Keynotes

By George Egerton

Boston: Roberts Brothers
London: Elkin Mathews
and John Lane, Vigo St.

1894

Copyright, 1893,
By Roberts Brothers.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

TO
KNUT HAMSUN,
In memory of a day when the west wind
and the rainbow met.
1892-1893.

"Fancies are toys of the brain, to write them down is to destroy them—as fancies! and yet—"

"I gave him such a pretty toy to play with, and he is breaking it up. When I say: 'You are very naughty, Biff; if you break it I shall whip you!' he only says:

"'But I must, Mumsey, I must!'"

Fragment of a Letter, 1893.

CONTENTS.

KEYNOTES.

A CROSS LINE.

The rather flat notes of a man's voice float out into the clear air, singing the refrain of a popular music-hall ditty. There is something incongruous between the melody and the surroundings. It seems profane, indelicate, to bring this slangy, vulgar tune, and with it the mental picture of footlight flare and fantastic dance, into the lovely freshness of this perfect spring day.

A woman sitting on a felled tree turns her head to meet its coming, and an expression flits across her face in which disgust and humorous appreciation are subtly blended. Her mind is nothing if not picturesque; her busy brain, with all its capabilities choked by a thousand vagrant fancies, is always producing pictures and finding associations between the most unlikely objects. She has been reading a little sketch written in the daintiest language of a fountain scene in Tanagra, and her vivid imagination has made it real to her. The slim, graceful maids grouped around it filling their exquisitely-formed earthen jars, the dainty poise of their classic heads, and the flowing folds of their draperies have been actually present with her; and now,—why, it is like the entrance of a half-typsy vagabond player bedizened in tawdry finery: the picture is blurred. She rests her head against the trunk of a pine-tree behind her, and awaits the singer. She is sitting on an incline in the midst of a wilderness of trees; some have blown down, some have been cut down, and the lopped branches lie about; moss and bracken and trailing bramble bushes, fir-cones, wild rose-bushes, and speckled red "fairy hats" fight for life in wild confusion. A disused quarry to the left is an ideal haunt of pike, and to the right a little river rushes along in haste to join a greater sister that is fighting a troubled way to the sea. A row of stepping-stones cross it, and if you were to stand on one you would see shoals of restless stone-loach "beardies" darting from side to side. The tails of several ducks can be seen above the water, and the paddle of their balancing feet and the gurgling suction of their bills as they search for larvae can be heard distinctly between the hum of insect, twitter of bird, and rustle of stream and leaf. The singer has changed his lay to a whistle, and presently he comes down the path a cool, neat, gray-clad figure, with a fishing creel slung across his back, and a trout rod held on his shoulder. The air ceases abruptly, and his cold, gray eyes scan the seated figure with its gypsy ease of attitude, a scarlet shawl that has fallen from her shoulders forming an accentuative background to the slim roundness of her waist.

Persistent study, coupled with a varied experience of the female animal, has given the owner of the said gray eyes some facility in classing her, although it has not supplied him with any definite data as to what any one of the species may do in a given circumstance. To put it in his own words, in answer to a friend who chaffed him on his untiring pursuit of women as an interesting problem,—

"If a fellow has had much experience of his fellow-man he may divide him into types, and given a certain number of men and a certain number of circumstances, he is pretty safe on hitting on the line of action each type will strike. 'Taint so with woman. You may always look out for the unexpected; she generally upsets a fellow's calculations, and you are never safe in laying odds on her. Tell you what, old chappie, we may talk about superior intellect; but if a woman wasn't handicapped by her affection or need of it, the cleverest chap in Christendom would be just a bit of putty in her hands. I find them more fascinating as problems than anything going. Never let an opportunity slip to get new data—never!"

He did not now. He met the frank, unembarrassed gaze of eyes that would have looked with just the same bright inquiry at the advent of a hare or a toad, or any other object that might cross her path, and raised his hat with respectful courtesy, saying, in the drawling tone habitual with him,—

"I hope I am not trespassing?"

"I can't say; you may be; so may I, but no one has ever told me so!"

A pause. His quick glance has noted the thick wedding-ring on her slim brown hand and the flash of a diamond in its keeper. A lady decidedly. Fast?—perhaps. Original?—undoubtedly. Worth knowing?—rather.

"I am looking for a trout stream, but the directions I got were rather vague; might I—"

"It's straight ahead; but you won't catch anything now, at least not here,—sun's too glaring and water too low; a mile up you may in an hour's time."

"Oh, thanks awfully for the tip. You fish then?"

"Yes, sometimes."

"Trout run big here?" (What odd eyes the woman has! kind of magnetic.)

"No, seldom over a pound; but they are very game."

"Rare good sport, isn't it, whipping a stream? There is so much besides the mere catching of fish; the river and the trees and the quiet sets a fellow thinking; kind of sermon; makes a chap feel good, don't it?"

She smiles assentingly, and yet what the devil is she amused at, he queries mentally. An inspiration! he acts upon it, and says eagerly,—

"I wonder—I don't half like to ask, but fishing puts people on a common footing, don't it? You knowing the stream, you know, would you tell me what are the best flies to use?"

"I tie my own, but—"

"Do you? How clever of you! Wish I could;" and sitting down on the other end of the tree, he takes out his fly-book. "But I interrupted you, you were going to say—"

"Only,"—stretching out her hand, of a perfect shape but decidedly brown, for the book,—"that you might give the local fly-tyer a trial; he'll tell you. Later on, end of next month, or perhaps later, you might try the oak-fly,—the natural fly, you know. A horn is the best thing to hold them in, they get out of anything else; and put two on at a time."

"By Jove, I must try that dodge!"

He watches her as she handles his book and examines the contents critically, turning aside some with a glance, fingering others almost tenderly, holding them daintily, and noting the cock of wings and the hint of tinsel, with her head on one side,—a trick of hers, he thinks.

"Which do you like most, wet or dry fly?" She is looking at some dry flies.

"Oh," with that rare smile, "at the time I swear by whichever happens to catch most fish,—perhaps really dry fly. I fancy most of these flies are better for Scotland or England. Up to this, March-brown has been the most killing thing. But you might try an 'orange-grouse,'—that's always good here,—with perhaps a 'hare's ear' for a change, and put on a 'coachman' for the evenings. My husband [he steals a side look at her] brought home some beauties yesterday evening."

"Lucky fellow!"

She returns the book. There is a tone in his voice as he says this that jars on her, sensitive as she is to every inflection of a voice, with an intuition that is almost second sight. She gathers up her shawl,—she has a cream-colored woollen gown on, and her skin looks duskily foreign by contrast. She is on her feet before he can regain his, and says, with a cool little bend of her head: "Good afternoon, I wish you a full basket!"

Before he can raise his cap she is down the slope, gliding with easy steps that have a strange grace, and then springing lightly from stone to stone across the stream. He feels small, snubbed someway; and he sits down on the spot where she sat, and lighting his pipe says, "Check!"

She is walking slowly up the garden path; a man in his shirt-sleeves is stooping among the tender young peas; a bundle of stakes lies next him, and he whistles softly and all out of tune as he twines the little tendrils round each new support. She looks at his broad shoulders and narrow flanks; his back is too long for great strength she thinks. He hears her step, and smiles up at her from under the shadow of his broad-leafed hat.

"How do you feel now, old woman?"

"Beastly! I've got that horrid qualmish feeling again. I can't get rid of it."

He has spread his coat on the side of the path, and pats it for her to sit down.

"What is it?" anxiously. "If you were a mare I'd know what to do for you. Have a nip of whiskey?"

He strides off without waiting for her reply, and comes back with it and a biscuit, kneels down and holds the glass to her lips. "Poor little woman, buck up! You'll see that'll fix you. Then you go, by-and-by, and have a shy at the fish."

She is about to say something, when a fresh qualm attacks her and she does not. He goes back to his tying.

"By Jove!" he says suddenly, "I forgot; got something to show you!"

After a few minutes he returns, carrying a basket covered with a piece of sacking; a dishevelled-looking hen, with spread wings trailing and her breast bare from sitting on her eggs, screeches after him. He puts it carefully down and uncovers it, disclosing seven little balls of yellow fluff splashed with olive-green; they look up sideways with bright round eyes, and their little spoon-bills look disproportionately large.

"Aren't they beauties?" enthusiastically. "This one is just out," taking up an egg; "mustn't let it get chilled; there is a chip out of it and a piece of hanging skin. Isn't it funny?" he asks, showing her how it is curled in the shell, with its paddles flattened and its bill breaking through the chip, and the slimy feathers sticking to its violet skin.

She suppresses an exclamation of disgust, and looks at his fresh-tinted skin instead. He is covering basket, hen, and all.

"How you love young things!" she says.

"Some! I had a filly once; she turned out a lovely mare! I cried when I had to sell her; I wouldn't have let any one in God's world mount her."

"Yes, you would!"

"Who?" with a quick look of resentment.

"Me!"

"I wouldn't!"

"What! you wouldn't?"

"I wouldn't!"

"I think you would if I wanted to!" with a flash out of the tail of her eye.

"No, I wouldn't!"

"Then you would care more for her than for me. I would give you your choice," passionately, "her or me!"

"What nonsense!"

"Maybe," concentrated; "but it's lucky she isn't here to make deadly sense of it." A humble-bee buzzes close to her ear, and she is roused to a sense of facts, and laughs to think how nearly they have quarrelled over a mare that was sold before she knew him.

Some evenings later she is stretched motionless in a chair; and yet she conveys an impression of restlessness,—a sensitively nervous person would feel it. She is gazing at her husband; her brows are drawn together, and make three little lines. He is reading, reading quietly, without moving his eyes quickly from side to side of the page as she does when she reads, and he pulls away at a big pipe with steady enjoyment. Her eyes turn from him to the window, and follow the course of two clouds; then they close for a few seconds, then open to watch him again. He looks up and smiles.

"Finished your book?"

There is a singular, soft monotony in his voice; the organ with which she replies is capable of more varied expression.

"Yes, it is a book makes one think. It would be a greater book if he were not an Englishman; he's afraid of shocking the big middle class. You wouldn't care about it."

"Finished your smoke?"

"No, it went out; too much fag to light up again! No," protestingly, "never you mind, old boy, why do you?"

He has drawn his long length out of his chair, and kneeling down beside her guards a lighted match from the incoming evening air. She draws in the smoke contentedly, and her eyes smile back with a general vague tenderness.

"Thank you, dear old man!"

"Going out again?" Negative head-shake.

"Back aching?" Affirmative nod, accompanied by a steadily aimed puff of smoke, that she has been carefully inhaling, into his eyes.

"Scamp! Have your booties off?"

"Oh, don't you bother! Lizzie will do it."

