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ONE MAN IN HIS TIME

by

ELLEN GLASGOW

1922

"One man in his time plays many parts."

NOTE

No character in this book was drawn from any actual person past or present.

CONTENTS

[CHAPTER I. THE SHADOW]
[CHAPTER II. GIDEON VETCH]
[CHAPTER III. CORINNA OF THE OLD PRINT SHOP]
[CHAPTER IV. THE TRIBAL INSTINCT]
[CHAPTER V. MARGARET]
[CHAPTER VI. MAGIC]
[CHAPTER VII. CORINNA GOES TO WAR]
[CHAPTER VIII. THE WORLD AND PATTY]
[CHAPTER IX. SEPTEMBER ROSES]
[CHAPTER X. PATTY AND CORINNA]
[CHAPTER XI. THE OLD WALLS AND THE RISING TIDE]
[CHAPTER XII. A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS]
[CHAPTER XIII. CORINNA WONDERS]
[CHAPTER XIV. A LITTLE LIGHT ON HUMAN NATURE]
[CHAPTER XV. CORINNA OBSERVES]
[CHAPTER XVI. THE FEAR OF LIFE]
[CHAPTER XVII. MRS. GREEN]
[CHAPTER XVIII. MYSTIFICATION]
[CHAPTER XIX. THE SIXTH SENSE]
[CHAPTER XX. CORINNA FACES LIFE]
[CHAPTER XXI. DANCE MUSIC]
[CHAPTER XXII. THE NIGHT]
[CHAPTER XXIII. THE DAWN]
[CHAPTER XXIV. THE VICTORY OF GIDEON VETCH]

[BOOKS BY ELLEN GLASGOW]

ONE MAN IN HIS TIME

CHAPTER I

THE SHADOW

The winter's twilight, as thick as blown smoke, was drifting through the Capitol Square. Already the snow covered walks and the frozen fountains were in shadow; but beyond the irregular black boughs of the trees the sky was still suffused with the burning light of the sunset. Over the head of the great bronze Washington a single last gleam of sunshine shot suddenly before it vanished amid the spires and chimneys of the city, which looked as visionary and insubstantial as the glowing horizon.

Stopping midway of the road, Stephen Culpeper glanced back over the vague streets and the clearer distance, where the approaching dusk spun mauve and silver cobwebs of air. From that city, it seemed to him, a new and inscrutable force—the force of an idea—had risen within the last few months to engulf the Square and all that the Square had ever meant in his life. Though he was only twenty-six, he felt that he had watched the decay and dissolution of a hundred years. Nothing of the past remained untouched. Not the old buildings, not the old trees, not even the old memories. Clustering traditions had fled in the white blaze of electricity; the quaint brick walks, with their rich colour in the sunlight, were beginning to disappear beneath the expressionless mask of concrete. It was all changed since his father's or his grandfather's day; it was all obvious and cheap, he thought; it was all ugly and naked and undistinguished—yet the tide of the new ideas was still rising. Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he lived.

As he lifted his face to the sky, his grave young features revealed a subtle kinship to the statues beneath the mounted Washington in the drive, as if both flesh and bronze had been moulded by the dominant spirit of race. Like the heroes of the Revolution, he appeared a stranger in an age which had degraded manners and enthroned commerce; and like them also he seemed to survey the present from some inaccessible height of the past. Dignity he had in abundance, and a certain mellow, old-fashioned quality; yet, in spite of his well-favoured youth, he was singularly lacking in sympathetic appeal. Already people were beginning to say that they "admired Culpeper; but he was a bit of a prig, and they couldn't get really in touch with him." His attitude of mind, which was passive but critical, had developed the faculties of observation rather than the habits of action. As a member of the community he was indifferent and amiable, gay and ironic. Only the few who had seen his reserve break down before the rush of an uncontrollable impulse suspected that there were rich veins of feeling buried beneath his conventional surface, and that he cherished an inarticulate longing for heroic and splendid deeds. The war had left him with a nervous malady which he had never entirely overcome; and this increased both his romantic dissatisfaction with his life and his inability to make a sustained effort to change it.

The sky had faded swiftly to pale orange; the distant buildings appeared to swim toward him in the silver air; and the naked trees barred the white slopes with violet shadows. In the topmost branches of an old sycamore the thinnest fragment of a new moon hung trembling like a luminous thread. The twilight was intensely still, and the noises of the city fell with a metallic sound on his ears, as if a multitude of bells were ringing about him. While he walked on past the bald outline of the restored and enlarged Capitol, this imaginary concert grew gradually fainter, until he heard above it presently the sudden closing of a window in the Governor's mansion—as the old gray house was called.

Pausing abruptly, the young man frowned as his eyes fell on the charming Georgian front, which presided like a serene and spacious memory over the modern utilitarian purpose that was devastating the Square. Alone in its separate plot, broad, low, and hospitable, the house stood there divided and withdrawn from the restless progress and the age of concrete—a modest reminder of the centuries when men had built well because they had time, before they built, to stop and think and remember. The arrested dignity of the past seemed to the young man to hover above the old mansion within its setting of box hedges and leafless lilac shrubs and snow-laden magnolia trees. He saw the house contrasted against the crude surroundings of the improved and disfigured Square, and against the house, attended by all its stately traditions, he saw the threatening figure of Gideon Vetch. "So it has come to this," he thought resentfully, with his gaze on the doorway where a round yellow globe was shining. Ragged frost-coated branches framed the sloping roof, and the white columns of the square side porches emerged from the black crags of magnolia trees. In the centre of the circular drive, invaded by concrete, a white heron poured a stream of melting ice from a distorted throat.

The shutters were not closed at the lower windows, and the firelight flickered between the short curtains of some brownish muslin. As Stephen passed the gate on his way down the hill, a figure crossed one of the windows, and his frown deepened as he recognized, or imagined that he recognized, the shadow of Gideon Vetch.

"Gideon Vetch!" At the sound of the name the young man threw back his head and laughed softly. A Gideon Vetch was Governor of Virginia! Here also, he told himself, half humorously, half bitterly, democracy had won. Here also the destroying idea had triumphed. In sight of the bronze Washington, this Gideon Vetch, one of "the poor white trash," born in a circus tent, so people said, the demagogue of demagogues in Stephen's opinion—this Gideon Vetch had become Governor of Virginia! Yet the placid course of Stephen's life flowed on precisely as it had flowed ever since he could remember, and the dramatic hand of Washington had not fallen. It was still so recent; it had come about so unexpectedly, that people—at least the people the young man knew and esteemed—were still trying to explain how it had happened. The old party had been sleeping, of course; it had grown too confident, some said too corpulent; and it had slept on peacefully, in spite of the stirring strength of the labour leaders, in spite of the threatening coalition of the new factions, in spite even of the swift revolt against the stubborn forces of habit, of tradition, of overweening authority. His mother, he knew, held the world war responsible; but then his mother was so constituted that she was obliged to blame somebody or something for whatever happened. Yet others, he admitted, as well as his mother, held the war responsible for Gideon Vetch—as if the great struggle had cast him out in some gigantic cataclysm, as if it had broken through the once solid ground of established order, and had released into the world all the explosive gases of disintegration, of destruction.

For himself, the young man reflected now, he had always thought otherwise. It was a period, he felt, of humbug radicalism, of windbag eloquence; yet he possessed both wit and discernment enough to see that, though ideas might explode in empty talk, still it took ideas to make the sort of explosion that was deafening one's ears. All the flat formula of the centuries could not produce a single Gideon Vetch. Such men were part of the changing world; they answered not to reasoned argument, but to the loud crash of breaking idols. Stephen hated Vetch with all his heart, but he acknowledged him. He did not try to evade the man's tremendous veracity, his integrity of being, his inevitableness. An inherent intellectual honesty compelled Stephen to admit that, "the demagogue", as he called him, had his appropriate place in the age that produced him—that he existed rather as an outlet for political tendencies than as the product of international violence. He was more than a theatrical attitude—a torrent of words. Even a free country—and Stephen thought sentimentally of America as "a free country"—must have its tyrannies of opinion, and consequently its rebels against current convictions. In the older countries he had imagined that it might be possible to hold with the hare and run with the hounds; but in the land of opportunity for all there was less reason to be astonished when the hunted turned at last into the hunter. Where every boy was taught that he might some day be President, why should one stand amazed when the ambitious son of a circus rider became Governor of Virginia? After all, a fair field and no favours was the best that the most conservative of politicians—the best that even John Benham could ask.

Yes, there was a cause, there was a reason for the miracle of disorder, or it would not have happened. The hour had called forth the man; but the man had been there awaiting the strokes, listening, listening, with his ear to the wind. It had been a triumph of personality, one of those rare dramatic occasions when the right man and the appointed time come together. This the young man admitted candidly in the very moment when he told himself that he detested the demagogue and all his works. A man who consistently made his bid for the support of the radical element! Who stirred up the forces of discontent because he could harness them to his chariot! A man who was born in a circus tent, and who still performed in public the tricks of a mountebank! That this man had power, Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over the undisciplined, the half-educated, the mentally untrained. It was power, as John Benham had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole, over empty stomachs.

There were persons in Stephen's intimate circle (there are such persons even in the most conservative communities) who contended that Vetch was in his way a rude genius. Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, for instance, insisted that the Governor had a charm of his own, that, "he wasn't half bad to look at if you caught him smiling," that he could even reason "like one of us," if you granted him his premise. After the open debate between Vetch and Benham—the great John Benham, hero of war and peace, and tireless labourer in the vineyard of public service—after this memorable discussion, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page had remarked, in his mild, unpolemical tone, that "though John had undoubtedly carried off the flowers of rhetoric, there was a good deal of wholesome green stuff about that fellow Vetch." But everybody knew that a man with a comical habit of mind could not be right.

Again the figure crossed the firelight between the muslin curtains, and to Stephen Culpeper, standing alone in the snow outside, that large impending presence embodied all that he and his kind had hated and feared for generations. It embodied among other disturbances the law of change; and to Stephen and his race of pleasant livers the two sinister forces in the universe were change and death. After all, they had made the world, these pleasant livers; and what were those other people—the people represented by that ominous shadow—except the ragged prophets of disorder and destruction?

Turning away, Stephen descended the wide brick walk which fell gradually, past the steps of the library and the gaunt railing round a motionless fountain, to the broad white slope of the Square with its smoky veil of twilight. Farther away he saw the high iron fence and heard the clanging of passing street cars. On his left the ugly shape of the library resembled some crude architectural design sketched on parchment.

As he approached the fountain, a small figure in a red cape detached itself suddenly from the mesh of shadows, and he recognized Patty Vetch, the irrepressible young daughter of the Governor. He had seen her the evening before at a charity ball, where she had been politely snubbed by what he thought of complacently as "our set." From the moment when he had first looked at her across the whirling tulle and satin skirts in the ballroom, he had decided that she embodied as obviously as her father, though in a different fashion, the qualities which were most offensive both to his personal preferences and his inherited standards of taste. The girl in her scarlet dress, with her dark bobbed hair curling in on her neck, her candid ivory forehead, her provoking blunt nose, her bright red lips, and the inquiring arch of her black eyebrows over her gray-green eyes, had appeared to him absurdly like a picture on the cover of some cheap magazine. He had heartily disapproved of her, but he couldn't help looking at her. If she had been on the cover of a magazine, he had told himself sternly, he should never have bought it. He had correct ideas of what a lady should be (they were inherited from the early eighties and his mother had implanted them), and he would have known anywhere that Patty Vetch was not exactly a lady. Though he was broad enough in his views to realize that types repeat themselves only in variations, and that girls of to-day are not all that they were in the happy eighties—that one might make up flashily like Geraldine St. John, or dance outrageously like Bertha Underwood, and yet remain in all essential social values "a lady"—still he was aware that the external decorations of a chorus girl could not turn the shining daughter of the St. Johns for an imitation of paste, and, though the nimble Bertha could perform every Jazz motion ever invented, one would never dream of associating her with a circus ring. It was not the things one did that made one appear unrefined, he had concluded at last, but the way that one did them; and Patty Vetch's way was not the prescribed way of his world. Small as she was there was too much of her. She contrived always to be where one was looking. She was too loud, too vivid, too highly charged with vitality; she was too obviously different. If a redbird had flown into the heated glare of the ballroom Stephen's gaze would have followed it with the same startled and fascinated attention.

As the girl approached him now on the snow-covered slope, he was conscious again of that swift recoil from chill disapproval to reluctant attraction. Though she was not beautiful, though she was not even pretty according to the standards with which he was familiar, she possessed what he felt to be a dangerous allurement. He had never imagined that anything so small could be so much alive. The electric light under which she passed revealed the few golden freckles over her childish nose, the gray-green colour of her eyes beneath the black eyelashes, and the sensitive red mouth which looked as soft and sweet as a carnation. It revealed also the absurd shoes of gray suede, with French toes and high and narrow heels, in which she flitted, regardless alike of danger and of common sense, over the slippery ground. The son of a strong-minded though purely feminine mother, he had been trained to esteem discretion in dress almost as highly as rectitude of character in a woman; and by no charitable stretch of the imagination could he endow his first impression of Patty Vetch with either of these attributes.

"It would serve her right if she fell and broke her leg," he thought severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining ground. When he sprang forward and bent over her, she rose quickly to her knees and held out what he thought at first was some queer small muff of feathers.

"Please hold this pigeon," she said, "I saw it this afternoon, and I came out to look for it. Somebody has broken its wings."

"If you came out to walk on ice," he replied with a smile, "why, in Heaven's name, didn't you wear skates or rubbers?"

She gave a short little laugh which was entirely without merriment. "I don't skate, and I never wear rubbers."

He glanced down at her feet in candid disapproval. "Then you mustn't be surprised if you get a sprained ankle."

"I am not surprised," she retorted calmly. "Nothing surprises me. Only my ankle isn't sprained. I am just getting my breath."

She had rested her knee on a bench, and she looked up at him now with bright, enigmatical eyes. "You don't mind waiting a moment, do you?" she asked. To his secret resentment she appeared to be deliberately appraising either his abilities or his attractions—he wasn't sure which engaged her bold and perfectly unembarrassed regard.

"No, I don't mind in the least," he replied, "but I'd like to get you home if you have really hurt yourself. Of course it was your own fault that you fell," he added truthfully but indiscreetly.

For an instant she seemed to be holding her breath, while he stood there in what he felt to be a foolish attitude, with the pigeon (for all symbolical purposes it might as well have been a dove) clasped to his breast.

"Oh, I know," she responded presently in a voice which was full of suppressed anger. "Everything is my fault—even the fact that I was born!"

Shocked out of his conventional manner, he stared at her in silence, and the pigeon, feeling the strain of his grasp, fluttered softly against his overcoat. What was there indeed for him to do except stare at a lack of reticence, of good-breeding, which he felt to be deplorable? His fine young face, with its characteristic note of reserve, hardened into sternness as he remembered having heard somewhere that the girl's mother had been killed or injured when she was performing some dangerous act at a country fair. Well, one might expect anything, he supposed, from such an inheritance.

"May I help you?" he asked with distant and chilly politeness.

"Oh, can't you wait a minute?" She impatiently thrust aside his offer. "I must get my breath again."

It was plain that she was very angry, that she was in the clutch of a smothered yet violent resentment, which, he inferred with reason, was directed less against himself than against some abstract and impersonal law of life. Her rage was not merely temper against a single human being; it was, he realized, a passionate rebellion against Fate or Nature, or whatever she personified as the instrument of the injustice from which she suffered. Her eyes were gleaming through the web of light and shadow; her mouth was trembling; and there was the moisture of tears—or was it only the glitter of ice?—on her round young cheek. And while he looked, chilled, disapproving, unsympathetic, at the vivid flower-like bloom of her face, there seemed to flow from her and envelop him the spirit of youth itself—of youth adventurous, intrepid, and defiant; of youth rejecting the expedient and demanding the impossible; of youth eternally desirable, enchanting, and elusive. It was as if his orderly, complacent, and tranquil soul had plunged suddenly into a bath of golden air. Vaguely disturbed, he drew back and tried to appear dignified in spite of the fluttering pigeon. He had no inclination for a flirtation with the Governor's daughter—intuitively he felt that such an adventure would not be a safe one; but if a flirtation were what she wanted, he told himself, with a sense of impending doom, "there might be trouble." He didn't know what she meant, but whatever it was, she evidently meant it with determination. Already she had impressed him with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as "wildness." It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly, alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of "wildness," of unexpectedness, of "something different" in her personality, had held his gaze chained to the airy flutter of her scarlet skirt. He felt vaguely troubled. Something as intricate and bewildering as impulse was winding through the smoothly beaten road of his habit of thought. The noises of the city came to him as if they floated over an immeasurable distance of empty space. Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes. And both the empty space and the ashen sky seemed to be not outside of himself, but a part of the hidden country within his mind.

"You were at the ball," she burst out suddenly, as if she had been holding back the charge from the beginning.

"At the ball?" he repeated, and the words were spoken with his lips merely in that objective world of routine and habit. "Yes, I was there. It was a dull business."

She laughed again with the lack of merriment he had noticed before. Though her face was made for laughter, there was an oddly conflicting note of tragedy in her voice. "Was it dull? I didn't notice."

"Then you must have enjoyed it?"

"But you were there. You saw what happened. Every one must have seen." Her savage candour brushed away the flimsy amenities. He knew now that she would say whatever she pleased, and, with the pigeon clasped tightly in his arms, he waited for anything that might come.

"You pretend that you don't know, that you didn't see!" she asked indignantly.

As she looked at him he thought—or it may have been the effect of the shifting light—that her eyes diffused soft green rays beneath her black eyelashes. Was there really the mist of tears in her sparkling glance?

"I am sorry," he said simply, being a young man of few words when the need of speech was obvious. The last thing he wanted, he told himself, was to receive the confidences of the Governor's daughter.

At this declaration, so characteristic of his amiable temperament, her anger flashed over him. "You were not sorry. You know you were not, or you would have made them kinder!"

"Kinder? But how could I?" He felt that her rage was making her unreasonable. "I didn't know you. I hadn't even been introduced to you." It was on the tip of his tongue to add, "and I haven't been yet—" but he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning. It was all perfectly true. He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here she was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of indifference and falsehood. And after all, what had they done to her? No one had been openly rude. Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely nothing. It had been a "charity entertainment," and the young people of his set had merely left her alone, that was all. The affair had been far from exclusive—for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited social circle—and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were, without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers. Was it maliciously arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should depend upon the people who had elected her father to office?

"As if that mattered!"

Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred formula to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and pleasantly piquant sensation. Through it all he was conscious of the inner prick and sting of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had passed into a mental aversion.

"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!"

Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky, the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores—all these things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure. In the winter night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of spring. Then she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was clouded by the old sense of unreality.

"They treated me as if I were a piece of bunting or a flower in a pot," she said. "They left me alone in the dressing-room. No one spoke to me, though they must have known who I was. They know, all of them, that I am the Governor's daughter."

With a start he brought himself back from the secret places. "But I thought you carried your head very high," he answered, "and you did not appear to lack partners." Some small ironic demon that seemed to dwell in his brain and yet to have no part in his real thought, moved him to add indiscreetly: "I thought you danced every dance with Julius Gershom. That's the name of that dark fellow who's a politician of doubtful cast, isn't it?"

She made a petulant gesture, and the red wings in her hat vibrated like the wings of a bird in flight. There flashed though his mind while he watched her the memory of a cardinal he had seen in a cedar tree against the snow-covered landscape. Strange that he could never get away from the thought of a bird when he looked at her.

"Oh, Julius Gershom! I despise him!"

She shivered, and he asked with a sympathy he had not displayed for mental discomforts: "Aren't you dreadfully chilled? This kind of thing is a risk, you know. You might catch influenza—or anything."

"Yes, I might, if there is any about," she replied tartly, and he saw with relief that her petulance had faded to dull indifference. "I was obliged to dance with somebody," she resumed after a minute, "I couldn't sit against the wall the whole evening, could I? And nobody else asked me,—but I don't like him any the better for that."

"And your father? Does he dislike him also?" he asked.

"How can one tell? He says he is useful." There was a playful tenderness in her voice.

"Useful? You mean in politics?"

She laughed. "How else in the world can any one be useful to Father? It must be freezing."

"No, it is melting; but it is too cold to play about out of doors."

"Your teeth are chattering!" she rejoined with scornful merriment.

"They are not," he retorted indignantly. "I am as comfortable as you are."

"Well, I'm not comfortable at all. Something—I don't know what it was—happened to my ankle. I think I twisted it when I fell."

"And all this time you haven't said a word. We've talked about nothing while you must have been in pain."

She shook her head as if his new solicitude irritated her, and a quiver of pain—or was it amusement?—crossed her lips. "It isn't the first time I've had to grit my teeth and bear things—but it's getting worse instead of better all the time, and I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to help me up the hill. I was waiting until I thought I could manage it by myself."

So that was why she had kept him! She had hoped all the time that she could go on presently without his aid, and she realized now that it was impossible. Insensibly his judgment of her softened, as if his romantic imagination had spun iridescent cobwebs about her. By Jove, what pluck she had shown, what endurance! There came to him suddenly the realization that if she had learned to treat a sprained ankle so lightly, it could mean only that her short life had been full of misadventures beside which a sprained ankle appeared trivial. She could "play the game" so perfectly, he grasped, because she had been obliged either to play it or go under ever since she had been big enough to read the cards in her hand. To be "a good sport" was perhaps the best lesson that the world had yet taught her. Though she could not be, he decided, more than eighteen, she had acquired already the gay bravado of the experienced gambler with life.

"Let me help you," he said eagerly, "I am sure that I can carry you, you are so small. If you will only let me throw away this confounded bird, I can manage it easily."

"No, give it to me. It would die of cold if we left it." She stretched out her hand, and in silence he gave her the wounded pigeon. Her tenderness for the bird, conflicting as it did with his earlier impression of her, both amused and perplexed him. He couldn't reconcile her quick compassion with her resentful and mocking attitude toward himself.

At his impulsive offer of help the quiver shook her lips again, and stooping over she did something which appeared to him quite unnecessary to one gray suede shoe. "No, it isn't as bad as that. I don't need to be carried," she said. "That sort of thing went out of fashion ages ago. If you'll just let me lean on you until I get up the hill."

She put her hand through his arm; and while he walked slowly up the hill, he decided that, taken all in all, the present moment was the most embarrassing one through which he had ever lived. The fugitive gleam, the romantic glamour, had vanished now. He wondered what it was about her that he had at first found attractive. It was the spirit of the place, he decided, nothing more. With every step of the way there closed over him again his natural reserve, his unconquerable diffidence, his instinctive recoil from the eccentric in behaviour. Conventions were the breath of his young nostrils, and yet he was passing through an atmosphere, without, thank Heaven, his connivance or inclination, where it seemed to him the hardiest convention could not possibly survive. When the lights of the mansion shone nearer through the bared boughs, he heaved a sigh of relief.

"Have I tired you?" asked the girl in response, and the curious lilting note in her voice made him turn his head and glance at her in sudden suspicion. Had she really hurt herself, or was she merely indulging some hereditary streak of buffoonery at his expense? It struck him that she would be capable of such a performance, or of anything else that invited her amazing vivacity. His one hope was that he might leave her in some obscure corner of the house, and slip away before anybody capable of making a club joke had discovered his presence. The hidden country was lost now, and with it the perilous thrill of enchantment.

He rang the bell, and the door was opened by an old coloured butler who had been one of the family servants of the Culpepers. How on earth, Stephen wondered, could the Governor tolerate the venerable Abijah, the chosen companion of Culpeper children for two generations? While he wondered he recalled something his mother had said a few weeks ago about Abijah's having been lured away by the offer of absurd wages. "You needn't worry," she had added shrewdly, "he will return as soon as he gets tired of working."

"I hurt my ankle, Abijah," said the girl.

"You ain't, is you, Miss Patty?" replied Abijah, in an indulgent tone which conveyed to Stephen's delicate ears every shade of difference between the Vetchs' and the Culpepers' social standing.

"How are you, Abijah?" remarked the young man with the air of lordly pleasantry he used to all servants who were not white. Beyond the fine old hall he saw the formal drawing-room and the modern octagonal dining-room at the back of the house.

"Howdy, Marse Stephen," responded the negro, "I seed yo' ma yestiddy en she sutney wuz lookin well an' peart."

He opened the door of the library, and while Stephen entered the room with the girl's hand on his arm, a man rose from a chair by the fire and came forward.

"Father, this is Mr. Culpeper," remarked Patty calmly, as she sank on a sofa and stretched out her frivolous shoes.

In the midst of his embarrassment Stephen wondered resentfully how she had discovered his name.

CHAPTER II

GIDEON VETCH

"Your daughter slipped on the ice," explained the young man, while the thought flashed through his mind that Patty's father was accepting it all, with ironical humour, as some queer masquerade.

It was the first time that Stephen had come within range of the Governor's personal influence, and he found himself waiting curiously for the response of his sympathies or his nerves. Once or twice he had heard Vetch speak—a storm of words which had played freely from the lightning flash of humorous invective to the rolling thunder of passionate denunciation. Such sound and fury had left Stephen the one unmoved man in the audience. He had been brought up on the sonorous rhetoric and the gorgeous purple periods of the classic orations; and the mere undraped sincerity—the raw head and bloody bones eloquence, as he put it, of Vetch's speech had been as offensive to his taste as it had been unconvincing to his intelligence. The man was a mountebank, nothing more, Stephen had decided, and his strange power was simply the reaction of mob hysteria to the stage tricks of the political clown.

Yes, the man was a mountebank—but was he nothing more than a mountebank? Like most men of his age, Stephen Culpeper was inclined to swift impressions rather than hasty judgments of people; and he was conscious, while he listened in silence to the murmuring explanations of the girl, that the immediate effect was a sensation, not an idea. At first sight, the Governor appeared merely ordinary—a tall, rugged figure, built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core, with the look of arrested energy which was doubtless an inheritance from the circus ring. There was nothing impressive about him; nothing that would cause one to turn and look back in a crowd. What struck one most was his air of extraordinary freshness and health, of sanguine vitality. His face was well-coloured and irregular in outline, with a high bulging forehead and thick sandy hair which was already gray on the temples. In the shadow his eyes did not appear remarkably fine; they seemed at the first glance to be of an indeterminate colour—was it blue or gray?—and there was nothing striking in their deep setting under the beetling sandy eyebrows. All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into them over the Governor's outstretched hand, he told himself that they were the most human eyes he had ever seen. Afterward, when he groped through his vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not find one. There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch's eyes; there was friendliness; there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour—a ripple of light that was like visible laughter—but above all there was humanity. Though Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that passed through his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know Gideon Vetch through his look and manner as well as he should have known another man after weeks or months of daily intercourse. Whatever the man's private life, whatever his political faults may have been, there was magic in the clasp of his hand and the cordial glow of his smile. He was always responsive; he stood always on the same level, high or low, with his companion of the moment: he was as incapable of looking up as he was of looking down; he was equally without reverence and without condescension. It was the law of his nature that he should give himself emphatically to the just and the unjust alike.

"He came home with me because I hurt my foot," Patty was saying.

Had she forgotten already, Stephen asked himself cynically, that it was not her foot but her ankle? His suspicions returned while he looked at her blooming face, and he hoped earnestly that she would not feel impelled to relate any irrelevant details of the adventure. Like Gideon Vetch on the platform she seemed incapable of withholding the smallest fragment of a fact; and the young man wondered if it were characteristic either of "the plain people," as he called them, or of circus riders as a class, that their minds should go habitually unclothed yet unashamed.

"Thank you, sir," said the Governor without effusion; and he asked: "Did you hurt yourself, Patty?" while he bent over and laid his hand on her ankle.

A note of tenderness passed into his voice as he turned to the girl; and when she answered after a minute, Stephen recognized the same tone of affectionate playfulness that she used when she spoke of him.

"Not much," she replied carelessly. Then she held out the drooping pigeon. "I found this bird. Is there anything we can do for it?"

The Governor took the bird from her, and examined it under the light with the manner of brisk confidence which directed his slightest action. The man, for all his restless activity, appeared to be without excess or exaggeration when it was a matter of practical detail. He apparently employed his whole efficient and enterprising mind on the incident of the bird.

"The wings aren't broken," he said presently, lifting his head, "but it is weak from hunger and exhaustion," and he rang the bell for Abijah. "Rice and water and a warm basket," he ordered when the old negro appeared. "You had better keep it in the house until it recovers." Then dismissing the subject, he turned back to Stephen.

"Well, I am glad to see you, Mr. Culpeper," he said. "You had a hard beginning, but, as they used to tell me when I was a kid, a hard beginning makes a good ending."

For the first time a smile softened his face, and the roving blue gleam danced blithely in his eyes. A moment before the young man had thought the Governor's face harsh and ugly. Now he remembered that the Judge had said "the man was not half bad to look at if you caught him smiling." Yes, he had a charm of his own, and that charm had swept him forward over every obstacle to the place he had reached. A single gift, indefinable yet unerring—the ability to make men believe absurdities, as John Benham had once said—and the material disadvantages of poverty and ignorance were brushed aside like trivial impediments. A strange power, and a dangerous one in unscrupulous hands, the young man reflected.

