THE IMITATOR

A NOVEL

By

PERCIVAL POLLARD

SAINT LOUIS

WILLIAM MARION REEDY

1901

[Contents]

CHAPTER I.

"The thing is already on the wane," said young Orson Vane, making a wry face over the entree, and sniffing at his glass, "and, if you ask me, I think the general digestion of society will be the better for it."

"Yes, there is nothing, after all, so tedious as the sham variety of a table d'hote. Though it certainly wasn't the fare one came to this hole for."

Luke Moncreith turned his eyes, as he said that, over the place they sat in, smiling at it with somewhat melancholy contempt. Its sanded floor, its boisterously exposed wine-barrels, the meaningless vivacity of its Hungarian orchestra, evidently stirred him no more.

"No; that was the last detail. It was the notion of dining below stairs, as the servants do. It had, for a time, the charm of an imitation. Nothing is so delightful as to imitate others; yet to be mistaken for them is always dreadful. Of course, nobody would mistake us here for servants."

The company, motley as it was, could not logically have come under any such suspicion. Though it was dining in a cellar, on a sanded floor, amid externals that were illegitimate offsprings of a Studenten Kneipe and a crew of Christy minstrels, it still had, in the main, the air of being recruited from the smart world. At every other table there were people whom not to know was to argue oneself unknown. These persons obviously treated the place, and their being there, as an elaborate effort at gaiety; the others, the people who were plainly there for the first time, took it with the bewildered manner of those whom each new experience leaves mentally exhausted. The touch of rusticity, here and there, did not suffice to spoil the sartorial sparkle of the smart majority. The champagne that the sophisticated were wise enough to oppose to the Magyar vintages sparkled into veins that ran beautifully blue under skin that held curves the most aristocratic, tints the most shell-like. Tinkling laughter, vocative of insincerity, rang between the restless passion of the violins.

"When it is not below stairs," continued Vane, "it is up on the roof. One might think we were a society without houses of our own. It is, I suppose, the human craving for opposites. When we have stored our sideboards with the finest glass you can get in Vienna or Carlsbad, we turn our backs on it and go to drinking from pewter in a cellar. We pay abominable wages to have servants who shall be noiseless, and then go to places where the service is as guttural as a wilderness of monkeys. Fortunately, these fancies do not last. Presently, I dare say, it will be the fashion to dine at home. That will make us feel quite like the original Puritans." He laughed, and took his glass of wine at a gulp. "The fact of the matter is that variety has become the vice of life. We have not, as a society, any inner steadfastness of soul; we depend upon externals, and the externals pall with fearful speed. Think of seeing in the mirror the face of the same butler for more than thirty days!" He shuddered and shook his head.

"We are a restless lot," sighed the other, "but why discompose yourself about it? Thank your stars you have nothing more important to worry over!"

"My dear Luke, there is nothing more important than the attitude of society at large. It is the only thing one should allow oneself to discuss. To consider one's individual life is to be guilty of as bad form as to wear anything that is conspicuous. Society admires us chiefly only as we sink ourselves in it. If we let the note of personality rise, our social position is sure to suffer. Imitation is the keynote of smartness. The rank and file imitate the leaders consciously, and the leaders unconsciously imitate the average. We frequent cellars, and roofs, and such places, because in doing so we imagine we are imitating the days of the Hanging Gardens and the Catacombs. We abhor the bohemian taint, but we are willing to give a champagne and chicken imitation of it. We do not really care for music and musicians, but we give excellent imitations of doing so. At present we are giving the most lifelike imitation of being passionately fond of outdoor life; I suppose England feels flattered. I am afraid I have forgotten whose the first fashionable divorce in our world was; it is far easier to remember the names of the people who have never been divorced; at any rate those pioneers ought to feel proud of the hugeness of their following. We have adopted a vulgarity from Chicago and made it a fashionable institution; divorce used to be a shuttlecock for the comic papers, and now it makes the bulk of the social register."

Moncreith tapped his friend on the arm. "Drop it, Orson, drop it!" he said. "I know this is a beastly bad dinner, but you shouldn't let it make you maudlin. You know you don't really believe half you're saying. Drop it, I say. These infernal poses make me ill." He attacked the morsel of game on his plate with a zest that was beautiful to behold. "If you go on in that biliously philosophic strain of yours, I shall crunch this bird until I hear nothing but the grinding of bones. It is really not a bad bit of quail. It is so small, and the casserole so large, that you need an English setter to mark it, but once you've got it,"—he wiped his lips with a flip of his napkin, "it's really worth the search. Try it, and cheer up. The woman in rose, over there, under the pseudo-palm, looks at you every time she sips her champagne; I have no doubt she is calculating how untrue you could be to her. I suppose your gloom strikes her as poetic; it strikes me as very absurd. You really haven't a care in the world, and you sit here spouting insincerity at a wasteful rate. If there's anything really and truly the matter—tell me!"

Orson Vane dropped, as if it had been a mask, the ironical smile his lips had worn. "You want sincerity," he said, "well, then I shall be sincere. Sincerity makes wrinkles, but it is the privilege of our friends to make us old before our time. Sincerely, then, Luke, I am very, very tired."

"A fashionable imitation," mocked Moncreith.

"No; a personal aversion, to myself, to the world I live in. I wish the dear old governor hadn't been such a fine fellow; if he had been of the newer generation of fathers I suppose I wouldn't have had an ideal to bless myself with."

Moncreith interrupted.

"Good Lord, Luke, did you say ideals? I swear I never knew it was as bad as that." He beckoned to the waiter and ordered a Dominican. "It is so ideal a liquor that when you have tasted it you crave only for brutalities. Poor Orson! Ideals!" He sighed elaborately.

"If you imitate my manner of a while ago, I shall not say what I was going to say. If I am to be sincere, so must you." He took the scarlet drink the man set before him, and let it gurgle gently down his throat. "It smacks of sin and I scent lies in it. I wish I had not taken it. It is hard to be sincere after a drink that stirs the imagination. But I shall try. And you are not to interrupt any more than you can help. If we both shed the outer skin we wear for society, I believe we are neither of us such bad sorts. That is just what I am getting at: I am not quite bad enough to be blind to my own futility. Here I am, Luke, young, decently looking, with money, position, and bodily health, and yet I am cursed with thought of my own futility. When people have said who I am, they have said it all; I have done nothing: I merely am. I know others would sell their souls to be what I am; but it does not content me. I have spent years considering my way. The arts have called to me, but they have not held me. All arts are imitative, except music, and music is not human enough for me; no people are so unhuman as musical people, and no art is so entirely a creation of a self-centred inventor. There can be no such thing as realism in music; the voices of Nature can never be equalled on any humanly devised instruments or notes. Painting and sculpture are mere imitations of what nature does far better. When you see a beautiful woman as God made her you do not care whether the Greeks colored their statues or not. Any average sunset stamps the painted imitation as absurd. These arts, in fact, can never be really great, since they are man's feeble efforts to copy God's finest creations; between them and the ideal there must always be the same distance as between man and his Creator. Then there is the art of literature. It has the widest scope of them all. Whether it is imitative or creative depends on the temperament of the individual; some men set down what they see and hear, others invent a world of their own and busy themselves with it. I believe it is the most human of the arts. Its devotees not infrequently set themselves the task of discovering just how their fellows think and live; they try to attune their souls to other souls; they strive for an understanding of the larger humanity. They—"

Moncreith interrupted with a gesture.

"Orson, you're not going to turn novelist? Don't tell me that! Your enthusiasms fill me with melancholy forebodings."

"Not at all. But, as you know, I've seen much of this sort of thing lately. In the first place I had my own temperamental leanings; in the next place, you'll remember, we've had a season or two lately when clever people have been the rage. To invite painters and singers and writers to one's house has been the smart thing to do. We have had the spectacle of a society, that goes through a flippant imitation of living, engaged in being polite to people who imitate at second hand, in song, and color, and story. Some smart people have even taken to those arts, thus imitating the professional imitators. As far as the smart point of view goes, I couldn't do anything better than go in for the studio, or novelistic business. The dull people whom smartness has rubbed to a thin polish would conspire in calling me clever. Is there anything more dreadful than being called clever?"

"Nothing. It is the most damning adjective in the language. Whenever I hear that a person is clever I am sure he will never amount to much. There is only one word that approaches it in deadly significance. That is 'rising.' I have known men whom the puffs have referred to as 'a rising man' for twenty years. Can you imagine anything more dismal than being called constantly by the same epithet? The very amiability in the general opinion, permitting 'clever' and 'rising' to remain unalterable, shows that the wearer of these terms is hopeless; a strong man would have made enemies. I am glad you are wise enough to resist the temptation of the Muses. Society's blessing would never console you for anything short of a triumph. The triumphs are fearfully few; the clever people—well, this cellar's full of them. There's Abbott Moore, for instance."

