FIRST HARVESTS

WORKS OF FICTION

BY
F. J. STIMSON
(J. S. of Dale)

FIRST HARVESTS

An Episode in the Life of Mrs. Levison Gower

A Satire Without a Moral

BY
F. J. STIMSON
(J. S. OF DALE)

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1888

Copyright, 1888, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
TROW’S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.

TO THE READER.

I have called this book a satire; yet have sought within that key an overtone of hope and faith. Our early generation of writers could be all optimists: for they wrote of virgin soil. But since their day has passed, our country’s first-fruits were garnered. With these we have to deal.

F. J. S.

Boston, November 6, 1888.

CONTENTS.

FIRST HARVESTS.

CHAPTER I.
THE SILAS STARBUCK OIL COMPANY.

ON the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, just where the long rise of the avenue begins, and vanishes in higher perspective like the stage of a theatre, its long slope always dotted with a multitude of yellow carriages, cabs, and dark-green private broughams, there stands a large brown-stone house of irreproachable respectability. The steps in front of the door are also of brown-stone; and the columns on either side terminate in the hollow globes of iron, painted green, common to a thousand other houses in New York. Upon the first floor above the basement are three windows and a door; in the second story are four windows, one above the door; and in the third, four others again. The windows are all of the same size; but those of the second and third stories are plain, while the lowest have above them an oval design with flowery, curved ornaments. What the original designer of these windows sought to express in them is not clear; but subsequent builders, not seeing the need of expressing anything in window-caps, but supposing some adornment proper in that place, have copied them without deviation, much as a lady ties a bow-knot on her lapdog’s tail.

Yet, such as it is, this square brown box contains a flower of American civilization. And flowers are gay, conspicuous, noteworthy in themselves; but the more noteworthy as bearing the seeds that shall be multiplied in next year’s crop. No one would perhaps think that this house, standing unadorned and unnoteworthy on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, was so rare a possession, or contained in itself so much; that this square box, valued solely because of its proximity to other similar square boxes, represented the American social apotheosis—the pure spheres of perfect democratic joy, the acme, in this republic of terrestrial success. Yet of the fact there can be no question. That little vertebral ridge named Fifth Avenue, with its one or two similar ridges, its few timid excursions and venturings in by-streets to the east and west, represents the flower and the crown of things; only those there live who can command at least wealth or power at will; neither blood nor brains nor breeding can maintain themselves upon that vantage-coin unaided and alone. So have we seen some bed of oysters, planted at just the proper level of the shoal, look down with superiority and scorn upon those below, cumbered with the sea-weed, and those above, left awash at low spring tides. Merely to own this house, and not to live in it; to own it only as some miser owns a picture or a rare gem, for the pleasure of possession—would cost, in interest and taxes, the labor of some score of able-bodied men each year. To live in it, with servants trained to feudal manners and address, with the necessary wines and equipage and flowers and feathers that attend so rare a gem, would cost the earnings of an army. Has the fortunate possessor of the house such an army at his call? Surely; else how could he keep it? We shall see them shortly. And what of the inside of the house?—is it suited to the high position of the inmates? Softly, my good madam; a stranger can hardly know how difficult it is to gain access to this mansion, and how exclusive is the set which Mrs. Gower leads.

For the pedestrians on the pavement look up to No. 2002 with an air of respect. Few of them but know the house as Mrs. Levison Gower’s. And even the pedestrians on the pavement, in this select spot, are of a picked and chosen class. Many of them are young girls, robed for this winter (it is the fashion) in trailing gowns of deep-blue velvet; many more are young men, carrying their arms bow-leggedly, as it were, as if not satisfied with the natural stiffness of their starch and buckram, but adding the conscious poise of art, to make you note that they are dressed, not clothed alone. And not one of them that passes but knows and values at its due the house in which you take so little interest. This is the respectable quarter; and the great, ugly house stands insolently, as of social position assured.

But our great city is too great, too human, to show us much of this. Like most fecund mothers, like nature herself, her luxuriance is somewhat slatternly, her exuberance has burst its stays. Here and there our manners, our conventions, trim a hedge or two; but everywhere the forests, and even at our feet, the weeds, grow wild. Fifth Avenue, and its short purlieus, is the home of society; but elsewhere in the island of Manhattan humanity lives, unkempt, full of sap—that great humanity which has made Mrs. Gower, and which she so studiously avoids. For she lives in society; and perhaps has never thought that it is on humanity she lives. Let us walk from her great house down the side street in search of it.

For a block or two the houses will stand shoulder to shoulder like a well-drilled rank, well kept, well swept, and uniformed in the same non-committal, smug, respectable brown-stone, a very broadcloth of building. Then the houses begin to grow narrower, with thinner walls, though still they keep their facing on the street. Soon you pass stables, city stables; their stale, sour odor, puffing from the rarely opened windows, is very different from the sweet, healthy smells of a country farm-yard. Now the street is lined with long, low, blank-windowed warehouses, built cheaply of brick and studded with star-shaped iron clamps; you wonder what may be their use, for the windows, even when not curtained with blue paper, are impenetrable and do not avow their vocation; nor, usually, is there any sign, though the ugly walls are covered with advertisements of patent medicines, powders for making bread, powders for washing clothes, powders for feeding children, Giant Destroyers of moths, and the like. But soon this limbo is passed, and you come to the populated districts of humanity. Here the windows are no longer blank; the houses overflow with children; stout mothers sit nursing them in the doorways and gossip with their neighbors in the second story across the way; things in general are used too much, to keep their varnish from the shop. I am afraid Mrs. Gower would call it squalor.

The retail shops do a driving business in the avenue around the corner; on the curb, under a ragged locust-tree, is a canvas shed for horses, too busy to take their feed respectably in a stable; the brick police station is the only building having pretension to respectability. An ice-cream vender sells his wares openly on the street, in front of a hospitable barber’s—the processes of human life are open and avowed; great iron gas-retorts are seen above the roofs of the houses. There is a row of huge smelting-furnaces, with straight lines of stunted willow-trees shading them; and the air is full of the crash of hammered iron. The pedestrians on the sidewalks walk with the same bent arms as on Fifth Avenue; but the arms are bent with labor, and the hands are half clenched, with the curl of being but just released from some accustomed tool. Piles of Spanish-cedar logs on the street denote our approach to the wharves; and now the river, fretted with the traffic of a continent, lies before us.

But our business—Mrs. Gower’s business—lies not among the wharves, but across the river and beyond. If the wind lies in the east, you may set your nose toward it and sniff the air—is there not already a faint smell perceptible, a smell other than that of the salt water, a smell artificial and complex? As we cross the river it increases. We thread our way among the tug-boats, the scows, the flat-ended ferry-boats and other land-lubber craft; passing all the great steamers of the lower town, and the lumber-wharves and water-gardens of the upper, and you may see ahead of you a series of long wharves, jutting far out into the stream. Behind them are many acres of long, low buildings, platforms, piles of barrels, and many huge and lofty towers of plated iron; the wharves themselves surrounded with attendant ships—fine ships, three-masted, with the natural beauty and symmetry that comes from adaptation to the free winds of heaven, and not to steam and man’s contrivance. There are no steam-boats at the wharves, and you will wonder why; but, by this time, the rich and unctuous smell from the wharves proceeding will demand your whole attention.

You will perhaps read the long sign, painted in letters, as it were, life-size, displayed in long procession athwart the wharf’s end, in square, plain, proper characters of black on white—

THE SILAS STARBUCK OIL COMPANY

—but the reading will be superfluous; for the pleasureless, painless perception of the eye but feebly supplements the pungent, will-arousing sensation of the other sense. It is the old battle of the idea and the will; and the will, as always, wins. And all the world is smell.

Many things grow clear to us as the smell grows stronger. While we mildly wonder that a sense so little cultivated in æsthetics can bring so strong a pain, we also perceive the reason for the absence of steamers; for petroleum is a dangerous blessing, fond of fire, and it takes fire to make water do its work—a lazy element, much like the human soul.

Is there a perfume called mille fleurs? A thousand odors woo our preference as we land among the great ships; but there is a certain agreeableness in some of them, as we get used to the worst and begin to discriminate. We can even understand the workmen growing fond of them, as they tell us that they do; that they are also conducive to long life seems more doubtful. All over the oil-yards are smells; as many in variety as the colors of aniline dye, from the first rather pleasant smell, like a cellar full of cider, barrels of cider with the bung-holes open, to the more fetid varieties. Many places have the sickening, capitive odor of ether, from the volatile surface-naphtha; this, being dangerous, has a peculiar fascination of its own. For naphtha is light, volatile, inflammable, impulsive, the aristocrat of oils; and its odor intoxicates.

But come—we must not dally with this naphtha, this crême de la crême of the upper crust—come to the receiving-tanks upon the hill. There is a lesson in the making of oil, as in most things. I make no doubt Mr. Tyndall would find the process quite of a piece with the evolution of the soul. Here you see the crude oil as it came from its native earth, in the pipe-lines from the wells; it looks like greenish molasses, and smells of the devil. Natural depravity, we must suppose. But see it in the tail-house; or, rather, let us first look at the stills, those broad, black towers, under which the fire rages, like those in the city of Dis. Here is the burning and the broiling that throws off the grosser atoms from the pure oil of light; first, alas! first of all, our pleasant naphtha, our cream of oils; a short hour or two is enough for that, and it is gone. Here you see it, through the glass cover to the iron trough in the tail-house, the first “run” of all. What a strange liquid, as it breaks and dances in its flow—light, shining, mobile, broken into sharp facets and flashes like cut glass; a spirit, not an oil.

Flossie Starbuck used to fancy this was the water of the streams of hell. A great poet had had the same idea before, which is surely to the credit of Flossie’s imagination; for she knew nothing of great poets, as a child.

This tail-house, or receiving-house, was a favorite haunt of hers, on half-holidays when her father would take her to the works, for a treat. It was pleasant, on a warm day, to stand at the window of the iron blower-house and watch the great fan whirl its four hundred revolutions in a minute, and feel the rush of cool air in through the open windows; but it was more interesting to sit in the tail-house and admire the “runs” of oil—the quick naphtha, dry and shining, with its etherous, heady fragrance, and then the duller, yellower oils, under which the flow of mixed water went in globules of a dirty blue. Florence could have told you as well as any workman when the naphtha-run had passed and it was time to turn the oil into the tanks, and whether it were Standard, Regular, or Water-White—the same discrimination that now she exercises upon humanity. Then, when the black, pitchy residuum began to show, she would get the superintendent to talk to her of the aniline, and of the lovely colors which the nasty, black stuff would make; and how the foul-smelling paraffine was made into chewing-gum “for young misses.” Flossie never used chewing-gum; but later in life, when standing before Transatlantic Titians, it had come over her with a pang that she had once admired aniline dyes; cards of which, magentas, sea-greens, mauves, the superintendent used to give to her, and she to place upon her bureau.

Have you had enough of oil? There is no beauty, you say, not much of truth, and many bad smells. One moment; before we turn away let us glance into the spraying-house. This was always Flossie’s bonne-bouche, and it shall be ours.

The spraying-tank is another great, round iron tower, rusted and dingy like the rest; but inside—have you seen the Alhambra? When Flossie first went into the Court of the Lions, passing in through the low gate in the ugly brick tower, to the green pool and the plashing fountain, and the sunlight streaming in from above upon the snowy columns of rosy marble and the rainbow-hued arabesques of those fairy vistas, the grouped columns changing, as she walked, like clusters of fair women holding converse in a garden—her first thought was of this. A fathom deep the oil lies in the central pool; and as we come in from the dark passage the spraying-fountain bursts upon us like a vision of glory. The great room would be dark, for there are no windows, but that an iron slide, high up above, is drawn back a quadrant of the circle of the wall; and through this a mighty shaft of sunlight pours downward into the whirl of golden spray. Here is the fountain of gold of the Arabian Nights.

Cool and still lies the oil in the amber pool, clear as some golden air; while above, the fountain whirls it in a million golden beads, spraying into spray as fine as water, falling a golden rain, but silent, without a splash, into the liquid rest of the basin, where it, fine as water, foams. Thence it is ever drawn back again, and forced through the fountain in the sun, until all commoner atoms are lost and the pure oil is sprayed to test. And the yellow drops run in steady curves and arches light as any lintel of the Moorish palace, and chase each other with a merry music till they fall in the amber pool; and there the full sun shines fair upon its surface in a gorgeous purple, green, and iridescent sheen. And so pure and beautiful the oil lies when the fountain is still, so clear, with the steam-pipes in the bottom keeping it warm lest it should grow cloudy! Here Flossie would sit and dream for hours, before she waked to the world and its real joys, watching the oil as it was sprayed to test.

And how do they know when it is pure enough to stand the test? The process is simple. An electric spark is applied, at the various degrees of heat, until the oil takes fire and flashes in the pan. Temptation is the test of all things in this world.

Yet many a fortune has been made in this place; and chief among them was, and still is, the fortune of Mr. Silas Starbuck, late of New York City, now of parts unknown, refiner of whale and sperm oils, deceased in 1872; half the income of which fortune, the corpus being vested in three testamentary trustees of prominence in the Presbyterian Church, and immense wealth of their own, is annually paid by said trustees (after deducting all necessary expenses of repairs, insurance, taxes, care and management of the property, their own commissions, and an annuity of $1,000 each to the American Bible Society and the Board of Foreign Missions) to the only daughter of the said testator—Florence, now wife of T. Levison Gower, Esq., whose “elegant residence” at No. 2002 Fifth Avenue we have already admired.

The question, how a man made his fortune, has in our days not only a commercial but a psychological interest. Society has never had any objection to the sale by gentlefolk of themselves; but it is only of late years that it has permitted them the sale of anything else. You could formerly predicate with much certainty that a gentleman who had money had either inherited it or married it; now the problem has become more complex. Society to-day graciously permits a man to make money; it is even not over-critical as to the means; and we may almost look forward to the time when a man who has gone down-town to make it will be able to go up-town and spend it himself, and not vicariously, by his grandchildren. This was not quite the case, however, when Silas Starbuck was alive; and this fact had a very important bearing on Mrs. Gower’s life. Old Starbuck, as you know, made his money, not only by the refinement of oil, but also by selling his oil when refined—a fact society could hardly overlook.

Si Starbuck was generally thought the weakest, as he was the youngest, of the four sons of old Captain Starbuck, who commanded for many years the brig Loan, and then the ship Fair Helen, both clearing from Old Town in the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Thaddeus, Obed, and Seth were all older brothers, who lived and grew to be captains in their day. Si was a lazy fellow in his youth, and unadventurous; he usually kept snug to the ship, and if he ever went aloft willingly, it was to get the five-dollar reward that the owners paid the man who first discovered a blow. Si was quick enough at seeing things, and was much cuffed by his brothers—perhaps more for this one excellence than for his many shortcomings. Silas commonly had to act as cook and general swabber-out; all the same, he managed to keep a sound skin to his body, and had more time for reading than the rest. At home, when the Starbuck family got together about the fire with the older men, emeriti, who stayed at home and swapped stories, Silas was the cynical listener to their yarns of risk of life and capital. Even when they told the history of the great three-thousand-barrel sperm take of ’38, from Fairhaven, his eyes glistened more over the balance-sheet than at the stories of their doings in the Pacific when the whales were killed. So, naturally enough, when Silas got his time, he left the ship and drifted over to the continent, going first to New Bedford, where he began refining the materials which his brothers found.

The event justified his sagacity. None of his brothers made fortunes; Thaddeus was killed by a black-fish in the Northern Pacific, and Seth died of the scurvy in Hudson’s Bay. When Silas began to be really successful in New York, he kept up little intercourse with his brothers. Mrs. Gower does not remember them at all; so, at all events, she tries to think, though she had one great scare. In ’64, just as she was beginning to think of her coming out in society, her uncle Obed, then a hale, grizzled old fellow of sixty winters (most of which were Arctic ones), made himself very prominent by resisting a Confederate cruiser with harpoons and a couple of bomb-lance guns. This was a terrible event for pretty Miss Flossie, as it got into all the papers, making quite a hero of poor old uncle Obed; and several of her father’s friends had no more savoir faire than to speak of the old whaleman as her father’s brother at a dinner-party. However, uncle Obed never troubled them in New York; and shortly after her marriage (to which he had been invited by cards accidentally mailed only two days before the wedding) he died, to her inexpressible relief; whether childless or not, she never troubled herself to inquire. Now, however, Mrs. Gower speaks with much pride of her brave old seafaring ancestors.

Thus it came about that all the virtue of the race, as well as all their wealth, is now vested in Mrs. Gower and her brother, Howland Starbuck. The wealth has but gilded the wings on which she soared; her virtues were her own.

CHAPTER II.
FLOSSIE STARBUCK ASPIRES.

THERE was a time when Mrs. Gower was not fashionable. It is necessary, for our purpose, to go back to these dark ages. Her maidenhood was passed in unobtrusive splendor behind a frowning brown-stone front on a cross-street only two doors from Fifth Avenue. This house was one of a thousand: nine hundred and ninety-nine other New York houses were just like it. Here old Silas Starbuck for his twenty last years, led an even life, torpid in his undigested gold. Here Miss Florence pressed her girlish nose against the window-pane to stare at the opposite houses and wonder who the inmates were, and whether their lives were like to hers; or she strained her large eyes sideways to reach the perspective of morning ash-barrels, reaching in either direction to the avenue beyond. She did not then even know that brown-stone fronts were expensive, when she looked and speculated so wearily upon them.

A little later she began to speculate upon the people in them, and wonder more particularly about them, as she saw them, when coming from church, meet each other on the avenue and bow. No one ever bowed to them; though sometimes an oldish man would stop and speak to her father. It was at this time that it occurred to her to read books; and she became romantic, and would dream, after the manner of democratic maidens, of some courtly suitor, some young prince, who would fall in love with her, and give her rare old family jewels and take her to court balls.

This era lasted but a short time with Florence Starbuck, for she was very clever and sensible, even as a girl. She soon learned to fix her ambitions on possible things. And, indeed, she had no envy for the impossible. She soon learned to covet only those goods which her neighbors possessed, according to our practical version of the commandment, that “thou shalt not hanker after the ideal.” There was a certain clumsy accord of motive between old Starbuck and his daughter, but he was far from appreciating her refinement of desire, or fancying what high things went on in his daughter’s pretty head when the weekly “Home” paper dropped from her idle hands, and she sat knitting her virginal white brow for longing of the world. He had really only known himself to be rich a short time; and the brown façade which kept him from the fashionable street still seemed to him the acme of earthly ambition, as the printed list of charitable benefactors did of heavenly. Wealth had come very suddenly when it did come; and he felt it hard that his wife, of whom he had been fond in a certain way, had not lived to enjoy it. He had married her in old New Bedford days; and she had died, shortly after Florence’s birth, in the New York house. Mrs. Gower often thought, with something like a shudder, of what she might have been, had her mother lived. Mrs. Gower, like most of us, had thoughts that she admitted to others, thoughts she admitted to herself, and thoughts she admitted to no one, not even herself; and this was one of the last.—Do not think her hard-hearted; she is, with all her faults, one of the best-hearted people in the world, for one so clever. Satisfy her ambition, and she is good-nature itself; and she hates to do an ill-natured thing, even to her enemies. Florence, by the way, was a name she owed to the mercy of her mother; old Starbuck would have called her Nancy, as he had called her brother, Silas. Fortunately, in his case, Mrs. Starbuck got in the Howland from a maternal grandfather; and he is now S. Howland Starbuck, Esq., in the advertisements of companies—Mr. Howland Starbuck on his card.

Of course Flossie went to a fashionable school on Fifth Avenue, where she chose her friends judiciously, and it was at this time that she began to read books. She derived much profit from books, and has always owed much to them; even now she reads a little, as an old habit not quite outgrown. I don’t know what it was fired her maidenly ambition; “Lucille” had not been written then, nor Ouida’s works, but I doubt there was something similar. And it was certainly books that gave her her first inkling of a beau monde. She used to be very generous among the girls, her schoolmates, but never sought to take the lead among them, and was only known as a rather nice little thing from Eighteenth Street. She never even tried to make their brothers’ acquaintance, which was duly ascribed on their part to her proper sense of the fitness of things. The brothers were more interested in her. Once she was asked to spend a week’s vacation with Miss Brevier; but she never invited any of her school friends to her own house. If she had not been so clever, she might almost have become popular. As you see, Flossie learned much at school; but she took away more, and most of all she had carried thither with her.

In her maiden meditation, Miss Starbuck gave much and serious thought to what could be done with her father and brother. Silas, Jr., was a big, large-boned fellow with a heavy jaw; thick as to legs and head; in whom the family traits came out with peculiar coarseness, much as when you raise a mullein in a garden. The effect of wealth had been to produce him with greater luxuriance and less pruning, in more size and even coarser fibre. However false may be this analogy, there is no doubt that his brave old uncle, who had struggled with famine and the setting ice in Arctic seas, belonged to a much finer type of manhood. Fortunately, as Miss Flossie reflected, there were no ethics in the question. Fashion asks no awkward questions. Style, in the year 1868, in New York, of all the cardinal virtues, was perhaps the easiest to attain. They had the money—if she could screw it out of Mr. Starbuck.

There, however, came the first difficulty. Not that Mr. Starbuck did not fully sympathize with her aims, so far as he understood them; but it was difficult to make him understand them all. She soared in higher circles. For, remember, Flossie, like most New England girls, had a natural refinement of her own. And she was very pretty—petite in figure, then, with a most delicious little face, a face with a thousand lights and no definite expression. Her eyes though—her eyes were expressive; there was an archness, a directness, and a certain dewy softness.—Flossie soon learned that she must be careful of her eyes, and only use them on great occasions. It was one of her many studies, out of school, how to make them look demure; particularly before older women—older women, stout in figure, who would set their heads back on their comfortable shoulders and gaze at her, through double eye-glasses, with the liberty of age.—At such times Flossie used to drop a sort of curtain over those eyes of hers and look straight before her. She was secretly afraid of these older ladies; and this helped her, for she really became embarrassed.

But to return to Mr. Starbuck. He was willing to live in an expensive street, and even to keep a costly carriage, in an expensive stable, with a cobble-stone court-yard, at eight dollars the cobble-stone, and put his name in three figures on subscription-papers; but there his liberality stopped. This was all very well; and Flossie used the carriage to go to Stewart’s and shop, and, on rainy “Sabbaths,” for the church. But old Starbuck, who spent the income of a hundred thousand in façade, would have thought himself a Sardanapalus if seventy-five cents a day had gone for a pint of claret. Frequently they even dined without soup; and all wines, in old Starbuck’s mind, were grouped under the generic name of Rum. Mr. Starbuck had no æsthetic objection to rum—rather the contrary—but he thought it not respectable, and kept his tastes in that direction as a private sin. On days when the minister dined with them a decanter of pale sherry was brought out—a species of rum sanctified, as it were, by church use, and not expensive. Mr. Starbuck’s evenings were devoted to slippers and snores. Certainly, no poor girl had ever more unpromising material to work on. Flossie felt that, at best, her father could be little more than a base of supplies; she could never use him for attack.

Improbable as it might seem, Miss Starbuck decided that her social salvation rested with her unlikely brother Silas. The discovery of the possible use of so clumsy an instrument, at her age, must be reckoned a master-stroke. An awkward school-boy, he had met certain other youths whom Flossie felt she would like to know; with some of them had gone skating or played games in the streets. Flossie encouraged her father to give him plenty of pocket-money; he was only a year older than she, and she might be expected partially to fill her mother’s place. It was to her that he owed his horse and buggy; this was before the days of dog-carts. Sometimes he would bring his friends home in the evening; she would discourage their coming to dinner, but would throw her influence with his to favor anything that could be reasonably accorded at other times; and Flossie would excuse it to her father when they stayed a little late, or would shut the doors between Si’s upper-floor room and the library when they made too much noise. Sometimes, when Si lost too much at vingt-et-un, he borrowed of his sister; and she was not so much shocked as old Starbuck would have been. She knew that young men would be young men, and that Si must make friends, if at all, by his pleasant social vices rather than his father’s business virtues. This sounds cynical; but she did not reason it out in such bald, unpleasant analysis—it all came from delicate feminine intuition, of which she had more than her share. She was a quick-witted girl, living in a great city, with nothing at home to attract her. What else could she think about? Her vision went no farther than her brown-stone horizon. She was not romantic; her intellect quite overbalanced her emotional nature. And she had no Browning societies, and had never read Emerson nor Ruskin.

At nineteen she had been out of school a year, but had no definite launching in society. She looked much younger, being as immature in person as she was the contrary in mind. She saw hardly anyone except her school-girl friends, with two or three of whom she still remained intimate; they were kind to her, in a patronizing way, and invited her to their own parties; sometimes they would even send for her, at the last moment, to fill a vacant place at a dinner. A few of her friends’ brothers, and all of her brother’s friends, had been attracted by her; none of them knew her well, but they were in the habit of joking about her when alone. Most of her friends’ brothers took little interest in her, and thought her slow. But then (said their sisters) she has seen so little of the world, poor thing! Flossie felt this, too; but, as her friends said, she was an unselfish little creature, and her mind was chiefly occupied with a sisterly solicitude for brother’s future. She would have liked him to go to college; but he did not share his sister’s wishes, and the father utterly disapproved of it. He considered the college-bred man, when successfully perfected, as a pretty poor article; and college itself as a place where young men learned to drink and smoke, and spent their money in buggy-hire and billiards, unbeknown to their fathers. He insisted on Si’s going into the office; and Si, having finished school, did in fact spend a portion of his mornings in that nursery of millions, his afternoons in the park or elsewhere, and his evenings over cards or at Academy balls, or elsewhere again, all unbeknown to his father. It was at this time that Si picked up that fine knowledge of life which fitted him, as a man of the world, to take, afterward, so prominent a position in society.

There is no unlucky accident which an adroit person may not turn to happy advantage. Si might never have been a success in literary circles; but he began to develop quite a popularity among young men of a very good set. At this time it was by no means necessary for a New York fashionable to be liberally educated. And young Starbuck had several valuable accomplishments—he was a good whip, and soon became a tolerable ’vet and knew every jockey on the road; he played a capital hand at poker, and told stories and talked slang with a certain pungent humor of his own; and he could even thrum an accompaniment on a banjo. He was blessed with perfect health, large appetites, plenty of money; sparred well; was both stupid and good-natured, and had all the other elements of greatness. Fortunately, Flossie had no very clear idea of what Si did with his friends; and, secretly, her respect for him rose when he came home late at night and the next morning talked familiarly of the Duvals, and Lucie Gower, and “Van.” (“Van” was Mr. Killian van Kull, of the Columbian and Piccadilly clubs.) It was at this period that Si, thanks partly to the intercession of his sister attained to the ownership of a latch-key, and began to come home very late indeed, and talk mysteriously of French balls. Flossie had a very vague notion what these might be; and old Starbuck was not over-strict on that score. He would have thought wine-bibbing infinitely worse, and cards a shade more heinous than either. And, in fact, he was not insensible to Si’s social successes. True, old Starbuck was on the same board of directors with T. L. Gower, Sr., and one of his co-trustees in a charity; but he secretly felt—all democrat in a democracy that he was—he secretly felt it a much greater triumph in his career that young Gower and his son should get drunk together. This is a coarse way of putting it; let us hasten through the beginnings of things and get out where we may see the stars once more.

CHAPTER III.
FLOSSIE STARBUCK ATTAINS.

T LEVISON GOWER, Jr., the Perseus to our Andromeda, that angel who was to take Flossie’s hand and lift her with him to a higher sphere, was a pallid young man with a long nose, a short forehead, a thin neck, and a prominent Adam’s apple. Large noses are aristocratic; and Gower valued his as typical of his pure Dutch blood. It was disappointing, though, after so fine a beginning, to find his brow retreat in a rapid little slope; and then, taking a quick round curve, to find your eye resting on the nape of his neck almost before you knew it. Horizontally lying across his forehead was a deep crease, perhaps three inches long, running half an inch below the line of the hair and half an inch above the abutment of his nose; this line did duty for determination and thought. The mouth and chin were large again. With this kind of face, Gower at twenty-two looked virile and worldly, and at five-and-thirty he looked twenty-two. What more can be said of him? His trousers never showed the impression of his knees, though his legs were long and thin; and there was more definite expression in the pattern of his colored shirt than of his face. This was before the fashion of scarf-pins; but he now wears—and would then have worn—a glass head of a bull-dog in a light-checked satin scarf. Gower’s ideas hardly ever change, which is fortunate for his peace of mind, and his tastes never, which is fortunate for his wife. Yet, were you to introduce young Gower anywhere (in American society, of course), the answer would be wreathed in smiles—Mr. Gower, of New York, I suppose? And in Flossie Starbuck’s mind these three words would have been fit climax for anything, from the caption of a tomb to a Newport hotel-register—Levison Gower, of New York. It was as Randolph of Roanoke. Crude as Flossie Starbuck’s notions were, she was fortunate enough to aim high the first time.

Gower first knew her brother in Eighteenth Street, where they used to play games together Saturday afternoons. Si was physically stronger than young Gower, and, from the first, inspired him with respect. Gower had not at this time learned his own advantages, and Starbuck used to treat him quite cavalierly. This rough patronage produced a respectful affection which years could not efface; and when they next were thrown together, owing to a similarity of tastes in roads and equipages, Si was still fortunate enough to remain the passive member in the friendship. This intimacy was further cemented in ways before indicated; and very soon, Gower, finding Starbuck a pleasant companion at wine-suppers and popular at public balls, bethought himself of bringing him home to dinner and introducing him to his sisters. Si was too stolid to show embarrassment, and his physical presence carried him through anything. The Misses Gower rather liked him; here was a man who was rich and manly, and yet made them feel their own superiority. Even the great Killian van Kull, Gower’s popular and accomplished cousin, took a fancy for Si. “Buck” Starbuck, as he dubbed him, began to be popular. Here was a man who could gamble and fight, who was ready for anything at night, and never ill-natured nor headachy the day after. Both Kill van Kull and Si had health, animal spirits, and a taste for dissipation; and little Lucie, as they were accustomed to call Levison in the intimacy of the trio, soon became their very admiring and submissive dependent. Thus Si had the luck to start in life with two of the most valuable friends a young man could have had; for Kill van Kull represented fashion and popularity, and Gower position and wealth. So he passed his first five years after leaving school, when he was supposed to be in business, and not wasting his time and money in college. Old Starbuck would have winced, had he known Si’s true courses, had he even known as much as Flossie did; but, after all, young Starbuck was building better (in this world’s way) than even his sister knew.

For it often became necessary to send someone home to bring Si’s clothes, or bear his excuses—he had gone up the Hudson to spend Sunday with the Duvals, or on a yachting-trip with Kill van Kull; and it was often inconvenient for him to leave Kill himself. No one was so convenient in these times as Lucie Gower; and he was good-natured, and could easily run back for an hour or two. Besides, if Si had gone, he might sometimes have met his father, and have been detained peremptorily. Thus Gower became a sort of male Iris, a messenger between pleasure and duty; and he was soon familiar with the high, empty house on Eighteenth Street. He usually saw Flossie at these times. There grew to be a sort of understanding between the two. She was so much cleverer than Gower was; and she knew exactly how to face old Mr. Starbuck. And Gower learned to have confidence in her, and often told “Buck” that his sister was a brick.

“Starbuck’s pretty sister” was getting to be a little better known among the young men now, though not unpleasantly talked of. She kept very quiet; and the one or two girls that knew anything about her—Miss Brevier, for instance—spoke well of her. Meantime, Si was getting on with the fast set, that set which the Duvals and old Jake Einstein were timidly forming before they dared dominate—the set which carried the tastes of the French shopkeeper into society. They spent much money, and a few fashionable hangers-on, like Van Kull, found it pleasant to stand under the golden shower.

Now came a great event in Si’s life. Van Kull and Gower found it tiresome to always go to a bar-room and sit on hard chairs with Si, when they wanted to drink and smoke after a theatre or a dance. It was proposed that Si should become a member of their club—the Piccadilly, of Madison Square. And in a few months or so Si had the pleasure of seeing his name, S. Howland Starbuck, printed in the blue book of that fashionable refuge for would-be solitary males.

It was a great event for Si, and possibly, also, for his father. Old Starbuck knew very well that, although old Mr. Gower was a member and colleague of his in church matters—affairs of the other world—he never would have gone sponsor for him, as he had for his son Silas, in a club election in this. Yet this knowledge did not offend him; he was glad to see his son Silas rise in the world, and bore no malice. Perhaps he was even pleased that his son could go where he could not. It was right that Si should make friends, and perhaps just as well that he had not gone much into the business, after all. For about this time the oil from Oil Creek began to attract attention in the markets. Long before—centuries before—the Indians had been used to dip their blankets along the creek’s still surface until they were thoroughly saturated, and then to obtain the oil by the simple process of squeezing; for the oil was known to be “great medicine” and good for rheumatism, sores, and troubled souls. In the salt-wells near Pittsburg, on Saturday nights, when the brine was well pumped away, the miners were annoyed by the increasing flow of the green, bad-smelling stuff, which by Monday would have disappeared, pressed back by the new flow of brine into its deep crevices in the subterranean rock. But no one had thought of value for the stuff—except the few quack doctors or credulous ones who, trusting to the old Indian legend, skimmed a little oil from wooden cribs about the creek and sold it as a medicine of nature’s patent, in the Philadelphia drug-stores, for one dollar the ounce. At this price the fluid was not a dangerous competitor with Mr. Starbuck’s product; and even when one of these same Philadelphia druggists analyzed the oil, found its value, and made a contract for the output of one of the salt-wells, the only effect of his enterprise was to ruin its value as a medicine by making it free to anyone (like those other medicines of water, air, and out-doors), without rendering it as cheap as the coal-oil already made from cannel-coal. Still, the flow, once begun, did not cease; wells were sunk whose daily flow exceeded the capacity of many a whale; already, refining whale and sperm was not what it had been; and there was more competition in petroleum, and he was not so well situated for the raw material. Old Starbuck began to think it was time he sold out; the works had been very profitable, and the expense and hazard of changing machinery and clientèle made the future risky. Few of his competitors had the energy to make the change, the process of refining being so different, but went on filtering the diminished catch of whale and sperm, until the divine law of the survival of the fittest put a quietus to their struggles. By all this Starbuck profited, as was to be expected. The S. Starbuck Oil Company was formed; capital, Two Millions; Starbuck himself remaining one of the directors. The business and works were then supposed to be worth about $800,000. One-half the capital was paid up, and $800,000 of it paid to S. Starbuck, Esq., for the works, machinery, business, and good-will; besides this cash, Starbuck received $800,000 in stock of the new company at its face value. The stock was then considered worth par, and he was shrewd enough to keep it always well above eighty; in fact, he continued to manage the concern for a year or two, and was even so clever as to get it back to a healthy basis, although he had first watered and then milked it to the tune of a million and a quarter. When he had succeeded in this, he sold half of his remaining stock, all he could safely get rid of, and retired absolutely from business. Eight months after this, his work being satisfactorily finished, to himself, in this world, he left it, in October, 1872. In April, 1873, the engagement of Miss Starbuck and Mr. T. Levison Gower, Jr., was formally announced.

People were much surprised, but less so than if Lucie Gower had married someone of whom they knew something. Now they commonly knew nothing of Flossie, except that she was “Buck” Starbuck’s sister. Things have changed since; and Si is Mrs. Levison Gower’s brother now. Miss Brevier was delighted, and went about telling her friends that Flossie was a perfectly sweet girl. Silas Starbuck’s friends commonly said “By Jove!” among themselves, and nothing when Si was present. Flossie was already twenty-four, and had been generally supposed, as much on account of this as of her retired life, not to be about to marry. Still, there were few ill-natured comments about it. Her modesty did her a good turn here. And no one much envied her young Gower, except for his wealth; and she had plenty of that.

The Gowers themselves looked more askance at the match. After all, it was their family that she was going to marry into. And she might have many relations. Only old Gower, seeing that she had the essentials, had the sense to accept the thing from the first. He knew that his social position was a rock on which a fair structure might be built with her money. Old Gower had come to New York about 1830 from one of the hill-towns in Northwestern Connecticut; and had first been known as engaged in the banking business, with one of the Lydams as his partner. It was a Miss Lydam whom he married. He was very rich, or had that reputation; and was a prominent magnate in one of the largest evangelical denominations. There he had met and known and appreciated old Starbuck. He was not sorry, however, that that gentleman was dead. Mr. Gower felt toward him much as a ci-devant marquis might have felt toward the rich farmer-general father of his daughter-in-law. Mr. Gower lived in the most democratic city of a democracy; but a democracy lends itself to sudden and extreme social distinctions. The imaginary line, drawn hap-hazard, must be drawn all the deeper to endure a decade. A society which has no Pyrenees must give an extra attention to the artificial forts of its boundaries. Old Mrs. Gower felt deeply these truths. She knew that Mr. Starbuck had been in oil; but she also said to herself that her son would raise Flossie to his own level. What that level was we have seen.

Meanwhile, the two lovers were very happy. Flossie allowed herself, by anticipation, a little more style in dress. She appeared with young Gower in his buggy in the park, radiant, and really very pretty. Lucie Gower’s friends congratulated him boisterously, and called her Flower-de-Luce—a name which persisted ten years or so, until some savage wit changed the Flower to Fruit. She was then still slight; and, for the first time, dared to show how pretty she was. “How she has come out since her engagement!” was the common remark. Indeed she had; she was very happy; she felt as if she had been born anew, into a world of which previously she had only seen the brown-stone front. Gower went to see her every day; and though these tête-à-têtes were rather long, she consoled herself with the idea that the marriage would soon be over. He, too, was impatient; and very proud of her. He secretly liked to have his friends dig him in the ribs—as they would do, with Gower. He had never possessed any girl, before, who had loved him solely for himself; for surely there was nothing else to attract Miss Starbuck?—he had little money. Lucie felt a flattering sense of ownership in this fair creature that was going to link her life with his. The simple fellow was touched by it; and he never really ceased to be in love with her, though too weak to resist temptation in any simple and attractive form. Si, too, was immensely delighted. He thought Lucie little better than a fool; but then, he was just the man to make a capital husband. And, on the whole, he would not be a disagreeable brother-in-law. However, after the first relief and contentment of the thing were over, and Flossie fairly disposed of, it no longer concerned Si very much.

Never was a marriage so happy, or the course of true love so smooth. There was a delicious excitement about it all to Gower; he felt as if he had multiplied himself by four. And Flossie—Flossie’s feelings were more complex. She obtained Miss Brevier’s services as a bridesmaid; and it was arranged that the newly-married couple should live on Fifth Avenue at the corner of Thirty-second Street. The old Starbuck house in Eighteenth Street was sold, and Si went into lodgings—as he had long desired.

The wedding-presents, though few in number, were very handsome; Flossie had the satisfaction of seeing her wedding under the head of “Fashionable Weddings” in the New York Herald; two clergymen performed the ceremony; and in the evening the bride and groom went to Boston. After a fortnight they returned and installed themselves in the Fifth Avenue house, which had been elaborately decorated and extravagantly furnished for their coming. Old Mrs. Gower gave a grand reception in their honor. And about the same time, young Gower began to find himself in his club-window, sucking his cane, and wondering what he should do with his afternoon, very much as usual. He puzzled much over a certain feeling he had, but was not clever enough at self-analysis to make it out. But it was as if the theatre had ended too early, and there were nothing to do with the rest of the evening.

Not so Mrs. Gower.

CHAPTER IV.
ARTHUR HOLYOKE’S DREAMS.

WHEN the living poet and the dead came out to see the stars once more, the Florentine found himself upon a grassy slope, alone in the early morning, with his silent guide. So, when Tannhäuser, after his ten years’ sojourn in the Venusberg, broke through the walls of the mountain in a rift made by a prayer, he too found himself on the brow of a green and sunny mountain valley, filled with the long-forgotten breath of morning; and, in place of the devil’s music, a shepherd piping to his sheep. So, reader, you in flesh and blood, as I hope, may follow me, in the story, to the time of dates and daylight, and a place—the time, September, 1883; the place, the village of Great Barrington, far down in Berkshire in old Massachusetts. The early morning shadows still reached long across the green carpet of meadow in the intervale; the shadows of the houses, and of the great masses of elm foliage, and of the tall spire of the meeting-house up on the hill; the undulating masses of greenery that robed the lower hills were striped here and there with autumn scarlet, like a blackbird’s wing; and the silver lace in the meadow grass, and the long silken cobwebs in the air, and the rich violet-blue sky, shading off to pink like an onyx near the horizon, were precursors of the coming glory of the day.

