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“Surely you must have read it long ago” Page 360

Copyright 1906

The Bobbs-Merrill Company

October

TO
MY FATHER AND MOTHER
CHARLES G. AND FANNY B. AMES

CONTENTS

JEWEL WEED

CHAPTER I

A LIGHT FROM THE FAR EAST

In the mists of the infinite, events poise invisible, awaiting their opportunity to incarnate themselves. They fasten, each after his kind, on these human lives of ours, as germs find the culture soil they love; so it follows that to the commonplace comes a life of dull routine, foolish happenings seek out the sentimentalist, sordid events seek the sordid and on the mystic dawns the mysterious. Calamities wait there, too, until Fate points out a weak spot in character on which they may pounce relentless with the temptation that pierces it. As there are certain things that would scarcely dare to happen to certain people, so other greater events would hardly condescend to those whom they recognize as being their own inferiors.

Once in a while, particularly when a man is young or beginning a new phase of life, there come times when the things that are to be seem almost tangible. They press until he feels them crowd, while he waits with tense expectation for them to become visible to the crude eye of outer experience.

Perhaps it was due to a certain occultism in the atmosphere that Ellery Norris felt this pressure of the future on the afternoon of Mr. Early’s reception to Ram Juna. Norris was a new young man in a new young city, and he had come West to live. However short and futile life may look to the old, it appears a big and long thing to twenty-three. Here in St. Etienne he was to work and work hard; among these people, now all strangers, he was to find the friends of his lifetime; here were to come all the experiences of struggle, failure, success, perhaps of love.

He turned and glanced with a little sense of relief at Richard Percival seated beside him. Dick was the one stanch thing out of his past; Dick he had known and loved at college; Dick was even now showing himself a friend; and all these other folk were but the ghosts of things to come. Then he laughed lightly at himself for his own fantasy, and returned to the survey of his surroundings.

The vast new hall in which they sat, a hall young in years but old Gothic in pretense, might have suggested a possessor of the stately and knightly type rather than a little cockatoo like Mr. Early; but man has this advantage over the snail, that, whereas, the snail is obliged to construct a home around its slimy little body, man may build his habitation to match his imagination and ambition. In the West, moreover, it is the custom to leave the low-vaulted past and build more stately mansions as fast as the increasing purse will permit.

The great room was cool, even on a glowing summer day. Its heavy walls shut out the heat and its narrow windows gave but a creeping light which lost itself in the vaulted spaces above. It was archaic in a modern fashion, too archaic to be quite convincing when combined with present-day ornaments and luxuries, too splendid to belong to any one except Mr. Early, and yet, withal, a satisfying place, dim and fragrant on this July afternoon. The pale summery gowns of the women and the sprinkling of dark coats of the few men present modified its gorgeousness.

To-day Mr. Early surely had reason to congratulate himself on his amplitude of space, for if ever a big background was needed, it was when the public had come in its hundreds to look upon the huge Hindu who stood beside the host, dwarfing him as well as the throng in front. Swami Ram Juna overtopped them all in inches, as in serenity.

Mr. Early, whose physique was of the Napoleonic order, just as much body as was necessary to incase a mighty soul, had, in spite of his few inches, an air of distinction which demanded and received attention. Ram Juna, on the other hand, betrayed no expectation of adulation. Rather was he utterly oblivious of it. Over the heads of those to whom he had been speaking his far-seeing eyes gazed into that nothingness which is popularly supposed to be full of spiritual significance. He was oblivious of the earth.

Here, then, before the group of guests, in fine contrast, like a tropical bird caught among thrushes, stood this big bronze creature, magnificently gowned in a long flame-colored garment touched upon its borders with strange embroideries and girdled about its ample waist with a wide sash of dull oriental red. The polished face was set off by a turban of snowy white, in whose center blazed, like a bloodshot eye, a single enormous ruby. Everything about Ram Juna was superlative—his size, his raiment, his rapt gaze, his doctrine.

But after all, though the Hindu occupied the position of honor in the social stage, Norris found it hard to keep his attention fixed on that bird of paradise, who, at best, was sure to be but a temporary interest in these western states of America, where facts, not theories, loom large. The new young man’s eyes wandered to the audience, made up of people like himself. The unknown catches us for an instant, but our own kind are perennially absorbing. Since he and Dick were perched on a deep window-sill, which brought them at right angles to the row of chairs, he began to study the faces on this side and that.

A little in front of them a woman of thirty or more, exquisitely dressed in summer white, pretty and complacent, leaned back in her chair. Happening to catch Percival’s eye he looked inquiry.

“Mrs. Appleton,” whispered that young man, and lifted his eyebrows as if to express astonished admiration, then made a wry face. Norris smiled his understanding and glanced back at the self-satisfied prosperity beneath her filmy hat. Then, suddenly, at the far end of the room, another face caught him—a profile of a girl’s head, outlined against a high bench-back, her dreamy eyes fixed on the speaker. It was a cameo-like face, not animated, but delicate and finely lined. Norris knew her in a flash. This was the girl whose photograph had stood on Dick’s mantel at college and of whom Dick had sometimes spoken in those rare intimate hours when he talked of his mother or of his purposes in life. Ellery forgot the rest of the room and watched her until a sudden forward lunge of Mrs. Appleton’s hat shut her off, and brought him back to consciousness of the place and the supposed interests of the day. He turned back with a sigh to Ram Juna, telling himself with some amusement that other minds than his own were wandering far afield, and that the attitude of polite interest came as much from the conviction that Esoteric Buddhism was “the thing,” as from any real absorption.

Already the Hindu had been talking to them for an hour. His speech had that precision and purity both of word and of enunciation by which a foreigner, trained in our classics, often shames our slovenly every-day English. He spoke, not as one who wishes to convert others to his own point of view, but, rather, as though unconscious of their presence, he poured out the fullness of his meditations in self-communion. The upward-turned eyes were half closed. Occasionally there was a flicker of the eyelids or a touch of scorn when he contrasted the eastern ideal of eternal repose with the western reality of endless struggle. Then for a moment he seemed to realize the presence of his auditors, ashamed now of their telephones, their public schools and even of their philanthropies, in the face of this supreme contempt for the things that fade.

Suddenly he opened wide his great eyes.

“And you,” he said, “you, with your guns, your armies and your ignorances, you think to rule us. Well, so be it! We grant to you dominion as a man gives to a child the sticks and straws for which it loudly clamors in its petty plays. But our treasures are the higher thoughts which alone are worthy of the man. These we reserve.”

The great oriental ruby above his forehead seemed to burn more brilliantly than ever as if to shame the frivolous occidental jewels that twinkled before it.

“Yes,” he went on, “these gems we do not submit to force. They are not to be ravished by blood and iron. Yet even these, our sacred treasures, we gladly share with those who, in humility and in the life of meditation, seek with us the universal truths. And truth, what is it? It eludes the scalpel of reason. It is the master and not the servant of logic. The only truths worthy to be known are those which are to be experienced by the soul in her hours of solitude. Then does she cease to think. Then does she cease to reason. Then does she know.”

He was dogmatic and they fell under his sway. A hush deeper than silence lay upon his audience as the Swami stood for a moment as though lost in himself. Recalling his surroundings he spoke again.

“My friends in this land, who are coming to understand with us, and we are not numerous even in India—the land of inspiration—my friends, whom you call by some long name which I have forgotten, ask me to tell you a little of what we know concerning the order of the universe. I will unfold.” As though giving instruction in elementary arithmetic, Swami Ram Juna began to sketch the adventures of the soul as it flies from one existence to another. His words were vivid and definite.

At this point Dick Percival’s lips began to move with the cynical amusement of youth.

“Pretty positive, isn’t he, about the things no mortal knows?” he whispered to Norris.

Softly spoken though the words were, Ram Juna instantly fixed his eyes upon the guilty youth. It was a habit of the Hindu to hear everything that rose above the sound of a thought.

“You think I speak of mysteries!” he demanded, suddenly breaking his discourse and leaning like a pine tree toward Percival. “You think that in a closet some one weaves a fantastic theory of life and lives. But no! What have I told you? What I speak, that has my soul known, as has many another soul. I tell of astral bodies. I have acquaintance with them as have you with the body of the young friend who sits beside you. I could show you—even you, whose eyes are covered with a film—I could show you! But no! It is too petty to demonstrate by a show.”

He moved a step backward and looked in a half-questioning way at the silent group in front.

“Perhaps,” he murmured hesitatingly, “perhaps it is by childish methods that one must teach the child.”

He muttered a few unknown words with his eyes still fixed on guilty Dick Percival, then he turned to Mr. Early.

“My kind host,” he said with a courteous gesture, “will you permit that I show to the unbelieving young gentleman an astral body?”

He turned and strode away toward dimness dimmer than that of the great hall, in the direction of that wing where rooms had been assigned him. A little rustle of pleased anticipation ran through the petticoats of the room. Interest ceased to be perfunctory and became genuine. This was more fun than doctrine, after all. Who wouldn’t be gratified at the chance of meeting an astral body—at least in a crowd? Alone, in a dark room, at midnight, it might prove less enjoyable.

Presently the Hindu returned, carrying in his hand a strangely twisted retort and something that looked like a primitive brazier.

“Look,” he said, “let us take some simple thing. I shall destroy the body of flesh and show you the body of shadow. I see roses in the strange jar yonder. You call them American beauties? Yes. Very well, I shall show you the ghost of an American beauty. Perhaps the unbelieving young gentleman will pluck one for me.”

Dick rose, pulled one of the flowers from among its fellows and handed it across heads to the Swami, who took it gravely.

“Even this simple form of life,” he explained, “has its astral existence. With seeing eyes it would be visible to you now, hidden inside the flesh of the flower. In order to make it the plainer, I shall destroy the body of the blossom and leave its spirit. That spirit you shall see. Look, I lay this beautiful rose upon this metal plate and cover it that the heat may be more intense. I consume it with the flame until the fire devours its shape and leaves only its ashes.”

A tense silence fell upon the waiting room, as Ram Juna thrust the covered rose into the brazier. At last he lifted the cover and displayed a little gray shapeless heap.

“The rose is dead,” he observed quietly. He turned now toward the glass phial, in the bottom of which lay a few grains of pinkish dust. Into this he poured the ashes of the burned flower. He lifted it high in air and surveyed it.

“The rose is dead,” he repeated, “but under the right conditions you shall see what we may call its ghost. See. A gentle warmth. I hold it not too close to the devouring flame. A gentle warmth.”

Those at the back of the room were rising now to peer over the hats of the more fortunate in front, but the hush remained unbroken. The dark eyes of the Hindu were bent on the glass before him, and a mystical smile played about his mouth.

In the bottom of the retort, in the bluish heap, began a movement, as though something alive were striving to free itself from bonds and rise. It heaved and struggled in the dusty mass, grew stronger, and instead of a shapeless writhing there came an upshooting pyramid, which gradually took upon itself form. A ghostly apparition of stem, of leaves, of a dusky red rose, grew more and more distinct until it glowed from its prison of glass, and Ram Juna smiled.

“The rose is dead!” he said for the third time.

A gasp of appreciation and awe passed through the room. The Swami turned to Dick Percival.

“That which I know, I speak,” he said simply.

Then with a sudden abrupt movement he shook the phial away from the warmth and held it up.

“Now only the poor body of ashes is within,” he went on. “The spirit is truly fled, until it shall find itself another incarnation, and we say that the flower is for ever dead. What then is this death with which we play and which plays with us? But I weary you with my too long discourse. Give me your pardon. I shall no more.”

There rose the sound of moving skirts and loosening tongues. The spell of oriental mysticism was broken and this became but one of many entertaining things to be chattered about in moods that varied from credulity to amusement. The ordinary reception atmosphere took possession, and the tinkle of animated feminine voices filled the air.

On the outskirts of the throng, which pressed forward to greet the host and to press the fingers of the seer, lingered the two young men, one of whom had stirred the unstirrable. Norris looked vaguely around as at unknown faces, and Dick nodded in this or that direction in that offhand manner which invites people to keep their distance rather than to seek further intercourse, but the woman who was handsome and thirty refused to be held at arm’s length.

“How-do, Mr. Percival? Glad to see you back. You have the genius of distinction, even in small things. How natural that the Swami should single you out for notice and so announce your home-coming to the world!”

“Is this the world?”

“Our little world,” Mrs. Appleton laughed; and as she spoke she peered curiously at Norris with the air of a naturalist who needs as many specimens of young men as possible for her collection. Dick smiled, whether with amusement or with cordiality it would be impossible to say.

“Mrs. Appleton, may I introduce Mr. Norris, who has come here as a new citizen. Apart from other considerations, we are grateful to anybody that swells the census, aren’t we?”

“So glad!” she murmured. “Mr. Percival must bring you to my lawn-party next week.”

But even while Norris expressed his thanks, Dick’s eyes wandered, until, with a cheerful start, he caught his companion’s arm.

“There she is, Ellery,” he said. “This way.”

Norris knew in his heart that he was waiting for that summons, and he turned and followed as Percival began a slow progress through the crowd toward that uncompromising stiff-lined bench of the kind that Mr. Early affected, where sat the girl like a cameo, beside a woman somewhat older than herself.

The younger woman lifted her eyes and caught from afar the greeting of the advancing men. That there should be no sudden illumination, no swift blush in her nod of recognition, gave Dick a slight feeling of irritation. He had regarded a little polite display of delight as in some way his right. But if she was undemonstrative, she had the virtues of her failing, for there was a certain serenity even in the broad curve with which her hair clung to her temples, and in the over-crowded room her smile was as refreshing as a draft from a cool spring. Both of these women were marked by a repose of manner which distinguished them from the eager crowd that was pushing toward the latest new apostle. It was the elder who put out a welcoming hand.

“Ah, Dick,” she said, “you are at home at last. How good it is to see you! When did you come?”

“Last night. Mother sent me over here to-day with the promise that I should see you—and Madeline.” His eyes traveled to the girl beyond. “And this, Mrs. Lenox, Miss Elton, is my good friend, Norris. You already know that we were lovely together in college, and in life we hope not to be divided. You’ll be good to him, won’t you?”

In Mrs. Lenox’s greeting there was that mixture of kindliness with shrewd instant analysis that becomes a habit with women of the world, and Norris stiffened with fresh realization that he was raw and unaccustomed to her suave atmosphere. He would have liked to be his best self before Percival’s friends, and he felt like an oyster. Even the gentle eyes of Miss Elton seemed to measure him. Fortunately they thought chiefly of Dick, and when did Dick’s facile tongue fail him?

“Of course this would be the first spot on which to reappear. No one but Mr. Early would dare to give a reception in July,” Mrs. Lenox exclaimed.

“And the absurd thing,” Dick retorted, “is that you all come—back into town, leaving birds and waters—at Mr. Early’s bidding.”

“Yes, my respect for my sex rises when I see them so eager to prostrate themselves before a simple seeker after truth with a turban and a ruby. A turban and a ruby do so illuminate the search for truth!”

“You are a scoffer,” laughed Dick. “Why are you here?”

“Foolish one, I came to scoff. I must see all there is to be seen. If there is an apple to be bitten, I must bite. I have floated in with the flood and out with the ebb of almost every fad from crystal-gazing to bridge. I always hope that one of them is going to be worth while.”

“But you can’t call the Swami’s philosophy ‘a fad’,” objected Norris.

“No, perhaps that wasn’t fair. Ram Juna is really very celestial in a ponderous kind of way, isn’t he? When he talked the simple old truths I liked him, but not in the esoteric explanations and profounder mysteries. I have chased Mystery for more years than I shall own, and, so far as I can see, whenever you open the door on her secret chamber, she shuts a door on the other side and is gone into a further holy of holies. I’ve come to disbelieve in those who tell me that they have caged her at last.”

“That’s what I say,” exclaimed Dick. “A man knows too much when he tells you that Mystery is five feet three, weighs a hundred and twenty-six pounds and eats no meat.”

“It’s too much like a mixture of legerdemain and theology.”

“I always liked juggling!” exclaimed Miss Elton. “And I like the ruby. See it now, gleaming over the ranks of war-paint and hats.”

“I believe the ruby interests you both more than the search for truth,” Dick laughed.

“And well it may!” Mrs. Lenox flashed back. “Once it belonged to a magnificent rajah ancestor, who hugged it to his soul, and held it too precious to be worn by his favorite wife. But now Swami Ram Juna has renounced the pomps and indulgences of courts and become, as I said, an humble seeker. He, too, loves the ruby—not from any vulgar love of display—but because to his soul it is a mystic symbol of Adhidaiva—the life-giving energy, refulgent as the sun behind dark clouds. Isn’t that a pointer for those of us who want diamonds and things? I believe I’ll ask Mr. Lenox for a symbol or two this very evening.”

“You seem well-informed.”

“Oh, Mr. Early posted me. It’s humiliating to think that perhaps he designed that as an easy way of getting the facts spread abroad and so preparing a way for the truth-seeker. And he also told me that they have very good copies of the Bagavad Gita at McClelland’s for a quarter, so you may keep up with the advance guard at small expense. I have to know things in order to keep my husband posted with entertaining gossip. Men always want to know every little thing and then lay the blame of gossip at the door of women.”

“I doubt if it is a difficult task for you to keep Mr. Lenox amused,” said Norris, smiling at her.

“Moreover,” added Percival, “I understand that when your frivolities cease to amuse, Mr. Lenox can divert himself by helping your father in the building of a new little railroad or something of that kind.”

“True, but building new railroads, beguiling though it be, proves more wearing to the nerves than does my conversation, so I must still practise the art of rattling. But I needn’t practise it on you,” she went on, glancing at Miss Elton under her eyelids. “Now, Dick, I am going to give you my very uncomfortable seat on this bench and let you and Madeline talk over old times, and new times which are to be still better. Perhaps Mr. Norris will go about with me and meet some of the people—beard the western prairie-dog in his den, so to speak.”

“Now that is really good of you, Mrs. Lenox. You know this is the first time Madeline and I have come together since we got through college and have been recognized as grown up. In fact, I’m not used to her in long dresses yet.”

He glanced at the smiling girl as Mrs. Lenox nodded and turned.

“How lovely Miss Elton is!” exclaimed Norris as they moved away together. “Of course I’ve seen her picture in Dick’s room, but it did not do her justice.”

“Lovely, indeed!” Mrs. Lenox answered heartily. “You have chosen the one word to be applied to Madeline Elton, both to her spirit and to her face—not thrilling, perhaps, but satisfying, which is better. She and Dick were inseparables through their childhood. It is rather a taken-for-granted affair, you know.”

“I guessed as much, though Dick never said anything.”

There was something so confidential and kindly in her manner that Norris forgot his awkwardness and felt moved to confidence in return.

“Dick was born to all good things,” he went on. “I sometimes wonder how that feels.” Then, seeing that she glanced at him inquiringly: “Dick always seems to me one who needs only to stand still, and Fortuna takes pains to hunt him up and offer him her choicest wares. Life looks to him more like a birthday party than like a battle-field. I say it not in envy, but with the awe of one who has had to scrabble and who sees endless scrabbling ahead. But I believe part of the charm that I feel about Dick is his manifest predestination to good luck.”

“One piece of his luck, if I am not mistaken, is in your coming here. There is no friend like a college friend for every-day wear,” she answered kindly.

“Well, I owe my position here to him,” Norris went on. “When he found that I had an uncle back in Connecticut who owned a share in the St. Etienne Star, he began to pull wires both at that end and this to get me a place on the editorial staff. I’m afraid that nothing but wires would have got it for me. So here I am making my first bow to society under the shadow of his cloak.”

“Of course you came here.”

“What, really, is Mr. Early?”

“Apostle, expounder of the universe, business man, prophet.”

Norris laughed.

“He’s our display window. The way in which he manages to keep a little lion always roaring on the bargain-table astonishes us all every day. And when he runs short of foreign lions he roars a bit himself. Privately, I think he’s more entertaining than the imported article. St. Etienne would be merely a western city without him.

“Now,” she went on, “I’m going to introduce you to some other girls. To me, as to Dick, Miss Elton may be the bright particular star, but she is not the only light.”

So Miss Elton and Percival were left alone in the crowd.

“Madeline,” said the young man, “does this getting through college make you feel as though you had suddenly had your cellars taken away and your attics left foundationless in space? The question is ‘what next?’ That’s what I used to ask you in the good old days when we played mumbly-peg together. What shall we play now?”

“I know what I shall play. There is home, with mother enraptured to have me at her beck and call again; and, of course, there are musical and social ‘does’. They are going to be such fun that I do not know if I shall have room to tuck in a little study. But I suppose you must have a harder game. Yes, you must.”

“And are you so contented with the dead level? I fancied you were going to be ambitious.”

She turned her head and looked out through the narrow mullioned window beside her as though to avoid his eyes, but she answered quietly:

“If I have any ambitions, they are not very imposing. Let’s talk about yours; or rather let’s not talk about yours here. There are too many people and too much Swami. We are out at the lake, at the old summer home. Run out and dine with us to-morrow. Father is almost as anxious to see you as I am. You know you are his chief consolation for the fact that I am not a boy.”

“Thanks. May I bring Norris? Not that I’m afraid of the dark by myself, but that I really want you to know him.”

“Bring him of course, Dick,” she said without enthusiasm.

“And now do you suppose I can get you a cup of coffee or a sherbet?”

“Hush, I don’t know whether anything so vivid is possible. I believe, out of deference to Ram Juna, the refreshments are light almost to Nirvana. You can’t insult a man who lives on a few grains of rice by making him watch the herd gorge on salads and ices, can you?”

“And do you really believe that great mountain of flesh was built out of little grains of rice?”

“Mrs. Appleton—you remember her?”

“She has pounced on me already. She remembers that I waltz like a dream.”

“Dick,” said Miss Elton scornfully, “don’t make the mistake of considering yourself a plum. Mrs. Appleton told me that the Swami feeds on dew and flaming nebulae.”

“Humph!” said Dick, “I think he’s a big bronze fraud.”

“Oh, come, men may be great without playing foot-ball,” she laughed.

“Well, he’s not for me. I can believe in almost any kind of a prophet except one that works miracles.”

“Who knows? The Swami may be the molder of your destiny,” said Madeline gaily, with youth’s lightness in referring to the vague future.

“He may; but I’d lay long odds against it.”

“I must be going.” Miss Elton rose. “The crowd is thinning, and Mrs. Lenox looks impressively in my direction. We are going out together on the train. Their new country place is near us, you know. And you, ungrateful one, I suspect, have not even spoken to Mr. Early yet. Go and ‘make your manners,’ like a good boy. I’ll expect you to-morrow afternoon. Mr. Norris, Dick has promised to bring you with him to dinner to-morrow. Till then, good-by.”

“Come, Ellery, we’ll face the music, now that the real attractions are gone,” said Dick.

Mr. Early extended two hands, ponderous in proportion to the rest of his body, in fatherly greeting.

“Ah, Percival, my dear fellow, so you are done with Yale and back again in St. Etienne? I welcome you out of the fetters of mere bookishness into the freedom of real life, where it is man’s business to serve, and not to absorb.”