"You're right; there he is. He's a case in point. One of the best cases; a man who has really, in the worldly sense, succeeded tremendously. His system of give and take is one of the most lovely schemes imaginable; we all know that. When a mining millionaire with marriageable daughters comes to town his first hostage to the smart set is to order a palace near Central Park and to give Abbott Moore the contract for the decorations. In return Abbott Moore asks the millionaire's womenfolk to one of his studio carnivals. That section of the smart set which keeps itself constantly poised on the border between smart and tart is awfully keen on Abbott Moore's studio affairs. It has never forgotten the famous episode when he served a tart within a tart, and it is still expecting him to outdo that feat. To be seen at one of these affairs, especially if you have millions, is to have got in the point of the wedge. I call it a fair exchange; the millionaire gets his foot just inside the magic portal; Moore gets a slice of the millions. All the world counts Moore a success from every point of view, the smart, the professional, the financial. Yet that isn't my notion of a full life. It's only a replica of the very thing I'm tired of, my own life."

"Your life, my dear fellow, is generally considered a most enviable article."

"Of course. I suppose it does have a glamour for the unobserving. Yet, at the best, what am I?"

Moncreith laughed. "Another Dominican!" he said to the waiter. "The liqueur," he said, "may enable me to rise to my subject." He smiled at Vane over the glass, when it was brought to him, drained it under closed eyes, and then settled himself well back into his chair.

CHAPTER II.

"I will tell you what you are," began Moncreith, "to I the eye of the average beholder. Here, in the most splendid town of the western world, at the turning of two centuries, you are possessed of youth, health and wealth. That really tells the tale. Never in the history of the world have youth and health and wealth meant so much as they do now. These three open the gates to all the earthly paradise. Your forbears did their duty by you so admirably that you wear a distinguished name without any sacrifice to poverty. You are good to look at. You are a young man of fashion. If you chose you could lead the mode; you have the instincts of a beau, though neither the severe suppression of Brummell nor the obtrusive splendor of D'Aurevilly would suit you. Our age seems to have come to too high an average in man's apparel to permit of any single dictator; to be singled out is to be lowered. Yet there can be no denying that you have often, unwittingly, set the fashion in waistcoats and cravats. That aping has not hurt you, because the others never gave their raiment the fine note of personal distinction that you wear. You are a favorite in the clubs; people never go out when you come in; you listen to the most stupid talk with the most graceful air imaginable; that is one of the sure roads to popularity in clubdom. When it is the fashion to be artistic, you can be so as easily as the others; when sport is the watchword your fine physique forbids you no achievement. You play tennis and golf and polo quite well enough to make women split their gloves in applause, and not too well to make men sneer at you for a 'pro.' When you are riding to hounds in Virginia you are never far from the kill, and there is no automobilist whom the Newport villagers are happier to fine for fast driving. You are equally at home in a cotillon and on the deck of a racing yacht. You could marry whenever you liked. Your character is unspotted either by the excessive vice that shocks the mob, or the excessive virtue that tires the smart. You have means, manners and manner. Finally, you have the two cardinal qualities of smartness, levity and tolerance." He paused, and gave a smile of satisfaction. "There, do you like the portrait?"

"It is abominable," said Vane, "it is what I see in my most awful dreams. And the horror of it is that it is so frightfully true. I am merely one of the figures in the elaborate masquerade we call society. I make no progress in life; I learn nothing except new fashions and foibles. I am weary of the masquerade and the masks. Life in the smart world is a game with masks; one shuffles them as one does cards. As for me, I want to throw the whole pack into the fire. Everyone wears these masks; nobody ever penetrates to the real soul behind the make-up."

"It is a game you play perfectly. One should hesitate long about giving up anything that one has brought to perfection. These others dabble and squabble in what you call the secondary imitations of life; you, at any rate, are giving your imitation at first hand."

"Yes, but it no longer satisfies me. Listen, Luke. You must promise not to laugh and not to frown. It will seem absurd to you; yet I am terribly in earnest about it. When first I came out of college I went in for science. When I gave it up, it was because I found it was leading me away from the human interest. There is the butterfly I want to chase; the human interest. I attempted all the arts; not one of them took me far on my way. My failure, Luke, is an ironic sentence upon the vaunted knowledge of the world."

"Your failure? My dear Orson; come to the point. What do you mean by the human interest?"

"I mean that neither scientist nor scholar has yet shown the way to one man's understanding of another's soul. The surgeon can take a body and dissect its every fraction, arguing and proving each function of it. The painter tries, with feeble success, to reach what he calls the spirit of his subject. So does the author. He tries to put himself into the place of each of his characters; he aims, always, for the nearest possible approach to the lifelike. And, above all the others, there is the actor. In this, as in its other qualities, the art of acting is the crudest, the most obvious of them all; yet, in certain moments, it comes nearest to the ideal. The actor in his mere self is—well, we all know the story of the famous player being met by this greeting: 'And what art thou to-night?' But he goes behind a door and he can come forth in a series of selves. A trick or so with paint; a change of wig; a twist of the face-muscles, and we have the same man appearing as Napoleon, as Richelieu, as Falstaff. The thing is external, of course. Whether there shall be anything more than the mere bodily mask depends upon the actor's intelligence and his imagination. The supreme artist so succeeds, by virtue of much study, much skill in imitating what he has conceived to be the soul of his subject, in almost giving us a lifelike portrait. And yet, and yet—it is not the real thing; the real soul of his subject is as much a mystery to that actor as it is to you or me. That is what I mean when I say that science fails us at the most important point of all; the soul of my neighbor is as profound a mystery to me as the soul of a man that lived a thousand years ago. I can know your face, Luke, your clothes, your voice, the outward mask you wear; but—can I reach the secrets of your soul? No. And if we cannot know how others feel and think, how can we say we know the world? Bah! The world is a realm of shadows in which all walk blindly. We touch hands every day, but our souls are hidden in a veil that has not been passed since God made the universe."

"You cry for the moon," said Moncreith. "You long for the unspeakable. Is it not terrible enough to know your neighbor's face, his voice, his coat, without burdening yourself with knowledge of his inner self? It is merely an egoistic curiosity, my dear Orson; you cannot prove that the human interest, as you term it, would benefit by the extension in wisdom you want."

"Oh, you are wrong, you are wrong. The whole world of science undergoes revolution, once you gain the point I speak of. Doctors will have the mind as well as the body to diagnose; lovers will read each others hearts as well as their voices; lies will become impossible, or, at least, futile; oh—it would be a better world altogether. At any rate, until this avenue of knowledge is opened to me, I shall call all the rest a failure. I imitate; you imitate; we imitate; that is the conjugation of life. When I think of the hopelessness of the thing,—do you wonder I grow bitter? I want communion with real beings, and I meet only masks. I tell you, Luke, it is abominable, this wall that stands between each individual and the rest of the world. How can I love my neighbor if I do not understand him? How can I understand him if I cannot think his thoughts, dream his dreams, spell out his soul's secrets?"

Moncreith smiled at his friend, and let his eyes wander a trifle ironically about his figure. "One would not think, to look at you, that you were possessed of a mania, an itch! If you take my advice you will content yourself with living life as you find it. It is really a very decent world. It has good meat and drink in it, and some sweet women, and a strong man or two. Most of us are quite ignorant of the fact that we are merely engaged in incomplete imitations of life, or that there is a Chinese wall between us and the others; the chances are we are all the happier for our innocence. Consider, for instance, that rosy little face behind us—you can see it perfectly in that mirror—can you deny that it looks all happiness and innocence?"

Vane looked, and presently sighed a little. The face of the girl, as he found it in the glass, was the color of roses lying on a pool of clear water. It was one of those faces that one scarce knows whether to think finer in profile or in full view; the features were small, the hair glistened with a tint of that burnish the moon sometimes wears on summer nights, and the figure was a mere fillip to the imagination. A cluster of lilies of the valley lay upon her hair; they seemed like countless little cups pouring frost upon a copper glow. All about her radiated an ineffable gentleness, a tenderness; she made all the other folk about her seem garish and ugly and cruel. One wondered what she did in that gallery.

"To the outer eye," said Vane, as he sighed, "she is certainly a flower, a thing of daintiness and delight. But—do you suppose I believe it, for a moment? I have no doubt she is merely one of those creatures whom God has made for the destruction of our dreams; her mind is probably as corrupt as her body seems fair. She is perhaps—"

He stopped, for the face in the mirror had its eyes thrown suddenly in his direction. The eyes, in that reflex fashion, met, and something akin to a smile, oh, an ever so wistful, wonderful a smile, crept upon the lips and the eyes of the girl, while to the man there came only a sudden silence.

"She is," continued Vane, in another voice altogether, and as if he were thinking of distant affairs, "very beautiful."

The girl's eyes, meanwhile, had shifted towards Moncreith. He felt the radiance of them and looked, too, and the girl's beauty came upon him with a quick, personal force that was like pain. Vane's spoken approbation of her angered him; he hardly knew why; for the first time in his life he thought he could hate the man beside him.