He has seized a foot from under the rocker, and sitting on his heels holds it on his knee, while he unlaces the boot; then he loosens the stocking under her toes, and strokes her foot gently. "Now the other!" Then he drops both boots outside the door, and fetching a little pair of slippers, past their first smartness, from the bedroom, puts one on. He examines the left foot: it is a little swollen round the ankle, and he presses his broad fingers gently round it as one sees a man do to a horse with windgalls. Then he pulls the rocker nearer to his chair, and rests the slipperless foot on his thigh. He relights his pipe, takes up his book, and rubs softly from ankle to toes as he reads.

She smokes, and watches him, diverting herself by imagining him in the hats of different periods. His is a delicate skinned face, with regular features; the eyes are fine in color and shape, with the luminous clearness of a child's; his pointed beard is soft and curly. She looks at his hand,—a broad, strong hand with capable fingers; the hand of a craftsman, a contradiction to the face with its distinguished delicacy. She holds her own up, with a cigarette poised between the first and second fingers, idly pleased with its beauty of form and delicate, nervous slightness. One speculation chases the other in her quick brain: odd questions as to race arise; she dives into theories as to the why and wherefore of their distinctive natures, and holds a mental debate in which she takes both sides of the question impartially. He has finished his pipe, laid down his book, and is gazing dreamily into space, with his eyes darkened by their long lashes and a look of tender melancholy in their clear depths.

"What are you thinking of?" There is a look of expectation in her quivering nervous little face.

He turns to her, chafing her ankle again. "I was wondering if lob-worms would do for—"

He stops: a strange look of disappointment flits across her face and is lost in an hysterical peal of laughter.

"You are the best emotional check I ever knew," she gasps.

He stares at her in utter bewilderment, and then a slow smile creeps to his eyes and curves the thin lips under his mustache,—a smile at her. "You seem amused, Gypsy!"

She springs out of her chair, and takes book and pipe; he follows the latter anxiously with his eyes until he sees it laid safely on the table. Then she perches herself, resting her knees against one of his legs, while she hooks her feet back under the other.

"Now I am all up, don't I look small?"

He smiles his slow smile. "Yes, I believe you are made of gutta percha."

She is stroking out all the lines in his face with the tip of her finger; then she runs it through his hair. He twists his head half impatiently; she desists.

"I divide all the people in the world," she says, "into those who like their hair played with, and those who don't. Having my hair brushed gives me more pleasure than anything else; it's delicious. I'd purr if I knew how. I notice," meditatively, "I am never in sympathy with those who don't like it. I am with those who do; I always get on with them."

"You are a queer little devil!"

"Am I? I shouldn't have thought you would have found out I was the latter at all. I wish I were a man! I believe if I were a man, I'd be a disgrace to my family."

"Why?"

"I'd go on a jolly old spree!"

He laughs: "Poor little woman! is it so dull?"

There is a gleam of deviltry in her eyes, and she whispers solemnly,—

"Begin with a D," and she traces imaginary letters across his forehead, and ending with a flick over his ear, says, "and that is the tail of the y!" After a short silence she queries: "Are you fond of me?" She is rubbing her chin up and down his face.

"Of course I am, don't you know it?"

"Yes, perhaps I do," impatiently; "but I want to be told it. A woman doesn't care a fig for a love as deep as the death-sea and as silent; she wants something that tells her it in little waves all the time. It isn't the love, you know, it's the being loved; it isn't really the man, it's his loving!"

"By Jove, you're a rum un!"

"I wish I wasn't, then. I wish I was as commonplace as—You don't tell me anything about myself," a fierce little kiss; "you might, even if it were lies. Other men who cared for me told me things about my eyes, my hands, anything. I don't believe you notice."

"Yes I do, little one, only I think it."

"Yes, but I don't care a bit for your thinking; if I can't see what's in your head, what good is it to me?"

"I wish I could understand you, dear!"

"I wish to God you could! Perhaps if you were badder and I were gooder we'd meet half-way. You are an awfully good old chap; it's just men like you send women like me to the devil!"

"But you are good," kissing her,—"a real good chum! You understand a fellow's weak points; you don't blow him up if he gets on a bit. Why," enthusiastically, "being married to you is like chumming with a chap! Why," admiringly, "do you remember before we were married, when I let that card fall out of my pocket? Why, I couldn't have told another girl about her! she wouldn't have believed that I was straight; she'd have thrown me over, and you sent her a quid because she was sick. You are a great little woman!"

"Don't see it!" she is biting his ear. "Perhaps I was a man last time, and some hereditary memories are cropping up in this incarnation!"

He looks so utterly at sea that she must laugh again, and, kneeling up, shuts his eyes with kisses, and bites his chin and shakes it like a terrier in her strong little teeth.

"You imp! was there ever such a woman!"

Catching her wrists, he parts his knees and drops her on to the rug; then perhaps the subtile magnetism that is in her affects him, for he stoops and snatches her up and carries her up and down, and then over to the window, and lets the fading light with its glimmer of moonshine play on her odd face with its tantalizing changes, and his eyes dilate and his color deepens as he crushes her soft little body to him and carries her off to her room.

Summer is waning, and the harvest is ripe for ingathering, and the voice of the reaping machine is loud in the land. She is stretched on her back on the short, heather-mixed moss at the side of a bog stream. Rod and creel are flung aside, and the wanton breeze with the breath of coolness it has gathered in its passage over the murky dykes of black bog-water is playing with the tail-fly, tossing it to and fro with a half threat to fasten it to a prickly spine of golden gorse. Bunches of bog-wool nod their fluffy heads, and through the myriad indefinite sounds comes the regular scrape of a strickle on the scythe of a reaper in a neighboring meadow. Overhead a flotilla of clouds is steering from the south in a northeasterly direction. Her eyes follow them,—old-time galleons, she thinks, with their wealth of snowy sail spread, riding breast to breast up a wide, blue fjord after victory. The sails of the last are rose-flushed, with a silver edge. Someway she thinks of Cleopatra sailing down to meet Antony, and a great longing fills her soul to sail off somewhere too,—away from the daily need of dinner-getting and the recurring Monday with its washing, life with its tame duties and virtuous monotony. She fancies herself in Arabia on the back of a swift steed; flashing eyes set in dark faces surround her, and she can see the clouds of sand swirl, and feel the swing under her of his rushing stride; and her thoughts shape themselves into a wild song,—a song to her steed of flowing mane and satin skin, an uncouth rhythmical jingle with a feverish beat; a song to the untamed spirit that dwells in her. Then she fancies she is on the stage of an ancient theatre, out in the open air, with hundreds of faces upturned toward her. She is gauze-clad in a cobweb garment of wondrous tissue; her arms are clasped by jewelled snakes, and one with quivering diamond fangs coils round her hips; her hair floats loosely, and her feet are sandal-clad, and the delicate breath of vines and the salt freshness of an incoming sea seem to fill her nostrils. She bounds forward and dances, bends her lissome waist, and curves her slender arms, and gives to the soul of each man what he craves, be it good or evil. And she can feel now, lying here in the shade of Irish hills, with her head resting on her scarlet shawl and her eyes closed, the grand, intoxicating power of swaying all these human souls to wonder and applause. She can see herself with parted lips and panting, rounded breasts, and a dancing devil in each glowing eye, sway voluptuously to the wild music that rises, now slow, now fast, now deliriously wild, seductive, intoxicating, with a human note of passion in its strain. She can feel the answering shiver of emotion that quivers up to her from the dense audience, spellbound by the motion of her glancing feet; and she flies swifter and swifter, and lighter and lighter, till the very serpents seem alive with jewelled scintillations. One quivering, gleaming, daring bound, and she stands with outstretched arms and passion-filled eyes, poised on one slender foot, asking a supreme note to finish her dream of motion; and the men rise to a man and answer her, and cheer, cheer till the echoes shout from the surrounding hills and tumble wildly down the crags.

The clouds have sailed away, leaving long feathery streaks in their wake. Her eyes have an inseeing look, and she is tremulous with excitement; she can hear yet that last grand shout, and the strain of that old-time music that she has never heard in this life of hers, save as an inner accompaniment to the memory of hidden things, born with her, not of this time.

And her thoughts go to other women she has known, women good and bad, school friends, casual acquaintances, women workers,—joyless machines for grinding daily corn, unwilling maids grown old in the endeavor to get settled, patient wives who bear little ones to indifferent husbands until they wear out,—a long array. She busies herself with questioning. Have they, too, this thirst for excitement, for change, this restless craving for sun and love and motion? Stray words, half confidences, glimpses through soul-chinks of suppressed fires, actual outbreaks, domestic catastrophes,—how the ghosts dance in the cells of her memory! And she laughs, laughs softly to herself, because the denseness of man, his chivalrous, conservative devotion to the female idea he has created, blinds him, perhaps happily, to the problems of her complex nature. "Ay," she mutters musingly, "the wisest of them can only say we are enigmas; each one of them sets about solving the riddle of the ewig weibliche,—and well it is that the workings of our hearts are closed to them, that we are cunning enough or great enough to seem to be what they would have us, rather than be what we are. But few of them have had the insight to find out the key to our seeming contradictions,—the why a refined, physically fragile woman will mate with a brute, a mere male animal with primitive passions, and love him; the why strength and beauty appeal more often than the more subtly fine qualities of mind or heart; the why women (and not the innocent ones) will condone sins that men find hard to forgive in their fellows. They have all overlooked the eternal wildness, the untamed primitive savage temperament that lurks in the mildest, best woman. Deep in through ages of convention this primeval trait burns,—an untamable quantity that may be concealed but is never eradicated by culture, the keynote of woman's witchcraft and woman's strength. But it is there, sure enough, and each woman is conscious of it in her truth-telling hours of quiet self-scrutiny; and each woman in God's wide world will deny it, and each woman will help another to conceal it,—for the woman who tells the truth and is not a liar about these things is untrue to her sex and abhorrent to man, for he has fashioned a model on imaginary lines, and he has said, 'So I would have you!' and every woman is an unconscious liar, for so man loves her. And when a Strindberg or a Nietzsche arises and peers into the recesses of her nature and dissects her ruthlessly, the men shriek out louder than the women, because the truth is at all times unpalatable, and the gods they have set up are dear to them—"

"Dreaming, or speering into futurity? You have the look of a seer. I believe you are half a witch!" And he drops his gray-clad figure on the turf; he has dropped his drawl long ago in midsummer.

"Is not every woman that? Let us hope I'm for my friends a white one."

"A-ah! Have you many friends?"

"That is a query! If you mean many correspondents, many persons who send me Christmas cards, or remember my birthday, or figure in my address book,—no."

"Well, grant I don't mean that!"

