thing: how hard pressed I am; how his mother is worrying and ill—well, I don't feel it will make much difference. He could see all that."

"You must remember that he has always had every inducement to enjoy himself," the young doctor ventured. "He doesn't understand your life. You sent him to a very nice private school, and whenever he failed got him tutors. You made him feel that he was a special case in the world. And he has always been thrown with boys and young men who felt they were special cases. At college he lived with the same set—"

"His mother and I wanted him to start with every advantage, to have a gentleman's education. At home he's seen nothing of extravagance and self-indulgence."

Sommers nodded sympathetically. It was useless to discuss the matter. The upright, courageous old merchant, whose pride was that he had never committed one mean action in the accumulation of his fortune, could never understand this common misfortune. He belonged to a different world from that in which his son was to take his part. They turned to other topics,—the business depression, the strike, the threatened interference of the American Railway Union.

"Blaisdell, who is the general manager of the C. K. and G.," Colonel Hitchcock remarked, "was saying tonight that he expected the Pullman people would induce the A. R. U. to strike. If they stir up the unions all over the country, business will get worse and worse. All we needed to make things as bad as can be was a great railroad strike."

"I suppose so," Sommers responded. "Why won't the Pullman people consent to arbitrate?"

The old merchant shook his head.

"They'd divide their twenty millions of surplus and go out of business first. They say they're saving money on the strike. Did you ever know of people with the whip-hand who had anything to arbitrate?"

CHAPTER XIII

Dr. Lindsay's offices were ingeniously arranged on three sides of the Athenian Building. The patient entering from the hall, just beside the elevators, passed by a long, narrow corridor to the waiting room, and thence to one of the tiny offices of the attending physicians; or, if he were fortunate enough, he was led at once to the private office of the great Lindsay, at the end of the inner corridor. By a transverse passage he was then shunted off to a door that opened into the public hall just opposite the elevator well. The incoming patient was received by a woman clerk, who took his name, and was dismissed by another woman clerk, who collected fees and made appointments. If he came by special appointment, several stages in his progress were omitted, and he passed at once to one of the smaller offices, where he waited until the machine was ready to proceed with his case. Thus in the office there was a perpetual stream of the sick and suffering, in, around, out, crossed by the coming and going through transverse passages of the "staff," the attendants, the clerks, messengers, etc. Each atom in the stream was welling over with egotistic woes, far too many for the brief moment in which he would be closeted with the great one, who held the invisible keys of relief, who penetrated this mystery of human maladjustment. It was a busy, toiling, active, subdued place, where the tinkle of the telephone bell, the hum of electric annunciators, as one member of the staff signalled to another, vibrated in the tense atmosphere. Into this hive poured the suffering, mounting from the street, load after load, in the swiftly flying cages; their visit made, their joss-sticks burned, they dropped down once more to the chill world below, where they must carry on the burden of living.

The attending physicians arrived at nine. The "shop," as they called it, opened at ten; Lindsay was due at eleven and departed at three. Thereafter the hive gradually emptied, and by four the stenographers and clerks were left alone to attend to purely business matters. Sommers came late the day after his return from New York. The general door being opened to admit a patient, he walked in and handed his coat and hat to the boy in buttons at the door. The patient who had entered with him was being questioned by the neat young woman whose business it was to stand guard at the outer door.

"What is your name, please?"

Her tones were finely adjusted to the caste of the patient. Judging from the icy sharpness on this occasion, the patient was not high in the scale.

"Caroline Ducharme," the woman replied.

"Write it out, please."

The patient did so with some difficulty, scrawling half over the neat pad the clerk pushed toward her.

"You wish to consult Dr. Lindsay?"

"The big doctor,—yes, mum."

"Did he make an appointment with you?"

"What's that?"

"Have you been here before?"

"No, mum."

"You will have to pay the fee in advance."

"What's that, please?"

"Ten dollars."

"Ten?"

The clerk tapped irritably on her desk with her pencil.

"Yes, ten dollars for the first visit; five after that; operations from fifty to five hundred."

The woman clutched tightly a small reticule. "I hain't the money!" she exclaimed at last. "I thought it would be two dollars."

"You'll have to go to the hospital, then."

The clerk turned to a pile of letters.

"Don't he see nobody here without he pays ten?" the woman asked.

"No."

"Where is the hospital?"

"St. Isidore's—the clinic is every other Saturday at nine."

"But my head hurts awful bad. The doctor up our way don't know anything about it."

The clerk no longer answered; she had turned half around in her swivel-chair. Sommers leaned over her desk, and said,—

"Show her into my room, No. 3, Miss Clark."

"Dr. Lindsay is very particular," the clerk protested.

"I will be responsible," Sommers answered sharply, in the tone he had learned to use with hospital clerks when they opposed his will. He turned to get his mail. The clerk shrugged her shoulders with a motion that said, 'Take her there yourself.' Sommers beckoned to the woman to follow him. He took her to one of the little compartments on the inner corridor, which was lined with strange devices: electrical machines, compressed air valves, steam sprays—all the enginery of the latest invention.

"Now what is it?" he asked gruffly. He was vexed that the matter should occur at this time, when he was on rather cool terms with Lindsay. The case proved to be an interesting one, however. There were nervous complications; it could not be diagnosed at a glance. After spending half an hour in making a careful examination, he gave the woman a preliminary treatment, and dismissed her with directions to call the next day.

"You will lose your eyesight, if you don't take care," he said. "We'll see to-morrow."

"No," the woman shook her head. "I've had enough of her lip. You'se all right; but I guess I'll have to go blind. I can't stand your prices. Here's two dollars, all I got."

She held out a dirty bill.

"In the world?" Sommers added smilingly. It was a familiar formula.

"Just about," she admitted defiantly. "And if my eyes go back on me, I guess 'twill be St. Isidore, or St. Somebody. You see I need my eyes pretty bad just now for one thing."

"What's that?" the doctor asked good-naturedly, waving the money aside.

"To look for him. He's in Chicago somewheres, I know."

"Ducharme?" the doctor inquired carelessly.

The woman nodded, her not uncomely broad face assuming a strange expression of determined fierceness. At that moment an assistant rapped at the door with a summons from Dr. Lindsay.

"Turn up this evening, then, at the address on this card," Sommers said to
Mrs. Ducharme, handing her his card.

He would have preferred hearing that story about Ducharme to charging old P. F. Wort with electricity. He went through the treatment with his accustomed deftness, however. As he was leaving the room, Dr. Lindsay asked him to wait.

"Mr. Porter is about to go abroad, to try the baths at Marienbad. I have advised him to take one of our doctors with him to look after his diet and comfort in travelling,—one that can continue our treatment and be companionable. It will just take the dull season. I'd like to run over myself, but my affairs—"

Lindsay completed the idea by sweeping his broad, fleshy hand over the large office desk, which was loaded with letters, reports, and documents of various kinds.

"What d'ye say, Sommers?"

"Do you think Porter would want me?" Sommers asked idly. He had seen in the paper that morning that Porter was out of town, and was going to Europe for his health. Porter had been out of town, persistently, ever since the Pullman strike had grown ugly. The duties of the directors were performed, to all intents and purposes, by an under-official, a third vice-president. Those duties at present consisted chiefly in saying from day to day: "The company has nothing to arbitrate. There is a strike; the men have a right to strike. The company doesn't interfere with the men," etc. The third vice-president could make these announcements as judiciously as the great Porter.

"I have an idea," continued Sommers, "that Porter might not want me; he has never been over-cordial."

"Nonsense!" replied the busy doctor. "Porter will take any one I advise him to. All expenses and a thousand dollars—very good pay."

"Is Porter very ill?" Sommers asked. "I thought he was in fair health, the last time I saw him."

Lindsay looked at the young doctor with a sharp, experienced glance. There was a half smile on his face as he answered soberly:

"Porter has been living rather hard. He needs a rest—fatty degeneration may set in."

"Brought on by the strike?"

Lindsay smiled broadly this time.

"Coincident with the strike, let us say."

"I don't believe I can leave Chicago just now," the young doctor replied finally.

Lindsay stared at him as if he were demented.

"I've a case or two I am interested in," Sommers explained nonchalantly. "Nothing much, but I don't care to leave. Besides, I don't think Porter would be an agreeable companion."

"Very well," Lindsay replied indifferently. "French will go—a jolly, companionable, chatty fellow."