The girl turned her head a little, put up her hand and so hid her face from both young men, or there is no telling what sudden excuse the two might not have seized for open enmity. It sounds fantastic, perhaps, but there are more enmities sown in a single glance from a woman's eyes than a Machiavelli could build up by ever so devilish devices. Neither of the two, in this case, could have said just what they felt, or why. Moncreith thought, vaguely enough perhaps, that it was a sin for so fair a flower to waste even a look upon a fellow so shorn of faith as was Orson Vane. As for Vane—

Vane brought his hand upon the table so that the glasses rocked.

"Oh," he exclaimed, "if one could only be sure! If one could see past the mask! What would I not give to believe in beauty when I see it, to trust to appearances! Oh, for the ability to put myself in the place of another, to know life from another plane than my own, to—"

But here he was interrupted.

CHAPTER III.

"The secret you are seeking," said the man who had put his hand on Orson Vane's shoulder, "is mine."

Vane's eyes widened slightly, roving the stranger up and down. He was a man of six feet in height, of striking, white-haired beauty, of the type made familiar to us by pictures of the Old Guard under Napoleon. Here was still the Imperial under the strong chin, the white mustache over the shapely lips; the high, clear forehead; the long, thin hands, where veins showed blue, and the nails were rosy. The head was bowed forward of the shoulders; the man, now old, had once been inches taller. You looked, on the spur of first noting him, for the sword and the epaulets, or, at least, for the ribbon of an order. But his clothes were quite plain, nor had his voice any touch of the military.

"I overheard a part of your conversation," the stranger went on, "not intentionally, yet unavoidably. I had either to move or to listen. And you see the place is so full that moving was out of the question. Did you mean what you were saying?"

"About the—"

"The Chinese wall," said the stranger.

"Every word of it," said Vane.

"If the chance to penetrate another's soul came to you, would you take it?"

"At once."

Moncreith laughed aloud. "Where are we?" he said, "in Aladdin's cave? What rubbish!" And he shook himself, as if to disturb a bad dream. He was on the point of reaching for his hat, when he saw the face of the girl in the mirror once more; the sight of it stayed him. He smiled to himself, and waited for the curious conversation between Vane and the stranger to continue.

"My name," the stranger was observing, taking a card from an etui, "may possibly be known to you?"

Vane bent his head to the table, read, and looked at the white-haired man with a quick access of interest.

"I am honored," he said. "My name is Orson Vane."

"Oh," said the other, "I knew that. I do not study the human interest in mere theory; I delight in the tangible. That is why I presume upon you"—he waved his hand gracefully—"thus."

"You must join us," said Vane; "there is plenty of room at this table."

"No; I must—if your friend will pardon me—see you alone. Will you come to my place?"

He spoke as youthfully as if he were of Vane's own age.

Vane considered a second or so, and then sprang to his feet.

"Yes," he said, "I will come. Good-night, Luke. Stay on; enjoy yourself. Shall I see you to-morrow? Good-night!"

They went out together, the young man and the one with the white hair. One glance into the mirror flashed from Orson's eyes as he turned to go; it brought him a memory of a burnished halo on a fragile, rosy, beauty. He sighed to himself, wishing he could reach the truth behind the robe of beauty, and, with that sigh, turned with a sort of fierceness upon his companion.

"Well," said Vane, "well?"

They were passing through a most motley thoroughfare. Barrel-organs dotted the asphalt; Italian and Sicilian poverty elbowed the poverty of Russian and Polish Jews. The shops bore signs in Italian, Hebrew, French—in anything but English. The Elevated roared above the music and the chatter; the cool gloom of lower Broadway seemed far away.

"Patience," said the old man, "patience, Mr. Vane. Look about you! How much of the heart of this humanity that reeks all about us do we know? Think,—think of your Chinese wall! Oh—how strange, how very strange that I should have come upon you to-night, when, in despair of ever finding my man, I had gone for distraction to a place where, I thought, philosophy nor science were but little welcome."

"My dear Professor," urged Vane finally, when they were come to a stiller region, where many churches, some parks and ivy-sheltered houses gave an air of age and sobriety and history, "I have no more patience left. Did I not know your name for what it is I would not have followed you. Even now I hardly know whether your name and your title suffice. If it is an adventure, very well. But I have no more patience for mysteries."

"Not even when you are about to penetrate the greatest mystery of all? Oh, youth, youth! Well, we have still a little distance to go. I shall employ it to impress upon you that I, Professor Vanlief, am not over-fond of the title of Professor. It has, here in America, a taint of the charlatan. But it came to me, this title, in a place where only honors were implied. I was, indeed, a fellow student with many of whom the world has since heard; Bismarck was one of them. I have eaten smoked goose with him in Pommern. You see, I am very old, very old. I have spent my life solving a riddle. It is the same riddle that has balked you, my young friend. But I have striven for the solution; you have merely wailed against the riddle's existence."

Vane felt a flush of shame.

"True," he murmured, "true. I never went further into any art, any science, than to find its shortcomings."

"Yet even that," resumed the Professor, "is something. You are, at any rate, the only man for my purpose."

"Your purpose?"

"Yes. It is the same as yours. You are to be the instrument; I furnish the power. You are to be able to feel, to think, as others do."

"Oh!" muttered Vane, "impossible." Now that his wish was called possible of fulfilment, he shrank a little from it. He followed the Professor up a long flight of curving steps, through dim halls, to where a bluish light flickered. As they passed this feeble glow it flared suddenly into a brilliant jet of flame; a door swung open, revealing a somewhat bare chamber fitted up partly as a study, partly as a laboratory. The door closed behind them silently.

"Mere trickery," said the Professor, "the sort of thing that the knaves of science fool the world with. Will you sit down? Here is where I have worked for—for more years than you have lived, Mr. Vane. Here is where I have succeeded. In pursuit of this success I have spent my life and nearly all the fortune that my family made in generations gone. I have this house, and my daughter, and my science. The world spins madly all about me, in this splendid town; here, in this stillness, I have worked to make that world richer than I found it. Will you help me?"

Vane had flung himself upon a wicker couch. He watched his host striding up and down the room with a fervor that had nothing of senility in it. The look of earnestness upon that fine old face was magnetic. Vane's mistrust vanished at sight of it.

"If you will trust me," he answered. He saw himself as the beneficiary, his host as the giver of a great gift.

"I trust you. I heard enough, to-night, to believe you sincere in wishing to see life from another soul than your own. But you must promise to obey my instructions to the letter."

"I promise."

A sense of farce caught Vane. "And now," he said, "what is it? A powder I must swallow, or a trance you pass me into, or what?"

The professor shook his head gravely. "It is none of those things. It is much simpler. I should not wonder but that the ancients knew it. But human life is so much more complex now; the experiences you will gain will be larger than they could ever have been in other ages. Do you realize what I am about to give you? The power to take upon you the soul of another, just as an actor puts on the outer mask of another! And I ask for no reward. Simply the joy of seeing my process active; and afterwards, perhaps, to give my secret to the world. But you are to enjoy it alone, first. Of course—there may be risks. Do you take them?"

"I do," said Vane.

He could hear the whistling of steamers out in the harbor, and the noise of the great town came to him faintly. All that seemed strangely remote. His whole intelligence was centered upon his host, upon the sparsely furnished room, and the secret whose solution he thought himself approaching. He was, for almost the first time in his life, intense in the mere act of existence; he was conscious of no imitation of others; his analysis of self was sunk in an eagerness, a tenseness of purposeness hitherto unfelt.

The professor went to a far, dark corner of the room, and rolled thence a tall, sheeted thing that might have been a painting, or an easel. He held it tenderly; his least motion with it revealed solicitude. When it was immediately in front of where Vane reclined, Vanlief loosed his hold of the thing, and began pacing up and down the room.

"The question of mirrors," he began, after what seemed to Vane an age, "has never, I suppose, interested you."

"On the contrary," said Vane, "I have had Italy searched for the finest of its cheval-glasses. In my dressing-room are several that would give even a man of your fine height, sir, a complete reflection of every detail, from a shoe-lace to an eyebrow. It is not altogether vanity; but I never could do justice to my toilette before a mirror that showed me only a shoulder, or a waist, or a foot, at a time; I want the full-length portrait or nothing. I like to see myself as others will see me; not in piece-meal. The Florentines made lovely mirrors."

"They did." Vanlief smiled sweetly. "Yet I have made a better." He paced the floor again, and then resumed speech. "I am glad you like tall mirrors. You will have learned how careful one must be of them. One more or less in your dressing-room will not matter, eh?"

"I have an excellent man," said Vane. "There has not been a broken mirror in my house for years. He looks after them as if they were his own."

"Ah, better and better."

Vane interrupted the Professor's silence with, "It is a mirror, then?"