No one was stirring in the village. In the ploughed uplands a few farmers were idly walking, hither and thither like generals on the battlefield of their success, tightening a sheaf of fodder or replacing a yellow squash or two that had rolled off from a summit of the great golden pyramids standing, piled like cannon-balls, in the cornfields. But the day of sowing was over, and the day of reaping was over, and little remained but to sit and look at the crops and grow fat. Up on the hill, the roads were empty—who should travel when there was no need? Even the plodding oxen-teams were idle in their stalls, being fattened and coddled, perhaps, for the annual cattle show. So that Gracie Holyoke and Arthur had the beautiful Stockbridge road, and the morning look of the mountains, all to themselves. They rode at a sharp canter, but with little conversation; at least, so a groom might have thought riding behind them; as the two heads never seemed to turn inward. But there was no groom, and the chestnut horses had a way of riding so closely side by side (being in this constantly drilled) that to turn one’s head was hardly necessary.

Were these two in love? A city groom, used to ride behind many a preening pair in their smart T-cart, seasoned and wearied with his master’s catechism of flirtation, which he had so often overheard; being there in theory to play propriety, but in fact, as he well knew, only as a license to flirt, much as a policeman is stationed in the Park for the skating when the ice is thin—such a groom would have said No. For they hardly ever look at one another. But perhaps an older groom, good dan Cupid himself, the blind passenger who perches like dark care on so many a horse’s back, and drives dark care away—he might answer Yea: for they are not flirting.

Now, there are several legitimate states of being in love, as videlicet, to be in love and know it, to be in love and not know it, to know that she loves you and to think that you love her, to be in love, but with another person than the one you think:—but to know it and not be in love is but a modern and puerile intellectual trifling; this we call flirtation. And in that these two were surely not. Were they then simply indifferent to one another? Unlikely—so early in the morning. And surely, the cosmic chances are all in our favor: is it not the normal relation, to be in love? Given, a young man of twenty-one and a lovely girl some few months younger—and the uplands, and the forest, and the sun, moon, stars, storm and springtime—and show me one such younker not in love and you will show me a wretched fellow you had best avoid.

No such selfish saint or sordid sinner can this slender Arthur be, who turns in his saddle and shows the clear-cut New English profile with the delicate but winning smile. But see, the smile has faded into earnestness; leaning yet farther from the saddle, he is looking up into his companion’s face, and seeming to be searching for something there. Does he find it? Ah, Cupid, good dan Cupid, were you right once more? or were we both too hasty—for she has not blushed, but the one rounded cheek we see, as we press after them, grows quickly pale, and we can just make out the dark eye-lashes that droop quickly down, breaking the contour; and now they do not speak again, but ride at the run in mutual silence—oh, a silence that is surely mutual, if ever silence was—and we have much to do, being old and no longer in love, to keep behind these two, who do not dally. This was all that happened in the ride. Only, coming home, and both dismounting (she without waiting for his aid) and he taking her hand to say good-morning (as he had done a hundred times before, that very summer) the color mounted in the young girl’s face (as it had never done before) so that she turned the face aside which was too near her heart, and ran indoors in haste and left him there.

This was all that happened on that ride—it was all that had ever happened—but in it, Arthur Holyoke had made bold to ask his cousin to become his wife; and she had bade him wait till evening for his answer; and then they both had ridden home. A city groom would have seen nothing of it all; yet these things had been done. A short probation, you will say, until the evening only; and Arthur hardly thought of it as such, but walked home briskly, hat in hand, castle-building; his dark gray eyes turned inward, and the wind making free with his curly, undecided-colored hair. For what probation was there more, after all their lives had so far been together, than living on together, man and wife? Not that she loved him then so much as he loved her—but that was to be expected. She loved him more than he deserved, he knew; but then, that is true of most pairs, and the men must needs not waste their pity, but resign themselves, as it is the way of women. And Arthur walked along the straight garden path that led from door to highway in Judge Holyoke’s old place, switching off the prim asters with his riding-cane. For his uncle’s house was built in the days of gardens, not of lawns—can we not imagine the large contempt with which the dwellers of a prairie would regard a barbered rood or two of grass?—and the flowers were part of Gracie’s presence there, and she of them.

Arthur was not too stout, but strong and graceful, almost Greek in figure as in face; a strange, strong scion of that narrow-chested clergyman-father, so stout in spirit, but so fragile in this world, who had died and left him to his uncle’s care, the Judge. There are many such: it seems our people (like some mute, inglorious poet) have had their period of pale and interesting youth, and now are comfortably stout and genial, in their easy-going middle age, the wasting spiritual fires quelled: like a sometime tractarian clergyman, now optimistic in a fat living. Arthur, however (not to carry the analogy too far), was spiritual enough in his way, though not the orthodox; delicately balanced, mobile, imaginative, Celtic more than Saxon, and rather Greek than either. Nor could you truly say that his way wanted depth, unless depth means sluggishness or stillness. Arthur was a New Englander, and New England is in reality the essence of all things American, in germ and future; and the people, the crowds, are already rather Greek than English. Irreverent, fond of novelty and quick—in politics, if not in art, they are Athenian. The public of Aristophanes is the public of the American burlesque; of lions, fair ladies, lecturers; of advertised politics, priests and prophets, of the mind-cure and of the secular Sunday newspaper.

Arthur Holyoke had been brought up by the Judge, chiefly on the simple plan of keeping him in the country and giving him plenty of books; a most admirable plan, never to be enough recommended. The Judge spent his winters in the city; then Arthur was kept at boarding-school; one of those quiet little boarding-schools of the wooden Doric variety, now disappearing. The Judge travelled abroad, or went to England or to the West, every summer; Arthur was left at Great Barrington. One winter Arthur had passed in Boston with his uncle, and had attended lectures at the Institute of Technology; it was the winter that Gracie had been away with her aunt in New York. This happened in one of these years when the whim of Hellenism seemed, in Boston, to be permanently eclipsing the Hebraism which has really made that city; and Arthur was intoxicated by the new atmosphere, as a hardy wind-flower might be in the rich sweet air and tempered light of a grapery. You do not make grapes of blackberries by putting them under glass; but you modify them considerably. If you had asked Arthur what was to be his profession, he would have answered engineering; but his inward consciousness was that he should be a great poet. But he knew the pitying contempt with which the world regards its contemporary failures—and its contemporaries are always failures—in that line; and in spite of his assurance that he had it in him (whilst others had not) he did not mean that it should be known until it was known only to his glory. These dreams had blended with his dreams of life with Gracie, until it was hard to say which was more the cause and which the effect; they grew apace together. To-day his dreams of love had the ascendant; and he wandered about the country many hours, rapt in his love and her. They would live where? in the city, of course; in New York, where was the largest focus for his genius. That, too, was the place where the most rapid fortune was to be made; for, of course, they must have money, and the money must be made quickly, that he might get his leisure and return to his poetry again. For this was to be the ultimate, the crown of his life. Engineering would not do; some quicker way than this must be found; banking, or railroads. The years of business would be irksome, no doubt; but then, with Gracie with him!

So the boy wandered, through the afternoon, working many a gorgeous variegation on the themes of love and fame; with but the least substratum of gold among them, as if to give strength to the pigments of his fancy. Meantime, Gracie, on her part, had been thinking, now happily, now in shades of sadness, oftener still in prayer. Yet she went about the household on her usual duties, passing silently like the daylight through the long library, where the old Judge sat over his briefs and closely-wrought opinions, nor ever noticed so slight a thing as a young girl’s mood.

Arthur found her in the garden, when he came, in a favorite place of hers, sitting on an old stone seat by the little brook, where it was most densely overshadowed by the flowering shrubs. She had that serious look in her dark eyes which he loved best in them, and she neither blushed nor smiled when he took her hand and sat him down beside her. Arthur had often fancied that at this time a flow of speech worthy of a Petrarch would be his; but as it was, the simplest words alone seemed strong to him. “The day has seemed so long to me!” Perhaps he thought it true; but it was not. The day had seemed short, and full of dreams. She made no answer; but, in a moment, turned her head and looked at him, gravely, as it seemed to Arthur, fondly, as it might have seemed to an older man. “I do not think we ought to be engaged,” she said; and this he could not make her unsay in all the afternoon.

But the old tragicomedy was re-enacted, which is so old, and will seem so new to our great-grandchildren; and Arthur knew, at the first, that she loved no one else; and at the last, he knew, or might have known, that she loved him. But the yes she would not say, but only, wait; and when he urged, But you may care for someone else? she only said, “I shall care for no one else, Arthur”—and at the last it grew to be but a pleasant play, so sure he was of her. It was settled between them that he was to go to New York and make his fortune and hers; and that then he was to come back and ask her father’s consent; or sooner perhaps, if the fortune was too slow in coming. She would not write to him, she said,—but she would answer a letter now and then—and he kissed her once for the first time, under the old lilac bush, before they left. And more, a thousand times more, he felt in love with her than he had even been that morning; and so they came out of the greenery into the broad sward with the long slanting shadows of the sunset, he still holding to her hand.

They were close on the Lenox road; and he had to drop her hand in haste, as an open carriage came swinging by, bearing an old acquaintance of ours—Mrs. Levison Gower and a guest of hers from Lenox. The guest must have made some quick remark to Mrs. Gower about them; for they both turned and looked at the young people, and she bowed to Gracie; and then the light wheels whisked by, leaving but the dust, and the crisp sound of the horses’ trot. Arthur had noticed the glance, but did not speak of it; he saw that Gracie was blushing again. He forgot even to ask who Mrs. Gower was, as he took Gracie’s hand again in his; and together, slowly, they went down the broad garden-walk.

CHAPTER V.
OF GRACIE HOLYOKE AND OF HER HEART.

A MAN’S grand life, says someone, is a dream of his youth realized in and by his later years; what then shall we say of a woman’s? Think not on this; but let your soul answer. The answer should be there, in the hearts of all; but whether it comes from memory, from things now half forgotten, or from within, or from some birth-dream had in childhood, who shall say? Yet is it there; like a child’s dream of a star; happy he whose manhood sees the star, its dream not yet departed. And all of us have fancied women so, at some time in our lives; have we never known one such? For but one such is enough, mother, bride, or daughter. Some slight girl whose maidenhood was a sweet bloom, like Mary’s lily in the Temple; and then we may have lost sight or knowledge of her, for a time. And then perhaps we have met some other woman, some old woman, with white hairs; not the same, of course, and yet it seems as if we could have pieced together their two lives and make them like one brook, that we have known in places only, which brings soft fields and flowers. And be sure that there was in between some womanhood, some mother’s life, not known save to her sons and God, not preached in meetings and conventions; deep hidden in some human fireside, like the brook that makes so green a summer wood—Such lives are white and shining, like a dream of God’s made real on the earth.

And all the world seems thirst, and lust, and envy, and desire; the fires of heaven are put out, and all men struggling, trampling, for the colored stones of earth; and yet such blooms do come upon it. But they blossom stilly, like silent lilies born above the meadow-mire. White and pure they shine, and breathe in heaven’s sunlight, and give out heaven’s fragrance, borne each upon its slender stem above the blind, black bog.

The day after this, Gracie had an errand, up in a little town beyond the hills. Arthur asked that he might go there with her; then they both might ride instead of driving. So they started, after luncheon; the new brown leaves lay crisp beneath their feet, and the light that flooded the valley was like yellow wine. Their way lay up over the hills to the eastward, and then, cresting their summits, along a rambling grass-grown road, between the crumbling stone walls and old unpainted farmhouses. What paint the farmers had to spare, they put upon the barns; a poor powdery stuff, weak in oil, and leaving but a brushing as of red earth upon the seasoned boards; the windows of the farmhouses looked out forlornly upon the fields already lonely, grim and unrelieved by any curtain. The places where gardens had been used to be, were common for the hens; along the fences for a hundred yards on either side of every house was a littering of chips where the wood-piles had been, but the piles were scant this year, and of half-grown birch; the reason was easy to see, for the great hills rolled off around them denuded of timber, save here and there a new growth of scrub oak. Beside each house the old well stood, its sweep pointing to the sky, but now disused and replaced by a patent log-pump, painted a garish blue.

Arthur rode very close to Gracie to-day; there was an exhilarating space and sweep to the free wind that brought bright color to their cheeks, and their clear eyes sparkled as their glances soared far over the brown downs and rested with delight upon the distant sky-line. There is something about our New England uplands like the barren worn-out plains of Old Castile; yet these two might have stood for a youth and future that one cannot hope from Spain.

They came out from the table-land down into a combe that had been worn for itself by a little stream now dry; as they ambled down the winding grass-grown way, the trees began again about them, oak and pines, then firs; a house or two was passed, and then a little school-house, the houses boarded up, and the school-house closed. They came down upon the turnpike, which had come by the longer way, around the hills; here was a bit of a village, a blacksmith’s house, a country store and an old hotel. The weather-worn wood of these seemed older than any thatched and plastered cottage in old England.

Gracie’s pensioners lived in a little house close by, the blacksmith’s wife and her six children; she had some medicine for them, and Arthur a few newspapers. While Gracie went to see them, Arthur led the horses to the inn; there was a swinging sign of George Washington over the door, which the pride of each successive owner had kept well varnished ever since the memorable night when he had stopped there,—though nothing else about the place was in repair. No one came to the door as Arthur walked up, and he tied his horses to a well-nibbled rail, and went in. There was a long bare entry leading from the front door, with a row of doors; each with a tin sign above it, “office,” “dining-room,” “ball-room” (now half obliterated), and “bar.” Arthur opened the last one, and went in.

There was a high black stove with a hard-coal fire, in the centre of the room; around it on the floor a square wooden tray, filled with sand. The walls were covered with gay posters, a cattle show, an advertisement of melodeons, of a horse stolen, of an auction sale of a farm, farming utensils, a horse and cow, many sleighs and wagons and some household furniture. An old man sat in one corner, in carpet-slippers, with a newspaper, and a look upon him as if he had not been out-doors that day.

“Well, Lem?” said Arthur, “business quiet, eh?”

“There ain’t much business, Mr. Holyoke,” said the hotel-keeper, without changing his position, “’xcept what’s in here.” And he pointed to the bar, and the pitcher of water, and the row of tumblers behind it.

“I want you to give my horses a feed,” said Arthur, “we came over from Great Barrington.”

“Came over from Barrington, did ye?” said he. “And what’s the news in town?” And without waiting for an answer, the old man rose and hobbled to the side door. “Mike!” he cried, “Mike!” There was no answer. “I guess the feller must ha’ gone to Lee,” he added, grumbling. “There’s a cattle show there, to-day.”

“Let me go,” said Arthur; “I’ll look after them.”

“You’ll find the feed in the bin,” said the inn-keeper, relapsing into his stuffed chair, with a sigh of relief.

“And what’s the news from your son, Mr. Hitchcock?” said Arthur, when he came back.

“Lem’s still out in Ioway,” said Mr. Hitchcock. “There ain’t much call for a young feller of sperit to be loafin’ around here. I brought him up for the business; but I guess the old place’ll have to keep itself after I am gone.”

“Still at your old books, Mr. Hitchcock, I see,” said Arthur, taking up a well-worn copy of Tom Paine. “Why, I didn’t know you read French!” And Arthur turned over with interest the leaves of a book the other had just laid down; it was a volume of Voltaire.

“I l’arned it when I was a b’y in college. Perhaps ye didn’t know as I was a college-bred man?”

“I might have known it,” said Arthur. “But you didn’t send Lem there?”

“No,” said the other, shortly. And then, with a chuckle, “They’ve pretty much all come to my way of thinking, now. D’ye notice the old meetin’-house as ye came along? They’ve had to shut it up, ye know. Have a cigar?” And Mr. Hitchcock brought two suspicious looking weeds out of a gayly pictured box, and extended one to Arthur. The latter took one, knowing the old man would be mortally offended if this rite of hospitality were passed by.

“Whose house was that I saw boarded up?” said Arthur, for the sake of something to say.

“What!” said the old man, “ain’t ye heard? That’s Uncle Sam Wolcott’s. The old man was livin’ there with his daughter and her little b’y.” And Hitchcock took a comfortable pull at his cigar.

“Yes,” said Arthur, “I remember now.”

“The child’s dead,” said he.

“What?” said Arthur. “Dead?”

Hitchcock nodded assent. “Killed him, ye know.”

“Killed him? who—”

“The grandfather—Samuel Wolcott. Killed him with an axe, Sunday week. Them air gospel folks got him crazy.”

The old man spoke with a sort of grim satisfaction, and Arthur looked at him in amazement. “Great heavens! you don’t mean to say he murdered him? Where’s the mother?”

“Lucky for her she warn’t there at the time, I guess. Fust time I ever knew o’ church doing a critter any good.”

“But where is she now?”

Hitchcock waved his hand in the direction of the biggest poster, “Farm for Sale.” “Gone back to her husband’s folks, I guess. And when she come back, she found old Wolcott a-hangin’ to a rafter in his barn.”

“But what possible motive—” began Arthur aghast. “Had he no other family?”

“He had a sister—I never heard what became o’ her. She married a feller by the name of Starbuck, from New London way, an’ I mistrust he turned out bad. I guess the old man got kinder disperited. An’ then the gospel folks—But he was the last of the old Wolcott family, an’ they was gret folks in their day. So they put him an’ the infant in the family tomb, and sealed it up.”

Arthur looked at the old hotel-keeper, and then out at the empty street. Gracie was coming along under the elm-trees, the yellow leaves falling about her in the autumn wind. “I must be going,” said he.

“Have a little something hot, before ye go?”

“No,” said Arthur, “thanks, I guess not.” And he made haste to get away, feeling the spirit of the place come over him like a pall.

“Well, good-bye?” said the other. “Always glad to see ye. But we’ve all got to come to it. Some day, ye’ll find me hanging to the beam up there, I expect.” Heedless of which gloomy prognostication, Arthur made haste to get to the stable and brought out the horses. They mounted, and rode some time in silence.

“Did Mr. Hitchcock tell you?” said Gracie with a shudder.

Arthur nodded. Something in the terror of the place brought out his love the stronger, as he looked at her, the tears in her deep gray eyes. “I wonder that we had not heard of it,” said he; “but these places are so out of the world.”

“Poor man, I have so often wondered if we could do nothing for him,” said she. “I went there once; but he almost ordered me out of the house.”

“Hitchcock says it was some religious mania,” said Arthur.

“He never went to church when I knew him,” said Gracie. “He cared most for his sister; and I think her husband turned out ill. Poor people, does it not seem cruel they cannot be taught to live? They could be so happy here, in this lovely country, if they only knew.”

“We are happy, are we not, dear?” said Arthur.

“Yes, Arthur. It almost seems wrong—” and Gracie looked out over the hills ahead of them, where the sun was already low in the sky.

“Are we going home, now?”

“I want to stop a moment at the Kellys—that Irish family, you know.”

Instinctively, they had taken another road back, leaving the old meeting-house and the now ended homestead on the right; and as they came up on the brow of the first hill, they passed a large wooden cross, painted freshly, with a gilt circle and the mystic letters I. N. R. I. in the centre. A short distance beyond this was a square old-fashioned farm-house, with a fine old doorway, needing paint like all the other houses. But the yard was full of pigs and hens and chickens; and about the door a half-score tow-headed children were playing. These ran up to Gracie as they rode up. “Mother’s in the kitchen,” said the biggest of the girls, putting a finger in her mouth. The boys stood still, and stared at them, abashed.

Gracie went in; and Arthur stood and looked about him. The fields were already stubble; but lit up with yellow piles of squashes; a noise of cattle came from the rambling old stable; and behind the house was a low peat-meadow, fresh-ditched and being drained. The healthy Irish stock had grown luxuriantly, where the older line was dying out. Gracie came out, smiling. “She is a nice old body, Mrs. Kelly,” said she. “And now, for home!” and they put their horses at the gallop, and were soon up on the bare downs again. And Arthur, like a man, began to plead his suit once more.

CHAPTER VI.
THE JUDGE SUMS UP HIS CASE.

JUDGE HOLYOKE sat in his library, trying to reconcile good law with good conscience by distinguishing the present case, in which the plaintiff was clearly in the right, from a former one in which he had been as clearly in the wrong. The opinion was a hard one; and the Judge had got no farther than the summing up, when there was a knock at the door. The Judge always wrote his opinions with ease and clearness when law and right coincided; but when they did not, he would lie awake of nights to produce an opinion which would remain a marvel of learning and obscurity. His high brow wrinkled a little when he heard the knock at the door; he hated to be disturbed while in the agonies of judicial creation; and as Arthur came tentatively in, he looked at him sternly, as upon a counsel who ventured upon an unexpected motion, with a curtly short-cutting well?

(He has come for a larger allowance, thought the Judge; he knows that he is of full age, and wants his full income.)

(How shall I ask him for his daughter, thought Arthur. Well—at all events, he must know that she is mine.)

Arthur sat down, still hesitating. The Judge waited impatiently, though he thought he knew what was in his mind; for it was part of his legal training never to give his own ideas until he had fully extracted those of the other side. Thus, mutual misunderstanding like that of a scene in a comedy was averted; for when Arthur did begin, it was to the point.

“Uncle John,” said he, “I am engaged to Gracie.”

Uncle John was in fact more staggered than if he had moved him for a non-suit; but his judicial calm was as unruffled as if it were but a similiter in pleading. “And is Gracie engaged to you?” he answered, illogically, but to the point, in his turn. And Arthur’s hesitation in replying gave him time to hastily adapt himself to the issue and make up his judicial mind; which was, as usual, that the court would reserve its decision. Arthur, however, hesitated but for a moment; and then with a faint blush mantling his ingenuous face, “I think, sir, she might be, if you would consent.”

“But, dear me,” said the Judge, “I don’t consent! Don’t understand me for one moment as consenting! Where’s Gracie? Did you tell her of this—of this surprising motion of yours?”

“No, sir,” said Arthur, “I thought—that——”

“That you wanted an ex parte hearing? Now I can’t pronounce a decision, sir, in the absence of the parties; and Gracie has not made her appearance in this suit as yet!”

“I’ll go get her,” said Arthur, promptly.

“No, sir, you’ll do nothing of the sort,” said the Judge, appalled at this evidence of collusion between the parties. “You’ll go away from here for some years before you get her; and then——”

“And then?” said Arthur, eagerly.

The Judge looked at him curiously over his round spectacles. “What do you propose to live upon?”

“I am coming to that,” said Arthur. “I have fifteen hundred a year——”

“Two thousand,” said the Judge, absently.

“Two thousand?” said Arthur, “I did not think it was so much.” And he began rapidly to calculate how much farther the extra five hundred would carry them.

“Well,” said the Judge, “you don’t propose to marry my daughter and live in Boston on two thousand a year, do you?” But, secretly, it seemed to him the proper thing to do.

“No, sir,” said Arthur; (“Oh,” interpolated the Judge, rather disappointed.) “I—I have decided to go to New York and enter a banking-house. And, in that, sir, I want to ask your help—and your advice.”

The Judge was silent a minute. “In order that you may use the one and decline the other, I suppose, with thanks. Well;—and granting this point (for the sake of argument)—What next?”

“Then,” said Arthur, “I shall try to make some money; and then, if I succeed—will you give your consent to our engagem—to our marriage?”

“Dear, dear,” thought the Judge, “how persistent he is! I haven’t given my consent to your engagement as yet,” he answered. “Why do you wish to go to New York?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Arthur, taken by surprise. “At least, it is a larger field—one may get on in the world more rapidly—and I thought, with my engineering training, as agent of a banking-house I should be sooner able to support a wife.”

“Do you think Gracie would be happier there than in Boston?”

“I don’t know—we had not got to that yet, sir,” said Arthur, cleverly enough. True, they had not; and the Judge smiled a little.

“I mean, in case we should consider this most preposterous scheme?” he added. “Do you mean to be a banker all your life?” he asked, suddenly.

“Oh, no, sir—at least, that is—I should like——”

“Suppose I should ask you to take some practical position on a railroad in the far West?”

“I think I should rather be in New York, sir.—But, of course, I should want to follow your advice.”

“Would you give up the New York plan entirely, if I asked you to?”

“Yes, sir,” said Arthur. “If you gave me Gracie.”

The Judge paused. Arthur sat, twirling his light straw hat in his hand, but looking earnestly at his uncle. “Shall I send her here to you, sir?” he said, finally, finding the suspense intolerable.

The Judge looked at him gravely, over his spectacles.

“On the whole, I think New York will be the best place for you. I will write to Mrs. Livingstone about it to-night. But not a word of this to Gracie, mind. And now, good-night.”

Arthur got up; but he hesitated nervously at the door, before turning the handle.

“And suppose—suppose she asks me, sir?”

“You will tell her I unqualifiedly disapprove of the whole project,” thundered the Judge in his most court-like manner; and Arthur must fain go content with that answer. But he met Gracie in the parlor, and told her that her father would not give his consent as yet; but that he had written to New York, and would find him, Arthur, a place in some banking-house.

And so, these two went on to talk of more important matters; or rather, Arthur did; as, how long he had loved her, and how much, and how he had come to speak upon just that day; until Gracie, hearing nothing from her father, feared that he might be ill or worried, and gave Arthur his dismissal, and with more formality than usual. A certain constraint was between these two now, most new and delightful, to Arthur, at least; but quite different from the old cousinly ease.

Meantime, the Judge had dropped his papers from him and set to considering this last case, that was so much nearer home. He had no objections—of course, he had no serious objection to his daughter’s marrying Arthur—if Arthur was good enough for her; for cousinship is but a slight objection in New England. The Judge had always looked up to his elder brother, the clergyman, as being far his own superior; but somehow, with his son and his own daughter, it seemed otherwise. The Judge strenuously kept out of his mind any consideration of Gracie’s leaving him, lest it should bias his decision; he felt an odd desire to submit the case to someone else, as one in which he was too much interested to sit.

Perhaps in every middle-aged or elderly mind, there is a slight impatience with the matrimonial doings of the younger, as being always somewhat premature and ill-considered. When one’s own life is neatly rounded off, when one has duly weighed its emptiness, and properly resigned one’s self to it; when that resignation, which once seemed so unlike content, has become a habit; there must be a certain impertinence,—you being so ready to say enfin!—in anyone’s starting up and crying recommençons! Of course, Judge Holyoke knew that Gracie would some day wed—of course, he wished her to be well, i.e., happily married—but not exactly here—not now—not to this one nor to that one. Not that he doubted that Arthur was in earnest—or that he spoke the truth in saying Gracie loved him—nor did he think that they were both too young to know their own minds. It is the fashion to scoff at first loves, but the Judge believed in them; whether rightly or wrongly, we cannot say; but this was part of that which made him trusted, even by the prisoner upon whom he was passing sentence; and yet, a just judge, too.

But somehow, things had changed so much since the Judge was young, that he did not see how any one could soberly contract to see them change much further, or take the risk of any new beginning. He himself had been a Rousseau, a Robespierre, a Lovelace with a dash of folly and Tom Paine, to the worthy people of the town where he then sat, the people who were then sleeping in the hillside yonder; and yet, how fine a town these same good folk had made, in the days when he was a young law-student under old Judge Sewall! But in middle life, the world and its movement had passed him; and now, the gay folk and the band were almost out of sight ahead of him, and he behind with the feeble and the stragglers, the old and the obstructive, and no longer any hankering to be drum-major.

For it seemed as if the old prizes had lost their lustre; and there were no longer any public for a man; an honest one getting so little applause, in this world’s stage, and the general taste being vitiated, and too coarse to relish the finer flavors of the human soul. He believed Arthur to be an honest man, with the education and breeding of a gentleman; more he did not ask, his smartness, or his faculty for getting on. The old Judge had little of the avarice miscalled of age; he thought too little of the worth of money for one who grieved so much that it alone had worth; perhaps Arthur, in his way, thought as much of this. With Gracie married, he at least might well go off the stage. Many creatures live but to their time of reproduction; this is all that nature seems to care; and the time which is given to live with and cherish his children to nature would seem but surplusage. He had lived and married; he had found all that even his youthful ambitions had dared to formulate or hope; but was he quite content? Somehow, the sky, so blue in the morning, had grown troubled and overcast toward the twilight. There was no one thing he could say was wanting; he had done what he had sought to do; he had been honored more than he had hoped; he would leave—what? A few well-wrought opinions, valuable until the next statute; a reputation as a nice old fogy; a few poor dollars, some books, and—

The door opened softly, but the Judge did not hear it; and his daughter entered and placed her soft hand on his. He started, as if he had been dreaming. Gracie was troubled by his absence of mind, and feared she might be the cause; she looked at him, not timidly, nor inquiringly, and yet so that the old man’s eyes grew softer as he looked at hers. “No, dear, you did not disturb me,—neither you nor Arthur,” he added, at her half-spoken word. “Tell me, do you care for him very much?”

“No more than I do for you, dear,” said the girl; but in her manner the Judge could read her silent strength of love. And more was said between them; but come, we are not fit for such scenes, you and I; let us go out gently and leave these two alone.

Meantime, Arthur, the cause of all this, was sleeping quietly, with the sleep of a hunter of any manner of wild-fowl, and the dreamlessness of insouciant youth. For Gracie loved him—that was clear, both to happy Arthur and the wakeful Judge.

There is a curious timeliness in our modern ailments; a timeliness which would be still more striking if we could know the elements of each man’s life. In older times, men wore out slowly, by labor or by rust; they set about dying deliberately, as they worked their land or managed their daily concernments. But in these days of steam and dynamite, our mode of death is sudden, quick and certain, like an explosion or a railway catastrophe; less like the processes of nature than those of man. Paralysis, like nihilism, has developed in the nineteenth century, and chooses, as if by some secret intelligence, its moment with a terrible skill.

So, one such night as this, and not long after—of the exact date I am not sure—death came upon the Judge, as he was sitting with his papers, working late at night and lonely, striving to fashion human statutes to fit diviner laws, that justice might be seen of men.

CHAPTER VII.
ARTHUR SEES THE WORLD.

IT was near the end of the first hour in the New York Stock Exchange. The floor was crowded. A few of the young brokers, who had less business and more time, having executed their orders, were now ready for sky-larking and horse-play. But it had been a great “bull” morning, and the greater number, many of whom were older brokers, and had only been attracted personally to the scene as the news of the great battle spread abroad about the Street, were still madly pressing around the painted signs which were set, like standards, to mark the stations of the stocks. The high roof of the hall seemed too close to make the noise endurable; the air itself seemed torn and tired with the cries of the combatants. The rays of light which came down from the high windows were full of shreds and the dust of battle; the worn floor was littered with bits of paper, telegrams and orders, the exploded cartridges of that paper warfare. To the contemplative stranger in the gallery—if any contemplating stranger there had presence of mind and spirit calm enough to remain so—it seemed as if the actors in the scene, rushing madly from one skirmish to another, crying their orders, now unheeded, now to a crazy crowd, were the orators or leaders of a vast mob, trying each to work his will upon the multitude. Or he may have thought it a parliament, a congress that had overleapt all rules of decorum, where each member forgot all save the open rush for private gain. But one who understood might still have seen the battle wax and wane; might have seen here the attack and there the repulse, here the concentration of forces and the charge, there the support brought up to the post that showed signs of wavering. And it was a battle, of a sort more common now than that of arms; and who shall say, less real than it? Surely, they were fighting for their hearths and for their altars; such altars and such firesides as they had. And many a city palace, and many a country cottage, were hanging with their owners on the outcome of the day. Each magnate of the market, each leader in the fray, stood surrounded by his staff and subaltern officers; while the telegraph boys and camp-followers rushed hither and thither, and nimble clerks hastened from the room with messages and returned with new supplies.

Near the end of the great arena where the chief point of onslaught seemed to be, stood the standard of the Allegheny Centrals—Allegheny Central, the great railroad that made their houses and their yachts and carriages for hundreds of the rich, and to which some ten thousand of the poor looked for their daily bread. No great corporation had a better name than this: none was surer, none more favored by widows with their mites, by shrewd lawyers, by banks, and by trustees. A greater power, almost, than the people, in the States through which it ran, it was well and honestly managed, and little in favor with speculators and those who like best of all to win by other people’s losses; perhaps the easiest way. This stock had therefore been chosen by the flower of the “bull” army, and was the very wedge of their attack. A great crop had been sown upon its line that year; and about the sign of Allegheny the maddest fight of all was fought. A dense crowd encircled it, a small sea of high hats—some already crushed in the conflict—and a babel of hoarse voices; and even on its outskirts were others madly pushing, pressing to get in. The figures cried went up by leaps at a time—Ninety! Ninety-one! a half! three quarters! Ninety-two for any part of ten thousand! And the smaller men, who had no thought of purchase at such a time, were drawn in as by a whirlpool, such was the excitement of seeing others get what all were there to make, such was the resistless attraction of success.

Among the men who took no part, but stood curiously, on the outskirts of the fight, were two whose faces and figures would attract you even in that crowd. They were apparently friends; at least, they had come in together. The older was a young man of twenty-four or five, very handsome in his way; that is, he was lithe, graceful, tall, with dark hair neatly cut, a small black moustache, shaped like a gentleman’s—it was not the moustache of a gambler, nor yet of an elegant of the dry-goods counter—and, above all, with an indescribable air of high finish and high living. His clothes were beautifully cut; his hands white, his cheeks red, his nervous system evidently in perfect order, and his digestion unimpaired. He came in sauntering, carelessly pointing out the people of interest to his friend; his manner was perfectly indifferent, as he drifted from one sign-post to another, chewing between his lips the green stem of some flower,—as a countryman puts a straw in his mouth when making a horse-trade. He passed by the Allegheny Central and stopped in front of the Louisville and Nashville sign; and no one suspected that he, Charlie Townley, of Townley & Tamms, had just sent brokers into the heat of the fight, by order of headquarters, to sell twenty thousand shares of the Allegheny Central itself. He cast no glance behind him, but was engaged in pointing out to his friend three well-known brokers—one famed for his wit, the other for his wife, and the third, to continue the alliteration, for his wiles. The companion was of different build; but we need not describe him. Arthur Holyoke had arrived in New York the very night before. He had come on from the country with his cousin and her aunt, Mrs. Livingstone, with whom in future Gracie was to live. He had been with Gracie all those weeks since her father’s death; but his quick perception had prevented him from speaking to her again of their engagement. Gracie was a girl whose standard of conduct was placed above the plain and obvious right; who would go out of her way to seek duties that were almost romantic, justice more than poetical, motives ethereal, and benefits to others that their better angels might have overlooked. And Arthur was enough of a poet himself to feel that he would not wisely mention love to her for many months at least; not because her father had not approved it, but because he was no longer there to approve.

When Judge Holyoke had written to his sister-in-law about Arthur, Mrs. Livingstone had spoken at once to Mr. Townley, who was an old friend of hers; and he had promptly offered to let Arthur serve an apprenticeship in his own business. Mr. Townley, the old gentleman, that is; for Charlie, despite all his finish and importance, was but a line-officer, representing them actively in the field. He was only a far-off orphan cousin of Mr. Townley’s, and a clerk in the firm of Townley & Tamms, on a salary of $2500 a year. But his alertness and his wide-awake air had gained for him the pleasanter duty of representing the firm in its seat in the Stock Exchange; said seat being, as we have seen, a privilege to get standing-room therein if possible.

No one knew all this of Townley. Most of his merely society acquaintances supposed him to be the senior partner’s son; even his intimate friends thought of him as the probable heir, in a fair way to be a partner, an impression which Charlie artfully heightened by his extravagant mode of life when away from his boarding-place, his late hours, and his general inattention to all but the showy work of the firm. It was evident that he took far more interest in keeping his dress correct than in the books of the firm; and, the Stock Exchange once closed, no young man of fashion could be more safely relied upon for an afternoon of sport, or a ride and dinner at the Hill-and-Dale Club.

But all this Arthur had yet to learn; for the present, he was interested in the battle around him, the conflict of the two spirits, hope and despair, affirmation and negation, enterprise and nihilism, in this safety-valve of traffic, where alone the two forces meet directly, each at touch and test with the other. For the Stock Exchange is a kind of gauge, testing the force of the national store and the national need of money; and the bears, too, have their healthy function, keeping down the fever in the body politic.

In the shriek and roar of all the crowd about them, the young men could hardly converse intelligibly; but that might come after; meantime, Arthur was fully employed in seeing. Few of the men showed evidence of much mental anxiety; opposite them, to be sure, a pale-faced little Jew stood in a corner, nervously biting his lips; but most of the crowd were red-faced, and panting with the physical excitement alone, as if it were a foot-ball match. As they looked on, a fat, good-natured-looking broker with an impudent face and a white hat cocked on one side of his head, came out of the Lake Shore crowd, and with the slightest perceptible wink to Townley as he passed, joined the madder fight about Allegheny Central.

“Ninety-one,” said he, “a thousand!”

“Come out of the floor,” said Townley to Arthur; “come up-stairs; there’s going to be some fun.” At first, no one paid any attention to the new-comer; and when our friends got to the gallery, the fat broker was still offering his stock at ninety-one to an unheeding world, and the state of affairs was much the same as before. Only, that at this distance the noise had something in it less human; it was inarticulate, monstrous, and the sight of half a thousand men, struggling, every eye fixed on his neighbor’s, made a something awful in the experience, as if they two on-lookers were unseen Valkyrs, looking down upon some battle of the Huns.

“Ninety-one,” they heard the new-comer say again; and this time he was answered; for there was a howl of derision, and then a sudden sway in the crowd, and a rush to where he stood. “Ninety and three quarters,” said he; “a half,” and there was another howl; but by this time the leaders of the inner defence had heard of this flank movement, and their tactics changed. “Ninety!” “Nine and a half!” “Eighty-nine!” “Eight and three quarters!” “A half!”

“Seven, for ten thousand,” said the solitary broker, coolly; and the roar doubled in volume, if such a thing were possible; and the rush to sell began, at rapidly dropping figures. The fat, good-natured broker turned away, and started to go, having sold the stock down five points in hardly fifty seconds; when crash! a small soft orange went through the centre of the impudent white hat. With a yell of derision, the crowd turned their fury upon this; whack! crack! flew the unlucky hat, from one fist to another, amid the cheers of the multitude, until a well-directed kick landed it beside Arthur in the gallery. This gave a new object to their humor; and with one accord the assemblage began singing in regular well-tempered cadence, evidently referring to Arthur:

“Lambs! Lambs!

One shorn lamb!”

Arthur, blushing, hurried from the gallery; and Charlie Townley followed him, laughing inordinately.

“They’ll get used to you in a day or two, my dear fellow,” said he. “They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t seen you with me.”

When they got into the corridor below, they met the broker of the ravaged hat. He had got another by this time, and winked, this time with a broad smile, at Townley as they came out. “I did that pretty well, I think?” said he.

“First-rate,” said Townley. “How much did it cost?”

“Not over twenty thousand shares, I guess, and twelve at least went to your friends. The boys didn’t like it, though, did they?” And the man’s mouth grinned wider, as he thought of the scene we have described.

“Charge the hat to the pool,” laughed Townley. “Who’s selling,—not the Old Man?”

“Tammy, I guess,” said the other. “Doubt if the Old Man even knows it.”

“Ta-ta,” said Townley; and they sallied forth, Arthur much wondering at these metropolitan methods of doing business; and Townley completed his duties as host and cicerone by giving him a very elaborate lunch at a down-town club and putting his name down among the candidates for membership. “You needn’t feed here unless you like,” said he; “but it’s so convenient to bring a fellow to.” Indeed, Townley had been very friendly to the young countryman; and this was no less than the third club at which he had “put him up” that day. “You can try ’em all, and then make up your mind which ones you’d like to join,” said he. At a word of remonstrance from Arthur, he had glibly anticipated all objection. “Now don’t talk about extravagance,” said he; “I tell you, no fellow ever made money in New York who didn’t spend it first.” And Arthur had been silenced by this paradoxical philosophy.

Townley’s friendship had even extended to providing him with a boarding-place, a room in the house where he himself lodged; and toward this the young fellows took their way, early in the afternoon. Arthur was already tired, with his short and idle day; he was overcome by the rush and the whirl and the magnitude of things. He had heard talked of, had handled, had seen the management of, huge sums of money; he had seen millions in the process of their making; but how to divert a rivulet of the Pactolean stream to himself seemed a greater mystery than ever. It took so much to make so little! Such huge heaps of bullion had to be sweated to yield to the manipulator the clippings of one gold dollar! Truly, on the other hand, Townley talked to him of millions made and lost as if they had been blackberries. It was, “There’s old Prime—he made a million in that Panhandle deal,” or “There goes poor old Howard—the shorts in Erie used him up,” until Arthur saw that he was seeing here a most instructive process: nothing less than the creation and founding of American families. Here were the people, the progenitors of future castes; the sources of inherited estate, of culture, of consideration; this old man with the battered hat, that sharp-faced young Israelite, were the ancestors, the probable fathers and grandfathers of the men and maidens who were to be “society” in the future Republic; the first acquirers of—not the broad acres, but the city lots—the rich houses, the stocks and bonds, the whole equipment of life, that was (if our laws are maintained) to make sleek the jeunesse dorée of the twentieth century. A million! It is not much, in many ways, in most ways that we read about in books and bibles; it is not a factor of the Crusades, nor of the War of the Roses, nor yet (as we are informed) of the kingdom of heaven. But most things that Townley saw were multiples of it; and now Townley carefully avoided reading books; for even General Gordon, you remember, writing from Khartoum to posterity, records the reflection that mankind and his works are governed by his ventral tube. Now of ventral tubes, a million is the deity; books should, as they used to, speak to souls. And Arthur, thinking of all this, who had marvelled first at all their eagerness, now wondered rather at their carelessness; of these men, taking and losing such things so lightly.