"I remember your face," pursued the Governor, while his smile faded—was brevity, after all, the secret of its magic? "You were at one of my speeches last autumn, and you sat in the front row, I think. I recall you because you were the only person in the audience who looked bored."

"I was." Frankness called for frankness. "I am not keen about speeches."

"Not even when Benham speaks?" The voice was gay, but through it all there rang the unmistakable tone of authority, of conscious power. There was one person, Stephen inferred, who had never from the beginning disparaged or ridiculed Gideon Vetch, and that person was Gideon Vetch himself. John Benham had once said that the man was a mere posturer—but John Benham was wrong.

"Oh, well, you see, Benham is different," replied the young man as delicately as he could. "He is apt to say only what I think, you know."

So far there had been no breach of good taste in the Governor's manner, no warning reminder of an origin that was certainly obscure and presumably low, no stale, dust-laden odours of the circus ring. He had looked and spoken as any man of Stephen's acquaintance might have done, facetiously, it is true, but without ostentation or vulgarity. When the break came, therefore, it was the more shocking to the younger man because he had been so imperfectly prepared for it.

"And because he is different, of course you think he'd make a better Governor than I shall," said Gideon Vetch abruptly. "That is the way with you fellows who have ossified in the old political parties. You never see a change in time to make ready for it. You wait until it knocks you in the head, and then you wake up and grumble. Now, I've been on the way for the last thirty years or so, but you never once so much as got wind of me. You think I've just happened because of too much electricity in the air, like a thunderbolt or something; but you haven't even looked back to find out whether you are right or wrong. Talk about public spirit! Why, there isn't an ounce of live public spirit left among you, in spite of all the moonshine your man Benham talks about the healing virtues of tradition and the sacred taboo of your political Pharisees. There wasn't one of you that didn't hate like the devil to see me Governor of Virginia—and yet how many of you took the trouble to find out what I am made of, or to understand what I mean? Did you even take the trouble to go to the polls and vote against me?"

Though Stephen flushed scarlet, he held his ground bravely. It was true that he had not voted—he hated the whole sordid business of politics—but then, who had ever suspected for a minute that Gideon Vetch would be elected? His brief liking for the man had changed suddenly to exasperation. It seemed incredible to him that any Governor of Virginia should display so open a disregard of the ordinary rules of courtesy and hospitality. To drag in their political differences at such a time, when he had come beneath the other's roof merely to render him an unavoidable service! To stoop to the pettifogging sophistry of the agitator simply because his opponent had reluctantly yielded him an opportunity!

"Well, I heard you speak, but that didn't change me!" he retorted with a smile.

The Governor laughed, and the sincerity of his amusement was evident even to Stephen. "Could anything short of a blasting operation change you traditional Virginians?" he inquired.

His face was turned to the fire, and the young man felt while he watched him that a piercing light was shed on his character. It was as if Stephen saw his opponent from an entirely fresh point of view, as if he beheld him for the first time with the sharp clearness which the flash of his anger produced. The very absence of all sense of dignity impressed him suddenly as the most tremendous dignity a human being could attain—the unconscious dignity of natural forces—of storms and fire and war and pestilence. Because the man never thought of how he appeared, he appeared always impregnable.

"I shall not argue," said the young man, with a smile which he endeavoured to make easy and natural. "The time for argument is over. You played trumps."

Vetch laughed. "And it wasn't my last card," he answered bluntly.

"The game isn't finished." Though Stephen's voice was light it held a quiver of irritation. "He laughs best who laughs last." The other had started the row, and, by Jove, he would give him as much as he wanted! He recalled suddenly the charges that there was more than the customary political log-rolling—that there were mysterious "discreditable dealings" in the Governor's election to office.

But it appeared in a minute that Gideon Vetch was adequate to any demand which the occasion might develop. Already Stephen was beginning to regard him less as a man than as an energetic idea, as activity incarnate.

"If you mean to imply that the laugh may be on me at the last," he returned, while the points of blue light seemed to pierce Stephen like arrows—no, like gimlets, "well, you're wrong about one part of it—for if that ever happens, I'll laugh with you because of the sheer rotten irony."

For the first time the other noticed how the Governor was dressed—in a suit of some heavy brown stuff which looked as if it had been sprinkled and needed pressing. He wore a green tie and a striped shirt of the conspicuous kind that Stephen hated. Though the younger man was keenly critical of clothes, and perseveringly informed himself regarding the smallest details of fashion, he acknowledged now that he had at last met a man who appeared to wear his errors of dress as naturally as he wore his errors of opinion. The fuzzy brown stuff, the green tie with red spots, the striped shirt—was it blue or purple?—all became as much a part of Gideon Vetch as the storm-ruffled plumage was part of an eagle. If the misguided man had attired himself in a toga, he would have carried the Mantle without dignity perhaps, but certainly with picturesqueness.

"I'll hold you to your promise—or threat," said Stephen lightly, as he turned from the Governor to his daughter. Why, in thunder, he asked himself, had he stayed so long? What was there about the fellow that held one in spite of oneself? "I hope you will be all right again in a few days," he said formally as his eyes met Patty's upraised glance. In the warm room all the glamour of the twilight—and of that hidden country within his mind—had faded from her. She looked fresh and blooming and merely commonplace, he thought. A brief half hour ago he had felt that he was in danger of losing his head; now his rational part was in the ascendant, and his future appeared pleasantly tranquil. Then the girl smiled that faint inscrutable smile of hers, and the disturbing green rays shot from her eyes. A thrill of interest stirred his pulses while something held him there against his will and his better judgment, as if he were caught fast in the steel spring of a trap.

"Oh, that's nothing," replied Patty, with her air of mockery. "If there were no worse things than that!"

He did not hold out his hand, though there was a flutter toward him of her fingers—pretty fingers they were for a girl with no blood that one could mention in public. There was a faint hope in his mind that he might still vanish unthanked and undetained. The one quality in father and daughter which had arrested his favourable attention—the quality of "a good sport"—would probably aid in his escape.

"Drop in some evening, and we'll have a talk," said the Governor in his slightly theatrical but extremely confident manner, "there are things I'd like to say to you. You are a lawyer, if I remember, in Judge Horatio Page's firm, and you were in the war from the beginning."

Stephen smiled. "Not quite." They were at the front door, and all hope of escaping into the desirable obscurity from which he had sprung fled from his mind.

"He is a great old boy, the Judge," resumed Gideon Vetch blandly, "I had a talk with him one day before the elections, when you other fellows were sitting back like a lot of lunatics and waiting for the Democratic primaries to put things over. He is the only one in the whole bunch of you who stopped shouting long enough to hear what I had to say. I like him, sir, and if there is one thing you will never find me doing it is liking the wrong man. I may not know Greek, but I can read men."

The front door was open, and the blast of cold air dispersed all the foolish fancies that had gathered in Stephen's brain. Beyond the fountain and the gate he could see the broad road through the Square and the dark majestic figure of Washington on horseback. The electric signs were blazing on the roofs of the shops and hotels which had driven the original dwelling houses out of the neighbouring streets.

Turning as he was descending the steps, the young man looked into the Governor's face. "Are you sure that you read Julius Gershom correctly?" he inquired.

For a minute—it could not have been longer—the Governor did not reply. Was he surprised for once into open discomfiture, or was his nimble wit engaged in framing a plausible answer? Within the house, where so much was disappointing and incongruous, Stephen had not felt the lack of harmony between Gideon Vetch and his surroundings; but against the fine proportions and the serene stateliness of the exterior, the Governor's figure appeared aggressively modern.

"Julius Gershom!" repeated Vetch. "Well, yes, I think I know my Julius. May I ask if you do?" The ironical humour which flashed like a sharp light over his countenance played with the idea.

"Not by choice." Stephen looked back laughing. There was one thing to be said in the Governor's favour—he invited honesty and he knew how to receive it. "But I read of him in the newspapers when I cannot avoid it. He does some dirty work, doesn't he?"

Again the Governor paused before replying. There was a curious gravity about his consideration of Gershom in spite of the satirical tone of his responses. Was it possible that he was the one man in town who did not treat the fellow as a ridiculous farce?

"If by dirty work you mean the clearing away of obstacles—well, somebody has to do it, hasn't he?" asked Gideon Vetch. "If you want a clean street to walk on, you must hire somebody to shovel away the slush. It is true that we put Gershom to shovelling slush—and you complain of his methods! Well, I admit that he may have been a trifle too zealous about it; he may have spattered things a bit more than was necessary, but after all, he got some of the mud out of the way, didn't he? There are people," he added, "who believe that the wind he raised swept me into office."

"I object to his methods," insisted Stephen, "because they seem to me dishonest."

"Perhaps." The blue eyes—how could he have thought them gray?—had grown quizzical. "But he wasn't moving in the best company, you know. He who sups with the Devil must fish with a long spoon."

"You mean that you defend that sort of thing—that you openly stand for it?"

"I stand for nothing, sir," replied Gideon Vetch sharply, "except justice. I stand for a square deal all round, and I stand against the exploitation or oppression of any class. This is what I stand for, and I have stood for it ever since I was a small, gray, scared rabbit of a creature dodging under hedgerows."

It was the bombastic sophistry again, Stephen told himself, but he met it without subterfuge or evasion. "And you believe that such people as Gershom can serve the cause of justice through dishonest means?" he demanded.

"I'll answer that some day; but it's a long answer, and I can't speak it out here in the cold," responded the Governor, while his blustering manner grew sober. "Gershom is a politician, you see, and I am not. You may laugh, but it is the Gospel truth. I am a reformer, and all I care about is pushing on the idea. I use any tools that I find; and one of the greatest of reformers has said that he was sometimes obliged to use bad ones. If I find good ones, so much the better; if bad—well, it is all in the day's job. But the cause is what matters—the thing you are making, not the implements with which it is made. You dislike my methods of work, but you must admit that by the only test that counts, the test of achievement, they have proved to be sound. I have got somewhere; not all the way; but still somewhere. Without advertisement, without patronage, without a cent I could call my own, I put my wares on the market. I became Governor of Virginia in spite of everything you did, or did not do, to prevent it." There was a strange effectiveness in the simplicity of the man's speech. It was natural; it was racy; it was like nothing that Stephen had ever heard before. He wondered if it could be traced back to the phraseology of the circus? "Of course you think I am an extremist," concluded Gideon Vetch abruptly, "but before you are as old as I am you will have learned that the only way to get half a loaf is to ask for a whole one. Come again, and I'll talk to you."

"Yes, I'll come again," Stephen answered, and he knew that he should. Whether he willed it or not he would be drawn back by the Governor's irresistible influence. The man had aroused in him an intense, a devouring curiosity. He wanted to know his thoughts and his life, the mystery of his birth, of his upbringing, of his privations and denials. Above all he wanted to know why he had succeeded, what peculiar gift had brought him out of obscurity, and had given him the ability to use men and circumstances as if they were tools in his hands.

When the young man ran down the steps there was a pleasant excitement tingling in his veins, as if he were feeling the glow of forbidden wine. Turning beside the fountain, he glanced back as the Governor was closing the door, and in his vision of the lighted interior he saw Patty Vetch darting airily across the hall. So it was nothing more than a hoax! She hadn't hurt herself in the least. She had merely made a laughing-stock of him for the amusement doubtless of her obscure acquaintances! For an instant anger held him motionless; then turning quickly he walked rapidly past the fountain to the open gate.

The snow was dimly lighted on the long slope to the library; and straight ahead, in the circle beneath the statue of Washington, the bronze silhouette of a great Virginian stood sharply cut against the luminous haze of the street. From the chimney-stack of a factory near the river a wreath of gray smoke was flung over the tree-tops, where it broke and drifted in feathery garlands. Across the road a group of three trees was delicately etched, with each separate branch and twig, on the slate-coloured evening sky.

He had passed through the gate when a voice speaking suddenly at his side caused him to start and stop short in his walk. A moment before he had fancied himself alone; he had heard no footsteps; and the place from where the words came was a mere vague blur in the shadows. There was something uncanny in the muffled approach, and the sensation it produced on his nerves was like the shock he used to feel as a child when his hand was unexpectedly touched in the dark.

"I beg your pardon," he said to the vague shape at the foot of a tree. "Did you speak to me?"

The shadows divided, and what seemed to him the edge of darkness moved forward into the dimly lighted space at his side. He saw now that it was the figure of a woman in a long black cloak, with the dilapidated remains of a mourning veil hanging from her small bonnet. As she came toward him he was stirred first by an impulse of pity and immediately afterward by a violent repulsion. In her whole figure there were the tragic signs of poverty and desperation; but it was the horror of her eyes, he told himself, that he should never forget. They were eyes that would haunt his sleep that night like the face of the drowned man in the nursery rhyme.

"Will you tell me," asked the woman hurriedly, "who lives in this house?"

It was a queer question, he thought, for any one to ask in the Square; but she was probably a stranger.

"This is the Governor's house," he answered courteously. "I suppose you are a stranger in town."

"I got here a few hours ago, and I came out for a breath of air. I was four days and nights on the way."

To this he made no reply, and he was about to pass on again, when her voice arrested him.

"You wouldn't mind telling me, would you, the Governor's name?"

"Not in the least. His name is Gideon Vetch."

"Gideon Vetch?" She repeated the name slowly, as if she were impressing it on her memory. "That's a queer name for a Governor. Was he born in this town?"

"I think not."

"And who lives with him? I saw a girl come out awhile ago. Is she his daughter, perhaps—or his wife—though she looked young for that."

"It must have been his daughter. His wife is not living."

"Is she his only child? Or has he others?" There was a quiver of suspense in her voice, and turning he looked at her more closely. Was it possible that she had known Gideon Vetch in his obscure past?

"She is his only child," he replied.

"Well, that's nice for her. Is she pretty?" An odd question if it had been put by a man; but he had been trained to accept the fact that women are different.

"Yes, you would call her pretty." As he spoke the words there flashed through his mind the picture of Patty Vetch as he had seen her that afternoon, in her red cape and her small hat with the red wings, against the snowy hill under the overhanging bough of the sycamore. Was she really pretty, or was it only the witchery of her surroundings? Now that he was out of her presence the attraction had faded. He was still smarting from the memory of that dancing figure.

"Well, it's a fine house," said the woman, "and it looks large for just two people. I thank you for telling me."

The pathos of her words appealed to the generous chivalry of his nature. He felt sorry for her and wondered if he might offer her money.

"I hope you found lodgings," he said.

"Yes, I've found a room near here—on Governor Street, I think they call it."

"And you are not in want? You do not need any help?"

She shook her head while the rusty mourning veil shrouded her features. "Not yet," she answered. "I'm not a beggar yet." Though her tone was not well-bred, he realized that she was neither as uneducated nor as degraded as he had at first believed.

"I am glad of that," he responded; and then lifting his hat again, he hurried quickly away from her up the road beneath the few old linden trees that were left of an avenue. Glancing back as he reached the Capitol building, he saw her black figure moving cautiously over the snow toward one of the gates of the Square.

"That was a nightmare," he thought, "and now for the pleasant dream. I'll go to the old print shop and see my Cousin Corinna."

CHAPTER III

CORINNA OF THE OLD PRINT SHOP

As Stephan left the Square there floated before him a picture of the old print shop in Franklin Street, where Corinna Page (still looking at forty-eight as if she had stepped out of a portrait by Romney) sat amid the rare prints which she never expected to sell. After an unfortunate early marriage, her husband had been Kent Page, her first cousin, she had accepted her recent widowhood, if not with relief, well, obviously with resignation. For years she had wandered about the world with her father, Judge Horatio Lancaster Page, who had once been Ambassador to Great Britain. Now, having recently returned from France, she had settled in a charming country house on the Three Chopt Road, and had opened the ridiculous old print shop, a shop that never sold an engraving, in a quaint place in Franklin Street. She had rented out the upper floors to a half-dozen tenants, had built a couple of rooms beside the kitchen for the caretaker, and had planted two pyramidal cedars and a hedge of box in the short front yard. "A shop is the only place where you may have calls from people who haven't been introduced to you," she had said; and of course as long as she had money to throw away, what did it matter, Stephen reflected, whether she ever sold a picture or not? At forty-eight she was lovelier, he thought, than ever; she would always be lovelier than any one else if she lived to be ninety. There wasn't a girl in his set who could compare with her, who had the glow and charm, the flame-like inner radiance; there wasn't one who had the singing heart of Corinna. Yes, that was the phrase he had been trying to remember, trite as it was—the singing heart—that was Corinna. She had had a hard life, he knew, in spite of her beauty and her wealth; yet she had never lost the quality of youth, the very essence of gaiety and adventure. When he thought of her, Patty Vetch appeared merely cheap and common, though he felt instinctively that Corinna would have liked Patty if she had seen her in the Square with the pigeon. It was a part of Corinna's charm perhaps, certainly a part of her enjoyment of life that she liked almost every one—every one, that is, except Rose Stribling, whom she quite frankly hated. But, then, people said that Rose Stribling, twelve years younger than Corinna and as handsome as a Red Cross poster, had run too often across Kent Page in the first year of the war. Kent Page had died in Prance of Spanish influenza before he ever saw a trench or a battlefield; and Rose Stribling, all blue eyes and white linen, had nursed him at the last. At that time Corinna was in America, and she hadn't so much as looked at Kent for years; but a woman has a long memory for emotions, and she is capable of resenting the loss of a husband who is no longer hers. Rumour, of course, nothing more; yet the fact remained that Corinna, who liked all the world, hated Rose Stribling. It was the one flaw in Corinna's perfection; it was the black patch on the stainless cheek, which had always made her adorable to Stephen. Like the snow-white lock waving back from her forehead, it intensified the youth in her face. He had often wondered if she could have been half so lovely when she was a girl, before the faint shadows and the tender little lines lent depth and mystery to her eyes, and the single white lock swept back amid the powdered dusk of her hair.

While the young man walked rapidly up Franklin Street, he saw before him the long delightful room beyond the pyramidal cedars and the hedge of box. He saw the ruddy glow of the fire mingling with the paler light of amber lamps, and this mingled radiance shining on the rich rugs, the few old brocades, and the rare English prints which covered the walls. He saw wide-open creamy roses in alabaster bowls which were scattered everywhere, on tables, on stools, on window-seats, and on the rich carving of the Spanish desk in one corner. Against the curtains of gold silk there was the bough of twisted pine he had broken, and against the pine branch stood the figure of Corinna in her gown of soft red, which melted like a spray of autumn foliage into the colours of the room. She was a tall woman, with a glorious head and eyes that reminded Stephen of a forest pool in autumn. Who had first said of her, he wondered, that she looked like an October morning?

As he approached the shop the glow shone out on him through the dull gold curtains, and he traced the crooked pine bough sweeping across the thin silk background like the bold free sketch of a Japanese print. When he rang the bell a minute later, the door was opened by Corinna, who was holding a basket of marigolds.

"We were just going," she said, "as soon as I had put these flowers in water."

She drew back into the room, bending over the low brown bowl that she was filling, while Stephen went over to the fire, and greeted the two old men who were sitting in deep arm chairs on either side of the hearth. It was like stepping into another world, he thought, as he inhaled a full breath of the warmth and the fragrance of roses; it was as if a door into a dream had suddenly opened, and he had passed out of the night and the cold into a place where all was colour and fragrance and pleasant magic. The other was real life—life for all but the happy few, he found himself thinking—this was merely the enchanted fairy-ring where children played at making believe.

"I hoped I'd catch you," he said, stretching out his hands to the log fire. "I felt somehow that you hadn't gone, late as it is." While he spoke he was thinking, not of Corinna, but of the strange woman he had left in the Square. Queer how that incident had bitten into his mind. Try as he might he couldn't shake himself free from it.

"Father is going to some dreadful public dinner," answered Corinna. "I stayed with him here so he wouldn't have to wait at the club. It won't matter about me. The car is coming for me, and I don't dine until eight. Stay awhile and we'll talk," she added with her cheerful smile. "I haven't seen you for ages, and you look as if you had something to tell me."

"I have," he said; and then he turned from her to the two old men who were talking drowsily in voices that sounded as far off to Stephen as the murmuring of bees in summer meadows. He knew that it was real, that it was the life he had always lived, and yet he couldn't get rid of the feeling that Corinna and the two old men and the charming surroundings were all part of a play, and that in a little while he should go out of the theatre and step back among the sordid actualities.

"The General and I are having our little chat before dinner," said Judge Page, a sufficiently ornamental old gentleman to have decorated any world or any fireside—imposing and distinguished as a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, with a crown of silvery hair and the shining dark eyes of his daughter. He still carried himself, for all his ironical comment, like an ambassador of the romantic school. "It is a sad day for your fighting man," he concluded gaily, "when the only stimulant he can get is the conversation of an old fogy like me."

"Your fighting man," old General Powhatan Plummer, who hadn't smelt powder for more than half a century, chuckled as he always did at the shrewd and friendly pleasantries of the Judge. He was a jocular, tiresome, gregarious soul, habitually untidy, creased and rumpled, who was always thirsty, but who, as the Judge was accustomed to reply when Corinna remonstrated, "would divide his last julep with a friend." The men had been companions from boyhood, and were still inseparable. For the same delusion makes strange friendships, and the General, in spite of his appearance of damaged reality, also inhabited that enchanted fairy-ring where no fact ever entered.

With the bowl of marigolds in her hands, Corinna came over to the tea-table and stood smiling dreamily at Stephen. The firelight dancing over her made a riot of colour, and she looked the image of happiness, though the young man knew that the ephemeral illusion was created by the red of her gown and the burnished gold of the flowers.

"John Benham sent them to me because I praised his speech," she said. "Wasn't it nice of him?"

"He always does nice things when one doesn't expect them," he answered.

Corinna laughed. "Is it because they are nice that he does them?" she inquired with a touch of malice. "Or because they are not expected?"

"I didn't mean that." There was a shade of confusion in Stephen's tone. "Benham is my friend—my best friend almost though he is so much older. There isn't a man living whom I admire more."

"Yes, I know," replied Corinna; and then—was it in innocence or in malice?—she asked sweetly: "Have you seen Alice Rokeby this winter?"

For an instant Stephen gazed at her in silence. Was it possible that she had not heard the gossip about Benham and Mrs. Rokeby? Was she trying to mislead him by an appearance of flippancy? Or was there some deeper purpose, some serious attempt to learn the truth beneath her casual question?

"Only once or twice," he answered at last. "She is looking badly since her divorce. Freedom has not agreed with her."

Corinna smiled; but the transient illumination veiled rather than revealed her obscure motives.

"Perhaps, like our Allies, she was making the future safe for further entanglements," she observed. "I always thought—everybody thought that she got her divorce in order to marry John Benham."

Frankly perplexed, he gazed wonderingly into her eyes. He knew that she saw a great deal of Benham; he believed that their friendship had developed into a deeper emotion on Benham's side at least; and it seemed to him unlike Corinna, who was, as he told himself, the most loyal soul on earth, to turn such an association into a cynical jest.

"I heard that too," he replied guardedly, "but of course nobody knows."

There was really nothing else that he could answer. Though he could discuss Alice Rokeby, one of those vague, sweet women who seem designed by Nature to develop the sentiment of chivalry in the breast of man, he felt that it would be disloyal to speak lightly of his hero, John Benham. "You could never guess where I've been," he said with relief because he had got rid of the subject. "I might as well tell you in the beginning that I have just left the Governor."

"Gideon Vetch!" exclaimed Corinna, as she dropped into a chair at his side. "Why, I thought you were as far apart as the poles!"

"So we were until ten minutes—no, until exactly an hour ago."

"It makes my blood boil when I think of that circus rider in the Governor's mansion," said the General indignantly. "Do you know what my father would have called that fellow? He would have called him a common scalawag—a common scalawag, sir!"

The Judge laughed softly. There was nothing, as he sometimes observed, that flavoured life so deliciously as a keen appreciation of comedy. "Now, I should call him a decidedly uncommon one," he remarked. "The trouble with you, my dear Powhatan, is that you are still in the village stage of the social instinct. In your proper period, when we Virginians were merely one of the several tribes in these United States, you may have served an excellent purpose; but the tribal instinct is dying out with the village stage. If we are going to exist at all outside of the archaeological department of a museum, we must learn to accept—. We must let in new blood."

"Do you mean to tell me, Horatio," blustered the General, "that I've got to let in the blood of a circus rider, sir?"

"Well, that depends. I haven't made up my mind about Vetch. He may be only froth, or he may be the vital element that we need. I haven't made up my mind, but I've met him and I like him. Indeed, I think I may say that Gideon and I are friends. We have come to the same point of view, it appears, by travelling on opposite roads. I had a long talk with him the other day, and I found that we think alike about a number of things."

"Think alike about fiddlesticks!" spluttered the General, while he spilled over his waistcoat the water Corinna had given him. "Why, the fellow ain't even in your class, sir!"

"I said we had thoughts, not habits, in common, Powhatan," rejoined the Judge blandly. "The same habits make a class, but the same thoughts make a friendship."

"He told me he had talked to you," said Stephen eagerly, "and I wanted to know what your impression was. He called you a great old boy, by the way."

The Judge, who could wear at will the face either of Brutus or of Antony, became at once the genial friend of humanity. "That pleases me more than you realize," he said. "I have a suspicion that Gideon knows human nature about as thoroughly as our General here knows the battles of the Confederacy."

"I confess the man rather gripped me," rejoined Stephen. "There's something about him, personality or mere play-acting, that catches one in spite of oneself."

The Judge appeared to acquiesce. "I am inclined to think," he observed presently, "that the quality you feel in Vetch is simply a violent candour. Most people give you truth in small quantities; but Vetch pours it out in a torrent. He offers it to you as Powhatan used to take his Bourbon in the good old days before the Eighteenth Amendment—straight and strong. I used to tell Powhatan that he'd get the name of a drunkard simply because he could stand what the rest of the world couldn't—and I'll say as much for our friend Gideon."

"Do you mean, my dear," inquired Corinna placidly, "that the Governor is honestly dishonest?"

The Judge's suavity clothed him like velvet. "I know nothing about his honesty. I doubt if any one does. He may be a liar and yet speak the truth, I suppose, from unscrupulous motives. But I am not maintaining that he is entirely right, you understand—merely that like the rest of us he is not entirely wrong. I am not taking sides, you know. I am too old to fight anybody's battles—even distressed Virtue's."

"Then you think—you really think that he is sincere?" asked Stephen.

"Sincere? Well, yes, in a measure. Nothing advertises one so widely as a reputation for sincerity; and the man has a positive genius for self-advertisement. He has found that it pays in politics to speak the truth, and so he speaks it at the top of his voice. It takes courage, of course, and I am ready to admit that he is a little more courageous than the rest of us. To that extent, I should say that he has the advantage of us."

"Do you mean to imply," demanded the General wrathfully, "that a common circus rider like that, a rascally revolutionist into the bargain, is better than this lady and myself, sir?"

"Well, hardly better than Corinna," replied the Judge. "Indeed, I was about to add that the two most candid persons I know are Corinna and Vetch. There is a good deal about Vetch, by the way, that reminds me of Corinna."

"Father!" gasped Corinna. "Stephen, do you think he has gone out of his mind?"

"That is the first sign that wisdom has broken its cage," commented her father. "No, my dear, I did not mean that you look like him; you are far handsomer. I meant simply that you both habitually speak the truth, and because you speak the truth the world mistakes you for a successful comedian and Vetch for a kind of political Robin Hood."

"Well, he is trying to hold us up in highwayman fashion, isn't he?" asked Corinna.

"Does it look that way?" inquired the Judge, with his beaming smile which cast an edge of genial irony on everything that he said. "On the contrary, it seems to me that Vetch is telling us the things we have known about ourselves for a very long time. He says the world might be a better place if we would only take the trouble to make it so; if we would only try to live up to our epitaphs, I believe he once remarked. He says also, I understand, that he is trying to climb to the top over somebody else; and when I say 'he' I mean, of course, his order or his class, whatever the fashionable phrase is. Now, unfortunately, there appears to be but one way of reaching the top of the world, doesn't there?—and that is by climbing up on something or somebody. Even you, my dear Stephen, who occupy that high place, merely inherited the seat from somebody who scrambled up there a few centuries ago. Somebody else probably got broken shoulders before your nimble progenitor took possession. Of course I am willing to admit that time does create in us the sense of a divine right in anything that we have owned for a number of years, as if our inheritance were the crown of some archaic king. I myself feel that strongly. If it came to the point, though I have said that I am too old to fight for distressed Virtue, I should very likely die in the last ditch for every inch of land and every worthless object I ever owned. When Vetch talks about taxing property more heavily I am utterly and openly against him because it is my instinct to be. I refuse to give up my superfluous luxuries in the cause of equal justice for all, and I shall fight against it as long as there is a particle of fight left in my bones. But because I am against him there is no reason, I take it, why I shouldn't enjoy the pleasure of perceiving his point of view. It is an interesting point of view, perhaps the more interesting because we think it is a dangerous one. To approach it is like rounding a sharp curve at high speed."