"Yes," said Vanlief, nodding at the sheeted mirror, "it is a mirror. Have you ever thought of the wonderfulness of mirrors? What wonder, and yet what simplicity! To think that I—I, a simple, plodding old man of science—should be the only one to have come upon the magic of a mirror!" His talk took the note of monologue. He was pacing, pacing, pacing; smiling at Vane now and then, and fingering the covered mirror with loving touch as he passed near it. "Have you ever, as a child, looked into a mirror in the twilight, and seen there another face beside your own? Have you never thought that to the mirror were revealed more things than the human eye can note? Have you heard of the old, old folk-superstitions; of the bride that may not see herself in a mirror without tragedy touching her; of the Warwickshire mirror that must be covered in a house of death, lest the corpse be seen in it; of the future that some magic mirrors could reveal? Fanciful tales, all of them; yet they have their germ of truth, and for my present discovery I owe them something." He drew the sheet from the mirror, and revealed another veil of gauze resting upon the glass, as, in some houses, the most prized pictures are sometimes doubly covered. "You see; it is just a mirror, a full-length mirror. But, oh, my dear Vane, the wonderfulness of this mirror! I have only to look into this mirror; to veil it; and then, when next you glance into it, if it be within the hour, my soul, my spirit, my very self, passes from the face of the mirror to you! That is the whole secret, or at least, the manifestation of it! Do you wish to be the President, to think his thoughts, feel as he feels, dream as he dreams? He has only to look into this mirror, and you have only to take from it, as one plucks a lily from the pool, the spiritual image he has left there! Think of it, Vane, think of it! Is this not seeing life? Is this not riddling the secret of existence? To reach the innermost depths of another's spirit; to put on his soul, as others can put on your clothes, if you left them on a chair,—is this not a stupendous thing?" In his fever and fervor the professor had exhausted his strength; he flung himself into a chair. Vane saw the old man's eyes glowing and his chest throbbing with passion; he hardly knew whether the whole scene was real or a something imposed upon his senses by a species of hypnotism. He passed his hand before his forehead; he shook his head. Yet nothing changed. Vanlief, in the chair, still quaking with excitement; the mirror, veiled and immobile.

For a time the room stood silent, save for Vanlief's heavy breathing.

"Of course," he resumed presently, in a quieter tone, "you cannot be expected to believe, until you have tried. But trial is the easiest thing in the world. I can teach you the mere externals to be observed in five minutes. One trial will convince you. After that,—my dear Vane, you have the gamut of humanity to go. You can be another man every day. No secret of any human heart will be a secret to you. All wisdom can be gained by you; all knowledge, all thought, can be yours. Oh, Orson Vane, I wonder if you realize your fortune! Or—is it possible that you withdraw?"

Vane got up resolutely.

"No," he said, "I have faith—at last. I am with you, heart and soul. Life seems splendid to me, for the first time. When can I have the mirror taken to my house?"

CHAPTER IV.

Vane's dressing-room was a tasteful chamber, cool and light. Its walls, its furniture, and its hangings told of a wide range of interest. There was nowhere any obvious bias; the æsthetic was no more insistent than the sporting. Orson Vane loved red-haired women as Henner painted them, and he played the aristocratic waltzes of Chopin; but he also valued the cruel breaking-bit that he had brought home from Texas, and read the racing-column in the newspaper quite as carefully as he did the doings of his society. Some hint of this diversity of tastes showed in this, the most intimate room of his early mornings. There were some of those ruddy British prints that are now almost depressingly conventional with men of sporting habits; signed photographs of more or less prominent and personable personages were scattered pell-mell. All the chairs and lounges were of wicker; so much so that some of the men who hobnobbed with Vane declared that a visit to his dressing-room was as good as a yachting cruise.

The morning was no longer young. On the avenue the advance guard of the fashionable assault upon the shopping district was already astir. The languorous heat that reflects from the town's asphalt was gaining in power momentarily.

Orson Vane, fresh from a chilling, invigorating bath, a Japanese robe of exquisite coolness his only covering, sat regarding an addition to his furniture. It had come while he slept. It was proof that the adventure of the night had not been a mere figment of his dreams.

He touched a bell. To the man who answered the call, he said:

"Nevins, I have bought a new mirror. You are to observe a few simple rules in regard to this mirror. In the first place, to avoid confusion, it is always to be called the New Mirror. Is that plain?

"Quite so, sir."

"I may have orders to give about it, or notes to send, or things of that sort, and I want no mistakes made. In the next place, the cord that uncovers the mirror is never to be pulled, never to be touched, save at my express order. Not—under any circumstances. I do not wish the mirror used. Have you any curiosity left, Nevins?

"None, sir."

"So much the better. In Lord Keswick's time, I think, you still had a touch of that vice, curiosity. Your meddling got you into something of a scrape. Do you remember?"

"Oh, sir," said the man, with a little gesture of shame and pain, "you didn't need reminding me. Have I ever forgotten your saving me from that foolishness?"

"You're right, Nevins; I think I can trust you. But this is a greater trust than any of the others. A great deal depends; mark that; a very great deal. It is not an ordinary mirror, this one; not one of the others compares with it; it is the gem of my collection. Not a breath is to touch it, save as I command."

"I'll see to it, sir."

"Any callers, Nevins?"

"Mr. Moncreith, sir, looked in, but left no word. And the postman."

"No duns, Nevins?"

"Not in person, sir."

"Dear me! Is my position on the wane? When a man is no longer dunned his credit is either too good or too bad; or else his social position is declining." He picked up the tray with the letters, ran his eye over them quickly, and said, "Thank the stars; they still dun me by post. There should be a law against it; yet it is as sweet to one's vanity as an angry letter from a woman. Nevins, is the day dull or garish?"

"It's what I should call bright, sir."

"Then you may lay out some gloomy clothes for me. I would not add to the heat wittingly. And, Nevins!"

"Yes sir."

"If anyone calls before I breakfast, unless it happens to be Professor Vanlief,—Vanlief, Nevins, of the Vanliefs of New Amsterdam—say I am indisposed."

He dressed himself leisurely, thinking of the wonderful adventures into living that lay before him. He rehearsed the simple instructions that Vanlief had given him the night before. It was all utterly simple. As one looked into the mirror, the spirit of that one lay on the surface, waiting for the next person that glanced that way. There followed a complete exodus of the spirit from the one body into the other. The recipient was himself plus the soul of the other. The exodus left that other in a state something like physical collapse. There would be, for the recipient of the new personality, a sense of double consciousness; the mind would be like a palimpsest, the one will and the one habit imposed upon the other. The fact that the person whose spirit passed from him upon the magic mirror was left more or less a wreck was cause for using the experiment charily, as the Professor took pains to warn Orson. There was a certain risk. The mirror might be broken; one could never tell. It would be better to pick one's subjects wisely, always with a definite purpose. This man might be used to teach that side of life; that man another. It was not a thing to toy with. It was to be played with as little as human life itself. Vivisection was a pastime to this; this implicated the spirit, the other only the body.

Consideration of the new avenues opening for his intelligence had already begun to alter Vane's outlook on life. Persons who remarked him, a little later, strolling the avenue, wondered at the brilliance of his look. He seemed suddenly sprayed with a new youth, a new enthusiasm. It was not, as some of his conversations of that morning proved, an utter lapse into optimism on his part; but it was an exchange of the mere passive side of pessimism for its healthier, more buoyant side. He was able to smile to himself as he met the various human marionettes of the avenue; the persons whose names you would be sure to read every Sunday in the society columns, and who seemed, consequently, out of place in any more aristocratic air. He bowed to the newest beauty, he waved a hand to the most perennial of the faded beaux. The vociferous attire of the actors, who idled conspicuously before the shop-windows, caused him inward shouts of laughter; a day or so ago the same sight would have embittered his hour for him.

At Twenty-third street something possessed him to patronize one of the Sicilian flower-sellers. The man had, happily, not importuned him; he merely held his wares, and waited, mutely. Orson put a sprig of lily-of-the-valley into his coat.

Before he left his rooms he had spent an hour or so writing curt notes to the smartest addresses in town. All his invitations were declined by him; a trip to Cairo, he had written, would keep him from town for some time. He took this ruse because he felt that the complications of his coming experiment might be awkward; it was as well to pave the way. Certainly he could not hope to fulfil his social obligations in the time to come. An impression that he was abroad was the best way out of the dilemma. The riddance from fashionable duties added to his gaiety; he felt like a school-boy on holiday.

It was in this mood that he saw, on the other side of the avenue, a figure that sent a flush to his skin. There was no mistaking that wonderful hair; in the bright morning it shone with a glow a trifle less garish than under the electric light, but it was the same, the same. To make assurance surer, there, just under the hat—a hat that no mere male could have expressed in phrases, a thing of gauze and shimmer—lay a spray of lilies-of-the-valley. The gown—Vane knew at a glance that it was a beautiful gown and a happy one, though as different as possible from the filmy thing she had worn when first he saw her, in the mirror, at night.