"Well, perhaps, yes. Scattered over the world, if my death were belled out, many women would give me a tear, and some a prayer; and many men would turn back a page in their memory and give me a kind thought, perhaps a regret, and go back to their work with a feeling of having lost something that they never possessed. I am a creature of moments. Women have told me that I came into their lives just when they needed me; men had no need to tell me, I felt it. People have needed me more than I them. I have given freely whatever they craved from me in the way of understanding or love; I have touched sore places they showed me, and healed them,—but they never got at me. I have been for myself, and helped myself, and borne the burden of my own mistakes. Some have chafed at my self-sufficiency, and have called me fickle,—not understanding that they gave me nothing, and that when I had served them their moment was ended, and I was to pass on. I read people easily, I am written in black letter to most—"

"To your husband?"

"He," quickly,—"we will not speak of him; it is not loyal."

"Do not I understand you a little?"

"You do not misunderstand me."

"That is something."

"It is much!"

"Is it?" searching her face. "It is not one grain of sand in the desert that stretches between you and me, and you are as impenetrable as a sphinx at the end of it. This," passionately, "is my moment, and what have you given me?"

"Perhaps less than other men I have known; but you want less. You are a little like me,—you can stand alone; and yet," her voice is shaking, "have I given you nothing?"

He laughs, and she winces; and they sit silent, and they both feel as if the earth between them is laid with infinitesimal electric threads vibrating with a common pain. Her eyes are filled with tears that burn but don't fall; and she can see his some way through her closed lids, see their cool grayness troubled by sudden fire, and she rolls her handkerchief into a moist cambric ball between her cold palms.

"You have given me something, something to carry away with me,—an infernal want. You ought to be satisfied: I am infernally miserable. You," nearer, "have the most tantalizing mouth in the world when your lips tremble like that. I—What! can you cry? You?"

"Yes, even I can cry!"

"You dear woman!" pause; "and I can't help you?"

"You can't help me; no man can. Don't think it is because you are you I cry, but because you probe a little nearer into the real me that I feel so."

"Was it necessary to say that?" reproachfully; "do you think I don't know it? I can't for the life of me think how you, with that free gypsy nature of yours, could bind yourself to a monotonous country life, with no excitement, no change. I wish I could offer you my yacht; do you like the sea?"

"I love it; it answers one's moods."

"Well, let us play pretending, as the children say. Grant that I could, I would hang your cabin with your own colors, fill it with books (all those I have heard you say you care for), make it a nest as rare as the bird it would shelter. You would reign supreme. When your highness would deign to honor her servant, I would come and humor your every whim. If you were glad, you could clap your hands and order music, and we would dance on the white deck, and we would skim through the sunshine of Southern seas on a spice-scented breeze. You make me poetical. And if you were angry, you could vent your feelings on me, and I would give in and bow my head to your mood. And we would drop anchor, and stroll through strange cities,—go far inland and glean folklore out of the beaten track of everyday tourists; and at night, when the harbor slept, we would sail out through the moonlight over silver seas. You are smiling,—you look so different when you smile; do you like my picture?"

"Some of it!"

"What not?"

"You!"

"Thank you."

"You asked me. Can't you understand where the spell lies? It is the freedom, the freshness, the vague danger, the unknown that has a witchery for me,—ay, for every woman!"

"Are you incapable of affection, then?"

"Of course not. I share," bitterly, "that crowning disability of my sex; but not willingly,—I chafe under it. My God! if it were not for that, we women would master the world! I tell you, men would be no match for us! At heart we care nothing for laws, nothing for systems; all your elaborately reasoned codes for controlling morals or man do not weigh a jot with us against an impulse, an instinct. We learn those things from you,—you tamed, amenable animals; they are not natural to us. It is a wise disposition of Providence that this untamableness of ours is corrected by our affections. We forge our own chains in a moment of softness, and then," bitterly, "we may as well wear them with a good grace. Perhaps many of our seeming contradictions are only the outward evidences of inward chafing. Bah! the qualities that go to make a Napoleon—superstition, want of honor, disregard of opinion, and the eternal I—are oftener to be found in a woman than a man. Lucky for the world, perhaps, that all these attributes weigh as nothing in the balance with the need to love, if she be a good woman; to be loved, if she is of a coarser fibre."

"I never met any one like you; you are a strange woman!"

"No, I am merely a truthful one. Women talk to me—why? I can't say; but always they come, strip their hearts and souls naked, and let me see the hidden folds of their natures. The greatest tragedies I have ever read are child's play to those I have seen acted in the inner life of outwardly commonplace women. A woman must beware of speaking the truth to a man; he loves her the less for it. It is the elusive spirit in her, that he divines but cannot seize, that fascinates and keeps him."

There is a long silence; the sun is waning and the scythes are silent, and overhead the crows are circling,—a croaking, irregular army, homeward bound from a long day's pillage.

She has made no sign, yet so subtilely is the air charged with her that he feels but a few moments remain to him. He goes over and kneels beside her, and fixes his eyes on her odd, dark face. They both tremble, yet neither speaks. His breath is coming quickly, and the bistre stains about her eyes seem to have deepened, perhaps by contrast, as she has paled.

"Look at me!"

She turns her head right round and gazes straight into his face; a few drops of sweat glisten on his forehead.

"You witch woman! what am I to do with myself? Is my moment ended?"

"I think so."

"Lord, what a mouth!"

"Don't! oh, don't!"

"No, I won't. But do you mean it? Am I, who understand your every mood, your restless spirit, to vanish out of your life? You can't mean it! Listen!—are you listening to me? I can't see your face; take down your hands. Go back over every chance meeting you and I have had together since I met you first by the river, and judge them fairly. To-day is Monday: Wednesday afternoon I shall pass your gate, and if—if my moment is ended, and you mean to send me away, to let me go with this weary aching—"

"A-ah!" she stretches out one brown hand appealingly, but he does not touch it.

"Hang something white on the lilac-bush!"

She gathers up creel and rod, and he takes her shawl, and wrapping it round her holds her a moment in it, and looks searchingly into her eyes, then stands back and raises his hat, and she glides away through the reedy grass.

Wednesday morning she lies watching the clouds sail by. A late rose-spray nods into the open window, and the petals fall every time. A big bee buzzes in and fills the room with his bass note, and then dances out again. She can hear his footstep on the gravel. Presently he looks in over the half window,—

"Get up and come out,—'twill do you good; have a brisk walk!"

She shakes her head languidly, and he throws a great soft, dewy rose with sure aim on her breast.

"Shall I go in and lift you out and put you, 'nighty' and all, into your tub?"

"No!" impatiently. "I'll get up just now."

The head disappears, and she rises wearily and gets through her dressing slowly, stopped every moment by a feeling of faintness. He finds her presently rocking slowly to and fro with closed eyes, and drops a leaf with three plums in it on to her lap.

"I have been watching four for the last week, but a bird, greedy beggar, got one this morning early: try them. Don't you mind, old girl, I'll pour out my own tea!"

She bites into one and tries to finish it, but cannot. "You are a good old man!" she says, and the tears come unbidden to her eyes, and trickle down her cheeks, dropping on to the plums, streaking their delicate bloom.

He looks uneasily at her, but doesn't know what to do; and when he has finished his breakfast he stoops over her chair and strokes her hair, saying, as he leaves a kiss on the top of her head, "Come out into the air, little woman; do you a world of good!"

And presently she hears the sharp thrust of his spade above the bee's hum, leaf rustle, and the myriad late summer sounds that thrill through the air. It irritates her almost to screaming point; there is a practical non-sympathy about it; she can distinguish the regular one, two, three, the thrust, interval, then pat, pat, on the upturned sod. To-day she wants some one, and her thoughts wander to, and she wonders what, the gray-eyed man who never misunderstands her, would say to her. Oh, she wants some one so badly to soothe her; and she yearns for the little mother who is twenty years under the daisies,—the little mother who is a faint memory strengthened by a daguerreotype in which she sits with silk-mittened hands primly crossed on the lap of her moiré gown, a diamond brooch fastening the black-velvet ribbon crossed so stiffly over her lace collar, the shining tender eyes looking steadily out, and her hair in the fashion of fifty-six. How that spade dominates over every sound! and what a sickening pain she has, an odd pain; she never felt it before. Supposing she were to die, she tries to fancy how she would look; they would be sure to plaster her curls down. He might be digging her grave—no, it is the patch where the early peas grew, the peas that were eaten with the twelve weeks' ducklings: she remembers them, little fluffy golden balls with waxen bills, and such dainty paddles,—remembers holding an egg to her ear and listening to it cheep inside before even there was a chip in the shell. Strange how things come to life! What! she sits bolt upright and holds tightly to the chair, and a questioning, awesome look comes over her face; and then the quick blood creeps up through her olive skin right up to her temples, and she buries her face in her hands and sits so a long time.

The maid comes in and watches her curiously, and moves softly about. The look in her eyes is the look of a faithful dog, and she loves her with the same rare fidelity. She hesitates, then goes into the bedroom and stands thoughtfully, with her hands clasped over her breast. She is a tall, thin, flat-waisted woman, with misty blue eyes and a receding chin. Her hair is pretty. She turns as her mistress comes in, with an expectant look on her face. She has taken up a nightgown, but holds it idly.

"Lizzie, had you ever a child?"

The girl's long left hand is ringless; yet she asks it with a quiet insistence, as if she knew what the answer would be, and her odd eyes read her face with an almost cruel steadiness. The girl flushes painfully, and then whitens; her very eyes seem to pale, and her under lip twitches as she jerks out huskily,—

"Yes!"

"What happened to it?"

"It died, M'am."

"Poor thing! Poor old Liz!"

She pats the girl's hand softly, and the latter stands dumbly and looks down at both hands, as if fearful to break the wonder of a caress. She whispers hesitatingly,—

"Have you—have you any little things left?"

And she laughs such a soft, cooing little laugh, like the chirring of a ring-dove, and nods shyly back in reply to the tall maid's questioning look. The latter goes out, and comes back with a flat, red-painted deal box, and unlocks it. It does not hold very much, and the tiny garments are not of costly material; but the two women pore over them as a gem collector over a rare stone. She has a glimpse of thick-crested paper as the girl unties a packet of letters, and looks away until she says tenderly,—

"Look, M'am!"

A little bit of hair inside a paper heart. It is almost white, so silky and so fine that it is more like a thread of bog-wool than a baby's hair; and the mistress, who is a wife, puts her arms round the tall maid, who has never had more than a moral claim to the name, and kisses her in her quick way.

The afternoon is drawing on; she is kneeling before an open trunk, with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. A heap of unused, dainty lace-trimmed ribbon-decked cambric garments are scattered around her. She holds the soft, scented web to her cheek and smiles musingly; and then she rouses herself and sets to work, sorting out the finest, with the narrowest lace and tiniest ribbon, and puckers her swarthy brows, and measures lengths along her middle finger, and then gets slowly up, as if careful of herself as a precious thing, and half afraid.