The young doctor felt that Lindsay was enumerating pointedly the qualities he lacked.

"Porter's connection will be worth thousands to the man he takes to. He's in a dozen different corporations where they pay good salaries to physicians. Of course, if you've started a practice already—"

"I don't suppose my cases are good for ten dollars."

Lindsay's handsome, gray-whiskered face expressed a polite disgust.

"There's another matter I'd like to speak about—"

"The patient Ducharme?" Sommers asked quickly.

"I don't know her name,—the woman Miss Clark says you admitted against my rules. You know there are the free dispensaries for those who can't pay, and, indeed, I give my own services. I cannot afford to maintain this plant without fees. In short, I am surprised at such a breach of professional etiquette."

Sommers got up from his seat nervously and then sat down again. Lindsay undoubtedly had the right to do exactly what he pleased on his own premises.

"Very well," he replied shortly. "It shan't occur again. I have told the
Ducharme woman to call at my rooms for treatment, and I will give Miss
Clark her ten dollars. She was an exceptionally interesting and instructive
case."

Lindsay elevated his eyebrows politely.

"Yes, yes, but you know we specialists are so liable to be imposed upon. Every one tries to escape his fee; no one would employ Carson, for example, unless he had the means to pay his fee, would he?"

"The cases are not exactly parallel."

"All cases of employment are parallel," Lindsay replied with emphasis. "Every man is entitled to what he can get, from the roustabout on the wharf to our friend Porter, and no more."

"I have often thought," Sommers protested rather vaguely, "that clergymen and doctors should be employed by the state to do what they can; it isn't much!"

"There are the hospitals." Lindsay got up from his chair at the sound of an electric bell. "And our very best professional men practise there, give their time and money and strength. You will have to excuse me, as Mr. Carson has an appointment, and I have already kept him waiting. Will you see Mrs. Winter and young Long at eleven thirty and eleven forty-five?"

As Sommers was leaving, Lindsay called out over his shoulder, "And can you take the clinic, Saturday? I must go to St. Louis in consultation. General R. P. Atkinson, president of the Omaha and Gulf, an old friend—"

"Shall be delighted," the young doctor replied with a smile.

As he stepped into the corridor, one of the young women clerks was filling in an appointment slip on the long roll that hung on a metal cylinder. This was an improved device, something like a cash-register machine, that printed off the name opposite a certain hour that was permanently printed on the slip. The hours of the office day were divided into five-minute periods, but, as two assisting physicians were constantly in attendance beside Sommers, the allotted time for each patient was about fifteen minutes.

"Mrs. Winter is in No. 3," the clerk told him. "Long in No. 1, and Mr.
Harrison and a Miss Frost in the reception room."

So the machine ground on. Even the prescriptions were formularized to such an extent that most of them were stencilled and went by numbers. The clerk at the end of the corridor handed the patient a little card, on which was printed No. 3033, No. 3127, etc., as he circled by in the last turn of the office. There was an apothecary store on the floor below, where the patient could sit in an easy-chair and read the papers while the prescription called for by his number was being fetched by an elegant young woman.

Sommers hurried through with Mrs. Winter, who was a fussy, nervous little woman from the West Side; she resented having "a young feller" thrust on her.

"I knew Dr. Lindsay when he was filling prescriptions on Madison Street," she said spitefully.

Sommers smiled. "That must have been a good while ago, before Chicago was a big place."

"Before you was born, young man; before all the doctors who could came down here in a bunch and set up offices and asked fees enough of a body to keep 'em going for a year!"

Then young Long; then one, two, three new patients, who had to have physical examinations before being admitted to Lindsay. Once or twice Lindsay sent for Sommers to assist him in a delicate matter, and Sommers hurried off, leaving his half-dressed patient to cool his heels before a radiator. After the examinations there was an odd patient or two that Lindsay had left when he had gone out to lunch with some gentlemen at the Metropolitan Club. By two o'clock Sommers got away to take a hasty luncheon in a bakery, after which he returned to a new string of cases.

To-day "the rush," as the clerks called it, was greater than usual. The attendants were nervous and irritable, answered sharply and saucily, until Sommers felt that the place was intolerable. All this office practice got on his nerves. It was too "intensive." He could not keep his head and enter thoroughly into the complications of a dozen cases, when they were shoved at him pell-mell. He realized that he was falling into a routine, was giving conventional directions, relying upon the printed prescriptions and mechanical devices. All these devices were ingenious,—they would do no harm,—and they might do good, ought to do good,—if the cursed human system would only come up to the standard.

At last he seized his coat and hat, and escaped. The noiseless cage dropped down, down, past numerous suites of doctors' offices similar to Lindsay's, with their ground-glass windows emblazoned by dozens of names. This building was a kind of modern Chicago Lourdes. All but two or three of the suites were rented to some form of the medical fraternity. Down, down: here a druggist's clerk hailing the descending car; there an upward car stopping to deliver its load of human freight bound for the rooms of another great specialist,—Thornton, the skin doctor. At last he reached the ground floor and the gusty street. Across the way stood a line of carriages waiting for women who were shopping at the huge dry-goods emporium, and through the barbaric displays of the great windows Sommers could see the clerks moving hither and thither behind the counters. It did not differ materially from his emporium: it was less select, larger, but not more profitable, considering the amount of capital employed, than his shop. Marshall Field decked out the body; Lindsay, Thornton, and Co. repaired the body as best they could. It was all one trade.

On State Street the sandwich men were sauntering dejectedly through the crowd of shoppers: "Professor Herman Sorter, Chiropodist." "Go to Manassas for Spectacles";—it was the same thing. Across the street, on the less reputable western side, flared the celluloid signs of the quacks: "The parlors of famous old Dr. Green." "The original and only Dr. Potter. Visit Dr. Potter. No cure, no charge. Examination free." The same business! Lindsay would advertise as "old Dr. Lindsay," if it paid to advertise,—paid socially and commercially. Dr. Lindsay's offices probably "took in" more in a month than "old Dr. Green" made in a year, without the expense of advertising. Lindsay would lose much more by adopting the methods of quackery than he could ever make: he would lose hospital connections, standing in the professional journals, and social prestige. Lindsay was quite shrewd in sticking to the conventions of the profession.

CHAPTER XIV

When Sommers reached his rooms that evening, he found Mrs. Ducharme waiting for him. She held in her hand his card.

"I thought you'd give me the go-by," she exclaimed, as he entered. "Your kind is smooth enough, but they don't want to be bothered. But I came all the same—on the chance."

"What have you been doing?" the doctor inquired, without noticing her surliness. "Walking about in the streets all day and making your inflammation worse?"

"Well, you see I must find him, and I don't know where to look for him."

"Well, you won't find your husband walking about the streets, especially if he's gone off with another woman; but you will get blind and have to go to the hospital!"

"Well, I'll kill her first."

"You will do nothing of the sort," said the doctor, wearily. "You'll make a fuss, and your husband will hit you again, and go away."

"He was all right, as nice a man as you could find before she came to Peory. You see she is married to another man, a baker, and they lived in Decatur. Ducharme—he's a Frenchman—knew her in Decatur where he worked in a restaurant, and he came to Peory to get rid of her. And he got a job and was real steady and quiet. Then we got married, and Ducharme was as nice a man as you ever knew. But we wasn't married a week—we had a kafe together—before she got wind o' his being married and come to town. He told me she was trying to get him to go away, and he said how he didn't want to; but she had influence with him and was worrying around. Well, the third day he sent me a note by a little boy. 'Caroline,' it said, 'you'se a good woman and an honest woman and we could get on first rate together; but, Caroline, I don't love you when she is about. She calls me, and I go.'"

"Well, that's all there is to it, isn't it?" Sommers asked, half amused. "You can't keep him away from the other woman. Now you are a sensible, capable woman. Just give him up and find a place to work."

Mrs. Ducharme shook her head sorrowfully.

"That won't do. I just think and think, and I can't work. He was such a nice man, so gentlemanlike and quiet, so long as she stayed away. But I didn't tell you: I found 'em in Peory in a place not fit for hogs to live in, and I watched my chance and gave it to the woman. But Ducharme came in and he pushed me out, and I fell, and guess I cracked my head. That's when my eye began to hurt. The kafe business ran out, and I followed them to Chicago. And here I been for three months, doing most anything, housework generally. But I can't keep a place. Just so often I have to up and out on the road and try to find him. I'll brain that woman yet!"