Arthur could not have had a better cicerone than Charlie Townley. He knew his New York like the inside of his pocket; its streets, its ways, its women, its wiles, its heroes and its favorites; its eating places, drinking places, breathing places; its getting up and its lying down. When they passed Fourteenth Street, his manner changed very apparently; the æsthetic overcame the practical; the hard shine of millions was displaced by the softer radiance of women’s eyes. Many of these same eyes were, in their turn, riveted by the display of women’s wares in the shop-windows about Union Square, which gave Townley the opportunity of gazing at his ease; although, it must be owned, if any of these eyes looked up and met his own, he seemed little disconcerted.

They stopped and made a call at the Columbian Club, which was crowded with men, breaking the long journey homeward to their firesides, domestic or otherwise. And as, in some country hamlet of the Middle Ages, we can fancy the little ale-house, standing on the heath, midway; Jock and Dickon are plodding home tired from the long day’s plowing; behind this one smoking chimney the cold November sky lowers drearily, the last pale tints of the tired day are fading, and the common is bare, and the naked moorland left to the wolves; and the two men stop in a moment at the Cat-and-Fiddle to have a bite and a sup, a cup around the tavern-fire, and a bit of human companionship, to talk about the price of corn, and of Hodge the tinker’s son and Joan his sweetheart, and the doings of the new squire, whose round brown towers peep from the coppice of the distant park—so, too, here in our New York, the jaded men drop in, and chat about the price of stocks, their neighbor’s horses and his wife, and have a glass of bitters round the fire. Townley took vermouth, lamenting bitterly that his health permitted nothing stronger; but other paler men than he administered brandy-cocktails unto themselves, or pick-me-ups of gin. Here Charlie brushed himself, and took his silver-headed cane; and again the pair sallied forth upon their journey, crossing Madison Square and striking up the Avenue. Many damsels, richly robed, now lit up the long way; there is usually a received type at any period for the outdoor gorgeousness of womankind, and this year it was blue—a walking-suit of blue, from neck to heel, close-fitting, and all of velvet. Dozens and scores of velvet gowns they passed, and Arthur noticed that his guide, philosopher, and friend looked at many of them as if they were familiar sights, but bowed to few. Now there had been many, in Union Square, to whom he had nodded, at the least. He seemed to read Arthur’s thoughts, for he said:

“These are all off-side girls. You don’t see the others out at this time.”

“What do you mean?” said Arthur.

“Why, they’re not in society, you know.” And he lifted his hat to one of them, who had given him a most empressé bow, including in it Arthur. “There’s one of the prettiest girls in town,” said he, meditatively; “Kitty Farnum. They’re awfully rich, too; old Farnum’s got no end of money.” This thought seemed to depress Charlie for a minute, and they walked on in silence. Now Arthur had met Miss Farnum at a New Haven ball, where she had been a very proud belle indeed.

“There,” said Townley, at last, as they crossed a side street, “is Mrs. Levison Gower’s.” There was a certain reverence in his tone, as he said this, that his voice had not yet shown in all that day, and Arthur looked with a proper admiration, though not clearly understanding why, at the house we have already described.

Their lodgings were near by (so Townley always spoke of the boarding-house where he lived), and the young men separated to dress for dinner. Arthur had been rather surprised that so elegant a person lived in a boarding-house at all; but the fact was, Townley preferred to use his money elsewhere than at home. But he never dined with the other inhabitants; in fact, his acquaintance with them was extremely slight, as he always breakfasted in his room; and to-night he put a finishing touch upon his hospitality by inviting Arthur to a very pretty little dinner at the Piccadilly Club. But after this, Townley had an engagement, and Arthur was left to his own devices. He smoked his cigar and read the evening paper; then he began an article in the Edinburgh Review, took up the Spectator, and ended with Punch; after which he became unoccupied, and his spirits dropped visibly.

By this time several men had strolled in; there was much laughing and gay spirits; around him were all the luxuries of mind and body that the inventive bachelor mind has yet devised for the comfort of either such part of himself. But as Arthur leaned back in the deep, throne-like leather chair and sipped (if one may so say) his reina victoria, his consciousness went back to a certain sunny hillside, with the light of the rich autumn morning, and the joyous beat of the hoofs upon the dewy grass.

He had been to see Gracie only the day before; but he drew on his overcoat and walked around to the Livingstones. A light was in the second-story window of the high house; and he rang the bell hopefully.

“Mrs. Livingstone?”

“Not at home,” said the man, gravely.

“Is—is Miss Holyoke in?”

“The ladies are out, sir,” said the man, decidedly.

“I will not leave a card,” said Arthur, answering the man’s gesture; and he walked sadly back to the club-house.

Surely, Arthur felt, the forms of life and the trammels of the great city were coming home to him.

CHAPTER VIII.
ARTHUR SEES MORE OF THE WORLD.

THE firm of Townley & Tamms were of the oldest and best-known bankers and brokers in the Street. Mr. Townley had been known in New York over fifty years; he had a taste for art, and was a director in the Allegheny Central Railroad. Tamms was a newer man; a younger man with a square head, stiff red beard, broad stubby fingers, and great business ability. Arthur was expected to be there a little after nine in the morning, which made it necessary for him to breakfast at the boarding-house on Fifth Avenue at sharp eight. Most of the other men did the same, except Townley, who had his coffee in his room.

These men were not interesting; in fact, they seemed to Arthur singularly unattractive. Their faces were all chopped or rough-hewn into one prevailing expression, as rows of trees by the sea-shore are bent the same way by the wind. It would be best described as a look of eagerness; their eyes were sharp and piercing, and they even ate their breakfast eagerly. They all seemed common to Arthur; and he one of them, reduced to his lowest terms of expression, a unit of population, nothing more. They were all hurrying through breakfast, folding their napkins, putting on their great-coats, and going down-town for money, and for nothing else; so was he. To be sure, he had a woman he loved at the end of it; but so, perhaps, had they.

Arthur rose impatiently, leaving his second egg, and passed out, receiving a clipped or half-audible “good-morning” from most of his fellow-boarders; the sort of salutation that hurried men may give who must still dimly remember or recognize, while they may regret, the necessity for small social courtesies. He put on his overcoat, and started walking down the Avenue.

There was no reasoning himself out of it, his spirits drooped; not with the sentimental and romantic melancholy of a young man (which is a sort of pleasant sadness, and results in nothing worse than pessimistic poems, nocturnal rambles, and a slightly increased consumption of narcotics and stimulants), but with that more practical, less tolerable, discontent which the grown man has in moments when the conviction is irresistibly borne in upon him that his position in the world is not a brilliant one, and his worth, to make the best of it, is unappreciated. For those who choose to be sad over these things there is no remedy. And in New York, he felt himself—number one million three hundred and fifty-six thousand two hundred and two.

Arthur had, too, a strong desire to go and see Gracie, much as a child wants to go to its mother’s lap and cry. But how much farther off she seemed than if they had stayed at Great Barrington! It was impossible, of course, for him to see her; she had insisted that there should be no announced engagement between them. He doubted even if Mrs. Livingstone knew of it. But how long it would be before they could be married, before they could live in a house—in a house like that one there, for instance! And Arthur waved his cane unconsciously at a house on the corner of Thirty-second Street, in which, though ugly enough outside, it seemed to him it might be reasonably possible for him to maintain his own identity and their dignity of life. Then he remembered that Townley had pointed it out to him the day before as Mrs. Levison Gower’s house, and that he had been introduced to her at Lenox. Probably she would not remember him now.

Going to the office, he sought that corner of a desk which was in the future to be his station in the world. Townley arrived late, and gave him a hasty nod; it was a busy day, and he had been up late in the night at the first ball of the season. Arthur’s work that day consisted in writing letters for the firm, following Mr. Tamms’s hastily pencilled instructions; but the first letter he wrote of all was not signed by the firm signature, and it bore the address “Miss Holyoke, care of Mrs. Richard Livingstone, 6 W. ——th Street, City.” Such letters as these it is that make the world go on; and truly they are more important than even the foreign mail of Messrs. Townley & Tamms. This relieved his mind, and the daily labor for his daily bread coming happily in to sweeten his meditations, he got fairly through to four o’clock, when Townley proposed that they should go to drive.

Arthur protested his duty to his employers.

“Nonsense,” said Charlie; “the governor knows you’ve got to get into harness by degrees. Besides, he doesn’t pay you anything for your services—and they arn’t worth anything, yet,” he added. The last argument was unanswerable.

Charlie’s cart (it is quite impossible for us, who have known him nearly two days, to call him Townley any more) was very high, very thick, and very heavy, and was purchased in Long Acre; the horses, which answered the same description, were also imported; and the harness, which corresponded to the cart in thickness and heaviness, came from Cheapside. Townley’s coat, clothes, top-hat, whip, and gloves were all native of Bond Street or Piccadilly; and in fact, the only thing about him which was produced fairly beyond the London bills of mortality was the very undoubted case of green Havana cigars that he offered to Arthur the moment they had left the Park. They drove up Fifth Avenue, past the same procession of pedestrians they had seen the day before, and Arthur could not but note how much more interesting they seemed to their fellow-creatures from the summit of their dog-cart, and how the interest had become mutual as they entered the Park and joined the procession of T-carts, phaetons, and victorias. He admired the dexterity with which Charlie kept the tandem-reins and the whip properly assorted in his left hand, while the right was continually occupied in raising his hat to pretty women who had bowed.

The Hill-and-Dale Club, the newly established country institution, a sort of shrine or sacred grove whither city folk betook themselves to commune with nature, was in Westchester County, not far from the historic banks of the Bronx. An old country mansion, former quarters of Continental generals, rendezvous of Skinners and Cowboys, had been bought, adorned, developed, provided with numerous easy chairs and sporting prints; and lo! it was a club. The wide lawn in front was turned into a half-mile track for running races; a shooting range and tennis-grounds were made behind; and you had a small Arcadia for mundane pleasures. Here could tired mortals loaf, chat, eat, drink, smoke, bet, gamble, race, take exercise, and see their fellow-creatures and their wives and cattle. Expatriated Britons found here a blessed spot of rest, a simulacrum of home, where trotting races were tabooed, where you were waited on by stunted grooms, and could ride after your hounds, and always turned to the left in passing. Before this Elysium did Charlie pull up, and throwing the reins to a stable-boy, led Arthur to the inner Penetralia. After inscribing his name in the club-book (making the fourth, thought Arthur) they went to the smoke-room, where they met a dozen of the fellows (some of whose faces seemed already familiar to him) and executed the customary libation. Here Charlie stood boldly up to a composite ambrosia of which the base was brandy, saying that he thought a fellow deserved it after that drive. Some conversation followed; but I sadly fear ’twould not be worth the trouble of reporting in cold print. Then Charlie proposed they should go look at the stables; and they did.

“That is the beast for you,” he said, pointing to a gaunt, fiery-eyed creature with a close-cropped tail. “Vincent Duval is going abroad, and you can have him for four hundred.”

“But, my dear fellow, I can’t——”

“Nonsense, Holy,” said Charlie familiarly falling into the nickname that then and there sprang full-grown like Minerva from his inventive brain. “Look here, young fellow, I want to give you some advice. Let’s go in and smoke on the piazza.” They found easy seats above the broad green lawn, half across which reached already the shadows of a belt of huge bare forest trees that rimmed in the western end; and there, inspired by tobacco and the beauty of the scene, did Charles Townley deliver himself as follows:

“My dear boy, we live in a great country; and in a free country a man can make himself just what he likes. You can pick out just the class in life that suits you best. This is the critical moment; and you must decide whether to be a two-thousand-dollar clerk all your life, a ten-thousand bachelor, or a millionaire. If you rate yourself at the two-thousand gauge, the world will treat you accordingly; if you spend twenty thousand, the world, sooner or later, will give it to you. There’s Jimmy De Witt, for instance; after the old man busted, he hadn’t a sous markee—what was the result? He had an excellent taste in cigars and wine, knew everybody, told a good story—you know what a handsome fellow he is?—no end of style, and the best judge of a canvas-back duck I ever saw. Everybody said such a fellow couldn’t be left to starve. So old Duval found him a place as treasurer of one of his leased railroads down in Pennsylvania, where all he has to do is to sign the lessee’s accounts; he did this submissively, and it gave him ten thousand a year. Then we made him manager of the Manhattan Jockey Club—that gave him six thousand more; then he makes a little at whist, and never pays his bills, and somehow or other manages to make both ends meet. And now they say he’s going to marry Pussie Duval. Do you suppose he’d ever have been more than a poor devil of a clerk, like me, if he’d tried economy?” And Charlie leaned back and puffed his cigar triumphantly.

“But I mean to pay my bills,” said Arthur.

“Well, he will, too, in time,” said Charlie.

Arthur smiled to himself, and reflected that the corruptions of New York were rather clumsy, after all, and its snares and temptations a trifle worn-out and crude; but he said nothing, and by this time their tandem was brought around and they whirled off to the city. When they got home, he found a note:

“Mr. and Mrs. William H. Farnum request the pleasure—Mr. Holyoke’s company—small party, Thursday the twenty-eighth,” etc, etc.

He tossed it over to Charlie. “Since you’re such a social mentor, what must I do to that?” said he.

“Decline it, of course,” said the other; “I’ve got one myself; you see they saw us together. You mustn’t show up, the first time, at the Farnums.”

Arthur was nettled. “I shall do nothing of the kind,” said he. “I shall accept it.”

“As you like,” laughed the other, good-naturedly. “I shall accept, too, as far as that goes; but you needn’t go. They can put it in the newspaper that I was there, if they like.” Arthur opened his eyes; what sort of young nobleman, then, was his friend, disguised as a clerk upon a salary?

“Perhaps you object to my calling on the Livingstones?” said he, with biting sarcasm.

“Not at all—the Livingstones are all right,” said unconscious Charlie. “But don’t go to-night; come to the opera with me. In fact, you can’t make calls in the evening any more, you know.”

“What opera is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Charlie, serenely. “What does it matter?”

Arthur had nothing to reply to this; and the opera turned out to be “Linda.” But Charlie was right; the audience proved more interesting. Here was a dress parade of all that was most fashionable in New York; for it was a great night, the first of the season, and everyone was anxious to put herself en évidence. Townley was out of his seat three quarters of the time; and Arthur paid little attention to what was going on on the stage. The wicked marquis came, saw, and sought to conquer; the sentimental young heroine sighed and suffered, repelled both the marquis and his diamonds, and fled from the wilds of Chamounix to the seclusion and safety of Paris; and the jewelled ladies in the boxes (familiar with this tale) gave it now and then their perfunctory attention, recognizing that all this drama was being well and properly done, the correct thing, according to the conventions of the stage. Directly opposite him, in one of the grand-tier boxes, were three women who attracted his eyes unwittingly. Two of them were young, and both were beautiful; one, with heavy black hair and fair young shoulders sitting quietly; the other not quite so pretty, but with an indescribable air of complete fashion, a blonde with the bust of a Hebe, talking with animation to quite a little group of male figures, dimly visible in the back of the box; and the third a woman of almost middle age, with the figure of a Titian Venus and hair of an indescribable ashen yellow. Surely he knew that face?

“Who is that in the box opposite—the middle one, I mean, with the two beauties?”

Charlie lifted his opera-glass, and then as quickly dropped it. “She would thank you,” he said, “for your two beauties. She is the only married woman of her set who isn’t afraid to have pretty young girls about her. That’s Mrs. Gower, and she’s looking at you, too.”

Arthur looked up and met her eye; she made a very slight but unmistakable inclination of her head, and Arthur bowed.

“You’re in luck, young’un,” said Townley. “Now you’ve got to go and speak to her.”

“Have I?” said Arthur. “I know her very slightly.”

“She doesn’t seem to think so, and you needn’t remind her of it,” said Charlie, the worldling; and Arthur, having noted the number of the box from the end of the row, started on his quest. He came to the door that seemed to be the seventh in number from the stage, and paused a minute with his hand upon the knob. What young man’s heart, however much its pulsations may be dedicated to another, does not beat awkwardly when he is on the point of addressing three lovely women, two of them quite unknown, the other nearly so? Then again, suppose he had counted wrong, and not got into the right box?

His hesitation was cut short by the sudden opening of the door and the exit of a gentleman from within. Before it closed, Arthur had plunged boldly into the dark anteroom, and was blinking earnestly out from it, somewhat dazzled by the blaze of light and the gleam of the three pairs of white shoulders in front.

“Ah, Mr. Holyoke, I hoped you would come—Mr. Wemyss, Mr. Holyoke—Miss Duval, Mrs. Malgam, Mr. Holyoke, of——”

“Of New York, I believe,” said Arthur, bowing, and accepting the chair which the gentleman addressed as Wemyss had given up, at a look from Mrs. Gower. Certainly, Mrs. Gower had charming manners, he thought; and it was very pleasant of her to be pleasant to him.

“Of New York? I am so glad—I knew that Great Barrington was only your summer home, but I had feared that you were wedded to Boston. Where is Miss Holyoke?” Mrs. Gower added, without apparent malice; and Arthur cursed himself inwardly as he felt that he was blushing.

“She is living with her aunt, Mrs. Livingstone,” said he. And then, with a wild attempt at changing the subject, “Do you like ‘Linda,’ Miss Duval?”

(Crash! went the big drums; whizz, whizz, in cadence came the fiddles. The wicked marquis, who had also turned up in Paris, was at his old tricks again.)

“I think it is perfectly sweet,” said Miss Duval. “Patti does it so well!”

“It must be very pleasant for her to have you here,” said Mrs. Gower, innocently. “I was so sorry to hear of poor Judge Holyoke’s death. And so you have come to settle in New York? How delightful! Let me see—I have not seen you since last summer, at Lenox, have I?”

“It is very kind of you to remember me,” said Arthur.

“Or was it Lenox?” Mrs. Gower went on. “I remember seeing Miss Holyoke one day as I drove by, in Great Barrington,” she added naïvely.

Arthur felt that she was watching him, and was seeking for a reply, when fortunately Linda came forward, almost under the box, and told in a long aria, with many trills and quavers, with what scorn she repelled the marquis’s advances; the marquis, in the meantime, waiting discreetly at the back of the stage until she had had her encore and had flung madly out of his ancestral mansion. This being the musical moment of the evening, all paid rapt attention; and when the last roulade was over Mrs. Gower rose and they all proceeded to help with opera cloaks and shawls. “Mr. Holyoke, you must come and dine with me—are you engaged—let me see—a week from Friday?”

“You are very kind,” said Arthur. “No, I think not.”

“Then I shall expect you—at half-past seven, mind,”—and our hero had the felicity of walking with Mrs. Gower to her carriage, the others coming after them, with the two young ladies. The carriage-door closed with a snap, leaving Arthur with Wemyss and the other man, whom he did not know. Wemyss seemed to feel that their acquaintance had come to an end; so there was nothing left for Arthur but to return to Charlie Townley.

“What the deuce is Mrs. Lucie up to now?” thought he, when Arthur had recounted to him his adventures; but he said nothing; and Arthur was left for the last act to give his entire attention to the stage. Virtue triumphed, and Vice (who, as represented in the person of the lively marquis, seemed to be a pretty good sort of fellow after all—an amiable rascal, the kind of chap of whom you would feel inclined to ask, What would he like to drink?) was duly forgiven; and he showered his diamonds as wedding-gifts upon the bride. So that Linda, thrice fortunate Linda, not only followed the paths of virtue, but got her lover and the diamonds into the bargain; and with this moral and a Welsh rarebit Arthur and his friend sought home and pleasant dreams.

CHAPTER IX.
ARTHUR GETS ON IN THE WORLD.

THERE should never be more than six at a dinner, unless there are fourteen. You can have your dinner either a parlor comedy or a spectacular play: but you must choose which you will have. Mrs. Gower was well aware of this; and hers consisted of a leading lady, a first young lady, a soubrette, a virtuous hero, a heavy villain, and a lover. With these ingredients, you may have a very pleasant dinner; but you must be a sufficiently skilful observer of humanity to detect the rôle. For people say that there are not such rôles any more, and that we are all indifferent and good-natured, and none of us heavy villains.

Arthur was too inexperienced for this; for, like all young men, he also supposed that all these characters were conventional fictions of the stage. He did not believe in villains. Perhaps it would repay us to formulate Arthur’s views, as those of a respectable young New Englander of good education and bringing-up, with whose fortunes in life our book is largely concerned. Roughly expressed, they might be put in canons, much as follows:

I. The world is in the main desirous of realizing the greatest good of the greatest number.

II. Unfortunate necessities—the primal curse of labor, or what not—occupy the greater part of the time of the greater number with sustaining life; so the leisure of the fortunate few is doubly pledged to the discovery and attainment of the object before mentioned.

III. Money is a regrettable necessity; but its acquirement, even from the selfish point of view, is but a means to an end. That end, where personal, is the enjoyment of the pleasures of life—i.e., literature, art, refined society, travel, and health. The larger end is intelligent charity, or public work.

IV. Vice exists, like vermin, as a repulsive vulgarity.

V. Crime exists pathologically—i.e., it is either an abnormal disease, or the consequence of a pitiable weakness.

VI. Honesty is the first virtue of the greater number; honor, which is honesty with a flower added, is the peculiar virtue of a gentleman.

VII. Gentlemen are honorable and brave; ladies are like Shelley’s heroines, or the ladies in the Idylls of the King.

VIII. The chiefest quality of humanity is love; and the object of all human endeavor is to observe and avail itself of the love of that being which is not humanity.

So much for his ethics; and, as we have said Arthur was a poet, it may not come amiss to add an approximation of his theory of æsthetics. This was, in brief:

IX. All beauty is the visible evidence of the love of God; nature is a divine manifestation; and literature, art, and music are the language in which humanity may reply. Thus, in particular, all highest poetry is but this—the discovery of the love of God.

Such were his tenets, the standard of Arthur’s exalted moments, as he supposed them then to be of others. In trying to live by them, he knew that he was weak, as all men are. Of all the people whom he knew, Gracie Holyoke alone seemed always to observe them.

So it may well be that Arthur did not, on that night, justly estimate the worth of those about him. He had, simply, a very enjoyable dinner; he was innocently pleased with the glitter of the glass, the sparkle of the diamonds, the richness of the china, the beauty of the women, the finish of their talk; it was a venial sin for him to like the food and wines,—but there was perhaps one other ingredient in his pleasure, the subtilest of all, which escaped him. Leaving this, for his account, let us speak of the others.

And here we may save space and the wearied reader’s attention, for they had no ethics and no æsthetics; and their philosophy of life was simple. Probably their sensual sin was not so great as Arthur’s—for terrapin and duck were a weariness to most of them—but in the summum bonum they all agreed. To be not as others are, and have those others know it—such was their simple creed. Jimmy De Witt was on the whole the most innocent; his being yearned for horses and yachts, even if they were not all the fastest; and he was not a bad fellow, a great friend of Lucie Gower himself, and so sitting in loco conjugis, for the husband of the hostess was absent. To him came next Mrs. Malgam, who was—but all the world, yea, even to the uttermost bounds thereof where the society newspapers do permeate, knows all about Mrs. Malgam. Upon De Witt’s other side, convenient, Miss Duval—“Pussie” Duval, grand-daughter of Antoine of that ilk who had kept the little barber shop down on Chambers Street; then Arthur, on Mrs. Gower’s right; and on her left Caryl Wemyss again, a modern Boston Faust, son of the great poet who was afterwards minister to Austria; his son, thus born to the purple of diplomacy, had lived in Paris, London, and Vienna, executed plays, poems, criticisms, music, and painting, and, at thirty-five, had discovered the hollowness of things, having himself become perfect in all of them. So he became a critic of civilization—and this is how he was not as other men—for it was the era of the decadence, and he the Cassandra who foresaw it. Mrs. Gower, our leading lady, made the sixth.

From being the lonely Cinderella of an unexplored fireside, Flossie had grown to be one of the most famed and accomplished hostesses in all New York. She had the tact of knowing what topics would touch the souls of the men and move the women’s hearts, and of leading the conversation up to these without apparent effort or insolent dictation. She could make Strephon talk to Chloe, or Marguerite to Faust, without taking the awkward pair by the elbows and knocking their heads together. And all this sweetly, simply, while reserving the preferred rôle to herself, as a carver justly sets aside for his own use his favorite bit of venison. Ordinarily, these six people—four of them, surely—would have talked about other people and their possessions; but Mrs. Flossie rightly fancied that Arthur, knowing little of the world, could only talk about books, or at most, about the world in the abstract. Taking up the talk where it was left at the opera, an early speech from Arthur to the effect that he did not mean to go much into society gave her the necessary opening.

“You must not do so,” said she. “Society is as important to a young man as work. Is it not, Mr. Wemyss?” (One of the charms of this woman’s cleverness was that indefinable quality of humor which consists in the relish of incongruities; her reference to Wemyss for the uses of work, for instance.)

“Society is sour grapes to those beyond its pale,” said Wemyss, “but those who can value it press from it the wine of life.” (Wemyss gave a little laugh, to indicate that he did not mean to be taken as a prig.) “Seriously,” he added, “no person of wide intelligence can afford to ignore the best society of a nation, whatever it be, for it represents its essence and its tendency. It is the liquid glass of champagne left in the frozen bottle, and has more flavor than all the rest, it is the flower, which is at once the present’s culmination and the future’s seed.”

“Oh, that is so true!” cried Pussie Duval. Miss Duval would have made the same remark had Mr. Wemyss asserted that abuse of stimulants was the secret of Hegel. The others stared rather blankly. Arthur had never considered it quite so seriously; and to Mrs. Malgam and Jimmy De Witt, interpreting it esoterically, society needed no more explanation than the Ding an Sich.

“Then again,” said Wemyss, “did you ever go to a party of the people? I don’t mean at Washington—there they get a little rubbed off—but at home. Well, I went to one, once—some people who had lived for many years in the house next to mine on Beacon Street—and I do assure you, it was triste à faire peur; they thought you were flippant if you even smiled, and took offence, like awkward boys and girls, at the least informality. One longed for a Lovelace, si ce n’était que pour les chiffonner. Now, in the world, one’s manners are simple, easy; you have some liberty; people don’t take offence—il n’y a jamais de mal en bonne compagnie. But the trouble with society in this country is,” he continued, “that it has no meaning. Now it must have a meaning to be interesting; it must mean either love or politics. In France, if not in England, it has both. But here, all the meaning of it stops when one is married.”

“Thank you,” said Flossie.

“Madame,” said Wemyss, “you are one of the three sirens, singing in the twilight of the world. But in this dark night about you, society exists only to make all young men get married. In the old time, it had a more serious reason for being. In courts where there was a more social element in politics, intrigues were always quasi-political; parties were made at evening parties; and ministries were entered from boudoirs; you met the Opposition in his salon, and embraced the minister’s principles with—”

“Look out, Mr. Wemyss,” said Mrs. Gower, playfully.

—“when you paid a compliment to his wife. But here, society and politics are worlds mutually exclusive; how would the Governor of the State appear at a dinner-party? Politically, the best people are laid on the shelf, like rare china. Society’s only recognized function is to bring young people together; when brought together, they are supposed to join hands and step aside; it is a marriage-brokerage board, and its aim is merely matrimony.”

“What a social failure you must be, Mr. Wemyss,” said Flossie.

“In America,” retorted Wemyss. “But even a man who has not married has some social rights. I like a society of men and women—not of Jacks and Gills. But if I tell Mrs. Grundy her gown is becoming, likely as not she’ll call for the police, in this country.”

“I think she’ll take a bit more than that without bolting,” laughed Jimmy De Witt.

“The fact is,” said Wemyss, who felt that he was becoming epigrammatic, “all worldly pleasures, from the original apple, rest on the taste of the forbidden fruit. The joys of war, the delights of business, the pleasures of gossip, the satisfaction of swearing,—they’re all the fun of breaking some commandment. Voltaire never would have put pen to paper but for the first; the pleasure of art is to worship graven images; the spice of newspapers is the false witness that they bear against your neighbor. And what becomes of fashionable life without the tenth, or a faint and ever-present memory of the seventh? Now all Americans covet their neighbor’s bank-account; but they are far too practical to covet their neighbor’s wife. Positively, we are too virtuous to be happy: for this Arcadian state of things makes society necessarily dull. Like most of the devil’s institutions, it requires considerable red pepper.”

Arthur stared at Wemyss, much astonished; but all three ladies seemed to take it as very excellent fooling indeed. Even Jimmy looked as if he didn’t wholly understand it, but knew it must be very good.

“But it’s the paradise of girls. It offers every opportunity to ardent youth. It shows its prizes in a glamour of light and dress-making, just as a Parisian shopkeeper puts gas-reflectors before his window. Bright eyes and white shoulders are garnished in extraordinary silks and satins; a blare of fiddles and trumpets fills up vacancies in their intellect; and thus, with all their charms enhanced, they are dangled before the masculine eye when his discernment has been previously befuddled with champagne?”

“Positively,” laughed Mrs. Gower, “we must leave you to your cigars. There’s no knowing what you’ll be saying next—and before an unmarried lady, too. Pussie, my dear, go out first, and deliver Mr. Wemyss from temptation.”

The three ladies rose, and the men drew back their chairs.

“You must really look out, Mr. Wemyss,” said Mrs. Malgam; “in one of your lyric moments you’ll forget that some girl isn’t married, and be engaged before you know it.”

Wemyss shuddered. “Ah, my dear lady, I wish I could forget that you were married——”

“Hush, hush,” cried Mrs. Gower, rapping Wemyss’s knuckles with her fan, “and soyez sage, when we are gone.”

But when left to themselves, Mr. Wemyss said little besides a word or two about literature and art. His conversation might have been a model to a governess fresh from boarding-school. Jimmy De Witt told a few stories, and Arthur had great difficulty in talking at all. Mr. Wemyss snubbed them both, as was his habit with intellectual inferiors; and after a very short cigar, they all repaired to the drawing-room, where little happened that Arthur saw; for, as all the company save Mrs. Gower seemed to regard him as an interloping hobbledehoy, to be tolerated only as a fantasy of Mrs. Gower’s, he shortly and not over-gracefully took his leave.

He walked to the club, and smoked, somewhat nettled with things in general, and full of much desire to punch Mr. Caryl Wemyss’s elegant head. Others had had that mood before Arthur; but you see our hero is by no means an exceptional personage. Being, however, the best we have got, we feel bound to see him through. Still, no Loyola would have chosen that dinner to be the time and place to reply to Wemyss with the propositions we have stated for Arthur at the beginning of this chapter; and the young idealist had wisely held his peace.

CHAPTER X.
IN WHICH ARTHUR MEETS A WEARIED SOUL.

NOW Mrs. Levison Gower, like Napoleon after Marengo and Austerlitz, was suffering from ennui. This malady of modern times executes its most dangerous ravages, like the gout, only among those who can afford it. It is a sort of king’s evil, privileged to the nobility and gentry; and that Flossie Starbuck’s healthy constitution ever succumbed to it is testimony—is it not?—to her extraordinary natural refinement: for born to it she certainly was not. She was a woman of some five-and-thirty summers—let us rather say, of some fifteen seasons, as being both politer and more closely descriptive—but with her thick blonde hair and her youthful figure, round and lithe as any girl’s, she was divine still in a riding-habit or a ball-dress, and could face the daylight of a north window without flinching. But the fact was, this Marguerite in appearance had been out fifteen seasons; if not so erudite as Faust, she was even more blasée with the world; kermesses had become stupid, interesting young men with rapiers and mysterious attendants in red had lost their interest, even jewels had ceased to make her heart beat as of yore: Mephistopheles alone remained eternal.

All the joys of her girl’s ambition she had tasted to the full. Every social eminence that she had seen, she had in turn attained. Each one of the diversions of a woman of fashion, she had pushed to its ultimate—gayety pure and simple, haughty and costly exclusiveness, travel and adventure, the patronage of literature and art, even religion and charity. But Mrs. Gower had been so unfortunate as to take her greatest pleasure at the beginning of her young life. Compared with that triumphal moment when first, surrounded by ladies with names she had hitherto known only in the newspapers, she had taken her place among the patronesses of the F. F. V. Ball as “Mrs. Levison Gower, Jr.”—what were all the second-hand joys of the imagination, of looking at books and pictures, even the more solid satisfactions of houses, opera-boxes, horses and liveries, or of social power? The life of the world was Mrs. Gower’s book; she made her own drama; any starveling in a garret could have the other kind. But that earliest pleasure was indeed divine. She had met the enemy, and made them hers. And how the dowagers had scowled at her, at first! The haughty Vans, the poor and lofty matrons of the old manorial families of New York, exemplary, unapproachable, Presbyterian. She had routed them with a flirt of her fan; she had dared their feudal armor with her bared fair breast. Their dowdy daughters had been snuffed out of fashion like candles in electric light; a spark of wit had made them laughable, a glance of her soft eyes had brought their brothers to her feet. Her chic had won the day, and soon they all began to copy her. Her phaeton and her ponies replaced the antiquated family rockaways; her style made up for breeding, and largely it was Flossie’s work that money in New York became the all-in-all, and blood an antiquated prejudice to jest at. And all the Einsteins and the Malgams and Duvals made haste to cluster under Flossie’s standard, wanting such a leader; and we Americans throw up our hats and cry how nice and democratic is the change—do we not? How proud was simple Lucie Gower to find him husband to a goddess! How natural for Caryl Wemyss to worship her, the spirit of his favorite decadence!

But still, that early and delightful triumph had been the climax of her life, as it now seemed; all other pleasures had proved silly or insipid. What gratification was it to her to move in the best society? The whole pleasure lay in getting there. She cared nothing for the best society, except in so far as she could humble it, and make it hers. Secretly, Flossie found more sympathy in her new friends of the Duval set than in the old-fashioned Van Kulls and Breviers of her husband’s family. The best people bored her. But the Duvals were nothing if not amusing, and had a truly French horror of the ennuyeux.

But she was a leader of it; there was still some satisfaction left in that. Her leadership was unquestioned; through whatever will-of-the-wisp of folly she chose to lead the dance, the many (and these the richest, newest, and most prominent) would follow. Mrs. Malgam alone could for a moment contest her prominence—“Baby” Malgam, whose fashionable inanity and lazy beauty had proved almost as good cards as Flossie’s cleverness. And the further she went, the faster would her people follow; for the Duvals and Einsteins were wild to écraser, by ostentation of their wealth, all those whose position rested on the slightest shadow of superiority that money could not buy. All these people, Flossie knew, would hail her as a leader and grovel at her feet; she, who represented, for her husband’s family, an older style than theirs, if she would be with them and of them. And the old style of things, which had satisfied her for fifteen years, was just now, certainly, beginning to bore her. The drama of her life lacked action.

Well: whither should she lead? What next? Charity, intellect, art, and dancing had been worn to the last thread; hounds and horses were in, just now; and society, in pink coats and silk jockey-caps, was making nature’s acquaintance on Long Island and in Westchester County. But what on earth or in the waters under the earth was to come after this, Mrs. Gower did not yet know. Still, it was comforting to feel that when she did know, it would be done; this was certainly a pleasure; perhaps the only real one left to poor Flossie in her years of disillusion. As a parvenue, she was never tired of having her will over those who had been born her superiors; and it is a delightful novelty that in these days of no prejudices a parvenue need no longer climb to the level of society, but will find it both less troublesome and more tickling to the vanity to pull society down to her.

The free fancy of Mrs. Gower’s matron meditation was interrupted by the entrance of a deus with a machina—in other words, by a footman with Mr. Caryl Wemyss’s visiting-card.

“Is Mrs. Gower at home?” said the footman; and he commanded larger wages for the subtile infusion of “her ladyship” he was able to give a plain American patronymic if used in the third person. He also had calves; and made no other than a financial objection to silk stockings, if required.

“Let him come in,” said Flossie; and she drew a footstool to her and disposed herself more at ease, before the wide wood-fire.

Wemyss entered perfectly. There were two manners of meeting ladies most in vogue at this time, which may perhaps be described as the horsey and the cavalier. Of the former, which was perhaps the more fashionable, Jimmy De Witt was an excellent example; he would have come in with boisterous bonhomie, a stable-boy’s story, or a blunt approval of Flossie’s pretty ankle, which was being warmed before the fire; but Wemyss affected the old-fashioned, and was pleased to be conscious that his manners were, as he would have said, de vieille roche. He took her hand and bowed deeply over it, as if he wanted to kiss it, but did not dare; then, drawing a low ottoman in front of the fire, he sat down, as it were, at her feet.

“Well, Mr. Wemyss, how did you find Boston?” said Mrs. Gower, by way of beginning.

“Boston, my dear Mrs. Gower, is impossible. There used to be some originals, but now there are only left their country acquaintances, or their self-imposed biographers, who feebly seek to shine by their reflected light. Emerson might do, for the provinces; but Emerson’s country neighbors! Their society is one of ganaches and femmes précieuses—oh, such precious women!—of circles, coteries, and clubs, with every knowledge but the savoir faire and every science but the savoir vivre!”

“But,” said Mrs. Gower, “surely I have seen some very civilized Bostonians, at Newport, in the summer?”

“You have—like a stage procession,” said Wemyss with a smile. “And so, if you stand long enough in the window of the club there, and are fortunate, you may, of an afternoon, see Mrs. Weston’s carriage and footmen go down the hill; and perhaps, if you smoke another cigar and wait, you may be so happy as to see Mrs. Weston’s carriage and footmen going up the hill again. The rest of Boston drive in carry-alls.”

Mrs. Gower laughed. “Now I always thought it would be such a charming place to live in—so many celebrated people have been there—so many associations——”

“My dear lady, it is consecrated ground if you like,” said Wemyss, interrupting. “And a very proper place to be buried in. But I tried living there for three months.”

“And so, now, you are going back to Paris?”

“I came on with that intention.”

“Why don’t you go then?”

“I am afraid it’s too late,” said Wemyss, looking at his watch. “My steamer sails at four.”

Mrs. Gower made a little ejaculation of surprise; and then laughed a trill or two. “Mr. Wemyss, you are a great humbug,” said she, throwing her head back upon the pink satin cushion, and looking at him from the corners of her half-closed eyes.

“We have to be,” said Wemyss, with a sigh. “Now there’s the trouble of Boston; they can’t understand that. And the six or eight of us who do, grow rusty for want of practice.”

“But you have one another?”

“We know one another down to the ground. There is no excitement in that; it is playing double-dummy without stakes.”

“And so you are going to Paris?”

“And so I was going to Paris?”

“But your steamer leaves at four, you say? What are you tarrying here for?”

“Mais, pour vos beaux yeux——”

“Mr. ’Olyoke,” said the footman from behind the heavy curtains. Wemyss struck his two hands together in mock desperation; but as a matter of fact, the interruption was opportune, for he did not in the least know what to do next. There is a certain point in talk beyond which anything not final is an anti-climax.

“Say you are not at home,” said he, eagerly.

But Mrs. Gower chose to be very gracious to Arthur. She gave him her hand with the simple cordiality of a school-girl. “I am so glad you have not forgotten our drive,” said she.

Arthur had quite forgotten it; so he filled up the time by bowing to Mr. Wemyss; a salute which that gentleman received with some stiffness. Mrs. Gower made a very suggestion of a tinkle in a bell that stood at her elbow.

“Horridge, are the ponies ready?”

“Mrs. Gower’s carriage his hin waiting,” said Horridge, with a respectful gasp or two before the vowels.

“You see, Mr. Wemyss,” said Flossie. “I hope you have not missed your steamer. I must not keep you for one moment longer.”

“I see I shall have to postpone my trip,” said Wemyss. “Madame!” (this with much formality.)

“Monsieur!” (Mrs. Gower quite outdid Mr. Wemyss in her exaggeration of a long curtesy.)

“Now, Mr. Holyoke,” said Flossie, when the cosmopolitan had departed, “I am sure you will give me your company for a drive in the park?”