Dick blushed guiltily as several surrounding ladies turned their lorgnettes on him, but Mr. Early went on, undisturbed and very audible:

“I do not introduce you to Swami Ram Juna, because introductions belong to the world of conventionalities, and he lives in that world where real human relations are the only things that count; but I put your hand in his, in token of the contact in which your spirit may meet his great soul.”

“Very good of you, I’m sure,” murmured Dick, as the Swami bent his head and gave him a penetrating look.

“You, too, then, are a seeker?” Ram Juna inquired in a low tone, but with his delicate and distinct enunciation.

“Ah—I hope so,” Dick answered hastily, and with an evident desire to push the topic no further. “And this, Mr. Early, is my old chum, Norris, who has come West to be on the editorial staff of the Star.”

“The Star? It is the symbol of illumination. Is then your Star devoted to the enlightenment of mankind?” asked Ram Juna, transferring his fixed gaze.

“In a sense—yes,” Norris faltered with a swift guilty recollection of certain head-lines in last night’s edition.

“He who writes must think. He who thinks goes below the surface. He who goes below the surface is moving toward the center,” said the Swami oracularly.

Mr. Early’s broad face expanded into a benevolent smile, and an oncoming instalment swept the young men away.

“Does Mr. Early learn his remarks by heart?” asked Norris.

“I don’t know. But let us be seekers. Let us seek dinner, and fresh air. Give me fresh air—anything but Nirvana!”

CHAPTER II

MOTHER AND SON

To have been captain of the foot-ball team, which some student of sociology has called the highest office in the free gift of the American people, might seem glory enough for one life; but Richard Percival was of such stuff that all past triumphs became dust and ashes. He was greedy of the future. Now that the doors of college were fairly closed, that career became to him but as a half-dreaming condition, before one wakes.

On this summer evening, however, it was easy to prolong the dream, since the hour was one for quiet of body and for wandering visions. The room was large and suffused with that restfulness which comes to homes where serene and thoughtful lives have been lived. There were long straight lines; there was a scarcity of knickknacks; there were pictures gathered because they were loved and not to fill a bare space on the wall; there were books and books and books, many of them with the worn covers of old friends. Here, clasped in the arms of another old friend of a chair, half-sat, half-lay his mother, and near her lounged Ellery Norris, the friend whose delicate mingling of love and admiration was as fragrant wine to Dick, who believed in himself because others had always believed in him. The dying twilight, laden with rose-spiciness and with the first shrill notes of the warm night, came in through high narrow windows. Everywhere was the sweet repose that comes after sweet activity, and the center of it was the fragile woman who lay back in her chair, caressing with light hand the head of the young man who sat upon the rug and leaned against her knee.

Norris was looking at Mrs. Percival with a kind of wondering admiration which the son saw with a touch of pity. Poor old Norris! It must have been tough to grow up without a home. As for this fragrant type of femininity, young Percival took it for granted—at least in the women that belong to a man; and the other women hardly count.

Everything made Dick feel very tender toward his past, very well satisfied with his present, very secure about his future. All would be good. That was the natural order of the universe. He had always found it easy to do things and to be a good deal of a personage.

He stared up silently at the space above the mantel where hung a portrait that gazed back at him, with features pale in the fading light. Singularly alike were the boyish face that looked up and the boyish face that looked down, though the painted Percival, a little idealistic about the eyes, wholly firm about the mouth, appeared the more determined of the two. Perhaps this came from the shoulder-straps, the blue uniform, and the military squareness of the shoulders.

“Yes, you are like him, Dick.” Mrs. Percival spoke to his thoughts. The boy looked up startled.

“Am I?” he asked. “I wish I might be. I wish I might be half so much of a man.”

“And I hope you will be more—no, not that. He was my all. I can hardly wish you to be more, but I hope you will do more. At least you don’t have a drag on you from the beginning, as he had. Has Dick told you the story, Ellery?” She turned with a gentle smile toward the other man. “You see I can’t help calling you Ellery. Dick’s letters have made you partly mine already. We are not strangers at all.”

Norris flushed and impulsively laid his firm square hand over the slender one that was stretched upon the chair arm nearest him.

“You don’t know how glad I am to be yours, and to have you for mine,” he said. “I never knew my mother.”

“You know then how Minnesota was a pioneer state, and how she sent a fifth of her population to the war, and Dad among the first? You know how the First Minnesota held the hill and turned the day at Gettysburg, though few of them lived to tell of their own bravery? It makes the lump come up in my throat even to remember it, just as it did when I first heard the news and knew that my boy-lover was there.”

There was silence a moment.

“Ah, Dick, you have a young body to match your heart,” Mrs. Percival went on, “but Dad, before he was twenty, carried a bullet in his side. He had to conquer pain before he could spend strength on other things.”

Dick rubbed his cheek with the mother’s trembling hand.

“Yes,” he said soberly, “it must have been harder to endure the sufferings that clung to him and killed him at last than it would have been to give everything in one swift sacrifice. Endurance,—that’s a word I don’t know, do I, mother?”

“No, dear, that’s the word you know least; but you’ll have to learn it.”

“Ellery, I guess that’s where you have the advantage of me.” Dick looked up with a smile.

“If I have, it’s been a dour lesson,” Norris answered with a wry face.

“Well, if Dad gave his life to his country by dying, I mean to give mine by living,” Dick went on. “There must be things that need doing.”

“More than there are men to do them,” said his mother softly. “You have his spirit and his genius. You have health, too. Don’t put a bullet in your young manhood.”

“What do you mean, mother?”

“There are a thousand wounds besides those from a gun. I’m counting on you to live his life as he would have liked to live it—to be his son, Dick.”

“You mustn’t expect the sun and the moon to stand still before me.”

“Oh, well, I dare say I’m as foolish as other mothers.” Mrs. Percival laughed as though she must do that or cry. “But you were certainly born to something, Dick. You’ve shown it ever since you organized your first militia company and whipped the five-year-olds in the next street.”

“And he’s kept right on bossing his particular gang ever since. Richard Dux,” smiled Ellery.

The boy grinned up at them, and his mind traveled to those later days when that leadership of his was so easily acknowledged as to be axiomatic. He saw in panorama the stormy joys of college life with the victories of the field. He beheld again the quieter hours when the young men saw visions together and felt themselves called to put shoulder to the car of righteousness, while they discussed with the sublime self-sufficiency of inexperience the politics and sociology of the world. The fellows all believed in him as one of those who are destined to be prime pushers at the wheel. Perhaps he would be among those conquerors who climb aboard and ride, forgetful of the plodding crowd which toils at the drudgery of progress but does not taste its glory. So many oblivions go to make one reputation.

Dick knew that power was in him. To others it showed in his unconscious self-confidence of carriage, in his eyes that glowed, in the electric something that compelled attraction.

But now college visions were fading into “the light of common day”. The boys had gone home to be men. Success began to look not like an aurora, but like a solid structure built of bricks that must be carried in hods. Hods are uninspiring objects.

Dick stared at the pile of unlit logs in the fireplace and felt the rhythmic strokes of his mother’s hand upon his well-thatched head as she watched him in sympathetic silence; but he saw the eyes of his fellow classmen and felt their good-by hand-clasps. Again the train thumped with monotonous rolling as it brought him ever westward and homeward. Farm after farm, village and town, city upon city, long level prairies that cried out of fertility, the rush and roar and chaos of Chicago, and then more cities and rivers and hills and lakes, and now the blessed restfulness of home and twilight. He had seen it all many times before—two thousand miles of space to be covered between New Haven and St. Etienne. On this last journey it had taken on a new significance to his eyes,—a significance which matched his dreams. It was instinct with meaning of which he was a part.

This was his country, huge, half-formed, needing men. Its bigness was not an accident of geography, but a pregnant fact in the consciousness of a people as wide as itself. Thousands of redmen once covered it, and it was then only a big place, not a great country. It must be a mighty race who would master those miles of inert earth.

God breathed His spirit into the earth and it became a living man. Man—His image—must breathe the spirit into the earth and make it a living civilization.

His father, with a Gettysburg bullet bruising his life, had nevertheless played the part, and done his share toward turning a frontier village into a noble city. With a thrill Dick saw himself building the structure higher on its firm foundations, making it great enough to match the wide fertile acres that lay about it, and the dazzling Minnesota sky that hung above. So he built his castle of achievement in the air, where his own glory lay mistily behind his service to his fellow men. Already the thing seemed done—vague and yet, somehow, concrete.

“Pooh, what is time? A mere figment of the imagination!” exclaimed Dick suddenly. “Was it day before yesterday that I came home? Forty-eight hours have put a gulf between the old and the new me. Condensed time,—just add hot water and it swells to six times its original bulk.”

His mother smiled indulgently at her son’s vagaries of speech, and he went on:

“Moreover, I’ve been away four years,—years of vast importance, it seems to me. I come back and everything is going on in the same old way. Every one is interested in the same old things. They don’t seem to think anything exciting has happened, except that the city has doubled in size and there has been another presidential election. They aren’t a bit stirred up over me. They aren’t even deeply moved because Ellery over there is wielding an inexperienced editorial pen. Everything is familiar, but I’ve forgotten it all. It’s hard to pick up the threads.”

“More than that, boys. The threads are not all done up in a neat bunch and handed to you as they are in New Haven. St. Etienne’s point of view is not always that of the gentleman and the scholar. Its great men are not of the campus, but those who control the destinies of others, sometimes by wealth, oftener by the genius of power. But, after all, this is the real world.”

Dick laughed again.

“And a world after my own heart, mother.”

“Yes, I think you will fit in,” she said with maternal complacency. “Both of you,” she added with sudden remembrance.

“The fitting-in on my part will have to be a process of swelling, I guess,” Norris said whimsically. “Small and narrow as is the berth I have at the Star office, I shall have to be bigger than I am before I fill it.”

“Oh, you’re all right. You’re fundamentally all right, and that means you’ll rise to every opportunity you get.” Dick’s voice took on some of the patronage of a leader for his follower. “I’d bank on Ellery Norris if the rest of the world turned sour.”

“Thanks,” said Ellery briefly, and their eyes met in that interchange of assurance which is the masculine American equivalent for embrace and eternal protestation. Mrs. Percival smiled to herself, amused yet pleased by the frank boyish affection.

“What kind of a time did you have at Mr. Early’s reception?” she asked abruptly.

“Oh, it was a circus with three rings. In the middle ring there was a performing hippopotamus of a Hindu. He was really a sunburst. Then in the farthest ring there were a thousand women with big hats, all talking at once. But in the nearest there were just Madeline and Mrs. Lenox, and that was a good show. By Jove! Madeline is prettier than ever, and hasn’t found it out yet. That’s the advantage of sending a girl off to a women’s college where there is no man to enlighten her.”

“Pretty! That’s not the word to describe Miss Elton. She’s too simple and dignified,” remonstrated Norris.

“Bowled over already, are you?” Dick jeered.

“Ellery is quite right,” Mrs. Percival interrupted. “Madeline has something Easter-lily-like about her.”

“You grow enthusiastic, mother.”

“I love her very dearly, Dick.”

“Norris and I are going out to see her to-morrow. We’ll take the motor, I guess.”

Mrs. Percival beamed down at him and gave his head an affectionate pat, and the son glanced up with a blandness that might easily have become a smirk. Yet his mother’s complacent satisfaction with the inevitable irritated him. Madeline Elton might be the most admirable combination of the virtues and the graces, but he wanted to find it out for himself.

Mrs. Percival rose with the air of one who has heard and said what she desired.

“Good night, dear boy,” she purred as Dick struggled to his long legs. “How good it is to have you to lean on and trust! These have been lonely years while you were away. Now I shall leave you two to your quiet smoke.”

Dick kissed her hand and then her lips, as though to show both reverence and love. Norris, too, stooped and kissed her hand, and the two watched her as she moved in her slow way up the stairs. As she disappeared, Norris turned and laid an arm over Dick’s shoulder.

“That’s the kind of thing, Percival, that you do not wholly appreciate unless you’ve gone without it. I grew up without any atmosphere to speak of, and I’ve been gasping for breath all my life. I wonder if I shall ever get a full allowance of air to live in.”

As they looked, friendly eye into friendly eye, Ellery seemed to review his own life in contrast with Dick’s. Dick had background; he had to begin everything for himself. He had earned most of his way through college; he had earned his standing among the men as he had earned his standing in scholarship, by dogged persistence instead of by the right of eminent domain to which Dick was born. He had never envied Percival’s readier brain, wider popularity, more profuse fortune; but something close to envy crept upon him now for this refinement of home, this delicate mother-love. This was a loss not to be made good by pluck or perseverance. Love was the gift of the gods.

CHAPTER III

AN OCCIDENTAL LUMINARY

Over next door, beyond the thick laurel hedge, on this same evening, Mr. Sebastian Early, now that the last of his guests had withdrawn the silken wonder of her reception skirts, was settling down to a quiet evening with his turbaned guest.

Now Mr. Sebastian Early is far too intricate a person to be dismissed, as Mrs. Lenox disposed of him, with a phrase and a laugh. In early life, it is true, he had seemed a commonplace and insignificant young man. His first appearance before the public was as the inventor of a hook-and-eye, but his hook-and-eye had such unusual merits that it seemed, according to the engaging pictures and verses in the street-cars, to simplify most of the sterner problems of every-day life. As its lineaments began to stare at passers-by from thousands of huge bill-boards over the length and breadth of the land, dimes turned to dollars in Mr. Early’s ever-widening pockets, and for the time he felt himself a man of distinction. Yet in these later and regenerate days, Mr. Early sometimes had a moment’s anguish as he remembered those miles of unesthetic bill-boards, which once marred the meadows and streams of his native land; for with a widening horizon, there had crept upon him a rising spirit of discontent.

Perhaps it was that divine discontent, which William Morris celebrates, that makes men yearn for higher things. Department stores still rolled out their multitudinous cards of hooks-and-eyes, but the person of Sebastian Early passed unnoticed in the crowd. He yearned for fame, not for his product, but for himself, and the same ability that led him to serve the wants of the public in hooks now drove him to study its social demands. Like many another unfortunate, he began to perceive that dollars alone were not enough of a key to unlock the magic door. In this over-fed land, people with money are growing too common. Therefore to gold one must add power and distinction, if one would keep one’s head above the herd. This must one do and not leave the other undone.

Sebastian determined to make himself interesting. The public has a fawning respect for fame. One or two abortive attempts convinced Mr. Early that his literary efforts would bring him not even the distinction of infamy. At last he hit upon an idea. He would be a patron of the Arts—not one of your little ordinary buyers, but a man whose purse was, so to speak, regilded by mind. He spent six months of hard work as a student of the situation and then he made his début. He selected a few gems of half-forgotten eighteenth century literature—gems that deserved to be given life-preservers on that stream of oblivion into which they were too surely being sucked. These he brought forth in tiny volumes, wide-edged and thick-papered, illuminated as to capitals and bound in ooze or in old brocade on which were scattered a few decorations, calculated, so unthinkable were they, to upset the reasoning power of the average reader, and thus prepare him for the literary matter which he should find within.

These books naturally “took.” They invited no man to read, but they were interesting to look at and therefore particularly adapted to those occasions when one must make a small gift to a friend. Scarce a center-table in the country but held at least one. The beauty of it was that the literary matter cost him nothing, and the books were their own advertising bill-boards; for wherever they went they lay in conspicuous places.

From books Mr. Early passed on to furniture; and he begot strange shapes, wherein forgotten Gothic forms were commingled with forms that never man saw before; and these also took. So the circle widened, until glass pottery and rugs were gathered into the potpourri of Mr. Early’s genius.

Finally he established his magazine, The Aspirant, for he began to feel the need of explaining things—chiefly himself—to his expanding circle. The Aspirant had covers of butcher’s paper; and the necessity for self-defense at last developed in Mr. Early that literary style which he had found it impossible to cultivate while he still had nothing to say. He grew a peculiar ability for self-glorification and for slugging the other man. Particularly caustic did his pen become in respect to those, whether painters, musicians, poets, novelists or reformers, who had endeared themselves to the great mass of the public. The Aspirant always called the public “the rabble,” and you can’t damn humanity more easily and cheaply than by calling it “the rabble.” Naturally every one hastened to buy Mr. Early’s furniture, his rugs and his pottery, and diligently to read The Aspirant, in order that he or she might escape the universal condemnation. Be outré and you’ll be right; be right and you’ll be outré; be outré anyway: was the simple creed.

To those penniless celebrities to whom purchase of Mr. Early’s commodities was over-expensive, there was another way out from under. They might visit Mr. Early’s hospitable home, and so contribute their mite to the halo of distinction that surrounded him. The great ones came to St. Etienne. They ate and drank and were exhibited to an admiring throng. They gave lectures, introduced from the platform by Mr. Sebastian Early; they went away and The Aspirant chronicled their satellite excellences. No such ex-guest need fear a blow in the face upon its pages. All these things came before the public—more and more before the public every year. They kept Mr. Early’s growing corps of assistants busy, inventing new furniture and new forms of invective.

It is needless to say that the hook-and-eye was never included in the illustrious list of Mr. Early’s productions. That gentleman frequently blessed himself in private that his first commodity had been put upon the market as the “Imperial,” and not as the “Bright and Early” as he had once half-resolved. Only a few knew who was responsible for the bill-boards.

Still even his new enterprises paid. He was a good business man, and he shared with “the rabble” an appetite for cold cash. Nor did the crafty Arts exhaust either his abilities or his desires; for though he had no wish to pose before the world in the over-done rôle of a millionaire, still he needed money and ever more and more money. To get it he kept his hand in many a business enterprise and his eye on many a speculation of which the gaping world did not dream. Even his right-hand editorial writer knew not of his left-handed dip into an electric light company here or a paving contract there, for his left hand had assistants too,—quiet, unobtrusive, even shy,—men who could lobby a bill “on the quiet,” or wreck an opposing company, even though they did not know the difference between Hafiz and chutney. And Mr. Early’s mind was of such a broad catholicity that it would be hard to tell which side of his career he most enjoyed, the variety-show or the still-hunt.

Thus it will be seen that this great man, who was a credit to the new art movement of our time, and of whom St. Etienne, a young western city, felt justly proud, was in his usual element when he introduced to the society, in which he was now a fixed star, a light from the Far East. And Swami Ram Juna seemed so sure that he himself was right and all the rest of the world was wrong, that Mr. Early felt him to be a kindred spirit.

The impression deepened as he found himself alone with the Hindu. He had rather dreaded the strange demands and customs that might meet him; but the man of bronze and the snowy turban proved himself to be the best of table companions, suave, courteous and sympathetic. He seemed even to take a kindly interest in such matters of a day as Mr. Early’s incursions into the realms of art and literature. Through dinner they chatted almost gaily, and afterward, while Mr. Early smoked, the Swami joined him in the slow sipping of a liqueur.

There is a frankness of those who have nothing to hide; there is a frankness which makes a mask for him who is, below the surface, all mystery. As Sebastian studied his companion, he told himself that this simple creature was after all a man, perhaps adapting himself to public demands as any clever fellow would; and, as this thought occurred to him, Mr. Early’s benevolence increased.

“You ought to write a book,” he said with the air of one projecting a novel thought. “With your gift for expression, and your—ah—insight into realities, you couldn’t fail to make a success of it.”

“It is my intention,” said the Hindu.

Mr. Early looked a little taken aback, but brightened again with a new suggestion.

“Why not do it here?” he asked. “Come, where could you find a more fitting place? You have your rooms in a wing of the house all to yourself. That gives you perfect solitude. I should be delighted to have you for my guest while you do your work; and when you finish, I know enough of the tricks of the trade to help you push it a bit.”

“Of a certainty truth is self-vigorous, and needs no tricks to keep it living.”

“Ah, yes,” the man of business answered cheerfully. “But one may boost it,—one may boost it, my dear fellow.”

The Swami bent his great head and appeared to meditate. When he looked up, his spiritual eyes were narrowed to a speculative slit, and he studied the face on the other side of the comfortable log fire.

“My friend, you are generous. You offer me a home, and I am fain to accept it, if I may put the offer in another form. For the present I must return to India. Too long already have I been away from the atmosphere which is to me life. I must see some of the brothers of my soul. I must saturate myself with repose and with the underlying—with Karma. Also, in this too-vigorous country, that is unattainable. But here, in this place, one who is filled with the message might give it forth to his brothers—or perhaps to the sisters, who appear the more anxious for it. Here the very energy of the air says ‘give’ rather than ‘grow’. If I might a year—six months hence—accept your hospitality?” He looked tentatively at Mr. Early.

“My home is yours. Do what you like with it,” said Mr. Early benignly. He was thinking how well a picturesque cut of the Hindu’s head would look on the covers of The Aspirant, combined with a judicious puff within.

The Swami smiled serenely.

“I observe,” he went on in his delicate voice, “that the wing on the ground floor, in which you have given me room, has two apartments, divided by a little passage, and that the little passage gives not upon the public highway, but upon a garden, quiet and lovely, that faces the sun and is shut in by brick walls and hedges. The farther one of these rooms is bare and but slightly furnished, though my bedroom is sumptuous like that of a maha-rajah. Still the bare small room pleases me best. If I might have this room when I come again! If I might keep the bare room sacred to my meditations, all unentered save by myself! It means to me much that no alien mind, no soul of a common servant, should mar the serenity of the atmosphere in that spot where I sit alone with myself. I would have it dedicated to the greater Me. It would be the cap-sheaf—do you not so say in this land of great harvests?—thus to give shelter not only to my body, but to my soul, in this bare and quiet little room.”

“Why, certainly, certainly!” Mr. Early could not help thinking that a guest who spent most of his time alone in an empty room would prove no great tax upon his entertainer.

“I thank you,” said Ram Juna, rising and making a salaam of curious dignity and courtesy. “You bid me lecture. You bid me write and instruct in the sacred truths. That will I do when I come again; and my consolation shall be the unblemished hours when I sit alone in the little room which faces the sun. You comprehend me? You understand?”

And Mr. Early, who never, if he could help it, spent a half-hour in either solitude or idleness, answered again:

“Why, certainly, certainly.”

“In some months, then, I may return, noble friend. And now I will bid you farewell until the dawn.”

The Swami, with marvelous lightness of foot in spite of his huge body, made off for his own domain. If Mr. Early, who now sat and yawned alone by the dying fire, could have peeped in on the excellent Ram Juna, he would have been much gratified by the evident satisfaction with which the Oriental surveyed the quarters which were one day to be his. The Swami strode at once across the bedroom, across the little passage that opened into the garden, into the unused room beyond. Here with a swift thrust he turned on the electric light, then moved from window to window, opened them, examined the heavy wooden shutters which he closed and unclosed, craning his bull-neck through the opened sashes. Around and under each piece of furniture he peered, nodding and smiling his approbation of everything. As he came out, he paused for some moments to examine the lock on the door.

“Quite inadequate, quite inadequate,” he muttered with a frown. “We must do better than that.”