"Lizzie!"

"Yes, M'am!"

"Wasn't it lucky they were too fine for every day? They will be so pretty. Look at this one with the tiny valenciennes edging. Why, one nightgown will make a dozen little shirts,—such elfin-shirts as they are too; and Lizzie!"

"Yes, M'am!"

"Just hang it out on the lilac-bush,—mind, the lilac-bush!"

"Yes, M'am!"

"Or, Lizzie, wait: I'll do it myself!"

NOW SPRING HAS COME.

A CONFIDENCE.

"When the spring-time comes, gentle Annie, and the flowers are blossoming on the plain!

Lal, lal, la, la, la, lallallalla, lal, lal, lal, la, la, la, la, la.

When the spring-time comes, gentle Annie, and the mockin'-bird is singing on the tree!"

"I don't believe that mocking-bird line belongs to the song at all, Lizzie; you never do get a thing right!"

The words have a partly irritated, partly contemptuous tone, that seems oddly at variance with the size of the child who utters them. She is lying flat on her stomach on the floor, resting her elbows at each side of a book she is reading, holding her sharp chin in the palms of her hands, waving her skinny legs in unconscious time to the half tired, half feverish lilt of the nurse as she jogs the baby in time to the tune. She gazes, as she speaks, at the girl with a pair of unusually bright, penetrating eyes. This mocking-bird line never fails to annoy her.

"Troth, an if I cud get the young limb to slape I wouldn't care if 'twas mockin'-birds or tom cats!" is the indifferent answer.

Strange how some trivial thing will jog a link in a chain of association, and set it vibrating until it brings one face to face with scenes and people long forgotten in some prison cell in one's brain; calling to new life a red-haired girl, with sherry-brown eyes, and a flat back, pacing a nursery floor in impatient endeavor to get a fractious child to sleep,—ay, her very voice and her persistent mixing of mocking-birds and spring-time. So muses the child twenty years after, as, past her first youth, with only the eyes and the smile unchanged, she lies on a bear-skin before the fire on a chilly evening in late spring, and goes over a recent experience. A half humorous smile, with a tinge of mockery in it, plays round her lips as she says,—

"Twenty years ago. Queer how it should fit in after all that time!

"Tell you how it was? That is not very easy; pathos may become bathos in the telling. Let me see. Of course it was chance,—or is there any such thing as chance? Say fate, instead. The three old ladies who spin our destinies were in want of amusement, so they pitched on me. They sent their messenger to me in the guise of a paper-backed novel with a taking name. I was waiting in a shop for some papers I had ordered, when it struck me. I took it up. The author was unknown to me. I opened it at haphazard, and a line caught me. I read on. I was roused by the bookseller's suave voice,—

"'That is a very bad book, Madam. One of the modern realistic school, a tendenz roman. I would not advise Madam to read it.'

"'A-ah, indeed!'

"I laid it down and left the shop. But the words I had read kept dancing before me; I saw them written across the blue of the sky, in the sun streaks on the pavement, and the luminous delicacy of the Norwegian summer nights; they were impressed on my brain in vivid color, glowing, blushing with ardor as they were. Weeks passed; one afternoon, time hung heavily on my hands, and I sent for the book. I read all that afternoon; let the telling words, the passionate pain, the hungry yearning, all the tragedy of a man's soul-strife with evil and destiny, sorrow and sin, bite into my sentient being. When the book was finished, I was consumed with a desire to see and know the author. I never reasoned that the whole struggle might be only an extraordinarily clever intuitive analysis of a possible experience. I accepted it as real, and I wanted to help this man. I longed to tell him in his loneliness that one human being, and that one a woman, had courage to help him. The abstract ego of the novel haunted me. I have a will of my own, so I set to work to find him. It was not so easy. None of my acquaintances knew him, or of him; he was a strange meteor; and as the book was condemned by the orthodox, I had to feel my way cautiously.

"Isn't it dreadful to think what slaves we are to custom? I wonder shall we ever be able to tell the truth, ever be able to live fearlessly according to our own light, to believe that what is right for us must be right! It seems as if all the religions, all the advancement, all the culture of the past, has only been a forging of chains to cripple posterity, a laborious building up of moral and legal prisons based on false conceptions of sin and shame, to cramp men's minds and hearts and souls, not to speak of women's. What half creatures we are, we women!—hermaphrodite by force of circumstances, deformed results of a fight of centuries between physical suppression and natural impulse to fulfil our destiny. Every social revolution has told hardest on us: when a sacrifice was demanded, let woman make it. And yet there are men, and the best of them, who see all this, and would effect a change if they knew how. Why it came about? Because men manufactured an artificial morality; made sins of things that were as clean in themselves as the pairing of birds on the wing; crushed nature, robbed it of its beauty and meaning, and established a system that means war, and always war, because it is a struggle between instinctive truths and cultivated lies. Yes, I know I speak hotly; but my heart burns in me sometimes, and I hate myself. It's a bad thing when a man or woman has a contempt for himself. There's nothing like a good dose of love-fever (in other words, a waking to the fact that one is a higher animal, with a destiny to fulfil) to teach one self-knowledge, to give one a glimpse into the contradictory issues of one's individual nature. Study yourself, and what will you find? Just what I did,—the weak, the inconsequent, the irresponsible. In one word, the untrue feminine is of man's making; while the strong, the natural, the true womanly is of God's making. It is easy to read as a primer; but how change it? Go back to any poet!

"Well, at length an old bookseller I knew gave me surer information. My intuition was not at fault: the experiences were wrung from the man's soul. As the old superstition has it, a dagger dipped in a man's heart-blood will always strike home; so no wonder they pierced me with their passion, despair, and brave endurance. What the old fellow wrote to him I know not, but I got an unconventional pretty letter from him, and it ended in our writing to each other. As my time to leave drew near, the desire to see him became overpowering. I could afford it; he could not. It ended in our arranging to meet at a little town on the coast.

"It is strange how the idea of a person one has never seen can possess one as completely as this did me. I, whom, as you know, think as little of starting alone for, say, Mexico, as another woman of going to afternoon tea; who have trotted the globe without male assistance,—felt as tremulously stirred as at confirmation day. There are days that stand out in the gallery of one's remembrances clean-painted as a Van Hooge, with a sharp clearness.

"I slept on board, and early the next morning, it was Sunday, I stood on deck watching the coast as we glided through the water that danced in delicious September sunshine. I was happily expectant. At dinner hour we passed a fjord, a lovely deep-blue fjord, winding to our right as we passed, with the spire of a church just visible among the fir-trees round the bend. Boats of all kinds, from a smart cutter to a pram were coming out after the service. The white sails swelled as they caught the breeze, flapped as they tacked, hung listlessly a second, and then dashed with a swerve, like swift snowy-winged birds, through the water. I had not troubled with church-going of late years. Why? Oh, speculation, weariness of soul that found no drop of consolation in religious observance,—maybe that might be the reason. But all those honest, simple folk in their Sunday bravery, fair-haired girls with their psalm-books wrapped up in their only silk kerchief, the ring of laughter echoing across the water, the magic of sun and sky, mountain and fjord, made me feel that I too was church-going, and I felt strangely happy. It is the off moments that we do not count as playing any part in our lives that are, after all, the best we have. I am afraid it would be impossible to make you see things as I felt, them.

"I went up to the hotel when I landed. I had the reputation of riches; the hotel was at my service. I inquire for him, go down to my sitting-room, send him my card, and wait. I wait with an odd feeling that I am outside myself, watching myself as it were. I can see the very childishness of my figure, the too slight hips and bust, the flash of rings on my fingers,—they are pressed against my heart, for it is beating hatefully,—ay, the very expectant side-poise of head is visible to me some way. It flashes across me as I stand that so might a slave wait for the coming of a new master, and I laugh at myself for my want-wit agitation. A knock.

"'Come in!'

"The door opens, and I am satisfied. In the space of a second's gaze I meet what my soul has been waiting for, ah, how long! I think always. Have I lived before in some other life that no surprise touches me?—that it is just as if I am only meeting the embodiment of a disintegrated floating image that has often flashed before my consciousness, and flown before I could fix it? Has this man, or some psychical part of this man, been in touch with me before, or how is it? I stand still and stretch out my hand; I check an impulse to put out both, I feel so tremulously happy. I know before he speaks how his voice will sound, what his touch will be like before he clasps my hand. It is odd how the most important crisis of our lives often comes upon us in the most commonplace way. It is the fashion to decry love; yet the vehemence of the denials, the keenness of the weapons of satire and scepticism that are turned against it only prove its existence. As long as man is man and woman is woman, it will be to them at some time the sweetest and possibly the most fatal interest in life to them. Thrust it aside for ambition or gain, slight it as you will, sooner or later it will have its revenge. I had felt no breath of it as maid, wife, or widow; my heart had been a free, wild, shy thing, jessed by my will. Sometimes, by way of experiment, I let it fly to some one for an hour, but always to call it back again to my own safe keeping. Now it left me.

"We sat and talked,—rather I talked, I think, and he listened. He said my going to see him even on literary grounds was eccentric; but then it seemed I had a way of doing as I pleased without exciting much comment. How did he know that? Oh, he had heard it! Was I really going away? How tiresome it was, really awfully tiresome! What was he like? Well, an American bison or a lion. You might put his head among the rarest and handsomest heads in the world. Prejudiced in his favor? No, not a bit. His hands, for instance, are great laborer's hands, freckled too; I don't like his gait either,—indeed, a dozen things. What we talked about? Well, as I said, he listened mostly; laughed with a great joyous boyish laugh, with a deep musical note in it. He has a deferential manner and a very caressing smile; a trick, too, of throwing back his head and tossing his crest of hair. Why he laughed? Well, I suppose I made him. I told him all about myself; turned myself inside out, good and bad alike, as one might the pocket of an old gown; laughed at my own expense, hid nothing. An extraordinary thing to do, was it? I suppose it was; but the whole thing was rather unusual. He got up and walked about, sometimes he thrust his hands in his pockets and exclaimed, 'The Deuce!' etc. I fancy he learned a good deal about me in a few hours. You see it was not as if one were talking to a stranger; it was as if one had met part of one's self one had lost for a long time, and was filling up the gaps made during the absence. You can't understand. I think we were both very happy. He admired—no, that is not the word; he was taken with me, that is better. He said my hands were 'as small as a child's;' the tablecloth was dark-red plush that made a good background. He pointed timidly, as a great shy boy might, to one of my rings; you see they don't as a rule wear many rings up there; I suppose they gave an impression of wealth. 'That one is very beautiful!' I laughed; I was so glad my hands were pretty,—pretty hands last so much longer than a pretty face. I laughed too at his finger, it had such a deferential expression about it; and I called him a great child. I think we were both like two great children; we had found a common interest to rejoice in,—we had found ourselves. Every moment was delightful; we were making discoveries, finding we had had like experiences,—had both hungered, both known want, were both of an age; we were both unconventional, and were shaking hands mentally all the time. I don't remember now what it was he said; but I remember I was obliged to drop my head, and I felt I was smiling from sheer, delicious pleasure. He cried laughingly: 'You say I am a great child, you are a child yourself when you smile!'