At first unconsciously, and then with quite brazen intent, he found himself keeping pace, on his side of the street, with the girl opposite. He knew not what emotion possessed him; no hint of anything despicable came to him; he had forgotten himself utterly, and he was merely following some sweet, blind impulse. Orson Vane was a man who had tasted the froth and dregs of his town no less thoroughly than other men; there were few sensations, few emotions, he had not tried. Almost the only sort of woman he did not know was The woman. In the year of his majority he had made a summer of it on the Sound in his steam yacht, and his enemies declared that all the harbors he had anchored in were left empty of both champagne and virtue. Yet not even his bitterest enemy had ever accused him of anything vulgar, brazen, coarse, conspicuous.

Luke Moncreith was a friend of Vane's, there was no reason for doubting that. But even he experienced a little shock when he met Vane, was unseen of him, and was then conscious, in a quick turn of the head, that Vane's eyes, his entire vitality, were upon a woman's figure across the avenue.

"The population of the Bowery, of Forty-second street, and of the Tenderloin," said Moncreith to himself, "have a name for that sort of thing." He clicked his tongue upon his teeth once or twice. "Poor Orson! Is it the beginning of the end? Last night he seemed a little mad. Poor Orson!" Then, with furtive shame at his bad manners, he turned about and watched the two. Even at that distance the sunlight glowed like a caress upon the hair of her whom Orson followed. "The girl," exclaimed Moncreith, "the girl of the mirror." He came to a halt before a photographer's window, the angle of which gave him a view of several blocks behind.

Orson Vane, in the meanwhile, was as if there was but one thing in life for him: a meeting with this radiant creature with the lilies. Once he thought he caught a sidelong glance of hers; a little smile even hovered an instant upon her lips; yet, at that distance, he could not be sure. None of the horrible things occurred to him as possibilities; that she might be an adventuress, or a mere masquerading shop-girl, or an adroit soubrette. No tangible intention came to the young man; he had not made it clear to himself whether he would keep on, and on, and on, until she came to her own door; whether he would accost her; whether he would leave all to chance; or whether he would fashion circumstances to his end.

The girl turned into a little bookshop that, as it happened, was one of Vane's familiar haunts. It was a place where one could always find the new French and German things, and where the shopman was not a mere instrument for selling whatever rubbish publishers chose to shoot at the public. When Vane entered he found this shopman, who nodded smilingly at him, busy with a bearded German. The girl stood at a little table, passing her slim fingers lovingly over the titles of the books that lay there. It was evident that she had no wish for advice from the assistant who hovered in the background. She did not so much as glance at him. Her eyes were all for her friends in print. She did look up, the veriest trifle, it is true, when Orson came in; it was so swift, so shy a look that he, in a mist of emotions, could not have sworn to it. As for him, a boyish boldness took him to the other side of the table at which she stood; he bent over the books, and his hands almost touched her fingers. In that little, quiet nook, he became, all of a moment, once more a youth of twenty; he felt the first shy stirrings of tenderness, of worship. The names of the volumes swam for him in a mere haze. He saw nothing save only the little figure before him, the shimmer of rose upon her face passing into the ruddier shimmer of her hair; the perfume of her lilies and some yet subtler scent, redolent of fairest linen, most fragile laces and the utterest purity, came over him like a glow.

And then the marvel, the miracle of her voice!

"Oh, Mr. Vane," he heard her saying, "do help me!" Their eyes met and he was conscious of a bewildering beauty in hers; it was with quite an effort that he did not, then and there, do something absurd and stupid. His hesitation, his astonishment, cost him a second or so; before he caught his composure again, she was explaining, sweetly, plaintively, "Help me to make up my mind. About a book."

"Why did you add that?" he asked, his wits sharp now, and his voice still a little unsteady. "There are so many other things I would like to help you in. A book? What sort of a book? One of those stories where the men are all eight feet high, and wear medals, and the women are all models for Gibson? Or one of those aristocratic things where nobody is less than a prince, except the inevitable American, who is a newspaper man and an abomination? Or is it, by any chance," he paused, and dropped his voice, as if he were approaching a dreadful disclosure, "poetry?"

She shook her head. The lilies in her hair nodded, and her smile came up like a radiance in that dark little corner. And, oh, the music in her laugh! It blew ennui away as effectually as a storm whirls away a leaf.

"No," she said, "it is none of those things. I told you I had not made up my mind."

"It is a thing you should never attempt. Making up the mind is a temptation only the bravest of us can resist. One should always delegate the task to someone else."

The girl frowned gently. "If it is the fashion to talk like that," she said, "I do not want to be in the fashion."

He took the rebuke with a laugh. "It is hard," he pleaded, "to keep out of the fashion. Everything we do is a fashion of one sort or another." He glanced at her wonderful hat, at the gown that held her so closely, so tenderly. "I am sure you are in the fashion," he said.

"If Mr. Orson Vane tells me so, I must believe it," she answered. "But I wear only what suits me; if the fashion does not suit me, I avoid the fashion."

"But you cannot avoid beauty," he urged, "and to be fair is always the fashion."

She turned her eyes to him full of reproach. They said, as plainly as anything, "How crude! How stupidly obvious!" As if she had really spoken, he went on, in plain embarassment:

"I beg your pardon. I—I am very silly this morning. Something has gone to my head. I really don't think I'd better advise you about anything to read. I—"

"Oh," she interrupted, already full of forgiveness, since it was not in her nature to be cruel for more than a moment at a time, "but you must. I am really desperate. All I ask is that you do not urge a fashionable book, a book of the day, or a book that should be in the library of every lady. I am afraid of those books. They are like the bores one turns a corner to avoid."

"You make advice harder and harder. Is it possible you really want a book to read, rather than to talk about?"

"I really do," she admitted, "I told you I had no thought about the fashion."

"You are like a figure from the Middle Ages," he said, "with your notion about books."

"Am I so very wrinkled?" she asked. She put her hand to her veil, with a gesture of solicitous inquiry. "To be young," she sighed, with a pout, "and yet to seem old. I am quite a tragedy."

"A goddess," he murmured, "but not of tragedy." He laughed sharply, and took a book from the table, using it to keep his eyes from the witchery of her as he continued: "Don't you see why I'm talking such nonsense? If it meant prolonging the glimpse of you, there's no end, simply no end, to the rubbish I could talk!"

"And no beginning," she put in, "to your sincerity."

"Oh, I don't know. One still has fits and starts of it! There's no telling what might not be done; it might come back to one, like childishness in old age." He put down the book, and looked at her in something like appeal. "There is such a thing as a sincerity one is ashamed of, that one hides, and disguises, and that the world refuses to see. The world? The world always means an individual. In this case the world is—"

"The world is yours, like Monte Cristo," she interposed, "how embarassed you must feel. The responsibility must be enervating! I have always thought the clever thing for Monte Cristo to have done was to lose the world; to hide it where nobody could find it again." She tapped her boot with her parasol, charmingly impatient. "I suppose," she sighed, "I shall have to ask that stupid clerk for a book, after all. He looks as if he would far rather sell them by weight."

"No, no, I couldn't allow that. Consider me all eagerness to aid you. Is it to be love, or ghosts, or laughter?"

"Love and laughter go well together," she said. "I want a book I can love and laugh with, not at."

"I know," he nodded. "The tear that makes the smile come after. You want something charming, something sweet, something that will taste pleasantly no matter how often you read it. A trifle, and yet—a treasure. Such a book as, I dare say, every writer dreams of doing once in his life; the sort of book that should be bound in rose-leaves. And you expect me to betray a treasure like that to you? And my reward? But no, I beg your pardon; I have my reward now, and here, and the debt is still mine. I can merely put you in the way of a printed page; while you—" He stopped, roving for the right word. His eyes spoke what his voice could not find. He finished, lamely, and yet aptly enough, "You—are you."

"I don't believe," she declared, with the most arch elevation of the darkest eyebrows, "that you know one book from another. You are an impostor. You are sparring for time. I have given you too much time as it is. I am going." She picked up her skirts with one slim hand, turned on a tiny heel, and looked over her shoulder with an air, a mischievousness, that made Orson ache, yes, simply ache with curiosity about her. He put out a hand in expostulation.

"Please," he pleaded, "please don't go. I have found the book. I really have. But you must take my word for it. You mustn't open it till you are at home." He handed it to the clerk to be wrapped up. "And now," he went on, "won't you tell me something? I—upon my honor, I can't think where we met?"

"One hardly expects Mr. Orson Vane to remember all the young women in society," she smiled. "Besides, if I must confess: I am only just what society calls 'out.' I have seen Mr. Orson Vane: but he has not seen me. Mr. Vane is a leader; I am—" She shrugged her shoulder, raised her eyebrows, pursed up her mouth, oh, to a complete gesture that was the prettiest, most bewildering finish to any sentence ever uttered.

"Oh," said Orson, "but you are mistaken. I have seen you. No longer ago than last night. In—"

"In a mirror," she laughed. Then she grew suddenly quite solemn. "Oh, you mustn't think I didn't know who you were. It was all very rash of me, and very improper, my speaking to you, just now, but—"

"It was very sweet," he interposed.