He stood and thought a moment, then put out the light, stepped to the garden door and disappeared into the night.

With so light a tread did he come back that Mr. Early, should he have been listening, could have heard no warning footstep to tell him that his guest was returning.

Back in his own bedroom, Ram Juna peeped into the luxurious bath-room with placid delight.

“So much water, so easily hot,” he said. “It is admirable. All is admirable.” He sank in a heap, cross-legged, in the middle of the floor, with large hands folded over his stomach, and large eyes narrowed, while a kindly smile spread over his face, and his head nodded at rhythmic intervals, for all the world like a benevolent Buddha. The ruby glowed and sparkled like a living thing in the light and movement; and thus he sat for some hours.

CHAPTER IV

AT MADELINE’S

“Now,” said Richard Percival, as he and Norris stowed themselves away in his automobile, “we shall leave the city, in which are contained how many loves and struggles and silk umbrellas at reasonable prices, and go to the lake where there is no civilization to bother and distract. The lake is ‘The Lake’ par excellence to St. Etienne. It was created by Providence for summer homes. Therefore it was placed only ten miles from the Falls. Providence was a good business woman. Generations of savages lived and died—chiefly died—here. They came where the Father of Waters roared and tumbled and they made their prayers to the Great Spirit, but the sight never suggested to them a great city. Then came the Anglo-Saxon, whatever he is, and harnessed the power of the river, and built ugly gray mills, dusty with flour, and turned his log huts into houses of brick and stone, and erected saloons and department stores. And when he had worked like Dædalus—and you’ve probably forgotten who Dædalus was, now that you have been a few weeks out of college—when he had worked like Dædalus, I say, and got the hardest of it done, he began to look at something besides the Falls and to pine for means of dalliance. Behold then at his hand, Lake Imnijaska! And now Madeline Elton is the best thing on its shore. Gee up, old motor!”

They sped along and Dick took up the tale. He was used to talking while Norris listened and appreciated.

“Evidently you don’t know who Dædalus was or you would have answered back. What kind of an omniscient editor are you going to make, think you? Never mind, Dædalus is dead; and, anyway, Edison has beaten him by six holes.

“The lake, as I was saying, twists and turns so that it gets in more shore to the square inch than any other known sheet of water. Therefore the real-estate dealer loves it. And if you elevate your longshore nose and sniff at our lake because no salt codfish dry upon smelly wharves and no sea anemones or crabs appear and disappear with the tides, then will the entire population of St. Etienne rise and howl anathemas at you. They will run you out of town on the Chicago Express, and as you fly for your life they will shriek after you, ‘Well, anyway, we feed the world with flour!’ Yes, sir, that is the way we Westerners argue.”

Dick halted at the top of the hill up which the faithful motor had coughed, and the two looked down on the shimmering blue that stretched below them with arms of broken opals sprawling for miles, now here, now there. Long tortuous passages opened out anew into ever more bays, as though the water were greedy to explore. Around it rolled the woodland in billows of intense green with sandy beaches in the troughs and straight cliffs at the crests. The green islands were vivid in color. So was the sky above, like the flash in a sapphire. A half-dozen sails fluttered gull-like, and as many launches darted along, suggesting living water creatures.

“By Jove!” Ellery exclaimed, moving uneasily. “When you sniff this air it makes you want to stand on tiptoe on a hilltop and shout. And when you look at these colors, they are too brilliant to be true.”

“Even you, you old conservative slow-poking duffer!” cried Dick. “This is the land to wake you up. It calls ‘harder—harder!’ every-day.”

“It’s a different kind of beauty from what I’m used to.” Ellery sobered down again. “I’ve been trying to analyze it ever since I came West. It wouldn’t appeal to the tired or the world-weary. Its charm is for the vigorous and the confident and the hopeful—for the young.”

“For us, my boy,” Dick said.

“At Madeline’s,” as Dick called it, with that obliviousness of the older generation shown by the younger, Norris felt as they entered, as he had felt at Mrs. Percival’s, that he was in a candid, human, refined home, with a full appreciation of the finer sides of life. They passed through the drawing-room and by long glass doors to the broad piazza, with every invitation to laziness, easy chairs, cushions, magazines, all made fragrant by a huge jar of roses and another of sweet peas. And there was not too much. The veranda in turn gave upon a wide expanse of green that stretched steeply down to that cool wet line where the lapping waters met the lawn. The trees whispered softly around. Every prospect was pleasing, and only man was vile; for there was another man, sitting in the most comfortable of chairs and engaging Madeline all to himself, as he contentedly sipped the cup of tea that he had taken from her hand. This other man, whose name was Davison, was making himself agreeable after the fashion of his kind, a fashion quite familiar to every girl who has been so unfortunate as to get a reputation, however little deserved, for superior brains.

“Afternoon,” he said, “I didn’t suppose any other fellows except myself were brave enough, to call on Miss Elton. I hear she’s so awfully clever, you know. Taken degrees and all that sort of thing. Give you my word it comes out in everything around her. Why, this very napkin she gave me has a Greek border. Everything has to be classic now.”

“Not everything, Mr. Davison,” said Madeline indulgently. “You know I am delighted to have you here.” She turned abruptly to the new-comers as though she had already had a surfeit of this subject. It is a pleasant thing to have had a good education, but one does not care to spend one’s time thinking about it, any more than about how much money there is in one’s pocket.

“You had a fine ride out?” Madeline asked.

“Great!” answered Dick. “To be young, on a summer day, seated in a good motor with a thoroughly tamed and domesticated gasoline engine, and to be coming to see you—what more could we ask of the gods?”

“You see Percival feels that he must lard the gods into his intercourse with you, Miss Elton,” Mr. Davison interjected.

“That’s because the gods have become nice homey things,” retorted Dick. “Even in the West we couldn’t keep house without Dionysius assisted by Hebe to superintend our afternoon teas, and Hercules as a patron of baseball.”

Madeline laughed and cast a grateful look in his direction.

“You see how pleasant it is to feel familiar with the gods so that you can use them freely,” she said.

“So you don’t think it’s necessary, in order to be clever, to despise everything that’s done nowadays, because the Greeks used up all the ideas first?” asked Davison.

“Not at all. Nature conducts a vast renovating and cleaning establishment, and whenever any old ideas look the least bit frayed or soiled around the edges, pop, in they go, and come out French dry-cleaned and as fresh as ever. They’re sent home in a spick-span box and you couldn’t tell ’em from new.”

“If we don’t get anything new I hope that we, at least, get rid of some of the old things—fears and superstitions,” said Madeline. “Things that are holy rites in one age are so apt to be holy frights in the next.”

“Say, did you ever go down the streets of Boston and notice the number of signs of palmists and astrologers and vacuum cures?” exclaimed Davison. “But perhaps it ain’t fair to take Boston for a standard.”

Ellery, a true New Englander, stared at him in astonishment, as one who heard sacred things lightly spoken of.

“Most of us can see how funny we are,” Davison pursued.

“Can we?” murmured Dick.

“But Boston,” he went on calmly, “has lost her sense of humor. She peers down at everything she does and says, ‘This is very serious.’ That’s why she takes astrologers in earnest. They’re in Boston. Anyway, I think you were mighty sensible to come back to us, Miss Elton, rather than to stay in the unmarried state, alias Massachusetts. A girl really has a much better chance in the West.”

“Yes, that’s where Miss Elton showed a long head,” said Dick with evident glee.

“But really now, joking apart,” Davison went on, having made his opening, “don’t you think it’s unsettling to a girl to do too much studying?”

“I hope you are not deeply agitated over the eradication of womanliness,” Madeline remonstrated. “Really, Mr. Davison, it isn’t an easy thing to stop being a woman—when you happen to be born one.”

“But there are plenty of unwomanly women,” he objected.

“That’s true,” she answered, “but I believe womanliness is killed—when it is killed—not through the brain, but through the heart. It’s not knowledge, but hard-heartedness that makes the unwomanly woman.”

She glanced up and met Norris’ eyes. It was not easy for him to join in the chatter of the others, but he was thinking how she illuminated her own words. Manifestly she was not lacking in mind, and quite as evidently her brain was only the antechamber of her nature. She gave him the impression of “the heart at leisure from itself”. There was the unconsciousness of sheltered girlhood, but already, in bud, the suggestion of that big type of woman who, as years mellow her, touches with sympathy every life with which she comes in contact. What she now was, promised more in the future, as though Fate said, “I’m not through with her yet. I’ve plenty in reserve to go to her making.”

“Intelligence,” said Dick pompously, “is the tree of life in man, and the flower in woman—and one does not presume to criticize flowers.”

Mr. Davison changed his method of attack.

“Oh, of course I’m up against it,” he said, “with you three fresh from the academic halls. But I can tell you you’ll feel pretty lonely out here. The street-car conductors don’t talk Sanskrit in the West. They talk Swede.”

“Oh, this,—this is home!” cried Madeline, springing up as if to shake off the conversation. “You don’t know how I love it! It’s fresh and vigorous and its face is forward.” She flung out her arms and smiled radiantly down on the three young men, as though she were an embodiment of the ozone of the Northwest.

“Sing to us, please, Madeline,” said Dick.

“Very well, I will,” she said. “I’ll sing you a song I made myself yesterday, when I was happy because I was at home again. Perhaps it will tell you how I feel, for it’s a song of Minnesota.” She turned and nodded to Mr. Davison, and then slipped through the doors to the room where the piano stood.

The long shadows of afternoon lay across the lawn, and the grass, more green than ever in the level light, clasped the dazzling blue of the quiet waters. The three men stretched themselves in their easy chairs, as a stroked kitten stretches itself, with a lounging abandon which is forbidden to their sisters, as Madeline’s voice rose fresh and true and touched with the joy of youth.

“Ho, west wind off the prairie;
Ho, north wind off the pine;
Ho, myriad azure lakes, hill-clasped,
Like cups of living wine;
Ho, mighty river rolling;
Ho, fallow, field and fen;
By a thousand voices nature calls,
To fire the hearts of men.
”Ho, fragrance of the wheat-fields;
Ho, garnered hoards of flax;
Ho, whirling millwheel, ’neath the falls;
Ho, woodman’s ringing ax.
Man blends his voice with nature’s,
And the great chorus swells.
He adds the notes of home and love
To the tale the forest tells.
“Oh, young blood of the nation;
Oh, hope in a world of need;
The traditions of the fathers
Still be our vital seed.
Thy newer daughters of the West,
Columbia, mother mine,
Still hold to the simple virtues
Of field and stream and pine.”

The song stopped abruptly, and Dick sprang to his feet.

“Good, Madeline!” he exclaimed. “You make me feel how great it is to be part of it.”

“Do I?” she said. “I thought of you when I wrote it. Oh, here come father and mother back from their drive.”

Mr. Davison rose hastily.

“I’d no idea it was so late,” he said. “I must be going. Miss Elton, I didn’t mean a word of all that about your being so clever. You’re all right.”

“Thanks for the tribute,” Madeline smiled as he disappeared down the drive. “Dick, I wish you’d always be on hand when he comes. He makes my brain feel like a woolly dog.”

“Rummy chap,” said Norris.

The older people came in to greet the boy they had known all his life, to ask the innumerable usual questions, to say the inevitable things through dinner.

Afterwards, when the last fragments of sunset burned through and across the water, they gathered on the piazza. It was that dreamy hour when women find it easy to be silent and men to talk. Madeline and her mother sat close, with hands restfully clasped in their joy at being together. Mr. Elton eyed the two young men from his vantage of years of shrewd wisdom. Both the boys were clean-shaven, after the manner of the day, a fashion that seems to become clean manliness, vigorous and self-controlled. Both were good to look at; but here the resemblance ended, for Dick’s long slender face and body lithe with its athletic training, was alive and restless, as though he found it difficult to keep back his passion for activity; Ellery, big but loosely joined, had the dogged look of one that held some of his energy in reserve. A good pair, Mr. Elton concluded, and felt a sudden spasm of longing for a son—not that he would have exchanged Madeline for any trousered biped that walked, but it would be a great thing to own one such well of young masculine vigor as these.

“It’s going to be great fun for us old fellows to sit back and watch you young ones,” the elder man ejaculated. “There are several good-sized jobs waiting for you.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Dick. “When there’s nothing to do, nobody’ll do it.”

“And it will be a tame sort of a world, eh? Well, thank the Lord, it’s none of our responsibility any longer. You’ve got to tackle it. The new phases of things are too much for me, with a brain solidified by years.”

“You might at least help us by stating the problem,” said Norris.

“You see, it’s like this. Until a few years ago every census map of the United States was seamed by a long line marked ‘frontier.’ That line is gone. That’s the situation in a nutshell. Our work, the subjugation of the land, is about done, and the question is now up to you; what are you going to do with it? You know the old story of the man who said he had a horse who could run a mile in two-forty. And the other fellow asked, ‘What are you going to do when you get there?’ We’ve done the running and our children are there. Now what? You must develop a whole set of new talents—not trotting talents, but staying talents.”

“I suppose,” said Norris slowly, for Dick was silent, “circumstances bring out abilities. That’s the law that operated in the case of the older generation, and we’ll have to trust to it in ours.”

“That’s true. But I sometimes wonder if, after all, we are helping you to the best preparation. We send you back to get the old education. The tendency of old communities is to rehash the traditions until they become authority. New communities have to face problems for themselves and solve them by new ways. The first kind of training makes scholars. The second brings out genius. The old makes men think over the thoughts of others. Heaven knows we need men who will think for themselves!”

“Well, ‘old and young are fellows’,” said Dick. “To-day grows out of yesterday.”

“Yes, if it grows. The growing is the point. It mustn’t molder on yesterday. You must have enough books to get your thinkers going, but not more. You must not feast on libraries until you get intellectual gout and have to tickle your palate with dainties. A good deal of stuff that’s written nowadays seems to me like literary cocktails,—something to stir a jaded appetite. That’s my friend Early’s specialty—to serve literary cocktails. But the appetite you bolster up isn’t the equivalent of a good healthy hunger after a day out-of-doors.”

“When nature wants a genius, I suppose she has to use fresh seed,” said Dick.

“And genius is creative,” Mr. Elton went on. “So far, the genius this country has developed is that which takes the raw material of forest and river and creates civilization. And let me tell you that’s a very different job from heaping up population.”

Silence fell on the little group and they became suddenly aware of lapping waters and the sleepy twitter of birds, and even of a long slender thread of pale light that struck across the lake from a low-lying star. Madeline gave a little sigh and pressed her mother’s hand.

Dick flushed and hesitated in the darkness, with youth’s confidence in its own great purposes and youth’s craving for sympathy in its ambitions. Mr. Elton’s combination of kindness and shrewdness seemed to draw him out.

“It sounds impertinent and conceited for a young fellow like me to talk about what he means to do.”

“Fire away. I knew your father, Dick.”

“Then you’ll know what I mean when I say that it has always been my ambition to live up to his traditions—his ideal of a man’s public duties.”

Mr. Elton nodded and Dick went on, while Ellery eyed him with some of the old college respect, and Madeline leaned eagerly forward.

“I don’t mean any splurge, you understand, but the same quiet service he gave. Father left his affairs in such good order that there isn’t any real necessity for me to try to add to my income. Of course, it isn’t a great fortune, but it’s more than enough; and my ambitions don’t lie that way. There’s a certain amount of business in taking care of it as it stands. Mother is glad to turn the burden of it over to me. She’s done nobly—dear little woman—but—”

“I understand. It’s a man’s business.”

“Yes,” said Dick, with the simple masculine superiority of four and twenty. “That’s enough of a background for life, you see; but I long since made up my mind that public affairs—affairs that concern the whole community—are to be my real interest.”

“So you’re going into politics, Dick?” said the older man slowly.

“Well, not to scramble for office,” Percival answered with a flush. “We fellows have been well-enough taught, haven’t we, Ellery? to know that it is rather an ugly mess—I mean municipal affairs in this country. The local situation, here in St. Etienne, I have yet to study; and I don’t mean to lose any time in beginning.”

Mr. Elton made no reply for a moment, and when he spoke there was an unpleasant cynicism in his voice that galled Dick’s pride.

“The young reformer! Well, I suppose a decent man with a little ability could do something here, if he knew what he was going to do. It’s a good thing to get on your sea-legs before you try to command a ship.”

“Father!” Madeline cried out, unable to contain herself. “Don’t you be a horrid wet blanket!”

The three looked at her to see her face aglow with the lovely feminine belief in masculinity that also belongs to the early twenties.

“That’s all right,” said the elder Elton unemotionally. “I wasn’t wet-blanketing—I know things are needed. There’s plenty of corruption wanting to be buried, and most of us are content to hold our noses and let it lie. Or perhaps we give an exclamation of disgust when it is served up in the newspapers. Reform if you must, but don’t reform all day and Sundays too; and build your cellars before you begin your attics.”

Then he went on a shade more heartily: “It’s a mighty good thing for some of you young fellows to be going into politics; perhaps that’s the chief work for the next generation. And Norris—what of you?”

Ellery started. It had been a silent evening for him, but his silence had glowed with interest, not so much in the conversation as in his own thoughts. Two things had forced themselves home,—the first when he looked down on that expanse of vivid water, vivid sky, vivid green. Here a man, even a young man, might waken to all his faculties and make something of life. He need not plod dully through years, to reach success only when he is old and tired. The landscape poured like wine into Ellery Norris’ veins.

And now here was the other side. He had watched with fascination the restfulness of Miss Elton’s hands, the one that held her mother’s, the one that lay quietly in her lap. He watched her steady eyes that kept upon her father and Dick as they talked. He saw her face glow with sympathy and interest and yet remain calm, as if secure in the goodness of the world; and he told himself that he was glad this wonderful thing belonged to Dick. Dick’s restlessness would be held in leash, as it were, by this steadfastness.

Once she half turned as though she felt his scrutiny, and queer pains darted through his body when her eyes met his.

Now when Mr. Elton attacked him, he came back from his far-away excursion with a sense of surprise that there was a present, but he smiled cheerfully.

“Oh, I’m not a very important person. I’m just beginning to learn the trade of a newspaper man, and I’m afraid I shan’t be able to think about much but city news and bread and butter for the next few years.”

“No telling what may happen, with his Honor, the mayor here, backed up by the power of the press. We’ll make St. Etienne a model city in the sight of gods and men, eh, boys?” said Mr. Elton good-humoredly, but rising as if to cut short the conversation.

“Can’t we take a walk before Ellery and I go back to town?” asked Dick.

“Go, you kid things. I haven’t seen the evening paper yet, and that’s more to my old brain than moonlight strolls.” Mr. Elton dismissed them.

The three young people set out upon a path that twisted by the lake shore, bordered on its inner side by trees that had become in the darkness mere shapeless masses out of which an occasional mysterious thread of light brought into sight some uncanny shape. The purple of the evening zenith had sunk into deeper and deeper blue, pricked here and there with stars. Bats were wheeling in mysterious circles among the tree-tops, and the air was full of sounds that seem to come only at twilight.

“Isn’t it strange that though every one of those trees is an old friend, I should be frightened at the very idea of being alone among them at night? And yet there’s nothing in the dark that isn’t in the day,” said Madeline.

“Oh, yes, there is,” Dick rejoined. “There’s more being afraid in the dark.”

She laughed and they went on in silence.

“Who’s been building a new house, just on the very spot I always meant to own some day—right here next to your father?” Dick demanded, stopping abruptly.

“Oh, you haven’t seen that, have you?” said Madeline. “Let’s sit down on this log and look at the stars. That’s Mr. Lenox’s new house; and I’m so sorry for them!”

“Why grieve for the prosperous? Reserve your tears for the suffering.”

“Why, you know, in town, they live with Mr. Windsor, who is Mrs. Lenox’s father, and he’s a multimillionaire; and it’s a great establishment; and the world is necessarily very much with them. So when Mr. Lenox proposed that they should build a country house of their own and spend their summers here, I think he wanted to get out to some primitive simplicity, where the children could go barefoot if they wanted to. But as soon as it was suggested, Mr. Windsor presented his daughter with a big tract, and insisted on building this great palace, and they have to keep so many servants that Mr. Lenox says it is a regular Swedish boarding-house. And there are so many guest-rooms that it would be a shame not to have them occupied; and extra people run out in their motors every day; and the children have to be kept immaculate all the time. So they’ve brought the world out with them. Mr. Lenox has to dress for dinner, instead of putting on old slippers and going out to weed the strawberry-bed, which is what he would like to do when he gets out on the evening train.”

“Poor things, in bondage to their house!” said Norris, and they all looked solemnly at the multitude of lights shining through the trees.

“There are ever so many disadvantages about being among the few very rich people in a western town, where most of your friends aren’t opulent,” Madeline went on. “When Mrs. Lenox makes a call, she has to wait while the woman changes her dress. And nobody says to her, ‘Oh, do stay to lunch,’ when they’ve nothing but oysters or beefsteak, but they wait till they get in an extra chef and then send her a formal invitation. I believe ours is one of the half-dozen houses where people don’t pretend to be something quite different from what they are when Mrs. Lenox appears. And yet she’s the most simple-minded and genuine person, and would rather have beefsteak and friendship than paté de fois gras and good gowns any day.”

“Poor things!” said Dick again.

“I think they are out on the terrace now. Would you like to go over and see them?” Madeline asked.

“No, thank you,” said Dick politely. “We won’t make their life any more complicated. Besides, I prefer the society of you and the stars to that of the miserable too-rich. And they are not alone.”

“Of course not. They never are. But Mrs. Lenox said yesterday that late this fall, when every one else has gone into winter quarters, she is going to ask you and me and perhaps one or two others to visit her; and we’ll have a serene and lovely time.”

“Do you think that there is any hope that they will have lost part of their money by that time?” asked Dick.

“Father says Mr. Windsor has forgotten how to lose money, and of course Mr. Windsor and Mr. Lenox are all one.”

“I must see to it that I don’t marry a millionaire’s daughter,” said Dick.

CHAPTER V

SALAD DAYS

The most desirable thing in life is to have the sense of doing your duty without the trouble of doing it. Therefore days of preparation are always delicious days. There is the mingling of repose with all the joys of activity. To be planning to do things has in it more of triumph than the actual doing. It carries the irradiating light of hope and purpose, without the petty pin-prick of detail which comes when reality parodies ideals.

Dick’s first summer at home was a period of delight. He absorbed ideas and so felt that he was doing something in this city of his birth which now, in his manhood, came back to him as something new and strange. The weeks drifted by and he seemed to drift with them, though both mind and body were alert. All the things he learned and all the things he meant to do were tripled and quadrupled in interest when he passed them on to his two counselors-in-chief, Norris, solid and appreciative, Madeline, even more believing and more sympathizing, but glorified by that charm of sex which gilds even trifling contact of man and maid, making her friendship not only gilt but gold.

So he spent his days in prowling about and meeting all sorts and conditions of men, while Ellery slaved in a dirty and noisy office; but when Saturday came and the Star went to press at three, Norris, with the blissful knowledge that there was no Sunday edition, would meet Percival, stocked with a week’s accumulation of experiences. In the hearts of both would be deep rejoicing as, at week-end after week-end, they stowed themselves in Dick’s motor and betook themselves lakeward, nominally to go to the Country Club and play golf, but with the subconsciousness for both that the lake meant Madeline.