As he rose to his feet and reached for his walking stick, Stephen remembered that in England the Judge was supposed to have the fine presence and the flashing eagle eyes of Gladstone. Were they alike also, he wondered, in their fantastic mental processes?

"It's time for me to go, Corinna," said the old man, stooping to kiss his daughter, "so I shan't see you until to-morrow." Then turning to Stephen, he added with a whimsical smile, "If you are so much afraid of Vetch, why don't you fight him with his own weapons? What were you doing, you and John, when the people voted for him?"

"To tell the truth nobody ever dreamed that he would be elected," replied Stephen, flushing. "Who would have thought that an independent candidate could win over both parties?"

The Judge had moved to the door, and he looked back, as Stephen finished, with a dramatic flourish of his long white hand. "Well, remember next time, my dear young sir," he answered, "that in politics it is always the impossible that happens." The long white hand fell caressingly on the shoulders of old Powhatan Plummer, and the two men passed out of the door together.

When Stephen turned to Corinna, she was resting languidly against the tapestry-covered back of her chair, while the firelight flickering in her eyes changed them to the deep bronze of the marigolds on the table. With her slenderness, her grace, her brilliant darkness, she seemed to him to belong in one of the English mezzotints on the wall.

"Did you buy that print because it is so much like you?" he asked, pointing to an engraving after Hoppner's portrait of the Duchess of Bedford.

She laughed frankly. "Every one asks me that. I suppose it was one of my reasons."

As he sat down again in front of the fire, his eyes travelled slowly over the walls; over the stipple engravings of Bartolozzi, over the rich mezzotints of Valentine Green and John Raphael Smith, over the bewitching face of Lady Hamilton as it shone back at him from the prints of John Jones, of Cheesman, of Henry Meyer. Was not Corinna's place among those vanished beauties of a richer age, rather than among the sour-faced reformers and the Gideon Vetches of to-day? The wonderful tone of the old prints, the silvery dusk, or the softly glowing colours that were like the sunset of another century; the warmth and splendour of the few brocades she had picked up in Italy; the suave religious feeling of the worn red velvet from some church in Florence; the candles in wrought-iron sconces, the shimmering firelight and the dreamy fragrance of tea roses—all these things together made him think suddenly of sunshine over the Campagna and English gardens in the month of May and the burning reds and blues and golden greens of the Middle Ages. Corinna with her unfading youth became a part of all the loveliness that he had ever seen—of all beauty everywhere.

"I haven't had a chance to tell you," she said, "that I am going to meet the Governor."

"Where? At the Berkeleys'?"

"Yes, at the Berkeleys' dinner on Thursday. Are you going?"

He laughed. "Mrs. Berkeley called me up this morning and asked me if I would take somebody's place. She didn't say whose place it was, but she did divulge the fact that the dinner is given to Vetch. I told her I'd come—that I was so used to taking other people's places I could fill six at the same time. But a dinner to Vetch! I wonder why she is doing it?"

"That's easy. Mr. Berkeley wants something from the Governor. I don't know what he wants, but I do know that whatever it is he wants it very badly."

"And he thinks he'll get it by asking him to dinner? There seems to me an obvious flaw in Berkeley's reasoning. I doubt if Vetch is the kind of man who follows when you hold out an apple. He appears to be exactly the opposite, and I think he's more likely to dash off than to come when he is called. I wonder, by the way, if they are going to have Mrs. Stribling?"

"Rose Stribling?" A gleam of anger shone in Corinna's eyes. "Why should that interest you?"

"Oh, they say—at least Mrs. Berkeley says, and if there is any misinformation abroad she ought to be aware of it—that Mrs. Stribling's latest attachment to her train is the Governor himself."

He had expected his gossip to arouse Corinna, and in this he was not mistaken. Springing up from her relaxed position, she sat straight and unbending, with her indignant eyes on his face. "Why, I thought the war had cured her."

"The war was not a cure; it was merely a temporary drug for our vanity," he rejoined gaily. "It didn't cure me, so you could hardly regard it as a remedy for Mrs. Stribling's complaint. I imagine coquetry is a more obstinate malady even than priggishness, and, Heaven knows, I tried hard enough to get rid of that."

"I hoped you would," admitted Corinna. "But, dear boy, the way to make you human—and you've never been really human all through, you know—was not with a uniform and glory." She was talking flippantly, for they made a pretence now of alluding lightly to his years in France—he had gone into the war before his country—and to the nervous malady, the disabled will, he had brought back. "What you need is not to win more esteem, but to lose some that you've got. Your salvation lies in the opposite direction from where flags are waving. If you could only deliberately arrange to do something that would lower your reputation in the eyes of gouty old gentlemen or mothers with marriageable daughters! If you could manage to get your nose broken, or elope with a chorus girl, or commit an unromantic murder, I should begin to have hopes of you."

"I may do something as bad some day and surprise you."

"It would surprise me. But I'm not sure, after all, that I don't like you better as you are, with your fine air of superiority. It makes one believe, somehow, in human perfectibility. Now, I can never believe in that when I realize how I feel about Rose Stribling. There is nothing perfectible in such emotions."

"Rose Stribling! Beside you she is like a pumpkin in the basket with a pomegranate!"

Corinna laughed with frank pleasure. "There are a million who would prefer the pumpkin to the pomegranate," she answered. "Rose Stribling, you must admit, is the type that has been the desire of the world since Venus first rose from the foam."

"Can you imagine Mrs. Stribling rising from foam?" Stephen retorted impertinently.

"No, Venus has grown fatter through the ages," assented Corinna, "but the type is unchanged. Now, among all the compliments that have been paid me in my life, no one has ever compared me to the Goddess of Love. I have been painted with the bow of Diana, but never with the doves of Venus."

Because he felt that her gaiety rippled over an undercurrent of pain, Stephen bent forward and touched her hand with an impulse of tenderness.

"You are more beautiful than you ever were in your life," he said. "There isn't a woman in the world who can compare with you." Then he laughed merrily. "I shall watch you two to-morrow evening, you and Rose Stribling."

"I am sorry," replied Corinna in a troubled voice. "I may tell you the truth since Father says it is the last thing any one ever believes—and the truth is that she makes me savage—yes, I mean it—she makes me savage."

"I know what the Judge means when he says you are like Vetch," returned Stephen abruptly. Then, without waiting for her reply, he added in an impulsive tone: "Triumph over her to-morrow night, Corinna. Go out to fight with all your weapons and seize the trophies from Mrs. Stribling."

"You funny boy!" exclaimed Corinna, but the sadness had left her voice and her eyes were shining. "Why, I am twelve years older than Rose Stribling, and those twelve years are everything."

"Those twelve years are nothing unless you imagine that you are in a novel. It is only in books that there is a chronology of the emotions."

"She is a fat blonde without a heart," insisted Corinna, "and they are invulnerable."

"Well, snatch Vetch away from her. He deserves something better than that combination."

"Oh, she can't hurt him very much, even though she no longer has a husband to get in her way. Have you ever wondered how George Stribling stood her? It must have been a relief to find himself safely dead."

"He stood her as one stands sultry weather probably, but with less hope of a change. He had that slow and heavy philosophy that wears well. I think it even dawned upon him now and then that there was something funny about it."

"Of course he knew that she married him for his money," said Corinna, "but that is the last thing the natural man appears to resent."

Stephen rose and bent over her. "Promise me that you will save Vetch," he implored mockingly.

"Why this sudden interest in Vetch?" Corinna rose also and reached for her fur coat. "It makes me curious to meet him. Yes, I promise you that I will go to-morrow night attired as for a carnival in all the mystery of a velvet mask. I may not save Vetch, but I think at least that I can eclipse Rose Stribling. My motive may not be admirable, but it is as feminine as a string of beads."

He kissed her hand. "Bless your heart because you are both human and my cousin." For an instant he hesitated, and then as they reached the door together, he turned with his hand on the knob, and looked into her eyes. "The Governor has a daughter. Did you know it?" he asked.

"Why, of course I know it. Isn't Patty Vetch as well advertised as the newest illustrated weekly?"

"I was wondering," again he hesitated over the words, "if you had seen her and what you think of her?"

"I have seen her twice. She was in here the other day to look at my prints, and," her brilliant eyes grew soft, "well, I feel sorry for her."

"Sorry? But do you like her?"

"Haven't you always told me that I like everybody?"

He laughed. "With one exception!"

"With one particular exception!"

"But honestly, Corinna." His tone was insistent. "Do you like Patty Vetch?"

"Honestly, my dear Stephen, I do. There is something—well, something almost pathetic about the girl; and I think she is genuine. One day last week she came here and made me tell her everything I could about my prints. I don't mean really that she made me, you know. There wasn't anything forward about her then, though I hear there is sometimes. She seemed to me a restless, lonely, misdirected intelligence hungry to know things. That is the only way I can describe her, but you will understand. She has had absolutely no advantages; she doesn't even know what culture means, or social instinct, or any of the qualities you were born with, my dear boy; but she feels vaguely that she has missed something, and she is reaching out gropingly and trying to find it. I like the spirit. It strikes me as American in the best sense—that young longing to make up in some way for her deficiencies and lack of opportunities, that gallant determination to get the better of her upbringing and her surroundings. A fight always appeals to me, you know. I like the courage that is in the girl—I am sure it is courage—and her straightforward effort to get the best out of life, to learn the things she was never taught, to make herself over if need be."

"Is this Patty Vetch, Corinna, or your own dramatic instinct?"

"Oh, it's Patty Vetch! I had no interest in her whatever. Why should I have had? But I liked the way she went straight as a dart at the thing she wanted. There was no affectation about her, no pretence of being what she was not. She asked about prints because she saw the name and she didn't know what it meant. She would have asked about Browning, or Swinburne, or Meredith in exactly the same way if this had been a book-shop. She wanted to know the difference between a mezzotint and a stipple print. She wanted to know all about the portraits too, and the names of the painters and who Lady Hamilton was and the Duchess of Bedford and the Ladies Waldegrave and 'Serena,' and if Morland's Cottagers were really as happy as they were painted? She asked as many questions as Socrates, and I fear got as inadequately answered."

"Well, she didn't strike me as in the least like that; but you can be a great help to her if she is really in earnest."

"She didn't strike you like that, my dear, simply because you are a man, and some girls are never really themselves with men; they are for ever acting a part; a vulgar part, I admit, but one they have learned before they were born, the instinctive quarry eluding the instinctive hunter. The girl is naturally shy; I could tell that, and she covers it with a kind of boldness that isn't—well, particularly attractive to one of your fastidious mind. Yet there is something rather taking about her. She reminds me of a small, bright tropical bird."

"Of a Virginia redbird, you mean."

"A redbird? Then you have seen her?"

"Yes, I've seen her—only twice—but the last time she indulged her sense of humour in a practical joke about a sprained ankle."

"I suppose she would joke like that. Even the modern girl that we know isn't in the best possible taste. And you must remember that Patty Vetch is something very different from the girls that you admire. I hope she'll let me help her, but I doubt it. She is the sort that wouldn't come if you tried to call and coax her. You said her father was like that, didn't you? Well, with that kind of wildness, or shyness, one can't put out a cage, you know. The only way is to scatter crumbs on the window-sill and then stand and wait. Will you let me take you home?"

They had crossed the pavement to her car, and she waited now with her smile of whimsical gaiety.

"If you will. It is only a few blocks, but I want to hear about the gown you will wear for your triumph."

It seemed to him that there was the chime of silver bells in her laughter. "Oh, my dear, must every victory of my life end in a forlorn hope!"

CHAPTER IV

THE TRIBAL INSTINCT

The spirit of the age, the worship of the many-headed god of magnitude, was holding carnival in the town. Faster and faster buildings were rising; the higher and more flimsily built, the better it seemed, for it is easier to demolish walls that have been lightly erected. Everywhere people were pushing one another into the slums or the country. Everywhere the past was going out with the times and the future was coming on in a torrent. Two opposing principles, the conservative and the progressive, had struggled for victory, and the progressive principle had won. To add more and more numbers; to build higher and higher; to push harder and harder; and particularly to improve what had been already added or built or pushed—these impulses had united at last into a frenzied activity. And while the building and the pushing and the improving went on, the village grew into the town, the town grew into the city, and the city grew out into the country. Beneath it all, informing the apparent confusion, there was some crude belief that the symbol of material success is size, and that size in itself, regardless of quality or condition, is civilization. For the many-headed god is a god of sacrifice. He makes a wilderness of beauty and calls it progress.

Long ago the village had disappeared. Long ago the spacious southern homes, with their walled gardens of box and roses and aromatic shrubs in spring, had receded into the shadowy memories of those whom the modern city pointed out, with playful solicitude, as "the oldest inhabitants." None except the very oldest inhabitants could remember those friendly and picturesque streets, deeply shaded by elms and sycamores; those hospitable houses of gray stucco or red brick which time had subdued to a delicate rust-colour; those imposing Doric columns, or quaint Georgian doorways; those grass-grown brick pavements, where old ladies in perpetual mourning gathered for leisurely gossip; those wrought-iron gates that never closed; those unshuttered windows, with small gleaming panes, which welcomed the passer-by in winter; or those gardens, steeped in the fragrance of mint and old-fashioned flowers, which allured the thirsty visitor in summer. These things had vanished years ago; yet beneath the noisy commercial city the friendly village remained. There were hours in the lavender-tinted twilights of spring, or on autumn afternoons, while the shadows quivered beneath the burnished leaves and the sunset glowed with the colour of apricots, when the watcher might catch a fleeting glimpse of the past. It may have been the drop of dusk in the arched recess of a Colonial doorway; it may have been the faint sunshine on the ivy-grown corner of an old brick wall; it may have been the plaintive melody of a negro market-man in the street; or it may have been the first view of the Culpeper's gray and white mansion; but, in one or all of these things, there were moments when the ghost of the buried village stirred and looked out, and a fragrance that was like the memory of box and mint and blush roses stole into the senses. It was then that one turned to the Doric columns of the Culpeper house, standing firmly established in its grassy lawn above the street and the age, and reflected that the defeated spirit of tradition had entrenched itself well at the last. Time had been powerless against that fortress of prejudice; against that cheerful and inaccessible prison of the tribal instinct. Poverty, the one indiscriminate leveller of men and principles, had never attacked it, for in the lean years of Reconstruction, when to look well fed was little short of a disgrace in Virginia, an English cousin, remote but clannish, had died at an opportune moment and left Mr. Randolph Byrd Culpeper a moderate fortune. Thanks to this event, which Mrs. Culpeper gratefully classified as the "intervention of Providence," the family had scarcely altered its manner of living in the last two hundred years. To be sure there were modern discomforts which related to the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of whiskey; but since the Culpepers had been indulgent masters and light drinkers, they had come to regard these deprivations as in the nature of blessings. Solid, imposing, and as richly endowed as an institution of learning, the Culpeper generations had weathered both the restraints and the assaults of the centuries. The need to make a living, that grim necessity which is the mother of democracy, had brushed them as lightly as the theory of evolution. Saturated with tradition as with an odour, and fortified by the ponderous moral purpose of the Victorian age, they had never doubted anything that was old and never discovered anything that was new. About them as about the hidden village, there was the charm of mellowness, of unruffled serenity. Some ineradicable belief in things as they have always been had preserved them from the aesthetic derangement of the Mid-Victorian taste; and in standing for what was old, they had stood, inadvertently but courageously, for what was excellent. Security, permanence, possession—all the instincts which blend to make the tribe and the community, all the agencies which work for organized society and against the wayward experiment in human destiny—these were the stubborn forces embodied in the Culpeper stock.

The present head of the family, that Randolph Byrd Culpeper who had been only ten years old when Providence intervened, was now a fine-looking, heavily built man of sixty-five, with prominent dark eyes under sleepy lids, abundant iron-gray hair which was brushed until it shone, and a drooping moustache that was still as brown as it had been in his youth. He had an impressive though stolid bearing, an amiable expression, an engaging smile, and the manner of a weary monarch. It was his boast that he had never done anything for the first time without ascertaining precisely how it had been done by the highest authority before him. Devoid of even the rudiments of an imagination, he had never been visited in a nightmare by the suspicion that the name of Culpeper was not the best result of the best of all possible worlds. As long as his prejudices were not offended his generosity was inexhaustible. For the rest, he bore his social position as reverently as if it were a plate in church, had never spoken a profane word or recognized a joke in his life, and still dined at two o'clock in the afternoon because his grandfather, who was dyspeptic by constitution, had been unable to digest a late dinner. At the time of his marriage, an unusually happy one, he was regarded as "the handsomest man of his day"; and he was still yearned over from a distance by elderly ladies of suppressed romantic temperaments.

Mrs. Culpeper, a small imperious woman of distinguished lineage and uncertain temper, had gone through an entire life seeing only one thing at a time, and never seeing that one thing as it really was. If her husband embodied the moral purpose, she herself was an incarnation of the evasive idealism of the nineteenth century. Her universe was comprised in her family circle; her horizon ended with the old brick wall between the alley and the Culpepers' garden. All that related to her husband, her eight children and her six grandchildren, was not only of supreme importance and intense interest to her, but of unsurpassed beauty and excellence. It was intolerable to her exclusive maternal instinct that either virtue or happiness should exist in any degree, except a lesser measure, outside of her own household; and praise of another woman's children conveyed to her a secret disparagement of her own. Having naturally a kind heart she could forgive any sin in her neighbours except prosperity—though as Corinna had once observed, with characteristic flippancy, "Continual affliction was a high price to pay for Aunt Harriet's favour." In her girlhood she had been a famous beauty; and she was still as fine and delicately tinted as a carving in old ivory, with a skin like a faded microphylla rose-leaf, and stiff yellowish white hair, worn à la Pompadour. Her mind was thin but firm, and having received a backward twist in its youth, it had remained inflexibly bent for more than sixty years. Unlike her husband she was gifted with an active, though perfectly concrete imagination—a kind of superior magic lantern that shot out images in black and white on a sheet—and a sense of humour which, in spite of the fact that it lost its edge when it was pointed at the family, was not without practical value in a crisis.

On the evening of Stephen's adventure in the Square, the Culpeper family had gathered in the front drawing-room, to await the arrival of a young cousin, whom, they devoutly hoped, Stephen would one day perceive the wisdom of marrying. The four daughters—Victoria, the eldest, who had nursed in France during the war; Hatty, who ought to have been pretty, and was not; Janet, who was candidly plain; and Mary Byrd, who would have been a beauty in any circle—were talking eagerly, with the innumerable little gestures which they had inherited from Mrs. Culpeper's side of the house. They adored one another; they adored their father and mother; they adored their three brothers and their married sister, whose name was Julia; and they adored every nephew and niece in the connection. Though they often quarrelled, being young and human, these quarrels rippled as lightly as summer storms over profound depths of devotion.

"Oh, I do wish," said Mary Byrd, who had "come out" triumphantly the winter before, "that Stephen would marry Margaret." She was a slender graceful girl, with red-gold hair, which had a lustrous sheen and a natural wave in it, and the brown ox-like eyes of her father. There was a great deal of what Peyton, the second son, who lived at home, and was the most modern of the family, called "dash" about her.

"It was the war that spoiled it," said Janet, the plain one, who possessed what her mother fondly described as "a charm that was all her own." "I sometimes think the war spoiled everything."

At this Victoria, the eldest, demurred mildly. Ever since she had nursed in France, she had assumed a slightly possessive manner toward the war, as if she had in some mysterious way brought it into the world and was responsible for its reputation. She was tall and very thin, with a perfect complexion, a long nose, and a short upper lip which showed her teeth too much when she laughed. Her hair was fair and fluffy; and Mrs. Culpeper, who could not praise her beauty, was very proud of her "aristocratic appearance."

"Why, he never even mentions the war," she protested.

"I don't care. I believe he thinks about it," insisted Janet, who would never surrender a point after she had once made it.

"He's different, anyhow," said Hatty, the one who had everything, as her mother asserted, to make her pretty, and yet wasn't. "He isn't nearly so normal. Is he, Mother?"

Mrs. Culpeper raised troubled eyes from the skirt of her pale gray silk gown which she was scrutinizing dejectedly. "How on earth could I have got that spot there?" she remarked in her brisk yet soft voice. "I am afraid you are right, dear, about Stephen. He certainly hasn't been like himself for some time. I have felt really anxious, I suppose it was the war."

While the war had lasted she had seen it, according to her habit of vision, with peculiar intentness, and she had seen nothing else; but from the beginning to the end, it had appeared to her mainly as an international disturbance which had upset the serene and regular course of her family affairs. For the past two years she had refused to think of it except under pressure; and then she recalled it only as the occasion when Victoria and Stephen had been in France, and poor Peyton in a training camp. Her feeling had been violent, but entirely personal, while Mr. Culpeper, who possessed the martial patriotism characteristic of Virginians of his class and generation, had been animated by the sacrificial spirit of a hero.

"Oh, Stephen is all right," declared Peyton, who felt impelled to take the side of his brother in a family discussion. He was an incurious and gay young man, of active sporting interests and immaculate appearance, with so few of the moral attributes of the Culpepers that his mother sometimes wondered how he could possibly be the son of his father. Indeed there were times when this wonder extended to Mary Byrd, for it seemed incredible that anything so "advanced" as the outlook of these two should have been a legitimate offspring of either the Culpeper or the Warwick point of view.

"He would be all right," maintained Janet, "if he would only marry Margaret. I am sure she likes him."

"Oh, I don't know. There's that young clergyman," rejoined Hatty, "and Margaret is so pious. I suppose that's why she has never been popular with men."

"My dear child," breathed Mrs. Culpeper in remonstrance, and she added emphatically, as if the doubt were a disparagement of Stephen's attractions, "Of course she likes him. Why, it would be a perfectly splendid marriage for Margaret Blair."

"It isn't possible," asked Mary Byrd, for if her manners were modern, her prejudices were old-fashioned, "that Stephen could have met any one else over there?" She was wearing an elaborate, very short and very low gown of pink velvet, not one of the simple blue or gray silk dresses, with modest round necks, in which her sisters attired themselves in the evening. A little later she and Peyton would go on to a dance; for her mother's consternation when the frock had been unpacked from its Paris wrappings had been temporarily mitigated by the assertion that unless one danced in gowns like that, one simply couldn't be expected to dance at all. "Of course, if you wish me to be a wall-flower like Margaret Blair," Mary Byrd had protested with wounded dignity; and since Mrs. Culpeper wished nothing on earth so little as that, her only response had been, "Well, I hope to heaven that you won't let your father see it!"

Now, as her husband was heard descending the stairs, she said hurriedly: "Mary Byrd, if you won't put a scarf over your knees, I wish you would wear one around your neck."

"Oh, Father won't mind," retorted Mary Byrd flippantly. "He is a real sport, and he knows that you have to play the game well if you play it at all." Then turning with her liveliest air, she remarked as Mr. Culpeper entered: "Father, darling, I've just said that you were a sport."

Mr. Culpeper surveyed her with portentous disapproval. He adored her, and she knew it, but because it was impossible for his features to wear any expression lightly, the natural gravity of his look deepened to a thundercloud.

"Is Mary Byrd going in swimming?" he demanded not of his daughter, but of the family.

"No, you precious, only in dancing," replied Mary Byrd, as she rose airily and placed a kiss above the thundercloud on his forehead.

"Will you go looking like this?"

"Not if I can possibly look any worse." She swayed like a golden lily before his astonished gaze. "Can you suggest any way that I might?"

"I cannot." His face cleared under the kiss, and he held her at arm's length while paternal pride softened his look. "Do you really mean that you won't shock the young men away from you?" It was as near a jest as he had ever come, and a ripple of amusement passed over the room.

"I may shock them, but not away." The girl was really a wonder. How in the world, he asked himself, did she happen to be his daughter?

"Do you mean that all the other girls dress like this?" It was his final appeal to an arbitrary but acknowledged authority.

"All the popular ones. You can't wish me to dress like the unpopular ones, can you?"

His appeal had failed, and he accepted defeat with the sober courage his father had displayed in a greater surrender.

"Well, I suppose if everybody does it, it is all right," he conceded; and though he was not aware of it, he had compressed into this convenient axiom his whole philosophy of conduct.

As he crossed the room to the glowing fire and the black marble mantelpiece, which had supplanted the delicate Adam one of a less resplendent period, he wore an air that was at once gentle and haughty—the expression of a man who hopes that he is a Christian and knows that his blood is blue.

"Hasn't Stephen come in yet?" he inquired of his wife. "I thought I heard him upstairs."

She shook her head helplessly. "No, and I told him Margaret was coming. That is her ring now."

Mr. Culpeper looked at Mary Byrd. "I am sure that Margaret would clothe herself more discreetly," he remarked in a voice which sounded husky because he tried to make it facetious. "When I was a young man it was the fashion to compare women to flowers, and in these unromantic days I should call Margaret our last violet—"

A peal of laughter fell from the bright red lips of Mary Byrd. "It sounds as depressing as the last rose of summer," she cried, "and it's just as certain to be left on the stem—" Then she broke off, still pulsing with merriment, for the door opened slowly, and the last violet entered the room.

CHAPTER V

MARGARET

As he inserted his latch-key in the old-fashioned lock, Stephen remembered that his mother had instructed him not to be late because Margaret Blair was coming to spend the evening. "It takes you so long to change that I believe you begin to dream as soon as you go to your room," she had added; and while he made his way hurriedly and softly up the stairs, he wondered how he could have so completely forgotten the girl whom he had always thought of vaguely as the one who would some day—some remote day probably—become his wife. He was not in love with Margaret, and he believed, though one could never be sure, that she was not in love with him—that her fancy, if a preference so modest could be called by so capricious a name, was for the handsome young clergyman who read Browning with her every Tuesday afternoon. But he was aware also that she would marry him if he asked her; he knew that the hearts of four formidable parents were set on the match; and in his past experience his mother's heart had invariably triumphed over his less intrepid resolves. When Janet had said that the war had "spoiled" this carefully nurtured sentiment, she had described the failure with her usual accuracy. If he had never gone to France, he would certainly have married Margaret in his twenty-fourth year, and by this time they would have begun to rear a promising family. For he was the offspring of tradition; and the seeds of that strange flower, which some adventurous ancestor had strewn in his soul, could not have broken through the compact soil in which he had grown. If he had never felt the charm of the unknown, he would have remained satisfied to accept convention for romance; if he had never caught a glimpse of wider horizons, he would have restricted his vision contentedly to the tranquil current of James River. But the harm had been done, as Janet said, the exotic flower had sprung up, and he had learned that the family formula for happiness could not suffice for his needs. He craved something larger, something wider, something deeper, than the world in which his fathers had lived. In that first year after his return he had felt that antiquated traditions were closing about him and shutting out the air, just as he had felt at times that the fine old walls of the house were pressing together over his head. At such moments the sense of suffocation, of smothering for lack of space in which to breathe, had driven him like a hunted creature out into the streets. It was not long before he discovered that certain persons brought this feeling of oppression more quickly than others, that the presence of Margaret or of his parents stifled him, while Corinna made him feel as if a window had been suddenly flung open. The doctors, of course, had talked in scientific terms of diseased nerves and a specialist whom his mother had called in on one occasion had tried first to probe into the secrets of his infancy and afterward to analyse his symptoms away. But the war, among other lessons, had taught him that one must not take either one's sensations or scientific opinion too seriously, and he had contrived at last to turn the whole thing into the kind of family joke that his father could understand. Outwardly he took up his life as before; if the penalty of depression was psychoanalysis, it was worth while to pretend at least to be gay. Yet beneath the surface there was, he told himself, a profound revulsion from everything that he had once enjoyed and loved—an apathy of soul which made him a moving shadow in a universe of stark unrealities. He knew that he was sinking deeper and deeper into this morass of indifference; he realized, at times vividly, that his only hope was in change, in a complete break with the past and a complete plunge into the future. His reason told him this, and yet, though he longed passionately to let himself go—to make the wild dash for freedom—his disabled will, the nervous indecision from which he suffered, prevented both his liberation and his recovery. There were hours of grayness when he told himself that he had neither the fortitude to endure the old nor the energy to embrace the new. In his nature, as in his environment, two opposing spirits were struggling: the realistic spirit which saw things as they were and the romantic spirit which saw things as they ought to be. It was the immemorial battle, brought by circumstances to a crisis, between the race and the individual, between tradition and adventure, between philosophy and experience, between age and youth.