"He was to have supper with me, and he went away for an hour. After he left I walked over to a long mirror and looked at myself. Tried to fancy how he saw me,—that might be different, you know. I had color, life, eyes like stars, trembling, smiling lips. There was something quivering, alert about me; I scarce knew myself. Of course the same hips, figure, features were reflected there,—it was something shining through that struck me as foreign. Do you know what I did? I danced all round the room. Shows what an idiot an old woman can be. By the way, he denied that I was old; I was like a little girl, but a remarkable little girl; no wonder people always noticed me, as if I were a somebody. How did he know that? Oh, he had heard it, for that matter seen it too, at the pier. He knew the moment I stepped off the boat that it was I. Yes, people always stared at me, but how could he know? Ah! presentiment perhaps. So he was on the pier? Why did he not come and meet me? No legible answer, but a slow reddening up to the roots of his fair hair. I do not know quite how he conveyed it, but I had the sensation, a charming one, of being treated as a queen.

"But to go back. I sat or rather lay in an arm-chair at the window, and watched the water and the ships. It was getting dusk, the luminous dusk of the north, as if a soft transparent purple veil is being dropped gently over the world. The fjord was full of lights from the different crafts at anchor, and the heaven full of stars; and the longer one looked up there, the more one saw myriads of flimmering eyes of light, until one's brain seemed full of their brightness, and one forgot one's body in gazing. Long silvery streaks glistened through the heaving water like the flash of feeding trout, and lads and lassies in boats rowed to and fro, and human vibration seemed to thrill from them, filling the atmosphere with man and woman. And the silken air caressed my face as the touch of cool, soft fingers. I had a feeling of perfect well-being; one does not get many such moments in one's life, does one? I think I just was happy, rehearsing the hours that flew too quickly, recalling every look, tone, gesture, and smile. The jomfru came in to lay the table; she knew me from a previous visit and began to talk; but I wanted to be alone with my thoughts; so I went upstairs, washed my hands and puffed them with sweet smelling powder, and then when I went down again and sat and waited I clasped them up over my head to make them white. He came back, flung his hat on the sofa out of sheer boyish delight at being back, came over and stood and looked down at me, and I laughed up to him. If I were to talk until Doomsday, I could not make you understand what I cannot yet understand myself.

"After supper, at which I sipped my tea and watched him, we sat at the window and looked out at the purple world. I had told him he might smoke. Well? Well, we talked, and we talked when we were both silent; and he, I mean his thinking self, came to me; and I—well, I believe from the moment he came into the room, all the best of me went straight to him. The lights out in the harbor twinkled, a star fell, and I wished—well, wishes are foolish. I think he must have been watching my face, for when our eyes met, he smiled as if he understood. Sometimes he jumped up and stood rocking a chair backward and forward. He was sorry I was going away! Yes? Oh, we might meet again! That might be difficult! Indeed? I should have thought he would be the last person in the world to say it was difficult to meet. He laughed at that, with a quick sidelong look he has, like a Finn dog, and said I was sharp, awfully sharp, as if he liked being caught. By the way, he occasionally used strong language; said I must forgive him, he wasn't very used to ladies' society.

"At ten I said I would say good-night for conventionality's sake. He begged, humbly it struck me, for a little longer. I was to leave by the steamer at eight in the morning, would be down at seven; he might come to me. Would I give him a portrait of myself? Yes, I would get one specially done. As much in profile as possible, he thought that would be happier. Yes. He came to the top of the stairs with me, and when we bade good-night he took my hand and held it curiously as if it were something fearfully fragile, and stood and watched me down the corridor. And will you credit it? I felt inclined to run like an awkward little school-girl. I said prayers that night; thanked God, I don't quite know what for,—I suppose I did then,—perhaps for being happy. I looked at my foreign self in the glass too, and when the light was out—Yes?—I did what you and every other woman might do, I cuddled my face to an imaginary face, rubbed my cheek to an imaginary cheek, whispered a God bless you! and fell asleep.

"I was down before seven, paid my bill, and sat waiting, with the little tray, with its thick white cups and lumpy yellow cream, before me. He came,—such a glad man, with glad eyes, glad smile, and outstretched hands. And I,—I was so glad, too, that I could have shouted out for very joy of living. I might have been drinking some magic elixir instead of coffee.

"'It is tiresome!' he said impatiently.

"'What is tiresome? You have said that so often.'

"'It is tiresome when a person one wants so badly to keep in the country is going out of it.'

"'Supposing I were to stay in it, you would probably be in one place and I in another. It is only a question of a little dearer postage!'

"We both laughed at that. It takes such a little thing to make one laugh when one is happy. Then the steamer came in sight, and we walked down through the bright morning to the pier, and went on board. He stood silently; we only looked at each other. It did not then strike me as odd—it does now. The first bell rang! I felt a chill steal over me. 'It is tiresome, it is hateful!' His smile had flown; and old deep lines and traces of past suffering I had not noticed before showed plainly.

"'I will come back,' I said, 'when the winter is over!'

"'Ay, but winter is long, or it used to be!'

"'No matter, I will come with the spring!'

"The second bell rang! Ah, why can't we do as our hearts bid us? We have one short life, and it is spoiled by chains of our own forging in deference to narrow custom. I shivered. There was after all an autumn chill in the air. I hate the sound of a steamer bell now.... The third bell! We turn, and I tighten my small fingers in his great hand, and I say good-by and God bless you! Not from a purely religious conception of God, unless it be that God (and I think it does) means all that is good and beautiful, tender and best. I might have said, 'The best I can think of befall you!' A second later, and the streamer rail separates us! I look into his soul through his eyes, and see it is sorry, regretful,—as sorry as I am glad it is so: he is sorry I am going from him, and in that short concentrated gaze his soul comes to me as I would have it come to me.

"'When spring comes' I whisper as I lean over to him, while the steamer glides out. He follows it to the end of the pier, and stands there as long as we are in sight. If he had held out his arms and said, 'Woman, stay with me!' I would, I fear, have jumped down and stayed. Didn't know anything about him? No, that is true, only that I had been waiting for something ever since I was old enough to have a want, and that he was that something; that I was nearly thirty when I found him, and—life is short!

"I was so glad, in spite of leaving him, that I believe I thought the sun shone differently. I almost asked some people on deck if they did not think that the day was quite the loveliest day ever dawned since the world was a world; if there was not something peculiarly and singularly delicious in the very air? I found a quiet sofa, and lay with closed eyes, and lived it over again.

"The rest is more difficult to tell you. I was insanely happy, then I was intensely miserable. I sent him my portrait and a letter, and counted the days and the hours to a reply. It came. I stole away to read all the warm meaning ill concealed under the words of it; slept with it under my pillow, carried it in my bosom, and answered it straight from my heart. Why try and tell you of the aftertime? I would not go through that winter again for anything in the world. Hope, fear, suspense, joy, despondency,—all the strongest feelings that can torture or wear out a heart were mine. I longed to be up on a high mountain alone with my dream. I wonder does a man ever realize the beauty there is in a woman's thought of him! What kind were the letters? Warm, passionate, yet with a reservatio mentalis that hurt me, but always with a 'When spring comes!' in them. It is amazing to what depths of folly a human being can descend! I had his photograph on my table; I greeted it as a Russian peasant his household saint. It would be hard to find my match in idiocy. I felt a letter coming, and waited with strained ears and fever-racked nerves for the postman's knock. Do you know there is something touchingly pitiful in the way one finds out all the tender bits in a letter and re-reads them? I have kissed a thumb-mark on the paper! Heavens, how the days dragged! I was ill with yearning thought; night brought no rest but the comfort of being alone; all the years of my life were not as long as that weary winter. Sleep fled, and nervous pain took its place. It was foolish, exceedingly foolish, because it was fatal to my looks. At the rare times I looked at myself I got a glimpse of a thin, waxen, yellow face with dark-ringed eyes, and I was certainly older looking. Thinking of it all dispassionately, I am inclined to think I was hysterical. How many of the follies and frailties of women are really due to hysterical rather than moral irresponsibility is a question. You see there is no time of sowing wild oats for women; we repress and repress, and then some day we stumble on the man who just satisfies our sexual and emotional nature, and then there is shipwreck of some sort. When we shall live larger and freer lives we shall be better balanced than we are now. If what I suffered is love, all I can say is I would not ask a better sample of conventional hell's pain. Hu-s-sh! Very well, I won't say those things!

"It is bad enough to be a fool and not to know it; but to be a fool and feel with every fibre of your being, every shred of your understanding, that you are one, and that there is no help for it; that all your philosophy won't aid you; that you are one great want, stilled a little by a letter, only to be haunted afresh by the personality of another creature, tortured with doubts and hurt by your loss of self-respect,—ah! it was a long winter! Then the New Year came and went, and time dragged slowly but surely, and at length the Almanacs said it was spring-time, and the girls at the street corners called, 'Vilets, sweet vilets!' and the milliners marked down guinea bonnets to 12s. 11d., and I watched each token of its coming with a fearsome, joyous expectation—Go on? Ah, yes, I'll go on,—where was I? Oh, spring was coming, wasn't it? I do not laugh as I used to, eh? How used I to laugh? I forget. Well, I won't laugh if it hurts you, dear, not even at myself.

"Well, once again, I was standing at a table in a hotel room, waiting. It is the simple things that are so hard to describe, and that are most complicated in their effects. I said again, 'Come in!' held fast to the table with my left hand and smiled,—to be accurate, began a smile. Spring is later up there; perhaps some of the winter's frost was still in the atmosphere, for something froze it on my lips. I felt a curious stiffening in my face, and the touch of his hand did not thaw me. Feel happy? No; I was numb in one way, and yet keenly alive to impressions. I felt as if my nerve net was outside my skin, not under it, and that the exposure to the air and surrounding influences made it intensely, acutely sensitive. I seemed to see with my sense of feeling as well as my sight. You know how in great cold you seem to burn your hand with an icy heat if you suddenly grasp a piece of iron? Well, I felt some way I was touched by glowing shivers: that sounds nonsense, but it expresses the feeling. Why? I don't know why: I was analyzing, being analyzed; criticising, being criticised. It was all so different, you see. Supposing you had just sipped a beaker of exhilarating, life-giving, rich wine with an exquisite bouquet, and a glow that steals through you and witches and warms you; and suddenly, without your knowing how it happens, the draught is transformed into luke-warm water, or 'Polly' without the 'dash' in it! What did he say? Let me think. Oh, yes: I was wretchedly thin. Odd how things strike one. I once saw a representation of Holberg's Stundeslöse in Copenhagen. One of the characters is an ancient housekeeper, with a long money-bag, who is, as they term it, 'marriage-sick.' A match is arranged between her and a young spark in the village. The scene is this: while the monetary part of the affair is being arranged by the notary, etc., he says to her,—'Permit me to pass my hand over your bosom, mistress?' She simpers; and I shall never forget the comical expression of dismay with which the suitor rolls his eyes and drops his jaw as he turns aside. I felt rather than saw the comprehensive look which accompanied his comment on my thinness, and that scene flashed across my inner vision. Odd, was it not? A sort of sympathetic after-comprehension. It was as if I, too, were having a hand passed across the flatness of my figure.