If there is no Englishman who would not enjoy walking down Pall Mall on the arm of two dukes, there is surely no American who would not like to be whirled through the world at the side of Mrs. Levison Gower. They drove for an hour in the park; and Arthur had the pleasure of raising his hat to Jimmy De Witt, Miss Pussie Duval, Mrs. Jack Malgam and Antoine Duval, Jr., Killian Van Kull, Charlie Townley, and many others unknown to him who bowed to her. She talked to him of books and poetry; of Heine, Rossetti and of Shelley; and the tender tones of her voice would have moved an older man than Arthur to sympathy with her. “I had thought that she was worldly,” said Arthur to himself. “There must be some secret in her life I have not yet discovered,” (this was very possible, seeing he had only been with her three hours)—“some great suffering or repression which makes her wear this fashionable garb as an armor to veil her wounded heart. It is despair that makes her plunge so wildly into this whirl of company and show; the loss forever of something she once longed for, that drives her to distraction and diversion. Love of pleasure it is surely not.”

Ah, poor Arthur, no doctor ever yet of soul or body but gave a biassed diagnosis of a pretty woman’s soul. How easy it is to weave romances over soft gold hair! How natural to read poetry and lost loves in the light of lovely eyes that look so sweetly now in yours! So good Bishop Berkeley showed us that we mortals see but an image of external things, an inference from the sensation of our own retina; and we silly men, like idolaters, worship but the image we ourselves create. The lily of the field still draws us, not the potato-flower, worthy vegetable. And we fondly assume that the lily cares nothing for its vestment; that it toils not, nor spins, and has its eye upon the stars alone.

Arthur now really felt that he was a friend of Flossie Gower’s. His favorite poems were all hers, and she quoted from many of them, with sighs. She had shown to him what the cynic world had never seen, the regrets and longings that lay beneath the pearls and laces that clothed her heart’s casement; the true woman, not the fashionable figure known to others. How pleasant it was, to have a friend like her; one whose own life was over, and had all the more sympathy, for that, with lives of others. She asked him to come and see her whenever he liked; and Arthur thought how comforting it would be, to go to this woman for sympathy and advice, so much older than he, and yet so young at heart!

So seriously did Arthur think all this, that it quite jarred upon him when Charlie met him on his return and boisterously complimented him. “Well, old man, you are going it, and no mistake!” (Mrs. Gower’s name was pronounced Go-er, which gave opportunity for endless puns.) “I say, old fellow, you come down fresh from the pastures like what-d’ye-callem—Endymion—Adonis, or the other masher—and sail to windward of the whole squadron!”

Arthur shook Townley off a little impatiently, and refused to dine at the club, as he requested. But, taking dinner alone, with the other boarders, he could not but say to himself that they were not pleasing to him; their minds seemed narrow and their ways uncouth. They were more affable than on the first day, perhaps because it was the evening, not the morning; there was even a certain clumsy attention in the manner of one or two of the younger men, as if they would laugh at his stories, were he to tell any. After dinner, he read a novel in his study with a cigar, feeling comparatively comfortable in the rooms, which already seemed less strange to him; and at eleven o’clock he went to Miss Farnum’s party. (One always spoke of Miss Farnum, Miss Farnum’s house, Miss Farnum’s dinners—not her mother’s.) Townley, true to his intention previously expressed, was not there; the dressing-room was full of very young men, pulling on gloves and chattering; one older gentleman with a fine pair of shoulders and an honest face was in the corner next Arthur, and attracted the latter by his looks. “I wonder where they keep their brushes,” was all he said; but he said it pleasantly; and Arthur and he walked down together.

Miss Farnum, who was a marvellously beautiful young woman, met them almost at the door. “Ah, I see you know one another already,” said she.

“But we don’t,” said the stranger, smiling; and Arthur was introduced to him as Mr. Haviland. Then Miss Farnum turned to present Arthur to her mother; which formality over, our hero found himself very much alone; and he naturally drifted away into a corner, where he found Mr. Haviland awaiting him. It was pleasant enough to stand there and watch the influx of young beauties; girl after girl came in, in clouds of pink or white, bowed and courtesied at the door, and drifted into the comparative quiet of the main dancing-room, where they eddied around by twos and threes, waiting to be accosted by simpering youth. Haviland was very civil to him, and introduced him to many of them; so that Arthur found himself walking and dancing first with a blonde in blue or white, next with a brune in pink or yellow; they were all lovely, but it was difficult to permanently differentiate their natures in one’s mind.

The ball was a very brilliant one, and the rooms were full; many of the ladies were pretty, and all seemed rich and well educated. But there was an indefinable spirit of unrest, of effort at shining, of social anxiety, which struck Arthur as a new note in his New York social experiences; and Charlie Townley’s patronising remarks recurred again to him. When he went back to Miss Farnum, her reception duties were over; they had a waltz together, and then wandered into a conservatory for cool and rest.

“How different it all seems from New Haven,” was Arthur’s first remark; and she said yes, it did; and asked him if he were really living in New York, and if it was not Mr. Townley with whom she had seen him walking the other day.

“Mr. Townley is a great friend of mine, you must know; and I think it is too bad of him not to come to-night. And, by the way—whom were you with in the park this afternoon?”

“With Mrs. Gower,” said Arthur.

“Mrs. Gower? Mrs. Levison Gower? Was it? I didn’t see—” and no one would have guessed that the acquaintance of the lady mentioned was yet an unrealised dream to Miss Farnum. She led Arthur off soon after, and presented him to some of her most particular friends; Arthur was so fortunate as to secure one of these young ladies—Miss Marie Vanderpool—for the german; and they had seats very near the head. Altogether, Arthur was in the high tide of social favor; and nearly everyone whom he met talked to him of Mrs. Gower, and he marvelled a little that that lady—who had spoken almost tragically to him of her loneliness—should have so many dear and admiring friends. When he went home, it was with three or four tinsel orders at his button-hole; and Haviland, whose coat-collar was yet undecorated, met him in the hall.

“Are you going the same way?” said he to Arthur; and when it turned out that they were, he asked him to drop in and have a cigar. Haviland knew that Arthur was a stranger in the city; and it soon turned out that they had one or two acquaintances in common. Then, as is the way of men, their conversation drifted to the last pretty face they had seen—Kitty Farnum. “She is a great friend of mine, and I stayed until the end on her account,” said Haviland; “though I don’t dance.” They stopped at Haviland’s house; and entering, Arthur was inducted into the most delightful bachelor rooms, down-stairs, filled with books, weapons, and implements for smoking.

“Yes,” said Haviland, speaking of Miss Farnum; “and it’s a great pity to see her going as she is now. Why” (he went on, in answer to an inquiring look from Arthur) “she is wild upon getting into society, as she calls it, or her mother is for her. There is a girl, rich, beautiful, refined, well educated, and she positively looks up to a set of people the whole of whom aren’t worth her little finger, as if they were divinities.”

“It certainly seems very funny, if it’s true,” said Arthur.

“Funny?” fumed Haviland, “I assure you they are as much her inferiors as they would have her theirs. Fashion is a vulgar word, and fashionable people are a fast, vulgar set; fast, because they are too empty-headed and uncultivated to enjoy any pleasure of taste or intellect, and vulgar because they are too stupid to understand any other superiority than that of mere display.”

Haviland spoke almost savagely, intemperately, as it seemed to Arthur, about such a trivial thing. “Can he be in love with her?” thought he; and he wondered why he told him all this.

“It’s her mother,” Haviland went on, “she has brought her up to marry some fine Englishman, and wants to get New York at her feet first.”

And Arthur, who had noticed how intimate Haviland had seemed with Kitty Farnum that evening thought that he had discovered his secret. Their conversation then took a serious turn, to their mutual profit and pleasure; and when Arthur finally went home, the night was going away, and the business of the day beginning. He liked Haviland better than any man he had met, thus far, in New York. But still, his ideas were changing.

CHAPTER XI.
THE STORY OF A QUIET SUNDAY EVENING.

SUNDAY was a long-looked-for day to Arthur. It was only the second Sunday after his arrival in New York; but it was as if he had been many months in the city already; and on the evening thereof he was to take tea at the Livingstones’.

Tea is not a formal meal; and surely it could do no harm if he went there early? It was almost six o’clock, and well on in the twilight when he arrived at the house; Miss Holyoke was in the parlor, the servant said; the other ladies were up-stairs. The low tones of a piano reached his ear as the man was speaking; and Arthur recognized a soft and serious Bach prelude, very quiet, very tender, very old in melody and simple chords. It was a favorite piece of Gracie’s; and Arthur stood at the door, unseen, and watched her play. Her black dress and slender figure was just visible in the faint light that came in from some other room; but her face, sweet and pale, was clearly outlined against the long window and the last light of the November day; it touched her chin and brow and her parted lips; and the look of these was like the music she was playing. The prelude died away, in minor modulations, like a low amen; and Gracie sat playing idly with the ivory notes, her head drooping, and a dim shining from the firelight in her dark hair.

When the others came down, they found these two sitting together, like brother and sister, and talking in low voices to each other. Arthur knew Mrs. Livingstone; but the others of the family were still strangers to him. Mr. Livingstone was an old man, much bent, with older manners and appearance than his years warranted; then there was an only daughter, Mamie, and a favorite cousin of Mr. Livingstone’s, Miss Brevier. Mamie Livingstone was a pretty young girl, with slightly petulant manners, as if she had been a little spoiled; she had a wonderfully mobile face, and quick intelligent eyes, and was evidently warm-hearted and impulsive, and very fond already of her cousin Grace. She regarded Arthur critically, and with some disapproval; in fact, she snubbed him more completely than that young gentleman had yet been snubbed—thanks to Mrs. Gower—in New York.

“Where is Mr. Townley, mamma?” said she, imperiously. “I want to see Mr. Townley.”

“Hush, Mamie,” said Mrs. Livingstone, slightly shocked; and the old gentleman looked at his daughter with a meek astonishment, as is so often the way with contemporary parents. Charlie had been invited in acknowledgment of his kindness to Arthur.

“Mr. Townley,” said Mr. Livingstone in a quavering voice, “is a very old friend of mine, in whom I have always had the greatest confidence. I have yet to make the acquaintance of his young—connection.”

“They say he waltzes like an angel,” said Mamie the irrepressible; and just then the door-bell rang, and the subject of their conversation appeared, with his usual irreproachable exterior. Arthur had never seen him so subdued; he sat next to Miss Mamie, but treated her quite du haut en bas, talking much to Mr. Livingstone. Arthur could see that he was on his best behavior; and his best behavior was extremely unobjectionable, though he came very near being caught in the middle of some airy personality when Mr. Livingstone inaugurated the meal by saying grace.

After tea was over, Miss Mamie manœuvred Charlie into a remote corner, where he seemed to find her more worthy his attention. The evening was very quiet; Mr. Livingstone gravely reading some review, and addressing from time to time a solitary remark to his wife, who sat with her hands folded, placidly. Gracie talked to Arthur of himself, and our hero told her of all that had happened since he came to New York. Her life had, of course, been a quiet one, divided between books, her music, and charitable occupations. In all these Miss Brevier had encouraged and assisted her; Gracie spoke very warmly of her, her intelligence and character. This was after Miss Brevier, in the other room, had begun reading aloud to the old couple, in a low and sweet, but very clearly modulated voice.

“When can I come next?” said Arthur to Gracie as they rose to go. There was a sweetness in her presence that had won his heart a thousand times again; she seemed a rarer being, in this peopled city; he adored her.

“You must not come often, dear Arthur—my aunt thinks it better for us both. She thinks that we are both too young, and that you must try a year or two in society to make sure that you really care for me—and I for you,” she added, in a tone hardly audible. Arthur’s only answer was to press her hand; and so they parted.

When they got into the street, Townley lit a large cigar, with a slight sigh of relief. “Lively little girl, that Miss Livingstone,” said he; “but I say, old man, what an evening! No wonder she wants to come out.”

“I am sorry you found it slow,” said Arthur, testily.

“Oh, well, I know it’s devilish respectable and all that sort of thing,” said Charlie. “Good middle-class domestic life; they’re just like our grandfathers, and our grandfathers were nothing but bourgeois after all; that little girl will sink all that, or I’m mistaken. Come round by Sixth Avenue a minute, will you?”

There was a certain incongruity in Charlie’s words, as it seemed to Arthur; it might have been Wemyss who was speaking, instead of this careless young Epicurean, who usually troubled himself little with abstractions and general categories, but occupied his understanding with perceiving the most practical sort of causes and effects. The fact was that Townley had used the current slang of his set, word-counters for thought, and his mind was already far from the subject, and his lips framed to the whistle of an air from “Iolanthe.” They turned into Sixth Avenue (which is a strange, conglomerate street—insolently disreputable at times, elsewhere commercially prosperous, or even given to small tradesmen and other healthy citizenship, but always, in its earlier days, at least, rakishly indifferent to brown-stone-front respectability) and stopped at a little shop in a tiny two-story brick block. On the left was a little glass door, with the simple legend Rose Marie upon the panel; and in front of them a toy staircase, leading to the imminent upper regions. Through the glass of the door Arthur could see one or two bonnets on pegs in the window, and he divined that the shop was a milliner’s. “Is Miss Starbuck in?” said Charlie to a child who appeared with a candle. The child (who was either deformed or very old-looking for her age) looked keenly at Arthur, whose eyes fell helplessly before her searching gaze.

“She has gone to a concert at the Garden,” said the child. As they spoke, there was a murmur of men’s voices from an adjoining room, and a rough clatter of applause, with knocking of heels and sticks.

“All right,” said Townley. “Good-night.” And after this somewhat inexplicable call the two young men went back to their Fifth Avenue lodgings. Here they found John Haviland, largely reposing himself on two chairs before Arthur’s hospitable hearth.

Haviland and Arthur had met many times since the Farnum ball; and Arthur was more pleased than surprised at finding him in his rooms to-night. “I’m so glad you waited—I’ve just come from the Livingstones,” said he. “Charlie, let me introduce my friend Mr. Haviland—Mr. Townley. Have a cigar—oh, you’ve got a pipe, have you?”

The others already had cigars; and disposing themselves in attitudes of permanent equilibrium, all plunged into the divine cloud of vapor until such times as the genius of the place should move them to speech.

“Is the Miss Holyoke who is staying at the Livingstones’ your cousin?” asked Haviland, finally.

“Yes,” said Arthur. “Don’t you know her?”

“What a queer old thing that Miss Brevier is,” said Charlie. “Can you believe it, she used to be a bosom-friend of Mrs. Levison G.!”

“Pity Miss Brevier dropped her,” said Haviland, dryly.

“Miss Brevier drop her?” said Charlie, whose sense of humor was sometimes, at a critical moment, deficient. “You are chaffing.”

“Mrs. Gower,” said Haviland, gravely, “does more harm than any woman in New York.”

“She is a person of European reputation,” suggested Townley.

“She is unquestionably proficient in the latest and silliest vices of the aristocracies we came over here to escape from,” retorted John.

Townley laughed a little, while Haviland puffed vigorously at his pipe.

“I say, Arthur?” said the former, “speaking of Mrs. G., have they asked you to join the Four-in-Hand Club?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a club organized for the purpose of driving twice a year up to Yonkers with string teams and liveries, and showing your most esteemed young ladies in flaring light-colored dresses to all the sidewalk population of New York,” broke in Haviland, “and paying four thousand a year for the privilege!”

“What rot,” laughed Charlie. “In the first place, it needn’t cost you one thousand a year, for one wheel apiece. Four fellows can own a drag together, you know. And it’s great fun. Mrs. Gower got it up, and all the boys belong. Why, old Mosenthal came to me the other day with tears in his eyes, and offered to keep two full-rigged drags, if we’d only let him come in—and lend me one of ’em, he meant,” added Charlie with a grin.

“How cheap for him,” growled the other, “if he could buy the envy and consideration of the society of this great republic for the price of a few horses!”

Townley’s good-nature never forsook him; but he looked at Haviland as if puzzled; and the latter rose to go. “I called on the Livingstones last week,” said he to Arthur, “and met your cousin. Good-night, Mr. Townley.”

“What a prig he is,” said Charlie, with a sigh of relief when Haviland had gone. “I always supposed it, from his looks. I knew that he refused to join the Four-in-Hand Club; and you hardly ever meet him in society—except at some queer place like the Farnums’ for instance. He mugs down-town at his office all the day, and improves his mind in the evening, I suppose, or reads goody-goody stories to little Italian children, down on Baxter Street! He’s good as gold, you know.”

“Don’t you ever mean to work yourself?” asked Arthur.

“Not that way,” laughed Charlie. “It’s not in my line. Books and things are played out, I tell you.” But the full account of his plans of life Charlie was too canny to impart, perhaps even to admit to himself.

For Charlie had not always been thus. There was a time when he was fresh from Princeton College, and he used to fill his table with English and foreign reviews, and could talk intelligently of their contents. He had begun his business life with enthusiasm, and was only known as a promising athlete outside of it. He showed great industry at the office, and some ability, and had been referred to by his elders as a well-informed young man.

But Charlie was a smart fellow, wide awake, and it did not take him long to get, as he fancied, désorienté. Suddenly, the second or third autumn of his business career, he had given up his reading, dropped his industry and early hours, and, for reasons well known to himself, he became the Charlie Townley known to us and the world. He had almost abandoned Wall Street for the Piccadilly Club and the Park; he dropped out of sight, on ’Change, and reappeared smiling in “society.” And so well did he play his cards, that he, a poor and almost friendless stranger, without money or influence, with but one solitary advantage, that of a name not unknown in New York, had become—it would be premature to say what he had become, or why he did it; like all great generals, he had his strategy, not to be fathomed by the enemy, still less by emulous friends. Let us stick to the what, nor pry into the why or wherefore.

What he did, then, was to become the most ineffable dandy in all New York. With perfect clothing and fine linen, the exactly new thing in sticks and hats, and a single eye-glass decorously veiling his intellect and dangerously wide-awake eye, Charlie had become that thing of which the name may change from dandy to lion, from buck to swell, from blood to dude, but the nature endureth forever. But this was but dressing the part, it was merely the transformation of the exterior, the travesti; it was here that Charlie’s career began. He only spoke to those whom others spoke to, and said only those things that others thought; he preferred married women to the society of maidens, even to the charm of blushing buds; though he selected one or two virgin beauties every season to whom he royally threw an occasional sunbeam of his society. These were always faultless either in family, or in beauty, or in fashion—for Charlie was catholic in his recognition of merit—and they appreciated the word or look he grudgingly accorded them and were duly grateful. Soon, his approval would give a cachet to almost any girl; but careless Charlie was all unconscious; girls were slow, he said. Mrs. Gower, Mrs. Malgam, Mrs. Jacob Einstein, formed his court. With these he reigned; by them he was taken up and formed, and later, by them adored, as the heathen worship the brass or wooden idol they themselves have made. This was at the time when Mrs. G. had gone in for belles-lettres; she and Townley read de Musset and Balzac together, and Theophile Gautier’s poems. Who would have supposed that Charlie had ever read de Musset! It was at the same period that Levison Gower, Senior, died, and Mrs. G. adopted the hyphen; there was an English titled family of that name, and she fancied the difference of one vowel would only lend a vraisemblance to the descent; but society saw the joke and called her Lady Levison for all one season. There never had been any Levison in the Gower family; Gower senior’s father had come from Connecticut, and his first name was John Lewis. The family estate consisted of an old farm-house and a few acres near Windsor Locks; the house is now burned down, and upon the ancestral acres grows rank tobacco.

What precious humbug is all this! Well, well, let us not despise humbug; nihil humani alienum. Let us rather see this humbug; let us put it on a pin, and examine this insect. You may be sure Charlie found his account therein. Frivolity is a word for dullards; I wish the ministers could enforce their precepts half as well as the dressmakers. Fashion is a marvellous potency, the public opinion of small things; in a democracy who can despise it? As I write, fashion tells our womankind, Put birds upon thy bonnet; and lo! four hundred thousand women in New York alone wear fowls. How many years ago was it, now, that someone said, Sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor? And four hundred thousand in the world have done it, not yet.

As for Charlie—in Mrs. Edgeworth, or in “Sandford and Merton,” or other book of our childhood I once read a fable: how Honesty, Industry, and Ability formed a partnership for the acquirement of ambergris from whales. And Ability caught a hundred whales in the first year, and Industry carefully separated from all these whales a few ounces of ambergris, and Honesty sold this ambergris for a large sum of money. And Rapacity, who had been lying by, laughing, all this time, signed the check and took the ambergris; and lo! the check was worthless. And Society looked on and laughed, and said Rapacity was a smart fellow; and in the next year there were many worthless checks, but no ambergris.

Now Charlie was not Rapacity; but he was a clever fellow and could see this and other fables as they were enacted before his eyes. And he would not steal; nor would he go to the North Pole and search for whales. But he was in search of les moyens de parvenir.

CHAPTER XII.
A COMMUNIST AND HIS SISTER.

MEANTIME a discussion upon society in general and other things in particular, something like that of Haviland and Townley, was going on in the back shop of the little brick store upon Sixth Avenue. A certain James Starbuck had lodgings there with his sister; that is, he was usually there when he was in New York. But this his occupation seldom permitted; for he was employed as a sort of small paymaster or inspector of the great Allegheny Central Company, a corporation which owned coal-mines, oil-wells, pipe-lines, factories, bonds, stocks, and other contracts so complex that the mind of even its owner grew confused at thinking of it. Starbuck was a slender, pale, narrow-chested American mechanic, whose bright eyes contrasted strikingly with his feeble frame and stooping shoulders, and whose sharp look betokened an unhealthy intelligence. His work was one which did not, however, require manual exertion, and he did it faithfully. His sister Jenny was very different in appearance; handsome, fond of pleasure, high spirited, they had only their cleverness in common.—But with Jenny’s case we have nothing to do.

Of course, the reader, on the alert for coincidences and dovetailings of plot (as one always is in a novel, however veracious) has noticed that the name of Starbuck is not strange to this story; and has smiled to himself, superior, as his sagacity foresaw a link of connection in this fact. But was James Starbuck a cousin of clever, fashionable, refined Flossie? Starbuck did not know it. What, in active, progressive America, in the migrating America of the last fifty years, need a man know of his antecedents? They go for little in his life. Starbuck remembered his father well enough; and how he had struggled from pillar to post, from one frowzy city street to another, with the jaded, tawdry woman who was his wife; until one day, from a new and prosperous little city in the oil regions of Pennsylvania, he had gone, never to be seen or heard of after, by wife or child. And there they had lived, as they had been left there; and his mother took to dress-making and a boarding-house for miners, and his pretty sister had been sent to the public schools, and he had found work with the Company. His sister went through the High School, and then came home discontented; she could not bear their mode of life, nor like her mother’s boarders—great hulking fellows who came home at night grimy from the wells and mines, and were, at best, but laboring-men, though they had money enough. Then her mother had died; and her brother had proved unequal to the actual labor of the business; but his quickness, his Yankee intelligence, had not gone unobserved, and he had been given this sort of clerkship or travelling agency, which made it possible for him to live at either end of the line. But he could not support her yet, though she persuaded him to move to New York; and she quickly found a place with Rose Marie, who was a little, beady-eyed old Frenchwoman, and slept in the remotest attic-chamber, so that she grew to be rather a myth, and Jenny’s friends used to disbelieve in her existence, and called Jenny Rose Marie, in joke.

But we, who know everything, will not attempt to escape the reader’s perspicacity. Yes (though it has nothing to do with the story), James Starbuck was in fact the grandson of that old whaling-captain Obed, Flossie’s father’s elder brother—he would have been her second cousin, then—quite too far for city kin to be counted, even had Mrs. Gower known anything about it. His father, by some curious chance, atavism, or some other influence, had taken after the uncle, and ceased to follow the sea; but, not like his uncle, he had not prospered, and had lived upon the world when he could; when he could not, he brought his wife back to her home in the small country town in Connecticut. The father was one of those curious fellows who turn their hand to anything, and of whom the best you can say is that they are hardly respectable, and the worst that they don’t quite deserve to be hanged. Their lives are one long misdemeanor, but (unless we count fraudulent bankruptcy, and except an occasional bigamy) they rarely commit a crime. This Horace Starbuck had his ups and his downs, his ins and his outs; but the friends and the places of his prosperity knew him not in his adversity, and vice versa. There was no more continuity to his career than there is to a string of cheap assorted beads; and I doubt if even the devil took any serious interest in him. He was clever, too, in a way, with that common-school education no person born in New England can be without; he had made an invention, and owned a patent or two in the course of his life, and formed several corporations, in Connecticut and elsewhere, for their exploitation. It chanced that in one of these (it was upon a patent for machine-made shirts) some stockholder had actually paid up his stock; this lucky chance was the means of bringing seven thousand dollars into Horace Starbuck’s pocket, the largest sum he ever possessed at any one time of his life. He promptly got himself married to a girl in his own town, which was probably, on the whole, the most defensible action of his career. They went on a wedding-trip to New York, where Starbuck went into six new corporations; and in a few months they were as poor as ever, and these twin children were born to them. Mrs. Starbuck’s health gave out after this; and she never had any more children. Her husband’s business made it necessary for him to travel a great deal; and she sometimes went with him, sometimes not. Hardly a commercial hotel in the United States but Starbuck had stopped there; he made his nest in hotels, as a spider does in dark places by the sea. His travels led him all over the northern part of America and to Australia; his assets consisted of a diamond-pin, a gold watch and chain, and four collars and a shirt, besides the clothes he wore; and he subsisted mysteriously. At one time he had considerable reputation in Ohio and Indiana as Dr. Westminster, the cancer doctor; he wore his hair long, and had his portrait so taken printed in the newspapers; his treatment consisted in an application of leaves of bracken or fern, steeped in hot water, and business prospered, until he foolishly used cabbage-leaves instead, and a patient died of the blister. He made some money by curing stammering, at one hundred dollars the cure; if the patients did not pay him, he threatened suit, and they were glad to get rid of him at any price. At times he gave temperance lectures (drinking never was one of his vices); and if worst came to worst he could play three-card-monte, though he hated to resort to this, as being fairly beyond the liberal moral line he drew for himself. He never had any permanent occupation; when luck ran strong against him, he would return to the little Connecticut town, where his wife had a bit of real estate and a home with her brother, old Sam Wolcott, and there vegetate. He honestly and in good faith considered himself a gentleman; he always wore a black coat, and once came near getting a Labor nomination for Congress. But the workmen, when it came to the point, would none of him; though he did occupy a seat for a year as a Prohibitionist in the Connecticut Legislature. He was given to long disappearances; and at the time of his Australian tour it really seemed to his wife as if he were never coming back. However, he walked in home, one day, with the gold watch and chain, and quite a little sum of money; and did not finally disappear until that time in the Pennsylvania mining-town, whither he had gone to buy oil-land, having at last persuaded his wife to sell her little bit of real estate in Connecticut, against her brother Sam’s advice. All this James Starbuck did not know, of course; but in a general way he did not accord much respect to his father’s memory. He considered pride of ancestry a most disagreeable form of aristocracy; and whereas his father would speak of himself as a gentleman, James Starbuck boasted openly that he was nothing but a plain laboring-man. James was perfectly honest in financial affairs, and he tried to look after his twin-sister. Much of his childhood had been spent with his uncle Sam; and his earliest recollections were of that little district-school the reader may remember. For uncle Sam belonged to the salt of the earth, good old Puritan stock, and lived to be the last of it, the day he hanged himself, and the Wolcott family tomb was sealed.

They had had a scene to-night, apropos of her visit to the garden-concert. She had gone with an ornate and expensive person, a sporting gentleman, whose ostentatious affluence had won her fancy; and whom James detested. She called him one of her “gentleman-friends;” and they had angry words about him, for I suspect, after all, James was a better judge of a gentleman than his father had been. But she had his own cleverness and strength of will; and it was difficult for James, who despised all authority himself, to exercise it upon another. Both brother and sister were, and had always been, absolutely and utterly devoid of any semblance or savor of religion; how absolutely, only those who have lived in certain classes of society in modern American manufacturing towns can know; and there was a large range of motive upon which it was perfectly hopeless for the brother to call. He knew it, and he was too bluntly honest not to recognize it; so he ended merely by hoping that his sister would not make a d——d fool of herself; which as they both had common-sense and practical minds, was perhaps the best argument he could use. But Jenny, perfectly conscious of her ability to take care of herself, was quite well aware of all that could be said on both sides; and replied that if Jim chose to smoke pipes in his shirt-sleeves with common laborers, there was no reason why his sister should not accept a gentleman’s invitation to go to a concert. An English navvy might have stopped her going with a knock-down argument; but no pure-blooded American ever strikes a woman, and James could only swallow his wrath, admitting that his sister was a free human being in a free country, and if she preferred pleasure and he power, why it was the way of humanity. He was conscious that his own aims were selfish enough, and though he dimly felt that jewellery and fashionable hats and shawls were vanities, it was hard to put that idea into their language. For he believed in labor and commodities; and these, at least, were commodities. What fault he found was in their distribution alone; and his sister was but taking her way to get them unto herself. But to see her aping aristocracy added a drop to the hate he bore that bête noire of his class; though surely Dave St. Clair was no aristocrat, as he had to admit. Dave St. Clair was the gentleman who had taken his sister to the garden.

What was it, then, that made him hate the world? It was money, accumulation, capital, as he had learned to call the word. And he went back to the little coterie in the back room, and fervidly resumed his speech where his sister’s departure had interrupted it.

“I tell you,” said he, “we must change it all. A man is only worth what he makes. They tell us society would be a chaos without private property; I tell them it is private property that makes a chaos of society. They talk about the law! the law! I tell them the world would be better without law. It is a bogey, invented to scare off us ignorant fellows from the plunder the rich have appropriated, just such a bogey as religion was, only religion has been exploded. It is the law’s turn to go next. All property is robbery; and it is only because land-owners are the worst thieves of all, that we feel differently about other things. The earth belongs to the human race; and no man can rightly own its surface, whether he got his title from a feudal baron or a Spanish general, any more than he can own the air of heaven. But property in other things is just as bad; and Jay Gould is a worse man than the Duke of Westminster, though he has ten million acres and Gould only a few hundred. How much of his wealth represents the honest labor of himself or his forefathers?”

There was a murmur of applause at this. There were some half dozen men in the room, all sober and apparently intelligent, and all natural-born Americans.

“But somebody must own things,” one of them remarked. “Somebody must own the mills, and the railroads, and the machinery. Why up to our works we’ve got a single engine that cost nigh unto eighty thousand dollars.”

“We can all own them,” Starbuck went on earnestly, “just as we all made them. Who do you suppose made that eighty-thousand dollar machine—the banks with their money and so-called capital, or the men as put it together? A man is worth just what he makes, I tell you. Can Jay Gould make an engine? But because we’ve all got to have a little land, and a little plant and money, are those as have got it to take away from us ninety-nine per cent. of all we make? Yes—if we’re fools enough to stand it. A man can have what he can keep and use, what he can eat and what he can wear. If he chooses to store up his day’s labor, to set aside the bread and meat he earns, he can do so, and keep it till it spoils. But this dog-in-the-manger business ain’t to be carried no further; and if a feller squats down on land, and don’t use it, an’ another feller without no land comes along and wants it, that first feller has got to get up and git—that’s all. A man’s a man for what he is, for what he can do—not for what he owns.”

“But who’s going to support the Government?”

“Government,” said Starbuck, with a snort of disgust, to the speaker, who was something of a ward politician. “Government! We don’t want no government, Bill. What’s the use of a government, except to scrouge out taxes, and make wars, and support standing armies and lazy politicians?—To protect life, liberty, and property, they say; property may go to h—l for all I care; and I guess life and liberty can take care of themselves; they aren’t much helped by government, anyhow. And don’t you suppose we fellers can look after them? And our own schools, and our roads and things, too, each town and city for itself?”

The man addressed as Bill paid little attention to these last remarks, but was talking politics with his neighbor. “Vote for F—— this year,” he was saying; and Starbuck caught the end of his sentence as he finished his own remarks.

“Vote!” he interrupted, with infinite contempt. “Vote, vote again! I tell you, you’re only doing yourselves harm. It ain’t no sort of use. The ballot-box is just the last toy the bosses have got up, to keep you fellows quiet. Why, all this machinery keeps up the Government, and the laws, and the property, and the very things we’ve got to fight against. There’s that patriotic bosh, and the talk about national honor, and the German wars and all—all for the benefit of the State, and the bosses, and the existing condition of things. What call has a Frenchy to go and cut a Dutchman’s throat—or I an Irishman’s? He’s my mate, just as the next fellow is. I say, what we’ve got to do is, to fight; but not fight each other. We’ve got to fight the aristocrats, or the bosses, or the capitalists at home. I tell you these bond-holder fellows are all over the world; they’re just as much in Egypt or in Mexico or in Turkey as they are here or in England. We’ve got to make a clean sweep, that’s what we’ve got to do.”

“By God, when a man talks, I like to hear him talk like a man,” said another, approvingly; and there was a murmur of applause.

“But what’s the use of destroying things?” said a third, of a sparing turn of mind.

“Destroying things! that’s the d——dest bugbear of all,” cried Starbuck. “Do you know, if everything in the world was destroyed to-morrow, we fellows could put it all back in two years? Aye, and less, if we worked with a will. I tell you, we’ve got to make a clean sweep, first of all; and when we build ’em up again, we’ll build for ourselves this time—and don’t you forget it,” he added, by way of climax.

“Well, you talk pretty fine for a young fellow,” answered one of the older men; and the party got up and exchanging a rough good-night, separated. Starbuck sat a long time with his chin on his hand, pulling at the embers of his pipe. Late at night the door opened and his sister returned; he heard a short colloquy at the door, and then she entered alone, with a flush upon her handsome face. She had the rude, frank bearing and the pitiless smile which belong to the type who take life’s pleasures without much regard to its pains or the pains of others; and the strong, full curve of the merry lip grows harder with age, with less of merriment and more of malice. But, withal, such a woman as no man could ever rule; and James felt it vaguely, as he sat and looked at her.

“A pretty time for you to be in o’ nights,” said he; and the girl laughed loudly; and putting off her hat and shawl upon a chair, went to a little mirror and stood before it, touching her hair with her fingers. Now, a laugh and then silence was perhaps of all things the most exasperating to James Starbuck.

“Who was that brought you home?” said he, rudely.

“I don’t know what call you’ve got to ask me that,” said she. “I go with what gentlemen I choose; I don’t interfere with you sticking to your workmen, do I? Phew! how it smells of pipes;” and Jenny ostentatiously rattled open the light windows.

“Well, its just here; I can’t have you going round this sort of way, that’s all,” and James banged his white fist upon the table. The girl only laughed, more contemptuously and less merrily than before, and the brother grew furious.

“I can’t have it—d’ye hear?”

“Mind your own business,” said the sister, “and don’t talk nonsense. I suppose you’d have me sit here in the back room and be a poor sempstress all my life. You like your lectures and your laborers’ clubs, and your political power that you’re all the time talking about—and I like to have a good time, and go out in society. We’re quits. What have you got to say against it?”

“It—it ain’t right,” said James, weakly.

“Oh, ain’t it? Well—I like it, then. I suppose you never do but what’s right, of course. You’re all the time complaining we don’t get enough of the good things of this world—I guess you’d get ’em yourself, if you could, anyhow. And I can.” And Jennie pulled off a very pretty little glove and showed a single diamond ring, which flashed bravely in the lamp-light. “You go ahead your way, an’ I’ll go mine; an’ I guess we’ll both get what we can.”

James was honest enough in his philosophy, and really without direct personal ends; and the last words goaded him to madness.

“Yes, an’ I guess you went your own way up to Allegheny City a little too much,” said he. “Where’s Charley Thurston now?” (This Charley Thurston was an old friend of Starbuck’s, to whom his sister had been once reported engaged.)

“I left Charley Thurston of my own free will, because I wanted to live in New York,” screamed the girl, really angry at last. “Look here, Jim Starbuck—I’ve had about enough of you anyhow. You can’t give me the position in life I require; and I’ve had more’n enough of your talk. This house is mine; and I paid for it, and for every dress I’ve got to my back—yes—and for this ring, too,” she added, noticing her brother’s glance. “You just go, do you hear? Clear out——” And the girl tore her brother’s coat from the nail and threw it into his lap.

“You don’t mean that,” said James.

“Yes, I do—I’m sick of you and all your low acquaintances. I suppose you want me to pay for your lodging, do you?”

James got up, wearily. They had had many such a dispute before; but, with his feeble health and physical condition he had never managed to keep his temper so long as now.

“You’ll be sorry for this, Jennie,” was all he said. “You know where to find me.” And he went out, and the front door closed behind him.

Left alone, the beauty rubbed her forehead impatiently, and pouted for a few minutes. Then she took out a small case of crimson velvet from her pocket and opened it; it was a framed and highly colored photograph of herself, on porcelain, and set in gilt, with small jewels inlaid in the frame. As she looked upon it, her mouth unbent at the corners, her lips came back to their usual roguish, fascinating curves. She laid aside her dress, and robed in a splendid pink-and-lilac négligé, unbound her hair and sat for a long time before the glass, looking from it to the miniature and back again to the original. Then she took out a letter and read its contents, still smiling.

And then, for the first time that evening, you might have seen a resemblance—to what? Why, for all the world—as she sat with her yellow hair falling on her full neck, with the contented, infantine smile, and the fashionably cut robe-de-chambre—for all the world, like Mrs. Flossie Gower.

CHAPTER XIII.
UNA AND THE LION.

JOHN HAVILAND was a banker down-town, a man of much business and of few intimate friends. He was over thirty at this time, and made no sign of getting married; which was the stranger, as his health was good, his wealth sufficient, and he cared less for the pleasures of life than for its happiness. He had no brothers nor sisters; his mother was a widow and he lived with her. Flossie said it was hard to get interested in such people as John Haviland.

Every afternoon at four he left his office and went on a long and solitary walk; thus his days were of a piece with his life. He never chose the conventional promenades: and through the outlying districts, the river villages, the Bowery, the forgotten little parks and green places; by Riverside and Morningside; through the mysterious Greenwich settlement, as well as Central Park, Morrisania, and Fort Washington; in any sort of weather—sleet, snow, rain, or freeze—you might have met the man, striding along like a well-oiled engine, observant of everything, from the street urchins to the signs in the shop-windows. This at an hour of day when he might have gone to teas; wherefore people said he had never been in love. Which is a rash predication of your chimney-sweeper, but happened to be true of Haviland.

One day his wandering took a direction beyond Washington Square. This most characteristic of all New York squares lies bounded on the north by Belgravia, on the west by Bohemia, on the east by Business, and on the south by Crime. West of it are rich districts of individuality, where the bedrock of shabby gentility develops occasional lodes and pockets for the student of humanity. It is a place where the deserving and the undeserving poor are huddled together, both of them inefficient, but neither wicked; and where all the inhabitants make some sort of incoherent struggle against the facts of life, and either, on the one hand, emulate respectability, or, on the other, excuse themselves with the divine license to vagabondage given by Art.

In one of the southernmost and more dubious of these streets, Haviland, steaming along with his mind on everything and a watch on deck—for he was no introspective Hamlet—noticed a group of hulking fellows ahead of him. They were the sort of persons that have no obvious function in the divine economy; persons whose principal end seems to be to get knocked on the head with clubs in street riots, thereby dying, at least, with some poetic justice. Haviland would not have ordinarily noticed them; but he was struck by their unwonted rapidity of motion, and looking, he saw that they were following something; that something being a graceful female figure, dressed in black. John Haviland swung promptly into line behind them; and gaining more rapidly upon them than they upon the lady, he sauntered innocently between two of them when she was still a few dozen yards in front of them. He glanced casually at them as he passed; they slunk away like beaten dogs, and melted, in divers directions, from sight.

In a moment more they had reached a broader street; and John was on the point of diverging his course again from that of his protégée, when, looking at her, he hesitated a second, and then walked rapidly up to her.

“Miss Holyoke?” said he, raising his hat and with an unavoidable shade of surprise in his tone.

“Mr. Haviland? you down here too? Or perhaps you come on the same errand?” And Gracie smiled frankly, as John looked up, puzzled, into her lovely face. “I am visiting some poor families, you know—for the Combined Charities——”

“But surely,” he broke in, “you ought not to be down here alone, Miss Holyoke?” They were at Sixth Avenue by this time; and Gracie was looking for a car.

“Usually my aunt lets me have the carriage,” said Gracie; “but Miss Livingstone needed it to-day. And I don’t like to drive quite up to the doors, even then. It seems so hard to drive up with one’s own carriage and horses, and then have to refuse them everything but a little work,” she added, smiling. “And Miss Brevier often goes with me.”