Yes, it was "something different" that he craved. He had known Margaret too long; there was no surprise for him in any gesture that she made, in any word that she uttered. They had drunk too deeply of the same springs to offer each other the attraction of mystery, the charm of the unusual. He was familiar with every opinion she had inherited and preserved, with every dress she had worn, with every book she had read. As a whole she embodied his ideal of feminine perfection. She was gentle, lovely and unselfish; she never asked unnecessary questions, never exacted more of one's time than one cared to give, never interfered with more important, if not more admirable, pursuits. That was the rarest of combinations, he knew—the delightful mingling of every virtue he held desirable in woman—and yet, rare and delightful as he acknowledged it to be, he was obliged to confess that it awakened not the faintest quiver of his pulses. Margaret aroused in him every sentiment except the one of interest; and he had begun to realize that at the moments when he admired her most, it was often impossible for him to make conversation. It had never occurred to him to wonder if their association had become emotionally unprofitable to her also, for in accordance with the system under which he lived, he had assumed that woman's part in love was as heroically passive as it had been in religion. What he had asked himself again and again was why, since she was so perfectly desirable in every way, he had never fallen in love with her? Until this evening he had always told himself that it would come right in the end, that he was in his own phrase simply "playing for time." Margaret was handsomer, if less piquant, than Patty Vetch. She possessed every quality he had found lacking in poor Patty; yet he admitted ruefully that he felt the vague sense of disappointment which follows when one is offered a dish of one's choice and finds that the expected flavour is missing.

There was a peremptory knock at his door, and his mother looked in reproachfully. "You must hurry, Stephen, or everything will be burned to a cinder."

"I am sorry," he replied with compunction, "I didn't realize that I was late."

Her expression was stern but kind. "If you could only learn to be punctual, dear. Of course while we felt that you were not quite yourself, we tried not to worry about it. But you have been home so long now that you ought to be able to drop back into your old habits."

She was right, he knew; the exasperating thing about her was that she was always right. It was reasonable, it was logical, that after two years he should be able to drop back into his old habits of life; and yet he realized, with the intensity of revolt, that these habits represented for him the form of bondage from which he desired passionately to escape. He could not oppose his mother, and the knowledge that he could not oppose her increased his annoyance. As far back as he could remember she had governed her household as a benevolent despot; and the fact that she lived entirely for others appeared to him to have endowed her with some unfair advantage. Her very unselfishness had developed into an unscrupulous power to ruin their lives. How was it possible to weigh one's personal preferences against an irresistible force which was actuated simply and solely by the desire for one's good? Who could withstand a virtue which had encased itself in the first principle of religion—which gave all things and demanded nothing except the sacrifice of one's immortal soul?

"I am ready now," he said; and then as they went downstairs together, he added contritely: "After this I'll try to remember."

"I hope you will, my dear. It vexes your father." Even in his childhood Stephen had understood that his father's "vexation" existed only as an instrument of correction in the hands of his mother. Though he had discovered by the time he was three years old that the image was nothing more than a nursery bugaboo, there were occasions still when the figure was solemnly dressed up and paraded before his eyes.

"So it's the Dad, bless him!" he exclaimed, for if he loved his mother in spite of her virtues, he joined heartily in the family worship of the head of the house. "Well, he has had a word with Margaret anyway, and he ought to thank me for that."

"Dear Margaret," murmured Mrs. Culpeper, "she is looking so sweet to-night."

That Margaret was looking very sweet indeed, Stephen acknowledged as soon as he entered the room, where the firelight suffused the Persian rugs (which had replaced the earlier Brussels carpet woven in a mammoth floral design), the elaborately carved and twisted rosewood chairs and sofas, upholstered in ruby-coloured brocade, the few fine old pieces of Chippendale or Heppelwhite, the massive crystal chandelier, and the precise copies of Italian paintings in gorgeous Florentine frames. Here and there hung a family portrait, one of Amanda Culpeper, a famous English beauty, with a long nose and a short upper lip, not unlike Victoria's. This painting, which was supposed to be by Sir Joshua Reynolds, was a source of unfailing consolation to Victoria, though Stephen preferred the Sully painting of his grandmother, Judith Randolph, who reminded him in some subtle way of Margaret Blair. In his childhood he had believed this drawing-room to be the most beautiful place on earth, and he never entered it now without a feeling of regret for a shattered illusion.

As he took Margaret's hand her expression of intelligent sympathy went straight to his heart; and he told himself emphatically that after all the familiar graces in women were the most lovable. She was a small fragile girl, with a lovely oval face, nut-brown hair that grew in a "widow's peak" on her forehead, and the prettiest dark blue eyes in the world. Her figure drooped slightly in the shoulders, and was, as Mary Byrd pointed out in her dashing way, "without the faintest pretence to style." But if Margaret lacked "style," she possessed an unconscious grace which seemed to Stephen far more attractive. It was delightful to watch the flowing lines of her clothes, as if, he used to imagine in a fanciful strain, she were poured out of some slender porcelain vase. Her dress to-night, of delicate blue crêpe, began slightly below the throat and reached almost to her ankles. It was a fashion which he had always admired; but he realized that it gave Margaret, who was only twenty-two, a quaint air of maturity.

"I am so sorry I am late," he said, "but I had to go back to the office for a paper I'd forgotten." It was the truth as far as it went; and yet because it was not the whole truth, because his delay was due, not to his return for the paper, but to his meeting with Patty Vetch in the Square, his conscience pricked him uncomfortably. When deceit was so easy it ceased to be a temptation.

She looked at him with an expression of guileless sympathy. "After working all day I should think you would be tired," she murmured. That was the way she would always cover up his errors, large or small, he knew, with a trusting sweetness which made him feel there was dishonour in the merest tinge of dissimulation.

Mary Byrd was talking as usual in high fluting notes which drowned the gentle ripple of Margaret's voice.

"I was just telling Margaret about the charity ball," she said, "and the way the girls snubbed Patty Vetch in the dressing-room."

"And it was a very good account of young barbarians at play," commented Mr. Culpeper, who was a romantic soul and still read his Byron.

"Patty Vetch? Why, isn't that the daughter of the Governor?" asked Mrs. Culpeper, without a trace of her husband's sympathy for the victim of the "snubbing." A moment later, in accordance with her mental attitude of evasive idealism, she added briskly: "I try not to think of that man as Governor of Virginia."

Of course the subject had come up. Wherever Stephen had been in the past few weeks he had found that the conversation turned to the Governor; and it struck him, while he followed the line of girls headed by his mother's erect figure into the dining-room, that, for good or bad, the influence of Gideon Vetch was as prevalent as an epidemic. All through the long and elaborate meal, in which the viands that his ancestors had preferred were served ceremoniously by slow-moving coloured servants, he listened again to the familiar discussion and analysis of the demagogue, as he still called him. How little, after all, did any one know of Gideon Vetch? Since he had been in office what had they learned except that he was approachable in human relations and unapproachable in political ones?

"I wonder if Stephen noticed the girl at the ball?" said Mrs. Culpeper suddenly, looking tenderly at her son across the lovely George II candlesticks and the dish of expensive fruit, for she could never reconcile with her ideas of economy the spending of a penny on decorations so ephemeral as flowers.

"Oh, he couldn't have helped it," responded Mary Byrd. "Every one saw her. She was dressed very conspicuously."

"Do you imply that you were not?" inquired her father, without facetious intention.

Mary Byrd beamed indulgently in his direction. "Oh, you don't know what it is to be conspicuous, dear," she answered. "What did you think of her dress, Stephen?"

He met her question with a blush. Was he really so modest after the war and France and everything?—Victoria wondered in silence.

"It was something red, wasn't it?" he rejoined vaguely.

"It was scarlet tulle." Mary Byrd, as her mother had once observed, "hadn't an indefinite bone in her body." Then she imparted an additional incident. "She got it badly torn. I saw her pinning it up in the dressing-room."

"I should have been sorry for her," said Margaret simply; and he felt that he had never in his life been so nearly in love with her.

"Is she pretty?" asked Mrs. Culpeper, appealing directly to Stephen as a man and an authority. It was the question the strange woman had put to him in the Square, and ironical mirth seized the young man as he remembered.

"Do you think her pretty, Stephen?" repeated Margaret, and waited, with an expression of impartial interest, for his reply.

For an instant he hesitated. Did he think Patty Vetch pretty or not? "I hardly know," he answered. "I suppose it depends upon whether you like that kind of thing or not. Why don't you ask Peyton?" At the time he couldn't have told himself whether he admired Patty or not. She surprised him, she struck a new note, the note of the unexpected, but whether he liked or disliked it, he could not tell. "There is something unusual about her," he concluded hurriedly, feeling that he had not been quite fair.

"Well, I think she's good looking enough," Peyton, the incurious young man of "advanced" tastes, was replying. "She seems to have a kind of fascination. I don't know what it is, but I dare say she inherited it from her father. The Governor may be unsound in his views and uncertain in his methods, but I've yet to see any one who could resist his smile."

"The Judge admires him," remarked Stephen, with the air of a man who tosses a bomb into a legislative assembly.

"Oh, Stephen," protested Victoria on a high note of interrogation, "how can he?"

"The Judge likes to keep up well with the times," observed Mr. Culpeper, whose final argument against any innovation was the inquiry, "What do you suppose General Lee would have thought of it?" Pausing an instant while the family hung breathlessly on his words, he continued heroically: "Now, it doesn't bother me to be called an old fogy."

"There's no use trying to hide the fact that the Judge isn't quite what he used to be," said Mrs. Culpeper in an unusually tolerant tone. "He has let his habit of joking grow on him until you never know whether he is serious or simply poking fun at you."

"The next thing we hear," suggested Peyton, who was quite dreadful at times, "will be that the old gentleman admires the daughter also."

"He doesn't like conspicuous women," rejoined Victoria. "He told me so only the other day when Mrs. Bradford announced that she was going to run for the legislature."

"That's the kind of conspicuousness we all object to," commented Peyton; "Patty Vetch isn't that sort."

Janet was more merciful. "Well, you are obliged to be conspicuous to-day if you want anybody to notice you," she said. "Look at Mary Byrd."

Mary Byrd tossed her bright head as gaily as if a compliment had been intended. "Oh, you needn't think I like to dress this way," she retorted, "or that I don't sometimes get tired of keeping up with things. Why, there are hours and hours when I simply feel as if I should drop."

"Well, as long as you look like that you needn't hope for a change," remarked Stephen admiringly. Then, turning his gaze away from her too obvious brightness, he looked into the tranquil depths of Margaret's blue eyes, and thought how much more restful the old-fashioned type of woman must have been. Men didn't need to bestir themselves and sharpen their wits with women like that; they were accepted, with their inherent virtues or vices, as philosophically as one accepted the seasons.

It was a dull supper, he thought, because his mind was distracted; but a little later, when they had returned to the drawing-room, and the family had drifted away in separate directions—Mary Byrd and Peyton to a dance, his father to his library, and his mother and the three other girls to a game of bridge in the next room, he received an amazing revelation of Margaret's point of view. His sentiment for the girl had always suffered, he was aware, from too many opportunities. He had sometimes wished that an obstacle might arise, that the formidable parents would try for once to tear them apart instead of thrust them together, but, in spite of the changeless familiarity of their association, he was presently to discover how little he had known of the real Margaret beneath the flowing grace and the nut-brown hair and the eyes like blue larkspur. Though the tribal customs had shaped her body and formed her manners, a rare essence of personality escaped like a perfume from the hereditary mould of the race.

As he looked at her now, sitting gracefully on the ruby brocade of one of the rosewood chairs, with her lovely head framed by the band of intricate carving, he was aware that the delicate subtleties and shadings of her feminine charm made an entirely fresh appeal to his perceptions, if not to his senses. He had never admired her appearance more than he did at that instant; and yet his gaze was as dispassionate as the one he bestowed on the Sully portrait of which she reminded him. Her eyes were very soft; there was a faint smile on her thin pink lips which gave the look of coldness, of reticence to her face. With her head bent and her hands folded in her lap, she sat there waiting pensively—for what? It occurred to him suddenly with a shock that she was deeper, far deeper than he had ever suspected.

"You are so different from the other girls, Margaret," he said at last, oppressed by the old difficulty of making conversation. "You don't belong to the same world with Mary Byrd and—" He was going to add "Patty Vetch," but he checked himself before the name escaped him.

She seemed to melt rather than break from her attitude of waiting, so gently did her movements sink into the shadowy glow of the firelight.

"No, I don't," she replied, with a touch of sadness. "I sometimes wish that I did."

"You wish that you did!" Here was surprise at last. "But, why, in Heaven's name, should you wish that when you are everything that they ought to be?"

"As if that mattered!" There was a tone in her voice that was new to him. "It's gone out of fashion to be superior. Nobody even cares any longer about your being what you ought to be. I've been trained to be the kind of girl that doesn't get on to-day, full of all sorts of forgotten virtues and refinements. Nobody looks at me because everybody is staring so hard at the girls who are improperly dressed. There is only one place where I can be sure of having attention, and that is in an Old Ladies' Home. Old ladies admire me."

For the second time that day he found himself startled by the eccentricities of the feminine mind; but in Margaret's passive resignation there was none of Patty's rebellion against the cruelty and injustice of life. Generations of acquiescence were in the slender figure before him; and he realized that the completeness of her surrender to Fate must have softened her destiny. Both girls were victims of the changing fashion in women, of an age that moved not in a stream, but in a whirlpool.

"I admire you," he said in a caressing voice, "more than I admire any one else in the world."

She had been gazing into the fire, and as she turned slowly in answer to his words, it seemed to him that the blue of a summer sky shone on him from beneath the tremulous shadow of her eyelashes.

"The trouble," she replied, with an appealing glance, "is that I don't know how to be common. There isn't any hope of a girl's being popular if she doesn't know how to be common. I would be if I could," she confessed plaintively, "but I haven't the faintest idea how to begin."

"I hope you'll never learn," he insisted. In awakening his sympathy she had awakened also a deep-rooted protective instinct. He felt that he longed to guard and defend her, as a brother of course, and if this newer and tenderer sentiment was the result of feminine calculation, he was too chivalrous or too inexperienced to perceive it. What he perceived was simply that this lovely girl, whom he had known from infancy, had opened her heart and taken him into her confidence. To admit that she was not a success in her small social world, proved her, he felt, to be both frank and courageous.

"Of course they don't call their way common," she pursued, with what seemed to him the most touching candour. "Their word for it is 'pep'." She pronounced the vulgar syllable as if she abhorred it. "That is what I haven't got, and that's why I have never been a real success in anything except church work. Even in the Red Cross it was 'pep' that counted most, and that was the reason they never sent me to Europe. Mother tried to make me into the kind of girl that men admired when she was young; but the type has gone out of fashion to-day just as much as crinolines or a small waist. If I were clever I suppose I could make myself over and begin to jump about and imitate the sort of animation I never had; but I'm not really clever, for I've tried and I can't do it. It only makes me feel silly to pretend to be what I am not."

Her confession struck him, while he listened to it, as the sweetest and most womanly one he had ever heard.

"I cannot imagine your pretending," he answered, and felt that the remark was as inane as if he had quoted it from a play. After a moment, as she seemed to be waiting for something, he continued with greater assurance, "I dare say they have a quality that the older generation missed. It isn't just commonness. The modern spirit means, I suppose, a breathless vitality. We are more intensely alive than our ancestors, perhaps, more restless, more inclined to take risks."

The phrases he had used made him think suddenly of Gideon Vetch. Was that the secret of the Governor's irresistible magnetism, of his meteoric rise into power? He embodied the modern fetish—success; he was, in the lively idiom of the younger set,—personified "pep." After all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness? Was not the fact of its decay the sign of some secret disintegration, of rottenness at the core? And if the new spirit could destroy, perhaps it could build as well. There might be more in it, he was beginning to discern, than mere lack of control, than vulgar hysteria and undisciplined violence. The quality expressed by that dreadful word was the sparkle on the edge of the tempest, the lightning flash that revealed the presence of electricity in the air. After all, the god of the future was riding the whirlwind.

"I wonder if we can be wrong, you and I?" he went on presently, forgetting the intensely personal nature of Margaret's disclosures, while he followed the abstract trend of his reflections. "Isn't it conceivable that we are standing, not for what is necessarily better, but simply for what is old? Isn't the conservative merely the creature of habit? I suppose the older generation always looks disapprovingly at the younger, and, in spite of our youth, we really belong to the past generation. We see things through the eyes of our parents. We are mentally middle-aged—for middle age is a state of mind, after all. You and I were broken in by tradition—at least I know I was, and even the war couldn't free me. It only made me restless and dissatisfied. It destroyed my belief in the past without giving me faith in the future. It left me eager to go somewhere; but it failed to offer me any direction. It put me to sea without a compass."

Clasping his hands behind his head, he leaned back against the carving of his chair, and fixed his gaze on the portrait of the English ancestress over the mantelpiece. The firelight flickered over his firm, clear-cut features, over the sleek dark hair, which was brushed straight back from his forehead, and over his sombre smoke-coloured eyes in which a dusky glow came and went. Margaret, watching him with her pensive smile, thought that she had never seen him look so "interesting."

"We used to talk in those first days about the 'spiritual effect' of the war," he resumed dreamily, speaking more to himself than to his companion. "As if organized violence could have a steadying effect—could have any results that are not the offspring of violence. It is hard for me to talk about it. I've never even tried before to put it into words; but we are both suffering from the same cause, I think. I know it has played the very deuce with my life. It has made me discontented with what I have; but it hasn't shown me anything else that was worth striving for. I seem to have lost the power of wanting because I've discovered that nothing is worth having after you get it. Every apple has turned into Dead Sea fruit."

He had never before spoken so freely, and when he had finished he felt awkward and half resentful. Margaret's extraordinary frankness had started him, he supposed, on a similar strain; but he wished that he had kept back all that sentimental nonsense about what his mother called disapprovingly, his "frame of mind." Any frame of mind except the permanently settled appeared unsafe to Mrs. Culpeper; and her son felt at the moment that her opinion was justified. Somehow the whole thing seemed to have resulted from his meeting with Gideon Vetch. It was Vetch who had "unsettled" him, who had taken the wind out of the stiff sails of his prejudices. Had the war awakened in him, he wondered, the need of crude emotional stimulants, the dangerous allurement of the unfamiliar, the exotic? Would it ever pass, and would life become again normal and placid without losing its zest and its interest? For it was the zest of life, he realized, that he had encountered in Gideon Vetch.

"But you are a man," Margaret was saying plaintively. "Everything is easier for a man. You can go out and do things."

"So can women now. You can even go into politics."

She made a pretty gesture of aversion. "Oh, I've been too well brought up! There isn't any hope for a girl who is well brought up except the church, and even there she can't do anything but sit and listen to sermons. Mother's consolation," she added with a soft little laugh, "is that I should have been a belle and beauty in the days when Madison was President."

Then putting the subject aside as if she had finished with it for ever, she began talking to him about the books she was reading. Of all the girls he knew she was the only one who ever opened a book except one that had been forbidden.

An hour later, when Margaret went home with her father, Stephen turned back, after putting her into the car, with a warmer emotion in his heart than he had ever felt for her before. She was not only lovely and gentle; she had revealed unexpected qualities of mind which might develop later into an attraction that he had never dreamed she could possess. Never, he felt, had the outlook appeared so desirable. He was in that particular dreaminess of mood when one is easily borne off on waves of sentiment or imagination; and it is possible that, if his mother had been able to refrain from improving perfection, he might have found himself sufficiently in love with Margaret for all practical purposes. But Mrs. Culpeper, who had no need of dissimulation since she had always got things by showing that she wanted them entirely for the good of others, was incapable of leaving her son to work out his own future. When he entered the house again he found her awaiting him at the foot of the staircase.

"I hope you had a pleasant evening, Stephen."

"Yes, Mother, very pleasant."

"Margaret is a dear girl, and so well brought up. Her mother has a great deal for which to be thankful."

"A great deal, I am sure." A sharp sense of irritation had dispelled the dreamy sentiment with which he had parted from Margaret. To his mother, he knew, the evening appeared only as one more carefully planned and carelessly neglected opportunity; and the knowledge of this exasperated him in a measure that was absurdly disproportionate to the cause.

"She is so refreshing after the things you hear about other girls," pursued Mrs. Culpeper. "Poor Mrs. St. John was obliged to go to a rest cure, they say, because of the worry she has had over Geraldine; and the other girls are almost as troublesome, I suppose. That is why I am so thankful that you should have taken a fancy to Margaret. She is just the kind of girl I should like to have for a daughter-in-law."

"You'll have a long time to wait, Mother. I don't want to marry anybody until I need a nurse in my old age."

He spoke jestingly, but his mother, with her usual tenacity, held fast to the subject. Under the flickering gas light in the hall (they were still suspicious of the effect of electricity on Mr. Culpeper's eyes) her face looked grimly determined, as if an indomitable purpose had moulded every feature and traced every line in some thin plastic substance.

"I have set my heart on this, Stephen."

At this he laughed aloud with an indecorous mirth. In spite of her instincts and traditions how lacking in feminine finesse, how utterly without subtlety of method she was! She had stood always for the unconquerable will in the fragile body, and she had used to the utmost her two strong weapons of obstinacy and weakness. He did not know whether the dread of being nagged or the fear of hurting her had influenced him most; and when he looked back he could recall only a series of ineffectual efforts at evasion or denial. It is true that he had once adored her—that he still loved her—but it was a love, like his father's, which was forbearing but never free, which was always furtive and a little ashamed of its own weakness. Ever since he could remember she had triumphed over their inclinations, their convictions, and even their appetites, for they had eaten only what she thought good for them. She had invariably gained her point; and she had gained it with few words, without temper or agitation, by sheer force of character. If she had been a moral principle she could not have moved more relentlessly.

"Mrs. Blair and I used to talk it over when you and Margaret were children," she continued, in the inflexible tone with which she was accustomed to carry her point. "Even then you were fond of her."

He looked at her with a gleam of the tolerant amusement he had caught from his father's expression. "Can you imagine anything more certain to turn a man against a marriage than the thought that it was arranged for him in his infancy?" he objected.

"Not if he knew that his mother had set her heart on it?" She looked hurt but resolute.

"Don't set your heart on it, Mother. Let me dree my own weird."

"My dear boy, it is for your own good. I am sure that you know I am not thinking of myself. I may say with truth that I never think of myself."

It was true. She never thought of herself; but he had sometimes wondered what worse things could have happened if she had occasionally done so.

"I know that, Mother," he answered simply.

"I have but one wish in life and that is to see my children happy," she said, with an air of injured dignity which made him feel curiously guilty.

It was the old infallible method, he knew. She would never yield her point; she would never relax her pressure; she would never admit defeat until he married another woman.

"I want nobody else in your place, Mother. Goodnight, and try to set your heart on something else."

As he undressed a little later he was thinking of Margaret—of her low white brow under the "widow's peak," of her soft blue eyes, of her goodness and gentleness, and of the thrill in her voice when she had made that touching confession. Margaret's voice was the last thing he thought of before falling asleep; but hours afterward, when the dawn was beginning to break, he dreamed of Patty Vetch in her red cape and of that hidden country of the endless roads and the far horizons.

CHAPTER VI

MAGIC

The next day after luncheon, as Stephen walked from his club to his office, he lived over again his evening with Margaret. "If she cared for me it might be different," he mused; and then, through some perversity of memory, Margaret's pensive smile became suddenly charged with emotion, and he asked himself if he had not misinterpreted her innocent frankness? Even if she cared, he knew that she would die rather than betray her preference by a word or a look. "Whether she cares or not, and it is just possible that she does care in her heart, she will marry me if I ask her," he thought; and decided immediately that there was no necessity to act impulsively in the matter. "If I ask her she will persuade herself that she loves me. She will marry me just as hundreds of women have married men in the past; and we should probably live as long and as happily as all the others." That was the way his father and mother had married; and why were he and Margaret different from the generations before them? What variable strain in their natures impelled them to lead their own separate lives instead of the collective life of the family? "I suppose Mother is right as far as she sees," he admitted. "To marry Margaret and settle down would be the best thing that could happen to me." Yet he had no sooner put the thought into words than the old feeling of suffocation rushed over him as if his hopes were smothered in ashes.

Yes, he would settle down, of course, but not now. Next year perhaps, or the year after, he would sincerely fall in love with Margaret, and then everything would be different.

He was passing through the Square at the moment; and while he played with the idea of his marriage with Margaret, he found himself glancing expectantly at the car which was waiting in front of the Governor's door. "I wonder if she is going out," he thought, while a superficial interest brightened the dull hours before him. "It would be no more than she deserved if I were to go in and ask after her ankle." In obedience to the mocking impulse, he entered the gate and reached the steps just as Patty came out on the porch. She was walking with ease, he noticed at once, and she wore again the red cape and the little hat with red wings.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "it is you!"

"I stopped to ask after your ankle," he retorted with ironic gaiety. "I am glad it doesn't keep you from walking."

"That's the new way of treating a sprain," she replied calmly. "Haven't you heard of it?"

"Yes, I've heard of it." He glanced down at her stocking of thin gray silk. "But I thought even then there were bandages."

She smiled archly—he felt that he wanted to slap her—and glanced up at him with playful concern. The gray-green rays were brighter in the daylight than he had remembered them and her mocking lips were the colour of cherries. He thought of the thin pink curve of Margaret's mouth and wondered if the war had corrupted his taste.

Yes, Margaret was womanly; she was well bred; she possessed every attribute that in theory he admired; yet she had never awakened this sparkling interest, this attraction which was pungently flavoured with surprise that he could be so strangely attracted. He could gaze unmoved by the hour on Margaret's smooth loveliness; but the tantalizing vision of this other girl's face, of her cloudy black hair and her clear skin and her changeable eyes, with their misty gleam like a firefly lost in a spring marsh—all these things were a part not of the tedious actuality, but of that hidden country of romance and adventure. For the first time since his return from France, he was carried far outside of himself on the wave of an impulse; he was interested and excited. Not for an instant did he imagine that he was falling in love. His thoughts did not leave the immediate present when he was with her; and a part of the adventure was the feeling that each vivid moment he spent with her might be the last. It was, he would have said had he undertaken to analyse the situation, merely an incident; but it was an incident that delighted him. He knew nothing of Patty Vetch except that she charmed him against his will; and, for the moment at least, this was sufficient.

"Oh, there are sprains and sprains," she answered, with the quiver of her lip he remembered so disturbingly. "Didn't you learn that in the trenches?" Was she really pretty, or was it only the provocative appeal to his imagination, the dangerous sense that you never knew what she would dare to say next?

"I didn't go there to learn about sprains," he responded gravely.

"Nor about maneuvers apparently?" She hesitated over the word as if it were unfamiliar.

At her charge the light of battle leaped to his eyes. "Then it was a maneuver? I suspected as much."

The audacity of her! The unparalleled audacity! "But I am not so much interested in maneuvers," he added merrily, "as I am in the strategy behind them."

She looked puzzled, though her manner was still mocking. "Is there always strategy," she pronounced the word with care, "behind them?"

"Always in the art of warfare."

"But can't there be a maneuver without warfare?" He could see that she was venturing beyond her depths; but he realized that a confession of ignorance was the last thing he must ever expect from her. Whatever the challenge she would meet it with her natural wit and her bright derision.

"Never," he rejoined emphatically. "A campaign goes either before or afterward."

A thoughtful frown knit her forehead. "Well, one didn't go before, did it?" she inquired with an innocent air. "So I suppose—"

He ended her sentence on a note of merriment. "Then I must be prepared for the one that will follow!"

She threw out her hand with a gesture of mock despair. "Oh, you may have been mistaken, you know!"

"Mistaken? About the campaign?"

"No, about the maneuver. Perhaps there wasn't any such thing, after all."

"Perhaps." Though his voice was stern, his eyes were laughing. "I am not so easily fooled as that."

"I doubt if you could be fooled at all." It was the first bit of flattery she had tossed him, and he found it strangely agreeable.

"I am not sure of that," he answered, "but the thing that perplexes me—the only thing—is why you should have thought it worth while."

Her eyes grew luminous with laughter, and the little red wings quivered as if they were about to take flight over her arching brows. "How do you know that I thought about it at all? Sometimes things just happen."

"But not in this case. You had arranged the whole incident for the stage."

"Do you mean that I fell down on purpose?"

"I mean that you were laughing up your sleeve all the time. You weren't hurt and you knew it."

Her expression was enigmatical. "You think then that I arranged to fall down and risk breaking my bones for the sake of having you pick me up?" she asked demurely.

Put so plainly the fact sounded embarrassing, if not incredible. "I think you fell for the fun of it. I think also that you didn't for a second risk breaking your bones. You are too nimble for that."

"I ought to be," she retorted daringly, "since I was born in a circus."

Surprised into silence, he studied her with a regard in which admiration for her courage was mingled with blank wonder at her recklessness. If she had inherited her father's gift of expression, she appeared to possess also his dauntless humour. For an instant Stephen felt that her gaiety had entered into his spirit; and while his impression of her danced like wine in his head, he answered her in her own tone of mocking defiance.

"Well, everything that is born in a circus isn't a clown."

Her eyes widened. "Is that meant for a compliment?"

"No, merely for a reminder. But if you were born in a circus, I assume that you didn't perform in one."

She shook her head. "No, they took me away when I was a baby—just after Mother died. I never lived with the circus people, and Father didn't either except when he was a child. Not that I should have been ashamed of it," she hastened to explain. "They are very interesting people."

"I am sure of it," he answered gravely, and he was very sure of it now.