"'Yes, I have got thin.' Silence. Had I been very ill? Yes, very! Was that why I was so pale? It was fearful,—not a tinge of warm color in my face; one would be afraid to touch me. I felt as if I were being toted up: item, so much color; item, so much flesh. Had I been worried? I had lost that buoyant childishness that was so attractive. Ah, yes, I had dwelt too much on a trouble I had. Did I sleep? Not much. That was foolish. I ought to eat plenty, too. I looked as if I didn't eat enough; my eyes and cheeks were hollowed out. Ah, yes, no doubt I did look older than in autumn! I was not contradicted. I would have told a little lie to spare a man's feelings. Men are perhaps more conscientious.

"What else? I am rehearsing it all as best I can. Oh, my hands were altered; he thought they were not so small, eh? Might be my wrists were less round, that made a difference. Did it? They certainly were larger, and not so white. Did he kiss me? Oh, yes. You see I wanted to sift this thing thoroughly, to get clear into my head what ground I was standing on. So I let him. They were merely lip-kisses; his spirit did not come to mine, and I was simply analyzing them all the time. Did I not feel anything? Yes, I did,—deeply hurt; ah, I can't say how they hurt me! They lacked everything a kiss, as the expression of the strongest, best feeling of a man and woman, can hold. How do I know? My dear woman, have you never dreamt, felt, had intuitive experiences? I have. I am not sure that I had not a keen sense of the ludicrous side of the whole affair; that one portion of my soul was not having a laugh at the other's expense. I do not quite know what I had been expecting. 'Tis true he had written me beautiful letters. You see he is too much of a word-artist to write anything else.

"Treated me badly? No, I am not prepared to say that he did. I am glad he was too honest to hide his startled realization of the fact that autumn and spring are different seasons, and that one's feelings may undergo a change in a winter. I do not see why I should resent that. Why, it would be punishing him for having cared for me. To put it in his words: 'I came as a strangely lovely dream into his life.' Probably the whole mistake lay in that. He thought of me as a dream lady, with dainty hands; idealized me, and wrote to the dream creature. When I came back in the flesh, he realized that I was a prosaic fact, with less charming hands, a tendency to leanness, and coming crow's feet. His look of dismayed awakening was simply delicious.

"I wish I could catch and fasten the fleeting images that flit across my memory; you would grasp my mental attitude better. In the midst of all my pain,—I was sitting next him, and he was stroking my hand mechanically,—I noticed a glass case on the wall containing an Italian landscape, with ball-blue sky and pink lakes; pasteboard figures of Dutch-peasant build, with Zouave jackets, Tyrolese hats, and bandaged legs, figured in the foreground; you wound it up, and the figures danced to a varso-viana. I was listening to him, and yet at the same time I caught myself imagining how he and I would look dressed like that, bobbing about to the old-fashioned tune. I could hardly keep from shrieking with laughter. He had a turn-down collar on: he ought always to wear unstarched linen,—it and his throat didn't fit. You cannot understand me? Dearest woman, I do not pretend to understand the thing myself.

"Did we not talk about anything? Of course we did,—Tolstoi and his doctrine of celibacy; Ibsen's Hedda; Strindberg's view of the female animal,—and agreed that Friedrich Nietszche appealed to us immensely. You must make allowances. Here was a man passionately attached to his art,—his art, that he had been treating churlishly for months for the sake of a dream. The dream was out, and he feared her revenge. That is the one potent element of consolation for me. If one has made an idiot of one's self, it is at least self-consoling to have done so for a genius. He chose the better part, if you come to think of it. The man or woman who jeopardizes a great talent—be it of writing, painting, or acting—for marriage sake is bartering a precious birthright for a mess of pottage, mostly indifferent pottage. And even if it were excellent, it is bound to pall when one has it every day. There never was a marriage yet in which one was not a loser; and it is generally the more gifted half who has to pay the heaviest toll.

"I believe he was intensely sorry for me. I asked him once, you know, half playfully, half maliciously, if he had meant something, something deliciously tender,—I quoted it out of one of his letters. He paled to his lips, closed his eyes for a second, and I saw drops of sweat break out on his forehead. I sprang up and turned aside his answer. I remember when I was a little child I never would pick flowers; I always fancied they felt it, and bled to death. I used to sneak behind, and gather up all those my playmates threw down on the road or fields, and put them, stalks down, into the water in the ditch or brook; even now I can't wear them. I did not wish to hurt him either; he could not help his passion-flower withering. I suppose it was written that my love should turn, like fairy gold, into withered leaves in my grasp.

"What, dear,—a white hair? Oh, I saw several lately. How did it end? Oh, he said that he was going away to glean material for a new book; that he would burn my letters,—it was safer and wiser to burn letters. No, I did not ask him; he volunteered it. He asked me, did I not think so? I said yes. But is it not marvellous how dazzlingly swift our thoughts can travel, like light? While I was saying, 'Yes, one often regretted not having burned letters; receipts, receipts for bills, were really the only things of importance to keep,' I was thinking and crying inwardly over my letters. Such letters!—one only writes once like that, I think. All the perfume of the flowers I ever smelt, all the sun-glints on hill and sea, all the strains of music and light and love I had garnered from the glad, fresh, young years when I tossed cowslip balls in the meadows, were crystallized into love-words in those letters of mine. It seemed to me often that the words burnt with a white flame as I wrote them, and I was shy when I saw them written; and he said, 'I shall burn them!' much as you might say, 'I shall take the trimming off that last summer hat of mine.' I did not like to think of his burning them, perhaps with his old washing-bills. Do you know, if I had a finger or toe cut off, I wouldn't like them to take it away; I'd like to bury it. A sort of feel, I suppose.

"Well, we said good-by! I felt as if I had a sponge with a lot of holes in it, instead of a heart, and that all the feeling had oozed away through them. He was glad to go, I think; he felt himself a brute I dare say, yet how could he help it?

"Were you ever at the Scandinavian church in the Docks? I went one Sunday after I came back. I like those blue-eyed, sea-faring folk; and the priest wears a black gown and stiff ruff, like Luther of mixed renown. An apple-tree outside the open door was struggling to open its delicate pink blossoms; each petal had a tinge of soot,—it reminded me of the pretty cheeks of a grimy maid-of-all-work. I sat still; a sunbeam came in and pierced Judas's heart, as he sat at his section of the Last Supper table, and it wrapped me up in a sun haze, so that all was misty around me. The sermon only struck my ear with a soothing, drowsy roll, something like the wave-note of the incurling sea in the Mediterranean,—a legato accompaniment to my thoughts; and I had a grand burial all by myself. I dug a deep grave, and laid all my dreams and foolish wishes and sweet hopes in it. A puff of wind rustled through the rigging of the ships, and set the flags with their yellow cross fluttering, and scattered a few of the tender blooms over it, and—ah, well! it seems hard to realize now. Spring has gone!

"Do you really think that crinolines will be worn?"

THE SPELL OF THE WHITE ELF.

Have you ever read out a joke that seemed excruciatingly funny, or repeated a line of poetry that struck you as being inexpressibly tender, and found that your listener was not impressed as you were? I have; and so it may be that this will bore you, though it was momentous enough to me.

I had been up in Norway to receive a little legacy that fell to me; and though my summer visits were not infrequent, I had never been up there in mid-winter, at least not since I was a little child tobogganing with Hans Jörgen (Hans Jörgen Dahl is his full name), and that was long ago. We are connected. Hans Jörgen and I were both orphans, and a cousin (we called her aunt) was one of our guardians. He was her favorite; and when an uncle on my mother's side (she was Cornish born; my father, a ship captain, met her at Dartmouth) offered to take me, I think she was glad to let me go. I was a lanky girl of eleven, and Hans Jörgen and I were sweethearts. We were to be married some day,—we had arranged all that,—and he reminded me of it when I was going away, and gave me a silver perfume-box, with a gilt crown on top, that had belonged to his mother; and later when he was going to America he came to see me first. He was a long, freckled hobbledehoy, with just the same true eyes and shock head. I was, I thought, quite grown up. I had passed my "intermediate," and was condescending as girls are; but I don't think it impressed Hans Jörgen much, for he gave me a little ring, turquoise forget-me-nots with enamelled leaves and a motto inside (a quaint old thing that belonged to a sainted aunt, they keep things a long time in Norway), and said he would send for me; but of course I laughed at that. He has grown to be a great man out in Cincinnati, and waits always. I wrote later and told him I thought marriage a vocation, and I hadn't one for it; but Hans Jörgen took no notice,—just said he'd wait. He understands waiting, I'll say that for Hans Jörgen.

I have been alone now for five years, working away, though I was left enough to keep me before. Someway I have not the same gladness in my work of late years. Working for one's self seems a poor end, even if one puts by money. But this has little or nothing to do with the white elf, has it?

Christiania is a singular city if one knows how to see under the surface, and I enjoyed my stay there greatly. The Hull boat was to sail at 4.30, and I had sent my things down early; for I was to dine at the Grand at two with a cousin, a typical Christiania man. It was a fine, clear day, and Karl Johann was thronged with folks. The band was playing in the park, and pretty girls and laughing students walked up and down. Every one who is anybody may generally be seen about that time. Henrik Ibsen—if you did not know him from his portrait, you would take him to be a prosperous merchant—was going home to dine; but Björnstjerne Björnson, in town just then, with his grand, leonine head, and the kind, keen eyes behind his glasses, was standing near the Storthing House with a group of politicians probably discussing the vexed question of separate consulship. In no city does one see such characteristic odd faces and such queerly cut clothes. The streets are full of students. The farmers' sons among them are easily recognized by their homespun, sometimes home-made, suits, their clever heads and intelligent faces; from them come the writers and brain-carriers of Norway. The Finns, too, have a distinctive type of head, and a something elusive in the expression of their changeful eyes; but all, the town students too, of easier manners and slangier tongues,—all alike are going, as finances permit, to dine in restaurant or steam-kitchen. I saw the menu for to-day posted up outside the door of the latter as I passed,—"Rice porridge and salt meat soup, 6d.,"—and Hans Jörgen came back with a vivid picture of childhood days, when every family in the little coast-town where we lived had a fixed menu for every day in the week; and it was quite a distinction to have meat-balls on pickled-herring day, or ale soup when all the folks in town were cooking omelets with bacon. How he used to eat rice porridge in those days! I can see him now put his heels together and give his awkward bow as he said, "Tak for Maden tante!"