“Do you mean that you come here often?” asked John; and she told him that she and Miss Brevier had each “taken” the people on one street; and were seeing that they got help when help was necessary, and that the undeserving had none wasted upon them. John put her safely in the car, and resumed his pedestrian voyage with something new to think of. This personal visiting by refined young ladies was doubtless an excellent thing on its poetic side; but it could not but seem to him that the danger and the exposure were out of proportion to the benefit. He had had much experience among the city poor, and was perhaps a little skeptical as to the advantages to be gained by such devotion. For, as is the way of things so often here below, the selfish, the fraudulent, the undeserving, find it easy to advertise themselves and solicit help; while the saddest cases of all are lost in some modest garret; there they suffer unseen, ashamed to cry for charity, and wear their lives out silently. Except this latter class, and cases of long illness, most of the poor in New York are poor from laziness, intemperance, or crime; and their moral attitude towards society is rather that of sullen and callous defiance, or covetous acquiescence, than repentance. We need to get a better breed of men, not coddle the present one overmuch. Life suits them well enough as it is, if they could only get a few of their neighbors’ goods; such goods as they desire and Mrs. Flossie desired, and not the summum bonum. If degraded, they do not mind their degradation, but are content with it; money always, clothing and food sometimes, they will derisively accept; but work they will evade and not perform. Amongst these, thought Haviland, there may be much squalor, even much suffering; but there is little real poverty. Had he told all this to Gracie she would have said that it made no difference; and that one should try all the more to find the true cases, where righteous-minded beings were sinking in the turmoil of the world; and that one such family helped and saved was worth a hundred of impostures. Moreover, Gracie had not a man’s fear of being taken in; had she thought of it at all, she would have scorned it; the odium of deception falls on the deceiver, not the deceived; she would not stoop to be suspicious. And mercy will ever be a mystery to mere justice: like the ways of God to human intellect.

Meantime Haviland was walking along, lost in thought. He wandered mechanically through various unknown and afterward unremembered districts, by a strange old graveyard yet undesecrated, through Leroy Street, and Sixth Avenue, until his time was up; then he went home and dined, with his mother. In the evening he had his ward club meeting; this was a thing in which he took great interest, and he went as a matter of course. It was not an easy thing, at this time, to be admitted to the councils that rule in the free city of New York. And, as we have spent some time over pretty Flossie Gower, that flower of republican society, it may not be wasted time to see a little what thing this political club was, which may stand, in a sense, for its root.

If New England, with its offshoots on the Western Reserve and elsewhere, is the result of an attempt to obtain religious freedom, our whole country, in a still larger sense, is the result of an attempt to obtain political liberty. Our national faith has been that which is, of all possible faiths, the farthest from that of poor James Starbuck; it is government by everyone, while nihilism is the negation of any government at all; moreover it is individualism, as opposed to socialism. But in New York there has grown to be a class who, as others could give no time to government, sought to make up for it by giving all of theirs. For what proportion is there between the time of a busy merchant or physician, and that of a professional idler? And the interminable and vain caucuses, impossible to the one, form the delight of the other. These had leisure to make acquaintances; to know each other; to pass their days in bar-rooms, nurseries of political power; and long ere this, they had arrogated to themselves an effective oligarchy. Theirs to make nominations and to mar candidates’ careers; and the people, high-placed or low, had no right in their august councils save on sufferance. Thus we dropped aristocracy, and got a kakistocracy; but an oligarchy still.

John Haviland, however, had been admitted. He had had to struggle hard for this honor; and had finally attained it much more by his physical prowess than by his intellectual qualifications. Near his house were the rooms of a well-known “professor in the art of self-defence;” and there he had been in the habit of taking lessons, and occasionally “putting on the gloves” with all comers. Among the frequenters of the place were also many of the local magnates of the party; and Haviland, whose manners were frank and hearty, had thus met most of his ward leaders, and knocked the greater part of them down successively. Thus treated, they took a fancy to him; said that there was no nonsense about him; and one day, to Haviland’s great surprise, informed him that he had been elected a member of their local club.

The meeting to-night was not over-interesting. It might have been railed less incendiary, but it was certainly more selfish than Mr. James Starbuck’s, we have so lately left; while for earnestness and a definite attempt at effecting something, the two were not for one moment to be compared. For whereas the official political organization of the great national party in Haviland’s ward was occupied primarily with satisfactory apportionments of the offices among the would-be candidates, and secondarily with beating the rival party at the polls, Starbuck’s people went in much more directly for measures than for men, and as for offices, desired none at all.

Haviland found it hard to keep his attention, that evening, on the subject before the meeting. Tom was saying what a good fellow was William, and how the machinations of Richard might be defeated if Patrick were only secured, which might be done if Michael were given a local judgeship. It was pretty unsatisfactory talk at the best, and hardly can have been what the makers of the Constitution, or even what Monsieur Jean Jacques Rousseau, intended. Haviland had often stood up against it, alone; but that night he gave little ear to it, and things went their own way.

From this meeting he went to the Farnums’. He was a familiar in the house, and could call late, if he chose. Mrs. Farnum had disappeared; Mr. Farnum was rarely visible; but sitting in the front room alone, with a sweeping robe of pale-gray velvet across the floor, and head and arm leaning on a low chair, a book discarded lying face downward on the floor, he found the beauty. A moment before he entered, her eyes (purple-gray they were in color) had had a strange look, both proud and longing, both weary and fierce. This was peculiar to them; but it softened a shade as he entered, and she looked up at him.

“Mr. Haviland?” said she.

“Yes—I came to see you because——”

“Because you had nothing better to do,” said she, tersely.

“If you will,” said John, smiling. “Though it is not kind.”

“The world is not kind,” said the beauty, with a frown, looking off again.

“For the world you are not responsible,” said Haviland gravely. “Tell me, do you know Miss Holyoke?”

“Miss Holyoke? What Miss Holyoke?”

“Mrs. Richard Livingstone’s niece.”

“No,” said Kitty Farnum, curtly. “I don’t know Mrs. Livingstone.”

“But I thought you might have met Miss Holyoke. Do you not belong to the Combined Charities?”

“Certainly not.”

“I wish you did,” said John, half to himself. “I thought you and Miss Holyoke might—might find it pleasant to go together.”

“I have no interest in them,” said Miss Farnum, as if finally. And she looked as if she thought the world too intolerable to herself to dream of trying to mitigate it for others.

“Excuse me,” said Haviland; and the talk drifted off into commonplaces. But Miss Farnum’s manners were not lenient, and his call was a short one.

Haviland continued to take his afternoon walks; but he was now more than ever apt to lose himself in the district west of Washington Square. Gracie never came to any trouble, all that winter, on her charitable excursions; but, if you had ever met her there alone, you would have very likely met, just far enough behind her, so that she never saw him, steaming along in his usual wholesome way, our friend John Haviland.

CHAPTER XIV.
A SOCIAL SUCCESS.

ARTHUR HOLYOKE was making his way. Despite Charlie’s admonitions to the contrary, he had succeeded in living within his income; and, after a six months’ trial at the office, the firm put him upon a salary. It was small, to be sure; but it was a distinct step toward the home that he was hoping to build. He had joined one club, recognizing that after the initiation the expense was trifling; and that he must be put in a way to meet men. Here he spent much of his time; bachelor lodgings are cheerless.

Business was, on the whole, a disillusion. The firm of Townley & Tamms had formerly carried large banking and investment accounts; but these had not increased of late years; and it gradually became evident to Arthur that all this legitimate business would hardly pay their office expenses. Where they really made their money was either in buying large blocks of securities at less than their value, or, more commonly, in selling new issues, after a long course of artificial demand and advertisement, at very much more than they had ever paid for them. Tamms was the light and soul of the firm. He never went up-town into society; he never sought to shine in the fashionable world, and pretended that he did not want to. His largest social orbit did not transcend the society of the Brooklyn church to which he belonged; in the city of churches he lived and had his being; and he was in all respects a most reputable citizen. Old Mr. Townley might come down at eleven or at nine; Arthur might leave at three or at five; but they always met Tamms at the office, or left him there, curled up over his private desk, silent, in his formal black coat, with his restless eyes shining like a spider’s; and he seemed to have a spider’s capacity for living without fresh air and exercise. The deacons entrusted to him the church funds, and even, occasionally, made a long or short sale of stocks, on private account, at his advice; for Tamms, even by these aspirants for the kingdom of heaven, was reputed a man of remarkable business sagacity on earth. And in these days, when even the church must have its secular foundation and its corner lots, the laying up of treasure on earth is not to be avoided; what we need, therefore, is some really sure preventive of moth and rust, and some wholly efficacious precaution against those thieves that break in and steal. Although there is, I believe, no text telling us that thieves need be always with us.

But the tendency of the times is toward a fiercer battle in the struggle for existence, and weaker laws to keep the rapacious in check. Of the ever smaller surplus that the world’s work wins, a larger share is every year being demanded by the laborer, and aggregated capital, organized monopoly, growing hungrier as it has to take less, thirsts each year more greedily for all that is left. And the middle class, which has ruled the world so long, is being ground to pieces by these warring Titans.

Tamms perceived this, not so dithyrambically, but more practically, and he profited by it. No one could turn in and out of corporations more cleverly than he; or turn them more adroitly to private ends, or drop out of them more apropos. Such an ingenious contrivance for clever men are these; more ingenious than the law which governs them. Indeed, the law has now dropped far behind, standing where it stood in the Middle Ages, when corporations were few and simple, and it stares agape at the Frankensteins of its own creation. But these same soulless monsters afford to their masters unlimited power, without interest or responsibility; and Tamms revelled in them. And Tamms was a self-made man, and a smart one; and the public deified him for both attributes, as is its wont; and his church would have canonized him, had his business needed a saintship instead of a seat in the Stock Exchange.

Arthur’s head grew dizzy at the corporations, and syndicates, and pools and other unnamed enterprises that Tamms’s busy life was wound up in. Head and chief was, of course, the great Allegheny Central Railroad; this was the chief gold-mine that they worked; for in it Tamms could make his own market and buy and sell at his own price. But there were many others. And of these, the stock of the Silas Starbuck Oil Company had grown lately prominent.

The Stock Exchange was no longer a strange sight to Arthur; he had grown familiar with it, with its moods, its dialect, its very battle-cries and interjections. And here he had seen the Allegheny Central bought and sold, and bought again; and of late he had been sent to out-of-the-way holes and corners, auctions, and even to the up-town houses of retired merchants (Mrs. Gower’s among the number, only Mrs. Gower would not sell) in search of the share certificates of the Starbuck Oil.

“Governor’s up to something,” said Charlie. “Don’t believe anybody knows what—not even the old man.” The “governor” was Mr. Tamms; Mr. Townley was the “old man.” And it was true the latter had little to do with the business of the firm. He had been a conservative, prominent banker in his day; and still carried much weight with the multitude; but, though he bore his gray head with much dignity behind his white choker, there was little in it—as Townley might have said. Little remained of the once active spirit behind it but a fixed belief in Allegheny Central and a strong taste for landscape paintings of the French school. However, no one had found this out but Tamms, not even Mr. Townley himself, though Charlie, as we have seen, suspected it. And Mr. Townley was a merchant of the old school, whom all the world delighted to make trustee for its posterity. He had a great box in the Safety Deposit Vaults, crammed with the stocks and bonds upon which others lived; and these he administered carefully and well.

But one great day there was a “corner” in Starbuck Oil stock; for some mysterious reason the once common certificates had disappeared, like partridges on the first of September. Madder and more extravagant grew the demand for it at the board; scantier still the supply offering; one per cent. a day was bid, even for its temporary possession, so highly were the shares suddenly prized. There were vague rumors of “plums,” “melons,” and consolidations; meantime the Starbuck Oil stock had disappeared from human vision. Then, one morning, came the news; the Allegheny Central had absorbed the Silas Starbuck Oil Company; two shares were to be given for one, and in addition, to cover terminal facilities, connection, etc., five millions of six per cent. bonds were to be issued. Townley & Tamms, it was announced, had taken them all, and offered them to the eager public for 105 and interest. “Thought the governor was up to something,” said Charlie. “What do you suppose we paid for them?—the bonds, I mean,” said he to Arthur; and he put his tongue in his cheek and looked very knowing.

Arthur was kept busy, writing personal letters to the more valued clients of the firm, calling attention to the merits of the bonds in question; and preferred not thinking of the matter at all. He solaced himself with human sympathy; that is to say, the delights of society as offered in balls and dinners; and soon grew so accustomed to the stimulant as to take much pleasure in it.

For do we not see every day, gentle reader—that is to say, fashionable, fascinating, admired reader—how great and potent is the charm of this life? Do we not see men ruining themselves, girls giving themselves, for this alone? How dull, how short-sighted must our forefathers have been, who flattered themselves that we, their clever children, would content ourselves with the rights of man! What we desire is the envy of mankind.

Humanity has indeed labored over a thousand years for these simpler things, ever since that crowd of uncultivated Dutchmen came down on Rome, and the feudal system adopted Christianity unto itself and strangled it, or sought to do so. We have tried with brain and sinew, through blood and fire, to get this boon, that our lives may be respected, and our liberty of person not constrained. And now, in the nineteenth century, we have got it; and lo! society is bored. Languid and dull—too dull to hear, in its liberal mass, that low and distant murmur, too skeptical, indifferent, to see the dark low cloud, just forming, now, to the West and East—is it a mighty swarm of locusts, or is it merely storm and rain? Here and there a tory sees it, dreading it; here and there a radical, dreaming of it; their imagination aiding both. And the multitude, who are not indifferent, and who are never bored, have little time to look at the weather, still less to read and think; or, if they read, it is no longer now the Bible, which, they are told, is but a feudal book, a handy tool of bishops and of premiers. Moreover, modern enlightenment teaches that it is a lie; there never were twelve basketfuls of fragments left from loaves and fishes on the Mountain; therefore what words were spoken on the Mountain cannot be true.

The world is free; and ninety-nine per cent. are miserable, and the other one is bored. So, we remember, Flossie Gower was bored, when she got all her wishes, and had liberty to do what thing she chose. But surely, liberty being the greatest good, it follows she must choose to do good things? But to-day the light of the sun does not content us, nor the fragrance of the woods and fields, the breath of free air and the play of mind and body, love and friendship, and health and sympathy. These are but the tasteless water of life; the joys of possession and of envy are the wine. The early pagans were happy with these indeed, benighted creatures; but what though the ancient text says, What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Others will envy us the world; but our own souls pall with us. We moderns have invented amour-propre. What matters being happy? The true bliss is, that others think you so. We have realized equality; and all these good people (even to Jem Starbuck’s sister) struggle to escape from it. Jem Starbuck was a nihilist, and their logical counterpart. What did Flossie care for her two horses and Russian sleigh and silver mountings and black and white furs and waving scarlet plumes? If Central Park were the wastes about the Northern Pole, do you suppose she would care to take her sleigh-ride there, and show off to old John Franklin’s whitened bones alone? Is it the light, and the air, and the motion, that makes her pleasure; is it the mere child’s delight in brilliant colors that makes her flaunt her trailing scarlet plumes; or is it the subtile intoxication of the world’s notice of those things the world desires? And Mrs. Gower’s equals see these things and do homage; and their daughters wed for these, and their husbands work; and in pretty Jenny Starbuck’s head, walking on the roadside, the homage turns to envy; and in James her brother’s heart, to gall.

Arthur went in this sleigh many times, and enjoyed it, and said pretty things to Mrs. Gower in exchange. He had a poet’s delight in rich and beautiful things, in show and speed and glitter. Shine, not light, attracts your women, says Goethe; and the old courtier-poet might have said the same of men, himself included. And Mrs. Gower lolled back, beautiful, her yellow hair shining strangely through the snow; so Helen in the Greek sunlight; so Faustina in the streets of noble Rome; so Gutrune, by whose wiles twelve thousand heroes and the gods went down to darkling death. All these were blondes, and smiled and charmed and had their adoration and their joy of life. What call had Flossie to trouble herself with the eternal verities, or man’s past or future? She was not eternal. She was, furthermore, a skeptic and a cynic—if a butterfly can be said to be skeptic of eternal life. She had no real knowledge of the things she won. She would have liked the sword of Siegfried for a panoply, to put the Grail in her cabinet of rare china. She would have liked to possess these things, and money and fans and dresses, and have other women know that she possessed them. She would have liked to possess men’s hearts.

Not that she was wicked. She was no tragedy queen, no evil heroine of romance; she had no desire, so far as she knew, to injure anyone. She would have paid a fortune for a picture that other people admired; but she would have exchanged it for a ball-dress, had there been but one ball-dress in the world; and she simply did not believe in the Holy Grail, or the sword of Siegfried, or men’s hearts. So a rude conqueror thirsts for the great King’s talisman, and barters it for an ounce of colored glass, and wears the latter on a ring in his nose. But yet this glass is not the ultimate reality, despite its wearer’s pride.

So some air-dwelling German has told us, long time the world slumbered unconscious, wrapped in a dreamless sleep. And the gold of the Rhine still slumbered in its waters, and the gods kept guard. Then all things broke to consciousness, after a myriad of cycles of years; and their first awakening was a joy; and men arose, and lived in the light of the earth. But shortly, after some few centuries, this consciousness became a blight; and they turned, and knew themselves. And the gold was wrested from the deep waters by an evil race of men, forswearing love forever; and the love of the world turned to avarice, and the love of man to the love of self, and the love divine was forgotten and whelmed in the dusk of the gods. And so the pessimists of the day must follow out the old myth, and tell us that the end and cure of all is this darkness of the gods, the death of all things, the black waters that well again from earth, the rising waves of the dreamless sea.

But behind Zeus and Prometheus and Hera lay Fate, a power not themselves, to whom both gods and men must bow. And beneath Wotan and Loge sits Erda, in the heart of Earth, silent; and the web of things to come is spun, slowly, by the silent Norns.

CHAPTER XV.
THE DIVERSIONS OF FINE LADIES.

PARIS had palled upon Mr. Caryl Wemyss, and in February he returned to New York. Paris, he found, had deteriorated since the Empire. Moreover, his social position there was not wholly satisfactory. In London it was better; but even there they did not sufficiently distinguish between him and other Americans; between him, son of the famous poet-dramatist, minister to England and man of letters, when there were no other American men of letters, and, for instance, the present minister, whom Wemyss did not consider a gentleman at all. So his friend, the young Earl of Birmingham, wishing to visit America, Wemyss had returned with him; and was now piloting that nobleman through the maze of New York society.

But this proved a more difficult task than Wemyss anticipated; for the Earl was quite unable to recognize any distinctions, and evinced a most catholic taste for all beauty, unadorned by birth, and pretty faces without pedigree. And now the Farnums had presumed to give a ball in his honor; and Birmingham was there, and Wemyss, of course, had had to go there with him, and Flossie Gower had come to keep him company.

A man may be a peer of England and wear a coronet; but a man’s a man for a’ that. And as the pudgy, little, sandy-haired Englishman, with his scrap of whisker, his red eyes and his white eyebrows, stood beside Miss Farnum, it was easy, at least for Wemyss and Flossie Gower, to see that he was much impressed.

If one had to name the potent quality of Miss Farnum’s presence, I should call it majesty; you, perhaps, might call it scorn. Her walk was that of Juno, over clouds; beneath her coronal of red-brown hair her eyes were great and gray, now looking out beyond you, over all things, sphinx-like—now introspective, but disdainful still.

Mrs. Gower could see that she treated Birmingham as a high-priestess might some too importunate worshipper; and the noble Englishman was, for once, embarrassed of his person—and by hers.

“Who is that girl?” asked Mrs. Gower of Wemyss. “The daughter of our host?”

“A fine piece of flesh and blood,” said he.

“A fine piece of soul and spirit, or I am much mistaken,” retorted Mrs. Gower. “See, she positively dares to be bored, and the Earl is at his trumps at last. Really, I must have her at my house——”

“She’d be charmed to go, I’ve no doubt,” said Wemyss, with the gesture of a yawn. “But come, you surely don’t expect me to talk to one pretty woman of another? Tell me of yourself.”

“What is there to tell? Look at Baby Malgam’s violets—they are lovely.”

“The loveliness of violets,” said Wemyss, “is a fact established some years since, and which I am ready at all times and seasons to admit. Your own loveliness is a more inspiring subject.”

Mrs. Gower took absolutely no notice of this, but continued to watch Miss Farnum, as a vampire might study a torpedo. Wemyss was seeking a more gracious simile, when Charlie Townley came up and ousted him. “You are coming to Tony Duval’s supper at the ball, Mrs. Gower? Tony has got the Earl and Mrs. Malgam——”

“Oh, I am going—if it will not shock Mr. Wemyss here,” laughed Flossie. Wemyss cast at her one look of grave reproach, and bowed his own dismissal. To suppose that anything done by others could ruffle his own breeding—he, a polished patrician of the décadence! (The décadence was a favorite theme of Wemyss; perhaps it was pleasant to think that the society in which he had not been a success—at least, not a popular success—was rushing to its own failure.) Townley sat down by Mrs. Gower.

“But seriously, Charlie, don’t you think it may be a trifle risqué—this opera ball?”

“Qui n’a rien, ne risque rien,” said Charlie, bowing. Flossie laughed; he was one of her ancient train, discarded; a privileged character. In reality this ball, advertised to be improper, was very decent and very dreary, for the most part. And they could draw the curtain of their box, like peris in paradise overlooking gehenna, and turn aside from the multitude below.

But perhaps we shall see more, if we go with Jenny Starbuck. For he had asked her, too; and she was going, masked, upon the floor. She had hesitated much; and refused an invitation from Mr. Dave St. Clair. Probably it would have given her more moral courage had she known that Mrs. Levison Gower was going too.

Her brother James she had not seen for months; not since that night when she had turned him into the street. She did not care; he was but a common fellow, and she meant to be a lady. For some time she had taken lessons for the stage, as being the quickest path to elegance of life; but she was a stupid woman, intellectually, and had not mind for this. In mind she was not like her unknown cousin, Flossie; but she could only imitate her in what she saw. Her quilted satin cloak was very like Flossie’s; and she too could get into a coupé and tell the coachman to drive to the Academy.

An immense board floor had been laid over the entire theatre; scattered about this were orange and lemon trees in green tubs; and among them walked perhaps a couple of hundred people—nearly all in fancy-dress and many with false noses or fantastic wigs. They looked like the chorus of an opera just dismissed, except that they appeared more low-spirited and ill at ease. Many of the women were in men’s costumes—Magyar uniforms, Cossack, Austrian; some even were in jocose dresses, making a burlesque of themselves; and Jenny, dressed like a lady, looked on these with scorn. Here and there a quadrille was being danced, and among these were a few paid dancers whose kicks and gyrations were supposed to indicate spontaneous gayety and exuberance of joy. Taken all-in-all, it did not so well imitate Paris, even, as Flossie Gower and her following, London.

But Jenny stood waiting at the dressing-room door, and did not venture on the floor alone. It was still more than half empty, and though the great orchestra rang out in most exciting rhythm, the crowd seemed cold. But above, in the tiers of boxes, every box was full; here the women all were dressed like Jenny, and a few were even masked.

She waited there, in vain; till, finally, Mr. St. Clair saw her and offered himself as escort, magnanimously. Jenny was glad enough to take his arm, and they made the tour of the floor. He laughed at her for wearing her mask, but she insisted still. The band broke into a waltz—fiery, intoxicating; the floor filled with dancers, glancing by them in gay colors, fancifully dressed; but there were more diamonds in the boxes, and bare necks, and men in ordinary evening dress. In front of her was a large box, with three or four ladies, masked; one, her breast all covered with a diamond rain. The box was just above the place where Jenny stood; and she looked at the necklace enviously. Its owner gave a little scream, and Jenny heard the words, how shocking! Jenny followed her glance; beside her on the floor were two girls in satin tights. Then as she looked back to the box, she saw Mr. Townley bend down and speak to her; Jenny lifted her own mask a moment and tossed her head at him and smiled, then leaned heavier on the arm of Dave St. Clair.

Charlie got over his confusion in a moment; but not too quickly for a chorus of delighted laughter from the ladies near him. “Who is she, Mr. Townley?” laughed she of the diamonds; “she’s very pretty.” And “tell us all about it, Charlie—we won’t tell,” roared Tony Duval.

“You’re welcome to all I know,” said Townley, coolly. “She’s a dress-maker on Sixth Avenue, and makes dresses for my aunt.” Tony only laughed the more at this, and good-natured Lucie Gower led Charlie out of the box. “Come,” said he, “you must introduce me to her; I’m sure she does business with my uncle.” In the back of the box a little, red-haired Englishman was talking to a younger lady, sitting in the shadow; and she was glad, when everybody’s attention was drawn to a masked figure in the box opposite—a lady whose green tulle dress and very low corsage bespoke her also fashionable. “What superb emeralds!” cried the black-haired lady, in front.

“I’d have thought Mrs. Hay would have known better,” said the other. “But there’s no mistaking the emeralds—on those shoulders——”

“What! you don’t say its Mrs. Wilton Hay? Where did she get them? I asked Jack for a set not half so fine, and they cost a fortune. Who gave them to her?”

“Mr. Hay, of course,” laughed the other.

“You did not know diplomacy had been so profitable?” said Tony Duval. “See, there goes your husband—he has just been introduced to the blonde beauty.”

“Not really? ’Pon honor, I didn’t think he had it in him,” said she. Then Tony Duval began to relate to his companion an anecdote of a nature that seemed to Arthur most surprising; he was sitting behind the rivière of diamonds; and the rest of the company seemed bored.

“Positively, Mr. Wemyss, there is nothing new under the sun,” answered the blonde in front. “After all, the flowery paths seem quite as stupid as the straight and narrow way.”

“It’s very slow,” answered he addressed. “They’ve too much conscience for it still.”

“Perhaps,” suggested another, “we could give them lessons.”

It was Van Kull who spoke; and in the pause that ensued came the point of Duval’s story, accentuated by the silence; and Wemyss tactfully called attention to an adjoining box, where the ladies were sitting with their feet upon the railing, smoking cigarettes.

“Come,” said she of the diamonds, rising; “we have had our moral lesson; it is time to go.”

From the floor, Jenny Starbuck had watched this box, until she saw them rise as if to go. She stayed at the ball many hours later. But Arthur, in the back of the box, was witness of a little scene that she could not see.

The elder ladies went out first, passing the Earl, who seemed busied with his companion’s opera-cloak. She was standing, leaning upon the back of an armchair, with her weight upon one round, bare arm; and as Arthur went out of the door he was almost certain that he saw their noble guest lay his hand upon her arm, familiarly.

A second after, and Arthur had dropped his opera-glass; it rolled back into the box, and he went back for it. There was no change in Kitty Farnum’s attitude; she was still leaning on the chair, but looking at Lord Birmingham: her face cold and fixed, like some scornful face of stone. She gave her arm to Arthur and walked out.

CHAPTER XVI.
IN MAIDEN MEDITATION.

GRACIE was sitting alone in her own room; she had been reading—the “Faery Queene” the book—but it had slipped from her hand—and now she was thinking. Not of herself, but of others; Arthur, perhaps, principally. For she had given her heart to him; and in a perfect maidenly love there is always some foretaste of the maternal, a fond solicitude as of a mother for her child. Perhaps even Arthur did not know how much she thought of him: and Mrs. Livingstone was too much bound up in Mamie, and Mamie too much in herself, to notice it; Miss Brevier alone had seen it, and had held her peace. Gracie fancied that no one knew it, save Arthur himself; though for her and Arthur it had changed the world. The world itself she did not understand; all things did not look clear to her that winter; the people of her acquaintance puzzled her. It almost seemed as if she would not have their sympathy in all ways; but this could not be proven, for Gracie never made a confidante. Now Mamie Livingstone, on the other hand, confided everything to her; and then, apparently, forgot it all, much as a Parisian lady may be supposed to forget the substance of her last auricular confession; for Gracie noted a certain repugnancy or incoherence in this young woman’s heart history of which the heart’s possessor was unaware entirely.

Mamie was intensely a metropolitan girl; the exquisitely sensitive product of a great social nerve-centre. She did not know her Emerson, and was wholly untroubled with “the whichness of the why:” but she had mastered her own environment at an early age. And she had—except, of course, as against young men, her natural prey—a frank disposition and a warm heart.

The great event of her life, her appearance in society, was to take place in the season following; and all through this winter Mamie was in a state of electric anticipation. She was already laying, in an innocent and girlish way, her wires. What Gracie failed chiefly to understand was these very love confidences, above mentioned: for though Mamie talked most ardently of the qualities of her successive swains, they seemed to bear a much more definite relation to her own self-love than to her heart. But then, it was her self-love that was the source of motive to her; her heart was an amusement only. And Mamie knew the world, as has before been hinted, à priori; she was a girl of transcendental mind, who saw through the copper-plate formulas of her study-books to the realities around her; with innate ideas and tastes as to what was fashionable and really fine. She alternately patronized and petted Gracie, who was three years older than herself; yet Gracie had more influence over her than anyone else. As for the parental authority of her father and mother—the phrase is too grotesquely mediæval to be completed. Mr. Livingstone was an old gentleman with a million and a half of property, whose manners had outlived his mind.

Gracie was looking—if I could describe to you the manner of her look, you would all men be poor Arthur’s rivals, I am sure; the direction of her look was simply to the northward, through the window. The manner of it—perhaps even Arthur never wholly noted it; may be he thought all girls had it; may be he even preferred the scintillating alertness of Pussie Duval’s or Baby Malgam’s—people now called her Baby with a touch of malice—which was more new to him. It was a deep and holy radiance, as if the look’s object were not yet quite found, and a certain questioning withal. Gracie was almost sure to have it when alone; perhaps a certain exquisite if unconscious tact restrained it, with other girls, lest they should call it pose; but no man—that is, no man—ever saw it fairly, but his soul was turned to fire. Medusa’s look it was that turned a man to stone; but there seems to be no metaphor for this opposite one. Perhaps because the Greeks had never met with it; it is found since Hamlet and since Gretchen, and grows mostly in the country, with books, sweet thoughts, and solitude. I have more rarely met with it in crowded colleges; yet it is not absolutely inconsistent with a knowledge of Greek.

“You do look so sweet, cousine,” cried Mamie as she tripped into the room, “but awfully poky. I’ve got such a thing to tell you about Mrs. Lucie Gower. And oh, do you know? Charlie Townley called here to-day. And somebody else too—aha?”

“Who was it?” said Gracie.

“Who was it, Ma’am Soft-airs, indeed. Cousine, do let me try a bit of rouge some time—that blush was so becoming to you. Mr. Haviland, of course; and I peeked through the crack of the door when the servant said you weren’t at home. But tell me, Gracie dear, do you think it would do for me to ask Mr. Townley to dinner next time? You know, I’ve had all the younger men, and he dances like an angel.”

“Why, Mamie, you don’t mean to have a dance?”

“No, no, stupid, but for next winter, I mean. I’m determined to have Charlie lead my german, you know; they say all the young married women are fighting for him. And the only other man is Daisy Blake, and he’s too slow for anything. Besides, I’m dead in love with Townley, you know.”

“Oh,” said Gracie.

“I heard he gave a supper-party last night, and both Mrs. Gower and Mrs. Malgam were there, and the Earl of Birmingham; and afterward they all went in masks to a public ball. Wasn’t it horrid? And just think what fun it would be to get him away from those married women? Why, Marion Roster told me last year that the débutantes had no chance at all. I’ll see about that.” And Mamie stamped her little foot and tossed her pretty head defiantly; and indeed it looked as if the filly might make it hard running for the four-year-olds. And Charlie Townley, had he seen it, might have felt that he had gotten his reward on earth. For I doubt if any poet’s bays or any soldier’s laurel were more highly prized by maid or wife than Mamie, the rich, well-bred, well-born, rated Charlie Townley’s style of excellence. Le style c’est l’homme, says some old, grave writer; what then is style to a giddy young woman? And I doubt if either bays or laurel be so marketable. And Charlie was a man of the world, familiar to its stock-exchanges; who did not mean to marry, but meant to marry well.

Gracie looked at Mamie Livingstone with some faint wonder; and then the young girl laughed loudly, as was usual, and kissed her, and called her a dear old thing; and laughed again, as if she had been jesting. And so the other one supposed it, and smiled back through Mamie’s many kisses.

“Look here,” Mamie began again, with a gesture of triumph; and she pulled a note from her pocket, and waved it triumphantly in Gracie’s face. “I’ve got a note from him already!”

“Oh, Mamie——”

“’Sh, Ma’am Prunes and Prisms—it’s only about a summer fan. I asked him to get a kind which I knew had only been made at one place down-town, and they were all sold out, so he had to write and tell me so. See, isn’t the signature nice? ‘your devoted servant, Charles Townley’—and such a nice manly hand.” And Mamie roguishly made pretence of kissing it, the while her eyes danced with merriment. Gracie looked at her—puzzled; and Mamie only laughed the more. “There, there, don’t look so grave, you delightful old darling; it’s not so awfully serious, after all—yet.” And with the final burst of laughter that accompanied her last word, Mamie danced from the room.

Left alone, Gracie’s smile, which had reflected Mamie’s, changed to a deeper look, a look that Mamie’s face could never mirror. Yes, it was a puzzle, in a way; people so rarely seemed to care for the essentials of things. Gracie’s notion of a man was enlightened heroism, of a woman perfect bravery and trust, and the light in the lives of both the light of the world that comes from another, like the sun’s. But to these young ladies and gentlemen, the light of the world was the light of a ball-room.

So she sat there, looking northward over the roofs and steeples, to the bright sky-line; and perhaps, if an eye were at the other end of that ray of light that slanted through space to meet her own, it saw a human soul. But to the telegraph wires and brick chimneys, to Mamie and the men near by on the roofs, it was a girl with a pretty face like another.

Human nature, they tell us; and another says, people are all alike when it comes to the point; and the motives of mankind have ever been the same, says a third. The course of history is thus and so; it is human nature to do this, and take this bundle of hay rather than that; and we are all alike, they repeat again; scholars, men, and books repeat again, until we do become human nature—or drown ourselves in preference.

But it is a lie. Humanity is not all alike; it is as a broad plain of grass or weeds; and this is alike. But among it, here and there, there flames a poppy, and above it, here and there, stands up the glorious lily, like a halo on a flower’s stem; and beneath it breathes the sweet and gentle violet. Hard by grow the weeds, and dock and hardy thistles; on one stem perhaps with these, unconscious of them.

So mankind is a great crowd composed of common units, all alike; but with them walking, mostly alone, there journeys the hero, and there the martyr, and the woman with a soul. And the hero looks straight ahead, sad and strong; the martyr looks up to heaven; and the soul looks about it and breathes its fragrance to its fellows.

But the crowd is so great that these three, though they are many, yet seem few. And they journey as they may, and work, and do, and die; but ah me! they are lonely, for they seldom meet, each one the other; they are fortunate if they see each other’s radiance dimly, through the crowded field.

CHAPTER XVII.
A CULTIVATOR OF THISTLES.

SPRING had come. Theatres were fuller, the opera not so full; dancing parties were less frequent, and there began to be talk of races and of country parties; it was no longer a rule without exception that the men wore dress suits who were dining at Delmonico’s. Besides this, there were also the green buds, and the crocuses, and the twitter of the birds in Central Park.

Arthur Holyoke looked like the spring, as he sauntered down the steps of his lodgings with a light stick and betook himself, swinging it, to that temple of a modern Janus, the railway station. Ah, you may talk to me of rialtos and bridges of sighs, of moonlit pavilions and of temples, court-rooms, and shrines; but the great stage of humanity, of catastrophes, partings, and dénouements—is it not now the railway station? Here the jaded head of a family, tired of struggling, beheads himself by abandoning his middle-aged wife and her six children; here Jack, fresh from college, goes down to that country party where he shall meet Jill, and proposes to her, the very next night but one, on the piazza above the tennis-ground. Here mamma comes home, or papa goes away; or we leave for India, or Grinnell Land, or school. This is the portal to pleasant long vacations, and to dreary working days; here Edwin and Angelina begin their new life, and murderers escape; and old men come home.

Arthur had gained decision, alertness in his manner; he wore a spring suit of a most beautiful delicate color; if he had luggage, it was all disposed of, and he looked like a poet hovering above earthly cares. In the one hand he held an Evening Post, in the other a cigarette; and as he took his seat in the parlor-car he opened the one and threw away the other in a manner that betokened his content with himself, and, consequently, with the world. For he was going on a week’s visit to La Lisière, the country-seat of the Levison-Gowers, at Catfish-on-the-Hudson.

Arthur looked about to see if any of his fellow-guests were on the train; but there was no one who looked like a likely member of so select a party as all of Mrs. Levison Gower’s were known to be. There was a maiden with a gold ornament at her neck, and a pot-hatted and paunchy personage with a black coat and tie—both quite impossible. Arthur gave them up and buried himself in his newspaper.

At Catfish he alighted, and standing with his luggage, on the outer platform, looked about him inquiringly. A groom, who was standing by a pretty little dog-cart with a nervous horse, touched his hat. Arthur walked up to him. “Can you tell me how to get to Mrs. Levison Gower’s?”

“Mr. Holyoke?” said the groom, touching his hat again. “This is to be your horse, sir,” and placing the reins in Arthur’s hands, he lifted the leather trunk and overcoats in behind. Arthur got in front and the horse started at a jump, the groom catching on as they turned. “Beg pardon, sir,—first turn to the left, sir,” said he, as Arthur held in the horse and hesitated at the first dividing place of roads. Thus directed, they soon came to a high stone gate, clad with ivy, each post surmounted by a stone griffin which Arthur recognized as belonging to the Leveson-Gower arms. (The American family, said Mrs. Gower, spelt it with an i.) Through this they passed and by a lodge with a couple of children at the door, who courtesied as he drove by; and then through quite a winding mile of well-kept park and green coppiced valley. At last they reached the house; in front of it was a level lawn and terrace bounded by a stone balustrade, and beneath this lay the blue Hudson and the shimmering mountains beyond.

Arthur was given a small room, in the third story; but it had a view of the river and a comfortable dressing-room; from the window of which he caught a view of a most glorious sky as the sun went down behind the purple mountains. This passed the time very pleasantly; for it took him only a few minutes to dress, and he had a certain delicacy about appearing below, while it was yet sunlight, in his dress suit. The scene even suggested a short poem to him, the gradual fading of one mountain-crest after another as the sun left them all in turn; something about the sun of love illuminating and then leaving sombre the successive ages of man. But the clangor of a gong interrupted his first stanza; and he went down-stairs.

Here, too, they were admiring the beauties of nature. Several of the guests were assembled on the lawn-terrace before mentioned, and talking in subdued tones about the scenery; among them two or three lovely women, flaunting their fair heads in evening dress and laces. Arthur recognized Miss Farnum, and Mrs. Malgam, and who was that lovely creature in the corner with Charlie Townley? A most radiant and perfect blonde, whose yellow hair was luminous in the twilight. He would ask his hostess. She was standing in the corner of the terrace, leaning over the stone balustrade and looking into the still depths of the forest beneath; a man was beside her. She turned as Arthur approached, and held out her hand frankly to him.

“So glad to see you, Mr. Holyoke,” said she. “Mr. Wemyss I think you know.”

Arthur did know Mr. Wemyss; and admitted as much to that indifferent gentleman. “A beautiful place you have here, Mrs. Gower,” was all he could think to say.

“Perfect,” added Wemyss. “Look at that mountain—not the first one, but the second, half lost in the gloom, beyond the bay of bright water—I have rarely seen a mountain placed with more exquisite taste.”

“You are very kind,” replied Mrs. Gower with a slight smile. “I think I may say, with Porthos, that my mountains are very fine—‘mon air est très-beau,’ you know.”

“Tell me, Mrs. Gower,” said Arthur, “who is the lady talking with the man I do not know; the dark man, with broad shoulders?”

“Don’t you know him? That is Lionel Derwent, the great English traveller—writer—soldier—socialist—what shall I say? And she is Mrs. Wilton Hay. You must indeed know her, for you are to take her in to dinner. Shall I introduce you?”

Mrs. Hay was one of those apparent and obvious beauties of whom all young men are rather afraid. How could his poor attentions content so experienced a shrine? Still, it was in a state of rather pleasurable panic that he went up to her, was presented, and made his due obeisance. Mrs. Hay did not snub him; her mission was to fascinate; and from this and other points about her, Arthur divined that she was English. English beauties are less coy than ours, and more eager to please: all professional manners must be equable. And even Mrs. Flossie Gower’s photographs were not sold on Broadway; though perhaps she sighed for that distinction.

“I am told I am to have the pleasure of taking you in to dinner,” said Arthur. Mrs. Hay had dazzled him a little, and he could think of nothing better to say.

“What a pity you had to be told!” laughed she. “It would be so much nicer if one could choose partners, you know. It’s almost as bad as marriage, isn’t it? All the spontaneity of the companionship is destroyed; and you haven’t any escape—at least, until after dinner.” Now, this was a clever device of the siren by which she bound Arthur to her band of adorers for the whole evening. He was nothing loath.

“Marriage!” he answered vaguely. He started to tell her she would rob the grave of its terrors, let alone matrimony; but it seemed rather sudden. So he laughed; and swore to himself as he felt that he had laughed sillily. Was he such a country-boy as to be afraid of this woman because she was handsome and he saw it?