"When I was a child," she went on in a matter-of-fact tone, "I used to make Father tell me all he could remember about the 'freaks,' as they called them. The fat woman—her name was really Mrs. Coventry—was very kind to him when he was little, and he never forgot it. He never forgets anybody who has ever been kind to him," she concluded with simple dignity.

An emotion which he could not define held Stephen speechless; and before he could command his words, she began again in the same cool and quiet voice. "His mother ran away to marry his father. She came of a very good family in Fredericksburg, and her people never forgave her or spoke to her afterward. But she was happy, and she never regretted it as long as she lived. It was love at first sight. Grandfather was Irish and he was—was—" she hesitated for a word, and at last with evident care selected, "magnificent." "He was magnificent," she repeated emphatically, "and she saw him first on horseback when she was out riding. Her horse became frightened by one of the animals in the circus, and he caught it and stopped it. It began that way, and then one night she stole out of the house after her family had gone to bed, and they ran away and were married. I think she was right," she added thoughtfully, "but then I reckon—I mean I suppose it is in my blood to take risks."

She looked up at him and he responded. "But where did you learn to see things like this, and to put them into words? Not in a circus?"

"I told you I couldn't remember the circus. Mother was in one, and though Father never told me how he fell in love with her—he never talks of her—I think it must have been when he went back to see the people. He always took an interest in them and tried to help them. He does still. Even now, if anybody belonging to a circus asks him for something, he never refuses him. When he was twelve years old somebody took him away and sent him to school, but he always says he never learned anything at school except misinformation about life. No books, he says, ever taught him the truth except the Bible and 'Robinson Crusoe.' He used to read me chapters of those every day—and he does still when he has the time."

What a strange world it was! How full of colour and incident, how drenched with the quality of the unusual!

"And what did you learn?" he asked.

"I?" She was speaking earnestly. "Oh, I learned a great many—no, a multitude of things about life."

At this he broke into a laugh of pure delight. "With a special course of instruction in maneuvers," he rejoined.

Though her smile showed perplexity she tossed back his innuendo with defiance. "And by the time we meet again I shall have learned about—strategy."

How ready she was to fence, and how quick with her attack! It was easy to believe that there was Irish blood in her veins and an Irish sparkle in her wit.

"Oh, then you will out-general me entirely! Isn't it enough to force me to acknowledge your superior tactics?"

She appeared to scrutinize each separate letter. "Tactics? Have I been using superior tactics without knowing it?"

"That I can't answer. Is there anything that has escaped your instinctive understanding?"

She laughed softly. "Well, there's one thing you may be sure of. I'll know a great deal more about some things by the time I see you again." Then, with one of her darting bird-like movements, she ran down the steps and into the car. "I wish Father were here," she said, looking out at him. "He wants to talk to you."

"I should like to talk to him. I shall come again, if I may."

"Oh, of course, and next time we may both be at home." As the car started she called out teasingly. "My next maneuver may be more successful, you know!"

How provoking she was, and how inspiriting! Was she as shrewd, as sophisticated, as she tried to appear, or was he merely, he asked himself, the victim of her irrepressible humour, of a prodigious display of the modern spirit? At least she was a part of her time—not, like Margaret and himself, a discordant note, a divergent atom, in the general march toward recklessness and unrestraint. Young as she was, he felt that she had already solved the problems which he had evaded or pushed aside. She had learned the secret of transition—a perpetual motion that went in circles and was never still. Here, he realized, was where he had lost connection, where he had failed to hold his place in the turmoil. He had tried to stand off and reach a point of view, to become a spectator, while the only way to fit into the century was simply to keep moving in whirls of unintelligent unison; never to meditate, never to reason upon one's course; but to sweep onward, somewhere, anywhere as long as it was in a new direction. Elasticity, variability—were not these the indispensable qualities of the modern mind? The power to make quick decisions and the inability to cling to convictions; the nervous high pitch and the failure to sustain the triumphant note; energy without direction; success without stability; martyrdom without faith. And around, above, beneath, the pervading mediocrity, the apotheosis of the average. Was this the best that democracy had to offer mankind? Was there no depth below the shallows? Was it impossible, even by the most patient search, to discover some justification of the formlessness of the age, of the crazy instinct for ugliness? He could forgive it all, he might eventually bring his mind to believe in it, if there were only some logical design informing the disorder. If he could find that it contained a single redeeming principle that was superior to the old order, he felt that he should be able to surrender his disbelief.

He was leaving the gate when a woman, walking slowly in front of the house, spoke to him abruptly.

"If I wait here shall I see the Governor come out?"

With the feeling that he was passing again through a familiar nightmare, he turned quickly and looked down on the pathetic figure he had seen the evening before. In the daylight she seemed more pitiable and less repellent than she had appeared in the darkness. The hollowness of her features gave a certain dignity to her expression—the look of one who is returning from the shadows of death. Years ago, before illness or dissipation had wrecked her health and her appearance, she may have been attractive, he surmised, in a common and obvious fashion. Her black eyes were still striking, and the sunlight revealed a quantity of coarse black hair on which he detected the claret tinge of fading dye.

"I am sorry," she added as she recognized him. "I did not know it was you." As soon as she had spoken she became confused and tried to pass on; but he made a movement to detain her.

"Have you any particular reason for wishing to see the Governor?"

"Oh, no, I am a stranger here." Her accents were ordinary, yet there was a note of the unusual in her appearance and manner. Whatever she was, she was not commonplace.

"But you were waiting to see him?" he said.

Her gaze left his face and travelled uncertainly over the mansion. "Oh, yes, I thought I might see him. I've never seen a Governor."

"You do not wish to speak to him?"

"No; why should I wish to speak to him? I'm a stranger, that's all. I like to see whatever is going on. Was that his daughter who went out just now?"

"Yes, that was his daughter."

"Then she is pretty—almost as pretty as—Thank you, sir. I will go along now. I'm staying not far from here, and I come out when I get the chance to watch the squirrels in the Square."

The explanation sounded simple enough; yet he suspected, though he could not have defined his reason, that she was not telling the truth. Again he asked himself if she could have known Gideon Vetch in the past? It was possible; it was not even improbable. Once, even ten or fifteen years ago, she may have been handsome in her coarse and showy style; and he had no proof, except Patty, that the Governor had ever possessed a fastidious taste.

The woman had turned with furtive haste in the direction of the outer gate; and when Stephen started on again toward the library, he crossed a man who was rapidly ascending the brick walk from the fountain at the foot of the hill. By his jaunty stride and his air of excessive joviality—the mark of the successful local politician—Stephen recognized Julius Gershom, the campaign-maker, as people called him, who had stood behind Gideon Vetch from the beginning of his career. "What an unconscionable bounder the fellow is," thought Stephen as he passed him. What an abundance of self-assertiveness he had contrived to express in his thin spruce figure, his tightly curling black hair, which grew too low on his forehead, and his short black moustache with pointed ends which curved up like polished metal from his full red lips.

"I suppose he is on his way to the Governor," mused the young man idly. "How on earth does Vetch stand him?"

But to his surprise, when he glanced back again, he saw that Gershom had passed the mansion, and was hurrying down the walk which the strange woman had followed a moment before. Stephen could still see her figure approaching a distant gate; and he observed presently that Gershom was not far behind her, and that he appeared to be speaking her name. She started and turned quickly with a movement of alarm; and then, as Gershom joined her, she went on again in the direction she had first taken. A few minutes later their rapidly moving figures left the Square and passed down the street beyond the high iron fence.

"I wonder what it means?" thought Stephen indifferently. "I wonder what the deuce Gershom has got up his sleeve?"

By the time he reached his office the wonder had vanished; but it returned to him on his way home that afternoon when he dropped into the old print shop for a word with Corinna.

"I passed that fellow Gershom in the Square to-day," he said. "Do you know him by sight?"

She shook her head. "What is he like? Patty tells me that he has become a nuisance."

"Ah, then you have seen Patty?"

A smile turned her eyes to the colour of November leaves. "She was here for an hour this morning. I have great hopes of her. I think she is going to supply me with an interest in life."

"Then she still amuses you?"

"Amuses me? My dear, she enchants me. She stands for the suppressed audacities of my past."

He looked at her thoughtfully. "I wonder how much of her is real?"

"Probably half. She is real, I think, in her courage, but not in her conventions."

"Well, I confess that she puzzles me. I can't see just what she means."

"I doubt if she means anything. She is a vital spirit; she chafes at chains; and she is smarting from a sense of inferiority. There is a thirst for power in her little body that may make her either an actress or a politician."

"Now, it seems to me that if she has any sense it is one of superiority. She treated me like a brick under her feet."

For a minute Corinna was silent. The smile on her lips had grown tenderly humorous; and there was a softness in her eyes which made him sorry that he had not known her when he was a child. "Do you know what she told me to-day?" she said. "She studies a page of the dictionary every morning, and she tries to remember and practise all day the new words that she learns. She is now in the letter M."

A peal of merriment interrupted her. "That explains it!" exclaimed Stephen with unaffected delight, "maneuver—misinformation—multitude—"

"So she has practised on you too?"

"Oh, they all practise on me," he retorted. "It is what I was made for."

"Well, as long as it is only words, you are safe, I suppose."

He denied this with a gesture. "It is everything you can possibly practise with—from puddings to pigeons."

"My poor dear, so you have been eating Margaret's puddings. Weren't they good ones?"

"Oh, perfection! But I wasn't thinking of Margaret."

"I know you weren't. For your mother's sake I wish that you were."

His face looked suddenly tired. "Margaret is perfection, I know; but I feel sometimes that only perfect people can endure perfection."

"Yes, I know." Her smile had faded now. "I admire Margaret tremendously, but I feel closer to Patty."

"Perhaps. I am not sure. Somehow I have been sure of nothing since I came out of the trenches—least of all of myself. I am trying to find out now what I am in reality."

As he rose to go she held out her hand. "I think,—I am not certain, but I think," she responded gaily, "that Patty's dictionary may give you the definition."

CHAPTER VII

CORINNA GOES TO WAR

"Yes, I've had a mean life," thought Corinna, while she stood before her mirror carefully placing a patch on her cheek. In her narrow gown of black velvet, with the silver heels of her slippers shining beneath the transparent draperies, she had more than ever the look of festival, of October splendour. If her beauty had lost in roundness and softness, it had gained immeasurably in authority, in that air of having been a part of great events, of historic moments which clung to her like a legend. Romance and mystery were in her smile; and yet what had life held for her, she mused now, except the frustrated hope, the blighted fruit, the painted lily? Her beauty had brought her nothing that was not tawdry, nothing that was not a gaudy imitation of happiness. She had given herself for what? For the shadow of reality, for the tinted shreds of a damaged illusion. The past, in spite of her many triumphs, had been worse than tragic; it had been comic—since it had left her beggared. Looking back upon it now she saw that it had lacked even the mournful dignity of a broken heart.

"I have had a mean life; but it isn't over yet, and I may make something better of the rest of it," she thought. "At least I have fighting blood in my veins, and I will never give up. After all, even if my life has been mean, I haven't been—and that is what really counts in the end. If I haven't been happy, I have tried to be gallant—and it takes courage to be gallant with an aching heart—"

As she fastened the long string of pearls—one of Kent Page's early gifts—she drew back from the mirror, with the light of philosophy, if not of happiness, overflowing her eyes. With her grace and her radiance she stood for the flower of the Virginian aristocratic tradition; with her sincerity and her fearlessness she embodied the American democratic ideal. Her forefathers had brought representative government to the New World. They had sat in the first General Assembly ever summoned in America; and through the generations they had fought always on the side of liberty tempered by discipline, of democracy exalted by patriotism. They had stood from the beginning for dignity, for manners, for the essence of social culture which places art at the service of life. Always they had sought to preserve the finer lessons of the past; always they had struggled against the tyranny of mediocrity, the increasing cult of the second best. From this source, from the inherited instinct for selection, for elimination, from the inbred tendency toward order and suavity of living, Corinna had derived her clear-eyed acceptance of life, her nobility of mind, her loveliness and grace of body. She had been prepared and nurtured for beauty, only to bloom in an age when beauty had been bartered for usefulness. Would the delicate discriminations in which she had been trained, the lights and shadows of her soul, become submerged in the modern effort to reduce all distinctions to a level, all diversities to an average?

Turning away from the mirror, Corinna glanced over the charming room, with the wood fire, the white bearskin rug, the ivory bed draped in blue silk, the long windows opening on the garden terrace and the starlit darkness. There had been luxury always. Money she had had in abundance; yet there had been no hour in the last twenty years when she would not have exchanged it all—everything that money could bring her—for the dinner of herbs where love was. She had possessed everything except the one thing she had wanted. She had served the tin gods in temples of gold and jade. With the deep instinct for perfection in her blood, she had spent her life in an endless compromise with the inferior.

"Was there something lacking in me?" she asked now of her glowing reflection. "Was there some vital spark left out when I was born? And to-night? Why should I care how it goes? What is Rose Stribling to me or I to her?" Why should she still cherish that dull resentment, that smothered sense of injury in her heart? Was it the burden of her inheritance, the weakness of the older races, that she could not forget? She had loved a man who was unworthy; she had loved him for no better reason, she understood now, than a superficial charm, a romantic appeal. The fault was in the man, she knew, yet she had forgiven the man long ago, while she still hated Rose Stribling. Perversity, inconsistency—but it was her nature, and she could not overcome it. "If she had ever loved him, I might have forgiven her," she thought, "but she cared for him as little as she cares for Gideon Vetch to-day. It was vanity then, and it is vanity now. You cannot hurt her heart—only her pride—"

Her father called from the stairs; and with a last swift glance at her image, she caught up a fan of ostrich plumes and a wrap of peacock-blue velvet. She had never looked more brilliant in her life, not even on that June morning twenty-five years ago, when, coloured like a rose, she had been married to Kent Page beneath a bower of roses. She had lost much since then, freshness, innocence, the trusting heart and the transparent gaze, but she had lost neither charm nor radiance.

"So we are invited to meet Gideon Vetch," remarked the Judge as they went down the steps; and from the whimsical sound of his voice, she knew that there was a smile on his face. The house, with its picturesque English front half hidden by Virginia creeper, stood at the end of a long avenue, in the centre of a broad lawn planted in fine old elms.

"Yes, there must be some reason for the dinner, but Sarah Berkeley did not tell me."

"Well, I'll be glad to see the Governor again," said the Judge, leaning comfortably back as the car rolled down the avenue to the road, "but you will have a dreary evening, I fear, unless John should be there."

Corinna smiled in the darkness. So even her father, who so rarely noticed anything, had observed her growing interest in John Benham. After all, might this be—this sudden revival of an old sentiment in John's heart—"the something different," the ultimate perfection for which she had sought all her life? "He is beginning to mean more to me than any one else," she thought. "If only I had never heard that old gossip about Alice Rokeby."

Leaning over, she patted the Judge's hand. "Don't have me on your mind, Father darling. Go ahead and enjoy the Governor as much as you can. I am easy to amuse, you know, and besides, I have my own particular iron in the fire to-night."

"You are never without expedients, my child, but I hope this one has no bearing on Vetch."

"Oh, but it has. Like Esther, the queen, I have put on royal apparel for an ulterior object. Did you notice that I had made myself as terrible as an army with banners?"

"I thought you were looking unusually lovely," replied the Judge gracefully. "But you are always so handsome that I suspected no guile."

Corinna laughed merrily. "But I am full of guile, dear innocent! I go forth to conquer."

"Not the Governor, I hope?"

"Oh, no, the Governor is nothing—a prize, nothing more. My antagonist is Mrs. Stribling."

"Rose Stribling?" The Judge was mildly astonished. "Why, I remember her as a little girl in white dresses."

Corinna's smile became scornful. "Well, she isn't a little girl any longer, and she oughtn't to be in white dresses."

"Dear me, dear me," rejoined the old gentleman. "I am aware that you have a dramatic temperament, but it is scarcely possible that you are jealous of little Rose. She is a good deal younger than you, if I am not mistaken—but my memory is not all that it once was."

"She is twelve years younger and at least twenty years more malicious," retorted Corinna lightly. "But those twelve years aren't as long as they were in your youth, my dear. A generation ago they would have spelt an end of my conquests; to-day they mean only new worlds to conquer."

The Judge looked perplexed. "Am I to infer from this that you have designs on the Governor? And may I inquire what use you intend to make of him after you have captured him from the enemy?"

Corinna shrugged her shoulders. "I hadn't thought of that. Release him, probably. But, whatever happens, I shall have saved him from a worse fate. For that he ought to thank me, and he will if he is reasonable."

"Few men are reasonable in captivity. Do you think, by the way, that Mrs. Stribling would like another husband, and such a husband as our friend the demagogue?"

"I think she would like a political career, and of course her only way of obtaining a career of any kind is to marry one. Though she isn't discerning, she has sense enough to perceive that. They tell me that the Governor is starting straight for the Senate, and the wife of a senator—of any senator—might have a very good time in Washington. Besides, there is always the chance of course that the winds of public folly may blow him into the White House."

"If what you say is true it would be a hard fate for an honest rogue," admitted the Judge. "In your hands he would at least go unharmed."

"Oh, unharmed certainly. Perhaps helped."

"Then it is better so. But the thing that interests me in Vetch, is not his value as a matrimonial or romantic prize; I am concerned solely and simply with his opinions."

"Well, you will have the advantage of Mrs. Stribling and me, for we shall probably find the cigars an impediment to our attack. At any rate, we ought to have a less tedious evening than you expect."

A little later, when she entered the long drawing-room where the other guests were already assembled, Corinna threw an inquiring glance in the direction of Mrs. Stribling. Could the shallow pink and white loveliness of that other woman, the historic type of the World's Desire, bear comparison with her own starry beauty? It was a petty rivalry. She had entered into it half in jest, half in irritation, yet some sportsmanlike instinct prompted her to play the game to the end. She would prove to Rose Stribling that those twelve years of knowledge and suffering had taught her not to surrender, but to conquer.

The Berkeleys were what was still known in their small social world as "quiet people." They entertained little, and always with a definite object which they were not afraid to disclose. Their house, an incongruous example of Mid-Victorian architecture, was still suffused for them with the sentimental glamour of their wedding day. The walls, untouched for years, were covered with embossed paper and panelled in yellow oak. The furniture, protected for five months of the year by covers of striped linen, was stiffly upholstered in pea-green brocade; and the pictures, hanging very high, were large but inferior oil paintings in heavily gilded frames that represented preposterous sheaves of wheat or garlands of roses. Forty years ago the house reproduced within and without "the best taste" of the period, and was as bad as the Berkeleys could afford to make it. Since then fashions had come and gone; yet the hospitable home remained as unchanged as the politics of the host or the figure of the hostess. The Berkeleys were still content to be "old-fashioned people," with the fine feeling and the indiscriminate taste of an era which had flowered not in architecture but in character, when the standard of living was high and the style in furniture correspondingly low. To-night the ten guests (the Berkeleys never gave large dinners) had been carefully chosen, and the evening would probably be distinguished by good talk and good wine. Though they were law-abiding persons to the core, the bitterness of the Eighteenth Amendment had not penetrated to the subterranean darkness where Mr. Berkeley's treasures were stored.

Mrs. Berkeley, a brisk, compact little woman, with a pretty florid face and the prominent bosom and tapering waist of forty years ago, turned from the Governor as Corinna and the Judge entered, and hurried forward in her animated way, which reminded one of the manner of a child that is trying to make a success of a dolls' party. Beyond Mr. Berkeley, a short, neutral-tinted man without emphasis of personality, Corinna saw Mrs. Stribling's tall, full figure draped in a gown of jade-coloured velvet, with a daringly short skirt from which a narrow, sharply pointed train wound like a serpent. Her heavy hair, of an unusual shade of pale gold, had the smooth, polished look of metal which had been moulded in waves close to her head. In spite of her active life and her disastrous affairs, she presented an unblemished complexion, as if her hard rosy surface were protected by some indestructible glaze. Beside her opulent attractions the frail prettiness of Alice Rokeby, who was dining out for the first time this winter, looked wistful and pathetic. Every one, except Corinna, who had been abroad at the time, knew of the old affair between Alice Rokeby and John Benham; and every one who knew of it had thought that they would be married as soon as she got her divorce. But time had dragged on; Corinna had come home again; and Alice Rokeby's violet eyes had grown deeper and more wistful, with a haunted look in them as if they were denying a hungry heart. She had never dressed well; she had never, as Mrs. Stribling remarked, known how to bring out her best points; and to-night she had been even less successful than usual. Both Corinna and Mrs. Stribling could have told her that she should have avoided violent shades; and yet she was wearing now a dress of vivid purple which made her pale rose-leaf complexion look almost sallow. Though she could exercise when she chose a strangely passive attraction, her charm usually failed in the end for lack of intelligent guidance.

A little beyond Alice Rokeby, where her eyes could follow his gestures, John Benham was talking in his pleasant subdued voice to Patty Vetch, who looked, in her frock of scarlet tulle, as if she had just alighted from the chorus of a musical comedy. Her boyish dark head was bent over a fan of scarlet feathers, a toy which appeared ridiculously large beside her small figure. It was evident that the girl was trying to cover an uncomfortable shyness with an air of mocking effrontery; and a moment later, when Corinna joined them, Benham glanced up with a flash of satirical amusement in his eyes. He was a tall thin man of middle age, with a striking appearance and the straight composed features of an early American portrait. His dark hair, brushed back from his forehead, had the shining gloss that comes of good living and careful grooming, and this gloss was reflected in his smiling gray eyes and in the healthy red of his well-cut though not quite generous mouth. He was a charming guest, an impressive speaker, a sympathetic listener; yet there had always seemed to Corinna to be a subtle deficiency in his character. It was only of late, since their friendship had turned into a warmer feeling, that she had been able to overcome that sense of something wanting which had troubled her when she was with him. She could define no quality that was absent; but the impression he still gave her at times was one of a man tremendously gifted and yet curiously inadequate. A mental thinness perhaps? An emotional dryness? Or was it merely that here also she felt, rather than perceived, the intrinsic weakness of the old order?

Beyond Benham, Gideon Vetch, rugged, sanguine, and wearing the wrong tie with his evening clothes as valiantly as he had worn the rumpled brown suit in which Stephen had last seen him, was talking in a loud voice to Miss Maria Berkeley—one of those serene single women arrayed in dove-colour who belong as appropriately as crewel work or antimacassars to another century. If Patty was shy and self-conscious, it was evident that her state of mind was not shared by her father. He was interested because he was expressing a cherished opinion, and he was talking in an emphatic tone because he hoped that he might be overheard. When Mrs. Berkeley drew him away in order to introduce him to Corinna, he resumed his theme immediately, as if he were addressing a public meeting and had scarcely noticed that there had been a change in his audience. "Miss Berkeley was asking me what I thought of the effects of prohibition," he explained presently with his smile of unguarded friendliness. How was it possible to arrest the attention of a man who insisted on talking of prohibition?

At the table a little later Corinna asked herself the question again, while she made light conversation for the retired general who had taken her in—an anecdotal, bewhiskered presence, with the husky voice and the glazed eyes of successful pomposity. Glancing occasionally at Vetch who sat on her left, she found that he was describing to Mrs. Berkeley the best protection against forest fires. As far as Corinna was concerned, she felt that she might as well have been a view from the window, or the portrait of Mr. Berkeley's great aunt that hung over the mantelpiece. He had probably, she reflected, classified her lightly as "another gray-haired woman," and passed on to Rose Stribling, who bloomed triumphantly between John Benham and Stephen Culpeper. Vetch was so different from what Corinna had expected to find him that, in some vague way, she felt disappointed and absurdly resentful. Had her imagination, she wondered, prepared her to meet one of the picturesque radicals of fiction? Had she looked for a middle-aged Felix Holt; and was this why the Governor's prosaic figure, his fresh-coloured, undistinguished face and his vehement, spectacular gestures, dispelled immediately the interest she had felt in the meeting? There were no salient points in his appearance, nothing that she could detach from the rest in her mental image of him. There was no single characteristic of which she could say: "He may be common; he may be vulgar; but he strikes the note of greatness here—and here—and here." With such a man, she felt, the direct and obvious appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious. He could discern pink and white and blue and gold; but the indeterminate shades, the subtleties and mysteries of charm were enigmatical to him. His emotions would be as literal as his convictions or his oratory. Yet there must be some faculty in him which did not appear on the surface, some primitive grasp of realities in his understanding of men. Why should the influence of this sanguine, loud-talking demagogue, she asked herself the next minute, be greater than the influence of John Benham, who possessed every admirable trait except the ability to make people follow him? What was this fundamental difference in material or structure which divided them so completely? When she had traced it to its source would she discover the secret of Vetch's conquering personality?

Looking away from the General, her eyes rested for a moment on Stephen Culpeper, who was listening with his reserved impersonal attention to the amusing prattle of Patty Vetch. Obeying an imperative rule, Mrs. Berkeley had placed her youngest guests together; and yet, if Stephen had been seventy-five instead of twenty-six, he could sparcely have had less in common with the Governor's daughter. With her small glossy head, and her scarlet cheeks and lips above the fan of ostrich feathers, the girl reminded Corinna of a spray of Christmas holly, all dark and bright and shining. Ever since Patty's first visit to the print shop Corinna had felt a genuine liking for her. The girl had something deeper than charm, reflected the older woman; she had determination and endurance, the essentials of character. Of course she was crude, she was ignorant; but these are never insurmountable obstacles except to the dull. With intelligence and resourcefulness all things are possible—even the metamorphosis of a circus rider's daughter into a woman of the world.

Becoming suddenly aware that Vetch was silent, and that Mrs. Berkeley had turned to Judge Page on her left, Corinna looked for the first time into the frank blue eyes of the Governor. Strange eyes they were, she thought, the one striking feature in a face that was ordinary. It was like looking down into the very fountain of life—no, of humanity.

"I have been watching your daughter," she began casually. "She is very pretty."

"Yes, she is pretty enough"—his tone was playful—"but I don't like this craze for short hair."

She looked him over calmly. Indirect methods would be wasted on such an opponent. "You must admire Mrs. Stribling's."

"I do. Don't you?" His glance roved to the ample beauty beside John Benham. "It looks exactly like a rope of flax."

"A rope suggests a hanging to me," she rejoined grimly.

He laughed, and she noticed that his eyes were brimming over with humour. Yes, they were extraordinary eyes, and they made one feel sympathetic and friendly. The man had a quality, she couldn't deny it.

"We don't hang any longer," he replied.

"Oh, yes, we do sometimes—without the law."

The blue sparkles in his eyes contracted to points of light. She had at last, by arresting his wandering attention, succeeded in making him look at her.

"I wonder what you mean," he mused aloud, and added frankly, "I've never seen you before, have I?"

"Have I?" she mimicked gaily. "Wouldn't you remember me? Or are all gray-haired women alike to you?"

His gaze travelled to her hair. "I didn't mean it that way. Of course I should have remembered." He spoiled this by adding: "I never forget a face," and continued before she could answer, "I don't know whether your hair is gray or only powdered a little; but you are as young as—as summer."

"Or as your political party."

"That's good. I like a nimble wit." He was plainly amused. "But my party isn't young, you know. It is as old as Esau and Jacob. Oh, yes, I've read my Bible. I was brought up on it."

"That is why your speech is so direct," she said when he paused, concluding slowly after a minute, "and so sincere."

"You feel that I am sincere?"

She met his eyes gravely. "Doesn't every one?"

He laughed shortly. "Ah, you know better than that!"

"Well, my father does. He says that it is your sincerity that makes you resemble me."

To her surprise he did not laugh at this. "Do I resemble you?" he asked simply.

"Father thinks so. He says that people won't take us seriously because we tell them the truth."

An impression drifted like smoke across the blue of his eyes. Who was it, she wondered, who had said that his eyes were gray? "Don't they take you seriously?" he asked.

"As a woman, yes. As a human being, no."

He smiled. "You are too deep. I can't follow. I understand only the plain bright ideas of the half educated, you know."

Her brilliant glance shone on him steadily. "I shan't try to explain. What one doesn't understand without an explanation isn't worth knowing. But somebody must take you seriously, or you wouldn't be where you are."

"Do you know where I am?" he demanded impulsively.

"I know that you are Governor of Virginia."

"Oh, that! I thought you meant something more than that," he returned with a note of disappointment in his voice.

"What could I mean more than that? Isn't it the first step upward in a political career?"

"Perhaps. But I was thinking of something else. The chief thing seems to me to be to work a way out of the muddle. Anybody may be Governor or even President if he tries hard enough—but it is a different matter to bring some kind of order out of this confusion. I've got an idea that I've been hammering at for the last twenty years. Not a great one, perhaps, though I think it is; and I'd like to get a chance to put it into practice before I die. I want to wake up people and tell them the truth."

Was he, for all his matter-of-fact appearance, simply another political dreamer, another visionary without a definite vision?

"And will they listen when you tell them?" she asked.

He laughed. "Who knows what may happen? When I was a kid in the circus—you have heard, of course, that I spent my childhood in a travelling circus"—how simply he brought this out!—"the fat woman, we called her 'the fat lady' in those days, had a favourite proverb: 'When the skies fall we shall catch larks'. I reckon when the skies fall the people will learn wisdom."