There were, to be sure, other people, girls agreeable, pretty and edifying, men of their own type and age, older men who did less sport and more business, but all of these were neither more nor less than a many-colored background to the little three-cornered intimacy which, as Dick said, “was the real thing.”

It came to be understood that the three should spend their Sunday afternoons together, not on the cool piazza, where intrusion in its myriad forms might come upon them, but off somewhere, either on the bosom of the waters or on the bosom of the good green earth, who whispers her secret of eternal vitality to every one that lays an ear close to her heart.

The season was like the placid hour before the world wakes to its daily comedy and tragedy; and yet, with all its superficial serenity, this summer carried certain undercurrents of emotion that hardly rose to the dignity of discontent, but which, nevertheless, troubled the still waters of the soul. At first Madeline half resented the continual presence of Norris at these sacred conclaves. He seemed so much an outsider. Dick she had known all her life and she could talk to him with perfect freedom, but his friend often sat silent during their chatter, as though he were an onlooker before whom spontaneity was impossible. Yet as Sunday after Sunday the two young men strode up together, she grew to accept Ellery. First he became inoffensive; then she became aware that his eyes spoke when his lips were dumb; and finally, when words did come, they were the words of a friend who understood moods and tenses. In some ways it was a comfort to have this buffer between her and Dick. It helped to prolong the period of uncertain certainty.

Dick never spoke of love, but the way was pointed not only by the easy restfulness of their comradeship, but in the very atmosphere that surrounded them. She read it half-consciously in the looks of father and mother as they met and accepted Dick’s intimacy in the house, in the warmth of Mrs. Percival’s motherly affection when Madeline ran in for one of her frequent calls. Life was full of it, like the gentle half-warmth that comes before the sun has quite peeped over the horizon on a summer morning; and it was well that this dawn to their day should be a long one. Madeline had been away the greater part of four years, and she was now in no hurry to cut short her reunion with the old home life. Dick, too, had his beginnings to make, man-fashion, and they ought to be made before he took on himself the full life of a man. So she was happily content to drift, conscious in a vague dreamy way that the drift was in the right direction, feeling the situation without analyzing it. It was a condition of affairs like Madeline herself, gently affectionate, but not passionate or deeply emotional. She was not of the type of women who rise up and control destiny.

Norris, for all his passive exterior, had undercurrents that were fervid and powerful, and this first summer in the West, unruffled on its surface, stirred them and sent his life whirling along their irresistible streams. He never lost the sense that he was an outsider, admitted on sufferance to see the happiness of others and allowed to pick up their crumbs. If hard work, oblivion and lovelessness were to be his lot, the hardest of these was lovelessness. Much as he loved Dick he continually resented that young man’s careless acceptance of the good things of life, and most of all did his irritation grow at Percival’s way of taking Madeline for granted, enjoying her beauty, her sympathy, the grace that she threw over everything, and yet, thought Ellery, never half appreciating them. He himself bowed before them with an adoration that was framed in anguish because these things were, and were not for him. More and more cruel grew the knowledge that the currents of his life were gall and wormwood, flowing through wastes of bitterness.

Yet, along with the new grief came a new awakening, at first dimly felt by Madeline alone, then read with greater and greater clearness.

But of all undercurrents, Dick, prime mover and chief talker, remained unconscious, absorbed in his own dawning career, delighting in his two friends chiefly as hearers and sympathizers with his multitudinous ideas.

So it happened that one August afternoon, when it was late enough for the sun to have lost its fury, a not too strenuous breeze drove their tiny yacht through a channel which stretched enticingly between a wooded island and the jutting mainland.

“Let’s land there,” Madeline exclaimed suddenly. “It looks like a jolly place.”

She pointed toward a stretch of beach caught between the arms of trees that came to the very water’s edge, and enshrined in a great wild grape-vine that had climbed from branch to branch until it made a tangled canopy.

Dick turned sharply inward and ran their prow into the twittering sand.

“Thou speakest and it is thy servant’s place to obey,” he said.

“How does it feel to keep slaves? I’ve often wondered,” Ellery said as he jumped ashore and Dick began tossing him rugs and cushions.

“Very comfy, thank you, and not at all un-Christian,” she answered saucily. “Dick, don’t throw the supper basket, under penalty of liquidating the sandwiches. I think there’s a freezer of ice-cream under the deck, if you’ll pull it out. Now, are you ready for me?”

She stepped lightly forward under Dick’s guidance, took Ellery’s outstretched hands and sprang to the shore, where a kind of throne was built for her against a prostrate log,—all this help not because it was necessary, but as the appropriate pomp of royalty.

“I suspect,” said Dick, looking about him with great satisfaction, “that this was a favorite picnic place for Gitche Manito and Hiawatha, in the morning of days.”

“That shows how nature can forget,” Madeline retorted. “Surely you know the real story, Dick.”

“I don’t,” said Ellery. “Tell it to me.”

She snuggled comfortably down into her rugs.

“In early days, which is the western equivalent for ‘once upon a time,’ a furious storm raged down the lake and tore the water into long ribbons of purple and green. A beautiful girl stood, perhaps on this very spot, with a savage who had rescued her from a sinking canoe and brought her here, dripping but safe. Over there on the mainland her father came running out of the woods in an agony of fear. He saw her here, saw her signals, but the shriek of the storm and the roar of the waters drowned out the words that she frantically screamed toward him. He saw her point to the Indian, who was always feared, always counted treacherous, and his dread of the hurricane changed to terror of the savage. He raised his rifle and the girl’s deliverer dropped dead at her feet.”

“Then fifty years went by, and this became a bower for the eating of sandwiches,” added Dick.

Norris was lying on his back and staring through the tangle of grape and maple leaves at the flecks of blue beyond.

“That’s a noble story,” he said. “I didn’t suppose this new land had any legends. It all gives me the impression of being just old enough to be big.”

“Isn’t that the conceit of the Anglo-Saxon? He calls this a new land because he’s lived here only about a half-century. Things did happen before you were born, my dear boy,” said Dick.

“Indeed! What things?” Norris asked placidly.

“Suppose you enlarge your mind by looking up the stories of the old coureurs du bois who used to stumble through these woods when they were the border-land between Chippewa and Sioux.” Dick threw a pebble at Norris’ face. “Suppose you go up to that inky stream in the north, which twists mysteriously through the forests, black with the bodies of dead men rotting in its mire. I don’t wonder they thought the rough life more fascinating than kings and courts. I’d like to have seen sun-dances and maiden-tests; I’d like to have eaten food strange enough to be picturesque, and to have found new streams and traced them to their sources, and to have come unexpectedly on new lakes, like amethysts. It’s as much fun to discover as to invent. And then the Jesuit fathers, half-tramp, half-martyr,—they were great old fellows.”

“And the Frenchman—where is he?” said Madeline. “Gone, and left a few names for the Swede and the American to mispronounce; but you may come down later, Mr. Norris, and find how law and order, in our own people, fought with savagery out here on the frontier. It’s a thrilling story.”

“You love it all and its legends, don’t you?” Ellery looked from one to the other.

“Don’t you?” Madeline asked.

“By Jove, I do!” he cried, sitting suddenly upright as though stirred with genuine feeling. “I love it without its legends. It does not seem to me to have any past. It is all future. It makes me feel all future, too.”

“Do you know what’s happened to you?” Dick laughed exultantly. “Gitche Manito the Mighty has got you—the spirit of the West—which, being interpreted, is Ozone.”

“Something has got me, I admit,” Norris cried. “What is it? What is it that makes the sky so dazzling? What is it that makes the leaves fairly radiate light? What is it that, every time you take a breath, makes the air freshen you down to your toes? I feel younger than I ever did before in all my life.”

The other two were looking at him.

“Well, our height above the sea-level—” Dick began.

“Oh, rot!” Ellery exclaimed. “It’s something more than air—it’s atmosphere. You feel here that it’s glorious to work.”

“You make me proud of you, old boy.”

“It’s funny how universally you fellows call me ‘old boy’. I suppose I was older than the rest of you. I had to take the responsibility for my own life too soon and it took out of me that assurance that most of you had—that complacent confidence that things would somehow manage themselves. But I’m getting even now. I’m appreciating being young, which most men don’t.”

“Bully for you!” Dick cried. “If you couldn’t be born a Westerner, you are born again one. I am moved to tell you something that gave me a small glow yesterday. I met Lewis—the editor of the Star, you know, Madeline—and he insisted on stopping me and congratulating me on having brought Mr. Norris to St. Etienne; said he was irritated at first by having a man forced on him by influence, when there was really no particular place for him, but, he went on, ‘Mr. Norris is rapidly making his own place. We think him a real acquisition.’”

“Oh, pooh!” Norris lapsed sulkily into his usual quiet manner. “Of course I can write better than I can talk. My thoughts are just slow enough, I guess, to keep up with a pen.”

Dick laughed softly as though he were pleased at things he did not tell. Madeline, for the first time, gave her real attention to Mr. Norris, whom she had not hitherto thought worth dwelling on—at least when Dick was about. Never before had this young man talked about himself.

A silence fell.

“Was that a wood-thrush?” Norris asked, manifestly grasping at a change of subject.

“I don’t know, and I don’t intend to know,” Madeline cried, with such unusual viciousness that the two men stared. “Poor birds!” she said. “I’ve nothing against them, but I’m in rebellion against the bird fad. I’m so tired of meeting people and having them start in with a gushing, ‘Oh, how-de-do! Only fancy, I have just seen a scarlet tanager!’ and you know they haven’t, and they wouldn’t care anyway, and their mother may be dying.”

Ellery laughed, and Dick said:

“Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to invent a fad of my own.”

“Let us in on the ground floor.”

“If you like. I’m learning the notes of the wind in the tree-tops. It has such variety! No two trees sound alike. Hear that sharp twitter of the maples? The oak has a deep sonorous song, and the elm’s is as delicate as itself. I believe I could tell them all with my eyes shut.”

“One breeze with infinite manifestations. I suppose our souls twist the breath of the spirit to our own likenesses in the same way,” Ellery said.

Madeline looked at him and he smiled.

“You’re getting poetical, old codger,” said Dick. “You must be in love.” Ellery blushed, but Dick went on, oblivious of byplay. “I move that we celebrate the occasion by a cold collation. Last week, your mother kindly made inquiries about my tastes that led me to infer that everything I most affect is stowed away in that comfortable-looking basket.”

So they had supper, and Norris fished a volume of Shelley from his pocket and read The Cloud, which Dick followed by a really funny story from a magazine. They fell to talking about their own affairs, which to the young are the chief interests. It takes years “that bring the philosophic mind” to make abstractions stimulating. Finally they wafted homeward under a sky dark at the zenith and becoming paler and paler, violet, rose, wan white, with a line of intense violet along the horizon, and, as they sailed, Madeline sang softly as one does in the immediate presence of nature.

This was one day. On another Dick was full of his adventures of the week. He was learning to know his St. Etienne in all its phases. He told them of the lumber mills down by the river, where brawny men, primitive in aspect, fought with a never-ending stream of logs which came down with the current and raised themselves like uncanny water-monsters, up a long incline, finally to meet their death at the hands of machinery that ripped and snarled and clutched. Who would dream, to look at the great commonplace piles of boards that lined the riverbank for miles, that their birth-pangs had been so picturesque?

Or again, Dick told them of those other mills, which were the chief foundation of St. Etienne’s wealth, piles of gray stone, for ever dust-laden and dingy, into which poured a never-ending stream of grain, and out of which poured an equally unceasing stream of bags and barrels laden with flour. Around the wide interiors wandered a few men, gray too, who peeped now and then into caverns where hidden machinery did all the work. Outside, locomotives whistled and puffed and snorted, as they switched the miles of cars to and from the mills. Great vans rolled up with their burdens of fresh empty barrels to be filled and rolled away again.

It was the commonplace of daily toil, but Dick made it vivid, because it was in him to see all things as the work of men, and whenever you catch them doing real work, men are interesting.

Sometimes Dick had other stories to tell. In his collegiate days, he had grown familiar with the typical slum and its problems. The class in sociology had visited such. So he went to the slums of St. Etienne, and behold, they were not slums at all, for the slum can not be grown, like a mushroom, in a night. It must have a thousand nauseous influences stagnating for a long time undisturbed. But here were meager little wooden huts, flanked by rusting piles of scrap-iron, or flats along the river-bottom where the high waters of spring were sure to send the dwellers in these shabby apologies for homes scrambling to the roofs, or drive them to the shelter of the neighboring brewery. Here as the waters swept under the stony arches of the bridges, old women tucked up their petticoats and fished for the richness with which a city befouls its river. Here they made themselves neat woodpiles of the drift of the sawmills, and turned an honest penny by exhibiting on their roofs gaudy advertisements of plug-tobacco, that those who passed on the bridge above might look down and read and resolve to avoid the brand thus obnoxiously glorified.

Sometimes Dick had to relate a picturesque interview with a policeman who unfolded to him unknown phases of life, for though he believed in himself, Percival also believed in the other man, and therefore made him a friend. Every one likes a jolly friendly prince, and that was Dick’s type.

Or he would dip into a police court where all the stages of wretchedness were pitchforked into one another’s evil-smelling company, so that it ranged from the highest circle of purgatory to the lowest depths of hell.

“Why do you go to such places, Dick? It’s nauseating,” Madeline exclaimed.

“Why?” he demanded. “I suppose that sometime, when I’ve made over my information into the neat systematic package that you prefer, I shall start a soul-uplifting row. I look forward to that as my career. You ought to get a career, Madeline.”

“A career? I know the verb, but not the noun,” she retorted saucily. “I’m afraid mine is nothing but the trivial task, flavored with all the flavors I like best.”

Sometimes, when they went home together at night, Percival had stories to unfold to Norris alone—stories he could not tell Madeline, of things found in the mire, upon which the healthy happy world turns its back when every night it goes “up town” to pleasant hearthstones and to normal life. These were tales of foul sounds and foul air, where men and women gathered and drank and gambled and laughed with laughter that was like the grinning of skulls, hollow and despairing. They were stories of girls with sodden eyes and men with wooden faces—of innumerable schemes to suck money by any means but those of honor. And these were the phases of his study that Dick looked upon with a kind of anguished fascination, as more and more he saw how the hands stretched out of that mire smirched the city which he hoped to serve.

Sometimes, and this was when they were with Madeline again, Ellery would have his experience to tell, redolent of printer’s ink, and full of the interest of that profession which is never two days the same—stories of how business toils and spins and is not arrayed like Solomon. Norris, too, was beginning to run up against human nature both in gross and in detail, and to know the world, from the fight last night in Fish Alley up to the doings of statesmen and kings. Madeline had little to tell, for she was living quietly at home, taking the housekeeping off her mother’s hands and driving her father to the morning train. She had few episodes more exciting than an afternoon call or a moonlight sail. But the young men brought her their lives, and when she had made her gay little bombardment of comment, they felt as though some new light had fallen upon familiar facts. The very simplicity of her thought put things in the right relation and gave the effect of a view from a higher plane.

There were many times when they did not discuss, but gave themselves to the joy of young things. They sailed, and Madeline held the tiller; and, when evening came on, they curled down with cushions in the bottom of the boat and sang and chattered the twilight out. They played golf and tennis, and the blood leaped in their veins, for whatever they did, they did it with heart and soul. As for their relations with one another, these were taken for granted, and what they meant, not one of the three stopped to question. It was enough that they were sweet and satisfying in silence.

Late in the season there came a Sunday, memorable to Ellery, when Dick had gone away for some purpose, and, after a little self-questioning, Norris ventured alone for his afternoon with Madeline. She welcomed him with such serene unconsciousness that he wondered why he had hesitated.

“I’m not so good a sailor as Dick, Miss Elton,” he said. “Will you trust yourself with me?”

“Being an independent young woman, I’m willing to depend on you.”

“A truly feminine position.”

“It means that I am quite capable of seizing the helm myself if you should fail me,” she laughed.

“And I am masculine enough to determine that you shall get it only by favor, not by necessity,” he retorted.

“That suits me quite well,” Madeline answered gravely.

“And you are not apprehensive of storms in the vague far-away?”

“Don’t. I’m so contented with things as they are that I do not want to think of far-aways or of anything that means change.”

“You are satisfied with to-day?” he persisted.

“Perfectly.”

Ellery flushed with traitorous rejoicing that Dick was absent. It was a day of sunshine—not the ardent blaze of summer, but the crisp glow of October that seems all light with little heat. The lake was so pale as to be hardly blue, and girdled with soft yellow, touched only here and there with the intenser red of the rock maples. Back farther from shore rose the tawny bronze of oaks. The light breeze flung the Swallow along with those caressing wave-slaps that are the sleepiest of sounds.

To sail under that sky, with Madeline leaning on her elbow near at hand, they two separated from the rest of the world by wide waters, was like a brief experience of Paradise. Ellery watched the light tendril of hair that touched her cheek, lifted itself and touched again, near that lovely curve above her ear. The cheek was warm and creamy but untouched by deeper color. He fell into that mood of blessed silence that, as a rule, comes only when one is solitary.

As they rounded at the dock he came back to himself with a sudden wonder if she had missed the titillation of Dick’s chatter, for she had been as silent as he.

“I’m afraid I have been very dull. I enjoyed myself so much that I forgot to try to amuse you.”

“It’s been a heavenly sail, exactly to match the day,” Madeline answered with a deep contented sigh that filled him with delight. “I was this moment thinking what a comfort it was to know you well enough so that I didn’t have to talk. It’s a test of comradeship, isn’t it?”

As they smiled at each other, his heart leaped with the consciousness of a bond below the surface.

He treasured this crumb of her kindness, not because she was niggardly, but because there was little that belonged to him and to him alone. Sometimes, in the rush and roar of the office, came the memory of her eyes and her voice of assurance.

“What will our comradeship be like, when—when she is Dick’s wife?” he questioned himself, and then fell to work with fury.

Thus the delightful summer died into the past; there came a winter only less good, with its dinners and dances, with quiet fireside evenings, and yet another summer of the same close friendship that began to take on the semblance of a permanent thing in life, all the richer as experience grew deeper and knowledge wider and the best things dearer.

Whether they read or sang or discussed, though the world saw little done, these three young people had the inestimable happiness of knowing one another.

CHAPTER VI

JEWEL WEED

Along the wide straight street of the city surged the usual shopping crowd. Largely petticoated was it, for o’daytimes man must be busy at his office that woman may have this privilege of going shopping. Surely there is no other stream in the wide world that is so monotonous as this human never-ending current. The same types, the same clothes, the same subjects of conversation in the fragments that catch the ear. And seldom does one see a face that looks even cheerful, much less happy,—all intent on matching ribbons.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon;
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.”

Thus might they cry aloud, if they were condemned to proclaim their sins, like the long banner of bat-like souls that Dante saw passing in similar fashion beneath his eye.

And yet, in spite of its monotony, humanity is perennially interesting to itself. Therefore among the strenuous, the hurrying, and the anxious-eyed, one girl loitered on dilatory foot from wide window to wide window.

“Girl” seems an inadequate word to describe Lena Quincy. It may be applied to any youthful feminine person, and Lena, in spite of her carefully-groomed shabbiness, was by no means one of the herd. She affected one like a bit of Tiffany glass, shimmering, iridescent, ethereal; and no ugliness in her surroundings could take away that impression.

Every one who looked at her at all looked twice. She had grown so used to this tribute that it hardly affected her unless it came from one who merited her interest in return.

Now she was wandering from one to another of the ladies with the waxen faces, the waxen hands and the wooden hearts, who gazed back unmoved from behind their plate-glass; though it was not the fixed and amiable smiles of the lay-figures that caught her attention, but rather the curious way in which this one’s braid was laid on the gown, or the new device in buttons, there beyond.

Now she turned and studied the human flux in front. She was not shopping, save in sweet imagination. This was her theater, and she was fain to make the show last as long as possible. Her absorbent gaze saw everything. Yet it was selective too, for it passed swiftly over the chaff of the shabby and fixed itself on the wheat of the properly gowned. Sometimes she wove romances about her swiftly-disappearing actors, romances not of heart and soul but of garments, of splendors and of money; but even such entrancing tissues of her brain vanished like pricked soap-bubbles when there passed in the body one of those select few whose skirts proclaimed perfection. Could dreams stand against reality? Yet the dreams were blissful, though, when they were gone, the girl was left steeped in the bitterness of envy.

It is said that there is a consolation in being well-dressed that religion itself can not afford. It is to be remembered that there is also the pharisaism which always forms a hard shell about every kernel of religion; and the pharisaism of the correct costume is the most complacent of all forms of self-righteousness. Lena’s lips grew positively pale as she saw it pass, drawing its rustling petticoats close to its side. She hungered and thirsted for this form of righteousness.

It was early April, and there was a savage nip in the air, for Winter shook his fist at the world long after he dared to come out of his lair. Spring refused to sit in his lap for more than an instant, but leaped from that affectionate position, ashamed of her intimacy with the hoary sinner, and the buds swelled slowly and swelled exceeding small.

Other women hurried, but Lena did not feel the cold except when she saw a set of magnificent Russian sables with a cordial invitation to “Buy now”. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears at her own impotence. Why had God created her such as she was and then denied her the perquisites of her desires? It was as though nature should make the heart of a rose and should leave off all the out-shaken wealth of petals, whose reflected lights and shadows make the flower’s heart lovely.

With the mist clearing from her eyes Lena walked onward to the next big sheet of glass, and looked through a wealth of Easter hats and bonnets at the mirror that was meant to manifold their charms. She did not see the millinery, but there was comfort in the really good glass, not like her parody at home which cast a pale green tinge over a distorted image.

On Lena nature had really spent herself. The very texture of her skin made the fingers itch to caress its transparent delicacy that let through a tender flush. Every curve of her body suggested hidden beauty, and the way she turned her head on her shoulders left one feeling how music and painting fall short of expressing the loveliest loveliness. But, having accomplished a miracle, fate had left it without a meaning and thrown it on an ash heap. No wonder that it resented its position.

Every man who passed Lena on the street looked at her; some of them spoke to her; but she was possessed of a self-respect that kept her from responding to such overtures. She prided herself on her virtue. Certain it was that the admiration of the other sex never set her vibrating with delicate emotions, never increased by a single beat the pulses of her heart, except when it suggested some definite benefit to herself. With reason, Lena congratulated herself on her firm resistence to the many-formed temptations that come to beauty housed with poverty.

Now, as she looked in the milliner’s glass, she saw her own face, rose-like and delicate. She saw the great violet eyes, so innocent that they almost persuaded herself, as they did others, that some creature more celestial than ordinary humanity wondered from behind them at the world. She saw the fair soft curls that clung about her forehead, and the sight of these things gave a momentary peace to her soul. Then she surveyed the dingy felt hat that rested brutally on the silken wonder of her hair, and rebellion rose again.