Well, we are sitting in the Grand Café after dinner, at a little table near the door, watching the people pass in and out. An ubiquitous "sample-count" from Berlin is measuring his wits with a young Norwegian merchant; he is standing green chartreuse. It pays to be generous even for a German, when you can oust honest Leeds cloth with German shoddy: at least, so my cousin says. He knows every one by sight, and points out all the celebrities to me. Suddenly he bows profoundly. I look round: a tall woman with very square shoulders, and gold-rimmed spectacles is passing us with two gentlemen. She is English, by her tailor-made gown and little shirt-front, and noticeable anywhere.

"That lady," says my cousin, "is a compatriot of yours. She is a very fine person, a very learned lady; she has been looking up referats in the University Bibliothek. Professor Sturm—he is a good friend of me—did tell me. I forget her name; she is married. I suppose her husband he stay at home and keep the house!"

My cousin has just been refused by a young lady dentist, who says she is too comfortably off to change for a small housekeeping business; so I excuse his sarcasm.

We leave as the time draws on, and sleigh down to the steamer. I like the jingle of the bells, and I feel a little sad; there is a witchery about the country that creeps into one and works like a love-philter, and if one has once lived up there, one never gets it out of one's blood again. I go on board, and lean over and watch the people; there are a good many for winter time. The bell rings. Two sleighs drive up, and my compatriot and her friends appear; she shakes hands with them, and comes leisurely up the gang-way. The thought flits through me that she would cross it in just that cool way if she were facing death; it is foolish, but most of our passing thoughts are just as inconsequent. She calls down a remembrance to some one in such pretty Norwegian, much prettier than mine, and then we swing round. Handkerchiefs wave in every hand. Never have I seen such persistent handkerchief-waving as at the departure of a boat in Norway; it is a national characteristic. If you live at the mouth of a fjord, and go to the market-town at the head of it for your weekly supply of coffee-beans, the population give you a "send off" with fluttering kerchiefs; it is as universal as the "Thanks." Hans Jörgen says I am Anglicized, and only see the ridiculous side, forgetting the kind feelings that prompt it.

I find a strange pleasure in watching the rocks peep out under the snow, the children dragging their hand-sleds along the ice. All the little bits of winter life of which I get flying glimpses as we pass, bring back scenes grown dim in the years between. There is a mist ahead; and when we pass Dröbak cuddled like a dormouse for winter's sleep, I go below. A bright coal-fire burns in the open grate of the stove, and the "Rollo" saloon looks very cosy. My compatriot is stretched in a big arm-chair reading. She is sitting comfortably with one leg crossed over the other, in the manner called shockingly unladylike of my early lessons in deportment. The flame flickers over the patent leather of her neat low-heeled boot, and strikes a spark from the pin in her tie. There is something manlike about her; I don't know where it lies, but it is there. Her hair curls in gray-flecked rings about her head; it has not a cut look, seems rather to grow short naturally. She has a charming, tubbed look; of course every lady is alike clean, but some men and women have an individual look of sweet cleanness that is a beauty of itself. She feels my gaze, and looks up and smiles; she has a rare smile,—it shows her white teeth and softens her features.

"The fire is cosy, isn't it? I hope we shall have an easy passage, so that it can be kept in."

I answer something in English.

She has a trick of wrinkling her brows; she does it now as she says,—

"A-ah, I should have said you were Norsk, are you not really? Surely, you have a typical head, or eyes and hair at the least?"

"Half of me is Norsk, but I have lived a long time in England."

"Father of course; case of 'there was a sailor loved a lass,' was it not?"

I smile an assent and add: "I lost them both when I was very young."

A reflective look steals over her face. It is stern in repose; and as she seems lost in some train of thought of her own, I go to my cabin and lie down; the rattling noises and the smell of paint make me feel ill. I do not go out again. I wake next morning with a sense of fear at the stillness; there is no sound but a lapping wash of water at the side of the steamer, but it is delicious to lie quietly after the vibration of the screw and the sickening swing. I look at my watch,—seven o'clock. I cannot make out why there is such a silence, as we only stop at Christiansand long enough to take cargo and passengers. I dress and go out. The saloon is empty, but the fire is burning brightly. I go to the pantry and ask the stewardess when we arrived. Early, she says; all the passengers for here are already gone on shore, and there is a thick fog outside; goodness knows how long we'll be kept. I go to the top of the stairs and look out; the prospect is uninviting, and I come down again and turn over some books on the table, in Russian, I think. I feel sure they are hers.

"Good-morning!" comes her pleasant voice.

How alert and bright-eyed she is! it is a pick-me-up to look at her.

"You did not appear last night; not given in already, I hope!"

She is kneeling on one knee before the fire, holding her palms to the glow; and with her figure hidden in her loose, fur-lined coat, and the light showing up her strong face under the little tweed cap, she seems so like a clever-faced slight man that I feel I am conventionally guilty in talking so freely to her. She looks at me with a deliberate, critical air, and then springs up.

"Let me give you something for your head! Stewardess, a wine-glass!"

I should not dream of remonstrance, not if she were to command me to drink sea-water; and I am not complaisant as a rule.

When she comes back I swallow it bravely, but I leave some powder in the glass; she shakes her head, and I finish this too. We sat and talked, or at least she talked and I listened. I don't remember what she said; I only know that she was making clear to me most of the things that had puzzled me for a long time,—questions that arise in silent hours, that one speculates over, and to which one finds no answer in text-books. How she knew just the subjects that worked in me I knew not; some subtile intuitive sympathy, I suppose, enabled her to find it out. It was the same at breakfast; she talked down to the level of the men present (of course they did not see that it might be possible for a woman to do that), and made it a very pleasant meal.

It was in the evening—we had the saloon to ourselves—when she told me about the white elf. I had been talking of myself and of Hans Jörgen.

"I like your Mr. Hans Jörgen," she said; "he has a strong nature and knows what he wants; there is reliability in him. They are rarer qualities than one thinks in men; I have found through life that the average man is weaker than we are. It must be a good thing to have a stronger nature to lean to. I have never had that."

There is a want in the tone of her voice as she ends, and I feel inclined to put out my hand and stroke hers,—she has beautiful long hands,—but I am afraid to do so. I query shyly,—

"Have you no little ones?"

"Children, you mean? No, I am one of the barren ones; they are less rare than they used to be. But I have a white elf at home, and that makes up for it. Shall I tell you how the elf came? Well, its mother is a connection of mine, and she hates me with an honest hatred; it is the only honest feeling I ever discovered in her. It was about the time that she found the elf was to come that it broke out openly, but that was mere coincidence. How she detested me! Those narrow, poor natures are capable of an intensity of feeling concentrated on one object that larger natures can scarcely measure.

"Now I shall tell you something strange. I do not pretend to understand it; I may have my theory, but that is of no physiological value,—I only tell it to you. Well, all the time she was carrying the elf she was full of simmering hatred, and she wished me evil often enough; one feels those things in an odd way. Why did she? Oh, that—that was a family affair, with perhaps a thread of jealousy mixed up in the knot. Well, one day the climax came, and much was said; and I went away and married, and got ill, and the doctors said I would be childless. And in the mean time the little human soul—I thought about it so often—had fought its way out of the darkness. We childless women weave more fancies into the 'mithering o' bairns' than the actual mothers themselves; the poetry of it is not spoiled by nettle-rash or chin-cough any more than our figures. I am a writer by profession—oh, you knew! No, hardly celebrated; but I put my little chips into the great mosaic as best I can. Positions are reversed; they often are now-a-days. My husband stays at home, and grows good things to eat and pretty things to look at, and I go out and win bread and butter. It is a matter not of who has most brains, but whose brains are most salable. Fit in with the housekeeping? Oh, yes. I have a treasure, too, in Belinda. She is one of those women who must have something to love. She used to love cats, birds, dogs, anything. She is one bump of philo-progenitiveness; but she hates men. She says: 'If one could only have a child, ma'm, without a husband or the disgrace! ugh, the disgusting men!' Do you know, I think that is not an uncommon feeling among a certain number of women. I have often drawn her out on the subject; it struck me, because I have often found it in other women. I have known many, particularly older women, who would give anything in God's world to have a child of 'their own' if it could be got, just as Belinda says, 'without the horrid man or the shame.' It seems congenital with some women to have deeply rooted in their innermost nature a smoldering enmity—ay, sometimes a physical disgust—to men. It is a kind of kin feeling to the race-dislike of white men to black. Perhaps it explains why woman, where her own feelings are not concerned, will always make common cause with woman against man. I have often thought about it. You should hear Belinda's 'serve him right' when some fellow comes to grief! I have a little of it myself [meditatively], but in a broader way, you know. I like to cut them out in their own province.

"Well, the elf was born; and now comes the singular part of it. It was a wretched, frail little being, with a startling likeness to me. It was as if the evil the mother had wished me had worked on the child, and the constant thought of me stamped my features on its little face. I was working then on a Finland saga, and I do not know why it was, but the thought of that little being kept disturbing my work. It was worst in the afternoon time, when the house seemed quietest; there is always a lull then, outside and inside. Have you ever noticed that? The birds hush their singing, and the work is done. Belinda used to sit sewing in the kitchen, and the words of a hymn she used to lilt in half tones—something about joy bells ringing, children singing—floated in to me, and the very tick-tock of the old clock sounded like the rocking of wooden cradles. It made me think sometimes that it would be pleasant to hear small, pattering feet and the call of voices through the silent house; and I suppose it acted as an irritant on my imaginative faculty, for the whole room seemed filled with the spirits of little children. They seemed to dance round me with uncertain, lightsome steps, waving tiny, pink, dimpled hands, shaking sunny, flossy curls, and haunting me with their great innocent child-eyes, filled with the unconscious sadness and the infinite questioning that is oftenest seen in the gaze of children. I used to fancy something stirred in me, and the spirits of unborn little ones never to come to life in me troubled me. I was probably over-worked at the time. How we women digress! I am telling you more about myself than my white elf.