"But you have caught your larks, haven't you?"

"No, I used to set snares by the hundred, but I never caught anything better than a sparrow."

A wistful look crossed her face, and for an instant the youth seemed to droop and fade in her eyes. "Isn't that life?—sparrows for larks always?"

His sanguine spirit rejected this as she had known that it would. "Life is all right," he replied, "as long as there's a fighting chance left to you. That is the only thing that makes it worth while, fighting to win."

She gazed meditatively at the points of flame on the white candles. "I suppose it would be so with you; for you fit into the age. You are a part of this variable uncertain quantity called democracy, which some of us old-fashioned folk look upon as a boomerang."

"Yes, I am a part of it," he answered slowly. "I see it as it is, I think. It is pure buncombe, of course, to say that it hasn't its ugly side; but I believe, if I have a chance, that I can make something of it." He paused a moment while he hesitated over the silver beside his plate; but there was no uncertainty in his voice when he went on again, after deliberately picking up the fork he preferred. It was a little thing to remember a man by—the merest trifle—but she never forgot it. Only a big man could be as natural as that, she reflected. "I reasoned it all out before I went into politics," he was saying. "I didn't get it out of books either—unless you count the Bible and 'Robinson Crusoe,' which are the only two I ever read as a boy. But the way I worked it out at last was that democracy, like life, isn't anything that's already finished. It is raw stuff. We are making it every minute of the time; and it depends on us whether we put it through as a straight job or a failure. Democracy, as I see it, isn't a word or a phrase out of a book, or a formula, or anything that has frozen into a fixed shape or pattern. It is warm and fluid, and it is teeming with living forms. It is as much alive as the earth or air or water, and it can be used to develop as many varying energies. That is why it is all so amazingly interesting. As long as you don't fall away from that thought you have your feet planted on solid ground—you can face things squarely—"

"You preach a kind of political pragmatism," she said as he paused.

"Pragmatism? That's a muscular word, but I don't know it. I wonder if Robinson Crusoe discovered it."

"If Robinson Crusoe didn't discover it, he lived it," she rejoined gaily; and then, as the voice of Mrs. Berkeley was heard purring softly on Vetch's other side, Corinna turned to the bewhiskered General, whose only sense, she had already ascertained, was the historic sense.

While she leaned back, with her head bent in the direction of his husky voice, she was visited by a piercing realization of the emptiness, the artificiality of her life. Futility—weariness—disenchantment—a gray lane without a turning that stretched on into nothingness! Many thoughts were blown through her mind like leaves in a high wind. She saw herself from the beginning—striving without rest—searching—searching—for what? For happiness—for perfection—for the starry flower that she had never found. All was tawdry, all was tarnished, all was unreal. In looking back she saw that the festival of her life was an affair of tinselled splendour and glittering dust. Was this only the impression of Vetch on her mood? Did he possess some magic gift of personality which caused the artificial, the counterfeit, to wither in his presence?

Conversation was not animated; and while she listened with a smile to dreary anecdotes of the War Between the States, she allowed her gaze to wander slowly down the table to where Alice Rokeby sat, with her large soft eyes, so vague and wistful, asking of life, "Why have you passed me by?" Now and then these eyes, which reminded Corinna of the eyes in a dream, would turn timidly to John Benham, and then there would steal into them that strange look of hunger, of desperation. What did it mean? Corinna wondered. Surely there was no truth in the old gossip that she had heard long ago and forgotten?

John Benham had put a question to the Governor across the table; and he sat now, leaning a little forward, while he waited for an answer. The light from the tall white candles, in branched candelabra of the Queen Anne pattern, fell directly on his handsome austere face, so full of delicate reserves and fine intentions; and all the disturbing questions fled from Corinna's mind while she looked at him. Surely, she repeated to herself, with a triumphant emphasis, surely there was no truth in that old ugly gossip! The backward sweep of his iron-gray hair accentuated the height of his forehead, and produced at first sight an impression of intellectual superiority. His nose was long and slightly aquiline; his mouth firm and clear-cut, with thin lips that closed tightly; his chin jutted a little forward, giving a hatchet-like severity to his profile. It was the face of a fair fighter, of a man who could be trusted absolutely beyond personal limitations, of a man who would always keep the vision of the end through any enterprise, who would always put the curb of expediency on emotional impulses, who would invariably judge a theory not by its underlying principle, but by its practical application. A charming face, too, complex and imaginative, a face which made the rugged and open countenance of the Governor appear primitive and undeveloped. Corinna admired Benham; she respected him; she liked—was it even possible, she asked herself, that she loved him? Yet here again she was conscious of that baffled feeling of inadequacy, of something wanting, as if an essential faculty of soul had been either left out by Nature, or refined away by the subtle impersonal processes of his mind.

Clearly there had been an error of judgment in placing him beside Mrs. Stribling. His taste was too fastidious to respond to her palpable allurements. She would have had a better chance with Vetch, for the flippant pleasantry with which Benham responded to the beaming enchantress was clothed in the very tone and look he had used with Patty Vetch in the drawing-room. Yes, it was futile to stray too far from one's type. Rose Stribling had failed to interest Benham, mused Corinna, for the same reason that she herself had been unable to arouse the admiration of Gideon Vetch. The lesson it taught, she repeated cynically, was simply that it was futile to stray too far from one's type. Vetch had talked to her as he might have talked to her father or to the husky warrior on her right; but he had never once looked at her. His attention would be arrested by large, sudden, bright things like the rosy curve of Mrs. Stribling's shoulders or the shining ropes of her hair.

"How absurd it was to imagine that I could compare with that!" thought Corinna with amusement. Her sense of defeat was humorous rather than resentful; yet she realized that it contained a disagreeable sting. Was her long day over at last? Had the sun set on her conquests? Had her adventurous return to power been merely a prelude to the ultimate Waterloo? Lifting her eyes suddenly from her plate she met the deep meditative gaze of John Benham across the marigolds on the table; and the faint flush that kindled her face made her eyes glow like embers. Had he read the thought in her mind? Was the tenderness in his glance only an ironical comment on the ignominious end of her Hundred Days?

She glanced away quickly, and as she did so she looked straight into the eyes of Alice Rokeby—those eyes that asked perpetually of life, "Why have you passed me by?"

CHAPTER VIII

THE WORLD AND PATTY

On the way home, leaning against her father who had not spoken since the car started, Patty shut her eyes and went over, one by one, the incidents of the dinner. What had she done that was right? What had she done that was wrong? Was her dress just what it ought to have been? Had she talked to Stephen Culpeper about the things people are supposed to discuss at a dinner? Had he seen how embarrassed she was beneath her pretence of gaiety? Would she be better looking if she were to let her hair grow long again? What had Mrs. Page, who looked as if she had stepped down from one of those old prints, thought of her?

Beneath the hard brightness of her manner there was a passionate groping toward some dimly seen but intensely felt ideal. She longed to learn if she could only learn without confessing her ignorance. Her pride was the obstinate, unreasonable pride of a child.

"If I could only find out things without asking!" The image of Stephen rose in her mind, which worked by flashes of insight rather than orderly processes. She saw his earnest young face, with the sleek dark hair, which swept in a point back from his forehead, his sombre smoke-coloured eyes, and the firm, slightly priggish line of his mouth. He seemed miles away from her, separated by some imponderable yet impassable barrier. The first time her gaze had rested on him at the charity ball she had thought impetuously, "Any girl could fall in love with a man like that!" and she had carelessly asked his name of the assiduous Gershom, who appeared to her to exist in innumerable reflections of himself. The next day when she had seen Stephen approaching her in the Square, she had obeyed the same erratic impulse, half in jest and half from the gambler's instinct to grasp at reluctant opportunity. After all, had not experience taught her that one must venture in order to win, that nothing came to those who dared not stake the whole of life on the next turn of fortune? She had been startled out of her composure by the sight of Stephen at the dinner; and yet she had not been conscious of any particular wish to see him again, or to sit at his side through two hours of embarrassment and uncertainty. Now, on the way home, she was suffering acutely from the burden of failure, from the smarting realization of her own ignorance and awkwardness. Her one bitter-sweet consolation was the knowledge that she had been "a good loser," that she had carried off her humiliation with a scornful pride which must have blighted like frost any tenderly budding shoots of compassion. "I'll show them that they mustn't pity me!" she thought, while her eyes blazed in the darkness. "I'll prove to them that I think myself every bit as good as they are!" She knew that her manner had been ungracious; but she knew also that something stronger than her will, some instinct which was rooted deep in the secret places of her nature, had made it impossible for her to appear otherwise. Impassioned, undisciplined, and capable of fierce imaginative loyalties and aversions, the strongest force in her character was this bitter ineradicable pride. To accept no benefits that she could not return; to fall under no obligation that would involve a feeling of gratitude; to pay the piper to the utmost penny whenever she called the tune—these were the only laws that she acknowledged. Though she longed ardently for the admiration of Stephen Culpeper, she would have died rather than relinquish the elfin mockery of her challenge.

"Well, did you enjoy it, Patty?" Her father turned to her with sudden tenderness, though the frown produced by some engrossing train of thought still gathered his heavy brows.

She caught his hand while her small face relaxed from its expression of rigid disdain. "I had simply the time of my life," she responded with convincing animation. "That Mrs. Page is the most beautiful woman I ever saw—but she can't be very young. I wonder what she was like when she was my age?"

Vetch laughed. "Not like a short-haired imp with green eyes anyway," he replied. "Mrs. Stribling looked very handsome, too, I thought."

"Oh, she's handsome enough," admitted Patty. "But she hasn't any sense. I listened to what she was saying, and she just asked questions all the time. Mrs. Page is different. You can tell that she has been all over the world. She knows things."

"Yes, I suppose she does," said Vetch. "What did you think of Benham?"

"He is good looking," answered the girl deliberately, "but I don't like him. He is making fun of you."

"Is he?" returned Vetch curiously. "Now, I wonder if you're right about that. At any rate he asked me a question to-night that I should like a chance to answer on the platform."

"He was in the army," said Patty, "and every one says he was a hero. The women were talking about him while you were smoking. They all admire him so. It seems that he went into an officer's training camp as soon as war was declared though he was over age; and then just recently he has done something that every one thinks splendid. He refused a tremendous fee from some corporation—what did they mean by a corporation?—because he thought the money was made dishonestly. Mrs. Page says he has as many public virtues as a civic forum. What is a forum, Father?"

Vetch laughed without replying directly to her question. "Did she say that?" he responded. "And what did she mean by it, I wonder?"

"It sounded clever," said Patty, "but I didn't understand. What is a forum, Father?"

Vetch thought a moment. "Mrs. Page would probably tell you," he replied, "that it is the temple of the improbable."

Patty stirred impatiently. "Now you are trying to talk like Mrs. Page," she rejoined. "I wish I knew what things meant."

"When you find out what they mean, Patty, they will cease to interest you."

"Well, I'd rather be less interested and more comfortable," said Patty, with a trace of exasperation in her voice. "To-night, for instance, I hadn't the faintest idea how to behave. Look at all those books I've read, too, when I might just as well have been enjoying myself. I've found out to-night, Father, that books can't tell you everything—not even books on etiquette."

Vetch broke into a laugh of boisterous amusement. "So that is how you have been spending your time!" he exclaimed. "You'd better trust to your common sense, my dear; it will carry you straighter."

"Oh, no, it doesn't. It doesn't carry me anywhere except into trouble. When I think of all the pains I've taken to learn how to talk like the dictionary! Why, nobody talks like the dictionary any longer! They all talk slang, every one of them—only they don't talk the kind that Julius Gershom and all these politicians do. If you could have seen Mrs. Berkeley's face when I told her I'd had a 'grand' time to-night—she looked exactly like a frozen fish—though just the moment before Mr. Culpeper had called somebody a 'rotter'. I heard him."

The Governor dismissed it all with a wave of his hand. "Trifles, trifles," was his only comment.

The car had entered the Square, and in a moment it was passing the Washington statue and the Capitol building. Until it stopped before the steps of the mansion, Patty did not reply; then springing up with a flutter of her scarlet skirt, she exclaimed airily, "But I am a trifle, too, Father!"

As he held out his hand from the ground, Vetch looked at her with an expression in which pride and pity were strangely mingled. "Then you are one of the trifles that make life worth living," he replied.

He had taken out his latch-key and was about to insert it in the lock, when the door opened and Gershom stood before them.

"I waited for you," he said to Vetch. "There's a matter I must see you about to-night." His ruddy face was tinged with purple, and he had the look of a man who has just been aroused from a nap.

"Well, I'm sleepy, and I'm going to bed," retorted Patty in reply to his glance rather than his words, and her tone was bitterly hostile.

"Then I'll see you to-morrow." He had followed her into the wide hall while the Governor closed the door and stopped to take off his overcoat. "Did you have a good time?"

She responded with a disdainful movement of her shoulders which might have been a shrug if she had had French instead of Irish blood in her veins. In her evening cloak of green velvet trimmed with gray fox she had the look of a small wild creature of the forest. Beneath her thick eyelashes her eyes shone through a greenish mist; and at the moment there was something frightened and furtive in their brightness.

"Of course," she replied defiantly, moving away from him in the direction of the staircase. "I had a wonderful time—perfectly wonderful. The people were all so interesting." Her pronunciation was as deliberately correct as if she were reading from a dictionary. It was the air of superiority that she always assumed with Gershom, for in no other way, she had learned from experience, could she irritate him so intensely.

His jovial manner gave place to a crestfallen look. "Who was there? I reckon I know the names anyway."

He affected a true republican scorn of appearances; and standing there, in his dishevelled business clothes beside Patty's ethereal youth, he looked as hopelessly battered by reality as a political theory, or as old General Powhatan Plummer of aristocratic descent.

Patty had often wondered what it was about the man that aroused in her so unconquerable an aversion. He was not ugly compared to many of the men her father had brought to the house; and ten years ago, when she first met him in the little country town where they were living, his curling black hair and sharp black eyes had seemed to her rather attractive than otherwise. If he had been merely untidy and unashamed in dress, she might have tolerated the failing as the outward sign of a distinguished social philosophy; but, even in those early days, his Jeffersonian simplicity had yielded to an outbreak of vanity. Though his clothes were unbrushed and his boots were unpolished, he wore a sparkling pin in his tie and several sparkling rings on his fingers. There was something else, too, some easy tone of patronage, some familiar inflexion, which as a child she had hated. Now, after the evening with Stephen Culpeper, she shrank from him with a disgust which was made all the keener by contrast. A pitiless light had fallen over Gershom while he stood there beside her, as if his bad taste and his pathetic ambition to appear something that he was not, had become exaggerated into positive vices. She was too young to perceive the essential pathos of all wasted effort, of all misdirected attempts to overcome the disadvantages of ignorance; and while she looked at him now, she saw only the vulgarity. Like all those who have suffered from insufficient opportunities and wounded pride, Patty Vetch was without mercy for the very weaknesses that she had risen above. After the evening at the Berkeleys' she felt that she should be less ashamed of a drunkard than of a man who wore diamonds because he thought that it was the correct thing to do. She remembered suddenly that on her fourteenth birthday she had bought a pair of paste earrings with ten dollars her father had given her; and for the sting of this reminder she knew that she should never forgive Gershom. Oh, she had no patience with a man who couldn't find out things and learn without asking questions! Hadn't she tried and tried, and made mistakes and tried again, and still gone on trying by hook or by crook; as her father would say, to find out the thousand and one things she oughtn't to do? If she, even as a child, had struggled so hard to improve herself and change in the right way, not the wrong way—then why shouldn't he? Her father, of course, wasn't polished, but he was as unlike Gershom as if they had been born as far apart as the poles. Even to her untrained eyes it was evident that Vetch possessed the authority of personality—a sanction that was not social but moral. Some inherent dislike for anything that was not solid, that was not genuine, had served Vetch as a kind of aesthetic discrimination.

"I know Benham," Gershom was saying eagerly. "I've worked with him. Smart chap, don't you think? Ever heard him speak?"

"No, I hate speeches."

"Did he and the Governor have any words?"

"Of course they didn't—not at dinner," she replied with a crushing manner. "Father is waiting for you."

"Then you'll see me to-morrow? I've got a lot I want to say to you. And I'll tell you this right now, Patty, my dear, you may run round with these high-faluting chaps like Culpeper as much as you please; but how many dinner parties do you think you'd be invited to if I hadn't put the old man where he is?"

At this she turned on him furiously, her eyes blazing through their greenish mist. "I don't owe you anything, and you know it!" she retorted defiantly. Then before he could detain her she broke away from him and ran up the stairs. How dared he pretend that he had placed her under an obligation! As if it made any difference to her whether her father were Governor or not!

As she fled upward she heard Gershom follow Vetch into the library, and she knew that they would sit talking there until long after midnight. These discussions had become frequent of late; and she surmised vaguely, though Vetch never mentioned Gershom's name to her, that the two men were no longer upon the friendly terms of the old days. Ever since Vetch's election, it had seemed to her that the pack of hungry politicians had closed in about him; and only the day before, when she had gone over to the Governor's office in the Capitol building, she had run away from what she merrily described as "the famished wolves" waiting outside his door. It was clear even to her that the political leaders who had supported Vetch were beginning already to distrust him. They had sought, she realized, to use his popularity, his eloquence, his earnestness, for their own ends; and they were making the historic discovery that the man who possesses these affirmative qualities is seldom without the will to preserve them. In their superficial ploughing of the soil, Vetch's adherents had at last struck against the rock of resistance. A man of ambition, or a man of prejudice, they might have controlled; but, as Patty had learned long ago, Vetch was that most difficult of political problems—the man of an idea.

Sitting before her dressing-table she glanced over the room, which was hung with the gaily decorated chintz she had bought after months of secret longing for roses and hollyhocks in her bedroom. Now she felt that it looked cheap and flimsy because she had sacrificed material to colour. She wanted something different to-night; she wanted something better. Turning to the mirror she gazed back at her vivid face, with the large deep eyes, so full of poignant expectancy, and the soft dimpled chin. From her expression she might have been dreaming of happiness; but the thought in her mind was simply, "The powder I use is too white. Those women to-night used powder that did not show. I must get some to-morrow." She was pretty,—even Stephen thought she was pretty. She could see it in his eyes when he looked at her; but her prettiness was merely the bloom of youth, nothing more. It was not that changeless beauty of structure—that beauty, as she recognized, of the very bone, which made Mrs. Page perennially lovely. "In ten, fifteen, at the most in twenty years, I shall have lost it all," she thought. "Then I shall get fat and common looking; and everything will be over for me because a little youthful colour and sparkle was all that I had. I have nothing to hold on to—nothing that will last. I don't know anything—and yet how could I be expected to know anything after the dull life I've had? In my whole life I've never known a woman that could help me. I've had to find out everything for myself—"

With her gaze still on the mirror, she laid the brush on its back of pink celluloid—how much she had admired it when she bought it!—and leaned forward with her hands clasped on the cover of the dressing-table. Her hair still flying out from the strokes of the brush surrounded her small eager face like a cloud. From the open neck of her kimono, embroidered in a pattern of cranes and wistaria, the thin girlish lines of her throat rose with an appealing fragility, like the stem of some delicate flower.

"I wonder if Mother could have helped me if she had lived?" she asked presently of her reflection. "I wonder if she was different from all the other women I've known?" Through her mind there passed swiftly a hundred memories of her childhood. First there came the one vivid recollection of her mother, a flashing, graceful figure, as light as thistle-down, in a skirt of spangled tulle that stood out from her knees. The face Patty could not remember, but the spangles were indelibly impressed on her mind, the spangles and a short silver wand, with a star on the end of it, which that fairy-like figure had held over her cradle. Of her mother this was all she had left, just this one unforgettable picture, and then a long terrible night when she had not seen her, but had heard her sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, somewhere in the darkness. The next day, when she cried for her, they had said that she was gone, and the child had never seen her again. In the place of her pretty mother there had been a big, rugged man, whom she had never seen before, and when she cried this man had taken her in his arms, and tried to quiet her. Afterward, when she grew bigger and asked questions, one of the neighbours had told her that her mother had lost her mind from a fall in the circus, that they had taken her away to an asylum, and that now she was dead.

"And wherever she is, she ought to go down on her knees and thank Gideon Vetch for the way he's looked after you," said the woman.

"But didn't he look after her too?" asked the child.

At this the woman laughed shrilly, lifting the soaking clothes with her capable red hands, and then plunging them down into the soapsuds." Well, I reckon that's more than the Lord Almighty would expect of him!" she replied emphatically but ambiguously.

"I wonder why Father never took me to see her. I'm sure I'd have remembered it."

The woman looked at her darkly. "There are some places that children don't go to."

"How long ago did she die?"

Patty waited patiently for an answer; but when at last the neighbour raised her head again from the tub, it appeared that her reticence had extended from her speech to her expression which looked as if it had closed over something. "You'll have to ask your father that," she returned in a phrase as cryptic as the preceding one. "I ain't here to tell you things."

After this the child set her lips firmly together, and asked no more questions. Her father had become not one parent, but both to her; and it seemed that whereever she looked he was always there, overshadowing like a mountain everything else on her horizon. In the beginning they had been very poor; but he had never let her suffer for things, although for weeks at a time she knew that he had gone without his tobacco in order to buy her toys. Until she went to the little village school, she had always had an old woman to look after her, and later on, when their circumstances appeared miraculously to improve, he employed the slim, gray, uninteresting spinster who slept now a few doors away from her. There were hours when it seemed to her that she had never learned the meaning of tediousness until the plain but hopeful Miss Spencer came to live with her.

Rising from her chair, she moved away from the mirror, and wandered restlessly to the pile of fashion magazines and festively decorated "books on etiquette" that littered the table beside the chintz-covered couch. "They don't know everything!" she thought contemptuously. How hard she had tried to learn, and yet how confused, how hopeless, it all seemed to her to-night! All the hours that she had spent in futile study appeared to her wasted! At her first dinner she had felt as bewildered and unhappy as if she had never opened one of those thick gaudy volumes that had cost so much—as much as a box of chocolates every day for a week. "I don't care," she said aloud, with sullen resolution. "I am going to let them see that I don't want any favours."

The next afternoon she went out early in order to escape Gershom; but when she came in, after a restless wandering in shops and a short drive, she met him just as he was turning away from the door.

"Something told me I'd find you at this hour," he remarked with unfailing good humour. "Come out and walk about in the Square. It will do you good."

She shook her head impatiently. "I'm tired. I don't like walking."

"Well, I reckon it's easier to sit anyway. We'll go inside."

"No, if I've got to talk to you I'd rather do it out of doors," she replied, turning back toward the gate.

"That's right. The air's fine. I shouldn't wonder if the bad weather ain't all over."

"I don't mind the bad weather," she retorted pettishly because it was the only remark she could think of that sounded disagreeable.

They passed through the gate, and walked rapidly in the direction of the Washington monument, which lifted a splendid silhouette against a deep blue background of sky. It was one of those soft, opal-tinted February days which fall like a lyric interlude in the gray procession of winter. The sunshine lay like flowing gold on the pavement; and the breeze that stirred now and then in the leafless boughs of the trees was as roving and provocative as the air of spring. In the winding brick walks of the Square children were at play with the squirrels and pigeons; and old men, with gnarled hands and patient hopeless faces, sat warming themselves in the sunshine on the benches. "Life!" she thought. "That's life. You can't get away from it." Then one of the old men broke into a cackle of cheerful laughter, and she added: "After all nobody is ever pathetic to himself."

"I believe I'll go in," she said, turning to Gershom. "I want to take off my hat."

He laughed. "Your hat's all right, ain't it? It looks pretty good to me."

A shiver of aversion ran through her. If only he wouldn't try to be funny! If only he had been born without that dreadful sense of humour, she felt that she might have been able to tolerate him.

"Please don't," she replied fretfully.

"Well, I won't, if you'll walk a little slower. I told you I had something to say to you."

"I don't want to hear it. There's no use talking about it. I'll say the same thing if you ask me for a hundred years."

A chuckle broke from him while he stood jauntily fingering the diamond in his tie, as if it were some talisman which imparted fresh confidence. Oh, it was useless to try to put a man like that in his place—for his place seemed to be everywhere!

"Well, it won't do any harm," he said at last. "As long as I like to listen to it."

"I wish you would leave me alone."

"But suppose I can't?" He was still chaffing. He would continue to chaff, she was convinced, if he were dying. "Suppose I ain't made that way?"

"I don't care how you're made. You may talk to Father if you like; but I'm going upstairs to take off my hat."

His chuckle swelled into a roar of laughter. "Talk to Father! Haven't I been talking to Father over at the Capitol for the last three hours?"

They had reached the gate beyond the monument, and swinging suddenly round, she started back toward the house. As she passed him he touched the end of her fur stole with a gesture that was almost imperative. His eyes had dropped their veil of pleasantry, and she was aware, with a troubled mind, that he was holding back something as a last resource if she continued to prove intractable. Again and again she had this feeling when she was with him—an uneasy intuition that his good humour was not entirely unassumed, that he was concealing a dangerous weapon beneath his offensive familiarity.

"After all I may be going to surprise you," he said lightly enough, yet with this disturbing implication of some meaning that she could not discern. "What if I tell you that I've no intention of making love to you?"

"You mean there is something else you want to see me about?" She breathed a sigh of relief, and her light steps fell gradually into the measure of his. Her conscience pricked her unpleasantly when she remembered that there had been a time when she would have spoken less curtly. Well, what of that? It was characteristic of her energetic mind that past mistakes were dismissed as soon as they were discovered. When one started out in life knowing nothing, one had to learn as best one could, that was all! Every day was a new one, so why bother about yesterday? There was trouble enough in the world as it was, without dragging back what was over.

"Please tell me what it is," she said impatiently.

He looked at her with curious intentness. "It is about an aunt of yours—Mrs. Green. I met her when I was in California."

Her surprise was so complete that he must have been gratified.

"An aunt of mine? I haven't any aunt."

For a minute he hesitated. Now that he had come to practical matters his careless jocularity had given place to a manner of serious deliberation. "Then your father hasn't told you?" he asked.

"Is she his sister?" Her distrust of Gershom was so strong that she could not bring herself to a direct reply.

"So he hasn't?" After all she might as well have answered his question. "No, she isn't his sister." His smile was full of meaning.

"Then she must be"—there was a change in her voice which he was quick to detect—"she must be the sister of my mother."

"Didn't you know that she had one?" he enquired. "Don't you remember seeing her when you were a child?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't remember her, and Father has never spoken of her."

At this he glanced at her sharply, and then looked away over the tops of the trees to the political mausoleum of the City Hall. "We take that as a sort of joke now," he remarked irrelevantly, "but the time was—and not so long ago either—when we boasted of it more than of the Lee monument. Cost a lot too, they say! Queer, ain't it, the way we spend a million dollars or more on a thing one year, and the next want to kick it out on the junk heap? I reckon it's the same way about behaviour too. It ain't so much what you do as the time you do it in that seems to make the difference." As she showed no inclination to follow this train of moralizing, he asked suddenly, "Do you remember your mother?"

"Only once. I remember seeing her once." He had not imagined that her voice could become so gentle.

"Did they ever tell you what became of her?"

"Yes, I know that. She lost her mind. They told me that she died in the asylum."

He was still watching her closely, as if he were observing the effect on her nerves of each word he uttered. "Did they tell you the cause of it?"

She shook her head. "That was all they ever told me."

"You mean your father never mentioned it to you? Are you sure he never spoke of Mrs. Green?"

"I shouldn't have forgotten. But, if she is my mother's sister, why has she never written to me?"

"Ah, that's just it! She was afraid your father wouldn't like it. There was a difference of some kind. I don't know what it was about—but they didn't get on—and—and—"

"I am sure Father was right. He is always right," she said loyally.

"Well, he may have been. I'm not denying that; but it's an old story now, and I wouldn't bring it up again, if I were you. He has enough things to carry without that."

She hesitated a moment before replying. "Yes, I suppose it's better not to speak of it. He has too many worries."

"I knew you'd see it that way; you're a girl of sense. And if Mrs. Green should ever come here, must I tell her that you would like to see her?"

"Does she think of coming here? California is so far away."

"Well, people do come, don't they? And I know she'd like to see you. She was very fond of your mother. I used to know both of 'em in the old days when I was a boy."

"Of course I'd like to see her if she could tell me about my mother. I want to ask questions about her—only it makes Father so unhappy when I bring up the past."

"It would, I reckon. Things like that are better forgotten." Then, dismissing the subject abruptly, he remarked in the old tone of facetious familiarity, "I never saw you looking better. What have you done to yourself? You are always imitating some new person every time I see you."

"I am not!" Her temper flashed out. "I never imitate anybody." Yet, even as she passionately denied the charge, she knew that it was true. For a week, ever since her first visit to the old print shop, she had tried to copy Corinna's voice, the carriage of her head, her smile, her gestures.

"Well, you needn't," he assured her with admiring pleasantry. "As far as looks go—and that's a long way—I haven't seen any one that was better than you!"