Dinner was announced; so he offered her his arm and said nothing until they were seated. Then they both looked around; and it was the occasion for those whispered confidences about the general coup d’œil and the appearance of their fellow-creatures which form so quickly the little bonds of mutual likes and dislikes.

And, truly, it is a fine and a suggestive sight—a dinner-party—custom cannot stale, to the thoughtful guest, its infinite variety; however age may wither it. For are not here collected, in one carefully arranged bouquet, the single flowers of our vast society? The newest varieties, the brightest tints and rarest hybrids. Here are twelve of the few who have wealth to bloom and give fragrance, leisure to cultivate, develop, and adorn; they are fretted with no cares until the morrow; their duty but pleasure, to be happy their one endeavor, to please and to be pleased. I am afraid to say how many folk have labored that this hour should be a pleasant one to these; shall we say, a thousand? The table is snowy and sparkling; about it sit these six men, whose chief virtue seems conformity, those six women, whose merit seems display. They do not eat, they dine; a daily sacrament of taste and studied human life. So, far above the cares of earth, feast leisurely the careless gods—do they not?

Who are our gods and goddesses? Well, first, there is Mrs. Levison Gower; she is in gray silk and silver, pétillante with esprit (how does it happen that she always makes one go to the French for epithets?). On the right, Lord Birmingham, who looks bored; next him (to Arthur’s slight surprise) is Kitty Farnum. Then John Haviland; then Mrs. Malgam; then Caryl Wemyss at the end, looking irritable. (Mr. Gower was away.) On his right, Mrs. Wilton Hay (black velvet is her dress, without lace or collar, from which her blond neck bursts, like a hot-house bud)—then Arthur; next him, little Pussie Duval and a stranger; beyond him, Miss Marion Lenoir, a dinner beauty, and Lionel Derwent, on his hostess’s left, and scowling at Lord Birmingham. Five—yes, six beautiful women; half a dozen picked men. A veritable round table, with women’s rights, in this castle by the storied river, “Tell me, who is that next you—a fine-looking man?” said Mrs. Hay.

“I believe his name is Van Kull,” said Arthur, indifferently.

“Oh, indeed?” said she, with interest; and honored our old acquaintance with her eye-glass. “I heard he was such a favorite with the Prince.” And as we have not seen Kill Van Kull for some years, a hint as to his past would not be amiss. Only, you mustn’t refer to his recent past, beyond the last two months. The fact is, Van Kull had a way of disappearing, under complicated circumstances; but as he always returned alone, after a few months, society pardoned it. Particularly when he came back with a man, a lord, or fresh from a visit at Sandringham—New York tries hard to be virtuous; but what can it do when an offence is condoned by London?

“I tell you, you should read your Bibles,” broke in a voice, like a heavy bell. The sentiment seemed mal à propos; but the voice was Lionel Derwent’s, and it continued speaking without the slightest tremor of consciousness that it was producing a sensation. “You are none of you Christians—not one.” Derwent was addressing Mrs. Gower; but, in the sudden silence, his remark seemed addressed to the entire company. The remark did not seem to offend anybody, coming from so handsome a man with so sweet a voice; but there was quite a little chorus of shocked dissent.

“Do you suppose,” said Derwent, gravely, “that the Christian church, when it reorganized society, meant—this sort of thing?” And with a sweeping glance, that was as definite as a wave of the hand, but not so discourteous, Derwent indicated the table and its brilliant occupants. No one seemed quite ready to defend herself, as there manifested; as for the men, they sat all withdrawn from the fray, with the feeling that, as they made no religious pretences, it did not concern them. Perhaps Miss Lenoir’s reply served the purpose as well as any other.

“But surely, Mr. Derwent, we are all church members,” said she, simply.

“The church itself is not Christian,” said he, as simply. “I doubt if it ever has been, since it got established in Rome, it or its Eastern and Western successors. The fact is, the only two high religions of the world have both rested on the abnegation of self: the Buddhist, by quietism and annihilation; the Christian, by action and sacrifice. But the Jews and Mahometans founded their ethics upon the development of self, upon visible rewards, slaves and flocks and herds, personal aggrandizement; and these things they obtained by wars of conquest, by the church militant, as rewards of the holy zeal that made converts by physical victory. Then Christ came; and it was his only work to remove this idea, to change this life, not as a king of a victorious people, but as a vessel of divine spirit. But this one work and faith of Christ, this only thing that made his teachings new, regenerative of the world, is just alone what all our churches, Protestant and Catholic, unite in evading, in dodging, in interpreting away. The one thing they will not follow Christ in is his unselfishness.”

“But we cannot all be saints and martyrs,” said Mrs. Gower.

“If we were all Christians, there would be no martyrs,” said Derwent.

“I think,” said Wemyss, softly, as if he were studying the painting of a fan, “I think that Mr. Derwent is historically right. Such was undoubtedly the pure doctrine, the face of the pale Christ as it first appeared, palsying the hand of art and civilization, unnerving the arm of war, bleaching life of all color and flower, whelming the sunlight of Greece in the pale artificial cloister, quenching the light of the world in an unsane, self-wrought asceticism.

‘When for chant of Greeks the wail of Galileans

Made one whole world moan with hymns of wrath and wrong.’

We may know the gods are but a beautiful fancy; but it would almost prove a devil’s existence, that humanity had hardly found itself at peace with itself in a fair and fertile earth, fanned by sea-winds and warmed by summer suns, when some devil’s instinct made it fashion for itself a cruel fetich, oppress its brief mortal hours with nightmares of immortal torture, curse itself with grotesque dreams of Calvaries and hells.” And Mr. Wemyss snuffed at the rosebud in his hand, as a Catholic might sprinkle holy-water.

“But, my good sir,” answered Derwent, and his voice rang with the disdain of the athlete for the æsthete, “Christ has not taken from you the flowers of the field nor the breezes of the sea, although his curse be on your factories and mints, your poison-stills and money-mills, your halls and courts and prisons. He has given you the soul of a man for the life of a dog. Any pig may possess, an ape can dress itself in trinkets; but only souls can dream, think, do, be free. Assert your souls in freedom, not weight them down with things. Think you that beauty, glory, love, and light come from possessing tangible objects?”

Caryl Wemyss made no reply; but raised a glass of Yquem to his lips and sipped it slowly. The rest were not in it at all, as Van Kull good-naturedly whispered to Pussie Duval. In his simple way, Kill Van Kull suspected that he would some day be damned; but he took it in good part. John Haviland made answer. “You, too, think Christianity is communism?” said he.

“Not necessarily that,” said Lionel Derwent; “and much more than that. The New Testament makes no direct attack on property but as the root of other evils. Property would be harmless, if it did not foster the self-idolatry; this is the true curse. Even that poor cynic, La Rochefoucauld, saw that amour-propre was the principle on which our social fabric rests. The truth is, that the moment you have counters, everybody makes getting counters all the game. Now, the true game is emulation of the soul, or, even, of the body; of the real self, not the factitious one. Let us have healthy bodies, brave men, heroes, and poets; beautiful women, kind hearts, noble souls; not dukedoms and visiting-lists, landed-estates and money-appraisals. If diamonds are intrinsically beautiful, wear them, paste or real; but do not wear them because they are things difficult for the country curates’ daughters to get. But flowers are prettier, after all. And even then, it is the beauty, not the trinket, we are right to seek. God made a woman’s neck; the devil made the diamonds upon it.”

“It is a far cry from the New Testament to woman’s fashions,” said Mrs. Wilton Hay, maliciously. Mrs. Hay was a hunting woman and followed the hounds; and her neck had frequently been praised in the society newspapers. But Derwent took it innocently.

“True,” said he, simply; “and I say our churches do not dare to preach the words of Christ, but awkwardly fashion them into parables and symbolisms; in effect, they say, ‘Christ said it, but did not mean it.’ The Roman church, too, enriches itself; but this is nearer Christ, for she gives a part away. But our dissenting churches encourage their director-deacons and produce-exchange elders in taking what they can unto themselves, and even whitewash their methods for ever so slight a share of the plunder. But when Christ made that remark about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle, he meant a needle’s eye, and not a paddock-gate. And when he said, ‘Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,’ he meant now and here, not in some future state of civilization, nor yet by charitable devise. And when he said, ‘take no thought for the morrow—for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also—and your father knoweth you have need of these things,’ he had in mind both the future course of stocks and the necessity of brown-stone fronts and widows’ life-assurance. But our churches imply to us, ‘Christ was a good man; but he was no political economist. He did not foresee these things. Life has grown a more complex art than he could comprehend.’”

Mrs. Gower had shown signs of rapidly increasing distress throughout this harangue; and now she gave the signal for the women to depart. “It is so interesting!” whispered Mrs. Malgam, as she swept in front of Derwent. “Do tell me more about it after dinner.” Derwent bowed; and the six men resumed their seats; Van Kull and Birmingham talking horse; Arthur and Wemyss near Haviland and Derwent.

“I do not object to your conclusions, Mr. Derwent,” began Wemyss, languidly, “but to your remedy. Christianity is so far from being this, that it is the cause of that decadence we both see. And what more natural than that Christianity, having destroyed civilization, should perish, like another Rienzi, in the conflagration itself has kindled?”

“And I,” said Haviland, impatiently, “object not to the remedy, but to your conclusion. That, I take it, is communism. Now, communism is no part of Christianity.”

“Neither,” said Derwent, “is property. Christ, from his principle of non-resistance, admitted property in others; but his own disciples were to do without it. There have been two great religions—religions in the true sense religion, transcendental faiths, looking from this world to the next—and each was followed by a so-called religion which was really not religion, but looked to this world alone. Both the two religions aimed at the annihilation of the individual; the Buddhist by passive abnegation, the Christian by active emulation in the doing of good to others. The one is the negation of self; the other is its apotheosis. Therefore, Christianity has naught to do with property, which is the accentuation of self, by aggrandizement, by appendages. Christ recognized persons, not personages. Christianity came with a commercial civilization, and as an antidote to it, after the Jewish religion, which had asserted a divine recognition of property; and set up an earthly kingdom, that had to do with flocks and herds and landed-estates. And after Christ Islam came, with wars and conquests. So the Jews never recognized the Messiah; they looked not beyond into the next world.”

“And as a compensation,” interposed Wemyss, “they seem likely to obtain all that there is of this. But we are told that finally the Jews, too, shall become Christians—which lends a terror even to the millennium.” There was a general laugh; of which Derwent seemed to be unconscious.

“So the gospels,” Derwent added, “recognize no property save in the soul. This is what we are adjured to preserve, though we lose the whole world besides. A man’s truth and love, his sense of goodness and beauty, his courage and his pity, are his alone. Even his body is only his secondarily, and temporarily; his broad acres, his trees and rivers, are no part of him at all.”

“But it remains property—even if you sell it all and give it to the poor,” said Haviland.

“Not if they give it over again to whomsoever has immediate need,” answered Derwent. “In this broad world there is room for all; and there are fruits in plenty, ample food, and raiment always ready. Let each one take what he needs, and have no fear of getting no more when these are gone. Why, the labor of all men for some few minutes a day will suffice to bring them all things they can need and use. Property is unnecessary. But men are like rude children at a public feast: each one fearing that he shall not get enough, they trample one another forward, and the foremost few lay hands upon it all.”

“No one of us who thinks,” said Haviland, “would object to communism if it were practicable. But I must have an overcoat, or a roof, or a horse; is anyone coming along who prefers my coat, my roof, to his, or to none, to take it? And, in the second place, men are not unselfish enough to work, even those few minutes a day, that all humanity may live.”

“They are, if they have souls,” said Derwent. “And if not, we are beasts; and let us perish like them. And as for the first objection, it is a trivial one, soon forgotten in practice. There will naturally grow up an unwritten respect for one’s personal belongings; so far as it is necessary that there should be. If a man needs a coat so much as to filch mine, it is better he should have it. Free men will no more stoop to take a neighbor’s coat, or roof, or hat, than a prince will steal a pocket-handkerchief. And as to great values like statues, paintings, libraries, they are for all the world, and not to be monopolized by a vulgar money-maker. He truly owns a picture who enjoys it; not he who buys it. The pleasure in these, by divine law, is not selfish, not individual; only when a man loses himself in the contemplation of a beautiful picture does he really enjoy it, really make it his; it is of as little moment who has the title to the canvas and frame, as it is who owns the wide prairies and the mountains that the poet roams over. So there need be no vulgar property in these things; and they are all that is worth enjoying. As to exotics, and waste land, and dozens of houses, and yachts, and palaces, and game-preserves—these are social crimes.”

“Exactly,” said Wemyss, with a well-bred sneer in his inflection. “You wish, like all the rest, to abolish civilization. All communists hate excellence; because they do not themselves excel. They say, since we cannot all be princes, let us all be savages.”

“What they say, Mr. Wemyss,” cried Derwent, fiercely, “is this: Instead of the vulgar democracy of crass possession, let us have the noble aristocracy of merit, mind, and soul. Let no man excel by owning the souls and bodies, the waking and the sleeping, the getting up and the lying down of his fellow-men. And this whether it be done directly, by chattel slavery, or more secretly and dangerously, by corporate control, monopoly of land, monopoly of that fateful thing that men call capital. Money is the devil’s counters; a treasure accursed, thrice cursed when welded into the ring of power, like that fabled Rhine-gold, which only he may win who for it lays aside all love, both human and divine. Let men enjoy the light of the earth, the noble teachings of art and letters, the health of the body and the freedom of the soul; but these without the virus of self-appropriation. It is this that makes barbarism; it is not civilization. Look at your Yankee money-grubbers; they give, and greedily, ten thousand dollars for a common painting, which they may ostentatiously make their own; they would hesitate to give a dollar for Dante’s Divine Comedy, if he wrote to-day, because—of course, they do not care for it—and they cannot lock it up as theirs and bar it from their fellow-men. And even if, as you insinuate, the future were to be what you call barbarism, the morning chase of the free savage after the wild creature on whom he feeds is more ennobling than the grimy greed of a stunted humanity for these counters that are worthless in themselves. I have seen Australia and Hawaii, and I have seen Sheffield and East London; and I say, better a thousand-fold the heathen savagery than such Christian civilization as are these.”

“I have hitherto failed to observe, among socialists or knights of labor, or their wives,” said Wemyss, dryly, “any newer or other impulse than a rising desire for these same counters that you scoff at, or the gin and brass jewellery that they may purchase with them.”

“Ay,” cried Lionel Derwent, “you have seen little yet but a blind, instinctive striving for the drugs and poisons you have fed them on; for the treasure you have kept, and welded to the ring of tyranny that held them down. So, when you lift a stone from the ground, or hurl the roof from some long-lived-in Bastile of humanity, the sudden sunlight streams in, and the prisoners, poor insects that they are, crushed by a thousand years of oppression, blinded, dazzled by the light of heaven, grope vainly and mechanically for the things of earth they have been wonted to, and which want and custom and your own example have taught them, too, to prize. No, they are not better than you are, yet; not until their souls have come to life that you so long have robbed them of. But give us light and love, and the word of Christ, and we will see. But, as I said in the beginning, your priests have tortured even this to suit their ends.”

“Well, Mr. Derwent, I wish you success in your mission. Civilization has got to go, one way or another; and I don’t know that it matters much which. I confess that your way strikes me as rather a novel one. Most of your radical friends, however, if what you say be their true aim, show a singular predilection for atheism, free-love, and omitting their daily baths.” With which climax and a slight yawn, Wemyss walked over and joined the group in the other corner.

John Haviland had for a long time been silent; but now he spoke. “I am afraid, Mr. Derwent,” said he, “that I so far agree with Mr. Wemyss as to feel that three essentials of civilization are so bound up together that with leaving either one we may lose the rest—I mean, my right to my property, my right to my wife, and my right to personal liberty. The same radicalism which, on the one hand, sets up a tyranny of majority government to tell me what I shall think, what I shall eat, what I shall spend, is that which, on the other hand, tends to the age of reason and the regulation of property out of existence, and women’s rights to lose themselves as women, and absolute liberty of divorce. Property and marriage and personal liberty—they go together. There is no argument for freedom but the inner light of the mind; none for monogamy but that it seems farther from the beasts; none for property but that man creates it for himself. And the age of reason, which denies a divine sanction, will yet require a divine sanction for all that it does not destroy.”

“Man does not create the air, nor the ocean, nor the surface of the earth,” said Derwent.

“No; and man does not hold the surface of the earth for himself, but for all humanity. Is it not better that you should make a garden of a hundred acres than that it should lie a common waste? You hold it, not for yourself, but in general trust; sooner or later, if you fail to make the land bear fruit for all of us, it will be taken from you. If you are not a good steward for the people, you will, sooner or later, fail. Christ said ‘Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor;’ but is it not doing the same thing to keep what I have, and use it for the poor?”

Derwent paused a moment; and before he could reply, Wemyss came back.

“Shall we join the ladies?” said he.

All the gentlemen got up, some hastily finishing their coffee, others taking a last whiff of their cigars.

“He paid twenty thousand,” said Van Kull, hurriedly, to Birmingham. “He bought him for the Duval stables.”

CHAPTER XVIII.
A DAY’S PLEASURE.

ARTHUR awoke the next morning with a confused consciousness of splendors and regret; a mood which seemed superinduced by some forgotten dream. His first perceptions, however, were of the glory of the morning and the budding, bursting season. The shade had been drawn up by a servant; and from his bed he saw through the open window mile after mile of the country-side, and beyond it the broad, gay river, wearing, like a new gown, the blue of early summer. What nests of men might be in sight were lost in the white glow of blossoms; but the birds made their presence vocal, singing in the close boughs unseen.

No man with a trace of sap left in him could lie inert at such a time; and Arthur rang the bell and asked the servant when they might have breakfast.

“There is no bell, sir,” said he; “the ladies mostly breakfasts by eleven, and the gentlemen when they like. Have you found your things, sir?”

As everything of Arthur’s had been laid out and brushed in most attractive order, he had; and he dressed and sought the breakfast-room. Here was no one but Mrs. Malgam, who, attired in a diaphanous material of many folds and pale tea-rose ribbons, was standing at the window like a thing bereft. But as Arthur came in, her face mantled with smiles that could have hardly “been much sweeter for the blush between.” “Oh, Mr. Holyoke, I am so glad you’ve come,” said she. “It is so poky, breakfasting alone.”

Mrs. Malgam sat down to make the tea; and Arthur sat down beside her. “What pretty hands she has,” thought Arthur; “I never noticed them before.” And just as he thought this, her blue eyes fixed his, looking suddenly up from the tea. “One lump or two?” said she. “One,” said Arthur, gravely.

A word should be given to Baby Malgam, as many thought her likely to be Flossie Gower’s rival; that is at some day, for as yet our heroine still distanced her. It is true, Flossie was a nobody, by birth; so was Mrs. Malgam; but her first husband had been Mr. Ten Eyck. Flossie was rich, but so at this time was Mrs. Malgam; Flossie was no longer young, while Baby’s ivory skin still was smooth with youth and pleasure and lack of care. Baby had been poor; and now she had three houses and four horses and forty ball-dresses and a young and fashionable and careless husband and an opera-box, and the grace and cachet of her own to properly adorn all these things—a grace which had been almost a trial to her when, already conscious of it, she had feared it was to be never used, but born like a blossom of the fields, to die there, and not in a china vase. But now she had her china vase, and was happy, and fast forgetting the fields, and him who had wandered with her in them; and regretted, not that he was dead, but that she was growing stout. And it was very cosey and charming for Arthur to be sitting with her so prettily at breakfast.

“Is nobody else up?” said he. But he did not say it in regret; and Caryl Wemyss would not have said it at all, as Arthur thought with a pang just afterward. Mrs. Malgam smiled a little, but she said:

“Mr. Derwent has been up and disappeared long since. Mr. Haviland has gone to the city. Flossie never appears until luncheon. About the rest, I don’t know.”

“What are we to do to-day?” said he, by way of conversation.

“Anything we like—that is Mrs. Gower’s rule. I fancy she and Mr. Wemyss will take a drive;” and she laughed a little again. “Mr. Van Kull and Mrs. Hay thought of riding. That is, Mr. Van Kull spoke of it to Mrs. Hay; and Mrs. Hay proposed it to Lord Birmingham. But I fancy his lordship will ride with Kitty Farnum.” And again did pretty Mrs. Malgam laugh a little.

“Are there horses for all of us?” said Arthur.

“Oh, yes. Mrs. Gower has a way of providing for us, you see.”

“In that case,” said Arthur, “will not you drive with me?”

Mrs. Malgam would and did; and a lovely drive they had of it in the fresh May morning, over the range of hills back in the high country behind the Hudson. Mrs. Malgam’s conversation was most charming, and instructive, too, to a young man; it is unfortunate that so much of its merit consisted in the manner and personality of its owner as to be quite incapable of transcription. They talked of the day; of the place; of Mrs. Gower, of Mrs. Gower’s friends; of love; a good deal of himself; a little of herself; of the time for luncheon; and of the immediate future. This last topic was called up by Mrs. Malgam’s asking whether Arthur was invited to the coaching party; and it turned out that Mrs. Gower had in immediate contemplation a drive in a coach and four from Catfish-on-the-Hudson up to Lenox. Lucie Gower was coming up from town to drive them; and Mrs. Malgam, though she had not yet received her invitation, was in hopeful expectation of one. It must be confessed that the prospect was enviable; and Arthur most ardently joined in the wish, so kindly expressed by the pretty woman who was his companion, that he might be one of the party.

Civilization has cruelly made up for making our luncheon regular and certain by depriving us often of any desire for it; but one of the brightest attractions of the upper circle of humanity, in which our hero now moved, is perhaps its return to this primitive condition. It is a pity that fresh air and idleness, cleanliness and exercise, do not necessarily bring with them health for the soul; but they bring health for this world, which is already something. Arthur and the pretty woman returned at two, impelled chiefly by a desire for food; and found others of the company, similarly inspired, already sitting at the table. Wemyss alone, whose dyspepsia seemed to be the last relic of his inherited puritan conscience, was not hungry.

“I do not know what we can do for you, lovely Jills, this afternoon,” said Flossie. “Three of our Jacks have disappeared. Mr. Haviland and Charlie Townley are in town, and Mr. Derwent has gone to the Mills village. Pussie, where’s your young man? Your acknowledged one, I mean—Jimmy De Witt?”

Miss Duval blushed and smiled. “Mr. De Witt is in town, I suppose. His address is the Columbian Club.”

“Yes, dear,” said Flossie, laughing. “Well, I’ve written to him. Then there’s Sidney Sewall coming to dinner,” Flossie went on, as if she were counting her chickens. Sewall was the famous editor of one of the great papers of the day.

“He’s awfully clever, and improving and all that,” continued the critical Mrs. Malgam; “but he’s no good in the country. What’s become of Mr. Derwent, did you say?”

“He’s passing the day at the Mills down in the town, studying the condition of the laboring classes, I suppose. He’s always doing that kind of thing.”

“Much more likely he’s found a pretty face there,” said Van Kull. “Those cranks are all humbugs.”

Miss Farnum looked at Van Kull while he spoke, and then looked about as if for someone to answer. Her eye fell upon Marion Lenoir. And Miss Lenoir was magnetized to speak.

“Oh, how can you say so, Mr. Van Kull?” she cried. “When he talks so earnestly, and fixes his eyes upon you so, they bore you through and through. I could fall in love with a man like that, I am sure.”

Miss Farnum rose and walked to the window. “Yes, and he bores me through and through,” Van Kull had retorted; but there was a general noise of rising and sliding back chairs, and no one noticed his little joke. Jokes were rare with this big fellow; a fact to which he owed much of his popularity.

Arthur stood at first with Miss Farnum for a minute; but she seemed unresponsive, and he was soon swept out in the wake of Mrs. Wilton Hay. The broad terrace was bathed in the pleasant May sunlight; but over the end opposite the house was an awning slanted down to the stone balustrade. The great river lay still; far to the south, where the light blue vanished in the gleaming, was a solitary sail.

The air was full of the singing of birds and the fragrance of spring blossoms; it was like a scene from Boccaccio, thought Arthur, the stone terrace and the flowers, and the distant view. Caryl Wemyss seemed to have like thoughts. “If life were only this, how simple it would be!” said he. But even this speech was too analytical for the company in its present mood.

“It only rests with us to make it so,” he added, as if expecting an answer.

“I don’t see what you mean,” said Mrs. Hay. And she did not. Wemyss smiled bitterly, or smiled as if he meant it so. Flossie laughed. Lord Birmingham came up and leaned over Mrs. Hay’s chair; then Van Kull came up on the other side, and Arthur had to go over to Miss Farnum, who was standing alone, looking over the parapet into the deep gorge in the forest, that led down toward the river. Mrs. Malgam and the other two girls were laughing together, standing at the other end of the terrace. Miss Farnum seemed to Arthur more blasée than any girl he knew.

“Why does your friend Mr. Haviland come here so much?” asked she, suddenly. Now, Arthur could certainly give no answer to this. And he remembered his first discovery of John’s secret, as he had thought.

“It is a delightful house to visit,” said he. “Did you have a pleasant ride this morning?” And he remembered the scene in the opera-box.

“I hate Englishmen and foreigners,” said she, inconsequently; and just then Birmingham came up. “Lovely day, Miss Farnum,” said he. “Ah, would you not like a bit of a walk? The park, down there, looks most inviting.”

“I don’t know,” said she, listlessly. “What are the others going to do?”

“They’re playing tennis, I dare say, or something like,” said he. “I got off, you know.”

Miss Farnum turned toward the house; and just then the others joined them. “You play, Mr. Holyoke, I know,” said Marion Lenoir, “and Mr. Van Kull is such a dab at it.” Van Kull looked anything but a dab at it, but rather an oddly sophisticated lamb being led to the slaughter; but then Miss Lenoir was, as she expressed it, “a tennis girl.” And certainly she looked it, when Arthur met her on the lawn, her lithe young figure robed in a blue and white tennis dress, her black hair shining in a tight coil.

“Fie, what would Jimmy say?” said Mrs. Gower to Miss Duval as they passed her. “Jimmy may say what he pleases,” said that young woman, with a shrug of her shoulders.

They had played several sets, and Miss Lenoir so well that she and Arthur had won most of them, when there was a ripple of excitement among the two married women, who had been sitting on a shady bench watching the game. Mrs. Gower had disappeared; Mr. Wemyss had sauntered up from time to time, to say a word and disappear again. “I do believe it’s the men come back!” cried Mrs. Hay, as a carriage stopped at the door of the house.

The game came to an end; and Arthur walked back with his partner to the terrace. Charlie Townley was there, and a middle-aged man who was Mr. Sewall, as Miss Lenoir told him; and a stout man with a red face, who bore a little clumsily his introduction to Mrs. Hay, and then turned with a “Well, old fellow—what do you know?” to Kill Van Kull. It was our old friend S. Howland Starbuck. He had changed more than Van Kull, and seemed ten years older, with a bloated look in his face. Van Kull, as he stood there in his light scarlet tennis-jacket and white flannels, was still a model of manly strength, with features pale and clear-cut, and a look of race about him. Probably he had led a far worse life than simple Buck Starbuck, as they still called him; but Van Kull’s beauty deathless, like a fallen angel’s. “So good of you all to take pity on us lone women,” said Flossie Gower, as she approached with Mr. Wemyss. “Mr. Sewall, thanks for leaving the administration so long unwatched. How are you, Si? Tell us what to do, Mr. Townley. Shall we take a sail?”

“A sail would be delightful, I think,” said Sewall, affably. “Mrs. Hay, I hope you got safely home the other night? Lord Birmingham, I am very glad to meet you; I had the pleasure of knowing your father, the late Earl.”

“Come, young women!” cried Flossie, “run and get your things on. I’ve ordered the lunch to be ready at five.”

Arthur was much impressed at the prospect of going on a pleasure-jaunt with so great a man as Sidney Sewall. He was one of those who really seem to shape the fortunes of the country; his newspaper was a political power throughout the land, and he made and unmade candidates at will. People of wealth and fashion were getting familiar to our hero; but the companionship of men of power was a social summit he had never yet climbed. Flossie Gower liked to get such men about her, as a child plays with chessmen.

There was a break to take them to the river; but most of the company preferred to walk. Mrs. Gower led the way with Mr. Sewall, and Arthur was close behind with Marion Lenoir. He was struck with the elaborate air of pleasure-seeking that Mr. Sewall assumed; he made himself a perfect squire of dames, for the nonce, and his talk was of other people and their misdoings. As they turned from the lower footpath-gate of Mrs. Gower’s place into the main road, they met Derwent, striding homeward in his knickerbockers; and Flossie introduced him to Mr. Sewall. Then they all went on and soon came to the river, where the Gowers’ pretty little steam-yacht lay at a private wharf. Derwent was full of his day at the Mills; and began talking of it to the great editor. “They are nearly all French Canadians,” said he, “not Americans at all; and their wages are quite as low, except the few skilled workmen and foremen, as at Manchester.”

“They were even lower last year,” said Sewall, “at the time of the worst depression. The mill has really no reason for being, except the tariff; and, of course, in the bad years the laborers are ten times worse off than if there were no tariff at all. But it attracts Canadian cheap labor; and our ignorant workmen think they are being protected all the same.”

“Surely, you would not abolish the tariff and wipe out the mill entirely?” said Wemyss, who had taken a seat close by. Sewall shrugged his shoulders. He was the editor of a great protectionist newspaper. “There is no use riding against a herd of cattle,” said he. “If you want to lead them, you must ride their way.” Arthur opened his eyes at this, for Sewall’s paper declared itself the great representative of the laboring classes; but he soon found that “cattle” was a milder term than the popular editor usually applied to his constituency. “The secret of statesmanship,” he went on, “in representative government, is to do nothing yourself until driven to it by the rabble, and in the meantime make capital out of the other fellow’s mistakes.”

“Ay,” said Derwent; “but it is not the people, but the selfish middle class that rules as yet. Anarchy, even tyranny, may be the mother of men, of high thought and noble deeds; but the lights of the Manchester school are matter and greed, dry bones and death.”

Sewall looked at him quizzically. “Oh, dear,” said he, good-naturedly, “here’s another terrible fellow who believes something!”

“But,” hazarded Arthur, with a blush, “will not representatives do something, and think something, when we make our politics something more than a game for party stakes?”

“Young man,” said Sewall, impressively, “this country cannot be governed without parties and organizations. And if the organizers are not paid for their trouble, they won’t organize. I’ve never known a man with a principle that was worth his salt in politics yet; how can you expect parties to have them? This great country of ours is on the make, just now; and it doesn’t trouble itself about much else.” And Mr. Sewall suddenly dropped his professional tone and, turning to Mrs. Gower, resumed his air of an homme du monde. “Lovely country, after all, is it not, Mrs. Gower? Look at that purple twilight stealing in under the western mountains; I’ve just got a Daubigny with exactly that feeling in it. Only Frenchmen can paint in the half lights, the minor tones, after all.”

Mrs. Gower still patronized art, though she successively had given over most of her special protections for the patronage of human life in general; but Sewall was an amateur, and was famed for his galleries, his cellars, and his orchids. Derwent looked at him from the corners of his eyes, but kept silent; meantime Kill Van Kull, Si Starbuck, and Marion Lenoir, sitting forward, had brought out their banjos and struck up a Southern melody, very soft and sweet. “What a pity we have no folk-songs,” said Wemyss. “Great art is, after all, impossible without the nursery songs and tales of many generations, without the legends and delusions of the people.”

“I am glad to find you need the people for something,” said Derwent, dryly.

“But they have self-educated it away,” said Wemyss. “They have driven beauty out of the world with the three Rs; and now they are about to cut one another’s throats for its mere goods and raw material.”

“True,” said Derwent. “But is it they that have done it? or we that have taught them?”

“Speaking of the people,” laughed Flossie, “there they are.” And she pointed to an excursion-boat coming up the river; it was filled with a holiday party—clerks, upper mechanics, small tradesmen, and their womankind. The latter were resplendently dressed in new bonnets and bright shawls; the husbands looked dingy and jaded. Wemyss took out his opera-glass and scanned the decks for a minute or more, then laid it down wearily as if exhausted. “I have no doubt they are most of them virtuous,” said he. “But they all wear glass diamonds in their ears.”

“Nay,” said Sewall, without cynicism, but as if merely stating an obvious fact. “There are the people.” And he pointed to a huge three-decked barge, coming slowly down stream before two tugs. It was covered with long streamers; the largest bearing, in flaring white letters, “The P. J. McGarragle Association;” and on smaller ones, “6th Ward.” All the decks were black with people; and all the people were waltzing to the loud rhythm of several brass bands. A few dozen of the younger men on the lower deck yelled at the little launch as it went by; they were tipsily singing an obscene song. “Mr. McGarragle has just been elected to Congress; and he is giving a free picnic to all his supporters in his district.”

“You were one of his supporters, Mr. Sewall, I believe?” said Derwent, calmly. “But you are both wrong. These are the American people, if I understand them right.” And he pointed to the night boat. The upper decks were crowded with men, intent on their newspapers, regardless of all else—business-men returning to Chicago or the great lakes. And in the bow and main deck were groups of emigrants bound for the prairies; ploughs, sewing-machines, and bales of Eastern goods. This great steamer swept by them with a certain majesty; and Mrs. Gower’s little yacht lay for some seconds, rolling and tossing in its wake.

It was after seven o’clock when they got back from the sail; and all the ladies hurried into the break, lest they should lose that calm leisure before dinner which a perfect toilet demands. Mr. Sewall and Lord Birmingham and Caryl Wemyss were further specially honored with seats therein; the others walked, Townley with Van Kull and Starbuck, Arthur with Lionel Derwent. “What a different man is Sewall from what one would suppose,” said Arthur.

“Sidney Sewall is the most guilty criminal in America,” said Derwent, vehemently. Arthur started a little at so superlative a characterization; which Derwent went on to explain. “There is a man with all the birthright of light; with the inherited instinct of truth, the training of character, the charm of breeding; with power of intellect and cultivation of the finest that your country gives; and if there is a malignant lie to be disseminated, a class-hatred to be stirred up, a cruel delusion to be spread, a poisonous virus of any subtler sort ready to be instilled into the body public and politic—there stands Sidney Sewall, of all men, ready and willing to do the devil’s work. And he does it with the genius of a Lucifer; and all to get his personal luxury, and his orchids and his wines, and a little power, and revenge for personal spites. Mephistopheles himself was not so quick at seeing the evil side of any human error, the wrong that may be wrought from any chance event. And yet it does not even pay; or pay any more than if he chose the good and served it with half that intellect of his that now seeks to sap his country’s soul!”

Poor Arthur had not thought to reap such a whirlwind with his little conversational seed, and stood aghast.

“And he doesn’t really care for money either; he knows its worthlessness, deep down, as well as I do. And he hasn’t even, or he says he hasn’t, the devil’s motive of ambition to make a reason for his wrong. And he’s married a rich woman, like any common adventurer. I tell you I have spent years in this country of yours; and the people have a heart, and a soul, and in their clumsy way they blunder ahead upon the right. But Sewall! He has no heart, nor soul, but only stomach and cerebral matter, like a jelly-fish. In his intellectual Frankenstein way, when fresh from his Ohio farm, he was once a communist; just as he might be to-morrow a dynamiter. But if to-morrow there comes to the polls a well-meaning, honest man, and against him a very figurehead of that greed and cynical materialism which bids fair to blast your country in its bud, this man will hasten to bid the people to choose Barabbas, that Cain and Abel’s strife may be on earth once more.”

By this time they were walking up the avenue to the house, and on the terrace they met their hostess, already dressed and waiting for them. “Ah, you philosophers!” said she. “You must make haste. By the way, you know I count upon you, Mr. Holyoke, for our coaching party! Mr. Derwent has already promised.” Arthur was, of course, delighted.

“I am so glad——” he began.

“There, there,” said she, “you must run and dress or you will be late to dinner. And Mr. Sewall is very particular about his dinners, I know.”

After Derwent’s outburst, Arthur went in to his dinner with some trepidation; but Derwent had too often dined and lodged with Arab chieftains, or other persons who had designs upon his life the next morning, to show his personal feelings in his demeanor. Arthur took in Miss Duval; and she asked him if he had been invited on the coaching party. She was going, and Mrs. Hay, and Kitty Farnum. Mrs. Malgam had not been asked, after all. “She is perfectly furious,” said Pussie; “and wanted to go home to-night.” And Arthur himself felt a slight pang at the absence of his fair companion, such a mitigated pang as one must feel at the exclusion of others from a paradise open to one’s self.

“What men are going?” he asked.

“Oh, Lord Birmingham, and Mr. Wemyss, and Mr. Van Kull—and—and Mr. ——”

“Derwent,” said Arthur. “I know.”

“Mr. Derwent? dear me,” said Miss Duval. “I wonder what he’s going for!”

“But where’s Mr. Gower?” asked Arthur.

“I don’t know,” said she. “He can’t come, I believe. Kill Van Kull is going to drive.”

“You can’t fancy what terrible things Mr. Derwent has been telling us, Mr. Sewall. We quite needed you last night. He has been saying we are none of us Christians.” It was Mrs. Malgam who spoke.

“We are not,” said Sewall. “Christianity is a very fine thing; but, like many another, quite too fine for this world. If people could practise it, there would be no need of it; it would be heaven here and now, and a divine revelation quite superfluous.”

“And are you really going to drive, Mr. Van Kull?” said Mrs. Hay. “You are such a dangerous man, I shall not trust myself with you—on the box-seat.” And she cast down her eyes, while Van Kull gave her one of the dark glances that made his pale face so famous.

“Would you confess as much in your paper, Mr. Sewall?” said Derwent, in answer to his speech.

“Certainly not,” said the great editor. “You know the natural failing of the middle classes is hypocrisy; and we still have a large constituency with them. They like to think they are Christians, while they make their money; just as they like to have full reports of divorce cases, and call it news.”

“Hypocrisy, in the end, is of all vices the one least suffered by gods and men,” said Derwent.

“Quite so; and sooner or later the people will arise and wipe out the middle class in this country, and leave nothing between them and us,” said Sewall, placidly. “That is why I am anxious to have my paper appeal more and more to the masses.”

“But when that day comes, we—that is, the people—will destroy you, too,” said Derwent.

Sewall looked again at Derwent, with his expression of polite curiosity, as at a misplaced mummy. “Our grandchildren, you mean,” said he. “I haven’t any.”

“All thinking men are agreed as to the coming déchéance,” put in Wemyss. “They only differ as to the feelings with which they regard it.”

“Well,” said Sewall, in a tone of finality, “we can get a good time out of this world as it is; those to come may amuse themselves as they like. What do you think, Mrs. Gower?”

“I think you are all pessimists,” said she. “Surely we live in a most enlightened age; consider the progress that has been made in a few years! Why, in my grandfather’s old house they hadn’t even carpets. Now the very poorest can have everything.”

“Everybody has a chance to make money now,” said Baby Malgam. “Just think how many self-made men you meet in society!”

“You wouldn’t have us go back to those days, surely,” said Flossie. “Just think how narrow people were! And everybody thought almost everybody else was going to be damned. But we are growing more liberal every day.”

“Ay,” grunted Derwent. “We are above the revelation of Christ; but our clever women talk glibly of theosophy, and go into fashionable crazes over imported Buddhist priests; and nobody is afraid of being damned.”

“What is theosophy, Mr. Derwent?” said Marion Lenoir. “Something to do with spirit-rapping, isn’t it?—or palmistry?”

“I am sure,” said Mrs. Malgam, “I was always brought up to go to church; but when I was first married, Mr. Ten Eyck didn’t care for it.”

“The only advantage should be, that the general smash gives us at least a chance at personal liberty. But most of these fads start in my place; and in Boston the masses are more philistine than almost anywhere,” said Caryl Wemyss.

“There is some strength in Philistinism,” said Sewall, curtly. “What I can’t stand is the critical crowd, the cousins of the nephews of the friends of Emerson, who now talk sagely of the fine art of their boarding-house literature, of the tea-table realism school—what Poe called, the Frog-pond weakly school. They are too delicate to take life straight, at most they can only stomach a criticism of a critique of humanity, as we give babies peptonized preparations of refined oatmeal. Their last fad is pure government. Pure government!” repeated Sewall, with a snort of disgust.

“It is the literature of the decadence, of course,” said Wemyss; “an emasculated type, product of short-haired women and long-haired men, gynanders and androgynes. I have often myself thought of writing another novel—if only for the sake of putting a great, horrid man into it. But gentlemen should all the more have courage to reassert their essence. It is an age, after all, when one may lead a full life. There is a fine passage somewhere in Zola, where the lips of two lovers are unsealed at the approach of death. So we, on the eve of the destruction of society, are free to live our lives elementally; enforced to idleness, like patricians in the fall of Rome.”

“Mr. Wemyss, do you know my definition of a Boston man?” cried Sewall, who had had an evident struggle to repress himself during this speech.