She uttered this last assertion tranquilly.

"She don't amount to much,—a measly, sandy-haired, cheap thing. I come of respectable folks, who had a farm outer Gales City, and never worked out 'fore this happened. But now I can't settle down to nothin'; it's always that Frenchman before my eyes, and her."

"Well, and after you have found her and disposed of her?" asked Sommers.

"Oh, Ducharme will be all right then! He'll follow me like a lamb. He doesn't want to mess around with such. But she's got some power over him."

"Simply he wants to live with her and not with you."

The woman nodded her head sadly.

"I guess that's about it; but you see if she weren't around, he wouldn't know that he didn't love me."

Mrs. Ducharme wiped away her tears, and looked at the doctor in hopes that he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her wanderings about Chicago, there would be one of those blind newspaper tragedies,—a trial, and a term of years in prison. As he meditated on this an idea seized the doctor; there was a way to distract her.

"The best thing for you to do," he said severely, "is to go to work."

"Can't get no place," she replied despondently. "Have no references and can't keep a place. See a feller going up the street that looks like Ducharme, and I must go after him."

"I have a place in mind where you won't be likely to see many men that look like Ducharme!"

He explained to her the situation of the Ninety-first Street cottage, and what Mrs. Preston needed.

"You take this note there to-morrow morning, and tell her that you are willing to work for a home. Then I'll attend to the wages. If you do what I want,—keep that fellow well locked up and relieve Mrs. Preston of care,—I'll give you good wages. Not a word to her, mind, about that. And when you want to hunt Ducharme, just notify Mrs. Preston and go ahead. Only see that you hunt him in the daytime. Don't leave her alone nights. Now, let's see your eye."

The woman took the brief note which he scribbled after examining her, and said dejectedly:

"She won't want me long—no one does, least of all Ducharme."

Sommers laughed.

"Guess I better go straight down," she remarked more hopefully as she left.

He should have taken the woman to the cottage, he reflected after she had gone, instead of sending her in this brusque manner. He had not seen Mrs. Preston since his return, and he did not know what had happened to her in the meantime. To-morrow he would find time to ride down there and see how things were going with the sick man.

There was much mail lying on his table. Nothing had been forwarded by Dresser, in accordance with the directions he had telegraphed him. And he had seen nothing of Dresser yesterday or to-day. The rooms looked as if the man had been gone some time. Dresser owed him money,—more than he could spare conveniently,—but that troubled him less than the thought of Dresser's folly. It was likely that he had thrown up his position—he had chafed against it from the first—and had taken to the precarious career of professional agitator. Dresser had been speaking at meetings in Pullman, with apparent success, and his mind had been full of "the industrial war," as he called it. Sommers recalled that the man had been allowed to leave Exonia College, where he had taught for a year on his return from Germany, because (as he put it) "he held doctrines subversive of the holy state of wealth and a high tariff." That he was of the stuff that martyrs of speech are made, Sommers knew well enough, and such men return to their haven sooner or later.

Sommers sorted his letters listlessly. The Ducharme affair troubled him. He could see that a split with Lindsay was coming; but it must not be brought about by any act of professional discourtesy on his part. Although he was the most efficient surgeon Lindsay had, it would not take much to bring about his discharge. Probably the suggestion about Porter was merely a polite means of getting him out of the office. Lindsay had said some pointed things about "the critical attitude." The "critical attitude" to Lindsay's kind was the last crime.

Ordinarily he would not have cared. The sacrifice of the three thousand dollars which Lindsay paid him would have its own consolation. He could get back his freedom. But the matter was not so simple as it had been. It was mixed now with another affair: if he should leave Lindsay, especially after any disagreement with the popular specialist, he would put himself farther from Miss Hitchcock than ever. As it was, he was quite penniless enough; but thrown on his own resources—he remembered the heavy, sad young man at the Carsons', and Miss Hitchcock's remark about him.

Yet this reflection that in some way it was complicated, that he could not act impulsively and naturally, angered him. He was shrewd enough to know that Lindsay's patronage was due, not to the fact that he was the cleverest surgeon he had, but to the fact that, well—the daughter of Alexander Hitchcock thought kindly of him. These rich and successful! They formed a kind of secret society, pledged to advance any member, to keep the others out by indifference. When the others managed to get in, for any reason, they lent them aid to the exclusion of those left outside. So long as it looked as if he were to have a berth in their cabin, they would be amiable, but not otherwise.

Among the letters on the desk was one from Miss Hitchcock, asking him to spend the coming Saturday and Sunday at Lake Forest. There was to be a small house party, and the new club was to be open. Sommers prepared to answer it at once—to regret. He had promised himself to see Mrs. Preston instead. In writing the letter it seemed to him that he was taking a position, was definitely deciding something, and at the close he tore it in two and took a fresh sheet. Now was the time, if he cared for the girl, to come nearer to her. He had told himself all the way back from New York that he did care—too much. She was not like the rest. He laughed at himself. A few years hence she would be like the rest and, what is more, he should not find her so absorbing now, if she were not like the rest, essentially.

He wrote a conventional note of acceptance, and went out to mail it. Possibly all these people were right in reading the world, and the aim of life was to show one's power to get on. He was worried over that elementary aspect of things rather late in life.

CHAPTER XV

These days there were many people on the streets, but few were busy. The large department stores were empty; at the doors stood idle floor-walkers and clerks. It was too warm for the rich to buy, and the poor had no money. The poor had come lean and hungry out of the terrible winter that followed the World's Fair. In that beautiful enterprise the prodigal city had put forth her utmost strength, and, having shown the world the supreme flower of her energy, had collapsed. There was gloom, not only in La Salle Street where people failed, but throughout the city, where the engine of play had exhausted the forces of all. The city's huge garment was too large for it; miles of empty stores, hotels, flat-buildings, showed its shrunken state. Tens of thousands of human beings, lured to the festive city by abnormal wages, had been left stranded, without food or a right to shelter in its tenantless buildings.

As the spring months moved on in unseasonable, torrid heat, all the sores of the social system swelled and began to break. The bleak winter had seen mute starvation and misery, and the blasts of summer had brought no revival of industry. Capital was sullen, and labor violent. There were meetings and counter-meetings; agitators, panaceas, university lecturers, sociologizing preachers, philanthropists, politicians—discontent and discord. The laborer starved, and the employer sulked.

"The extravagant poor are unwilling to let the thrifty reap the rewards of their savings and abstinence," lectured the Political Economist of the standard school. "The law of wages and capital is immutable. More science is needed."

"The rich are vultures and sharks," shrieked the Labor Agitator.

"And will ye let your brother starve?" exhorted the Preacher.

"For it is as clear as the nose on your face that corporations corrupt legislatures, and buy judges, and oppress the poor," insinuated the Socialist.

"It's that wretched free trade," howled the hungry Politician, "and
Cleveland and all his evil deeds. See what we will do for you."

"Yes, it's free trade," bawled one newspaper.

"It's nefarious England," snarled another.

"It's the greed of Wall Street, the crime against silver, the burden of the mortgage," vociferated a third.

"It's 'hard times,'" the meek sighed, and furbished up last year's clothes, and cut the butcher's bill.

"Yes, it's 'hard times,' a time of psychological depression and distrust," softly said the rich man. "A good time to invest my savings profitably. Real estate is low; bonds and mortgages are as cheap as dirt. Some day people will be cheerful once more, and these good things will multiply and yield fourfold. Yea, I will not bury my talent in a napkin."

Thus the body social threw out much smoke, but no vital heat; here and there, the red glare of violence burst up through the dust of words and the insufferable cant of the world.

The first sore to break, ironically enough, was in the "model industrial town" of Pullman. That dispute over the question of a living wage grew bitterer day by day. Well-to-do people praised the directors for their firm resolve to keep the company's enormous surplus quite intact. The men said the officers of the company lied: it was an affair of complicated bookkeeping. The brutal fact of it was that the company rested within its legal rights. The unreasonable people were dissatisfied with an eighth of a loaf, while their employers were content with a half. Then there was trouble among the mines, and the state troops were called out. Sores multiplied; men talked; but capital could not be coerced.