"But," she went on, not heeding his remark at all, "I knew you so well by sight, and I had really been introduced to you once,—one of a bevy of debutantes, merely an item in a chorus—and, besides, my father—"

"Your father?" repeated Orson, jogging his memory, "you don't mean to say—"

"My father is Augustus Vanlief," she said.

He took a little time to digest the news. The clerk handed him the book and the change. He saw, now, whence that charm, that grace, that beauty came; he recalled that the late Mrs. Vanlief had been one of the Waddells; there was no better blood in the country. With the name, too, there came the thought of the wonderful revelations that were presently to come to him, thanks to this girl's father. A sort of dizziness touched him: he felt a quick conflict between the wish to worship this girl, and the wish to probe deeper into life. It was with a very real effort that he brushed the charm of her from him, and relapsed, again, into the man who meant to know more of human life than had ever been known before.

He took out a silver pencil and held it poised above the book.

"This book," he said, "is for you, you know, not for your father. Your father and I are to be great friends but—I want to be friends, also, with—" he looked a smiling appeal, "with—whom?"

"With Miss Vanlief," she replied, mockingly. "My other name? I hate it; really I do. Perhaps my father will tell you."

She had given him the tip of her fingers, her gown had swung perfume as it followed her, and she was out and away before he could do more than give her the book, bow her good-bye, and stand in amaze at her impetuousness, her verve. The thought smote him that, on the night before, he had seen her, in the mirror, and spurned the notion of her being other than a sham, a mockery. How did he know, even now, that she was other than that? Yet, what had happened to him that he had been able so long to stay under her charm, to believe in her, to wish for her, to feel that she was hardly mortal, but some strange, sweet, splendid dream? Was he the same man who, only a few hours ago, had held himself shorn of all the primal emotions? He beat these questionings back and forth in his mind; now doubting himself, now doubting this girl. Surely she had not, in that dining-room, been sitting with her father? Would he not have seen them together? Perhaps she was with some of her family's womenfolk? Yes; now he remembered; she had been at a table with several other ladies, all elderly. He wished he knew the name one might call her, if ... if....

Luke Moncreith came into the shop. Orson caught a shadow of a frown on the other's face. Moncreith's voice was sharp and bitter when he spoke.

"Been buying the shop?" he asked.

"No," said Orson, in some wonder. "Only one book."

"Hope you'll like it," said the other, with a manner that meant the very opposite.

"I? Oh, I read it ages ago. It was for somebody else. You seem very curious about it?"

"I am. You aren't usually the man to dawdle in bookshops."

"Dawdle?" Orson turned on the other sharply. "What the deuce do you mean? Are you my keeper, or what? If I choose to, I can live in this shop, can't I?"

"Oh, Lord, yes! Looks odd, just the same, you trailing in here after a petticoat, and hanging around for—" he pulled out his watch,—"for a good half hour."

Orson burst out in a sort of clenched breath of rage. He kept the phrases down with difficulty. "Better choose your words," he said. "I don't like your words, and your watch be damned. Since when have my—my friends taken to timing my actions? It's a blessing I'm going abroad."

He turned and walked out of the shop, fiercely, swiftly. As the fresh air struck his face, he put his hand to it, and shook his head, wonderingly. "What's the matter with Moncreith? With me?" He thought of the title of the book he had just given away. "Are we all as mad as that?" he asked himself.

The title was "March Hares."

CHAPTER V.

A young man so prominent in the town as Orson Vane had naturally a very large list of acquaintances. He knew, in the fashionable phrase, "everybody," and "everybody" knew him. His acquaintances ranged beyond the world of fashion; the theatre, the turf, and many other regions had denizens who knew Orson Vane and held him in esteem. He had always lived a careful, well-mannered life; his name had never been in the newspapers save in the inescapable columns touching society.

When he was ready to proceed with the experiment of the mirror, the largeness of his social register was at once a pleasure and a pain. There were so many, so many! It was evident that he must use the types most promising in eccentricity; he must adventure forth in company with the strangest souls, not the mere ordinary ones.

Sitting in the twilight of his rooms one day, it occurred to him that he was now ripe for his first decision. Whose soul should he seize? That was the question. He had spent a week or so perfecting plans, stalling off awkward episodes, schooling his servants. There was no telling what might not happen.

He picked up a newspaper. A name caught his eye; he gave a little laugh.

"The very man!" he told himself, "the very man. Society's court fool; it will be worth something to know what lies under his cap and bells."

He scrawled a note, enclosed it, and rang for Nevins.

"Have that taken, at once, to Mr. Reginald Hart. And then, presently, have a hansom called and let it wait nearby."

"Reggie will be sure to come," he said, when alone. "I've told him there was a pretty woman here."

He felt a nervous restlessness. He paced his room, fingering the frames of his prints, trying the cord of his new mirror, adjusting the blinds of the windows. He tingled with mental and physical expectation. He wondered whether nothing, after all, would be the result. How insane it was to expect any such thing to happen as Vanlief had vapored of! This was the twentieth century rather than the tenth; miracles never happened. Yet how fervently he wished for one! To feel the soul of another superimposing itself upon his own; to know that he had committed the grandest larceny under heaven, the theft of a soul, and to gain, thereby, complete insight into the spiritual machinery of another mortal!

Nevins returned, within a little time, bringing word that Mr. Hart had been found at home, and would call directly.

Vane pushed the new mirror to a position where it would face the door. He told Nevins not to enter the room after Mr. Hart; to let him enter, and let the curtain fall behind him.

He took up a position by a window and waited. The minutes seemed heavy as lead. The air was unnaturally still.

At last he heard Nevins, in gentle monosyllables. Another voice, high almost to falsetto, clashed against the stillness.

Then the curtain swung back.

Reginald Hart, whom all the smart world never called other than Reggie Hart, stood for a moment in the curtain-way, the mirror barring his path. He caught his image there to the full, the effeminate, full face, the narrow-waisted coat, the unpleasantly womanish hips. He put out his right hand, as if groping in the dark. Then he said, shrilly, stammeringly.

"Vane! Oh, Vane, where the de—"

He sank almost to his knees. Vane stepping forward, caught him by the shoulder and put him into an arm-chair. Hart sat there, his head hunched between his shoulders.

"Silly thing to do, Vane, old chappy. Beastly sorry for this—stunt of mine. Too many tea-parties lately, Vane, too much dancing, too much—" his voice went off into a sigh. "Better get a cab," he said, limply.

He had quite forgotten why he had come: he was simply in collapse, mentally and physically. Vane, trembling with excitement and delight, walked up to the mirror from behind and sent the veil upon its face again. Then he had Nevins summon the cab. He watched Hart tottering out, upon Nevins' shoulder, with a dry, forced smile.

So it was real! He could hardly believe it. In seconds, in the merest flash, his visitor had faded like a flower whose root is plucked. The man had come in, full of vitality, quite, in fact, himself; he had gone out a mere husk, a shell.

But there was still the climax ahead. Had he courage for it, now that it loomed imminent? Should he send for Hart and have him pick up his soul where he had dropped it? Or should he, stern in his first purpose, fit that soul upon his own, as one fits a glove upon the hand? There was yet time. It depended only upon whether Hart or himself faced the mirror when the veil was off.

He cut his knot of indecision sharply, with a stride to the mirror, a jerk at the cord and a steady gaze into the clear pool of light, darkened only by his own reflection.

Strain his eyes as he would, he could feel no change, not the faintest stir of added emotion. He let the curtain drop upon the mirror listlessly.

Walking to his window-seat again, he was suddenly struck by his image in one of the other glasses. He was really very well shaped; he felt a wish to strip to the buff; it was rather a shame to clothe limbs as fine as those. He was quite sure there were friends of his who would appreciate photographs of himself, in some picturesque costume that would hide as little as possible. It was an age since he had any pictures taken. He called for Nevins. His voice struck Nevins as having a taint of tenor in it.

"Nevins," he said, "have the photographer call to-morrow, like a good man, won't you? You know, the chap, I forget his name, who does all the smart young women. I'll be glad to do the fellow a service; do him no end of good to have his name on pictures of me. I'm thinking of something a bit startling for the Cutter's costume ball, Nevins, so have the man from Madame Boyer's come for instructions. And see if you can find me some perfume at the chemist's; something heavy, Nevins. The perfumes at once, that's a dear man. I want them in my pillows tonight."

When the man was gone, his master went to the sideboard, opened it, and gave a gentle sigh of disappointment.

"Careless of me," he murmured, "to have no Red Ribbon in the place. How can any gentleman afford to be without it? Dear, dear, if any of the girls and boys had caught me without it. Another thing I must tell Nevins. Nothing but whisky! Abominably vulgar stuff! Can't think, really, 'pon honor I can't, how I ever came to lay any of it in. And no cigarettes in the place. Goodness me! What sweet cigarettes those are Mrs. Barrett Weston always has! Wonder if that woman will ask me to her cottage this summer."