“No,” said Wemyss, respectfully sipping a glass of Yquem.

“An Essay at Life,” said Sewall, hurling the words at Wemyss like a missile.

There was a certain pause and then Derwent was heard softly quoting Dante’s “gran rifiuto.”

“So there is nothing for us, you both think, but to make ‘the grand refusal,’” said he, sadly. “To take no office in our human life, but wait for death; amusing ourselves as best we may.”

After which, Lord Birmingham was heard saying to Miss Farnum, “I should so like to show you Noakes Park.”

“No,” said Sewall, taking up the thread of the conversation again, “what’s the use of breaking lances on wind-mills? The simple fact is, that everybody wants about a hundred times his individual proportion of the world’s labor; and some few fellows have got to have it, and the other ninety-nine be deprived of that little which they have. Therefore the more toys we give the rabble to play with the better. When they find them out, they’ll break the toys and our heads with them.”

“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Malgam, “I don’t see what there is so very terrible. I like real lace shawls; but my Irish servants prefer red and green ones. And what would be the use of taking a scrub-woman to the opera? She wouldn’t understand it.”

“It’s astonishing how soon those same scrub-women catch on,” said Charlie Townley, who sat next. “I see two or three at the opera every night.”

Derwent muttered something about the lust of the eyes and the pride of life; and Mrs. Gower said there was one in the box next her. “She has red arms and diamonds as big as a hotel-clerk’s,” said she, with a fine scorn. “But of course there must always be such people trying to get in.”

“Kehew entered her; but she was scratched for the Derby,” said Van Kull to Si Starbuck, who was on the other side of Mrs. Wilton Hay. “De Mora told me she was safe for the Grand Prix.”

“Kehew? why, that’s the very man who has entered his wife, too—at the opera,” laughed Flossie.

“He’s a great friend of the Duc de Mora,” said Si Starbuck to his sister. “I don’t see what there is bad about the old woman, and the daughter’s capital fun.”

“Kehew’s a wonderful man,” added Townley. “He turned up from some road-hotel just out of Chicago, and the next thing we knew he put through that Wabash deal.”

“What a name,” sighed Wemyss—“Kehew! how it expresses the sharp, lean-faced Yankee of the day, who doses his dyspepsia with whiskey-cocktails, and bores you through with his dull, soulless eyes! ‘Brainy,’ the newspapers call them, I think.”

“But they are making the country, and they make the government,” said Sewall. “It’s all very well to talk about the greatest good of the greatest number; but government is going to be run in the interest of the successful man, and not for general philanthropy.”

“Ah!” said Lionel Derwent, sadly. “You have done a good deal, in your country. You have done away with rank, and chivalry and the feudal system, with established churches and bishops, priests and deacons—except, perhaps, the Pope of Rome. You are independent of authority and experience, and enforced respect—Aristotle’s ‘Ethics,’ and Plato’s ‘Republic,’ to say nothing of Montesquieu and de Tocqueville, have become ‘chestnuts,’ as your phrase is. ‘You have eschewed a titled aristocracy and abolished primogeniture; you elect all your officers, from judges up to President; your laws run in the name of the people, instead of in the name of a prince; your State knows no religion and your judges wear no wigs!’—and for King Log you bow to King Stork; your God Baal is money, and you have lost individual liberty into the bargain.”

Mr. Sewall chuckled to himself a little, but said nothing, like an Augur with a sense of humor; the collective individual liberties of the land made power, and power was his. It was left to Mrs. Malgam to respond.

“I am sure,” said she, “I think money is very nice; and those who don’t want it needn’t get it.”

“Money,” said Wemyss, “gives us the very individual liberty Mr. Derwent wants.”

“Money,” said Flossie Gower, “is certainly necessary to get married on; else married people would have to be together all the time.”

“Oh,” said Marion Lenoir, “I think love in a cottage would be just charming. Do you know I saw such a lovely household last winter in Florida——”

But here Mrs. Gower gave the signal; and the men were left to their own reflections. Derwent rose abruptly, took a cigar, and walked out the open window to the terrace above the river. Wemyss and Arthur followed; and the other four were left about the dining-table.

Derwent was puffing his cigar violently, and did not speak to them; but after a minute or two he took the path leading down into the valley and disappeared in the wood. Wemyss and Arthur sat down in one corner of the terrace and lit their cigars comfortably.

“Derwent,” said Mr. Wemyss, “is one of those fanatics who do more harm, from their position and education, than any leader of the proletariat. But all women rave about him; for women are all hero-worshippers.”

“Mrs. Gower has asked him to go on the coaching party,” said Arthur, secretly flattered at being thought by Wemyss worthy of hearing that gentleman’s opinion. He made no reply to this, but frowned obviously. Pretty soon the others came out and joined them, and they had cognac and coffee; the ladies, too, were out on the terrace, at its other end, attracted by the beauty of the night; and gradually the two groups came together and intermingled. But it was the man’s hour; and they made bold to keep their cigars, even when, as soon happened, each one joined his fair one and took to walking with her. Wemyss walked with Mrs. Gower, Birmingham with Miss Farnum, Van Kull with Mrs. Hay, Charlie Townley with Miss Duval, and Mrs. Malgam with Si Starbuck.

Arthur found himself with Miss Lenoir. She was a pretty girl, with fine black hair and gray eyes, and an ivory-like complexion; and her dress was the perfection of style and enlightened civilization. It was the most glorious night; a night made for the imaginative and idle, for those who have read the world’s literature and looked at paintings, and whose women are fair ladies, bravely dressed. The great pathway of the river lay open to the dark sky, walled by ebon mountain-masses; to the east the azure shaded into blue, where the stars were sown less freely, tremulous, luminous with the rising moon. The moon’s light was pleasant, too, on the figure of the pretty girl beside him; and the others, as they passed and repassed, seemed like the gay ladies of Boccaccio’s garden, and looked, each pair, as if they had been lovers.

Down in the factory village, too, the night was fine; perhaps a few old men, smoking, enjoyed it, dumbly, as such people do. For these do not comment, in diaries or print, upon such things, nor analyze the moods they bring. But most of the women who were stirring made only a convenience of the moonlight, lighting the uncertain hazards of the dirty street; and the young men, smoking and drinking, were quite unconscious of it, for tobacco and whiskey had more direct action upon their consciousness, besides having a money cost, which the beauty of the night had not. But here, too, were some few young men wandering afield with young women, and perhaps upon these the moonlight had its unconscious effect. Up at Mrs. Gower’s the love-making, though not inartistically done, was rather like a play; here it was more earnest. Yet, as it seemed to Lionel Derwent, there was not so much difference between these two places, laying aside mere dress and manner, as there should have been.

But to Arthur, the softness and good taste and beauty of framing seemed inspiration fit for any poet. If the evening was not one of true happiness, it was an excellent worldly counterfeit. After Miss Lenoir went in, he stayed out alone, watching the river. The other guests, successively, sought the drawing-room; and soon he heard Mrs. Hay’s voice, singing a simple Scotch ballad, and singing it very well. Now, any cultivated foreman’s daughter, in the factory village, would have sung in bad Italian, and not sung well.

As Arthur stood leaning over the balustrade in the terrace, he heard low voices; and looking down, he recognized, in the moonlight, Mr. Caryl Wemyss and his hostess. Their talk seemed to have come to an end; for as she rose, he seized her white hand and imprinted (as the dime novels say), with studied grace, a kiss upon it.

CHAPTER XIX.
A COACH AND FOUR COUPLES.

SEVERAL days passed by in much the same way; and truly a pleasant way enough it was. Arthur went now and then to town; but it was easy to get vacations in Townley & Tamms’s office, and the inmates were mutually conceding upon this point, particularly when the absence was known to be connected with people likely to be valuable, as clients, to the firm. And perhaps Arthur had a secret notion that his visit at Mrs. Levison Gower’s was an advancement more speedy and notable than anything that was likely to come to him in the office while he was away. For, after all, in her society he was getting the ultimate result of all labors and seeing what it was that people realized when they were successful here on earth.

Townley urged Arthur strongly to avail himself of Mrs. Gower’s hospitality to its utmost limit. It was a principle of his philosophy of life that it was the part of a clever man to take things directly rather than attain to them gradually; to grasp the fruits, and not cultivate the tree. “Any country bumpkin, any ordinary mechanic, can do that,” he would say. “But we in New York, in Wall Street, sit at the counter on which is poured the net earnings, the savings, the symbols of title to all the creations of a mighty nation. Ten thousand men may work to build a railroad, for instance, and ten thousand more to run it; and the clean result of all their toil and trouble, free of all dross and surplusage, is turned into our hands, portable and convenient, in the shape of a few engraved certificates of stock, or bonds, or banknotes. Presto! change! and some of them are in my pocket, and some in yours, and perhaps a new bit of paper, issued by us for the balance.” Arthur found Charlie a much more intellectual fellow than he had thought at first.

Guests came and went at Mrs. Gower’s, all with some charm of person, or of fashion, or of successful mind; applied intellect, not perhaps the pure kind. Arthur spent a few days in town, to prepare for his longer absence on the coaching trip; Tamms was moving down to his summer quarters near Long Branch, and old Mr. Townley hardly ever came to the office now. He had a private room up-stairs, where he used to spend some two or three hours a week, looking after his trusts. Charlie was neglecting his business more than ever, but seemed to make up for it by his devotions to Mamie Livingstone, which were almost getting, for him, exclusive. That young lady was “coming out” the next autumn, and already making elaborate preparations for it. Arthur saw her when he went to call on Gracie Holyoke, who was going, with Miss Brevier, to the old place at Great Barrington for the summer.

Mrs. Malgam had gone away, and Haviland, and Miss Lenoir; and the party had gradually settled down to those who were invited for the drive. As their numbers were narrowed, a feeling of increased intimacy sprang up among those who were to go through so much together; and they were fond of talking of it and consulting maps as to roads and stopping-places; and they grew confidential about outsiders. “But I thought Mrs. Malgam was to go with us, too,” said Mrs. Hay one day to Pussie; the two women were sitting on a new-mown hay-rick on the lawn, that had been cut for ornamental purposes, too soon to make good hay. Arthur was lying, with a volume of poetry, at their feet.

“Oh, dear, no,” laughed innocent Miss Duval. “Flossie and Baby never could abide each other. You must know Mrs. Malgam is a very dangerous person, for all she looks like a pan of cream.”

“Oh, indeed,” said Mrs. Hay, compressing her rich lips. She had recognized in Mrs. Malgam her American counterpart, and was slightly afraid of the violet-eyed brune, to whose deeper beauty her own made but a tinsel foil.

“Yes, indeed,” said Pussie. “You know a man shot himself for Mrs. Malgam, once, they say. Isn’t it exciting?”

“What, really?” put in Arthur. He had been forgotten for the moment; and Mrs. Hay drew up her red satin brodequins with a start. “Here comes Mrs. Gower,” said she, “suppose we ask her?”

“Oh, don’t,” put in Pussie, rather frightened; but Mrs. Hay was not to be repressed. Flossie Gower barely raised her eyebrows at the question. “There was a man, a Mr. Vane, who shot himself,” said she. “But it was from overwork, and not for Baby Malgam, I suspect. He was nothing but a money-making machine.”

It was a glorious day, when it finally arrived. Nature seemed, as usual, to smile on Flossie Gower’s plans. The party met at breakfast, all the women radiant in the neatest of dresses, with the gayest of coaching umbrellas; Caryl Wemyss and Van Kull in brown frock-coats with rosebuds in their silk lapels, and Derwent and Birmingham informally in knickerbockers. Breakfast was a longer meal than usual; and the warm June air came in through the windows, laden with roses. Then the crisp and rapid sound of many horses’ feet was heard upon the ground, and they all ran to the door to inspect the coach.

The women ran away to get ready, and the servants were busy packing every conceivable kind of a wrap, shawl, waterproof, mackintosh, rug, cloak, cape, ulster, or other similar garment yet devised, together with various little leather and silver travelling-bags, contents to Arthur as yet unknown. Of course, there was no room for real luggage in the coach; this went behind in the wagonette. But the inside of the coach was quite choked up, as it was, with some bales of these and similar trifles; so that when any lady had a headache and had to ride inside she had to lie upon the cargo, the seats being lost some two feet beneath it. Behind stood the wagonette, with four extra horses, in case of need, loaded with the luggage; and besides all this there was an extra servant, or postilion, riding a “cock-horse,” or tow-horse, for the pulls up-hill.

At last all was ready; on top of all inside was thrown a bundle of the morning’s papers, which were to lie there unopened through many sunny days; the light steel ladder was brought out, and Miss Duval and Kitty Farnum were inducted with much ceremony to the highest seat, Derwent and Lord Birmingham their companions. Mrs. Hay went behind with Arthur and Caryl Wemyss, in front of the pair of servants—an old stout one and a thin young one, both well trussed up in their plum-colored broadcloth. But these were not there yet, and only their neatly folded coats, showing the two brass buttons with the well-known crest of Levison Gower, betokened their future presence. Mrs. Gower herself climbed lightly into the box-seat, scorning a ladder; Van Kull took the reins beside her, and with a rapid leap the four horses took the road. As they passed out the coachman and groom came climbing up behind; the latter seized the horn, and a long and joyous peal of coaching music woke the echoes of the sleeping woods and lawn.

It seemed this gay fanfare had loosed their tongues, for at once a clatter of laughter and merry voices began. Van Kull, the horses being fresh, was busied with his driving; but Mrs. Gower turned to talk with the four behind her, and soon Miss Duval’s flow of animal spirits was set off and exploded in shrieks of shrilly laughter. Miss Farnum, too, said something to make Birmingham roar his catastrophic bass guffaws, and Wemyss took up the cue with Mrs. Hay. Only the two servants sitting facing them maintained the severe aspect which decorum of them demanded.

They were already sweeping down the dewy ravine in the forest, and in a minute more had come to the gate of Mrs. Gower’s demesne; it flew open, the porter bared his head, the porter’s wife and children bobbed up and down behind him; and between the armorial pillars they rolled out upon the common road. A dusty, sleepy road it was, giving no hint of its much use; for, early as it was for them, the people that travelled by the highways, the morning tradesmen’s carts and factory operatives, had long since passed over it to their daily station in life. You would be surprised if you knew how busy this same road could be in the hour or two that followed sunrise. But now it stretched away in silence through the broad green country, and its dust lay heaped in ridges undisturbed. The horses trotted smartly down its gentle slope; and then, breaking into a joyous gallop, rushed them up the other for a mile or more. Here was the factory village; and they swept through it triumphantly, but almost unseen, for all the world was now indoors. A few dogs barked; a few street-children, too young to work in the mills, cheered at them, or jeered, it were hard to say which. There was a great whirring of wheels from the mills, however; and the two free leaders took fright at them, and almost broke away from Van Kull, who held them hard, the big veins swelling in his throat. The coachman facing Arthur leaned far out and looked forward at them anxiously; but no one else minded. Such was the exhilaration of the air and motion, they might have run away and Pussie Duval have but sung her song the louder, while the others laughed the more. At last Van Kull pulled up his smoking team on the face of a big hill, the town a mile or so behind them. It was a very steep hill, or they would have carried it by assault; but now the groom on the cock-horse rode up and hooked his harness to the whiffletree, and the five horses set their necks into the collar, and took the summit slowly, as by siege. As they rose up, the country all behind them was unfolded, ridge by ridge, like a map; Arthur from his back seat faced full toward it. Gradually the chimneys of the factory village sank down into the bosom of the valley; the hills breasting it rose up behind them, until they overlooked their highest ridge; now the village was nearly hidden in the green floor of the valley, and all beyond were faint blue films of mountains; then, as they rose still higher, the rift of luminous air between the near hills and the distant mountains was seen to be paved with the blue flood of the river. The horses paused a moment to take breath; it was marvellously still; now and then the cackle of a hen came up from the valley; a train was crawling along its other side, but it moved as noiselessly as the white specks of sails upon the river.

The sunlight began to be hot, and Wemyss was sent within to fetch the larger sunshades from the “cabin,” as Miss Duval pleased to call it.

“Now you men,” said Flossie, “may go behind and smoke; and Mrs. Hay can take a place in front. You have none of you had your morning cigars, I am sure.” They had not; and after due demurrage the change was made. Four blue clouds arose to heaven from the after-seat; the four fair women grouped together in front; and Van Kull looked now and then askance and backward, as if in envy. And surely if ever an approach to godlike Nirvana is realized on earth, it is when one is moving rapidly through a broad June morning, looking down upon the roundness of the world, and blowing clouds upon it dreamily.

When Lord Birmingham took Van Kull’s place upon the box, giving the latter his seat in the smoke-room, as he termed it, most of the party felt, if they did not show, a delightful drowsiness, which was only dispelled by their arrival at a town and rumors of luncheon. A wild burst of the coaching horn electrified the main street, and they drove up before the principal “hotel,” a vast and ill-aired wooden structure, quite inappropriate to a coaching party, or even to the more civilized usages of life, as Mr. Wemyss with much particularity pointed out. But a private room had been engaged for them, and in this, with some local chickens and the resources of Mrs. Gower’s cellar and grapery, they made out not so badly.

After luncheon the men smoked, and the women retired to their especial quarters, where, it is to be presumed, some took a nap, and others, having sent for the little travelling-bags before mentioned, performed mysterious rites therewith. Wemyss, Lord Birmingham, Miss Duval, Miss Farnum, and Arthur went to walk about the town, and became the subjects of considerable admiring comment. In the country, on the contrary, such had not been the case; nil admirari was a motto faithfully practised, and the old farmers would hardly hitch their trousers and turn about for the loudest horn or the most rattling pace. When they came back to the hotel and found the coach drawn up to the door, there was assembled a considerable concourse of immature populace, who had already passed from the open-mouthed stage to the derisive one, and were making sarcastic and injurious comments upon the coach and its equipment, with that tendency so noteworthy in young America to deride or decry what it does not itself possess.

Off went the horses—the two wheelers were nearly fresh, having only been in the wagonette in the morning—the coachman wound a rapid call upon his horn, attended by an obligato of small boys, and they swayed and swung through the winding street of the hot little town, out into fields and hedgerows again. The hedges were in front of the lawns and villa residences that surrounded the town; and the road was well arched over with elms just breaking into leaf, under which the afternoon sun slanted.

It seemed to the party almost the perfection of life, as the little disconnected comments and the absence of any effort of conversation indicated. Simple being was enough; there was no sicklying over that day’s air and sunlight with any pale cast of thought, as Derwent said. Again they were high up on the slope of the country side; but the great golden bay of the Hudson had become a river here, and close beyond it the blue mountains of the highlands loomed up bold and near.

Now they came down close by the shore of the river; its salted waters were lapping, lapping on the round, weedy shore-stones, and over against them, in the skirt of the hills, lurked already the night. The stream’s broad bosom glowed motionless, bearing here and there a bark or boat; but no Sidney Sewall spoke of these to-night, or cared to trouble with intellectual speculation. Arthur remembered with unconcern that in the past there had been such things as the city, business, hour of duty; what mattered this to them, the chosen ones, bright beings in a world apart? And certainly everyone of the party had a charm our hero had not realized before; even Mrs. Hay, with her strong, sensuous beauty, lent a richness and a color to the grouping.

“It is lovely, after all,” said Miss Farnum, dreamily, voicing his thoughts. Here they were entering a high hanging wood; on the lower side of the road a lofty hewn-stone wall, all overgrown with moss and ivy, surmounted with old-fashioned stone urns now chipped and crumbling away. Over it they could see the winding leaf-heaped walks of a forgotten garden, untended lawns, and old stone garden-seats swathed in moss and mould. “It must be the grounds of some gentleman’s old country-seat,” said Miss Farnum. “Everyone goes farther from the city nowadays.” There was a something begetting thought in this suggestion; the warm sunlight sank sleepily down in the cup there between the woodlands, and the old garden looked like a place where one might take a nap for half a lifetime—say from youth to early old age. It was evidently a place of the old Idlewild, Ik Marvel, Porte-Crayon days, when people lived in their country, wrote of Dobb his ferry, and were as yet unacquainted with Englishmen and other foreigners. There must have been a strong home fragrance in our life in the forties or thereabouts, before the few found out that we are provinces, or the many that we are all the world.... Now they came out by a little water-bay, or lagoon, reaching inland, where the water lay still and a salt crust was on the long plashed grasses. “I suppose the people who live here go to Mount Desert, nowadays,” said Miss Farnum. “I wonder why they left here?”

“Malaria,” suggested Wemyss.

“There always seems something unreal, impossible about malaria here,” said Arthur. “Malaria is languid, tropical, unsuited to our bleak Northern, Puritan, hard-worked hillsides and meadow bottoms. Consumption, not malaria, is the typical disease.”

“It is only lately creeping into New England,” said Wemyss, dryly. Just then a merry burst of laughter was heard from the front; Arthur looked behind him, but there seemed to be no one speaking. The laugh had been from Miss Duval; she turned around at the same moment, her black eyes sparkling from her rosy face. “Isn’t it delightful?” said she to Arthur. There seemed to be no other reason for her laughing than this; and Arthur laughed in accord with her. It was delightful.

Now they were up in the highlands again, bowling along a hard straight road between the rows of trees. Continually the merry horn was sounded to warn the slow teams ahead to turn aside, or wake the sleepy milkmen, or pedlars in their carts. The sun, across the river, had already set behind the purple mountains; but eastward, to the right, the hills were light.

They entered into a high wood, filled already with gray shadows; along the edge of the road still lay the last year’s leaves, thick-matted, making the sound of the wheels soft. What light there was came from the violet sky above the tree-tops; and against it Kitty Farnum’s profile shone pale and clear-cut. Arthur was humming a German song to himself, and looking at her and wondering about her: what she was, what was her secret of life.

So the night came on them, in the wood. It was evening when they came out of it and rolled along, low by the river-shore; opposite, the great black mass of the Storm King, and beyond it, farther to the north, the mountains sank into a long low line, and above the dark ridge the sky was saffron, and in it hung and trembled one large liquid star, reflected larger and softly in the calm river. And they all looked at these things and were silent.

CHAPTER XX.
THE CHARIOT OF THE CARELESS GODS.

THE coach drew up at the little wharf at Garrison’s, and the party got into the ferry-boat and were carried across the river. The great hotel at West Point had been opened; the waiters were spick and span; the wooden floors were varnished, and slippery like glass. In the hall were two or three pretty girls, overdressed in white tulle dresses, low-necked, with their cavaliers who served for the nonce and their noisy younger brothers. This bright company crowded to the porch, curious, when the carriages drove up; and Arthur heard one of the pretty girls say to another, “It’s the coaching party—from New York.”

They went out and wandered on the cliffs above the river; the beautiful moon-washed mountains stood about them, and below them slept the Hudson with its salt flood, deeper, nobler than any Rhine. But there were no castles here, nor Lorelei; and the sunken gold had long since been robbed from its depths and was circulating in the hands of men.

Arthur fell to Miss Duval’s share, a position he always found a somewhat uncomfortable one; for how could he replace another man like Jimmy De Witt, and that one her acknowledged lover? But, had he known it, Miss Pussie, who was looking forward with intense and hungry anticipation for the joys of worldly pleasure and a fashionable marriage, and regarded this coaching party as an earnest of them, would have blushed at herself if she had been so out of the mode as to be unable to flirt with anyone but her future husband. It must be owned, therefore, that she found our hero slow; she tried to talk to him of hunting, and he to her of books, both things of which they were reciprocally ignorant. Then they walked up and down the great piazza, and amused themselves by looking through the windows into the great parlors, where the hotel girls (puella tabernensis Americana) were dancing with some tightly buttoned cadets. Just then Lionel Derwent came up, alone with his cigar. “Let me join you,” said he. “I went downhill and I came upon Birmingham, in at attitude full of unconscious humor, addressing Miss Farnum; I came up-hill and blundered upon Van Kull and Mrs. Hay. From these I retreated in disorder only to make myself de trop with Mr. Caryl Wemyss and our charming hostess. Shall I be so here?”

Miss Duval laughed. “I was just going to bed, Mr. Derwent; so you and Mr. Holyoke can fight it out alone. Good-night—good-night, Mr. Holyoke.” And she left them in the doorway and took her way up the great staircase. Arthur and Mr. Derwent looked at one another inquiringly. “Shall we go and smoke?” said the latter, at last. “By all means,” answered Arthur. “Where shall we go—out upon the cliff?”

“I am afraid it is too densely populated there for such a wild man as myself, already,” said Derwent, laughing. “Come down to the billiard-room.” They went down there, and sat at a table, opposite a bar, where they were not, as Derwent expressed it, “troubled by the moon,” and here they smoked their cigars and pondered.

“Mr. Van Kull seems rather devoted to Mrs. Hay,” said Arthur, at a venture.

“And well he may be,” said Derwent, gravely. “He prefers the flowers of evil; and she is a most glorious one.”

“Evil?” said Arthur, incredulously. “She seems to me a kind-hearted creature, fond of show, no worse than thoughtless.”

“So is a nightshade blossom fond of sunlight, and bright-colored and innocent of harm,” said Derwent, with a smile. “Mrs. Hay is a luxuriant animal—a woman of the world, as other women are women of the town; and her life is one continual sermon unto these: ‘Look ye; I am rich, happy, high-placed; I have all the opportunities and advantages, all the taste and teaching, that the best can give; and I have not one single taste, or thought, or aspiration that the worst of you have not; nor have I lost one that you have, except, perhaps, the fondness for domestic life which some of the best of you may once have had. I, too, still care for dress and show and the longing glance of many men; these things, that you are foolishly told have ruined you, are just what I, too, prize in life; I, Mrs. Wilton Hay, the great high-born beauty whose photograph you have seen in the shop-windows!’ I tell you,” ended Derwent, savagely, “but for a little poor fastidiousness, her soul resembles theirs as do two berries on one stem. But consciously, ’tis true she does no harm; possibly she has not even sinned; as well attach a moral guilt to some gaudy wayside weed, growing by mistake in a garden among the sesame and lilies!”

“But Mrs. Gower seems very fond of her——”

“Ah! Mrs. Gower!” answered Derwent, dropping his voice. “She is a different sort of person entirely. Fannie Hay is but a soldier of Apollyon; but Florence Gower is a general-of-division.”

“I don’t see why you live with them,” said Arthur, boldly.

“Ah, Holyoke, I live everywhere; I see these, and others, too. That night when I came back from the factory village, I had been talking with the men, and with some of the young girls there. And I could fancy Mrs. Hay going there, good-naturedly as she might, and saying to them: ‘Don’t care for dresses, or to lure men’s love or women’s envy, or to dazzle your neighbor Jenny or break her Johnny’s heart; read books, look at pictures, enjoy the beauties of nature, seek the beauty of holiness.’—‘Does your ladyship?’ say they.—‘Well, at all events, be clean,’ answers Fannie Hay, shocked.—‘But cleanliness costs money, my fine lady.’—Christ solved the question once; but now Christ is forgotten; and the sphinx looks out unanswered over the desert sand.”

“Surely you can say nothing against Miss Farnum, at least?”

“She is caught like the others, in their web,” said he. “But come, it’s late indeed to be troubling ourselves over these two or three. What are they to the million?”

Arthur thought much of Derwent’s talk; but he seemed to him a morbid fellow, unpractical and vague. And still more morbid it all seemed in the morning, when he woke and saw the sunlight and blue sky above the mountains of the river. Dressing was a delight, with such an outlook and with such a day before him; and coming down he met Miss Farnum looking fresh as a rose with the dew on it. Caryl Wemyss was standing talking to her with that air of distinction of which he was so proud; and just after, Mrs. Hay and Miss Duval came bouncing down the staircase, arm in arm. So they went in to breakfast, without waiting for Mrs. Gower, hungry, and in high glee for want of a chaperone. “Oh, I don’t consider you a chaperone,” said Pussie Duval to Mrs. Hay. “Nor do I,” added Kill Van Kull, hastily.

Theirs was the central table in the dining-hall; and each lady found a dozen roses at her plate. These were from Lord Birmingham, who appeared late, and was duly thanked for them. Every man asked his neighbor for one rosebud as a boutonnière: and just then Flossie came in, dressed in the airiest of summer gowns; and there was a great arising and scraping of chairs among the gentlemen.

Soon they were down at the river, and crossing the river again. Such a wealth of brown sunlight as was in the air! The bold mountains rose up on either side, not soft and purple with heather, as in England, nor brown and sharp with rock, as in Italy, but green and shaggy, as in a new country, with a growth of timber; the deep, swirling waters, brown where you looked into them, shaded off to blue farther from the boat, where they gleamed smooth beneath the cloudless sky. And the sparkle and the stillness of the morning gave one the feeling of a truant school-boy.

“There is something about an American landscape that reminds one of the pictures in omnibuses,” said Wemyss. No one replied to this; for they were nearing the wharf, where the coach and four were standing, as if it were Fifth Avenue. Again there was the shifting of rugs and wraps in the body, and the courtesies of the steel ladder, and the pleasant twinkling of neat ankles as the ladies alertly mounted it. The four men hove themselves up anyhow, with Lord Birmingham and Miss Farnum on the box; and then with a swing the heavy drag was swaying under way, and the four shining chestnuts took the hill at a gallop. They were passing a row of square wooden houses where poor people lived, and Mrs. Hay turned about and called to Wemyss. “One thing I notice, Mr. Wemyss—in America you have tenements, not cottages.”

“Yes,” said he, “and ‘elegant residences’ for gentlemen’s houses!”

“Now, in Devonshire,” said Mrs. Hay, “those cottages would be smothered in roses and fuchsia vines. Don’t you have any cottage improvement societies? My cousin, Lady St. Aubyn, at Hartland (near Clovelly, you know), has been most active in them; and one of her tenants took the prize for the county!”

“These people are nobody’s tenants,” said Wemyss; “and they decorate their houses as they damn please, American fashion; with goats and tomato-cans, if they prefer.”

By this time they had entered the forest that clothes the slopes of Breakneck Mountain. The road was none of the best, and the top of the coach careened violently, almost shaking Derwent, who was idly smoking with his face in the sunlight and his eyes half closed, off the back seat. “Come, let’s walk,” said Pussie Duval; and as the coach halted a moment upon one of those ridges across the road imaginatively designated “thank-ye-marms,” she nimbly dropped herself over the side and sprang back into the daisies and buttercups. Arthur, Mrs. Hay, Flossie, Van Kull, and Wemyss followed; Derwent Mrs. Gower ordered to remain upon the coach and play propriety; whereupon that gentleman stretched himself quite lengthwise upon the warm back seat, pulled his cloth hat over his eyes, and to all appearances went to sleep.

“We can cut off a mile,” said Van Kull, “by cutting straight through the woods to where the road strikes the river again. Now then! each his own way, and the coach will wait for us there, if it gets in first.” So they disappeared; Van Kull with Mrs. Hay making for a pine grove on the high land, Wemyss and Mrs. Gower going lower, where there seemed evidences of a path, and our hero with Miss Duval taking a middle course through a rocky pasture, sweet-scented with fern and heathery blossoms, and dotted with dwarfed and obsolete apple-trees. This gave Lord Birmingham a chance of devoting himself entirely to his driving and his companion upon the box. For an hour or more the coach lumbered on; its driver talked incessantly, but drove very badly, and Lionel Derwent slumbered in the rear.

In the woods, the day was a very warm one. What breeze there was could not be felt. It would take too long to follow the devious ways of every party in all their wanderings; suffice it to say that shortly before noon Arthur, with Pussie Duval, came out upon the road close by the Hudson, where they sat upon a fence and waited. Arthur was getting every day more used to her society; and Mr. De Witt was no longer so continually upon his mind. Here they were met by the other two couples; and finally, when the coach came thundering down the hill with a wheel in a shoe, the whole six were sitting on the fence, à la mode du pays; and Wemyss was even whittling.

“Well, you have been long,” said Van Kull.

“Ah, you can’t make up for lost time with cracking of whips and horn-blowing!” laughed Mrs. Gower.

“What have they been doing all this time?—without prejudice, now, Mr. Derwent?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Hay—I’ve been asleep,” said that gentleman.

“Come, now, I’d like to know how long all of you have been here—that’s all,” growled his lordship, blushing obviously. “Get aboard there—I’m hungry as a bear. Where do we stop for lunch, Mrs. Gower?”

“At Fishkill,” said that lady. “It’s only a few miles ahead.” And in an hour or so they stopped before a sleepy old inn, low and rambling, with a Rip-Van-Winklish look about it. There is a lazy luxuriance, a sort of slatternly comfort, and a Southern coloring about these old New York villages, bespeaking material ease and an absence of moral nervousness; perhaps nervous morality would better express it. “I never look at a place like this,” said Wemyss, “without thinking that the most vigorous-sounding word in the Dutchman’s language was Schnapps!”

After luncheon the day was warm, and the ladies inclined to sleep. Only Derwent wished for a walk, and Arthur went with him, while the others smoked. They sauntered through the little town’s unkempt, painted streets; and Derwent sent a telegram. Arthur noticed, with some surprise, that it was addressed to Haviland. Then at three they returned, and found the party for the most part wrapped in dreams.

They put to and were off, but the order was changed, as usual, and Pussie Duval rode with Derwent on the box. Caryl Wemyss would not drive, for he never did anything that he thought he did not well; so he and Mrs. Gower and Birmingham sat on the back seat, with Arthur, Van Kull, Mrs. Hay, and Kitty Farnum on in front. The drive to Poughkeepsie was straight and uneventful. The long hours were only diversified by Mrs. Wilton Hay’s uncertain efforts on the coaching horn.

Poughkeepsie is a brick-built city, with horse-car lines, an opera-house, and a court of justice all its own. Here they had a suite of rooms, with long lace curtains, black-walnut furniture, and Brussels carpets, equipped “before the dawn of taste, in poor imitation of a poorer thing,” said Wemyss; “how different from an English inn!” The rest of the adornment consisted, in each room, of a steam-heater and a pitcher of ice-water! “I believe they even bathe in ice-water!” said he. “Dear me!” said Birmingham, simply. “I rang and could not get a tub at all.”

They had dinner in Mrs. Gower’s parlor, and a telegram was brought in to her during the dessert. “Oh, I am very glad,” said she, as she laid it down. “It is from Mr. Haviland; and he says he can join us to-morrow.” Arthur looked at her, and then at Derwent; but that gentleman made no sign; only, Lord Birmingham looked disgusted. The others expressed a polite gratification, and then the question came up what they were to do in the evening. Already a great intimacy had sprung up among the party, and a certain feeling of youth, born of much outdoor air and freedom from care. Some proposed ghost-stories, others, games. “I bar kissing games,” said Pussie Duval, with much aplomb, “in the absence of Mr. De Witt.” Kisses were debarred, being, as Van Kull expressed it, too serious things to be made game of; but forfeits, twenty questions, even dancing, was indulged in. When all these failed to satisfy their souls, it was rumored that Mr. Derwent was “up” in palmistry. “Oh, do tell us our fortunes!” was the cry. “We must have a regular gypsy tent.”

“Now,” said Mrs. Hay, “it’s no fun unless we all tell. Agree all of you to tell us what he says!”

“Girls, girls” (the women of Mrs. Gower’s set had a way of still addressing each other joyously as “girls”)—“suppose he reveals the secrets of your hearts?”

“’Pon my soul!” cried Mrs. Hay, “I’ve quite forgotten what they are! Who’ll go in first?”

A shawl had been hung across an open door, behind which Derwent took up his position. No one seemed anxious to make the first try; and at last the voice of the company fell upon Arthur Holyoke, “as having,” said Mrs. Gower, “the most future before him.”

Arthur went in and came out laughing. “I have had,” said he, “a very terrible horoscope, as Derwent says. Everything that I really wish for is to happen to me!”

“I don’t see what there is so very terrible about that,” said they all; and the others were emboldened. Mrs. Gower went in next. “Speak aloud, Mr. Derwent,” cried Mrs. Hay, “so we all can hear—we can’t trust the garbled statements of the culprits.”

Derwent’s voice was heard, in sepulchral tones, from behind the screen. “I see the hand of a woman who has done whatever she has meant to do——”

(“Dear me,” interjected Mrs. Hay, “how successful we all are!”)

“She may come near doing more than she meant to do; but her will shall conquer everything.”

“How delightfully enigmatic!” laughed Pussie Duval.

“You must go in next, Miss Pussie—you spoke,” said Van Kull. But Pussie wouldn’t; and the choice fell upon Kitty Farnum. She disappeared, and there was several moments’ silence. At last—

“Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,

Die hat einen Andern erwählt;

Der Andre liebt eine Andre

Und hat sich mit Dieser vermählt.

“Das Mädchen heiratet aus Ärger

Den ersten besten Mann,

Der ihr in den Weg gelaufen;

Der Jüngling ist übel dran.

“Es ist eine alte Geschichte,

Doch bleibt sie immer neu;

Und wem sie just passieret,

Dem bricht das Herz entzwei——”

“Good heavens!” laughed Flossie. “Come, you go in, Mr. Van Kull.”

“I can tell more of this man’s past than his future,” said the voice.

“There has been a voyage across the water—perhaps to Brighton, or to Cannes. And there is a fair maiden and a dark maiden; and both have had but little influence on his life. And there is to be another yet, I see——”

“There, there,” interfered Flossie, “if you make poor Van such a Don Juan, we shall have to send him home again, in our own protection. Mrs. Hay, you go in.”

But this the beauty flatly refused to do. And after much chaff at her expense, the party betook themselves to their several slumbers.

The next day was Sunday; but, as Wemyss said, to leave Poughkeepsie was a work of necessity and mercy; and they were early under way. Here they left the river, and they struck inland; the country grew more rural and primitive, and their spirits rose proportionately. Haviland appeared by the early train, and shared the back seat with Birmingham, Mrs. Gower, and Kitty Farnum. He brought the news of the day, which no one cared to hear; and some gossip of the town, which interested everybody. “How can you have the heart to bring him up?” Wemyss had said at breakfast; and Flossie had laughed, and said that she expected a very entertaining day. “He must go back Monday evening, you know,” she added.

They had another perfect day, and by this time all of them, even to Caryl Wemyss, were charged with ozone and overflowing with animal spirits. Even practical joking was in order; and Arthur had caught an instantaneous photograph, which he exhibited with much applause, of Van Kull assisting Mrs. Hay over a stone wall. Conversation was unnecessary; it was quite enough to live and laugh. Much amusement was caused by a rustic, at a farm-house where they stopped for milk, who first insisted that they were the advance-guard of a circus, and then would have it that they were “travelling” for something—“jerseys” and men’s clothing, he first suggested, and then parlor organs and patent medicines. And all the women were so pretty, and so stylish, and so sweet-tempered, that Arthur began to feel a little bit in love with every one of them.

“But one gets tired of women, after a while,” said Caryl Wemyss to Arthur, at Washington Hollow, where they lunched. The inn was an old roadside one, at the “four corners,” smelling of dusty leather and the road, with a large bar-room, fit political centre of the surrounding district; but the country was robed in beautiful green forests, into which the others had plunged, and came back loaded with wild flowers, Mrs. Gower with Lord Birmingham, and Haviland and Kitty Farnum last of all. For a wonder, Derwent had done the polite, and wandered off with Mrs. Wilton Hay. Van Kull and Miss Duval came back laughing over some quaint epitaphs they had discovered in what he termed a “boneyard” opposite. “What a jolly place this must have been in the old days!” said Flossie. “Look at the splendid great chimney-places and the old ball-room!” And Arthur’s memory suddenly went back to the ball-room at Lem Hitchcock’s. But it was summer now, and the place was civilized; some stranded woman-boarder was playing, upon an old piano overhead, one of Beethoven’s sonatas. And Derwent took up a curious old stone jug, in which they had had milk, and read:

“He who buys land, buys stones;

“He who buys meat, buys bones;

“He who buys eggs must buy their shells—

“Who buys good ale buys nothing else.”

But, after all, no stops were like the rapid riding; the sense of freedom and delight of sweeping high over the rolling country, making a panorama of it, and being in a little republic of their own. Two small roans were leaders to-day, and the chestnuts, being a little used up, were in the lighter baggage-wagon, in “spike team” with the cock-horse; for no great hills were expected that afternoon.

Arthur settled himself again to the pure delight of life, gazing joyously from sky to forest and from forest to the wide green carpet of the fields, sweeping by them with the changing angles of the long Virginia fences. Arthur and Pussie Duval were the least blasé of the party; and both drank in the very moments with enthusiasm. And when he was tired of looking at the swelling hills and spaces of the sky, it was pleasant to look in her fair face—or, for that matter, at any other of the beautiful women about him. As for Miss Duval, the world was like an opening treasure-house to her; she saw before her all she wanted, and had only to grasp her fill with full hands. Ah! saints and cynics to the contrary, this world has happiness for some—thought Arthur. But what he said was, “How lovely that long edge of the forest is, Miss Duval! See how boldly the high trees rise out of the meadow; I suppose it’s what the poets call a ‘hanging wood.’ La lisière they call it in French; I have always thought it was such a pretty name for Mrs. Gower’s place.”