“It’s a comfort that my collar fits so well,” she reassured herself. “After all, there is nothing more important than a collar. I don’t look in the least ‘common’.”

Among the hats stood a photograph of a popular actress, pert and pretty. The sight of it sent Lena’s thoughts afield into new wastes of bitterness.

The idea of the stage had once come to her like an inspiration. Nothing could be more easy and natural to her than to act; nothing more delectable than the tribute paid to the star. Money, flowing gowns, footlights, tumults of applause had seemed inevitable. Lena shivered now, with something else than cold inside her flimsy jacket, as she remembered the crumbling of her dream. She saw again the fat man with the sensual mouth who had given her a job; and felt again her tingling resentment when she found how small the part was, and how poorly paid. She remembered how she had held herself aloof from the other girls, who, like herself, had trivial parts, and how they had snubbed her in return; how even the little that she did was made ridiculous through the trick of a hook-nosed, gum-chewing rival, and how the first audience that she faced had tittered at her stumble. A wave of heat succeeded the shiver at this point in her remembrance. Then she recalled her impertinent answer to the vituperation of the manager, and how he had sworn at her for a damned minx, who thought herself a professional beauty.

“Vulgar! Vulgar! Vulgar!” she said to herself in impotent anger. She wished they could all know how she despised them. For she could act! She was still sure that she could play any part—except that of patient endurance. Yet, so far, hardship was all that life had offered her. A chance! That was it. So far, she had never had a ghost of a chance. Would fate—or luck—or Providence—or whatever it is that rules, never give her a turn of the wheel?

Next to the art of the milliner was displayed the art, less interesting to Lena, of the brush. Before the picture store a span of horses shook their jingling harness, and a brightly-buttoned coachman waited, with impassive face turned steadily to the front. There came from the doorway a girl who was lifted above the pharisaism of clothes into the purer ether. She was calm-eyed and well-poised, and Lena hated her for the rest of her life for her obliviousness of the sordid. Behind her walked a young man who now opened the carriage door and lingered a moment and laughed as he talked with the girl who had taken her seat. Lena involuntarily drew her feet closer beneath her skirts that no careless glance of that girl should fall upon their shabbiness. She looked at the man as she looked at the Russian sables. He was a type of that delectable world from which she was shut out.

“I should be ashamed to be silly about fellows, the way some girls are,” was her inward comment. “But I’d just like to have people see me with a thing like that dangling around me. And I shall, some time. I’m a whole heap prettier than she is.”

The carriage door shut abruptly. Lena’s too thin boots, out of plumb, suddenly slipped on a half-formed piece of ice. She made a desperate grab at the smooth surface of the window and then came ignominiously down—not wholly ignominiously, however, since her accident brought to her aid the man who was a type.

She didn’t have to stop to consider that the man would notice neither her hat nor her boots. She knew it instinctively and instantly. But the rose-petal face and the big eyes were overwhelmingly present to her consciousness. She saw them reflected in the look on his face as he bent over her.

“I hope you’re not hurt.”

“Not in the least. Only humiliated.” Lena smiled, because people are always attracted by cheerfulness.

“You are sure you have not twisted your ankle?” he insisted.

“Nothing but my hat and my hair,” she pouted. “Thank you for coming to my rescue.”

“It wasn’t much of a rescue,” he said.

“Are you sorry I didn’t have a tragedy and give you a chance to play hero?” she inquired naïvely.

“When you are in need, may I be the one to help?” he said with growing boldness.

Lena flushed and nodded as he lifted his hat and was gone. She walked slowly homeward, actually forgetting to stop at her favorite window in the lace store, so occupied was she with the latest story she was telling herself. It was a story in which a large house with soft rugs and becoming pink lights occupied the foreground, and somewhere in the background hovered a man who was a type and who loved to spend money on diamonds. The vision was so lovable that she lived with it all the way, even through the narrow entrance of the lodging-house and up the narrow stairs, saturated with obsolete smells—smells of dead dinners—to the very instant when she opened the upper door and faced bald reality and her mother. Mrs. Quincy sat by the window in a room on the walls of which the word “shabby” was written in a handwriting as plain, and in language far simpler than ever Belshazzar saw on the walls of Babylon. It fairly cried itself from the big-figured paper, peeling along its edges; from the worn painted floor; from the frayed rug of now patternless carpet; from the sideboard that looked like a parlor organ. Even from the closet door it whispered that there was more shabbiness hidden in the depths.

Mrs. Quincy herself was a part of it, for she was to Lena what the faded rose is to the opening one, a once beautiful woman, whose skin now looked like wrinkled cream.

Lena shut the door and came in without speaking. She flung her hat and coat on the bed in the corner, where a forlorn counterpane showed by the hollows and hills beneath that it had given up all attempt to play even. The girl sat down listlessly with her hands in her lap.

“You’ve been gone a long time, Lena,” said the mother in a delicately querulous voice. “You’re fortunate to be able to get out instead of being cooped up in this little room the way I am.” Mrs. Quincy coughed with conscious pathos. “I sometimes wonder if you ever think of your poor mother and how lonely she is most of the time. But I’d ought to be used to people’s always forgetting me.”

“Much I have to come home to!” Lena answered. “You’re about as cheerful as barbed wire. But you can comfort yourself! I shan’t be able to go out at all much longer, any way.”

“Why, what’s the matter now?”

“Do you expect me to wear a felt hat all summer?” Lena asked sharply. “I’m ashamed to be seen in that old thing and I should think you’d be ashamed to be so stingy with me.”

Her mother sighed and lapsed into the creaking comfort of her rocking-chair.

“I ain’t stingy,” she said at last. “But if you had your way you’d spend every last cent of the pension the very day it comes. I’ve got to look out we don’t starve. If you’d only make up your mind to work and earn a little instead of livin’ so pinched! I’m sure I’d work if I could. But there! there ain’t nothing for me to do but to set and suffer, and nobody knows what I endure.”

“I wasn’t born to be a working girl,” said Lena sullenly. “I’ve got the blood of a lady if I haven’t got the clothes of one.”

“Well, when it comes to eating and drinking, blood don’t count much. Everybody’s got the same appetite.”

“No, everybody hasn’t,” retorted the girl. “I haven’t any appetite for canned baked-beans and liver.”

“You eat them, anyway.”

“I know it, worse luck!”

There was a tingling silence for a moment and then Lena spoke with sudden energy.

“Mother, what can I do? I’m not one of those girls who can go ahead and don’t care. I haven’t been brought up as they have. The only thing you’ve taught me is that my father was a gentleman and that I am a beauty. And what good does that do me?”

“Teachin’ is respectable.”

“I can’t teach. I couldn’t pass a teacher’s examination to save my life. I don’t know how to do anything. And I won’t sink below the level of decent society. I’d starve first. Do you suppose I haven’t thought it all over a hundred times?”

“You can sew very nicely. I’m sure everything you make has real style.”

“Go into a shop at starvation wages to make pretty things for other girls to wear? I stopped along near Madame Cerise’s to-day and looked at some of the girls near the window, with their hair all lanky and their faces sunk in, working for dear life on finery. Mother, is that what you want for me?”

There was hungry appeal in Lena’s voice, that some mothers would have felt; but Mrs. Quincy was not on the lookout for other people’s shades of emotion.

“Well, if you’d any sense you’d take Joe Nolan, as I’ve told you fifty times if I’ve told you once. He’s got real good wages, and you could twist him around your little finger.”

Lena’s teeth came together with a click.

“Joe! Well, perhaps, when there’s nothing else left but the poorhouse. It’s pretty tough if I have to marry a mechanic.”

“Joe’s a good deal of a man. He won’t always be a mechanic, Lena. He’s got too much ambition.”

“He may, or he may not. Anyway, he’ll bear the marks of a mechanic all his days. I’m not his kind.”

Lena rose and went across the room to lean on the little dressing-table and survey herself in the old green glass. This was her panacea for every woe. The little pucker in her forehead straightened itself out.

“Look at me, mother,” she demanded, turning around. “Do you think all this is meant to scrub and sew and cook for the foreman in locomotive works? Because I don’t.”

She was smiling, but her mother did not smile in return.

“I believe I was most as pretty as you are when I was a girl,” Mrs. Quincy said. “And that was all the good it did. I thought I was making a grand marriage when I got your father; but he seemed to sort of flatten out and lose all his ambition after we was married. He didn’t seem to care about anything, though I used to give him my opinion pretty plain. And it’s mighty little he left me when he was took,” she added vindictively.

Her daughter eyed her speculatively.

“Well, I’m not going to be taken in the way you were,” she said sharply. “You thought a good old name and a promising career were enough; and father didn’t keep his promises. I want money and not the promise of money.”

“And where will you find him?” sniffed Mrs. Quincy, to whom “it” and “he” were synonymous. “I don’t notice any millionaires crowding up to you, for all your big eyes and your great opinion of yourself.”

“That’s just it. If I could only meet them!” Lena got up and walked restlessly about the room. Her eyes fell on the last night’s copy of the Star, opened to that chatty column headed “Woman’s Fancies”. She had read it with absorbed interest. Her body halted now, for the muscles often stop work when the mind becomes possessed of a great idea. She stood for a long time and looked from the unwashed window-pane while a new resolve slowly hardened itself within.

“I’ll try, I’ll try, I’ll try,” she said to herself, and her heart thumped uncomfortably. “And if I take it to the office myself, when they see me perhaps they—”

Aloud she said nothing, for she had early learned the great lesson that the best way of getting her own will with her mother was to do what she wished first and argue about it afterward.

“What have we got for supper, mother?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Mrs. Quincy sharply.

“Nothing? Well, give me some money and let me go and get something.”

Mrs. Quincy reluctantly lifted her skirt and began to explore her petticoat below. She shook open the mouth of a pocket into which she dived to return with a knotted handkerchief. Lena looked on impatiently as the knot was slowly untied and a small hoard of silver disclosed.

“There,” said Mrs. Quincy. “You can take this quarter, Lena, and do get something nourishing. Don’t buy cream-cakes. I feel the need of what will stay my stomach.”

“I’ll get baked-beans,” answered the girl with a short laugh.

“Yes, do. I shan’t have another cent till next pay-day comes. We’ve got to make this last. Get some tea, Lena—green, remember. The beans won’t cost more than twelve cents. I don’t see how you can have a new hat.”

“Well, give me ten cents, anyway,” Lena answered with unexpected submission.

“What do you want it for?”

“Please, mammy,” Lena said coaxingly. “I won’t buy cream-cakes or anything to eat. I want to invest in a gold mine.”

Mrs. Quincy gave her a sharp look and grudgingly handed out a dime; for Lena’s voice was instinct with hope, and hope was such a rare visitor in the dingy little lodgings that Mrs. Quincy grew generous under its magnetic warmth.

“Now what’d you want that ten cents for?” she asked curiously when the girl came back. “My land! Only paper and pencil? I thought you was going to do something grand.”

CHAPTER VII

LENA’S PROGRESS

About a month after Lena had made her investment in the raw materials of the writer’s art, Dick Percival happened to drop into the sooty and untidy office where for more than a year Norris had been engaged in manufacturing public opinion.

“Hello!” he cried as he opened the door. Then he stood transfixed at the vision that met his sight, for a very blond and fuzzy head was bent over Ellery’s desk and a very startled pair of blue eyes was raised to meet his own. There stood a rosebud dressed in gray. Is there anything more demure and innocent than a pinky girl in a mousy gown? Dick’s hat came off and a deferential look replaced the careless one.

“Hello, yourself!” said Norris. “You announce yourself like a telephone girl. Come in. What do you mean by troubling the quiet waters of my daily toil?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Dick politely. “If you are busy I—”

“That’s all right. Miss Quincy and I can postpone our confab without inconveniencing the order of the universe.” Miss Quincy was already gathering her notes, and she smiled at Dick in a half-shy way that said, “I remember you very plainly.” As she disappeared slowly down the hall, Dick started after her.

“Great Scott, Ellery!” he ejaculated. “How you have lied to me about the grubbiness of your work! If this is your daily grind, I don’t mind having a whirl at the editorial profession myself.”

Norris laughed.

“It isn’t the sum total of my duties,” he said.

“Who is Hebe?” asked Dick.

“Well, she’s rather a problem,” Ellery replied. “I believe she appeared a few weeks ago at Miss Huntress’ office—the woman editor, you know—with a catchy little article on fashions. It happened that the boss was in the office, and we consider it rather a grind on him, for he was much taken by either the article or the eyes, and she got a little job as a sort of reportorial maid-of-all-work. Funny, isn’t it? If a man is buying a rug, he wouldn’t think of deciding on it because it was green, without testing its wearing qualities; but in nine cases out of ten a girl gets chosen because of her eyes. That’s all I know about her. Pretty, isn’t she?”

“Pretty! Is that all the command you have of your native language? You ought to lose your job for that. Why she’s—never mind—I haven’t time now.”

“Neither have I,” answered Norris sharply. He remembered that long ago Dick had called Madeline pretty. It is a cheap and easy word. “I haven’t time for you, either. Will you go away; or will you keep still while I finish this work?”

“Waltz away.” Dick sat down on the window-sill and fell into a meditative state of mind. Once or twice he walked to the door and looked down the hall, while Norris plugged steadily away and ignored the presence of his friend.

After a prolonged silence, Dick spoke again, solemnly:

“I should like to meet her.”

“Whom?”

“Miss—Quincy, did you call her?”

“Oh! Isn’t she rather out of your class?”

“Pshaw! Don’t talk of classes, now that you’re out of college. Do you know anything about her?”

“Nothing,” said Ellery shortly. “I don’t consider it my business to go beyond my official relations.”

“Well, I haven’t any business relations not to go beyond,” said Dick. “So I mean to pursue the inquiry.”

“Do as you like,” Ellery answered. “Is that what you came down here to talk about?”

“No,” said Dick, changing his manner. “I came to talk up an editorial campaign. You don’t know my chum, Olaf Ericson, do you? He’s the biggest man on the force, and he’s a corker. I’ve learned more from him about bad smells than I did in two years of chemistry at New Haven. He knows this town from the seventh sub-cellar up, and ‘him and me is great friends’. Seriously, Norris, I’ve begun to get hold of just the facts I wanted about ‘the combine’, and it’s information that is so very definite and to the point that I believe I can make it hot for them. I want the public to be kept informed on everything that is to their discredit. Now the Star is a fairly clean paper, as papers go. I want help.”

“You’ll have to go up higher for that, my boy. It’s not for a freshman like myself to direct the policy of the paper. It would be a pretty serious matter to run up against those fellows. Mr. Lewis, the old man, is out, but when he comes back we’ll go and have a talk with him.”

“Talk to him! I should think so!” Dick exclaimed, and he began to pace the room and pour out the floods of his information, in wrath of soul and glow of spirits at his resolve to clean things up.

Meanwhile in Miss Huntress’ office, farther down the hall, Lena was discussing with that determined person the possibility of supplying the public with more of the kind of literature for which women, in particular, are supposed to have a mad desire. Miss Huntress was an adept at filling her page with personalities by which those who know nobody may have almost as great a knowledge of the great as those who have achieved the proud distinction of being “in it”. Lena had written a highly successful series of articles on “St. Etienne as seen from the shop windows,” and she longed for new and similar fields to conquer.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Miss Huntress, “if you couldn’t get up some catchy little things on private libraries and picture galleries. If you can raise some photographs to go with them, you might make quite a hit. That’s the kind of thing that takes. You see it makes people able to talk about the inside of rich folk’s houses.”

“I suppose you would want me to begin with Mr. Early,” said Lena, hardly knowing what reply to make.

“Never mind Mr. Early. Everybody knows just what he’s got and how his place looks. You might include him later, but I should start with people who are more exclusive and yet whose names everybody knows. Now there’s Mr. Windsor and Mrs. Percival. By the way, Mr. Norris is awfully intimate at the Percivals’. Perhaps he’d help you to an introduction. If Mrs. Percival would let you write up her library, you may be sure there’d be a lot of others who would follow her example. You might try it, anyway. Go and see her. Tell her what a hard time you are having to earn your own living. Your looks will carry you a long way.”

“I think young Mr. Percival is in Mr. Norris’ office now. Some one came in while I was there and I think he called him Percival,” said Lena faintly.

“Say! is that so?” exclaimed Miss Huntress. “Now’s your chance! Go in and ask while he’s there. He’ll find it hard to refuse to your face.”

“You go,” interposed Lena. “If I go, it will look as though I knew. But you can walk in all innocent.”

Therefore the conversation on matters which were to change the destiny of a city was interrupted by a smart knock on the assistant editor’s door, and Miss Huntress, eminently self-possessed, walked in on the two young men.

“Beg pardon, Mr. Norris, I didn’t know you had any one here,” she began. “But I won’t keep you a moment. The truth is, I want a series of articles on the private libraries of the city, and, knowing that you are acquainted with Mrs. Percival, I thought you’d help the paper to an opening there.”

“Let me introduce Mr. Percival,” said Norris. “He can give you more information than I can.”

“Well, this is lucky!” ejaculated Miss Huntress.

“Our library isn’t a show affair,” Dick said stiffly. “My mother, I am sure, would be very unwilling to submit to that kind of a write-up. My father was a book-lover, not a book-fancier. It’s essentially a private collection.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way about it,” Miss Huntress rejoined equably. “Of course, nowadays, I can’t admit that there’s any such thing as privacy. And it isn’t only that I want the articles, Mr. Percival. I want to help along a girl that needs the work, and an awfully nice girl she is. We haven’t any regular job for her, and all I can do is to throw odd bits of work in her way. She has an old mother to support, and it would be a real charity to her if you’d look at it in that light. Miss Quincy is a perfect lady, and you may be sure she’d take no advantage of you to write up anything sensational or impertinent.”

Dick started and glanced consciously at Norris, who grinned back.

“Of course that puts another light on it,” Mr. Percival said after a decent pause, and trying to compose his face to a judicial expression. “I’d hate to put a stumbling-block in the way of a girl like that. Ah-um—I’ll speak to my mother about it, Miss Huntress, and I dare say I can persuade her to allow it.”

“That’s very good of you,” Miss Huntress answered,—with sad comprehension that a complexion like Lena’s was a great aid to a literary career. “You couldn’t manage to let Miss Quincy go up this afternoon, could you?” she went on with characteristic energy in pushing an advantage. “It would be a good thing if she could get her first stuff ready for the Saturday-night issue.”

“My mother, I suppose, is driving this afternoon,” Dick said hesitatingly. He went through a hasty calculation and saw reasons for cutting out certain of his own engagements. “See here, Miss Huntress, if you’re in such a hurry, I don’t mind taking Miss Quincy up and telling her what I know about old editions and rare folios. I’ll make it right with mother afterward.”

Miss Huntress’ face cleared perceptibly.

“You’re awfully good, Mr. Percival. Won’t you come down to my office now, and I’ll introduce you to Miss Quincy? This is a real favor.” Dick shot a glance of triumph at Ellery, believing himself a skilled sly dog of a manipulator, and not knowing that he was the manipulated. Norris spoke in scorn.

“I suppose righteousness and reform can wait now.”

“You can bet they will. I’ll call on you to-morrow afternoon, Norris.”

“That’s the usual fate of reform. Don’t be a fool, Dick.” But Dick was already disappearing down the corridor in pursuit of the able woman editor.

The girl waiting in the disordered office looked more than ever like a bridesmaid rose, pink and ruffled and out of its proper setting, as she saw Mr. Percival coming.

“Miss Quincy,” said Dick, “I have a motor down stairs, and I’ll take you up to the house right away, if you don’t mind.”

If she didn’t mind!

When youth starts out to revolutionize the world, it meets with many distractions. Even in the hour that Dick spent in the quiet old library with Miss Quincy, he met with distractions. He tried to keep her mind on missals and Aldine editions, but she persisted in poring over old copies of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which she found tucked away in a forgotten corner. Nobody but Lena could have scented them out.

“The fashions are so funny, Mr. Percival!” she insisted. “Do look at these preposterous hoop-skirts and the little short waists. Did you say that no one knows how that gold leaf was put on that ugly old book? How absurd! I must put that down. I suppose that is the kind of thing I have to write up.”

“Be sure you don’t get mixed up and describe monkish fichus and gold leaf on the bias, or you’ll be everlastingly disgraced in the office.”

“Never mind. I’ll learn your horrid old pieces of information in a few minutes. Do let me look at this a little longer,” Lena answered so prettily, and pointed with so dainty a finger, and glanced up so pathetically, that Dick too became absorbed in Godey’s Lady’s Book.

“Weren’t they frightful guys?” Lena went on. “But I dare say the men of that time—what is the date?—1862—thought they were lovely.”

“Very likely, poor men! You see they hadn’t the privilege of knowing the girls of to-day and they thought their own women were the top-notch.”

“Now you are horrid and sarcastic,” said Lena.

“Never a bit. I find it impossible to believe that there was ever before so much beauty in the world. There was here and there a pretty girl, like Helen of Troy, and they made an awful fuss over her.”

“But she must have been really wonderful.”

“Yes, if a girl is as much run after as that, she must either be a raving beauty or else she lives in the far West.”

“But, you know, there aren’t so very many real beauties nowadays, are there?” She glanced sidewise at him in an adorable manner.

“I can’t remember more than one—or two,” said Dick judicially.

Lena laughed softly.

“I think it must have been very nice to be one of the few and be made a fuss over, instead of—”

“Instead of what?”

“Instead of having to grub and struggle for your bread,” Lena answered,—and there was a misty look in the big eyes she turned up to him.

“Poor little girl!” said Dick. “You certainly are not of the kind who ought to battle with the world. Haven’t you any man who could shelter you a little?”

Lena shook her head, with an air of patient suffering.

“My father is dead,” she said. “He was of a good family, as you might know by my name, but he was wounded in the war, and he never got over it. Of course he was very young then. He wasn’t married till long afterward. He died when I was a little thing.”

“That was the history of my father, too!” Dick felt a glow of kindred experience. “See, that is his portrait over the mantel.”

Lena looked very lovely and spiritual as she gazed up at the quiet face that looked back at her, and Dick watched her. Then she drew a full breath and turned her eyes on him.

“You are like him,” she said softly, and something in her voice made the words a thrilling tribute.

Then she added: “Yes, but he left you in comfort, and we—my mother and I—”

“Will you let me come to see your mother some time?”

Lena’s heart beat fast with mingled fear and hope, but all Dick saw was a startled and sweet surprise.

“I should be almost ashamed to have you come,” she said with a soft blush and a look of shy invitation. “We are so poor and we live in such a shabby place.”

“If your shabbiness comes because of your father’s sacrifice for his country it is something to be proud of,” Dick answered.

Through Lena’s mind there passed a swift memory of quarrels and bickerings, of daily smallnesses, which were her chief recollection of her father. She looked frankly up into Dick’s face.

“Yes,” she said. “That ought to make it easy to bear. Now I must not talk about myself any more. What did you tell me about that funny old book?”

“And I may come to see you and your mother?” Dick persisted.

“If you do not forget us to-morrow,”—Lena glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes in a way calculated to make him remember.