He strolled to the window, yawned, stretched out his arms, drawing his hands towards him at the end of his gesture. He inspected the fingers minutely. They needed manicuring. He began to put down a little list of things to be done. He strolled over to the tabouret where invitations lay scattered all about. That dear Mrs. Sclatersby was giving a studio-dance; she was depending on him for a novel feature. Perhaps if he did a little skirt-dance. Yes; the notion pleased him. He would sit down, at once, and write a hint to a newspaper man who would be sure to make a sensation of this skirt-dance.

That done, he heard Nevins knocking.

"Oh," he murmured, "the perfumes. So sweet!" He buried his nose in a handful of the sachet-bags. He sprayed some Maria Farina on his forehead. Perfumes, he considered, were worth worship just as much as jewels or music. The more sinful a perfume seemed, the more stimulating it was to the imagination. Some perfumes were like drawings by Beardsley.

He looked at the walls. He really must get some Beardsleys put up. There was nothing like a Beardsley for jogging a sluggish fancy; if you wanted to see everything that milliners and dressmakers existed by hiding, all you had to do was to sup sufficiently on Beardsley. He thought of inventing a Beardsley cocktail; if he could find a mixture that would make the brain quite pagan, he would certainly give it that name.

His mind roved to the feud between the Montagues and Capulets of the town. It was one of those modern feuds, made up of little social frictions, infinitesimal jealousies, magnified by a malicious press into a national calamity. It was a feud, he told himself, that he would have to mend. It would mean, for him, the lustre from both houses. And there was nothing, in the smart world, like plenty of lustre. There were several sorts of lustre: that of money, of birth, and of public honors. Personally, he cared little for the origin of his lustre; so it put him in the very forefront of smartness he asked for nothing more. Of course, his own position was quite impeccable. The smart world might narrow year by year; the Newport set, and the Millionaire set, and the Knickerbocker set—they might all dwindle to one small world of smartness; yet nothing that could happen could keep out an Orson Vane. The name struck him, as it shaped itself in his mind, a trifle odd. An Orson Vane? Yes, of course, of course. For that matter, who had presumed to doubt the position of a Vane? He asked himself that, with a sort of defiance. An Orson Vane, an Orson Vane? He repeated the syllables over and over, in a whisper at first, and then aloud, until the shrillness of his tone gave him a positive start.

He rang the bell for Nevins.

"Nevins," he said, and something in him fought against his speech, "tell me, that's a good man,—is there anything, anything wrong with—me?"

"Nothing sir," said Nevins stolidly.

Orson Vane gave a sort of gasp as the man withdrew. It had come to him suddenly; the under-self was struggling beneath the borrowed self. He was Orson Vane, but he was also another.

Who? What other?

He gave a little shrill laugh as he remembered. Reggie Hart,—that was it,—Reggie Hart.

He sat down to undress for sleep. He slipped into bed as daintily as a woman, nestling to the perfumed pillows.

Nevins, in his part of the house, sat shaking his head. "If he hadn't given me warning," he told himself, "I'd have sent for a doctor."

CHAPTER VI.

The smart world received the change in Orson Vane with no immediate wonder. Wonder is, at the outset, a vulgarity; to let nothing astonish you is part of a smart education. A good many of the smartest hostesses in town were glad that Vane had emerged from his erstwhile air of aristocratic aloofness; he took, with them, the place that Reggie Hart's continuing illness left vacant.

In the regions where Vane had been actually intimate whispers began to go about, it is true, and it was with no little difficulty that an occasional story about him was kept out of the gossipy pages of the papers. Vane was constantly busy seeking notoriety. His attentions to several of the younger matrons were conspicuous. Yet he was so much of a stimulating force, in a society where passivity was the rule, that he was welcome everywhere.

He had become the court fool of the smart set.

To him, the position held nothing degrading. It was, he argued, a reflection on smart society, rather on himself, that, to be prominent in it, one must needs wear cap and bells. Moreover his position allowed him, now and then, the utterance of grim truths that would not have been listened to from anyone not wearing the jester's license.

At the now famous dinner given by Mrs. Sclatersby, Orson Vane seized a lull in the conversation, by remarking, in his ladylike lisp:

"My dear Mrs. Sclatersby, I have such a charming idea. I am thinking of syndicating myself."

Mrs. Sclatersby put up her lorgnettes and smiled encouragement at Orson. "It sounds Wall Streety," she said, "you're not going to desert us, are you?"

"Oh, nothing so dreadful. It would be an entirely smart syndicate, you know; a syndicate of which you would be a member. I sometimes think, you know, that I do not distribute myself to the best advantage. There have been little jealousies, now and then, have there not?" He looked, in a bird-like, perky way, at Mrs. Barrett Weston, and the only Mrs. Carlos. "I have been unable to be in two places at once. Now a syndicate—a syndicate could arrange things so that there would be no disappointments, no clashings of engagements, no waste of opportunity.

"How clever you always are," said a lady at Orson's right. She had chameleon hair, and her poise was that of a soubrette. The theatre was tremendously popular as a society model that season. Orson blew a kiss at her, and went on with his speech.

"Actors do it, you know. Painters have done it. Inventors do it. Why not I?" He paused to nibble an olive. "To contribute to the gaiety of our little world is, after all, the one thing worth while. Think how few picturesque people we have! Eccentricity is terribly lacking in the town. We have no Whistler; Mansfield is rather a dull imitation. Of course there is George Francis Train; but he is a trifle, a trifle too much of the larger world, don't you think?"

"I never saw the man in my life," asserted the hostess.

"Exactly," said Orson, "he makes himself too cheap. It keeps us from seeing him. But Whistler; think of Whistler, in New York! He would wear a French hat, fight duels every day, lampoon a critic every hour, and paint nocturnes on the Fifth avenue pavement! He would make Diana fall from the Tower in sheer envy. He would go through the Astoria with monocle and mockery, and smile blue peacock smiles at Mr. Blashfield and Mr. Simmons. He would etch himself upon the town. We would never let him go again. We need that sort of thing. Our ambitions and our patience are cosmopolitan; but we lack the public characters to properly give fire and color to our streets. Now I—"

He let his eyes wander about the room, a delicate smile of invitation on his lips.

"Don't you think," said one of the ladies, "that you are quite—quite bohemian enough?"

Orson shuddered obviously. "My dear lady," he urged, "it is a dreadful thing to be bohemian. It is no longer smart. If I am considered the one, I cannot possibly be the other. There is, to be sure, a polite imitation; but it is quite an art to imitate the thing with just sufficient indolence. But I really wish you would think the thing over, Mrs. Sclatersby. I know nobody who would do the thing better than I. Our men are mostly too fond of fashion, and too afraid of fancy. One must not be ashamed of being called foolish. Whistler uses butterflies; somebody else used sunflowers and green carnations; I should use—lilies, I think, lilies-of-the-valley. Emblematic of the pure folly of my pose, you know. One must do something like that, you see, to gain smart applause; impossible hats and improbable hair, except in the case of actresses, are quite extinct."

A Polish orchestra that had been hitherto unsuccessful against the shrill monologue of Orson, and the occasional laughter of the ladies, now sent out a sudden, fierce stream of melody. It was evident that they did not mean to take the insult of a large wage without offering some stormy moments in exchange. The diners assumed a patient air, eating in an abstracted manner, as if their stomachs were the only members of their bodies left unstunned by the music. The assemblage wore, in its furtive gluttony, an air of being in a plot of the most delicious danger. Some rather dowdy anecdotes went about in whispers, and several of the ladies made passionate efforts to blush. Orson Vane took a sip of some apricotine, explaining to his neighbor that he took it for the color; it was the color of verses by Verlaine. She had never heard of the man. Ah; then of course Mallarmé, and Symons and Francis Saltus were her gods? No; she said she liked Madame Louise; hers were by far the most fragile hats purchasable; what was the use of a hat if it was not fragile; to wear one twice was a crime, and to give one away unless it was decently crushed was an indiscretion. Orson quite agreed with her. To his other neighbor he confided that he was thinking of writing a book. It would be something entirely in the key of blue. He was busy explaining its future virtues, when an indiscreet lull came in the orchestral tornado.

"I mean to bring the pink of youth to the sallowest old age," he was saying, "and every page is to be as dangerous as a Bowery cocktail."

Then the storm howled forth again. Everyone talked to his or her neighbor at top voice. Now and then pauses in the music left fag ends of conversation struggling about the room.

"The decadents are simply the people who refuse to write twaddle for the magazines...."

"The way to make a name in the world is to own a soap factory and ape William Morris on the side...."

"I can always tell when it is Spring by looking at the haberdashers' windows. To watch shirts and ties blooming is so much nicer than flowers and those smelly things...."

"The pleasantest things in the world all begin with a P. Powders, patches and poses—what should we do without them?..."

This sort of thing came out at loose ends now and then. Suddenly the music ceased altogether. The diners all looked as if they had been caught in a crime. The lights went out in the room, and there were little smothered shrieks. After an interval, a rosy glow lit up the conservatory beyond the palms; a little stage showed in the distance. Some notorious people from the music-halls began to do songs and dances, and offer comic monologues. The diners fell into a sort of lethargy. They did not even notice that Orson Vane's chair was empty.