“But you weren’t really thinking of that, Mr. Holyoke,” said she. “You weren’t looking at it.”

“I was looking at your eyes, Miss Duval, if you will have it,” said Arthur. It will be seen that our hero was making progress.

“Dear me!” cried Mrs. Hay, who overheard this speech, “I shall certainly write to Mr. De Witt. Why don’t you say such intense things to me, Mr. Van Kull?”

“Because I daren’t,” said Van Kull, meaningly.

“Please—I’ll promise not to write to Wilton,” retorted she. “Poor Wilton! he must find it so hot in Washington.”

How pleasant it is to feel ourselves moving above the world like gods! How pleasant it is, like gods, to make of our own rules of conduct our laws of good and evil! And what responsibility have we for the rest of humanity? They should not all attempt to be in fashion. Fashion is for us alone—us few, who transcend common laws.

Yet it is relying on the many abiding by the humdrum rules of gravity that the few can flutter and glitter freely on the surface. In the evening there was a moon (which shineth alike upon the just and on the unjust; particularly the latter, for moonlight has no conscience), and the warm night attracted them forth from the dreary hotel parlor. They wandered up the hill, through pastures, to where there was a cliff, above huge chasms of a quarry, carven deep into the living rock. Here they met some Italian laborers; they were living in little wooden huts about the quarry, with their womankind, richly, upon seventy cents a day. Their views of life were much the same as their own, thought Derwent, looking at the merry party; with only, perhaps, a little less morality, a little more religion, these day laborers, than had they.

Caryl Wemyss conversed with them a little in their own language, at which they were greatly pleased. They were citizens, and had come over to make their portion of our great democracy; but they sighed for the sunny skies of Sicily as yet.

Wemyss was walking with Mrs. Gower, and as they turned back they found Haviland sitting with Kitty Farnum on a stone wall in the long grass; the moon lit up her fair face and her eyes, which were shining; and all about them lay the petals of a rose that she had pulled to pieces. “How like Faust and Marguerite!” said Mrs. Gower.

“Say, rather, Psyche with her Dipsychus,” said Mr. Wemyss.

“Who is Dipsychus?” said Flossie Gower.

“Have you never met him, then?” said Wemyss. And coming back, she took his arm across the fields.

Wemyss pressed it gently, and began to analyze himself, whether he was in love with her or not. It rather flattered him to think he was.

CHAPTER XXI.
ARTHUR GOES HOME.

THE days were growing unnumbered by this time, measure of time being only necessary when one has daily petty duties, and existence is not a continuous, untroubled joy. Arthur positively bloomed; even Derwent seemed a shade less anxious for the souls of men, and Mr. Wemyss a point less analytic. And the morning was one to bring a bit of fresh color to the cheek of a very Tannhäuser who had been long years jaded with Venus’s joys, his dull eyes rested with the lights of earth again, his ear soothed by notes of spring and human love. The land was beautiful with bud-promise, the air steeped with joyous light of life. And the girls came down to breakfast, looking each and all a Hebe.

For the will of the world comes out in this—that all that has to do with life, new life, charms and attracts us; that all that speaks of over-thought, of over-soul, if you will, is wan and weird—either positively uncanny, or laughable, like the chorus of old men in Faust! Instinctively, we all turn to the flower, to the fresh looks of the young girl, to the rosy lips, full of the promise of future life. No wrinkled wisdom, no sorrowful lines of character, can make up for this. The first thoughtless girl we meet shows her beauté du diable more than a match for all the crow’s-feet of the intellect. And this is the magnetism of vitality; it is your full-blooded man that the masses of the world delight to follow. The unthinking are repelled by too much consciousness, as by disease.

We all have known such sunny mornings, when we that are living live, and the dead lie dead in their churchyards. Gayly the party mounted; and the strong horses galloped over the roads. They were still in the broad valley of the Hudson; far behind them lay the river, unseen, but farther still was visible yet the blue film of the Catskills. They crossed a broad intervale, and ahead of them was a gap in the hills, over which the road wound in a sort of pass. And now as they galloped up it in the shadow of the elms it was as if they had gone through a narrow door into a different country; the scene changed, the hills grew small, rugged, and broken; the vegetation was less rich; they were in New England. So marked was it that Wemyss pointed out the change; even the color of the houses was not the same, nor the look of the barns. They were small and neat, and painted sternly white; the very gates were better hung, and the sidewalks more neatly trimmed; the squalid, unkempt look was gone, and with it the greater luxuriance. One no longer felt the vastness of the Continent, but seemed to be in an older corner of it, the bars not yet let down, where elbow-room was less, and ideas and conventions artificially preserved. The hills were smaller, and the trees looked stunted; human habitations had a look like an old dress which the wearer in her penury still struggled to keep neat. Arthur was reminded at once of the look of the land about the hill-town to which he had driven on that day with Gracie. They had crossed the line into Connecticut, and the boundary was more marked than is usual in political divisions. Even in New York there had been a suggestion of the Western prairies; here was none. But there was a greater vigor in the air, which had a sort of moorland sparkle in it; and the talk was livelier than ever. They had a long and breezy drive of it, and the cock-horse was used many times in pulling up the grassy old road, which led uncompromisingly up the barren, ferny hills. For lunch they stopped at a little place called Lakeville, nestling in the hills between two clear blue ponds; and here John Haviland (having performed his errand) had to leave them to take his train back to the city.

In the afternoon Arthur was allowed to try his hand at driving; he sat on the box-seat with Miss Farnum, who was very silent, and Mrs. Gower and Wemyss had the rear seat to themselves. Kill Van Kull was allowed to get into the “cabin” and go to sleep, a refreshment which he averred the country air made most needful to him. Behind him on the middle seat the party were very noisy, and Arthur had much ado to keep his attention on the horses, who seemed also to feel the tang of the keen soft air. As they were going down a crooked hill, longer than he had expected, so that no shoe had been put on, the horses got almost beyond his control. He gathered the four reins together and pulled his best, and just managed to keep them in the road. The people behind were laughing and talking, unconscious of what was going on; and Arthur had already begun to congratulate himself upon his escape, when, as they were nearing the bottom, he got too far on the outer curve, and the heavy wheels sank deep in the gravel, still wet with the spring rains. One awful moment of suspense, and then the ponderous vehicle swayed heavily, rolled majestically over on its side. A shrill scream resounded behind him—it is not the custom for American girls to scream—and Mrs. Hay threw her arms wildly around Lord Birmingham, with the feminine instinct to embrace something in emergencies. But it was of no avail; and they all sailed gracefully off into the long grass, Arthur still devotedly hanging to the reins.

No one was hurt; and after a bare pause for reflection, everybody burst forth in a roar of laughter. Loudly and long they laughed, holding their sides; they were laughing too much to get up; one horse was down, and the others rearing and plunging. Van Kull put his head ruefully out of the window of the coach that was uppermost and contemplated the scene. His hat was crushed, he was nigh smothered with shawls and veils, and his hair hanging down over his eyes; and his head protruded slowly, like a disabled jack-in-the-box, amid the merriment of the company.

“Perhaps, when some of you damned fools get through laughing,” said he, without undue emphasis, “you’ll find time to attend to those leaders.”

Van Kull’s remark, though over-forcible, was undeniably just; and Derwent was already at their heads. The groom was also there; and in a few moments the horses were taken out, the coach set upright again, and all damage repaired. Everyone agreed that the accident was in nowise due to Arthur’s driving, but entirely to the soft bit in the road.

“These things will happen, you know,” said Birmingham, good-naturedly.

“It’s half the fun, I think,” said Pussie Duval.

“I thought you’d ’a dumped ’em, sir,” said the groom, “when I see that ere soft bit in the road.” And as a mark of special confidence, Arthur was allowed to drive the coach the rest of the way into Great Barrington, where they were to stop for the night.

The merriment consequent on their disaster did not cease during the afternoon, and Arthur was many times maliciously thanked for the diversion he had afforded the party. But Miss Farnum, who was still his companion on the box, seemed fortunately as much inclined to silence as he was himself. Indeed, she had been strangely silent all the day.

The country roads gradually drew themselves together and made themselves into the broad, straight avenue that is Great Barrington’s main street; and up this they swept gayly, about an hour before sunset. They did not pass the Judge’s old place; but as Arthur heard Mrs. Gower’s light laughter behind him the old scene in the garden recurred to him at once. It was not yet a year ago: and he remembered now that the man she had been driving with was Wemyss.

They drew up merrily before the village hotel—it seemed so odd to Arthur to be there in his own town; he had never associated it with so gay a party—and after a few minutes of preparation they started out to see the place. Miss Farnum made pretext of a headache and did not go; but the others sauntered along beneath the overarching elms. To the left the setting sun lay across the intervale in broad gold bars. Arthur was walking with Lord Birmingham and Mrs. Hay.

Coming back, they met Mrs. Gower at the dinner-table. “I am sorry,” said she, “Miss Farnum has to go home.”

“Dear me, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Hay, politely.

“What, you don’t mean she’s going to leave us?” said Lord Birmingham, blankly. He looked from one to the other of the party, as if asking an explanation. “She said nothing to me about it,” he added, naïvely.

“I have telegraphed to Mrs. Malgam to ask her to join us,” said Mrs. Flossie, hurriedly checking the general inclination to laugh that had succeeded his lordship’s last speech. “You need not look so blank, you men—no Jack shall be left without a Jill.”

“A Jill,” said Wemyss, maliciously, accentuating the indefinite article, and looking at Mrs. Hay.

“’Pon my word, I think you’re very insulting,” broke in Mrs. Hay, savagely. No one could exactly see why; whereupon Van Kull, with much social dexterity, looked upon Mrs. Hay and sighed. Further comment was checked by the arrival of Miss Farnum herself, who bore her fine face quite as unconsciously, a shade more coldly, than usual. And then the finer emotions gave place to food.

Arthur was honored by a seat on Mrs. Gower’s left; but he was silent through the meal, a fact which was maliciously attributed to the events of the afternoon. “Don’t look upset, Mr. Holyoke, please!” cried Miss Duval. “We have quite regained our composure.” Arthur had not been thinking of the accident at all; but he did color again, to be reminded of it. “It was a soft spot in the road, you know,” said he.

“A soft spot in your heart, I much suspect,” laughed Mrs. Gower. “Miss Farnum, you should not have sat with him.”

“Who?” said the beauty, bringing her gaze to a focus. “Oh,” she added, indifferently. “I?”

“’Pon my word,” screamed Mrs. Wilton Hay. “You two are too delicious! But you’re positively too absent-minded to be trusted together. Aren’t they Mrs. Gower? They might not have presence of mind enough not to elope, you know.”

Soon after this Miss Farnum left the table; and when Arthur followed, he found her out upon the doorstep, talking with Lionel Derwent. The sun had gone down now, and its last radiance came down upon them from some scarlet clouds. Miss Farnum went in almost immediately, leaving him with Derwent alone.

“A lovely evening,” said he. “Will you take a tramp?”

Arthur hesitated. Then he spoke with decision. “Yes. I have a call to make—won’t you come with me? Miss Livingstone, you know, and my cousin, Miss Holyoke, are here—do you know them?”

“No,” said the other; “but I shall like to.”

“Come along, then,” said Arthur. And they went up the long village street until the road began to twist among the apple-orchards and they got into the dusk that was already at the base of the wooded hills. Derwent pulled out a brierwood pipe and smoked it, and they walked in silence.

At last they came in front of the dignified old house, wearing, like a wig, its high-pitched roof and white balustrade, with its terrace for silk stockings and its dressed front of quaint old flowers as a ruffle of old lace. The gate creaked in its wonted way; and they walked up the familiar gravel-walk. “The ladies were at home;” and the two went into the large living-room, and found Gracie and Mamie Livingstone together. Arthur shook hands with Mamie, and then, after introducing Mr. Derwent, sat down by his cousin, leaving Mamie to his friend, a proceeding which the latter noticed. Derwent talked nearly all the time to Mamie, whose little self he read at once, but his eyes wandered more than once to Gracie and her cousin. Now, Gracie Mamie thought a character far simpler than herself. They all sat so near that when either pair was silent the other’s conversation could be heard. Their call had lasted nearly an hour, when Miss Brevier came in, who was there, matronizing the young people, for a few days only. Then the conversation became more general, save that Derwent talked some half an hour, at the end, with Miss Holyoke. It was after ten before they rose to go.

“So you are going to Lenox to-morrow,” said Gracie. “And after that?”

“After that, I don’t know; perhaps I shall come here?”

“I don’t think you could bear being at the Barrington Hotel,” said Gracie, with a laugh. Arthur bit his lip.

“Well, I suppose a fellow can go somewhere,” said he. “I may have to go back to the shop. Where do you go, Derwent?”

“I am going out among the Rockies of British Columbia, hunting,” said he. “I wish you’d come,” he added, turning to Arthur suddenly, as if the thought had then first struck him.

“Thanks,” said Arthur, ill-naturedly. “Unfortunately, I’m nothing but a broker’s clerk.” But his amour-propre was soothed by the evident increased consideration that Miss Livingstone had shown him; and even to the last moment she pressed him with questions, and hung admiringly upon his history of the trip.

“Who did you say was with you on the box when you upset?” she said, as they lingered at the doorway. The moon was up by this time, bleaching all the colored roses of the terrace in its yellow light.

“Miss Farnum,” said Arthur. “But I believe Mrs. Malgam takes her place to-morrow,” he added, carelessly.

“Oh!” said Mamie. “I’m fearing you’ll be quite too grand to speak to me when I’m a bud.” And she gave him a look—one of her practised looks—out of her very pretty eyes, a look that Gracie never could have compassed. Arthur returned it, with the skill of a year’s experience; meantime, Derwent was taking leave of the others, and they soon were walking home together—that is, to the Great Barrington Hotel.

“A charming girl,” said Derwent.

“Who?” said Arthur, curtly.

“Miss Livingstone,” said the other, after a pause. “Your young New York girls are such delicate flowers—and yet so hardy, too. And they can be trained to almost anything.”

Arthur did not sleep well that night; but the morning was a lovely one again. They had to wait until the New York train arrived, which was not until the afternoon, for Mrs. Malgam. Kitty Farnum had started off quietly, early in the morning, and Derwent had gone with her, meaning to see her safely to New Haven, where her maid would meet her, and then take the return train back with Mrs. Malgam. Lord Birmingham had been too dull to think of this proceeding, and was in a vicious humor all the day in consequence. Arthur was in two minds about going to see Gracie in the morning. But as Birmingham sulked all day, there were not men enough without him; so he went to walk with Mrs. Hay instead. Mrs. Hay was one of those women whose flirting was less intellectual than the American type; she delighted chiefly in appealing to men’s senses; and her company was not ennobling.

But in the afternoon appeared Mrs. Malgam, clothed in the loveliest of smiles and spring dresses. If she had any grudge against Flossie, she did not show it; but spoke to her caressingly, and with a certain deference, as from a giddy young girl to her chaperone. And then, as if her conscience were safely in Flossie’s charge, she inaugurated a most audacious and ostentatious love-affair with the peer; that is, she caused him to inaugurate it. Baby Malgam never inaugurated anything; she only looked as if she understood it. A pan of cream, indeed; not milk and water; opaque, unfathomable to the eye, and yet, perhaps, not deep. Wemyss talked with Arthur about it. “You are the only fellow left whom one can talk to,” said he. “Birmingham’s too dull, and Derwent’s not a man of the world.” Arthur’s heart warmed to him at once. “Baby Malgam,” said he, “means to beat Mrs. Gower on her own ground.”

This was said on the way to Lenox. At five the horses were brought up to the door; the brilliant party were again in their familiar seats, and bowling briskly over the well-made roads. And our hero was himself again; and the exhilaration of the motion, and the bright eyes and pretty dresses, and the trained flattery of their most desirable owners, and the admiration of the populace—to him as to them, was the breath of his nostrils.

“A woman’s looks

Are barbèd hooks,

That catch by art

The strongest heart,”

says the old Elizabethan poet; but they swallowed the hooks in those days.

So they came to Lenox; Lenox of the sleepy hills, and sweet wild roads, and shady green seclusion. Here were the first good roads they had seen since they left Mrs. Gower’s home; and Van Kull “let out” the horses, and they galloped like a summer storm. And the gayety seemed redoubled since Mrs. Malgam’s arrival. Lord Birmingham was evidently drinking her in like some new sort of wine; Derwent alone was silent and abstracted. So they were none of them sorry when he told them that he, too, must leave at Lenox. In the evening, he got a long walk with Arthur, and spoke most bitterly about them all. “As for Mrs. Hay,” he said, “she’s hardly worth considering; she only injures men, and men who are her mates. But Mrs. Gower is a woman who has successively sought and successively attained, or appeared to attain, every height, every good thing, and every great place in turn, in order that she might vulgarize it. She has mounted every summit but to make it hers. Do you see how Mrs. Malgam, and Miss Duval, and all the others ape her?”

Arthur thought him very ill-bred and rude to this most charming hostess, and almost dared to say so. Derwent pulled out his brierwood pipe, and they walked on in silence.

“Now,” the other went on, “take another sort of girl—a girl like your friend Miss Holyoke, for instance——”

“I don’t see what Miss Holyoke has to do with the case,” said Arthur, goading himself into a passion. And the walk ended—purposely, so far as Arthur was concerned—in a sort of quarrel. Coming back, he found Mrs. Malgam walking in the lawn of Mrs. Gower’s cottage, and joined her, and found solace after the Englishman’s asperity.

Mrs. Malgam was dressed in a faultless summer gown, and wore the famous pearls that she had bought with the estate of her first husband. Arthur revenged himself by repeating to her all Derwent’s conversation.

“I am glad he’s going,” said she. “He’s the most cynical person I ever met; and I hate cynicism.”

“Who’s that you’re talking of?” said Wemyss, coming up.

“Derwent,” said Arthur. “We’re both glad he’s going.”

“Oh, Derwent is quite impossible,” said Wemyss. “He’s well enough at a dinner where they feed the lions, but quite out of his place in society. The fellow’s a crank, too; just the sort of a man who ends by marrying a woman of the demi-monde.”

“By way of reformation, I suppose,” laughed Mrs. Malgam. Arthur walked with her some time, as Wemyss left upon this last bon mot; and the next day, when they came together after breakfast, there was no trace of Derwent.

“Do you know he’s a friend of Chinese Gordon?” said Lord Birmingham.

“I should think, quite possible,” said Wemyss. “I hope we’ll get a better fellow in his place—a gentleman, at least,” he added, sotto voce.

“They say he belongs to one of the oldest families in Northumberland, do you know,” said Mrs. Hay.

“All rot,” said Wemyss; “I believe him to be a mere adventurer—nothing more.”

“Well,” said Flossie, “I’ve written to Tony Duval in his place.”

“Oh, dear!” cried Pussie. “I hate to go about with Tony; or, rather, he says he hates to go about with me. He says he can’t have any fun while I’m around.”

“He hates to flirt before his little sister,” laughed Mrs. Gower. “Never mind, dear—I think you’ll soon be even with him.” And when Tony Duval arrived, all his simple soul went out to Mrs. Hay. “She is the finest woman I ever saw,” he would say to Arthur, almost with a sigh. And he sent to Long Island for his two best blooded horses; and the first day they rode out he spilled Mrs. Hay over a four-barred fence, just as they were returning, and brought the fair burden home in his brawny arms. Her eyes unclosed soon after she was in the house; and she was not seriously injured. And Arthur, who had indited a telegram to Wilton Hay at Washington, sensibly put the despatch in his pocket.

So the days went by delightfully. Arthur had fears that he was sometimes the odd man; but after all, they seemed to like him pretty well; and if even Pussie Duval failed him, there were other fair in Lenox with no cavaliers imported, like the fruit in the hampers, from the city. So June waned toward July, and everyone almost cheered at Flossie Gower’s proposal that they should have one more drive—to Lake George—before they parted. This new excursion was duly chronicled in all the newspapers, where Mamie Livingstone, eager, and perhaps a little envious, saw it. Arthur wrote and got his leave of absence extended at the office. They were easy-going people at the office.

Meantime, Derwent was “hunting big game” out in the Rockies, and Charlie Townley was sweltering in the city—“working like a dog, by Jove,” he would say—at the affairs of Messrs. Townley & Tamms. And Gracie Holyoke was in great Barrington, alone.

CHAPTER XXII.
A HOUSE BUILT WITH HANDS.

CHARLIE TOWNLEY’S ways were not like the ways of other young stock-brokers. He worked at the most unusual times, and usually made ostentation of idleness. Many others much delighted him by thinking him a fool, chiefly because he wore a single eye-glass; and had a drawl, up-town. He had begun the summer—in the latter part of May, after Arthur had gone to Mrs. Gower’s—by showing a considerable amount of attention to no greater a person than Miss Mamie Livingstone; thereby delighting her (as yet rudimentary) soul. The rest of his mind seemed given, as usual, to his person, his other equipages, and the various fashionable meetings of the season. His homage to Miss Mamie had been of the ostentatious variety, rendered at races and at horse-shows. He had even invited her to drive out to the Hill-and-Dale Club with him in his dog-cart; and it had only been as a favor reluctantly accorded to Gracie that she had not gone. Mamie was convinced that such an expedition would make her the most talked of débutante of the coming season; and she knew that in society (as perhaps in other things to-day) the main element of success is advertisement. When an article has once attracted notice, a clever person can make that notice favorable or the reverse almost at will.

But Gracie was gaining a very powerful influence over Mamie—almost as powerful as all the world outside. Her parents possessed none; they were not only of a previous generation, but ex officio prejudiced advisers; the girl of the period holds their evidence almost as cheaply as the business man holds his minister’s upon theological subjects. Herein also was she a girl of our age, when men go to Ingersoll and Tyndall for their theories of the unknown God, and their wives to faith-cures and esoteric Buddhism for the practice of Christianity, and leave the outworn Scriptures. Still, a nature like Gracie’s had its effect, even upon a girl like Mamie. She was too quick not to be conscious of this, and sought to make it up by chaffing and patronizing her elder cousin.

When Gracie persuaded Mamie to go with her to Great Barrington, Charlie was left entirely to his own devices. Some reader may say, his vices; but Charlie was not more vicious than another. He was almost alone—always excepting Mr. Phineas Tamms—in the office that summer. He showed, nevertheless, no desire to get away, but manifested a very strict attention to business. If Arthur had but known it, he had only been asked in Charlie’s place upon the coaching party; but Charlie was one who never made himself the cause of another’s knowing a disagreeable fact. He had his room permanently taken at Manhattan Beach; and he divided his leisure between this and divers clubs, urban and suburban. Occasionally he passed a Sunday on the yacht of an acquaintance.

Old Mr. Townley still dropped into the office two or three times a week; he still fancied their reputation unchanged, and the business the same as in the old concern of Charles Townley & Son, before they had helped young Tamms out of difficulties and given him a clerkship in the firm; and he bobbed his gray head sagely over Tamms’s exposition of his plans. Business was quiet enough. But after the old gentleman had fairly gone to Newport for the summer, things seemed to take a little start. Tamms’s family were away, his wife and two showy daughters travelling in Europe by themselves, and spending a great deal of money. Tamms himself lived at a small hotel down at Long Branch, where he had his private wire, and where he would occasionally rest a day in rustic seclusion, having his mail and stock-reports brought down to him to read. For Tamms never read books: like Mrs. Gower, he preferred the realities.

One day early in August Charlie was invited to go down and spend the night with his master, “the Governor,” as Charlie termed him. He marvelled much at this, and went with much curiosity, never having witnessed any of Mr. Tamms’s domestic arrangements. He knew that Tamms’s womankind were travelling abroad; for he had had frequent occasion to cash their drafts. He had often speculated at their lack of social ambition on this side the ocean, and had come to the conclusion that it was either because they thought it easier “over there,” or because Tamms deemed the time had not come for that as yet. But if not, why not?

Charlie took a little leather satchel with him, filled with railway reports, letters, telegrams, prospectuses, and other business documents. The boat was crammed with excursionists, clerks and their female friends, common people, as Charlie would have called them, evidently going down and back for the sail. Charlie secured a stool upon the upper deck, lit a cigar, and buried his thoughts in the stock-report of the afternoon paper; while the steamer made its way down the teeming harbor, by the base of the statue of Liberty, then being erected, past a Russian man-of-war, and through the green-shored Narrows.

To a patriot turned pessimist, there is something typical in the Jersey shore, the first American coast one sees in coming from the other world. Think of the last coast you leave—Cornwall, for instance—with its bold rocks, its glorious cliffs, its lofty castles that have been strongholds, at least, of courage and of faith; fit selvage for a land which sometime felt the nobility and the sacrifice of life. And then look at the long, low, monotonous strip of sand, the ragged, mean bank of crumbling clay, where the continent merely seems, as it were, sawed off, and ends with as little majesty as some new railway embankment. On the little bluff a gaudy row of cheap, undurable houses and hotels; even the sea seems but an anti-climax, a necessary but uninspiring end of things, devoid of dignity if not of danger. But the Jersey shore is not the coast of all the continent, nor is the city of New York America.

Charlie was not troubled by these things; they seemed as natural to him as the pink strip that marks the boundary of an atlas map. New York was an excellent place to make money in; and these things go well with materialism. The boat made its landing, and Charlie walked up the long pier through the crowd—a crowd of summer boarders, seeking rest, and who, finding rest a bore, had come down to see the evening steamer land, for the sake of excitement. The great rollers foamed in beneath the pier, lashing the piles indignantly; and the sea on either side was speckled with bathers—children, men, and women, the last looking their unloveliest in bathing-gowns.

The avenue at the pier-head was crammed with carriages—ladies, bored with the long day, who had come there for the last faint simulacrum of pleasure that the being seen in their own equipages still afforded them; other ladies waiting for their tired husbands from the city. In a handsome victoria with two long-tailed horses Charlie made out his host; and throwing up his overcoat and satchel, took his seat beside him.

“Hot in town?” said Tamms, laconically.

“Beastly,” answered Charlie.

“We might as well take a drive, I suppose; there’s nothing else to do before dinner.”

Charlie silently assented; and they took their way along the red-clay road; on the left the wooden walk and railing above the gullied bank that met the sea, on the right a long succession of eating-houses and candy stores; then huge barracks of hotels, then fantastic wooden villas, which wildest fantasies of paint and stained shingles had sought to torture into architecture. Not a tree was to be seen; and the vast assemblage of human habitations in the sandy plain resembled more a village of prairie dogs than anything else a traveller’s mind could have suggested.

“Land is immensely valuable here,” said Tamms. “That’s Deacon Thompson’s place; he paid thirty thousand for it two years ago, and he says he’s been offered fifty since.” Charlie looked at the red-and-green structure, with its little paddock of lawn, and felt that it would not satisfy him; and yet he possessed not even thirty thousand dollars. “Pretty place,” said Tamms.

Charlie assented. “Now what does a man like that want money for?” he argued to himself. But Tamms, having paid this tribute to the æsthetic side of life, proceeded to open his telegrams, and cast a hasty eye on the stock-reports in Charlie’s paper; then they both conversed of stocks and bonds. And after driving some three miles above the water (which made continual murmur at their feet) they drove back the way they came. At Elberon, Tamms pointed out the cottage where Garfield died.

“I see the Starbuck Oil has declared its usual dividend,” said Charlie, watching his chief closely. “The boys say it wasn’t earned.”

“I don’t suppose the directors would have paid it if they hadn’t earned it,” said Tamms, sharply. Now Tamms, since they had purchased the control, was one of the directors.

“I suppose not,” said Charlie. “I was merely saying what the boys say.”

“Humph!” was all the reply his host vouchsafed to this; and by this time they were driving into the carefully pebbled avenue of “The Mistletoe,” which was Mr. Tamms’s abode. It was a small hotel, partly surrounded by glass galleries, in one of which three young men were sitting at a lunch-table, over claret and seltzer and liqueurs, though it was after six o’clock. The house was most ornately furnished; a little yellow-haired girl of twelve, dressed in pale lilac silk, with a short skirt, and mauve silk stockings on her long little legs, was standing at the counter talking to the clerk. All the servants were in livery, and Charlie made a mental note that the place was unexpectedly “swell.”

“You want to go up to your room before dinner, I suppose,” said Tamms, as if making a concession to Charlie’s juvenile weaknesses. Charlie found his room a small apartment, with a rather expensive carpet and a most overpowering wall-paper; and it had the unusual luxury of a dressing-room attached. The sea was quite out of sight; but his room looked out upon the dusty street, and a printed placard on the wall informed him that its cost was twelve dollars a day. There was neither view, nor hills, nor country, nor even trees (save a line of petted young oaks that gave the place its name), in sight; but in every direction the eye was met by scores upon scores of wooden houses; and on the clipped grass that struggled with the red-clay plain the sun’s rays still beat mercilessly.

They dined sumptuously; and had champagne, which was, with Tamms, the only alternative for water. A score or so of richly dressed ladies, with their husbands, were at the tables, including the little girl in lilac silk, who drank champagne also. The mother of the little girl—a magnificent woman, with black hair, carefully dressed, like a salad—sat opposite them; and her husband leaned his elbow on the table and his beard upon the palm of his hand, and talked to Tamms, between the courses. Charlie was introduced as “a young man in my office,” and was treated by the lady with undissembled scorn; indeed, she condescended even to Tamms. And Charlie felt all the delight of some explorer landed among savages, who prefer colored beads to diamonds. “Positively,” thought Charlie, “she does not even know that I am Charlie Townley!” Mrs. Haberman certainly did not, and would have refused him her daughter’s hand in marriage, that evening, had he asked for it. And again it occurred to Charlie that wealth was the one universal good, after all.

Tamms certainly thought so; and when they got out on the piazza, began to talk about it. “Mr. Townley,” said he, “I think I have observed that while you are not over-attentive to the business, you can keep a secret.”

“You are very kind, sir,” said Charlie.

“The fact is, the Starbuck Oil Company has proved a very bad investment indeed for the Allegheny Central Railroad Company.”

“Dear me!” said Charlie, sympathetically, but as if inviting further confidence. Tamms looked at him for a moment, and then went on:

“The oil works showed the usual profit, but upon closing the accounts of the first year of the new terminal enterprise, we find that the property has failed to pay even its running expenses. In fact the company will probably default on the next coupon of the Terminal bonds.—How many of them have we left?”

Charlie was silent a moment, as if to count.

“Only a little over a hundred thousand,” said Charlie, “not counting those we are carrying for our customers.”

“You will of course have to look after their margins,” said Tamms, absent-mindedly. “Sell at once if they do not respond.”

(“The old Shylock!”) thought Charlie. “Certainly, sir,” he said. “Shall I sell the hundred thousand we have left of our own?”

Tamms looked at our young friend sternly. “And profit by our official knowledge of the coming default? Certainly not, sir. We will bear our loss with the rest.” And Tamms drew himself up and placed his right hand in the breast of his black frock-coat, much as if he were addressing posterity—or a newspaper reporter, as Charlie reflected. This sudden high moral attitude was admirable, if inexplicable.

“But,” said Charlie, “the bonds being guaranteed by the Allegheny Central Railroad——”

“Guaranteed by the Allegheny Central?” interrupted Tamms, in astonishment, his whity-blue eyes opened to their fullest extent.

“That was certainly my impression, sir,” faltered Charlie. For he remembered that he himself had composed a newspaper item to that effect.

“Here is the original circular under which the bonds were issued,” said Tamms, with dignity; and Charlie cast his eye over it timorously. There was certainly nothing in it about a guaranty, though Charlie had a distinct impression that when the bonds were “listed” on the Stock Exchange this had been the general understanding. “You must be thinking of some mere newspaper rumor,” added Tamms.

“Very possibly, sir,” Charlie replied, meekly; and just then an elaborately dressed woman of rather flamboyant appearance passed through the glass-covered piazza in which they were sitting, and Mr. Tamms scrambled hastily upon his feet and bowed. Charlie followed suit, though surprised at this unusual demonstration of his impassive principal; and as he looked at him, he fancied that he saw the faintest trace of some embarrassment.

“She is not a guest of the hotel,” said Tamms. “Her name is Beaumont, I believe; she owns an adjoining cottage.”

“Dear me!” said Charlie. “That is very bad for people who own the stock.”

“Own what stock?” said Tamms.

“The Starbuck Oil,” said Charlie, in a tone as if adding “of course.”

“Oh, ah, yes,” said Tamms. “It is most unfortunate. Still, they should have exchanged it for Allegheny Central when we gave them the chance.”

Charlie suddenly remembered that all the stock had not been exchanged.

“I suppose our people hold a majority, of course,” said Charlie. And again he looked at Tamms.

But to this Mr. Tamms vouchsafed no answer; he apparently did not hear it, for he was already rising and putting on his gloves. “Shall we take a stroll?”

“I should like nothing better,” said Charlie, heartily; and Tamms having sent for two cigars (for which, as Charlie noted, he paid fifty cents apiece), they took their way across the close-cropped lawn.

“That, I am told,” said Mr. Tamms, pointing to a gayly lighted pagoda opposite, “which they call the Maryland Club, is in reality nothing better than a gambling house.”

“Dear me!” said Charlie.

“It is an outrage upon our civilization that such social plague-spots are openly tolerated;” a sentiment from which Charlie could not withhold his assent, though he was glad the darkness prevented Mr. Tamms from seeing the smile which accompanied it. Nothing more was said between them for some time; Mr. Tamms was evidently wrapped in thoughts of business, and Charlie for his part was considering that previous state of her existence, in which he had known Mrs. Beaumont before.

So musing, they came to the plank-walk above the sea; it was almost deserted of promenaders, and below it, from the darkness of the night, came in the long ocean rollers, shining whitely on the shallow beach, as if gifted with some radiance of their own. They leaned some time over a railing by a bath-pavilion, and watched the breakers in silence; some women were in the sea—it was the servants from the hotel, bathing in the only hour that was allowed to them. And from the great hotel behind them came some vulgar music from a band.

“They are having a ball at the Beau-Monde to-night, I believe,” said Tamms, at last. “Would you like to look in?”

Charlie professed his willingness; and they walked across the dusty street to the huge caravanserai, its hundred windows flaming with light. They found the veranda crowded with perhaps a thousand people, sitting in groups, the ladies in white or low-necked dresses, their diamond ear-rings flashing thick as fire-flies above a summer swamp. Among them were numerous Jews and Jewesses; the latter, at least, a splendid, full-blooded, earth-compelling race, though their males more wizened. In the great ball-room some score or more of children were dancing to a waltz, but no grown people as yet. These were as elegantly attired as their parents, only that they did not wear low-necked gowns, but in lieu of this had short skirts and gay silk stockings reaching well above the knee. Among them was the twelve-year-old miss in lilac from the Mistletoe; and many of these had already diamond solitaires and more than the airs and graces of a woman of the world. Their cheeks were flushed, and their long hair tossing about them; some few were romping frankly, but most were too Dignified for this; and as their silk sashes fluttered and their silk stockings twinkled in the dance, they were undeniably a pretty sight, and might have been a pleasant one, to their mothers. But I think a country hay-mow had been better for them.

But these same mothers were sitting on the piazza outside, not yet too old to flirt, and taking more pleasure in showing off their dresses than perhaps their children did, as yet. And those who were too ill-favored by Heaven for this could at least talk about spending money, and about each other. Tamms soon found a congenial group, a group consisting of Mrs. Beaumont and himself; and Charlie was left to his own devices. He drifted into the bar-room and took a drink, by way of killing time; and thereabout he found the husbands mostly congregated. And, as their wives had been talking of spending money, they were talking about making it; and Charlie listened some time and then went home alone.

When he got to the Mistletoe, he called for a telegraph blank and wrote a telegram to Mrs. Levison Gower. It ran as follows:

“I think you had better sell your Starbuck Oil. Who is attending to your affairs in town? C. T.”

Surely, with all his faults, our friend thus proved himself a knight faithful and loyal, à la mode. But having written it, Charlie remembered that he did not know where to send it; for Mrs. Gower was off in a chariot which bore no freight of worldly care. Was she not mistress of Aladdin’s lamp? She had but to rub a finger, and all things were heaped at her feet. Aye; but the slaves of the lamp, who were they? Suppose they were not faithful; suppose they proved unruly and rose up in revolt? Did not even an Aladdin’s slave turn out to be one of the Genii?

Townley liked Mrs. Gower, and did not wish her to be humbled. Socially, she helped him still. Should he say Lenox? He thought a moment; and the upshot of his deliberations was a resolve to do nothing for a day at least. Whereupon he went to bed, and, let us hope, to pleasant dreams.

For he could not quite account for Tamms’s virtuous refusal to sell their own bonds before the coming default.

CHAPTER XXIII.
THE SLAVES OF THE LAMP.

YOU had better not go back to-day,” said Mr. Tamms to Charlie when he came down in the morning. “They can get along without you at the office; besides, I should like you to drive with me to Ocean Grove.” Charlie was always ready enough to get along without the office, even if the converse of that proposition had not been unusual enough upon the lips of Mr. Tamms to excite his curiosity. So the long-tailed fast horses were brought out in the trotting-buggy, and, well provided with cigars and morning papers, the two set forth upon their journey. It was a piping hot day; the glaring surface of the sea lay still beside them, and the straight, unshaded, red-clay road seemed to be rapidly baking into brick. Mrs. Haberman came to see them off, robed still in a sort of gorgeous bedchamber arrangement of pale silk and laces, the inevitable large diamonds still in her ears. For some miles their way was the same they had taken the day before, along the rows of shadeless villas, each “cottage” more ornate and ramifying than the last; then they came to a long rise of the sweltering fields, past a thin grove of pines, a few cheaper boarding-houses, and a swamp with an artificial pond. Beyond this the hotels began again; and they crossed a long lagoon that looked like some breeding-place for fevers and lay between two great wooden cities; these were Asbury Park and Ocean Grove; and in front of them was still the sea.

Many of the cottages were here the merest little wooden boxes, some of them put together still more informally, of canvas and of poles, so that one looked through the whole domestic range, from the front part, which was a parlor, through the open family bed-room to the kitchen behind. These were the abodes of those who (not like the dwellers at Long Branch) came here in search of religious experiences; but Charlie saw, save a Bible text or two in chromo, no visible evidence of the higher life. Paterfamilias was usually lolling, unbuttoned as to waistcoat, in the front part of the establishment; materfamilias, in an indescribable white gown that seemed but a shapeless covering for divers toilet sins, was busied with housewifely duties; and the filia pulchrior was commonly set forth in a hammock upon the little piazza, lost in some novel of “The Duchess” or of “Bertha Clay,” but not too lost in those entrancing pages to cast some very collected glances at Charlie and his patron’s handsome equipage.

There were fewer “saloons” than at Long Branch; but even more confectioners’ shops and summer circulating libraries; and plenty of hotels. Before the largest of these, Mr. Tamms drew up his steaming horses, and asked of the sable yet proud young porter if Mr. Remington were in. “Deacon Remington is down at the beach, sah,” was the reply; and Mr. Tamms gave orders for his horses to be rubbed and cared for, while they sought the Deacon (who seemed a person of much prominence at Ocean Grove) on foot.

Plank-walks led in all directions through the streets, which otherwise would have been heavy walking, in the heaped-up sand; for there was no turf nor other vegetation, except where an artificial platebande of red leaves and greenhouse plants was fostered at the street corners. They took the walk which led seaward, passing one or two huge wooden tabernacles where sermons, meetings, or other Methodist functions were performed every day, as frequent wooden placards informed them. But they were empty now; and Charlie could see the theatre of rows of rising seats, much like the band-pavilion at a beach less sacred than was this. They crossed the end of the freshwater lagoon, passed a flotilla of pleasure boats, and ascended to the sandy shore; here, from the crest of the beach, the walk led upward still, supported on piles, to the great ocean pier, a sort of sublimated piazza, double or triple decked, roofed, and extending far along the beach before them, with a pier projecting far out over the sea. Here was the population of the place assembled, knitting, reading, or doing nothing to the music of a brass band which, stationed at the outer end of the pavilion, was performing revival hymns. It seemed to Charlie that there must be some thousands of people on this pier alone; and he saw that there was another deck below, and still below that the beach was strewn, like drift-wood, with humanity. The task of finding Deacon Remington seemed hopeless, and Charlie made bold to ask why they should look further.

“The Deacon is the leader of our church,” said Tamms, “and a very shrewd man. He is one of the largest stockholders in Starbuck Oil.”

Charlie said nothing more; and in a moment a gaunt man rose up from a little table they were passing by and addressed Tamms eagerly. His upper lip was shaven, but otherwise his beard was unkempt; his sallow face had a worn and weary look which even the perfunctory smile that continually gleamed across it, like sheet-lightning, did not permanently relieve. “How’s the madam?” said Tamms.