But while politicians squabbled and capitalists sulked and economists talked, a strong tide of fellowship in misery was rising from west to east. Unconsciously, far beneath the surface, the current was moving,—a current of common feeling, of solidarity among those who work by day for their daily bread. The country was growing richer, but they were poorer. There began to be talk of Debs, the leader of a great labor machine. The A. R. U. had fought one greedy corporation with success, and intimidated another. Sometime in June this Debs and his lieutenant, Howard, came to Chicago. The newspapers had little paragraphs of meagre information about the A. R. U. convention. One day there was a meeting in which a committee of the Pullman strikers set forth their case. At the close of that meeting the great boycott had been declared. "Mere bluff," said the newspapers. But the managers of the railroads "got together." Some of them had already cut the wage lists on their roads. They did not feel sure that it was all "bluff."

* * * * *

It was the first day of the A. R. U. boycott. Sommers left the Athenian Building at noon, for Dr. Lindsay's clients carried their infirmities out of town in hot weather. He took his way across the city toward the station of the Northwestern Railroad, wondering whether Debs's threats had been carried out, and if consequently he should be compelled to remain in town over Sunday. On the street corners and in front of the newspaper offices little knots of men, wearing bits of white ribbon in their buttonholes, were idling. They were quiet, curious, dully waiting to see what this preposterous stroke might mean for them. In the heavy noonday air of the streets they moved lethargically, drifting westward to the hall where the A. R. U. committees were in session. Oblivious of his engagements, Sommers followed them, hearing the burden of their talk, feeling their aimless discontent, their bitterness at the grind of circumstances. This prodigal country of theirs had been exploited,—shamefully, rapaciously, swinishly,—and now that the first signs of exhaustion were showing themselves, the people's eyes were opening to the story of greed. Democracy! Say, rather, Plutocracy, the most unblushing the world had ever seen,—the aristocracy of THOSE WHO HAVE.

Thus meditating, he jostled against a group of men who were coming from a saloon. All but one wore the typical black clothes and derby hats of the workman's best attire; one had on a loose-fitting, English tweed suit. In this latter person Sommers was scarcely surprised to recognize Dresser. The big shoulders of the blond-haired fellow towered above the others; he was talking excitedly, and they were listening. When they started to cross the street, Sommers touched Dresser.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded abruptly.

"What are you doing? You had better get out of town along with your rich friends." He motioned sneeringly at the bag in Sommers's hand.

"I fancied you might be up to something of this kind," Sommers went on, unheeding his sneer.

"I had enough of that job of faking up text-books and jollying schoolteachers. So I chucked it."

"Why did you chuck me, too?"

"I thought you might be sick of having me hang about, and especially now that I am in with the other crowd."

"That's rot," Sommers laughed. "However, you needn't feel it necessary to apologize. What are you doing with 'the other crowd'?"

"I'm secretary of the central committee," Dresser replied, with some importance.

"Oh, that's it!" Sommers exclaimed.
"It's better than being a boot-licker to the rich."

"Like the doctors? Well, we won't quarrel. I suppose you mean to give 'us' a hard time of it? Come in when it is all settled, and we will talk it over. Meantime you've got enough mischief on your hands to last you for some months."

"I don't blame you," Dresser said benignantly, "for your position. Perhaps if I had had the opportunities—"

"That's just it. Your crowd are all alike, at least the leaders; they are hungry for the fleshpots. If they had the opportunities, we should be served as they are now. That's the chief trouble,—nobody really cares to make the sacrifices. And that is why this row will be ended on the old terms: the rich will buy out the leaders. Better times will come, and we shall all settle down to the same old game of grab on the same old basis. But you," Sommers turned on the sauntering blue-eyed fellow, "people like you are the real curse."

"Why?"

"Because you are insincere. All you want is the pie. You make me feel that the privileged classes are right in getting what they can out of fools and—knaves."

"That's about enough. I suppose you are put out about the money—"

"Don't be an ass, Dresser. I don't need the hundred. And I don't want a quarrel. I think you are playing with dynamite, because you can't get the plunder others have got. Look out when the dynamite comes down."

"It makes no difference to me," Dresser protested sullenly.

"No! That's why you are dangerous. Well, good-by. Get your friends to leave the Northwestern open a day or two longer."

"There won't be a train running on the Northwestern to-morrow. I've seen the orders."

"Well, I shall foot it home, then."

They shook hands, and Dresser hurried on after his friends. Sommers retraced his steps toward the station. Dresser's vulgar and silly phrase, "boot-licker to the rich," turned up oddly in his memory. It annoyed him. Every man who sought to change his place, to get out of the ranks, was in a way a "boot-licker to the rich." He recalled that he was on his way to the rich now, with a subconscious purpose in his mind of joining them if he could. Miss Hitchcock's wealth would not be enormous, and it would be easy enough to show that he was not "boot-licker to the rich." But it was hard to escape caste prejudices, to live with those who prize ease and yet keep one's own ideals and opinions. If this woman had the courage to leave her people, to open a new life with him elsewhere—he smiled at the picture of Miss Hitchcock conjured up by the idea.

The streets were filthy as always, and the sultry west wind was sweeping the filth down the street canons. Here in the district of wholesale business houses a kind of midsummer gloom reigned. Many stores were vacant, their broad windows plastered with play-bills. Even in the warehouses along the river a strange stillness prevailed. "Nothing was doing," in the idiom of the street. Along the platforms of the railroad company's train house, however, a large crowd of idlers had assembled. They were watching to see whether the trainmen would make up the Overland Limited. Debs had said that this company would not move its through trains if it persisted in using the tabooed Pullmans. Stout chains had been attached to the sleepers to prevent any daring attempt to cut out the cars at the last moment. A number of officials from the general offices were hurrying to and fro apprehensively. There was some delay, but finally the heavy train began to move. It wound slowly out of the shed, in a sullen silence of the onlookers. In the yards it halted. There was a derisive cry, but in a few moments it started again and disappeared.

"I guess it's all bluff," a smartly dressed young man remarked to Sommers.
"There's the general manager getting into the Lake Forest two-ten, and
Smith of the C., B. and Q., and Rollins of the Santa Fe, are with him. The
general managers have been in session most of last night and this morning.
They're going to fight it out, if it costs a hundred millions."

The young man's views seemed to be the popular ones in the Lake Forest train. It was crowded with young business men, bound out of town for their holiday. Not a few were going to the country club at Lake Forest. In this time of business stagnation they were cultivating the new game of golf. There was a general air of blithe relief when the train pulled out of the yards, and the dirty, sultry, restless city was left behind. "Blamed fools to strike now," remarked a fat, perspiring stockbroker. "Roads aren't earning anything, anyhow."

The conductor who was taking the tickets smiled and kept his own counsel.

"Good time to buy rails, all the same," his companion answered.

"I guess this'll yank old Pullman back to town," another remarked, glancing up from his paper.

"You don't know him. It won't bother him. He's keeping cool somewhere in the St. Lawrence. It's up to the railroads now."

"Let's see your clubs. Did you get 'em straight from Scotland? That's a pretty iron."

Older men were chatting confidentially and shaking their heads. But the atmosphere was not gloomy; an air of easy, assured optimism prevailed. "I guess it will all come out right, somehow, and the men will be glad to get back to work…. If Cleveland and his free trade were in hell!…" And the train sped on through the northern suburbs, coming every now and then within eyeshot of the sparkling lake. The holiday feeling gained as the train got farther away from the smoke and heat of the city. The young men belonged to the "nicer" people, who knew each other in a friendly, well-bred way. It was a comfortable, social kind of picnic of the better classes.

Most of the younger men, and Sommers with them, got into the omnibus waiting at the Lake Forest station, and proceeded at once to the club. There, in the sprawling, freshly painted club-house, set down on a sun-baked, treeless slope, people were already gathered. A polo match was in progress and also a golf tournament. The verandas were filled with ladies. One part of the verandas had been screened off, and there, in a kind of outdoor cafe, people were lunching or sipping cool drinks. At one of the tables Sommers found Miss Hitchcock and Mrs. Porter, surrounded by a group of young men and women who were talking and laughing excitedly.

"Ah! you couldn't get the twelve-thirty," Miss Hitchcock exclaimed, as Sommers edged to her. "We waited luncheon for you until the train came; but you are in time for the polo. Caspar is playing—and Parker," she added in a lower tone. "Let us go down there and watch them."