"Well, trouble came to their home, and I went and offered to take it. It was an odd little thing, and when I looked at it I could see how like we were. My glasses dimmed somehow, and a lump kept rising in my throat, when it smiled up out of its great eyes and held out two bits of hands like shrivelled white rose-leaves. Such a tiny scrap it was! it was not bigger, she said, than a baby of eleven months. I suppose they can tell that as I can the date of a dialect; but I am getting wiser," with an emotional softening of her face, and quite a proud look. "A child is like one of those wonderful runic alphabets; the signs are simple, but the lore they contain is marvellous. 'She is very like you,' said the mother; 'hold her.' She was only beginning to walk. I did. You never saw such elfin ears, with strands of silk floss ringing round them, and the quaintest, darlingest wrinkles in its forehead, two long, and one short, just as I have"—putting her head forward for me to see. "The other children were strong, and the one on the road she hoped would be healthy. So I took it there and then, 'clothes and baby, cradle and all.' Yes, I have a collection of nursery rhymes from many nations; I was going to put them in a book, but I say them to the elf now.

"I wired to my husband. You should have seen me going home. I was so nervous,—I was not half as nervous when I read my paper (it was rather a celebrated paper, perhaps you heard of it) to the Royal Geographical Society; it was on Esquimaux marriage songs, and the analogy between them and the Song of Solomon. She was so light, and so wrapped up, and my pince-nez kept dropping off when I stooped over her (I got spectacles after that); and I used to fancy I had dropped her out of the wrappings, and peep under the shawl to make sure [with a sick shiver], to find her sucking her thumb. And I nearly passed my station; and then a valuable book—indeed, it is really a case of Mss., and almost unique—I had borrowed for reference, with some trouble, could not be found, and my husband roared with laughter when it turned up in the cradle. Belinda was at the gate anxious to take her, and he said I did not know how to hold her,—that I was holding her like a book of notes at a lecture; and so I gave her to Belinda. I think the poor little thing found it all strange, and when she puckered up her face and thrust out her under-lip, and two great tears jumped off her lashes, we all felt ready for hanging. But Belinda, though she doesn't know one language, not even her own, for she sows her h's broadcast and picks them up at hazard,—she can talk to a baby. I am so glad for that reason she is bigger now. I couldn't manage it: I could not reason out any system they go on in baby talk. I tried mixing up the tenses, but somehow it wasn't right. My husband says it is not more odd than salmon taking a fly that is certainly like nothing they ever see in nature. Anyway it answered splendidly. Belinda used to say (I made a note of some of them): 'Did-sum was denn? Oo did! Was ums de prettiest itta sweetums denn? Oo was. An' did um put 'em in a nasty shawl an' joggle 'em in an ole puff-puff? Um did; was a shame! Hitchy cum, hitchy cum, hitchy cum hi, Chinaman no likey me!' This always made her laugh, though in what connection the Chinaman came in I never could fathom. I was a little jealous of Belinda, but she knew how to undress her. George, that's my husband's name, said the bath-water was too hot, and that the proper way to test it was to put one's elbow in. Belinda laughed; but I must confess it did feel too hot when I tried it that way: but how did he know? I got her such pretty clothes! I was going to buy a pragtbind of Nietzsche, but that must wait. George made her a cot with her name carved on the head of it; such a pretty one!"

"Did you find she made a change in your lives?" I asked.

"Oh, didn't she! Children are such funny things. I stole away to have a look at her later on, and did not hear him come after me. She looked so sweet, and she was smiling in her sleep. I believe the Irish peasantry say that an angel is whispering when a baby does that. I had given up all belief myself, except the belief in a Creator who is working out some system that is too infinite for our finite minds to grasp. If one looks round with seeing eyes, one can't help thinking that after a run of eighteen hundred and ninety-three years Christianity is not very consoling in its results. But at that moment, kneeling next the cradle, I felt a strange, solemn feeling stealing over me: one is conscious of the same effect in a grand cathedral filled with the peal of organ music and soaring voices. It was as if all the old, sweet, untroubled child-belief came back for a spell, and I wondered if far back in the Nazarene village Mary ever knelt and watched the Christ-child sleep; and the legend of how he was often seen to weep but never to smile came back to me, and I think the sorrow I felt as I thought was an act of contrition and faith. I could not teach a child scepticism; so I remembered my husband prayed, and I resolved to ask him to teach her. You see [half hesitatingly] I have more brains, or at least more intellectuality, than my husband; and in that case one is apt to undervalue simpler, perhaps greater, qualities. That came home to me, and I began to cry, I don't know why; and he lifted me up, and I think I said something of the kind to him. We got nearer to each other someway. He said it was unlucky to cry over a child.

"It made such a difference in the evenings! I used to hurry home,—I was on the staff of the 'World's Review' just then; and it was so jolly to see the quaint little phiz smile up when I went in.

"Belinda was quite jealous of George. She said 'Master worritted in an' out, an' interfered with everything; she never seen a man as knew so much about babies, not for one as never 'ad none of 'is own. Wot if he didn't go to Parkins hisself, an' say as how she was to have the milk of one cow, an' mind not mix it!' I wish you could have seen the insinuating distrust on Belinda's face. I laughed. I believe we were all getting too serious; I know I felt years younger. I told George that it was really suspicious: how did he acquire such a stock of baby lore? I hadn't any. It was all very well to say 'Aunt Mary's kids.' I should never be surprised if I saw a Zwazi woman appear with a lot of tawny pickaninnies in tow. George was shocked! I often shock him.

"She began to walk as soon as she got stronger. I never saw such an inquisitive mite. I had to rearrange all my bookshelves, change 'Le Nu de Rabelais' (after Garnier, you know) and several others from the lower shelves to the top ones. One can't be so Bohemian when there is a little white soul like that playing about, can one? When we are alone, she always comes in to say her prayers and good-night. Larry Moore of the 'Vulture,'—he is one of the most wickedly amusing of men; prides himself on being fin de siècle (don't you detest that word?) or nothing; raves about Dégas, and is a worshipper of the decadent school of verse; quotes Verlaine, you know,—well, he came in one evening on his way to some music hall. She's a whimsical little thing, not without incipient coquetry either,—well, she would say them to him. If you can imagine a masher of the Jan van Beer type bending his head to hear a child in a white 'nighty' lisping prayers, you have an idea of the picture. She kissed him good-night too (she never would before), and he must have forgotten his engagement, for he stayed with us to supper. She rules us all with a touch of her little hands, and I fancy we are all the better for it. Would you like to see her?"

She hands me a medallion, with a beautiful painted head in it. I can't say she is a pretty child,—a weird, elf-like thing, with questioning, wistful eyes, and masses of dark hair,—and yet as I look the little face draws me to it, and makes a kind of yearning in me, strikes me with a "fairy blast," perhaps.

The journey was all too short, and when we got to Hull she saw me to my train. It was odd to see the quiet way in which she got everything she wanted. She put me into the carriage, got me a foot-warmer and a magazine, kissed me, and said as she held my hand,—

"The world is small; we run in circles; perhaps we shall meet again. In any case I wish you a white elf."

I was sorry to part with her; I felt richer than before I knew her. I fancy she goes about the world giving graciously from her richer nature to the poorer endowed folk she meets on her way.

Often since that night I have rounded my arm and bowed down my face, and fancied I had a little human elf cuddled to my breast.

I am very busy just now getting everything ready; I had so much to buy. I don't like confessing it even to myself, but down in the bottom of my deepest trunk I have laid a parcel of things,—such pretty, tiny things. I saw them at a sale; I couldn't resist them, they were so cheap. Even if one doesn't want the things, it seems a sin to let them go. Besides, there may be some poor woman out in Cincinnati. I wrote to Hans Jörgen, you know, back in spring, and—Du störer Gud! there is Hans Jörgen coming across the street!

A LITTLE GRAY GLOVE.

Early-Spring, 1893.

The book of life begins with a man and woman in a garden, and ends—with Revelations.—Oscar Wilde.

Yes, most fellows' book of life may be said to begin at the chapter where woman comes in: mine did. She came in years ago, when I was a raw undergraduate. With the sober thought of retrospective analysis, I may say she was not all my fancy painted her; indeed, now that I come to think of it, there was no fancy about the vermeil of her cheeks, rather an artificial reality. She had her bower in the bar of the Golden Boar, and I was madly in love with her, seriously intent on lawful wedlock. Luckily for me she threw me over for a neighboring pork butcher; but at the time I took it hardly, and it made me sex shy. I was a very poor man in those days: one feels one's griefs more keenly then; one hasn't the wherewithal to buy distraction. Besides, ladies snubbed me rather on the rare occasions I met them. Later I fell in for a legacy, the forerunner of several; indeed, I may say I am beastly rich. My tastes are simple too, and I haven't any poor relations: I believe they are of great assistance in getting rid of superfluous capital; wish I had some!

It was after the legacy that women discovered my attractions. They found that there was something superb in my plainness (before they said ugliness), something after the style of the late Victor Emanuel, something infinitely more striking than mere ordinary beauty. At least so Harding told me his sister said, and she had the reputation of being a clever girl. Being an only child I never had the opportunity other fellows had of studying the undress side of women through familiar intercourse, say with sisters. Their most ordinary belongings were sacred to me. I had, I used to be told, ridiculous, high-flown notions about them (by the way I modified those considerably on closer acquaintance): I ought to study them; nothing like a woman for developing a fellow. So I laid in a stock of books in different languages, mostly novels, in which woman played title-rôles, in order to get up some definite data before venturing among them. I can't say I derived much benefit from this course. There seemed to be as great a diversity of opinion about the female species as, let us say, about the salmonidae. My friend Ponsonby Smith, who is one of the oldest fly-fishers in the three kingdoms, said to me once:—

"Take my word for it, there are only four true salmo,—the salar, the trutta, the fario, the ferox; all the rest are just varieties, sub-genuses of the above,—stick to that. Some writing fellow divided all the women into good-uns and bad-uns; but as a conscientious stickler for truth, I must say that both in trout as in women I have found myself faced with most puzzling varieties, that were a tantalizing blending of several qualities."

I then resolved to study them on my own account. I pursued the Eternal Feminine in a spirit of purely scientific investigation. I knew you'd laugh sceptically at that, but it's a fact. I was impartial in my selection of subjects for observation,—French, German, Spanish, as well as the home product. Nothing in petticoats escaped me. I devoted myself to the freshest ingénue as well as the experienced widow of three departed; and I may as well confess that the more I saw of her the less I understood her. But I think they understood me. They refused to take me au sérieux. When they weren't fleecing me, they were interested in the state of my soul (I preferred the former); but all humbugged me equally, so I gave them up. I took to rod and gun instead, pro salute animæ; it's decidedly safer. I have scoured every country in the globe; indeed, I can say that I have shot and fished in woods and waters where no other white man, perhaps, ever dropped a beast or played a fish before. There is no life like the life of a free wanderer, and no lore like the lore one gleans in the great book of Nature; but one must have freed one's spirit from the taint of the town before one can even read the alphabet of its mystic meaning.