CHAPTER IX

SEPTEMBER ROSES

The afternoon sunshine streamed through the dull gold curtains into the old print shop where Corinna sat in her tapestry-covered chair between the tea-table and the log fire. She was alone for the moment; and lying back in the warmth and fragrance of the room, she let her gaze rest lovingly on one of the English mezzotints over which a stray sunbeam quivered. The flames made a pleasant whispering sound over the cedar logs; her favourite wide-open creamy roses with golden hearts scented the air; and the delicate China tea in her cup was drawn to perfection. As she lay back in the big chair but one thing disturbed her serenity—and that one thing was within. She had everything that she wanted, and for the hour, at least, she was tired of it all. The mood was transient, she knew. It would pass because it was alien to the clear bracing air of her mind; but while it lasted she told herself that the present had palled on her because she had looked beneath the vivid surface of illusion to the bare structure of life. Men had ceased to interest her because she knew them too well. She knew by heart the very machinery of their existence, the secret mental springs which moved them so mechanically; and she felt to-day that if they had been watches, she could have taken them apart and put them together again without suspending for a minute the monotonous regularity of their works. Even Gideon Vetch, who might have held a surprise for her, had differed from the rest in one thing only: he had not seen that she was beautiful! And it wasn't that she was breaking. To-day because of her mood of depression, she appeared drooping and faded; but that night, a week ago, in her velvet gown and her pearls, she had looked as handsome as ever. The truth was simply that Vetch had glanced at her without seeing her, as he might have glanced at the gilded sheaves of wheat on a picture frame. He had been so profoundly absorbed in his own ideas that she had been nothing more individual than one of an audience. If he were to meet her in the street he would probably not recognize her. And this was a man who had never before seen a woman whose beauty had passed into history, a man who had risen to his place through what the Judge had described with charitable euphemism, as "unusual methods." "The odd part about Vetch," the Judge had added meditatively on the drive home, "is that he doesn't attempt to disguise the kind of thing that we of the old school would call—well, to say the least—extraordinary. He is as outspoken as Mirabeau. I can't make it out. It may be, of course, that he has a better reading of human nature than we have, and that he knows such gestures catch the eye, like long hair or a red necktie. It is very much as if he said—'Yes, I'll steal if I'm driven to it, but—confound it!—I won't lie!'"

After all, the sting to her vanity had been too slight to leave an impression. There must be another cause for the shadow that had fallen over her spirits. Even a reigning beauty of thirty years could scarcely expect to be invincible; and she had known too much homage in the past to resent what was obviously a lack of discrimination. Her disappointment went deeper than this, for it had its source in the stories she had heard of Vetch that sounded original and dramatic. She had imagined a personality that was striking, spectacular, or at least interesting; and the actual Gideon Vetch had seemed to her merely unimpressive and ordinary. Beside John Benham (as the thought of Benham returned to her, her spirit rose on wings out of the shadow), beside John Benham, in the drawing-room after dinner, Vetch had appeared at a disadvantage that was almost ridiculous; and, as Stephen Culpeper had hastened to point out, this was merely a striking illustration of the damning contrast between the Governor's chequered political career and Benham's stainless record of service.

A smile curved her lips as she gazed at the quivering sunbeams. Was that deep instinct for perfection, the romantic vision of things as they ought to be, awaking again? Did the starry flower bloom not in the dream, but in reality? The passion to create beauty, to bring happiness, which had been extinguished for years, burned afresh in her heart. Yes, as long as there was beauty, as long as there was nobility of spirit, she could fight on as one who believed in the future.

A shadow darkened the window, and a moment afterward there was a fall of the old silver knocker on her door. She thought at first—the shadow had seemed so young—that it was Stephen; but when she opened the door, she saw, with a lovely flush, that it was John Benham.

"You expected me?" he asked, raising her hand to his lips.

"Yes, I knew that you would come," she answered, and the flush died away slowly as she turned back to the fire. In the moment of recognition all the despondency had vanished so utterly that it had not left even a memory. He had brought not only peace, but youth and happiness back to her eyes.

He came in as impressively as he presented himself to an audience; and with the glow of pleasure still in her heart, she found her keen and observant mind watching him almost as if he were a stranger. This had been her misfortune always, the ardent heart joined to the critical judgment, the spectator chained eternally to the protagonist. She received a swift impression that he had prepared his words and even his gestures, the kiss on her fingers. Yet, in spite of this suggestion of the actor, or because of it, he possessed, she felt, great distinction. The straight backward sweep of his hair; the sharp clearness of his profile; the steady serenity of his gray eyes; the ease and suppleness and indolent strength of his tall thin figure—all these physical details expressed the reserves and inhibitions of generations. The only flaw that she could detect was that dryness of soul that she had noticed before, as of soil that has been too heavily drained. She knew that he excelled in all the virtues that are monumental and public, that he was an honourable opponent, a scrupulous defender of established rules and precedents. He would always reach the goal, but his race would never carry him beyond the end of the course; he would always fulfil the law, but he would never give more than the exact measure; he would always fight for the risen Christ, but he would never have followed the humble bearer of the Cross. His strength and weakness were the kind which had profoundly influenced her life. He represented in her world the conservative principle, the accepted standard, the acknowledged authority, custom, stability, reason, and moderation.

As he sat down in front of the fire, he looked at her with a gentle possessive gaze.

"Of course you have never sold a print," he remarked in a laughing tone, and she responded as flippantly.

"Of course!"

"Why didn't you call it a collection?"

"Because people wouldn't come."

"Then why didn't you keep them at home where you have so much that is fine?"

She laughed. "Because people couldn't come. I mean the people I don't know. I have a fancy for the people I have never met."

"On the principle that the unknown is the desirable."

She nodded. "And that the desirable is the unattainable."

His gray eyes were warmed by a fugitive glow. "I shouldn't have put it that way in your case. You appear to have everything."

"Do I? Well, that twists the sentence backward. Shall we say that the attainable is the undesirable?"

"Surely not. Can you have ceased already to desire these lovely things? Could that piece of tapestry lose its charm for you, or that Spanish desk, or those English prints, or the old morocco of that binding? Do you feel that the colours in that brocade at your back could ever become meaningless?"

"I am not sure. Wouldn't it be possible to look at it while you were seeing something else, something so drab that it would take the colour out of all beauty?" She was looking at him over the tea-table, and while she asked the question she raised a lump of sugar in the quaint old sugar tongs she had brought home from Florence.

He shook his head. "I am denied sugar. Has it ever occurred to you that middle age ought to be called the age of denial?" Then his tone changed. "But I wonder if you begin to realize how fortunate you are? You have the collector's instinct and the means to gratify it. To discover with you is to possess—don't you understand the blessing of that? You love beauty as a favoured daughter, not as one of the disinherited who can only peer through the windows of her palace."

"But you also—you love beauty as I do."

"But I can't own it—not as you do." He was speaking frankly. "I haven't the means. At least what I have I have made myself, and therefore I guard it more carefully. It is only those who have once been poor who are really under the curse of money, for that curse is the inability to understand that money is less valuable than anything else on earth that you happen to need or desire. Now to me the most terrible thing on earth is not to be without beauty, but to be without money—"

She smiled. "You are talking like Gideon Vetch."

He caught at the name quickly. "Like Gideon Vetch? You mean that I sound ignoble?"

The laughter in his eyes made him look almost boyish, and she felt that she had come suddenly close to him. After all he was very attractive.

"Is he ignoble?" she asked. "I have seen him only once, and that was at the dinner a week ago."

He looked at her intently. "I should like to know what you think."

"I hardly know—but—well, I must confess that I was disappointed."

"You expected something better?"

She hesitated over her answer. "I expected something different. I suppose I looked for the dash of purple—or at least of red—in his appearance."

"And he seemed ordinary?"

"In a way—yes. His features are not striking, and yet when he talks to you and gets interested in his own ideas, he sheds a kind of warmth that is like magnetism. I couldn't analyse it, but it is there."

"That, I suppose, is the charm of which they talk. Warmth, or perhaps heat, is a better word for it. Fortunately I'm proof against it because of what you might call an asbestos temperament; but I've seen it catch fire in a crowd, and it sweeps over an audience like a blaze over a prairie. It is a cheap kind of oratory; yet it is a power in unscrupulous hands—and Vetch is unscrupulous."

"You believe that?"

"I know it. It has been proved again and again that he will stoop to any means in order to advance his ideas, which mean of course his ambition. Oh, I'm not denying that in the main he is sincere, that he believes in his phrases. As a matter of fact one has only to look at his appointments, those that he is able to make by his own authority! There isn't a doubt in the world that he deliberately sold his office in exchange for his election—"

So this was one honest man's view of Gideon Vetch! John Benham believed this accusation, for some infallible intuition told her that Benham would never have repeated it, even as a rumour, if he had not believed it. Her father's genial defence of the Governor; his ironic aristocratic sympathy with the radical point of view appeared superficial and unconvincing beside Benham's moral repudiation. And yet what after all was the simple truth about Gideon Vetch? What was the true colour of that variable personality, which appeared to shift and alter according to the temperament or the convictions of each observer? She had never known two men who agreed about Vetch, except perhaps Benham and his disciple, Stephen Culpeper. Each man saw Vetch differently, and was this because each man saw in the great demagogue only the particular virtue or vice for which he was looking, the reflection of personal preferences or aversions? It seemed to her suddenly that the Governor, whom she had thought commonplace, towered an immense vague figure in a cloud of misinterpretation and misunderstanding. His followers believed in him; his opponents distrusted him; but was this not true of every political leader since the beginning of politics? The power to inspire equally devotion and hatred had been throughout history the authentic sign of the saviour and of the destroyer. Her curiosity, which had waned, flared up more strongly than ever.

"I should like to know," she said aloud, "what he is truthfully?"

Benham laughed as he rose to go. "Do you think he can be anything truthfully?"

"Oh, yes, even if it is only a demagogue."

"Only a demagogue! My dear Corinna, the demagogue is the one everlasting and unalterable American institution. He is the idol of the Senate chamber; the power behind the Constitution."

"But what does he really stand for—Vetch, I mean?"

"Ask him. He would enjoy telling you."

"Would he enjoy telling me the truth?"

With the laughter still in his eyes Benham drew nearer and stood looking down on her. "Oh, I don't mean that he is pure humbug. I haven't a doubt, as I told you, that he believes, sufficiently at least for election purposes, in the fallacies that he advocates, even in the old age pension, the minimum, or more accurately, the maximum wage, and of course in what doesn't sound so Utopian since we have experimented with it, that favourite dogma of the near-Socialists, the Government ownership of railroads. His main theory, however, appears to be some far-fetched abstraction which he calls the humanizing of industry—you've heard that before! Mere bombast, you see, but the kind of thing that is dangerous in a crowd. It is the catchpenny politics that has been the curse of our country."

"And of course he is not a gentleman." Corinna's voice was regretful. "I may be old-fashioned, but I can't help feeling that the Governor ought to be a gentleman. That sounds like General Plummer, I know," she concluded apologetically.

"The archaic cult of the gentleman? Well, I like to think that in Virginia it still has a few obscure followers. It is a prejudice that I dare to admit only when I am not on the platform, for the belief in the gentleman has become a kind of underground religion, like the worship in the Catacombs."

Her eyes had grown wistful when she answered: "It is the price we pay for democracy."

"The price we pay is the reign of social justice in theory, and in practice the rule of the Gideon Vetches of history. Oh, I admit that it may all work out in the end! That is my political creed, you know—that everything and anything may work out in the end. If I stood simply for tradition without progress, I should long ago have been driven to the wall."

"I feel as you do," she said after a moment, "and yet I am curious to see what will become of our experimental Governor."

"And I also. The man may have executive ability, and it is possible that he may give us an efficient administration. But, of course, it is merely a stepping-stone for his inordinate greed for power. His vanity has been inflamed by success, and he sees the Senate, it may be even the Presidency, ahead of him."

Though she smiled there was a note of earnestness in her voice. "Well, why not? There was once a rail splitter—"

"Oh, I know. But the rail splitter was born a president; and it is a far cry to a circus rider who was not born even a gentleman."

"Perhaps. Yet, right or wrong, hasn't the war stretched a little the safety net of our democracy? Isn't it just possible to-day that we might find a circus rider who was born a president too?" Then before he could toss back her questions she asked quickly, "After all, he didn't actually ride, did he?"

Benham shrugged his shoulders, a gesture he had acquired in France. "I've heard so, but I don't know. They tell queer tales of his early years. That was before the golden age of the movies, you see; and I suspect that the movies rather than the war introduced the mock heroic into politics."

He was still standing at her side, looking down into her upraised eyes, which made him think of brown velvet. For a long pause after speaking he remained silent, drinking in the fragrance of the room, the whispering of the flames, and the dreamy loveliness of Corinna's expression. A change had come over her face. In the flushed light she looked young and elusive; and it seemed to him that, beneath the glowing tissue of flesh, he gazed upon an indestructible beauty of spirit.

"Do you know what I was thinking?" he asked presently. "I was thinking that I'd known all this before—that I'd been waiting for it always—the firelight on these splendid colours, the smell of the roses, the sound of the flames, and the way you looked up at me with that memory in your eyes. 'I have been here before'."

A quiver as faint as the shadow of a flower crossed her face. "Yes, I remember. It is an odd feeling. I suppose every one has felt it at times—only each one of us likes to think that he is the particular instance."

"It is trite, I know," he said with a smile, "but feeling is never very original, is it? Only thought is new."

"But I would rather have feeling, wouldn't you?" she asked in a low voice, and sat waiting in a lovely attitude, prepared without and within, for the moment that was approaching. There was no excitement in such things now, she had had too much experience; but there was an unending interest.

"Then it isn't too late?" he asked quickly; and again after a pause in which she did not answer: "Corinna, is it too late?"

For a minute longer she looked up at him in silence. The glow was still in her eyes; the smile was still on her lips; and it seemed to him that she was wrapped in some enchantment which wrought not in actual life but in allegory—that the light in which she moved belonged less to earth than to Botticelli's springtime. Was romance, after all, he thought sharply, the only reality? Could one never escape it?

While he looked down on her she had stirred, as if she were awaking from a dream, or a memory, and stretched out her hand.

"Is it ever too late," she responded, "as long as there is any happiness left in the world?"

She smiled as she answered him; but suddenly her smile faded and that faint shadow passed again over her face. In the very moment when he had bent toward her, there had drifted before her gaze the soft anxious eyes of Alice Rokeby, and the look in them as they followed John Benham that evening a week ago.

"Oh, my dear," said Benham softly. Then his voice broke and he drew back hurriedly, for a figure had darkened the low window, and a minute afterward the door opened and Patty Vetch entered the room.

"The latch was not fastened, so I came in," she began, and stopped as her look fell on Benham. "I—I hope you don't mind," she added in confusion.

CHAPTER X

PATTY AND CORINNA

Patty had come straight to Corinna after a conversation with Stephen. She needed sympathy, and she had meant to be frank and confiding; but when Benham left them alone in the lovely room, which made her feel as if she had stepped into one of the stained glass windows in the old church she attended, her courage failed, and she forgot all the impulsive words she had learned by heart in the street.

"I am so glad," said Corinna sweetly. "I went to see you after luncheon to-day, and I was very much disappointed not to find you at home."

"That was why I came," answered Patty. "Your card was there when I got in, and I couldn't bear missing you."

"That was right, dear. It was what I hoped you would do."

Turning back to the fire, Corinna stooped and flung a fresh log on the Florentine andirons. Then, without glancing at the girl, she sat down in one of the deep chairs by the hearth, and motioned invitingly to a place at her side. She was determined to win Patty's heart, and she wanted to be near enough to reach out her hand when the right moment came. That moment had not come yet, and she knew it, for she was wise from experience. There was time enough, and she felt no impulse to hasten developments. She was strongly attracted, and since her sympathy was easily stirred, she wished, without any great desire, to help the girl if she could. The only way, she realized, was to watch and hope, to play the waiting game as far as this was possible to her active nature. For, above all things, Corinna hated to wait; and this potent energy of soul, this vital flame, had given the look of winged radiance to her eyes.

"You are always so happy," said Patty breathlessly, as she leaned forward and held out her hands to Corinna as if she were the fire. "Everything about you seems to give out joy every minute."

"You dear!" murmured Corinna softly, for admiration was to her nature what sunshine is to a flower. "I am happy to-day—happy as I thought I should never be again. I am so happy that I should like to take the whole world to my heart and heal its misery." Then she added hastily before the girl could reply: "You came just at the right moment. I have wanted a talk with you, and there couldn't be a better opportunity than this. The other night I tried to join you after dinner; but Mrs. Berkeley got all the women together, and I didn't have a chance to speak a word to you alone. You looked charming in that scarlet dress. Your head is shaped so prettily that I think you are wise to cut your hair. It makes you look like a page of the Italian Renaissance."

"Do you really like it?" asked Patty, and her voice trembled with pleasure. "Father hates it, but men never know."

Corinna laughed. "Not much more about fashions than they know about women."

"And that isn't anything, is it?"

"Well, perhaps they'll learn some day—by the time I am dead and you are old. You look so young, you can't be over eighteen."

"I'll be nineteen next summer—at least I think I shall, for nobody knows exactly when my birthday comes."

"Not even your father?"

"No, he guesses it's in June, but he isn't perfectly sure, and he hasn't any idea what day of the month it is. He gives me a birthday gift whenever he happens to think of it."

For a minute Corinna gazed thoughtfully into the fire. "It is queer the things men can't remember," she said at last. "Now, my father always forgets, or pretends to, that I've ever been married."

"Then I needn't be so surprised," rejoined Patty brightly, "when mine forgets that I ever was born!"

"Oh, he doesn't forget it really, my dear. He adores you."

"He is an angel to me," answered the girl with passionate loyalty. "I've never had any one else, you know, and he has been simply everything. Only I do wish he wouldn't have that tiresome Miss Spencer to live with us."

"But you ought to have some one with you."

"Not some one like that. She doesn't know as much as I do; but Father thinks she is all right because she lets her hair turn gray and wears long dresses."

Corinna's laugh was like music. "It takes more than that to make a virtuous mind!" she exclaimed, but she was not thinking of Miss Spencer.

"Do you know," said Patty, leaning forward and speaking with the earnestness of a child, "I doubt if Father ever looked at a well-dressed woman until he met you."

Was it natural ingenuousness, or did the girl have a deeper motive? For an instant Corinna wondered; then she returned merrily: "Certainly he wouldn't look at me when Mrs. Stribling is near."

"Yes, he admires Mrs. Stribling very much," replied Patty gravely, "but I don't. She isn't a bit real."

Corinna's gaze softened until it swept the girl's face like a caress. "I hope you won't mind my calling you Patty," she responded irrelevantly. "It is so hard to say Miss Vetch, for I can see that we are going to be friends."

"Oh, if you will!" cried Patty breathlessly, and she added eagerly, "I have never had a real friend, you know, and you are so beautiful. You are more beautiful than anybody I ever saw on the stage."

"Or in the movies?" Corinna's voice was mirthful, but there was a deep tenderness in her eyes. Was the girl as shallow as she appeared, or was there, beneath her vivid enamel-like surface, some rich plastic substance of character? Was she worth helping, worth the generous friendship that Corinna could give, or was she merely a bit of human driftwood that would burn out presently in the thin flame of some transient passion? "I'll take the risk," thought Corinna. "A risk is worth taking," for there was sporting blood in her veins. While she sat there in silence, listening to the artless unfolding of the girl's thoughts, she appeared to be searching for the hidden possibilities in that crude young spirit. So often in the past the older woman had given herself abundantly only to meet disappointment and ingratitude. Why should it be different now? What was there in this unformed child that appealed so strongly to her sympathy and tenderness? Not beauty surely, for Patty was merely pretty. Charm she had unmistakably; but it was a charm that men would feel rather than women; and of all the feminine varieties that Corinna had known in the past, she disliked most heartily "the man's woman." Was her impulse to help only the need of a fresh interest, the craving for a new amusement? The heart of life she had never reached. Something was missing—the unfading light, the starry flower that she had never found in her search. Now at last, in a golden middle age, she told herself that she would build her happiness not on perfection, but on the second best of experience. She would accept the milder joys, the daily miracles, the fulfilled adventures. And so, partly because she liked the girl, and partly because of a generous whim, she said presently:

"You shall have a friend—a real friend—from this day."

Patty who had been gazing into the fire turned on her a face that was as sparkling as a sunbeam. "I would rather have you for a friend than anybody in the world," she responded in a voice so caressing that Stephen would not have believed it belonged to her.

"I am sure that I can be useful to you," said Corinna, for the gratitude in the girl's voice touched and embarrassed her, "and I know that you can be to me. How would you like to come every morning and help me for an hour or two in my shop? There isn't anything to do, but we may get to know each other better." After all, she might as well show a fighting spirit and see the adventure through to the end.

Patty's eyes shone, but all she said was, "Oh, I'd love to! It is so beautiful here."

"Do you like it?" asked Corinna, and wondered how much the girl really saw. Did she have the eyes and the soul to see and feel beauty? "I have some good things at home. You must come out there."

"If you'll only let me sit and watch you!" exclaimed Patty fervently.

"As long as you like." A smile crossed Corinna's lips, as she imagined those large bright eyes, like stars in a spring twilight, shining on her hour after hour. How could she possibly endure their unfaltering candour? How could she adjust her life to their adoring regard? "How long has your mother been dead, Patty?" she asked suddenly. "Do you know—of course you don't—scarcely anybody has ever heard it—that I had a child once, a little girl, and she lived only one day."

"And she might have been like you," was all Patty said, but Corinna understood.

"Do you remember your mother, dear?"

"Only a little," answered Patty, and then she told of the spangled skirt and the silver wand with the star on the end of it. "That is all I can remember."

She rose with a shy movement and held out her hand. "Then I may come to-morrow?"

"Every day if you will, and most of all on the days when you need a friend." Bending her head, she kissed the girl lightly on the cheek. "Do you like my cousin Stephen?" she asked suddenly.

A look of scorn came into Patty's eyes. "He is so superior," she answered, with a gesture of complete indifference. "I don't like superior persons."

"Ah," thought Corinna, watching her closely, "she is really interested, poor child!"

After this the girl went out into a changed world—into a world which had become, as if by a miracle, less impersonal and unfriendly. The amber light of the sunset seemed to envelop her softly as if she were surrounded by happiness. It was like first love without its troubled suspense, this new wonderful feeling! It was like a religious awakening without the sense of sin that she associated with her early conversion. Nothing, she felt, could ever be so beautiful again! Nothing could ever mean so much to her in the rest of life! In one moment, almost by magic, she had learned her first lesson in discrimination, in the relative values of experience; she had attained her first clear perception of the difference between the things that mattered a little and the things that mattered profoundly.

The every-day world had faded from her so completely that it seemed a natural incident—it caused her scarcely a start of surprise—when she met Stephen Culpeper under the Washington monument. He had evidently just left his office, for there was a bulky package of papers in his hand; and he greeted her as if it were the merest accident that had taken him through the Square. As a matter of fact it was less of an accident than he made it appear, for he had declined to go home in the Judge's car because of some vague hope that by walking he might meet either Patty or Gideon Vetch. Since the evening of the Berkeleys' dinner the young man's interest had shifted inexplicably from Patty to her father.

"You looked so much like Mr. Benham a little way off," said Patty, as he turned to walk back with her, "that I might have mistaken you for him."

"If you only knew it," he replied, laughing, "you have paid me the highest compliment of my life."

She blushed. "I didn't mean it as a compliment."

"That makes it all the better. But don't you like Benham?"

Patty pondered the question. "I can't get near enough to him either to like or dislike him. He is very good looking."

"He is more than good looking. He is magnificent."

"You think a great deal of him?"

"I couldn't think more," he responded with young enthusiasm. "Every one feels that way about him. He stands for—well, for everything that one would like to be."

"I've heard of him, of course," said the girl slowly. "Father has been fighting him ever since he went into politics; but I never saw Mr. Benhem close enough to speak to him until the other evening." She raised her black lashes and looked straight at Stephen with her challenging glance. "All the men seemed so serious, except you."

He laughed and flushed slightly. "And I did not?"

Though her manner could not have been more indifferent, there was an undercurrent of feeling in her voice, as if she meant something more than she had put into words. He might take it as he chose, lightly or seriously, her look implied—and it was, he admitted, a thrilling look from such eyes as hers.

"You are nearer my age," she rejoined, "though you do seem so old sometimes."

A depressing dampness fell on his mood. "Do I seem old to you? I am only twenty-six."

Her inquiring eyebrows were raised in mockery. "That is too old to play, isn't it?"

"Well, I might try," he answered, and added curiously, "I wonder whom you find to play with? Not your father?"

"Oh, no, not Father. He is as serious as Mr. Benham, only he laughs a great deal more. Father jokes all the time, but there is something underneath that isn't a joke at all."

"I should like to talk to your father. I want to find out, if I can, what he really believes."

"You won't find out that," said Patty, "by talking to him."

"You mean he will not tell me?"

"Oh, he may tell you; but you won't know it. Half the time when he is telling the truth, it sounds like a joke, and that keeps people from believing him. He says the best way to keep a secret is to shout it from the housetops; and I've heard him say things straight out that sounded so far fetched nobody would think he was in earnest. I was the only person who knew that he was speaking the truth. They call that a 'method', the politicians. They used to like it before he was elected; but now it makes them restless. They complain that they can't do anything with him."

"That," remarked Stephen, as she paused, "appears to be the chronic complaint of politicians."

"Does it? Well, Mr. Gershom is always saying now that Father can't be depended on. It was much more peaceable," she concluded with artless confidence, "when he let them manage him. Now there are discussions and disagreements all the time. It all seems to be about what they think people want. Have you any idea what they want?"

"Does anybody know what they want—except when they want money?"

"Well, some of them would like Father to go to the Senate," she returned naïvely, "and some of them wouldn't. Do you think that Mr. Benham would be better in the Senate?"

"I think so, of course. But you mustn't judge, you know, by what my thoughts happen to be."

"I'm not judging. I hate politics. I always have. I want to get as far away from them as I can."

He looked at her intently. "And where would you like to go?"

"Into the movies." Her eyes sparkled at the thought. "At least I wanted to go into the movies until I saw Mrs. Page this afternoon."

"Mrs. Kent Page?" he asked in astonishment. "My Cousin Corinna?"

"Yes, in the old print shop. Isn't she adorable?"

He smiled at her fervour. "I have always found her so. But what has she to do with your change of ambition?"

"Oh, nothing, except that she is lovelier than any actress I ever saw."

They had reached the house, and while they ascended the steps, the sound of the Governor's voice, raised in vehement protest, floated to them through the half-open door.

"He must be talking to Julius Gershom," whispered Patty. "It is always like that."

"I don't care a damn for the whole bunch of you," said Vetch suddenly. "You can go and tell that to the crowd!"

"Well, I'll come back again after I've told them," Gershom replied in an insolent tone; and the next moment the door swung back and he appeared on the threshold.

At sight of Patty and Stephen he attempted to cover his embarrassment with a jest. "Your father and I were having one of our little arguments about a Ladies' Aid Society," he said. "He is beginning to kick against too much ice cream."

"Well, if you argue as loud as that," replied the girl with imperturbable coolness, "it won't be necessary to go and tell it to the crowd."

In an instant she had changed from the sparkling elusive creature Stephen had known into a woman of authority and composure. What an eternal enigma was the feminine mind! He had flattered himself that he had reached the end of her superficial attractions; and in a minute, by some startling metamorphosis, she was changed from a being of transparent shallows into the immemorial riddle of sex. She might be anything, or everything, except the ingenuous girl of the moment before.

"We must learn to lower our voices," said the Governor in a laughing tone. His anger, if it were anger, had blown over him like a summer storm, and the clear blue of his glance was as winning as ever. "I've been looking into the matter of that appointment Judge Page asked me about," he added, "and I think I may see my way to oblige him."

"If you are free for half an hour I'd like to have the talk we spoke of the other day," answered Stephen.

"Oh, I'm free except for Darrow. You won't mind Darrow."

He turned toward the library on the left of the hall; and as Stephen entered the room, after a gay and friendly smile in Patty's direction, he told himself that the man promised to be more interesting than any girl he had ever known.

CHAPTER XI

THE OLD WALLS AND THE RISING TIDE

A tall old man was standing by the window in the library, and as he turned his face away from the light of the sunset, Stephen had a vague impression that he had seen him before—not in actual life but in some half-forgotten picture or statue. The Governor's visitor was evidently a carpenter, with a tall erect figure and a face which had in it a dignity that belonged less to an individual than to an era. Beneath his abundant white hair, his large brown eyes still shone with the ardour of a convert or a disciple, and his blanched, strongly marked features had the aristocratic distinction and serenity that are found in the faces of the old who have lived in communion either with profound ideas or with the simple elemental forces of sky and sea. In spite of his gnarled hands and the sawdust that had lodged in the frayed creases of his clothes, he was in his way, Stephen realized, as great a gentleman and as typical a Virginian as Judge Horatio Lancaster Page. Both men were the descendants of a privileged order; both were inheritors of a formal and authentic tradition.