Miss Hitchcock detached herself skilfully from the buzzing circle on the veranda, and the two stepped out on the springy turf. The undulating prairie was covered with a golden haze. Half a mile west a thin line of trees pencilled the horizon. The golf course lay up and down the gentle turfy swells between the club-house and the wind-break of trees. The polo grounds were off to the left, in a little hollow beside a copse of oak. There were not many trees over the sixty or more acres, and the roads on either side of the club grounds were marked by dense clouds of dust. Yet it was gay—open to the June heavens, with a sense of limitless breathing space. And it was also very decorous, well-bred, and conventional.

As they strolled leisurely over the lawns in front of the club-house, Miss Hitchcock stopped frequently to speak to some group of spectators, or to greet cheerfully a golfer as he started for the first tee. She seemed very animated and happy; the decorative scene fitted her admirably. Dr. Lindsay came up the slope, laboring toward the ninth hole with prodigious welter.

"That's the way he keeps young," Miss Hitchcock commented approvingly. "He's one of the best golfers in the club. I like to see the older men showing that they have powers of enjoyment left."

"I guess there's no doubt about Lindsay's powers of enjoyment," Sommers retorted idly.

They passed Mrs. Carson, "ingeniously and correctly associated," as Miss
Hitchcock commented, and little Laura Lindsay flirting with young Polot.

Miss Hitchcock quickened her pace, for the polo had already begun. They saw Caspar Porter's little pony fidgeting under its heavy burden. It became unmanageable and careered wildly up and down the field, well out of range of the players. Indeed, most of the ponies seemed inclined to keep their shins out of the melee. Sommers laughed rather ill-naturedly, and Miss Hitchcock frowned. She disliked slovenly playing, and shoddy methods even in polo. When the umpire called time, Parker Hitchcock rode up to where they were standing and shook hands with the young doctor. As he trotted off, his sister said earnestly:

"You have done so much for him; we can never thank you."

"I don't believe I have done so very much," Sommers replied. He did not like to have her refer to his mission in New York, or to make, woman-wise, a sentimental story out of a nasty little scrape.

"I think polo will help him; papa agrees with me now."

"Indeed!" Sommers smiled,

"What is it that you don't say?" the girl flashed at him resentfully.

"Merely, that this is a nice green paddock for a young man to be turned out in—when he has barked his shins. Do you know what happens to the ordinary young man who is—a bit wild?"

"Well, let us not go into it. I am afraid of you to-day."

"Yes, I am in one of my crude moods to-day, I confess. I had no business to come."

"Not at all. This is just the place for you. Nice people, nice day, nice sporty feeling in the air. You need relaxation badly."

"I don't think I shall get it exactly here."

"Why not?"

The girl looked out over the shaven turf, dotted with the white figures of the golfers, at the careering ponies which had begun the new round in the match, up the slope where the club verandas were gay with familiar figures,—and it all seemed very good. The man at her side could see all that and more beyond. He had come within the hour from the din of the city, where the wealth that flowered here was made. And there was a primitive, eternal, unanswerable question harassing his soul.

CHAPTER XVI

"Shall we walk over to the lake," the girl suggested gently, as if anxious to humor some incomprehensible child. "There is a lovely ravine we can explore, all cool and shady, and this sun is growing oppressive."

Sommers accepted gratefully the concession she made to his unsocial mood. The ravine path revealed unexpected wildness and freshness. The peace of twilight had already descended there. Miss Hitchcock strolled on, apparently forgetful of fatigue, of the distance they were putting between them and the club-house. Sommers respected the charm of the occasion, and, content with evading the chattering crowd, refrained from all strenuous discussion. This happy, well-bred, contented woman, full of vitality and interest, soothed all asperities. She laid him in subtle subjection to her. So they chatted of the trivial things that must be crossed and explored before understanding can come. When they neared the lake, the sun had sunk so far that the beach was one long, dark strip of shade. The little waves lapped coolly along the breakwaters. They continued their stroll, walking easily on the hard sand, each unwilling to break the moment of perfect adjustment. Finally the girl confessed her fatigue, and sat down beside a breakwater, throwing off her hat, and pushing her hair away from her temples. She looked up at the man and smiled. 'You see,' she seemed to say, 'I can meet you on your own ground, and the world is very beautiful when one gets away, when one gets away!'

"Why did you refuse to go abroad with Uncle Brome?" she asked suddenly. She was looking out idly across the lake, but something in her voice puzzled Sommers.

"I didn't want to go."

"Chicago fascinates you already!"

"There were more reasons than one," he answered, after a moment's hesitation, as if he could trust himself no farther. The girl smiled a bit, quite to herself. Her throat palpitated a little, and then she turned her head.

"Tell me about the cases. Are they so interesting?"

"There is one curious case," the young doctor responded with masculine literalness. "It's hardly a case, but an affair I have mixed myself up with. Do you remember the night of the dinner at your house when Lindsay was there? The evening before I had been at the Paysons' dance, and when I returned there was an emergency case just brought to the hospital. They had telephoned for me, but had missed me. Well, the fellow was a drunken brute that had been shot a number of times. His wife was with him."

Sommers paused, finding now that he had started on his tale that it was difficult to bring out his point, to make this girl understand the significance of it, and the reason why he told it to her. She was attentive, but he thought she was a trifle bored. Soon he began again and went over all the steps of the affair.

"You see," he concluded, "I was morally certain that, if the operation succeeded, the fellow would be worse than useless in this world. Now it's coming true. Of course I have no responsibility; I did what any other doctor should have done, I suppose; and, if it had been an ordinary hospital case, I don't suppose that I should have thought twice about it. But you see that I—this woman has got her load of misery saddled on her, perhaps for life, and partly through me."

"I think she did right," the girl responded quickly, looking at the case from an entirely different side.

"I am not sure of that," Sommers retorted brusquely.

"What kind of a woman is she?" the girl inquired with interest, ignoring his last remark.

"I don't think I could make you understand her. I don't myself now."

"Is she pretty?"

"I don't know. She makes you see her always."

The girl moved as if the evening wind had touched her, and put on her hat.

"She's a desperately literal woman, primitive, the kind you never meet—well, out here. She has a thirst for happiness, and doesn't get a drop."

"She must be common, or she wouldn't have married that man," Miss Hitchcock commented in a hard tone. She rose, and without discussion they took the path that led along the bluff to the cottages.

"I didn't think so," the doctor answered positively. "And if you knew her, you wouldn't think so."

After a moment he said tentatively, "I wish you could meet her."

"I should be glad to," Miss Hitchcock replied sweetly, but without interest.

Sommers realized the instant he had spoken that he had made a mistake, that his idea was a purely conventional one. The two women could have nothing but their sex in common, and that common possession was as likely to be a ground for difference as for agreement. It was always useless to bring two people of different classes together. Three generations back the families of these two women were probably on the same level of society. And, as woman to woman, the schoolteacher, who travelled the dreary path between the dingy cottage and the Everglade School, was as full of power and beauty as this velvety specimen of plutocracy. It was sentimental, however, to ignore the present facts. Evidently Miss Hitchcock had followed the same line of reasoning, for when she spoke again she referred distantly to Mrs. Preston.

"Those people—teachers—have their own clubs and society. Mrs. Bannerton was a teacher in the schools before she was married. Do you know Mrs. Bannerton?"

"I have met Mrs. Bannerton," Sommers answered indifferently.

He was annoyed at the trivial insertion of Mrs. Bannerton into the conversation. He had failed to make Mrs. Preston's story appear important, or even interesting, and the girl by his side had shown him delicately that he was a bore. They walked more rapidly in the gathering twilight. The sun had sunk behind the trees, and the ravine below their path was gloomy. The mood of the day had changed, and he was sorry—for everything. It was a petty matter—it was always some petty thing—that came in between them. He longed to recall the moment on the beach when she had asked him, with a flicker of a smile upon her face, why he had decided to remain in Chicago. But they were strangers to each other now,—hopelessly strangers,—and the worst of it was that they both knew it.

* * * * *

There was a large house party at the Hitchcock cottage. The Porters and the Lindsays, with other guests, were there for the holidays of the Fourth, and some more people came in for dinner. The men who had arrived on the late trains brought more news of the strike: the Illinois Central was tied up, the Rock Island service was crippled, and there were reports that the Northwestern men were going out en masse on the morrow. The younger people took the matter gayly, as an opportune occasion for an extended lark. The older men discussed the strike from all sides, and looked grave. Over the cigars the general attitude toward the situation came out strongly: the strikers were rash fools; they'd find that out in a few weeks. They could do a great deal of harm under their dangerous leaders, but, if need be, the courts, the state, the federal government, would be invoked for aid. Law and order and private rights must be respected. The men said these things ponderously, with the conviction that they were reciting a holy creed of eternal right. They were men of experience, who had never questioned the worth of the society in which they were privileged to live. They knew each other, and they knew life, and at the bottom it was as useless to kick against the laws of society as to interfere with the laws of nature. Besides, it was all very good—a fair enough field for any one.