“I shan’t forget,” said Dick.

He took out a small note-book and wrote down the address she gave him. And she gave herself a little shake and pulled out a much larger note-book. “I ought not to waste my time and yours this way, but, you see, I’m not much of a business woman. I sometimes forget altogether.”

Dick thought her very preposterous and charming as she set to work with an air of severity; and so she was—the last thing on earth made to do serious work. They leaned together over one treasure after another, in that electric nearness that moves youth so easily, and sends a tingling sensation up the backbone.

When she suddenly rose, her cheeks were pinker and more transparent than ever, and her eyes softer and dreamier.

“Let me take you home in the motor,” said Dick.

“Dear me, no,” Lena exclaimed. “I’m afraid you think me entirely too informal already. I—I’m so stupid and impulsive. I’m always doing wrong things and not thinking till afterward. Good-by, and thank you, Mr. Percival.”

After he had bowed her out, Dick plunged into a big chair and spent a few moments in analyzing his own character. He perceived that in some ways he differed from most of his friends. Now Ellery and Madeline and most of the others lived along certain conventional lines, with certain fixed interests and habits. That kind of existence would be intolerable to him. He liked to star his days with all kinds of colored incidents that had no particular relation to his main work. He liked to run down every by-path, explore it a bit, and then come back to the highway. Those small excursions were apt to take a man into leafy dells where there were ferns and flowers too shy to fringe the dusty plodding thoroughfare. Dick liked that figure. It revealed to him a certain lightness of heart and poetry in himself that distinguished him from the prosy grubbers. This sprinkling of life with episodes was like a little tonic. It kept him vivid and alive.

Take this very afternoon just passed. It meant little, of course, either to him or to the pretty little pathetic reporter girl, but it had injected a bit of pleasure into her routine, and given him an insight into another kind of maiden from the well-kept, sheltered women he knew best. Such things help a man’s larger sympathies. He was glad that he could enjoy many types of men and women.

A rumble of wheels outside brought him out of this particular by-path into the highway.

“What a dispensation that the mater didn’t come home in the middle of it!” he said with a sigh of satisfaction.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FALLS

According to his promise, Dick presented himself at Ellery’s office on the next afternoon. He wore a brisk and moving air.

“Miss Quincy is not here to-day,” Norris said without looking up.

“I know it,” Dick answered promptly. “Are you through yet?”

“I’ve finished with the ephemeræ of this particular Tuesday, and before I begin on those of Wednesday, I have a few precious moments to waste on you.” Ellery wheeled his chair around.

“Do you know that this is Decoration Day and a holiday?”

“Is there anything a sub-editor does not know?”

“Have you ever been to the Falls of Wabeno?”

“No.”

“And you call yourself a true citizen of St. Etienne? Come with me and see the populace chew gum amid scenes of natural beauty.”

“I thought we were going to agitate civic reform.”

“We’ll agitate as we go along. Come, Ellery, it’s a superb day. I feel like the bursting buds. Let’s get out.”

“My dear Dick,” said Norris, “the trouble with you is that you never want to do anything; you always want to do something else. I begin to think that there are compensations to a man in having fate hold his nose to the grindstone. He learns persistence, willy-nilly.”

“Stop your growling. Up, William, up, and quit your galley-proof. I am willing to bet that my flashes in the pan will do things before I am through.”

“I dare swear they will get way ahead of my grubbing,” Ellery rejoined, slamming his desk. “Come, I’ll go with you.”

On the southern outskirts of the city lay a park where art had done no more than retouch nature. Here a placid stream suddenly transformed itself into an imposing waterfall, plunging with roars over a rocky cliff, and sending its spray whirling high in air to paint a hundred illusive rainbows amid outstretching tree-branches or against a somber background of stone.

Dick left his motor near the brink of the cliff above the Falls and the two climbed down the steep bank, stopping now and again to yield to the fascination of rushing water and to snuff the fresh-flying mist as it swept into their faces.

Caught in the gully below, the stream, which had suddenly contracted a habit of unruliness, tumbled onward under trees and through overhanging rocks until it joined the Mississippi a half-mile away.

There were other people, hordes of them, tempted by May sunshine.

“What is it, Ellery,” Dick demanded, “what deep-seated idealism is it that draws these crowds to the most beautiful spot near town as soon as spring offers more than half an invitation?”

“It certainly isn’t a poetry that crops out in their clothes or in their conversation,” Norris grumbled. “The staple remark seems to be, ‘Gee, ain’t it pretty?’”

“You mustn’t expect to see aristocracy here; this is too cheap, and too easy to reach. Your aristocrat prefers less beauty at greater effort and more cost. This is the place to touch elbows with the populace.”

They had climbed down the long winding steps by this time, and were leaning against the parapet of a small rustic bridge that crossed below the Falls.

“Let’s sit down on that bench,” said Dick, “and let the sunshine trickle through the trees and through us, and feel the spray in our nostrils, and delight in hanging maidenhair ferns, and watch the girls go by—the girls in pink and blue dresses, each leaning on the arm of a swain who grins. It’s vastly more fun than a fashionable parade.”

The branches met overhead, darkening the narrow chasm; the steep banks were spattered with dutchman’s breeches that fluttered like butterflies poised for a moment; down stream a few yards, where the valley widened, lay a tiny meadow where the sun fell full on a carpet of crow-foot violets that gave back the May sky. Two squirrels chased each other around a big maple, and a blue jay looked on and commented.

“Why is this stream of girls and men out for their holiday like baked ice-cream?” asked Dick. “That isn’t a conundrum; it’s a philosophic question.”

“I know, they give you the same sense of incongruity,” Ellery answered lazily.

“But I like them,” Dick pursued. “I like a great many more kinds of people than you do, Norris. You are narrow-minded. You want to associate only with the good and true and bathed.”

“Oh, I wish well to the majority of the race, but there are some that I do not care to eat with.”

Something in Ellery’s voice made his friend turn and survey him.

“You look tired. You’re working too hard. Don’t make the western mistake of thinking frazzled nerves mean energy.”

“That isn’t my kind,” Ellery smiled. “I’m all right. Let me spurt for a while. I got my position through favor, Dick, yours and Uncle Joe’s. I didn’t particularly deserve it, and I didn’t know anything about the work; so, for your sake as well as my own, I have determined to make good. Friendship may give a fellow his chance, but it doesn’t hold down a job, you know.”

“Pooh! You’ve made good already. A man can be tremendously experienced—for the West—when he’s been at a thing a year. Look at me and my work.”

“What do you consider your work? Road inspector?” For, to tell the truth, Norris was not wholly satisfied with Dick’s year of dawdling around the streets.

“My profession,” Dick answered with oracular gravity, “is a combination of hard work and fine art. It requires both toil and genius. I think I may say, with all natural modesty, that I have shown great natural aptitude for it. My profession is making friends. I have made friends useful and ornamental, friends great and small, friends beautiful and friends the opposite—which reminds me of your previous question, city politics. Whom do you suppose I supped with last night?”

“Whom?”

“With the Honorable, or by courtesy dubbed Honorable, William Barry,” Dick replied triumphantly.

“‘Piggy’ Barry?” ejaculated Ellery, turning on Dick in surprise. “Alderman Barry? The boss?”

“‘Piggy’ does somehow sound more appropriate than ‘Honorable’,” Dick said meditatively.

“And is he one of the people you like?” questioned Ellery with unfeigned surprise.

“For business purposes, yes. If I’m going to get into politics some day, it becomes me to cultivate local statesmen, doesn’t it? I took the great man to the theater, or at least to something that called itself the theater, and I gave him an excellent supper afterward. He seemed to appreciate it and my society.”

“I dare say you made yourself agreeable. Do you expect he will help you in your public career?”

“Not voluntarily, perhaps; but I wanted to know him, better and better. Under benign influences, he is indiscreet. He reminded me last night of Louis XIV. He might have said, ‘St. Etienne, it is I,’ but in his simpler and less sophisticated language, he was content to remark, ‘I’m the whole damn show, see?’”

“I’m glad he knew enough to put the appropriate adjective before show,” said Ellery grimly.

“And yet I suspect that, even in that statement, he lied,” Dick went on. “I studied him last night. You’ll never persuade me that that man, whose head is all face and neck, does the intricate planning and wire-pulling that runs this city. I’ve an idea Barry is only the two placards on each side of the sandwich-man. He may be the adjective show, but I doubt if he’s the man.”

“Have you discovered who is the real sandwich-man?”

“No, I haven’t. My reasoning is inductive. I see numerous little holes with small tips of threads sticking through them, but when I try to get hold of the threads to pull them out and examine them, the ends are too short or my fingers are too big. But get hold of them I shall, sooner or later, by hook or crook. If I don’t give some of those fellows the slugging of their lives, my name isn’t Richard Percival.”

“I suspect that it is Richard Percival,” said Ellery with a whimsical glance of affection.

“This, as I read it, is the history,” Dick went on. “Six years ago, when you and I were sub-freshmen, and unable to take an active part, there was a brief spasm of reform. It was a short episode of fisticuffs and fighting, which is for a day—a very different thing from governing, which goes steadily on from year to year. But this reform movement did result in giving the city a good charter.”

“The Garden of Eden was once fitted out with an excellent system of government.”

“Exactly. Charters, left to themselves, do not regulate human nature. The good citizens of St. Etienne went their own busy business way and left the less occupied bad citizens to adapt the charter to the needs of life; and that was an easy job, so easy that it has apparently been possible for one man to manage it. The charter put great power into the hands of the mayor. There have been three mayors elected under it, and they have all been ‘friends’ of Billy Barry.”

“I wonder if the next will be,” queried Ellery thoughtfully.

“And the majority of every working committee appointed by the city council is made of ‘friends’ of Piggy, who shows a fine disregard of party lines in his affiliations. William is one more product of this horseless wireless age—a crownless king.”

“What makes you think that he isn’t the power he seems?”

“A lot of things. The business interests behind him do not seem to be wholly his. That is another field for investigation.”

“You started yesterday to tell me about a big policeman.”

“Yes, Olaf Ericson, with the eyes and mustache of a viking above a blue uniform. When I met him last he had just had the melancholy duty of cutting down a poor wretch that had hung himself, and of sending for the coroner. He told me that the pathetic part of it was that the dead man was a total stranger in the city; and then he winked and asked if I knew that though the city paid the coroner his salary, the state guaranteed an extra fee of ‘saxty dollar’ to that official for every stranger who met with sudden death within our limits? I didn’t know, but I do now. I took pains to look up last year’s records and, curiously enough, out of one hundred and seventy-six cases that required the services of a coroner, one hundred and fifty-one were those of strangers. That would add about nine thousand dollars to a quite moderate salary. Another queer thing is that Doctor Niger—the coroner, you know—is Billy Barry’s brother-in-law.”

“Great Scott!” said Ellery.

“Great Barry, say I. Now it may be my historic sense, or it may be mere curiosity, but I mean to hunt up the personal history of those hundred-odd strangers who died forlorn and lonely within our gates.”

“Work quietly, Dick, and get your facts well in hand.”

“I intend to. But when I have it all, don’t you suppose your chief, Lewis, will be willing to publish the record?”

“I hope so.”

“I dare say the day will come when Barry and I shall cease to be friends,” said Dick cheerfully. “One must submit to the inevitable. But let’s keep the papers dribbling out information to the public. By the time the coroner story is finished, I expect to have another ready.”

“Tell me.”

“Not yet. What used old Eddy to preach to us in rhetoric? ‘Before you attempt composition, be sure that you have a rounded thought.’ This isn’t round, it’s elliptical. Big Olaf is a friend useful. He’s a shrewd fellow, who’s been looking stupid for some time. The ‘bunch’ hasn’t been treating him square. You can guess what that means. Anyway, he is sore as well as shrewd, and now I fancy he belongs to me.”

Norris turned with a start and stared Dick in the face.

“How did you get possession of him?” he asked sharply.

“Well, what if I bought him?”

“Do you mean that you are making up to him what Barry’s dirty hands have failed to give? You are bribing him to act as your spy?”

“I do not suppose there is any harm in my hiring a private detective.”

“That depends on whether he is already a public official, and on how you pay him, and what you pay him for.”

“Ellery, those fellows have sentries and pickets and fortifications and guns always in battle-array against us and our kind. The only thing to do is to gather hosts and ammunition on the other side.”

“True. But there isn’t any use in fighting dishonesty with dishonor. Dick, don’t lower your standard to the mere flinging of mud.”

But Dick did not appear to listen. His eyes were caught by one of the passing couples and he sprang to his feet.

“Let’s follow the stream a little farther,” he said, moving as he spoke. “The gorge grows wilder and more enticing the farther you go.”

He walked hurriedly down the path, and Ellery, whose mind seldom leaped, but progressed by orderly steps, followed in some bewilderment. An instant before Dick’s face had worn the profound air of a man on whose shoulders rested mighty problems. Now every movement was boyish and exultant. He laughed to himself. The stream thundered and one does not ask a friend to shout out his minor moods, so Ellery forbore to question.

Suddenly the brook burst through overhanging cliffs of party-colored sandstone out of its thread-like gorge into the wide chasm of the Mississippi. A small steamer lay at anchor and tooted a discordant horn to signify to the world that she intended to be up and doing. A crowd of phlegmatic-faced revelers stood upon the bank and watched her with absorbed indifference, while a smaller number pushed aboard and prepared for true joy by laying in a store of cracker-jack and peanuts at a diminutive counter.

“Just in time!” Dick ejaculated and he shoved Ellery on to the swaying deck as the hawsers were swung loose.

They whirled out into mid-stream and exchanged the fine feminine delights of the brook for the bold masculine ones of the great river, whose craggy banks rose high, like fortifications, forest-crowned. Tangles of woodbine, clematis and bitter-sweet sprawled down over striated rocks. The boat twisted its way through a current that boiled up from below in whirlpools. Here and there huge logs plunged downward like water-monsters, as they threaded between wooded islands, where meek-looking cottontails squatted and twiddled their noses at the passing craft; on, on, until, far off, loomed the boldest highest cliff of all, its top crested by a quaint old slit-windowed round tower of a fort, once a border defense against Chippewa and Sioux, now backed by the sleek lawns of well-groomed officers.

Ellery looked around at his fellow passengers, contentedly munching their peanuts and conversing in broad English flavored with Norse. They were a good-natured assemblage, who choked and snorted and chuckled and whinnied in their laughter. Norris’ eyes were caught by one girl, conspicuously because plainly dressed. As she turned her profile, he glanced at Dick. Dick too was staring at her, and even while Ellery eyed him, he raised his hat and bowed gravely, with a deferential air that became him.

“So,” exclaimed Norris under his breath, “that was why we tore like madmen to catch this boat!”

“It would have been a pity to lose it,” Dick responded innocently. “It is a delicious bit of scenery from here to the fort. I wanted you to see it.”

“Pink and white scenery with yellow curls,” jeered Ellery.

Dick made no reply and Ellery went on.

“She has a young man already. You can’t go and take her away from him. That wouldn’t be playing fair.”

“The man with her is an oaf. He has a loose mouth that wabbles when he opens it to pick his teeth.”

“So you think that though you may not snatch her bodily, you may make her wish to be with you instead of with him, and that the wish will lie fallow in her heart. Dick, you are a student of human nature,” Ellery said, half amused, half irritated.

“I dare say he is a gentleman at heart. Oafs always are.”

“What you really do,” Ellery continued, “is to make her uncomfortable and conscious of his clothes and his sprawl. She flushed when she saw you, and she has been sitting stiffly ever since.”

“Oh, drop it, Norris.”

Ellery shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know what you want to do it for,” he said. “You’re a queer combination, Dick, of the whole-souled reformer and the abject goose.”

“Nothing inconsistent about being a philanthropist and a philogynist. By Jove! She’s pretty in her malaise, pink, and pecking like a little wren at her oaf. Ellery, it’s a brute of a shame that such as she should be cast before him—she, a fine lacy creature who shows her breeding through it all.”

“How much are you in earnest?”

“There you go again!” Dick turned on his friend with a kind of exasperation. “You belong to that period of social development when they ask a man’s intentions if he looks twice at the girl he dances with. I don’t have to be in earnest, thank Heaven! But when I get a chance to look at anything so lovely as that girl, I mean to do it, just as I look at a flower or a picture. I don’t mean to lose all the delicious froth of life. Do you happen to know her first name?”

“Lena,” answered Ellery shortly.

“Lena! It’s a delicate fragile little name—not meant for a girl who has to plug her way through life. Her real name is Andromeda, poor child—chained to the rock and momently expecting the jaws of poverty.”

“You know, Dick, the attention that seems like a trifle to you, with a life full of interests, may look like a serious affair to her.”

“See here, old man, you needn’t be so snippy. Must I confine my philanthropy to the old and ugly to keep it above suspicion? I’m just so far interested in this, and no more, that I’m sorry for that little girl, and if I saw a chance, I’d do her a good turn, as I pass along; and if I didn’t think more of you than of any other man, I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of rendering so much of an account of myself.”

Ellery was silent and looked at the river with its whirlpools, at the cliffs, gray with stone and pale green with May, and sometimes at Dick, who leaned forward with his chin in his hand, apparently absorbed in thought, but occasionally shooting a glance at Lena who laughed and chattered with Mr. Nolan in a sort of intermittent fever.

The steamer tooted and splashed at the landing below the fort, and turned herself about for the return trip. Sand-martins dropped from their holes in the cliffs and skimmed across the bows, and the breeze blew fresher as they headed up stream. Still the two friends sat in silence, though once Percival looked across and laughed, as though he enjoyed the other’s seriousness.

“Norris, you are funny,” he said.

“Why?”

“You always see consequences to things.”

“Most things have both causes and effects,” Ellery retorted, ruffled.

“I deny it,” said Dick.

When they creaked at the dock, Dick suddenly pushed forward so that he almost touched Lena in the crowd that was hurrying to shore.

“Good afternoon, Miss Quincy,” he said. “I hope you have enjoyed this little sail as much as I have.”

Knowing that he had watched her ever since they started, she looked up at him with flushed inquiry.

“Yes, it was lovely,” she said.

“Come on, Lena,” exclaimed her escort, seizing her arm. “I guess we ought to hurry. There’ll be an awful crowd on the street-cars.”

“If you’ll allow me,” said Dick, “I have an automobile up near the Falls, and I’d be delighted to—”

“We come by the cars and I guess they’re good enough for us to go home by,” Mr. Nolan interrupted roughly. “We’re blocking the way here. Come, Lena.” He glowered at Dick’s lifted hat and added quite audibly: “Confound the dude! Thought he could cut in, did he?”

“Now then,” said Dick as he dropped back, “the oaf made a mistake. If he’d gracefully accepted my offer, he’d have gone up several pegs in her estimation. As it is, when her pretty little feet get trodden on by the crowd on the back platform, she will view us with regret as we whizz by. Poor little Andromeda!”

They loitered as the other “trippers”, now filled with zeal to catch the trolley, pushed past them up the glen, and soon they were practically alone. Nature reasserted her sway as though there had never been laughter and babble along the musical stream and under the over-arching trees. The friends walked more and more slowly. A white thing lay on the path before them, and Dick stooped to pick it up, while Ellery looked on with mild curiosity.

“It’s a letter, stamped and sealed.” Percival peered at it closely, for though the level sunlight flooded the tops of the trees, down here by the stream it was fast growing dark.

“Not much sealed, either,” he added, noticing what a tiny spot of the flap stuck tight to the paper beneath. “Some one has dropped it here. By Jove, Ellery, it’s addressed to William Barry! I’d give a farm in North Dakota to know what’s in it.”

He turned it again and stared at the back.

“I noticed,” said Ellery, “that there was a mail-box near where we left the automobile. You can post it as we go along.”

“Yes,” assented Dick. He glared at the name of William Barry as though it fascinated him. Then he tucked the letter into his breast pocket.

As the motor began to champ its bit, Norris remarked:

“You forgot to mail that letter, Dick.”

“So I did,” said Dick. “No matter. I’ll post it in town. It will go all the quicker.”

CHAPTER IX

AN INVITATION

A full month slipped away after the little excursion down the river before Dick saw Lena Quincy again. In fact he had almost forgotten her. That day, if it was recalled at all, was chiefly memorable because it marked a change in his attitude toward his chosen occupation. It seemed that revelation after revelation poured upon him. The intricate threads of city politics fascinated him more and more as he began to understand whence they led and whither.

But one day on the street Dick met and passed Lena. She gave him a little bow—wistful, it seemed to him, and she looked tired and thin. His conscience smote him. He had really meant to do a common kindly thing to cheer this girl, but it had slipped his mind. That night he hunted up her address in his note-book and found his way to the dismal lodging-house.

Four cheap-looking young persons were loitering in the parlor, two were drumming on a piano that was out of tune, and the room smelled fusty. The assembled group giggled and disappeared upon his entrance, and Lena, when she came down the stairs, flushing with embarrassment and pleasure, looked as much out of place as he felt. He stood before her, hat in hand. It would be impossible to talk to her in such a room.

“Miss Quincy,” he said, “it is such a perfect night that it is neither more nor less than self-torture to stay indoors. Can’t you be a bit unconventional and go out with me to the band concert in the park?” He remembered that she went about with the oaf.

Lena hesitated. She realized that this call was a crucial affair to her, though his long delay in coming proved it to be a casual matter to Mr. Percival. She must make no mistake. In her instant’s hesitation, while her soft eyes were looking inquiringly into his face, she had an inspiration.

“I should love it, Mr. Percival,” she said with that little air of reserve that set her apart. “But don’t you see, I—I—can’t go with you—until—until you know my mother and unless she approves.”

“Of course,” said Dick, quite unconscious of Lena’s play-acting.

Lena turned and twisted a bit of worn blue plush trimming on the shelf over the gas-log before she showed him a blushing face.

“The only thing I can do is to ask you to come up stairs and meet mother. She can hardly move about enough to come down.”

She led the way with anxiety in her heart as to how her mother would behave. Would she show irritable astonishment if Lena treated her with gentle deference, and asked her permission to be out in the evening with a strange young man? But Mrs. Quincy knew a thing or two as well as her daughter, and Dick saw only that the room was very ugly, that Lena moved about with lips compressed and voice gentle and full of tender consideration, to make her mother as comfortable as possible before she went away.

“And I shan’t keep you up late, mother, dear,” Lena said with a final kiss that made Mrs. Quincy wink to keep back the statement that she saw herself waiting for the return of her daughter.

The fresh evening air was delicious after this. Dick felt all his chivalry again stirred. It made no difference that Lena said little to keep up her share in the conversation. Dick was content to do the entertaining himself, and satisfied when Lena laughed. He bubbled over with fancies old and new, and even the old ones took fresh life. The college stories and jokes that everybody knew, the commonplaces of his world, set Lena exclaiming with delight. The excitement of the night, and they two alone in the crowd, made the little girl cling to his arm for fear they might be separated! There were quieter moments when they wandered to the outskirts and found a bench for a moment’s rest.