"This is Mr. Darrow," said Vetch in a voice which contained a note of affectionate deference. "I think he knew your father, Culpeper. Didn't you tell me, Darrow, that you had known this young man's father?"

"No, sir, I only said I'd worked for him," replied Darrow, with an air of genial irony which brought the Judge to Stephen's mind again. "That's a big difference, I reckon. I did some repairs a few years ago on a row of houses that belonged to Mr. Culpeper; but the business was all arranged by the agent."

"That was part of the estate, I suppose," explained Stephen. "My father leaves all that to his agent."

"Yes, I thought as much," replied Darrow simply; and after shaking hands with his rough, strong clasp, he sat down in a chair by the window. "They've made a lot of changes inside this house," he remarked. "Before they added on that part at the back the dining-room used to be in the basement. I remember doing some work down there when I was a young man and there was going to be a wedding."

"Well, that long room is very little use to me," returned Vetch. "As far as I am concerned they might have left the house as it was built." Then turning abruptly to Stephen, he said sharply: "You heard Gershom's parting shot at me, didn't you?" There was a gleam of quizzical humour in his eyes, and Stephen found himself asking, as so many others had asked before him, "Is the man serious, or is he making a joke? Does he wish me to receive this as a confidence or with pretended hilarity?"

"Something about telling the crowd?" he answered. "Yes, I heard it."

"We were having a tussle," continued Vetch lightly. "The fat's in the fire at last."

Stephen laughed drily. "Then I hope you will keep it there."

"You mean you would like an explosion?"

"I mean that anything that could clear up the situation would be welcome."

At this Vetch turned to Darrow and observed whimsically: "He doesn't seem to fancy our friend Gershom."

Darrow looked round with a smile from the window. "Well, there are times when I don't myself," he confessed in his deliberate way. "Of all bullies, your political bully is the worst. But he is not bad, he is just foolish. His heart is set on this general strike, and he can't set his heart on anything without losing his head." As the old man turned his face back to the sunset, the strong bold lines of his profile reminded Stephen of the impassive features of an Egyptian carving. Was this the vague resemblance that had baffled him ever since he had entered the room?

"To tell the truth," said Stephen frankly, "the fellow strikes me as particularly obnoxious; but I may be prejudiced."

"I think you are," responded Vetch. "I owe Gershom a great deal. He was useful to me once, and I recognize my debt; but the fact remains, that I don't owe him or any other man the shirt on my back!" As he met Stephen's glance he lowered his voice, and added in a tone of boyish candour that was very winning in spite of his colloquial speech: "I like your face, and I'm going to talk frankly to you."

"You may," replied the young man impulsively. It was impossible to resist the human quality, the confiding friendliness, of the Governor's manner. The chances were, he said to himself, that the whole thing was mere burlesque, one of the successful sleight-of-hand tricks of the charlatan. In theory he was still sceptical of Gideon Vetch, yet he had already surrendered every faculty except that impish heretical spectator that dwelt apart in his brain.

"You want something of course, every last one of you, even Darrow," resumed Vetch, with his charming smile. "I can safely assume that if you didn't want something, you wouldn't be here. Good Lord, if a man so much as bows to me in the street without asking a favour, I begin to think that he is either a half-wit or a ne'er-do-well."

"At least I want nothing for myself," laughed Stephen, a trifle sharply.

"Nor does Darrow, God bless him!—nor, for the matter of that, does Judge Page. I've got nothing to give you that you would take, and so you are wishing Berkeley on me for the penitentiary board." The gleam of humour was still in his eyes and the drollery in his expressive voice.

"We are seeking this for the penitentiary, not for Mr. Berkeley. He is the man you need."

"For a hobby, yes. That's all right, of course, but, my dear young sir, you can't run the business of a state as a hobby any more than you can administer it as a philanthropy."

"Perhaps. But can you administer it successfully without philanthropy?"

At this Darrow turned with a smile. "Can't you see that he is fooling with you?" he said. "Prison reform is one of his fads—that and the rights of the indigent aged and orphans and animals and any other mortal thing that has to live on what he calls the stones of charity. He knows why you came, and he likes you the better because of it."

"Gershom and I have had a word or two about that board," resumed Vetch; and as he stopped to strike a match, Stephen noticed that the cigar he held was of a cheap and strong brand. "Between the Legislature on one side and that bunch of indefatigable lobbyists on the other, I shan't be permitted presently to appoint the darkey who waits on my table." The cigar was lighted now, and to Stephen's sensitive nostrils the air was rapidly becoming too heavy. Oddly enough, he reflected, nothing had "placed" Vetch so forcibly as the brand of that cigar.

"That," observed the young man briefly, "is the penalty of political office."

"So long as I was merely a dark horse," said Vetch, "I was afraid to pull on the curb; but now that I've won the race, they'll find that I'm my own master. Won't you smoke?"

Stephen shook his head. "Not now. There is always the next race to be considered, I suppose."

The Governor's rugged, rather heavy features hardened suddenly until they looked as if they were formed of some more durable substance than flesh. Under the thick sandy hair his eyes lost their blueness and appeared as gray as Stephen had once thought them. "Have you ever heard," he asked with biting sarcasm, "that I was easy to manage and that that was why certain people put me in office?"

"Yes, I've heard that." As the young man replied, Darrow turned from the window and looked at him attentively.

"And may I ask what else you have heard?" inquired Vetch.

Stephen laughed and coloured. "I've heard that it was becoming difficult to do anything with you."

"Because I have the people behind me?"

"Well, because you think you have the people behind you."

Vetch leaned forward with a confiding movement, and flicked the ashes of his objectionable cigar on the immaculate sleeve of Stephen's coat. Yet, even in the careless gesture, a breath of freshness and health, of mental and physical cleanliness, seemed to emanate like an invigorating breeze from his robust spirit. "Of course I admit," he said thoughtfully, "that we are obliged to have some kind of party organization to begin with. There must be method and policy and all sorts of team-pulling and log-rolling until you get started. That kind of thing is useful just as far as it helps and not a step farther. I won my fight as an Independent—and, by George, I'll remain an Independent! I've got the upper hand now. I am strong enough to stand alone. If any party on earth thinks it can manage me—well, I'll show it that I can be my own party!"

Was it true, what they said of him,—that success had already gone to his head, that the best way to get rid of him was to give him a political rope with which he might hang himself? Or was there some solid foundation of fact in his blustering assumption of power? Was he actually a force that would have to be reckoned with in the future? From a mass of confused impressions Stephen could gather nothing clearly except his inability to form a definite opinion of the man. On the one side was the weight of prejudice, of preconceived judgment; and on the other he could place only the effect of a personal magnetism which was as real and as intangible as light or colour.

"Do you think that is possible?" he asked sceptically. "In a democracy like ours is any man so strong that he can stand alone?"

"Well, of course he is not alone as long as he has the support of the majority."

"You may have this support—I neither affirm nor deny it—but upon what does it rest? What do you offer the people that is better than the principles or the promises of the old parties? I heard you speak once, but you did not answer this question—to my mind the only question that is vital. You talked a great deal about humanizing industry—a vague phrase which might mean anything or nothing, since humanity covers all the vices as well as all the virtues of the race. Benham could use that phrase as oratorically as you do, for it rolls easily off the tongue and commits one to nothing."

Vetch's face lost suddenly its rigid gravity, as if he had suffered a rush of energy to the brain. His eyes became blue again, and as keen as the blade of a knife.

"I believe, and the people who are with me believe, that I can make something out of the muddle if I am given a chance," he replied. "Oh, I know that the reactionaries are in the saddle now—that they have been ever since they had the war as an excuse to mount! But I know also that you can no more drive out by law the spirit of liberalism from the American mind than you can drive out nature with a pitchfork. For a little while you may think you have got the better of it; but it will crop out in spite of you. Now, I am a part of returning nature, of the inevitable rebound toward the spirit of liberalism. In the thought of the people who voted for me, I stand for the indestructible common sense of the American mind. I am one of the first signs of the new times."

"And you believe that you prove this," asked Stephen frankly, "by turning over your power of appointment to a group of self-interested politicians? You show your ability to govern by evading the first requirement of good government—that there should be honest and able men in control of public offices?"

A flicker came and went in the blue eyes. "I told you the other day," answered Vetch in a low voice, "that I used the tools at my command, and I tell you now that I am sometimes forced to use rotten ones. People say that I am an opportunist; but who has ever discovered any other policy that deals with life so completely? They say also that I am without public conscience—another name for opinions that have crystallized into prejudices. The truth is that the end for which I work seems to me vastly more important than the methods I use or the instruments that I employ."

It was the familiar chicanery of the popular leader, the justification of expediency, that Stephen had always found most repugnant as a political theory; and while he drew back, repelled and disgusted, he asked himself if the national conscience, the moral integrity of the race, was in the keeping of demagogues?

"I am curious to know," he remarked after a moment, "how you are able to justify the sacrifice of what I regard as common honesty in public affairs?"

To his surprise, instead of answering directly, Vetch put a personal question. "Then you think I am not honest? Darrow wouldn't agree with you."

At this Darrow turned from the window. "Perhaps he doesn't mean what we do," he said quietly. "I've seen honest men that I knew ought to have been in prison."

"I am speaking of course of the doctrines you advocate," answered Stephen. "That seems to me to be, in the jargon of the reformer, somewhat unethical. Can you, I question, achieve anything important enough to compensate for what you sacrifice?"

Darrow turned again with his dry laugh. "You speak as if public honesty, by which I reckon you mean clean elections and unsold offices, were something we had actually possessed," he said.

"Oh, I know the old proceedings were bad enough," replied Stephen, "but I am trying to find out how the Governor expects to make them better. You understand that I am trying merely to see your point of view—to get at the roots of your theory of government. What you tell me will never find its way to the public."

"I realize that," said Vetch gravely, and he added with a quick glance at Darrow: "Do you think if I were not honest that I'd talk to you so frankly?"

Stephen smiled. "It might be. The political coat has many colours. I don't mean to be rude, you know, but one good turn in frankness deserves another."

"I like you the better for that." A cluster of fine lines appeared at the corners of the Governor's laughing eyes. "But, once for all, you must get rid of your false impressions of me, and see me as a fact, not as a kind of social scarecrow. First of all, you think I am an extremist—well, I am not. I am merely a man of facts. I see the world as it is and you see it as you wish it to be—that is the difference between us. I have lived with realities; I know actual conditions—and you know only what you have been told or imagined. Oh, I admit that you saw an edge of reality in the trenches; but, after all, life in the trenches was as abnormal as life in the movies. Each represents an extreme. What you know of average human life, of hunger and pain and labour, could be learned in an academy for young ladies. Yet you imagine that it is experience! You have lived so long in your lily-pond, with the rushes hemming you in, that when you hear all the frogs croaking on the same note, you think complacently, 'that is the voice of the people'. Why, I tell you, man, you are so ignorant of the conditions in this very town, that Darrow could take you out and show you things that would make you feel like Robinson Crusoe!"

Stephen turned eagerly to the old man at the window. "I am ready for you, Mr. Darrow."

Darrow nodded with a reluctant assent. "I've got my Ford around the corner," he answered. "If you would like to go up town with me I can show you a thing or two that might interest you."

"You mean the conditions in this city?"

"The conditions in all cities. They differ only in the name of the town."

"He will show you a little—just a little—of what getting back to peace means," said Vetch earnestly. "By next winter it will be worse, of course, but it has already begun. The rate of wages is falling—for wages always fall first—and the cost of living is still as high as in war times. Rents are going up every day, Darrow can tell you more about the speculation in rents than I can, and the housing of the working-classes, both white and coloured, is growing worse. We shall soon be facing the most serious problem of the system under which we live, the problem of the unemployed. Already it is beginning. Darrow was telling me just before you came in of a man in one of the houses where he has been working—a returned soldier too—who has walked the streets for weeks in search of work. He has been unable to pay his rent, so of course he is obliged to move somewhere, if he can find a place to move into. Oh, I realize perfectly what you are going to say! The brief prosperity of the war still envelops the labouring man in your mind; and you are preparing to remind me of the lace curtains and victrolas of yesterday. Yes, I admit that lace curtains and victrolas are not necessities. It was a case where nature cropped out in the wrong spot. Even the working-man may have suppressed desires, you see, and lace curtains and victrolas may stand not only for the improvidence of the poor, but for the neurasthenic yearnings of the rich. Talk about the economy of Nature! Why, nothing in the universe, not even the civilization of man, has ever equalled her indecent prodigality!"

As the man's words poured out in his rich, deep voice, Stephen stared at him in a silence which reminded him humorously of the pause in church before the sermon began. Was this the reason of Vetch's influence and authority—this flow of ideas, as from a horn of plenty, that left the listener both charmed and bewildered?

"I admit it all," rejoined the young man, "except that you have discovered the remedy."

The Governor laughed and settled back in his big leather-covered chair. "You think that I blow my own horn too loudly," he continued, "but, after all, who knows how to blow it half so well as I do? For the same reason some over-sensitive nerve of yours may wince at my behaviour at times, my lack of dignity or reserve; but have I ever lost a vote—I put it to you plainly—or the shadow of a vote by an occasional resort to spectacular advertising? It pays to advertise in politics, we all know that!—but it was honest advertising since I never failed to deliver the goods. I started out to prove my strength and to flay my opponents, and you tell me, you group of black-coated conservatives, that I make myself ridiculous because I strike an attitude. The people laughed—but, by George, they laughed with me! Oh, I know you think that I am wandering from my point; but I haven't forgotten your question, and I am going to answer it, if you will give me time. You ask me what I believe—"

"If you could tell me in few words and plainly."

"Well, first of all, I make no pretence. I do not promise to work miracles. I do not, like your conventional candidates, talk in platitudes. I do not undertake to achieve a regeneration of politics out of unregenerate human nature. As long as we have cherries we shall have blackbirds; as long as we have politics we shall have politicians. I acknowledge the good and the bad, and all that I promise is to get as good results as I can out of the mixture. Definitely I stand for a progressive reorganization of society—for a fairer social order and a practical system of cooperative industry, the only logical method of increasing production without reducing the labourer to the old disorganized slavery. I believe in the trite formula we workers preach—in the eight-hour day, the old age pension, which is only the inevitable step from the mother's pension, the gradual nationalization of mines and railroads. I believe in these things which are the commonplace of to-morrow; but it is not because of my beliefs that the people follow me. It is something bigger than all this that catches the crowd. What the people see in me is not the man who believes, but the man who acts. I stand to them not for words—though you and Benham think I've made my way by a gift of tongue—but for deeds—for things performed as well as planned. Other men can tell them what they want. My hold over them is that they feel I can get them what they want—a very big difference! Oh, I use words, I know, like the rest. I have read a few books, and I can talk as well as any political parrot of the lot when I get started. But the words I use are living words, if you notice them. I talk always about the things that I can do, never about the things that I think. Well, that is my secret—my pose, if you prefer—to present my argument to the crowd as an act, not as an idea. There are plenty of imposing statues standing around. What they see in me is a human being like themselves, one who wants what they want, and who will fight to the last ditch to get it for them."

It was plausible; it sounded convincing and logical; and yet, even while Stephen responded to the Governor's personal touch, some obstinate fibre of race or inflexible bent of judgment, refused to surrender. Vetch was probably sincere—it was fairer to give him the benefit of the doubt—but on the surface at least he was parading a spectacular pose. The rôle of the Friend of the People has seldom been absent from the drama of history.

With a glance at the window, where twilight was falling, Stephen rose, and held out his hand. "I shall remember your frankness," he said, "the next time I hear you speak. That, I hope, will be soon."

"And you will wait until then to be converted?"

"I shall wait until then to be wholly convinced."

"Well, Darrow may have better results. You go with Darrow?"

"If he will take me?" The deference with which the old man had inspired the Governor showed in Stephen's manner. "I shall be grateful for a lift on the way home."

Darrow had risen also; and after shaking hands with Vetch, he looked back at the younger man from the doorway. "I'll have my Ford round here in five minutes. Meet me at the nearest gate."

He went out hurriedly; and as Stephen followed him, after the delay of a few minutes, he found himself face to face with Patty, who was coming from "the blue room" on the opposite side of the hall.

"I hope you got what you came for," she said gaily.

"I came for nothing," he retorted lightly, "and I'm sure I got it."

"Well, that won't matter so much since it wasn't for yourself," she mocked. "Nobody ever wants anything for himself in politics. Father could tell you that."

"He told me a good many things—but not that."

"Did he tell you," she inquired daringly, "why he is falling out with Julius Gershom?"

"Is he falling out with him?"

"Didn't you see it—and hear it—when you came in?"

"I suspected as much; but after all it was none of my business."

"And you confine your curiosity to your own business?"

"Not entirely," he answered, and wondered if she were experimenting with the letter "C". "For instance I am curious about you."

Her eyes challenged him with their old defiance. "And I am certainly not your business."

"I admit that you are not—but that does not decrease my curiosity."

For a moment her smile grew wistful. "And what, I wonder," she asked, with the faintest quiver of her cherry-coloured lips, "would you like to know?"

"Oh, everything!" he replied unhesitatingly. There was no longer in his mind the slightest wish to avoid the approaching flirtation. On the contrary, he felt he should welcome it, if she would only continue to look like this. She was not beautiful—yet he realized that she did not need beauty when she could play so easily with a look or a smile on the heartstrings. A rush of tenderness overwhelmed his reserve at the very instant when her lashes trembled and drooped, and she murmured in a whisper that enchanted him: "Oh, but everything is too little." Though it was only the old lure of youth and sex, he felt that it was as divinely fresh and wonderful as first love.

"Is it too little?" he asked, and his voice sounded so far off that it was faint in his ears.

She raised her lashes and gave him a glance charged with meaning. "That depends," she answered, and suddenly, without warning, she passed to the lightest and gayest of tones. "Everything depends on something else, doesn't it? Now Father is coming out, and I must run upstairs and dress."

It was a dismissal, he knew, and yet he hesitated. "May I come again soon?" he asked, and held out his hand.

To his surprise Patty greeted his question with a laugh. "Do you really like politics so much?" she retorted; and fled lightly toward the staircase beyond the library.

CHAPTER XII

A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS

Darrow's little car was waiting before the entrance; and as soon as Stephen had taken his place by the old man's side, they shot forward into the smoky twilight. A policeman, standing in the circle of electric light at the corner, held up a warning hand; and then, as he recognized Darrow, he nodded with a smile, and there stole into his face the look of deference which Stephen had seen in the Governor's eyes. Glancing up at the sombre ruggedness of the profile beside him, the younger man asked himself curiously from what source of character or Circumstance this old man had derived his strange impressiveness and his Authority over men. With his gaunt length, his wide curving nostrils, his thick majestic lips, he looked, as Stephen had first seen him, a rock-hewn Pharaoh of a man. An unusual type to survive in modern America—republican and imperial! Did he represent, this carpenter who was also a politician, the political despotism of the worker—the crook and scourge of the labourer's power?

Suddenly, while he wondered, Darrow turned toward him. "What do you think of the Governor?"

"I hardly know," answered Stephen thoughtfully. "It is too soon to ask; but I think he is honest."

"He is more than honest," rejoined the other quietly. "He is human. He understands. He belongs to us."

"Belongs?" Stephen repeated the word with a note of interrogation.

Very slowly the old man answered. "I mean that he is more than anything that he says or thinks. He is bigger than his message."

"I suppose he stands for a great deal?"

"A man stands only for what he is, not for an inch more, not for an inch less. The trouble with all the leaders we've had in the past was that their thought outstripped their characters. They believed more than they were and they broke down under it. I'm an old man now. I've watched them come and go."

"You think that Vetch is a great leader?"

"I think he is a great leader, but I don't mean that I think he will ever lead us anywhere."

"You feel that he is losing his grip on the crowd?"

Up from Main Street the workers were pouring out of the factories; and while they moved in a dark stream through the light and shadow on the pavement, the faces flowed past Stephen with a pallid intensity which made him think of dead flowers drifting on a river. In all those faces how little life there seemed, how little individuality and animation!

"When I was a small kid I used to live by the seashore," said the old man presently in his dry, emphatic tones. "Many is the time I've stood and watched the tide coming in, and I never once saw it come in that it didn't go out again."

"Then you believe that the tide is turning against Vetch?"

For a minute, while they sped on in the obscurity of a side street, Darrow meditated.

"No, sir, I ain't saying that much—not yet. But the way I calculate is something like this. Vetch came in on a wave of popular emotion, and a wave of popular emotion is just about like the tide of the sea. It may rise a certain distance, but it can't stand still, and it can't go any farther. It's obliged to turn; and when it turns, it's pretty sure to bring back a good deal that it carried with it. A crowd impulse—as they call it in the pulpit and on the platform—is a dangerous thing. It's dangerous because you can't count on it."

"It looks to me as if Vetch counted upon it a little too much."

"That's his nature. He was born on the sunny side of the street. He thinks because he sees the way to help people that they want to be helped. I've been mixed up in politics now for fifty years, and in the labour movement, as they say, ever since it began to move in the South—and I've found out that people don't really want to be helped—they want to be fooled. Vetch offers 'em facts, and all the time it ain't facts they're wanting, but names."

"I see," assented Stephen. "Names that they can repeat over and over until they get at last to believe that they are things. Long reverberating names like Democratic or Republican—"

Darrow laughed grimly. "That's right, sir, that's the way I've worked it out in my mind. The crowd will come a little way after a fact; but in the end it gets tired because the fact won't work magic, like that conjure-stuff of the darkeys, and then it turns and goes back to the old names that mean nothing. Only when a crowd moves all together it's dangerous because it's like the flood-tide and ebb-tide of the sea."

"And the most irritating part of it," said Stephen, with an insight which had sometimes visited him in the trenches, "is that it gets what it deserves because it can always have whatever it wants—even the truth and honest government."

They were passing rows of narrow old-fashioned tenement-houses, standing, like crumbling walls of red brick, behind sagging wooden fences; and suddenly, while Stephen's eyes were on the lights that came and went so fitfully in the basement dining-rooms, Darrow stopped the car in the gutter of cobblestones, and motioned in silence toward the pavement. As Stephen got out, he glanced vaguely round him at the strange neighbourhood.

"Where are we?"

"North of Marshall Street. A quarter which was once very prosperous; but that was before your day. This is one of several rows of old houses, well-built in their time, better built, indeed, than any houses we're putting up now; but their day is over. The cost of repairing them would be so great that the agent is deliberately letting the property run down in the hope that this part of the street will soon be turned over to negroes. The negroes are so crowded in their quarter that they are obliged to expand, and when they do, this investment will yield a still higher interest. Coloured tenants stand crowding better than white ones, and they will pay a better rent for worse housing. As it is the rent of these houses has doubled since the beginning of the war."

"Good God!" said Stephen. "Do we stop here?"

"I want you to see Canning, the man the Governor told you about. He can't pay his rent, which was raised last Saturday, and the family is moving to-morrow."

"He ought to be paid for living here. Where will he go?"

"Oh, people can always find a worse place, if they look long enough. Canning was in the war, by the way. He's got some nervous trouble—not crazy enough to be taken care of—just on edge and unstrung. The war used him up, I reckon, and anxiety and undernourishment used up his wife and children. It all seems to have come out in the baby—queerest little kid you ever saw—born about a year ago. Mighty funny—ain't it?—the way we let children just a few squares away from us grow up pinched, half-starved, undersized, uneducated, and as little moral as the gutters can make 'em, and all the time we're parading and begging and even collecting the pennies out of orphan asylums, for the sake of the children on the other side of the world. But it's a queer thing, charity, however you happen to look at it. My father used to say—and he had as much sense as any man I ever met—that charity is the greatest traveller under the sun; and even if it begins at home it ain't ever content to stop there over night."

Standing there in the dim street, before the silent rows of bleak houses with their tattered window-shades and their fitful lights, Stephen stared wonderingly at the gaunt shape of the man before him. For the first time he was brought face to face with the other half of his world, with the half of the world where poverty and toil are stark realities. This was the way men like Darrow were thinking, men perhaps like Gideon Vetch! These men saw poverty not as a sentimental term, but as a human experience. They knew, while he and his kind only imagined. With a sensation as acute as physical nausea, a sensation that the thought of the Germans used to bring when he was in the trenches, there swept over him a memory of the social hysteria which had followed, like a mental pestilence or famine, in the track of the war. The moral platitudes, the sentimental philanthropy, and the hypocritical command of conscience to put all the world, except our own cellars, in order, where were these impulses now in a time which had gone mad with the hatred of work and the craving for pleasure? Yet he had once thought that he was returning to a world which could be rebuilt on a foundation of justice, and it was this lost belief, he knew, which had made him bitter in spirit and unfair in judgment.

The gate swung back with a grating noise, and they entered the yard, and walked over scattered papers and empty bottles to the narrow flight of brick steps, which led from the ground to the area in front of the basement dining-room. As Stephen descended by the light from the dust-laden window, a chill dampness rose like a fog from the earth below and filled his nostrils and mouth and throat—a dampness which choked him like the effluvium of poverty. Glancing in from the area a moment later, he saw a scantily furnished room, heated by an open stove and lighted by a single jet of gas, which flickered in a thin greenish flame. In the centre of the room a pine table, without a cloth, was laid for supper, and three small children, in chairs drawn close together, were impatiently drumming with tin spoons on the wood. A haggard woman, in a soiled blue gingham dress, was bringing a pot of coffee from the adjoining room; and in one corner, on a sofa from which the stuffing sagged in bunches, a man sat staring vacantly at a hole in the rag carpet. Tied in a high chair, which stood apart as if it were the pedestal of an idol, a baby, with the smooth unlined face not of an infant, but of a philosopher, was mutely surveying the scene.

More than anything else in the room, more even than the sodden hopelessness of the man's expression, the hopelessness of neurasthenia, this baby, tied with a strip of gingham in his high chair, arrested and held Stephen's attention. Very pallid, with the pallor not of flesh but of an ivory image, with hair as thin and white as the hair of an old man, and eyes that were as opaque as blue marbles, the baby sat there, with its look of stoical philosophy and superhuman experience. And this look said as plainly as if the tiny mute lips had opened and spoken aloud: "I am tired before I begin. I am old before I begin. I am ending before I begin."

Darrow knocked at the door, and the woman opened it with the coffee-pot still in her hand.

"So you've come back," she said in a voice that was without surprise and without gratitude.

"I came back to ask what you've done about a place. This gentleman is with me. You don't mind his stepping inside a minute?"

"Oh, no, I don't mind. I don't mind anything." She drew back as she answered, and the two men entered the room and stood gazing at the stove with the look of embarrassment which the sight of poverty brings to the faces of the well-to-do.

"When are you moving?" asked Darrow, withdrawing his gaze from the glimmer of the embers in the stove, and fixing it on the steam that issued from the coffee-pot.

"In the morning. We've found a cheaper place, though with rent going up every week, it looks as if we'd soon have nowhere worse to move to, unless it's gaol alley." Her tone dripped bitterness, and the lines of her pale lips settled into an expression of scornful resignation.

Without replying to her words, Darrow nodded in the direction of the young man, who had never looked up, but sat in the same rigid attitude, with his vacant eyes staring at the hole in the carpet.

"Any better?"

"How can he be better," returned the woman grimly, "when all he does is to walk the streets until he's fit to drop, and then drag himself home and sit there like that for hours, too worn out even to lift his eyes from the floor. This is the last coffee I've got. I've been saving it since Christmas, but I made it for him because he seems more down than usual to-night." Then a nervous spasm shook her thin figure, and she added in a fierce whisper: "He's sick, that's the matter with him. He ain't sick enough to be in a government hospital, but he'd be better off if he was. Even when he gets work he ain't able to stick to it. The folks that hire him don't have any patience. As long as he was over yonder in France it looked as if every woman in America was knitting for him; and now since he's back here he can't get a job to keep him and the children alive."

"How have you fed the children?"

"On what I could get cheapest. You see how sickly and peaked they look, and it's been awful damp in these rooms sometimes. The doctor says he ain't sick; it ain't his body, it's his mind. He says he's had a kind of horror inside of him ever since he came home. He's turned against everything he used to do, and even everything he used to believe in."

"That's hell!" exclaimed Stephen suddenly; and at her surprised glance, he added, "I've been there and I know. Nerves, they say, but just as real as your skin." He looked away from her to the man on the sofa. "To have that, and be in poverty!" Turning away from the father, his glance met the calm eyes of the baby fixed on him with that gaze which was as old and as pitiless as philosophy.

"Ma, may I help myself?" screamed one of the children, drumming loudly on the table. "I'd rather have bread and molasses!" cried another; and "Oh, Ma, when we move to-morrow will you let me take the kitten I found?"

"Well, I've talked to the Governor," said Darrow, in his level voice which sounded to Stephen so unemotional, "and I think we can find a job for your husband."

Suddenly the man on the sofa looked up. "I voted against him," he whispered angrily.

Darrow laughed shortly. "You don't know the Governor if you think he'd hold that against you," he replied. "But for that little weakness of his he might not be a political problem."