Sommers was excited by the reports. It made him restless to be lolling here outside of the storm when such a momentous affair was moving down the lake under the leaden pall of the city smoke. He asked questions eagerly, and finally got into discussion with old Boardman, one of the counsel for a large railroad.

"Who is that raw youth?" old Boardman asked Porter, when the younger men joined the ladies on the veranda.

"Some protege of Alec's," Brome Porter replied. "Son of an old friend—fresh chap."

"I am afraid our young friend is not going to turn out well," Dr. Lindsay, who had overheard the discussion, added in a distressed tone. "I have done what I can for him, but he is very opinionated and green—yes, very green. Pity—he is a clever fellow, one of the cleverest young surgeons in the city."

"He talks about what he doesn't know," Boardman pronounced sententiously. "When he's lived with decent folks a little longer, he'll get some sense knocked into his puppy head, maybe."

"Maybe," Brome Porter assented, dismissing this crude, raw, green, ignorant young man with a contemptuous grunt.

Outside on the brick terrace the younger people had gathered in a circle and were discussing the polo match. Miss Hitchcock's clear, mocking voice could be heard teasing her cousin Caspar on his performance that afternoon. The heavy young man, whose florid face was flushed with the champagne he had taken, made ineffective attempts to ward off the banter. Parker Hitchcock came to his rescue.

"I say, Lou, it's absurd to compare us with the teams east. We haven't the stable. Who ever heard of playing with two ponies?"

He appealed to Sommers, who happened to be seated next him.

"Steve Bayliss buys ponies by the carload and takes his pick. You can't play polo without good ponies, can you?"

"I don't know," Sommers answered indifferently.

He was looking at the lights along the shore, and contriving some excuse to cut short his visit. It was clear that he was uncomfortably out of his element in the chattering circle. He was too dull to add joy to such a gathering, and he got little joy from it. And he was feverishly anxious to be doing something, to put his hand to some plough—to escape the perpetual irritation of talk.

The chatter went on from polo to golf and gossip until the group broke up into flirtation couples. As Sommers was about to stroll off to the beach, Lindsay came out of the dining room and sat down by him with the amiable purpose of giving his young colleague some good social doctrine. He talked admiringly of the manner in which the general managers had taken hold of the strike.

"Most of them are from the ranks, you know," he said, "fought their way up to the head, just as any one of those fellows could if he had the ability, and they know what they're doing."

"There is no one so bitter, so arrogant, so proud as your son of a peasant who has got the upper hand," Sommers commented philosophically.

"The son of a peasant?" Lindsay repeated, bewildered.

"Yes, that's what our money-makers are,—from the soil, from the masses. And when they feel their power, they use it worse than the most arrogant aristocrats. Of course the strikers are all wrong, poor fools!" he hastened to add. "But they are not as bad as the others, as those who have. The men will be licked fast enough, and licked badly. They always will be. But it is a brutal game, a brutal game, this business success,—a good deal worse than war, where you line up in the open at least."

Sommers spoke nonchalantly, as if his views could not interest Dr. Lindsay, but were interesting to himself, nevertheless.

"That's pretty fierce!" Lindsay remarked, with a laugh. "I guess you haven't seen much of business. If you had been here during the anarchist riots—"

Sommers involuntarily shrugged his shoulders. The anarchist was the most terrifying bugaboo in Chicago, referred to as a kind of Asiatic plague that might break out at any time. Before Lindsay could get his argument launched, however, some of the guests drifted out to the terrace, and the two men separated.

Later in the evening Sommers found Miss Hitchcock alone, and explained to her that he should have to leave in the morning, as that would probably be the last chance to reach Chicago for some days. She did not urge him to stay, and expressed her regret at his departure in conventional phrases. They were standing by the edge of the terrace, which ran along the bluff above the lake. A faint murmur of little waves rose to them from the beach beneath.

"It is so heavenly quiet!" the girl murmured, as if to reproach his dissatisfied, restless spirit. "So this is good-bye?" she added, at length.

Sommers knew that she meant this would be the end of their intimacy, of anything but the commonplace service of the world.

"I hope not," he answered regretfully.

"Why is it we differ?" she asked swiftly. "I am sorry we should disagree on such really unimportant matters."

"Don't say that," Sommers protested. "You know that it is just because you are intelligent and big enough to realize that they are important that—"

"We strike them every time?" she inquired.

"Laura Lindsay and Caspar would think we were drivelling idiots."

"I am not so sure they wouldn't be right!" She laughed nervously, and locked her hands tightly together. He turned away in discomfort, and neither spoke for a long time. Finally he broke the silence,—

"At any rate, you can see that I am scarcely a fit guest!"

"So you are determined to go in this way—back to your—case?"

At the scorn of her last words Sommers threw up his head haughtily.

"Yes, back to my case."

CHAPTER XVII

Mrs. Ducharme opened the door of the cottage in response to Sommers's knock. Attired in a black house dress, with her dark hair smoothly brushed back from round, fat features, she was a peaceful figure. Sommers thought there was some truth in her contention that "Ducharme ought to get a decent-looking woman, anyway."

"How is Mr. Preston?" he asked.

Mrs. Ducharme shook her head mournfully.

"Bad, allus awful bad—and pitiful. Calling for stuff in a voice fit to break your heart."

"Mind you don't let him get any," the doctor counselled, preparing to go upstairs.

"Better not go up there jest yet," the woman whispered. "He did get away from us yesterdy and had a terrible time over there." She hitched her shoulders in the direction of Stoney Island Avenue. "We ain't found out till he'd been gone 'most two hours, and, my! such goings on; we had to git two perlicemen."

"I suppose you were out looking for Ducharme?" the doctor asked, in a severe tone.

"It was the last time," the woman pleaded, her eyes downcast. "Come in here. Miss Preston ain't got back from school,—she's late to-day."

Sommers walked into the bare sitting room and sat down, while Mrs. Ducharme leaned against the door-post, fingering her apron in an embarrassed manner.

"I've got cured," she blurted out at last. "My eye was awful bad, and it's been most a week since you sent me here."

"Did you follow my treatment?"

"No! I was out one afternoon—after Mrs. Preston came back from school—and I had walked miles and miles. Comin' home I passed a buildin' down here a ways on the avenue where there were picter papers pasted all over the windows; the picters were all about healin' folks, heaps and heaps in great theaters, a nice white-haired old preacher doin' the healin'. While I was lookin' at the picters, a door opened and a young feller came along and helped 'em carry in a cripple in his chair. He turns to me arter finishin' with the cripple and says, 'Come in, lady, and be healed in the blood of the lamb.' In I went, sure enough, and there was a kind of rough church fitted up with texts printed in great show-bills, and they was healin' folks. The little feller was helpin' em up the steps to the platform, and the old feller was prayin', and at last the young feller comes to me and says, 'Want ter be healed?' and I just got up, couldn't help it, and walked to the platform, and they prayed over me—you aren't mad, are you?" she asked suspiciously.

Sommers laughed.

"Mrs. Preston said you'd be very angry with such nonsense. But at any rate the old fellow—Dr.—Dr.—Po—"

"Dr. Potz," Sommers suggested.

"That's him. He cured me, and I went back again and told him about Ducharme. And he says that he's got a devil, and he will cast it out by prayin'. But he wants money."

"How much will it cost to cast out the devil?" the doctor inquired.

"The doctor says he must have ten dollars to loosen the bonds."

"Well," Sommers drew a bill from his pocket, "there's ten dollars on account of your wages. Now, don't you interfere with the doctor's work. You let him manage the devil his own way, and if you see Ducharme or the other woman, you run away as hard as you can. If you don't, you may bring the devil back again."

The woman took the money eagerly.

"You can go right off to find the doctor," Sommers continued. "I'll stay here until Mrs. Preston returns. But let me look at your eye, and see whether the doctor has cast that devil out for good and all."

He examined the eye as well as he could without appliances. Sure enough, so far as he could detect, the eye was normal, the peculiar paralysis had disappeared.