Once he spoke of some of the rough sides of her work, and she answered quietly that she was used to such things and managed to forget their hardship. Dick glanced at her face, self-contained in the gas-light. He remembered her mother and the ugly room. He had a vision of a sweet spirit bearing an adverse fate with dignity, and now giving him, in return for his small act of courtesy, the perfume of her presence, her beauty, her wondering admiration. For the time it seemed to Lena herself that she was what he fancied her. She was only showing him, she thought, the best side of herself. It was natural that she should hide the other.

The clock in the steeple far above tinkled out ten, and Lena drew herself to attention.

“Oh, not yet,” Dick exclaimed. “Let’s go somewhere and get an ice.”

Again Lena hesitated. Even so small a luxury tempted her for its own sake, and she liked to be with Mr. Percival. With Jim Nolan she would have gone in a moment, but she was determined that this man should not think her too easy of access.

“I think not,” she said reluctantly. “I must go home to mother. She isn’t used to being up late, and she needs my help.”

She knew that she had answered well when he urged:

“Very well, then. If you will give such very little nibbles of your time, you must give me more of them. Will you come out again—to the theater—off in the motor—anywhere?”

Lena could hardly speak, but she smiled up her thanks.

“Oh, Mr. Percival!” she said.

As he walked away after seeing her home, he felt himself irritated with the other women, the women to whom ease and pleasure are a matter of course.

So they fell into the way of making little expeditions together, and Dick no longer joked with Ellery about this delectable morsel of pinkness, but kept his growing intimacy to himself. This dell by the way, into which he had strayed by accident, was becoming more fascinating than the crammed highway with its buzzing life.

July and August and September passed and, in spite of her reserve, Dick felt that he was coming to know little Lena well. He had told her all about himself, his mother, his three-cornered intimacy with Norris and Madeline, his plans for his own future, and to all she listened, sometimes with a dreamy far-off look in the big eyes, sometimes with a swift smile of sympathy, in spite of the fact that he and his point of view were often puzzling to her. And he brought dainties and flowers to the dingy room.

Lena, on her side, thoroughly enjoyed some phases of her acquaintance with Mr. Percival. Apart from all other considerations, it was a real pleasure to prove herself the actress she knew she was. She pretended, when she was with him, that she was a wholly different kind of person. It was fun to do it well and convincingly and deliberately. It was exhilarating.

But deeper, far deeper than her histrionic satisfaction lay the hope that Dick Percival might be the key to some other kind of life than that she led; and as the months went by, this hidden intimacy, delicious to him because of its very remoteness, began to irritate her. Was he ashamed of her? Was he playing with her? Privately she found Prince Charming, unless he meant something more than a half-hour now and again, something of a bore. Of what pleasure could it be to her that he was rich and happy and full of plans and in touch with all that was delightful, if he gave none of this to her?

One evening she seemed listless as she sat enduring an account of a garden party he had been to the day before. He had thought it might amuse her, but it evidently didn’t.

“I’m always telling you of my affairs,” he said half querulously. “Why don’t you give me your experiences?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said dully. “You’ve had so many interesting things happen, and you expect ever so many more lovely things to come, but I’ve always been pinched, and I shall have to keep on pinching for ever, I guess.”

“Nonsense!” Dick answered impulsively. “The future is sure to bring you better things.”

She looked down a moment, and Dick had an impression that she was holding back tears. At any rate, when she lifted her head again, her face wore a cold little stare that he had never seen before, and that seemed to hold him at arm’s length.

“I’m quite alone with the people I have to live among,” she said. “I’m not like them, and I don’t care for them.”

“Am I one of your kind?” Dick asked. He reviled himself the next moment for having said so much, but Lena seemed to draw no inferences, though her color heightened a little as she answered:

“Oh, you! There’s only one of you, unfortunately. You are a little oasis in my desert. I’m very grateful for you, but—”

Lena had said such things before. Dick began to revolve plans for a larger kindness, and, in his slow masculine intellect, fancied that it was all his own idea to try and bring this small person into contact with those who would appreciate her and with whom she could be happy,—for of course Lena herself was quite submissive to her lot.

To Dick’s friends this long summer dawdled itself away much as the previous one had done. There were the same week-ends at the lake, with Dick more full of vivacity than ever, Ellery growing more certain of himself, Madeline rounding slowly out of girlhood into womanhood. Yet there was a difference. Half a dozen Sundays, when Percival was too busy, Ellery, half-irritated with his friend, half-exultant in his desertion, spent the quiet afternoons à deux with Madeline.

It seemed to Norris that some indefinable change was coming over Dick. At times he was vivid, even fantastic, and again he lapsed into erratic silences out of which he came at new and unexpected points. He developed ideas that appeared to his friend not quite in keeping with the sterling Dick of old. He was less sensitive, so thought Ellery, in his code of honor as he saw more and more of the crooked ways of men. Once Norris met him walking with one of the cheaper aldermen, and he wore a duplicate—in gilt—of the alderman’s walk and swagger. He talked politics and reform, but with less emphasis on his ideals and more on the game, which seemed to mean the fun of catching the rascals red-handed and turning them out.

Madeline, as Ellery studied her, was unaware of any change either in Dick himself or in his attitude toward her. It was like her to be above suspicions or small jealousies.

So summer slipped into October, and there came a month of lovely days. Winter, after a feint, slunk into hiding again, and the only result of his excursion was a more splendid red on the maples, a more glowing russet on the oaks. Indian summer reigned in his stead, flinging broadcast her gorgeous colors and her melting mellowness. That men might not surfeit of her sweets, she tempered her daytime prodigality of heat by nights of frost. People were coming back to town, a few, very few, in velvet gowns, but mostly in rags and anxious about their autumn wardrobes; and yet these were days to make one long, as one does in spring, for the smell of the good brown earth and the sniff of untainted country air. The atmosphere was full of glowing warmth that penetrated to the heart and made every face on the street reflect some of its delight; for autumn with her thousand charms and witcheries was proving that she died, not from gray old age, but in the fullness of her prime.

Madeline Elton, therefore, wished herself back again with the fallen maple leaves and the pines that held their own; and Mrs. Lenox was fitting temptation to desire as the two hobnobbed over cups of tea in easy friendliness. When Dick Percival appeared, Mrs. Lenox saw the way to make her bait irresistible.

“Dick,” she cried, “just the man! Don’t you pine for sunshine in your nostrils instead of city smoke? Doesn’t the thought of winter coming, cold and long, make you appreciate these last heavenly gleams? Do you remember what a delicious week you and Mr. Norris and Madeline spent with me a year ago?”

“Yes, to everything,” said Dick. “All of which means—what? No cream, please, Madeline.”

“All of which means,” answered the lady, “that Mr. Lenox and I are wise in our generation and do not fly to the city when the first birds go south; that I want Madeline to come and pay me a visit; that, as a kind of sugar-plum, a chromo, if you please, to induce her to buy my wares, I propose that you and Mr. Norris should join us on the Sunday of next week. What do you say?”

“May the Lord prosper you, and I’ll do my part as an attraction,” Dick replied heartily. “But I choose to be a sugar-plum rather than a chromo, especially if Madeline is going to eat me.”

“I didn’t need any additional inducement, Mrs. Lenox,” said Madeline. “Yourselves and all out-doors are surely sufficient. It will be good to get away from the grime. Now what bee have you in your bonnet, Dick?” For a new look had come into his face as she spoke.

Percival had been glancing around the cheerful comfortable room whose very books and pictures suggested peace of mind. It seemed to him that he looked with Lena’s longing eyes rather than with his own, familiar with these surroundings. He was thinking how little his small courtesies counted, and how much these women could do if they chose. Why shouldn’t he be bold? Madeline and Mrs. Lenox were simple-hearted enough to take his plea at its true value, and not misunderstand his motives. They would be interested in Lena in exactly the same way he was. He smiled at Madeline’s serenely inquiring face.

“Well, Dick?” she asked again.

“I was wondering whether I dared to suggest a little act of human kindliness to you two. You women are so much more ready to do such things than men are, but we are more apt to run up against the cases where it is needed. There’s a pathetic little girl doing some hack work for the Star. Norris knows her. She’s just one of those delicate creatures that ought to live in the sheltered corner of a garden, and she’s out on a bleak prairie. She’s about as much like the people she has to associate with as an old-fashioned single rose is like a cabbage. Even her mother, who is the only relative she has, is nothing but a fretful porcupine of a woman. I’ve been to see them a few times and the situation seems to me almost intolerable. If ever a girl needed a friend or two, it’s she—not for charity, you understand, but just for real contact with people of her own kind. Now a man’s not much use in such circumstances, is he? But naturally I think you are about the best kind of a friend in the world, so I came up this afternoon partly to see if you wouldn’t give her a hand.”

“It sounds as though it might be more of a pleasure than a painful duty.”

“So it would. You’d take to her, I know,” the young man went on eagerly. Mrs. Lenox watched him in somewhat irritated amusement. “She hasn’t your brains, of course, Madeline, but she has such charm, such simplicity and freshness, that you can’t help liking her. And she grubs away at perfectly uncongenial work, and lives with this fusty old mother in a fusty little lodging-house. It makes me sick to think of such daily crucifixion. I’ve no business to say it, I know; but when you spoke about a week at the lake, I couldn’t help thinking what such a thing would mean to her. She’d think herself in Paradise.”

“I suppose, Dick, that this is your adroit and tactful way of suggesting that I should ask her,” Mrs. Lenox said, laughing.

And Madeline, who, if Dick had proposed that Mrs. Lenox should turn her very charming summer home into an orphan asylum, would have considered that the proposition, as coming from him, was entitled to consideration, put in:

“I think it would be a lovely thing to do, Vera.”

“And we should probably let ourselves in for a frightful bore.”

“And you might entertain an angel unawares,” said Dick.

Mrs. Lenox knit her brows and meditated. She didn’t quite like Dick’s championship of this unknown girl, nor did she trust to his judgment; but, like a wise woman, she wanted to know what was the thing that had attracted him, and was big enough in heart to be willing to do a good turn wherever she could.

“This is the oracle of the Pythia,” she said at last. “We will not commit ourselves to anything at the behest of Richard Percival. On my way to the station, now, in fact, Madeline and I will go to see this rose among cabbages. We will introduce ourselves as your friends, Dick. If we think you are a mere deluded male thing, there the matter ends. If we, too, are carried away by enthusiasm, we will invite her on the spur of the moment, and Mr. Lenox, who, like most married men, is a connoisseur in pretty girls, can talk to her. Will this suit you, Dick?”

“Excellently,” said Dick, “I know the result.”

“Then you’ll come next Saturday? Madeline is coming day after to-morrow and I’ll write to Mr. Norris. Heaven send these days of sun continue. Now if we are to pay this call, and I am to catch my train, we must be off.”

Miss Quincy, having quarreled with her mother over her extravagance in buying a feather boa with the proceeds of her last small check, was seated by the window, industriously concocting a new hat. The Swedish “girl”, whose unfortunate fate it was to minister to the wants of Mrs. Olberg’s lodgers, gave a kind of defiant pound on the door, opened it and thrust in a disheveled blond head, followed by a hand puckered from the dish-water.

“Haar’s cards, Miss Quincy,” she said, “Dar’s twa ladies down staars.”

She dropped the cards on the floor and disappeared. Lena, in great curiosity, picked them up and read aloud:

“‘Mrs. Francis Lenox; Miss Elton.’”

“For the land’s sake! Who air they?” asked her mother.

“Two of the biggest swells in town.”

“Well, what on earth do they want here? We ain’t very swell.”

“Perhaps they want me to report some party or something,” said Lena.

She was losing no time in giving her hair one or two becoming jerks and going through a series of wriggles meant to impart grace and style to her costume.

“Perhaps they want to give you a million dollars,” said Mrs. Quincy sarcastically.

Lena, with heart burning with mingled shame at her own shabby surroundings, curiosity at their errand, and awe for the mighty names, entered the little parlor which gave the impression of never having been cleaned since it was born with its cheap worn plush furniture, its crayon portraits and its two vases of gaudy blue and gold. She faced the two ladies seated on the impossible chairs. Lena was almost as startling an apparition in that room as was Ram Juna’s rose in the dusty phial—whether a miracle or a clever trick. She looked so untouched by any vulgarity in her surroundings, so fresh and true, so instinct with virgin dignity, that the eyes that met her own were filled with the tribute of surprise; and she exulted in some hidden corner of her soul.

In the half-hour that they spent together she measured her new acquaintances carefully.

“And these are women of the world!” she said to herself. “Why, they’re boobies. I could do them up any time.”

For Lena did not know that women of this type are the most protected creatures on the face of the earth. The knowledge of good is given them, but not the knowledge of evil.

So she told them all about herself, which was what they seemed to want to hear, and when they went away Madeline said:

“I wonder if there are many such born to blush unseen. What an exquisite little tragedy she is!”

And Mrs. Lenox answered: “U—u—m! Well, I’ve asked her, haven’t I? I think the microbe of Dick’s impulsiveness must have got into me.”

Lena stood back in the shadow of the room to watch her departing guests. Then she ran up stairs with light steps, ruffling her plumes like a cocky little lady-wren as she went back to the dreariness where Mrs. Quincy sat rocking her inevitable creaking chair.

“Well!” asked her mother after a pause, a pause just long enough, the daughter knew, to fill her with irritable curiosity.

“Well,” Lena answered smartly, “and what do you think? They came to call, if you please, because Mr. Percival asked them to; and they were sweet as honey. And Mrs. Lenox asked me to spend a whole week at her country place.”

“For the land sake!”

“I guess,” Lena went on with complacence, “Mr. Percival must have said something pretty nice.”

Her mother stared at her speechless, and it was such an unusual thing for Mrs. Quincy to be struck dumb that Lena was correspondingly elated as she rattled on.

“Such dresses! I’d give anything to have such clothes and wear them with that kind of an every-day, don’t-care air. My, but Mrs. Lenox is a stunner! But the Lenoxes are just rolling in money; and they say Mr. Lenox hadn’t a red cent when she married him and gave him his start. It’s lucky I have another check coming from the Star. I’ll need more things than ever it will buy to go out there. I must begin to get ready right away.”

The mention of expenditure brought Mrs. Quincy back to her normal state of mind, and she resumed her rocking. Lena’s means and extremes in shopping were her standard grievance.

“I might know that ’ud be the next thing. Of course you’ll be spending every penny you can rake and scrape on clothes, so’s to look fine for your new fine friends. It’s no matter about me. I can go without a decent rag to my back, so long as you’ve got feathers and flummery.”

“Well, I earned the money. I don’t see why I shouldn’t spend it. I’m not robbing you,” said Lena sulkily.

“You might contribute a mite to your own board.”

“I’ll save you my board for a week,” snapped the girl.

Mrs. Quincy changed her tack. “And leave me shut up in town,” she resumed. “I should think you’d think twice, Lena, before you went off gallivantin’ and left your poor old mother here alone. Nobody seems to think I need any pleasure.”

“I’ll write and ask Mrs. Lenox if she won’t take you instead of me.”

“Take me! I should think not! I wouldn’t be hired to leave my own place and go off like a charity case among a lot of rich people who looked down on me because I was poor. I’ve got too much self-respect to jump at an invitation, like a pickerel at a frog. But there! You never think twice about things.”

“Suppose I did refuse. You’d fly out at me for not making the most of my chances,” said poor Lena, on the verge of tears.

Mrs. Quincy was temporarily silenced by the truth of this reply, and Lena pursued her advantage.

“Come now, mother, do you want me to get out of it?”

“Oh, I suppose you’ll have to go, or I won’t have no peace to my life,” Mrs. Quincy grudgingly responded.

“Yes, you shall. If you say so, I’ll give it up now and never say another word about it.”

“And act injured to death,” said her mother. “No, you go!”

“After you’ve done everything you can to spoil it for me,” answered Lena, not half realizing how well she spoke the truth, and how both by inheritance and by precept her mother had trailed the serpent over her life. To Lena, fortune and misfortune were still things of outward import, and almost synonymous with possession and non-possession. Yet, in spite of Mrs. Quincy’s dour looks, Lena found herself singing as she moved swiftly about the room. Spontaneous joy was a rare thing with her. The first peep into the delectable world was entrancing.

CHAPTER X

BITTER-SWEET

It was all charming, if a little strange—the friendliness of Miss Elton when Lena met her at the station, the smart trap and groom that met them at the end of their short journey, the very way in which Miss Elton took possession of those awe-inspiring objects, and the respectful curiosity of the loungers at the country station. As she stepped into the carriage, Lena caught a glimpse of a cart-horse with so many ribs as to suggest that the female of his species had yet to be created. He looked so like her mother, that he gave her a spasm of anguish which she tried to forget, as they were whirled down the road with its fringe of straight-limbed trees. Never had the world looked more lovely. Her spirits were lifted up.

Mrs. Lenox met them at the door with hospitable effusiveness, but Lena’s crucifixion began from that moment.

“The man will carry your bag up for you,” said Mrs. Lenox.

As Olaf obediently stepped forward, Lena flushed and thought: “They both noticed that it was only imitation leather.”

Mrs. Lenox walked up stairs with them, chattering gaily with Madeline, and Lena followed in embarrassed silence at the charming freshness and daintiness of everything about her.

“I’ve put you and Miss Elton in adjoining rooms,” said Mrs. Lenox, smiling kindly at her, “so that you needn’t feel remote and lonely on your first visit here.”

The man put down the bag and disappeared, and a trim maid came forward to help Lena off with her coat which, with a sudden pang, she wished were lined with satin instead of sateen.

“Sall Ay unpack you bag?” said the little maid politely.

“No, thank you. I prefer to do it myself,” said Lena desperately. It was more than she could endure to have a strange girl spying out the nakedness of the land. Yet when the little maid said, “Vary well, ma’am,” and walked into the next room, Lena wondered if she had made a mistake. She heard Miss Elton’s cheerful address of the appalling personage with the puffed up bit of hair and the saucy cap.

“How do you do, Sophie?”

“Good day, mees. As thar anything Ay can do for you?”

“I fancy my dress would be better for a good brushing after the dusty train, and the gown I want is in the top tray of the little trunk, Sophie.”

The door closed and Lena wondered in terror what of her small store of finery she ought to put on, and when she ought to go down stairs. She solved the first question to the best of her ability and sat down on the edge of a very clean beflowered chair in despair about the other, when there came voices in the hall, and Madeline tapped on her door, and called:

“Don’t you want to come out and see the baby?”

Now Lena detested babies as sticky and order-destroying vermin, but in relief she said: “A baby? Oh, how lovely!”

“Come,” said Mrs. Lenox. “The proper study of womanhood is baby.” Lena went out to find a very small person in a very tottering condition, steered up and down the hall by another be-capped maid who was holding tight to his rear petticoats, while Mrs. Lenox trotted by his side, pulling a woolly lamb that baa’d with enchanting precision, and allowing her skirts to be worried by a small puppy, whose business in life was to bite anything hard that lay on the floor or that wiggled. Mrs. Lenox and Miss Elton sat down on the floor to towsle and to be towsled amid laughter and hair-pulling and frantic yelps from the puppy, while Lena looked on and said: “Isn’t he cunning?” and wondered whether she ought to sit on the floor or not. She wondered if this were indeed the millionaire Mrs. Lenox of whom she read with awe from the “In the swing” column as being present at such and such “society functions”, thus and thus attired.

Somehow Mrs. Lenox, seated on the floor, with her hair over one eye, disconcerted Lena more than any amount of grandeur would have done. She felt as one might who should catch the Venus of Melos cutting capers. Then the redoubtable lady jumped up, tucked in a few hair-pins, gave a final shake to her small son and said:

“I dressed little Frank myself this afternoon. Don’t you think I did a good job? Dressing a baby combines all the pleasures of the chase with the requirements of the exact sciences, Miss Quincy. Now let’s go down and have some tea before big Frank gets home. I think we’ve time for a little friendly chat.”

This time Lena followed with greater sense of security. She knew her dress was pretty and becoming, though inexpensive; and as for conversation, that to Lena’s mind meant clothes and society, with which she felt a journalistic familiarity.

“Perhaps you prefer cream in your tea?” said Mrs. Lenox, with hand poised over the little table.

“No, thank you, I like lemon,” answered Lena, who had never tasted it before and now thought it very nasty indeed. Then she wondered why she had told such a small useless lie.

But it was comfortable to be in a big lovely room with a pile of logs blazing in a great fireplace, and soft lamps shedding a glow rather than making spots of light. She wished she had, like Madeline, picked out a very easy chair instead of the stiff one she had selected, but she felt too shy to move until Mrs. Lenox suggested it, and then she was embarrassed because she was embarrassed. She wondered if she should ever be able to do things like these women, without thinking of what she was doing.

Madeline was idly turning the pages of a magazine and now she held it up.

“Look at these illustrations. Aren’t they stunning?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Lenox. “I’m growing tired of that kind of thing. It isn’t art; it’s a fad. The trouble with most of this modern work is that it is too smart and fashionable. The clothes are more important than the people.”

“Quite a contrast to ancient art, where the people were everything and the clothes nothing,” Madeline retorted. “After all, I rather like the modern way. The old Greeks were not a bit more real people. They were nothing but types.”

“And very decapitated and de-legged types,” said Mrs. Lenox with a laugh. “And dirty, too—like the Sleeping Beauty. Do you know, it gives me the shivers to think of the Sleeping Beauty, lying there for ages, with dust and cobwebs accumulating on her. I’m sure I hope the prince gave her a thorough dusting before he kissed her.”

“You are horribly realistic, Vera—a person with no imagination.”

“I think I have just shown a truly vivid imagination.”

“It is the business of imagination to build up a world of loveliness and order.”

“I don’t agree with you. I think it is the business of imagination to project things as they really are. I don’t want to slip out from under reality and see only beauty. Beware, Madeline, or you will degenerate into a mere optimist.”

“Isn’t it funny that if your opponent can call you an optimist, he feels that he has delivered a knock-down blow to all your arguments?” Mrs. Lenox suddenly pulled herself together and turned toward Lena, who sat silently drinking her tea and taking no part in the conversation.

“Did you tell me that your mother is an invalid, Miss Quincy?”

“Not exactly; but she can’t go about much. It seems to play her out to walk.”

“It must be very hard on her to stay in the house all the time. I wonder if I might take her to drive with me once in a while?” A scarlet flush passed over Lena’s face at the very idea of her mother’s querulous vulgarity being displayed to this woman, and Mrs. Lenox could not help seeing her embarrassment.

A little wave of pity swept over the older woman. It must be a cruel fate to be ashamed of one’s surroundings. Mrs. Lenox herself was one of those serious-minded persons who regard their opportunities as responsibilities. She waged constant warfare with the dominion of externals, and believed with all her heart that the life was more than raiment; but a momentary doubt assailed her as to whether, after all, it might not be easier to conquer things when one owned them, rather than when one had to do without them. It has generally been Dives who is represented as enslaved by the goods of this world. Perhaps Lazarus, if his heart is absorbed in sordid longing for what others have and he has not, stands just as poor a chance of the kingdom of Heaven.