"You are quite right," he pronounced at last. "The doctor has handled this devil very ably. You can tell Mrs. Preston that I approve of your going to that doctor."

"I wonder where Mrs. Preston can be: she's most always here by half-past four, and it's after five. He," the woman pointed upstairs to Preston's rooms, "is sleeping off the effects of the dose Mrs. Preston gave him."

"The powders?" the doctor asked.

"Yes, sir. She had to give him two before he would sleep. Well, I'll be back by supper time. If he calls you, be careful about the bar on the door."

After Mrs. Ducharme had gone, the doctor examined every object in the little room. It was all so bare! Needlessly so, Sommers thought at first, contrasting the bleak room with the comfortable simplicity of his own rooms. The strip of coarse thin rug, the open Franklin stove, the pine kitchen table, the three straight chairs—it was as if the woman, crushed down from all aspirations, had defiantly willed to exist with as little of this world's furniture as might be. On the table were a few school books, a teacher's manual of drawing, a school mythology, and at one side two or three other volumes, which Sommers took up with more interest. One was a book on psychology—a large modern work on the subject. A second was an antiquated popular treatise on "Diseases of the Mind." Another volume was an even greater surprise—Balzac's Une Passion dans la Desert, a well-dirtied copy from the public library. They were fierce condiments for a lonely mind!

His examination over, he noiselessly stepped into the hall and went upstairs. After some fumbling he unbolted the door and tiptoed into the room, where Preston lay like a log. The fortnight had changed him markedly. There was no longer any prospect that he would sink under his disease, as Sommers had half expected. He had grown stouter, and his flesh had a healthy tint. "It will take it out of his mind," he muttered to himself, watching the hanging jaw that fell nervelessly away from the mouth, disclosing the teeth.

As he watched the man's form, so drearily promising of physical power, he heard a light footstep at the outer door, which he had left unbarred. On turning he caught the look of relief that passed over Mrs. Preston's face at the sight of the man lying quietly in his bed. What a state of fear she must live in!

Without a word the two descended, Sommers carefully barring and bolting the door. When they reached her room, her manner changed, and she spoke with a note of elation in her voice:

"I was so afraid that you would not come again after sending me help."

"I shall come as often and as long as you need me," Sommers answered, taking her hand kindly. "He has had another attack," he continued. "Mrs. Ducharme told me—I sent her out—and I suppose he's sleeping off the opiate."

"Yes, it was dreadful, worse than anything yet." She uttered these words jerkily, walking up and down the room in excitement. "And I've just left the schoolhouse. The assistant superintendent was there to see me. He was kind enough, but he said it couldn't happen again. There was scandal about it now. And yesterday I heard a child, one of my pupils, say to his companion, 'She's the teacher who's got a drunken husband.'"

Her voice was dreary, not rebellious.

"I don't know what to do. I cannot move. It would be worse in any other neighborhood. I thought," she added in a low voice, "that he would go away, for a time at least, but his mind is so weak, and he has some trouble with walking. But he gets stronger, stronger, O God, every day! I have to see him grow stronger, and I grow weaker."

"It is simply preposterous," the doctor protested in matter-of-fact tones, "to kill yourself, to put yourself in such a position for a man, who is no longer a man. For a man you cannot love," he added.

"What would be the use of running away from the trouble? He has ruined my life. Alves Preston is a mere thing that eats and sleeps. She will be that kind of thing as long as she lives."

"That is romantic rot," the doctor observed coldly. "No life is ruined in that way. One life has been wrecked; but you, you are bigger than that life. You can recover—bury it away—and love and have children and find that it is a good thing to live. That is the beauty of human weakness—we forget ourselves of yesterday."

In answer to his words her face, which he had once thought too immobile and passive for beauty, flamed with color, the dark eyes flashing beneath the broad white brow.

"Am I just caught in a fog?" she murmured.

"You are living in a way that would make any woman mad. I might twist myself into as many knots as you have. I might say that I had caused this disaster; that March evening my hand was too true. For I knew then the man ought to die."

He blurted out his admission roughly.

"I knew you did," she said softly, "and that has made it easier."

His voice trembled when he spoke again. "But I live with facts, not fancies. And the facts are that that ruined thing should not clog you, ruin you. Get rid of him in any way you will,—I advise the county asylum. Get rid of him, and do it quickly before he crazes you."

When he had finished, there was an oppressive stillness in the room, as if some sentence had been declared. Mrs. Preston got up and walked to and fro, evidently battling with herself. She stopped opposite him finally.

"The only thing that would justify that would be to know that you grasped it all—real happiness in that one bold stroke. Such conviction can never come."

"Happiness!" he exclaimed scornfully. "If you mean a good, comfortable time, you won't find any certainty about that. But you can get freedom to live out your life—"

"You fail to understand. There is happiness. See,—come here."

She led him to the front window, which was open toward the peaceful little lawn. On the railroad track behind the copse of scrub oak an unskilful train crew was making up a long train of freight cars. Their shouts, punctuated by the rumbling reverberations from the long train as it alternately buckled up and stretched out, was the one discord in the soft night. All else was hushed, even to the giant chimneys in the steel works. One solitary furnace lamped the growing darkness. It was midsummer now in these marshy spots, and a very living nature breathed and pulsed, even in the puddles between the house and the avenue.

"You can hear it in the night air," she murmured; "the joy that comes rising up from the earth, the joy of living. Ah! that is why we are made—to have happiness and joy, to rejoice the heart of God, to make God live, for He must be happiness itself; and when we are happy and feel joy in living, He must grow stronger. And when we are weak and bitter, when the world haunts us as I felt this afternoon on leaving the superintendent, when men strike and starve, and others are hard and grasping—then He must shrink and grow small and suffer. There is happiness," she ended, breathing her belief as a prayer into the solitude and night.

"What will you do to get it?" Sommers asked, shortly.

"Do to get it?" She drew back from the window, her figure tense. "When it comes within my grasp, I will do everything, everything, and nothing shall hinder me."

"Meantime?" the doctor questioned significantly.

"Don't ask me!" She sank into a chair and covered her eyes with her hand.
And neither spoke until the sound of footsteps was heard on the walk.

"There is Mrs. Ducharme coming home from the charmer of devils. It is time for me to go," Sommers said.

The room was so dark that he could not see her face, as he extended his hand; but he could feel the repressed breathing, the passionate air about her person.

"Remember," he said slowly, "whenever you need me—want me for anything—send a message, and I shall come at once. We will settle this thing together."

There was a sharp pressure on his hand, her thin fingers drawing him toward her involuntarily. Then his hand dropped, and he groped his way to the door.

CHAPTER XVIII

The cars were still whirring up and down Stoney Island Avenue when Sommers left the cottage, but he did not think to stop one. Instead, he walked on heedlessly, mechanically, toward the city. Frequently he stumbled and with difficulty saved himself from falling over the dislocated planks of the wooden walk. The June night was brilliant above with countless points of light. A gentle wind drew in shore from the lake, stirring the tall rushes in the adjacent swamps. Occasionally a bicyclist sped by, the light from his lantern wagging like a crazy firefly. The night was strangely still; the clamorous railroads were asleep. Far away to the south a solitary engine snorted at intervals, indicating the effort of some untrained hand to move the perishing freight. Chicago was a helpless giant to-night. When he came to the region of saloons, which were crowded with strikers, he turned away from the noise and the stench of bad beer, and struck into a grass-grown street in the direction of the lake. There he walked on, unmindful of time or destination, in the marvellous state of conscious dream.

The little space of one day separated him from that final meeting with Miss Hitchcock in the pleasant cottage above the lake. He had gone there, drawn by her, and he had gone away repelled, at strife with himself, with her. Nothing had happened since, and yet everything. As he had said to another woman, Mrs. Preston was a woman you remembered. And he had said that of a woman very different from the one he had seen and spoken with this night. That stricken, depressed creature of the night of the operation had faded away, and in her place was this passionate, large-hearted woman, who had spoken to him bravely as an equal in the dark room of the forbidding cottage. She had thrown a spell into his life this night, and his steps were wandering on, purposeless, unconscious, with an exhilaration akin to some subtle opiate.

Her life was set in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously—what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth century; the brutal rich, the brutalized poor; the stupid good, the pedantic, the foolish,—all, all that made the waking world of his experience! It was like the smoke wreath above the lamping torch of the blast-furnace. It was the screen upon which glowed the rosy colors of the essential fire. The fire,—that was the one great thing,—the fire was life itself.