What could she do to make Miss Quincy feel at ease? The girl certainly had brains and character. Dick had told them of her brave bearing of burdens. This stiff back and this silence were but the tribute of shyness to new surroundings. So ran Mrs. Lenox’s swift thoughts and she set herself to make Lena talk about the things with which she was familiar, to link her past to this present.

Evidently the same thought was flitting through Madeline’s brain, for before Mrs. Lenox spoke she began:

“Do you know, Miss Quincy, I have felt a little envy of you ever since Dick first told us about you.”

“Envy! Of me?” Lena exclaimed, moved to genuine surprise.

“Yes,” Madeline went on, leaning forward, eager to explain herself. “You see, I seem to have had a good deal of training, which looks as though it should prepare me to do something, and then—then I don’t do anything. It makes me feel flat and unprofitable. I’d like to feel like you every night—as though I’d really accomplished a thing or two.”

“Isn’t it like Madeline to try to make the girl feel the dignity of drudgery!” Mrs. Lenox said to herself.

“The stuck-up thing!” thought Lena; “rubbing it into me that she does not have to work for her living.”

She was tempted to make a sharp answer, but remembered her diplomacy and held it in.

“Work isn’t always so pleasant when you’re in it,” she said.

“Everything is apt to look rough around the edges until you hold it off and get a view of it as a whole,” Mrs. Lenox put in. “Even love—sometimes. But I think that, next to love, work is about the best thing in life.”

“Oh, that depends,” Madeline cried. “When I read papers at clubs, people talk about my ‘work’, but nobody thinks that it is worth while. I’d like to earn a dollar, just as a guaranty that some one thought the thing I did was worth it.”

“Gracious!” Lena exclaimed in genuine surprise. “Do you really feel that way about earning money?”

“Don’t you?” Madeline asked in return; and each looked at the other uncomprehendingly.

“No, I don’t,” Lena burst out sullenly, but forgetting to be shy. “I feel degraded by every dirty five-dollar bill I get by being a slavey. People make you feel that way. You get it rubbed into you every day.”

“No, no,” Mrs Lenox cried, remorseful now that their talk had drifted into such intimate personalities. “I am sure, Miss Quincy, nobody feels that way about a woman that works, except, perhaps, people whose opinion you can well afford to despise.” This was a shaft that struck so near home that Lena could hardly hold back the tears. “I am sure I think a thousand times more of a woman who does her honest share than I do of the helpless ones who lie down on somebody else and whine,” Mrs. Lenox went on.

Madeline was inwardly bemoaning her own lack of tact. She really wanted to make a friend of this girl, because Dick had asked her to, and here, at the very beginning, she had stumbled, and all that was meant to show her regard and sympathy but served to make a gulf between them.

Mrs. Lenox darted a look at her and sprang suddenly to her feet.

“Oh, here’s Frank,” she exclaimed with an air of relief. “Come in, boy, and have some tea and fire. It was good of you to come so bright and early.”

“Earlier than bright, I’m afraid,” he said.

Lena looked with interest toward the door. Frank Lenox was great in St. Etienne, first because he was the son-in-law of old Nicholas Windsor, a potentate of the first local magnitude, and second, because he was pushing to still greater success the enterprises that the elder man had begun. So people talked about him in the street-cars by his first name. Lena felt that it was a privilege to look at him, big, clean, with that mingling of alertness with power which is the characteristic of the American business man. It was an experience of absorbing interest to see the half underhand caress he gave his wife in passing, and to find herself actually shaking hands with him. He seemed imposing and friendly and yet quite like other people, as he looked around for a capacious chair and his wife handed him a cup of tea. She was conscious that he looked at her with great interest. She recognized the expression in masculine eyes and it soothed her ruffled spirit. It was the constant affirmation of her beauty, a beauty which had in it something dream-like that made men’s eyes dream. After all, she could always get along with men.

“If you’d know what brought me home before my time, it was not your charms, my dear, but a mad desire to get away from Harris, who cornered me and opened up the negro question. I saw nothing for it but to take to the woods.”

“It makes my traditional abolition blood boil to see how public opinion seems to be settling down and dallying with heresy and injustice again,” Madeline exclaimed. She looked flushed and vigorous, and Lena stared at her and wondered how she could care for such things. Was it pure affectation?

“Oh, you’re young, my dear,” said Mrs. Lenox laughingly. “You must hold all your opinions violently. And you haven’t been South. Things can’t help looking different down there.”

“Vera!” cried Miss Elton so explosively that Lena sat up straighter than ever, “you’re not really a renegade yourself, are you?” and she spoke as though her life depended on the answer.

“Certainly not,” Mrs. Lenox answered. “But I’m growing tolerant toward the poor old world as it is. I’m willing to let it grow slowly instead of insisting that it shall all be immediately as good and wise as I am. I’m learning to respect other people’s point of view and to suspect that my mind is not such an ingenious mechanism as I once supposed it to be.”

“Moreover, since she has married, she has contracted a habit of taking the opposite point of view,” said her husband.

“Oh, that’s one of the jokes that has successfully withstood the ravages of time,” said Mrs. Lenox scornfully.

“Very well, then, I’ll say that you are getting on toward middle life and have had your enthusiasms corrupted by a worldly-wise father and husband. But I dare say that Miss Quincy, being young, is quite as explosive as you are, Madeline. So we shall be two against two.”

He looked with a challenge toward the girl, and perhaps Lena might have managed the expected saucy answer if she had not suddenly remembered that her shoes were shabby and she had meant to keep them hidden under her skirts. This memory destroyed her new-found equilibrium, so she blurted out a weak, “I really don’t know anything about it,” and then blushed hotly at her own awkwardness.

“It’s a stupid subject, anyway,” said Mr. Lenox. “I fled from town to avoid it. Let’s not talk about negroes.”

“Tell us what has happened in the great world,” said Mrs. Lenox, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and chin in hands.

“Another Jap victory,” he said. “And I’ll take a second one of those little cakes please, if Miss Quincy will leave one for me. It cuts me to the heart to see how the young girls of our generation stuff on little cakes. If they’d only take example by these same Japanese, who develop strategy and patriotism on rice, cherry blossoms and gymnastics, there’d be some hopes for us as a people.”

He glanced again at Lena in a very amiable manner, as though he expected her to be saucy in return, but she blushed with mystification and mortification. She had felt doubtful as to whether she ought to take another of the little cakes, but they were very good, and she was young enough to love goodies, without many chances at anything so delectable as these particular bits. And now to be detected and made fun of! She began to question if she should be able to get along with these men, after all.

“Thank you,” he went on after a pause. “And now that I’m comforted with cake, another cup of tea, Vera; and then, if you would complete my happiness, just give me a posy out of that bouquet for my buttonhole.”

His wife rose, pulled a flower from a vase and pinned it to his coat.

“Here’s mignonette! That’s for dividends,” she said, and she put her fingers in his hair and gave his head a little shake.

“Don’t infringe on my head,—it’s patented,” he said. “Now go and sit down, and I will tell you something really exciting as well as instructive. I know about it because I have the privilege of helping the good work with a few dollars. Professor Gregory has dug up two or three hundred old manuscripts somewhere near Thebes, and he cables that they belong to the first century after Christ, that he expects them to illuminate most of the dark recesses of the time, and that I am privileged to share the glory by making an ample contribution. Doesn’t that stir your young blood? I never hear of these things without a passionate desire to go to some respectably aged land and dig and dig and dig. It’s a choice between doing so and making things in this very new land for some other fellow to dig up six thousand years from now. Which would you choose, Miss Quincy?”

Lena was extraordinarily pretty, and he had a theory that pretty girls were made to be talked to. Lena thought so too, yet all she said was, “I should think the digging would be very dirty work, though.”

He glanced at her swiftly, and, though there was nothing unfriendly in the look, she felt an uncomfortable shiver. She fell into a miserable silence which she hardly broke when the others addressed her with a deliberate question or made some manifest effort to include her in topics introduced for her benefit. These attempts were only too apparent to her and rasped her soul the more. These people had such a perplexing way of saying whatever came into their heads. They were serious and frivolous at unexpected places. They were not at all “elegant”; they were natural, but their naturalness was not of Lena’s kind. Mr. Lenox rose and smiled at his wife.

“I think I must go and have a look at my latest son,” he said. “He is a very interesting person. At present he seems to be composed of two simple but diverse elements, a stomach and a sense of humor.” At the door he paused again and said, “Have you seen our new coat of arms, Madeline?—two kids rambunctious?”

He went away and sounds of manifest hilarity floated down the stairs. And then dinner was announced, and he looked so good-tempered when he returned and gave Lena his arm that her spirits were again lifted up. She had never before been escorted to a meal as though it were an affair of ceremony.

“I met an old fellow to-day,” her host began with persistent attempt to draw her out, “that told me that for two years he had dined on bread and milk. And then I felt that I was a favorite of fortune to be able fearlessly to storm the dining-room. Happy the appendix that has no history.”

Lena giggled helplessly. Was it amusement that she saw in Mr. Lenox’s eyes as he unfolded his napkin and surveyed her?

“It’s an awesome thing, isn’t it, to be living in a world darkened on one side by the servant question and on the other by the appendix, like Scylla and Charybdis?”

She found herself sitting down to face the mysteries of a meal whose type was different from any hitherto met in her brief experience of life. Her internal summing up was, “Of course I can’t make any impression on Mr. Lenox. He likes the other kind of woman.”

She looked at Mrs. Lenox, a woman of restraint and dark hair and straight lines, and contrasted her with herself, a thing of curves and sunshine colors. She did not know that a man never cares for a type of woman, but only for woman in the concrete. Poor little Lena! When the evening was over and she found herself at last in her too-splendid bedroom, she put arms and head down on the dressing-table and sobbed. These people were simple where she was complicated and complicated where she was simple. It was all uncomfortable and different. She thought of Jim Nolan’s unfrilled conversation, of his clumsy, rather inane compliments, of his primitive amœba-like type of humor. She saw the whole course of her life of mean shifts and wranglings with her mother; and though its moral niggardliness was unappreciated, its physical meagerness sickened her in contrast to the ease and beauty of these newer scenes. She must climb out of that life, somehow, by hook or crook; if this were the alternative, she must grow to its likeness, no matter how the birth-pangs hurt. She would face it. She would even rejoice in the opportunity to study these women and mold herself to their outward form of bien aise. She would—she would. Faint and far-away voices came to her, and she wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Lenox were discussing her and laughing, as she would do in their place, at her gaucheries. The meaner you are yourself, the easier it is to believe in the meanness of others. It was the most godlike of men who taught the godliness of all men. Lena could not imagine that these people could either like or respect her unless she were molded after their pattern and had as much as they had.

And Miss Elton! She hated Miss Elton for that irritating calmness, for that easy appropriation of the good things of life. She hated with a hate that tingled her spine and shook her small body. The tragedy of littleness made her grit her teeth as she thought of the unconscious girl now going to bed in the next room.

“I’ll get even with her somehow,” was Miss Lena’s resolve. “Just let me get the hang of things a little, and I’ll show her!” Miss Quincy was conscious that though she as yet lacked knowledge of their world, she had the advantage of the inheritance of guile.

But things! things! things! Lena thought a little of the irony of it—that all her life she had pined to be set in luxury, and yet now and here the very rugs and chairs and soft lights, the pictures of unrecognized subjects, the unfamiliar delicacies before her at the table, all seemed to loom up and crush her into insignificance by their importance and expensiveness. They were her masters still.

But it was not Lena’s way to waste her time on abstractions. While she sat and watched her fire crumble away into ashes, she was chiefly occupied with the concrete, and there entered into her soul and took possession of its empty chambers and began to mold her to her own purposes the demon of social ambition, which is not the desire to do or to be, but rather the longing to appear to be and to seem to do—to take the chaff and leave the wheat.

Mastered by this powerful spirit, Lena actually did make great strides in the next few days. She learned to lounge quite comfortably, to pretend with verisimilitude, even to chatter a little, helped chiefly by a certain persistent light-weight on the part of Mr. Lenox; but the life was hard and the rewards meager. All the time she suspected Miss Elton and Mrs. Lenox of despising her, because she had so much less than they. Their kindliness was but an added insult.

CHAPTER XI

POLITICS AND PLAY

It was with joy that Lena stood, on Saturday night, with Mrs. Lenox and Miss Elton on the veranda, and hailed the advent of a large red automobile, which disgorged, besides Mr. Lenox, two dress-suit cases and two young men. Mr. Percival had liked her in her natural state and with him she would not need to “put on style”. He was to her the shadow of a great rock in a desperately thirsty land. The only kind of pretense that he demanded was that she should be a dear innocent little girl, and that rôle came easily. She smiled and blushed and saw that there was a difference in his eyes when he greeted her from the look he bent on the other two ladies. It was balm to her spirit to think that this man, who admired her, was himself admired by the people whom she suspected of despising her; and that they did admire him was evident. They were hardly seated at dinner before Mrs. Lenox began:

“Dick, I have just been reading your last night’s speech at the Municipal Club and I’m quite effervescing with it. I want to put you up on a pedestal and call the attention of Mr. Frank Lenox to you. He is one of the innumerable excellent gentlemen, over the length and breadth of the land, who are so busy running everything else that they let city politics go to the place that I’m not allowed to mention. It does my heart good to see you taking it up in earnest.”

“It was a good speech, all right. I’ve read it, too,” said Mr. Lenox. “And I’m all the wretch my wife calls me. I wish I’d heard you in your frenzy, Percival, though I have less faith in speeches and principles than she has. Reform is only a seed, you know, and most seeds never come to maturity or bear fruit. So most people justly doubt the reformer.”

“Do you think we’re thin sound-waves who do nothing but vibrate?” said Dick.

“Not at all; but I mean there are no such things in the world as abstractions. There are only men and women. Thoughts don’t seethe; men and women seethe. Principles don’t reform or corrupt; men and women do the reforming and corrupting. If you want to do things, don’t begin by making the air resound with denunciations of wickedness; but make people believe in you and despise the other fellow. When they like you they’ll begin to think about your ideas.”

“I don’t know any better way to make people believe in me than to stand up for what I think to be right,” said Dick sharply.

“Stand up all you like,” Lenox answered. “But the trouble with most good people is that they are contented to stand up. To arrive anywhere you’ve got to get right down and scrap.”

“Oh, I’m only trying my muscle a bit,” Dick answered laughingly. “I do not intend to do much generalizing except in the way of advertisement. I’m planning to put a spoke in the wheels of a few particular wrongs.”

“That’s what I hope. It’s easier to fulminate than to fight.”

“Then you’ll be glad to know that Dick has already been answerable for galvanizing the Municipal Club into new life,” Ellery put in. “It has been, as you know, a delightfully scholarly affair, any of whose members were quite capable of writing a text-book on civics; but Dick has roped in a lot of new men and stirred up the old ones.”

“To what end?”

“Well, for two things; we have appointed committees to keep close tab on all of the proceedings of the council—to attend every meeting—and others to work up the ward organizations so that we shall be prepared to work intelligently and together by the next election. We want to get some clean business man, who is well known, to stand for mayor. There’s a chance for you, Lenox.”

Lenox laughed. “You’ve caught me there, haven’t you? I am condemned for being still in the stage where I am content to mention things with indignation. However, if you have really gone so far, I’m more than willing to trail after you. I’ll at least back you with a few facts, such as every business man knows, and I’m good for a substantial contribution toward any campaign you may undertake. And what I do there are others who will do, too.”

“I’ll not forget your promise,” said Dick.

As usual, when men talk public affairs, the women had been content to listen, but Madeline’s temperament was too strong for her restraint.

“It’s all very well for you to put your hand in your pocket, Mr. Lenox,” she cried, “but I don’t want to hear you trying to undermine Dick’s idealism. If he does not have the comfort of some purpose higher than the daily fight, how can he endure it? Don’t persuade him to run through life on all fours and never look at the stars.”

Mr. Lenox looked at her warmly.

“Thank the Lord for you women,” he said. “You do not forget that there are stars and sky above the city smoke. If it were not for you and your kind, I’m afraid most of the world would be tied to the ground like serfs.”

“Oh, I fancy nature has liberated a few of you, and I am glad to believe that Dick is among the free,” she said.

She sat beside Dick, but she turned from him and spoke to Mr. Lenox. When Percival, softened by her words and the tone of belief in which they were spoken, looked up, he saw, not her eyes, but, across the table, those of Lena, big and sympathetic. As he gazed into them he saw all of Madeline’s confidence in him, all of Madeline’s ideals, but the more spiritual, the more feminine, because they were unspoken. Lena’s eyes were eloquent even if she was silent; internally she was really resenting Madeline’s tone, which seemed to her to assume that Dick was somehow Miss Elton’s particular property. “Perhaps you needn’t be so sure, missy,” she thought.

“You look like incarnate song” Page 199

After dinner, when the three men found their way to the drawing-room, Mrs. Lenox had started Madeline on a career of song. She was already in the midst of a curious weird Roumanian thing, and Norris made straight for the piano. Lena, ethereal in pale blue, was sympathetically listening to perfection. She had lost her look of incongruity with her surroundings. The dreamy eyes and the transparent skin found their setting in her filmy gown and the rich soft light. Dick drew in his breath. He seemed never to get used to her. Naturally he found a seat near her. She was his protégée.

“Don’t you sing, Miss Quincy?” was his inevitable query.

And she replied with inward anguish, “Not at all.”

“But I’m sure you do. You look like incarnate song,” he persisted. “You’re playing modest.”

Lena cast down her eyes and said, “I am a very truthful little girl.”

“Have you had a good time here?”

Then she looked up with kindling face. “Oh, so good! You can’t know how I thank you, Mr. Percival. I know I owe it to you. I feel as though I were breathing the air I belong in, at last. It’s so different from—but you know all about my life,” said Lena brokenly. “And Mrs. Lenox is so sweet and kind, I just love her!”

“And Miss Elton?”

Lena stiffened and made no reply for an instant.

“Miss Elton is quite as clever as you men, isn’t she?” Lena asked, in quite another tone of voice.

“Infinitely more so,” said Dick cordially.

“Do you like it?” she asked in a breathless way.

“Why, yes, in Madeline,” he answered. “She isn’t a bit priggish, you know, but just naturally interested in everything good. Why? Don’t you and she get on?”

Lena gave an uneasy little twist as though she did not enjoy the question, and she sighed.

“Why, frankly, I don’t wholly. It’s my own stupid little fault, of course. I’m not clever. She’s very charming; but she gets a little tiresome to me.”

“Does she?” said Dick ponderingly.

“It’s very hateful of me to say such things about your particular friend,” said Lena contritely. “Besides, I don’t mean—what do I mean? I never thought it out. But it’s so easy to tell you everything, Mr. Percival. And I think it’s rather nice for a girl to be more silly and inconsequential part of the time.” She laughed in a gurgling little fashion.

“I believe it is,” said Dick speculatively, as he looked at her. “But Madeline’s awfully jolly, you know. I’ve had more good times with her than with any other girl I know. No nonsense about her.”

“That’s it,—no nonsense,” said Lena, and this time her laugh was not so pleasant; and Dick glanced across at Madeline with a kind of resentment. “It isn’t like Madeline to go back on a fellow that way,” he said to himself. “Of course she’s had all kinds of advantages over this poor little thing; but it’s small of her not to forget them. I trusted her to make things sweet; and for the first time she has disappointed me.” He looked at Madeline with a distinct feeling of irritation as she rose from the piano. Mr. Lenox came and absorbed Lena, whom he was teaching to answer him saucily. Lena enjoyed this process, and it had inspired her to a really clever device, namely, to say vulgar little things in a whimsical way, as though she knew better all the time but wanted to be humorous. A good many other people have had the same brilliant idea, but it was none the less original to Lena, and it saved a lot of trouble and pretense. Norris and Miss Elton were hobnobbing and laughing at the other end of the room, and Dick followed them.

“Have you been out of town, Dick?” Madeline asked as he came up. “I tried to get you over the telephone a day or two ago, and they told me you were away.”

“Yes.” He laughed exultantly as he sat down. “I ran down to the penitentiary at Easton, just to make sure that I wasn’t mistaken in a fact or two.”

“What now?” asked Norris.

“I’ve been told that Barry—the lord of St. Etienne, Madeline—is at last tired of his humble but powerful place, and intends to show himself the master that he really is by running himself for our next mayor. Now even this docile city would hardly exalt a man whom it knew to be a criminal with a record of two years in the pen,—under another name, of course.”

“Is it possible that Barry—”

“I’ve verified my facts. There is only one man in the city besides myself that knows this, and he’s Barry’s closest friend. There’ll be a jolly old sensation in the bunch, when I spring my mine.”

“If nobody knows it, how did you happen to find out?” asked Madeline impulsively.

There was just a moment’s silence, and in that instant Norris had a flash of memory. He seemed to see Dick eying a letter addressed to William Barry, Esquire. Even while he remembered, he hated himself for daring to suspect that Dick would be capable of anything really shabby or dishonorable. Yet he did suspect—nay, more—he was sure; and the pause, the look of innocent inquiry on Madeline’s face grew intolerable. If Dick would say nothing, he, Norris, must.

“We newspaper men,” he rushed in gaily, “get hold of a vast amount of information that people flatter themselves is secret.”

Percival looked at him and grinned. The girl turned slowly from her amused survey of Dick to study Ellery’s face, which showed his discomfort in its flush. If a girl so gentle could feel scorn, Ellery would have thought he detected a touch of it. Certainly there was a hint of grieved surprise as she spoke, with her eyes still fixed on Norris.

“I’m very sorry, Dick,” she said humbly. “I didn’t mean to be prying. I’ve grown so used to asking you about everything. Mr. Norris ought to get a better mask.”

She laughed lightly, but Ellery’s face grew hotter. He wondered if she suspected him of some underhand trickery, and Dick realized it, yet kept amused silence. For an instant he hated Dick, and felt a wild impulse to defend himself; but second thoughts came quickly. She loved Dick and was therefore slow to impute evil to him. Dick loved her, and if he had for once played the petty knave, it was the place of a friend to protect her against that knowledge. That had been the instinctive reason for Norris’ words, and he was not going back on them now. Yet Ellery’s brain whirled to think how swiftly and by what simple means he might have toppled her slowly-ripening friendship into the mire. Ellery’s imagination piled superlatives on every act and expression of his lady. If she looked light disapproval, it was worse than another’s scorn. And Dick—for whom he had thrown away the thing he most valued in the world—Dick exclaimed gaily:

“Don’t be suspicious, Madeline. Are all secrets disgraceful? Can’t you trust your old friends?”

“Of course I’m not suspicious,” she answered indignantly. “I only mean to beg your pardon, Dick, and I assure you again that I’m not curious, even. I asked this question as I have asked a thousand others, and that would have been the end of it——except for Mr. Norris’ face.”

She smiled as she turned away, and Dick lifted his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, “What difference does it make, anyway? What difference!” Dick didn’t care whether she despised Ellery or not—he didn’t care enough to speak an honorable word of explanation.