As he walked on in the tumultuous sensations of dream, the discords of living were swept away: the beautiful flesh that rotted; the noble human figures that it was well to have covered; the shame of woman's form, of man's corrupted carcass; the world that has, with its beauty and charm, side by side with the world that has not, with its grime and its nastiness. In the dream that he dreamed the difference between the woman who had adornment and the other sad one back there in the cottage was as nothing. The irritating paradox of life was reconciled: there was great reasonableness in things, and he had found it.

Men fought and gambled to-day in the factories, the shops, the railroads, as they fought in the dark ages, for the same ends—for sensual pleasures, gross love of power, barbaric show. They would fight on, glorifying their petty deeds of personal gain; but not always. The mystery of human defeat in the midst of success would be borne in upon them. The barbarians of trade would give way, as had the barbarians of feudal war. This heaving, moaning city, blessedly quiet tonight, would learn its lesson of futility. His eyes that had been long searching the dark were opened now, and he could bide his few years of life in peace. He had labored too long in the charnel house.

He forgave life for its disgusting manifestations, for the triviality of Lindsay, for the fleshy Porter with his finger in the stock market, for the ambitious Carson who would better have rested in his father's dugout in Iowa. They were a part of the travailing world, without which it could not fulfil its appointed destiny. It was childish to dislike them; with this God-given peace and understanding one could never be impatient, nor foam at the mouth. He could enter into himself and remove them from him, from her. Some day they two would quietly leave it all, depart to a place where as man and woman they could live life simply, sweetly. Yes, they had already departed, had faded away from the strife, and he was no longer in doubt about anything. He had ceased to think, and for the first moment in his life he was content to feel.

All emotion over life must come to be transmuted to this—an elemental state of conviction transforming the tawdry acts of life. There was but this one everlasting emotion which equalized everything, in which all manifestations of life had their proper place and proportion, according to which man could work in joy. She and he were accidents of the story. They might go out into darkness to-night; there was eternal time and multitudes of others to take their place, to feel the ancient, purifying fire—to love and have peace.

CHAPTER XIX

The Fourth, of July had never before been kept in the like manner in Chicago. There was a row or two at Grand Crossing between the strikers and the railroad officials, several derailed cars and spiked switches, a row at Blue Island, and a bonfire in the stock yards. People were not travelling on this holiday, and the main streets were strangely silent and dull.

Sommers had found no one at the office in the Athenian Building. Lindsay had not been in since the strike began. Probably he would not appear until the disorderly city had settled down. Sommers had taken the clinic yesterday; to-day there was nothing for him to do except exercise his horse by a long ride in the blazing sunshine. Before he left the office a telegram came from Lake Forest, announcing that a postponed meeting of the board of managers of the summer sanitarium for poor babies would be put off indefinitely. Sommers knew what that meant—no appropriation for carrying on the work. At the last meeting the board of managers, who were women for the most part, had disagreed about the advisability of undertaking the work this season, when every one was feeling poor. Some women had been especially violent against supporting the charity in those districts where the strikers lived.

Miss Hitchcock, who was the secretary, and Sommers had got the heated members of the board to suppress their prejudices for the present, and vote a temporary subsidy. The telegram meant that under the present circumstances it would be hopeless to try to extract money from the usual sources. The sanitarium and creche would have to close within a week, and Sommers was left to arrange matters. After he had taken the necessary measures, he started on his ride. He had in mind to ride out of the city along the lines of railroad to the southwest to see whether the newspaper reports of the strike were justified or, as he suspected, grossly exaggerated. The newspapers, at first inclined to side with the Pullman men in their demand for arbitration, had suddenly turned about and were denouncing the strikers as anarchists. They were spreading broadcast throughout the country violent reports of incendiarism and riot.

Outside of the stations and the adjacent yards Sommers found little to see. A great stagnation had settled over the city this hot July day. Somewhat disappointed in his search for excitement he came back at nightfall to the cool stretches of the South Parks. He turned into the desolate Midway, where the unsightly wheel hung an inert, abortive mass in the violet dusk. His way home lay in the other direction, and his horse trotted languidly. He had determined to turn back, when suddenly a tongue of flame shot up a mile away toward the lake. This first long tongue ran out, followed by another and another, and yet others that raced north and south and up into the night.

"The Fair Buildings!" a man on a bicycle shouted, and sped away.

The broad flames now illuminated the dome of the Administration Building and the facades of the Court of Honor. Sommers spurred his horse, while the loungers suddenly, with one cry, poured from the park along the rough paths of the Midway, streaming out across the prairie toward the fire. He plunged into the cool gulf under the Illinois Central tracks, then out into a glare of full day, before the wild, licking flames. The Court of Honor with its empty lagoon and broken bridges was more beautiful in the savage glow of the ravaging fire than ever on the gala nights of the exposition. The fantastic fury of the scene fascinated man and beast. The streaming lines of people raced on, and the horse snorted and plunged into the mass. Now the crackling as of paper burning in a brisk wind could be heard. There was a shout from the crowd. The flames had gained the Peristyle—that noble fantasy plucked from another, distant life and planted here above the barbaric glow of the lake in the lustrous atmosphere of Chicago. The horseman holding his restive steeds drove in a sea of flame. Through the empty arches the dark waters of the lake caught the reflection and sombrely relighted the scene.

Sommers almost knocked over a woman who was gazing in speechless absorption at the panorama of flame. In the light of the fire he could see that it was Mrs. Preston. She seemed entranced, fascinated like an animal by the savagery of the fierce fire.

"It is grand, beautiful," she murmured to Sommers, who had dismounted. Her large frame trembled with suppressed excitement, and her face glowed.

"Beauty eating beauty," Sommers replied sadly.

"They ought to go, just like this—shoot up into the sky in flame and die, expire in the last beauty."

The excitement of the scene loosened her tongue, gave her whole being expression, and made her words thrill. She took off her hat as if to free her body, even by that little, while she drank in the scene of leaping flames, the crescendo of light, the pathetic, noble emptiness between the fire-eaten pillars of the Peristyle.

"That is better than the Fair itself. It is fiercer—not mere play."

"Nature has taken a hand," Sommers said grimly, "and knocks about man's toys. Look!"

He pointed to the fairylike brightness of the island in the lagoon. The green leafage of the shrubbery was suffused in tender light; the waters reflected calmly all their drapery, but none of the savage desolation of the pyre in the Court of Honor. Beyond where the gracious pile of the Art Building stretched across the horizon the light clouds of smoke floated, a gray wreath in the night. The seething mass of flame began to abate, to lessen almost imperceptibly, exhausting itself slowly with deep groans like the dying of a master passion.

Sommers suggested that they should circle the fire to the south, where they could see to better advantage the Peristyle now burning almost alone. They made the circuit slowly, Sommers leading his frightened animal among the refuse of the grounds. Mrs. Preston walked tranquilly by his side, her face still illuminated by the fading glow. The prairie lay in gloomy vastness, lighted but a little way by the waning fire. Along the avenue forms of men and women—mere mites—were running to and fro. The figures were those of gnomes toiling under a gloomy, uncertain firmament, or of animals furtively peeping out of the gloom of dusk in a mountain valley. Helpless shapes doomed to wander on the sandy strand of the earth!

The two found a place above the little inlet, directly across from the burning Peristyle. The fire had burned itself out now, and was dying with protests of reviving flame spurting here and there from the dark spots of the Court. The colossal figure rising from the lagoon in front of the Peristyle was still illuminated,—the light falling upon the gilded ball borne aloft,—solemnly presiding even in the ruins of the dream. And behind this colossal figure of triumph the noble horseman still reined in his frightened chargers. The velvet shadows of the night were falling once more over the distant Art Building, creeping over the little island, leaving the lagoons in murky silence. The throngs of curious people that had clustered about the western end of the fire were thinning out rapidly. A light night breeze from the empty spaces of prairie wafted the smoke wreaths northward toward the city of men whose plaything had been taken. At their feet a white column of staff plunged into the water, hissed and was silent. The passion was well-nigh spent.

Mrs. Preston sighed, like a child waking from a long revery, a journey into another land.

"I never felt that the fierce things, the passions of life, could bring their happiness too. It seemed that happiness was something peaceful, like the fields at night or this lake when it is still. But that is but one kind. There are many others."

Her low voice, powerful in its restraint, took up the mood of the place.