Vane was in a little boudoir lent him by the hostess. His nostrils dilated with the perfume of her that he felt everywhere. He sank into a silk-covered chair, before which he had arranged a full-length mirror, and several smaller glasses, with candles glowing all about him. He was conscious of a cloying sense of happiness over his physical perfections. He stripped garment after garment from him with a care, a gentleness that argued his belief that haste was a foe to beauty. He stretched himself at full length, in epicurean enjoyment of himself. The flame of life, he told himself, burnt the more steadily the less we wrapped it up. If we could only return to the pagan life! And yet—what charm there was in dress! The body had, after all, a monotony, a sameness; the tenderest of its curves, the rosiest of its surfaces, must pall. But the infinite variety of clothes! The delight of letting the most delicate tints of gauze caress the flesh, while to the world only the soberest stuffs were exposed! The rustle of fresh linen, the perfume that one could filter through the layers of one's attire!

Orson Vane closed his eyes, lazily, musingly. At that moment his proper soul was quite in subjection; the ecstasy in the usurping soul was all-powerful.

He was thinking of what the cheval-glass in that little room must have seen.

It would be unspeakably fine to be a mirror.

The little crystal clock ticking on the dressing-table tinkled an hour. It brought him from his reveries with a start. He began gliding into some shining, silken things of umber tints; they fitted him to the skin.

He was a falconer.

It was a costume to strike pale the idlers at a bathing beach. There was not a crease, not a fold anywhere. A leathern thong upon a wrist, a feathered cap upon his head, were almost the only points that rose away from the body as God had fashioned it. Satisfaction filled him as he surveyed himself. But there was more to do. Above this costume he put the dress of a Spanish Queen. When he lifted the massively brocaded train, there showed the most exquisitely chiseled ankles, the promise of the most alluring legs. The corsage hinted a bust of the most soothing softness. He spent fully ten minutes in happy admiration of his images in the mirrors.

When he proceeded to the conservatory, it was by a secret corridor. The diners were wearily watching a Frenchwoman who sang with her gloves, which were black and always on the point of falling down. She was very pathetic; she was trying to sing rag-time melodies because some idiot had told her the Newport set preferred that music. A smart young woman had danced a dance of her own invention; everyone agreed, as they did about the man who paints with his toes, that, considering her smartness in the fashionable world, it was not so much a wonder that she danced so well, as that she danced at all. They were quite sure the professional managers would offer her the most lavish sums; she would be quite as much of an attraction as the foreign peer who was trying to be a gentleman, where they are most needed, on the stage.

At a sign from Orson, the lights went out again, as the Frenchwoman finished her song. Several of the guests began to talk scandal in the dark; there are few occupations more fascinating than talking scandal in the dark. The question of whether it was better to be a millionaire or a fashionable and divorced beauty was beginning to agitate several people into almost violent argument, when the lights flared to the full.

The chorus of little "Ohs" and "Ahs," of rapid whispered comment, and of discreetly patted gloves, was quite fervid for so smart an assemblage. Except in the rarest cases, to gush is as fatal, in the smart world, as to be intolerant. There is a smart avenue between fervor and frowning; when you can find that avenue unconsciously, in the dark, as it were, you have little more to learn in the code of smartness.

Mrs. Sclatersby herself murmured, quite audibly:

"How sweet the dear boy looks!"

Her clan took the word up, and for a time the sibilance of it was like a hiss in the room. A man or two in the company growled out something that his fairer neighbor seemed unwilling to hear. These basso profundo sounds, if one could formulate them into words at all, seemed more like "Disgusting fool!" or "Sickening!" than anything else. But the company had very few men in it; in this, as in many other respects, the room resembled smart society itself. The smart world is engineered and peopled chiefly by the feminine element. The male sex lends to it only its more feminine side.

It is almost unnecessary to describe the picture that Orson Vane presented on that little stage. His beauty as "Isabella, Queen of Spain," has long since become public property; none of his later efforts in suppression of the many photographs that were taken, shortly after the Sclatersby dinner, have succeeded in quite expunging the portraits. At that time he gave the sittings willingly. He felt that these photographs represented the highest notch in his fame, the completest image of his ability to be as beautiful as the most beautiful woman.

Shame or nervousness was not part of Orson Vane's personality that night. He sat there, in the skillfully arranged scheme of lights, with his whole body attuned only to accurate impersonation of the character he represented. He got up. His motion, as he passed across the stage, was so utterly feminine, so made of the swaying, undulating grace that usually implies the woman; the gesture with his fan was so finically alluring; the poise of his head above his bared shoulders so coquettish,—that the women watching him almost held their breaths in admiration.

It was, you see, the most adroit flattery that a man could pay the entire sex of womankind.

Then the music, a little way off, began to strum a cachuca. The tempo increased; when finally the pace was something infectious, Orson Vane began a dance that remains, to this day, an episode in the annals of the smart. The vigor of his poses, the charm of his skirt-manipulation, carried the appreciation of his friends by storm. Some of the ladies really had hard work to keep from rushing to the stage and kissing the young man then and there. When we are emotional, we Americans—to what lengths will we not go!

But the surprises were not yet over. A dash of darkness stayed the music; a swishing and a flapping came from the stage; then the lights. Vane stood, in statue position, as a falconer. You could almost, under the umber silk, see the rippling of his veins.

Only a second he stood so, but it was a second of triumph. The company was so agape with wonder, that there was no sound from it until the music and the bare stage, following a brief period of blackness, recalled it to its senses. Then it urged Mrs. Sclatersby to grant a great favor.

Mr. Vane must be persuaded not take off his falconer's costume; to mingle, for what little time remained, with the company without resuming his more conventional attire.

Vane smiled when the message came to him. He nodded his head. Then he sent for the Sclatersby butler.

"Plenty of Red Ribbon!" he said to that person.

"Plenty, sir."

"Make a note of your commissions; a cheque in the morning."

Then he mingled again with his fellow-guests, and there was much toasting, and the bonds all loosened a little, and the sparkle came up out of the glasses into the cheeks of the women. The other men, one by one, took their way out.

Women crushed one another to touch the hero of the evening. Jealousies shot savage glances about. Every increase in this emulation increased the love that Orson Vane felt for himself. He caressed a hand here, a lock there, with a king's condescension. If he felt a kiss upon his hand, he smiled a splendid, slightly wearied smile. If he had hot eyes turned on him, burning so fiercely as to spell out passion boldly, he returned, with his own glances, the most ineffable promises.

There have been many things written and said about that curious affair at the Sclatersbys, but for the entire history of it—well, there are reasons why you will never be able to trace it. Orson Vane is perhaps the only one who might tell some of the details; and he, as you will find presently, has utterly forgotten that night.

"Time we went home, girls," said Vane, at last, disengaging himself gently from a number of warm hands, and putting away, as he moved into freedom, more than one beautiful pair of shoulders. He needed the fresh air; he was really quite worn out. But he still had a madcap notion left in him; he still had a trump to play.

"A pair of hose," he called out, "a pair of hose, with diamond-studded garters, to the one who will play 'follow' to my 'leader!'"

And the end of that dare-devil scamper did not come until the whole throng reached Madison Square.

Vane plunged to the knees in the fountain.

That chilled the chase. But one would not be denied. Hers was a dark type of beauty that needed magnolias and the moon and the South to frame it properly. She lifted her skirts with a little tinkling laugh, and ran to where Orson stood, splashing her way bravely through the water.

Vane looked at her and took her hand.

"I envy the prize I offered," he said to her.

CHAPTER VII.

Dawn found Orson Vane nodding in a hansom. He had told the man to drive to Claremont. The Palisades were just getting the first rosy streaks the sun was putting forth. The Hudson still lay with a light mist on it. The ascent to Claremont, in sunshine so clustered with beauty, was now deserted. A few carts belonging to the city were dragging along sleepily. Harlem was at the hour when the dregs of one day still taint the morn of the next one.

Vane was drowsy. He felt the need of a fillip. He did not like to think of getting back to his rooms and taking a nap. It was still too early, it seemed, for anything to eat or drink. He spied the Fort Lee ferry, and with it a notion came to him. The cabman was willing. In a few minutes he was aboard the ferry, and the cooler air that sweeps the Hudson was laving him. On the Jersey side he found a sleepy innkeeper who patched up a breakfast for him. He had, fortunately, some smokable cigars in his clothes. The day was well on when he reached the New York side of the river again, and gave "The Park!" as the cabman's orders.

His body now restored to energy again, his mind recounted the successes of the night. He really had nothing much to wish for. The men envied him to the point of hatred; the women adored him. He was the pet of the smartest people. He was shrewd enough, too, to be petted for a consideration; his adroitness in sales of Red Ribbon added comfortably to his income. He took pride in this, as if there had ever been a time, for several generations, when the name of Vane had not stood good for a million or so.

The Park was not well tenanted. Some robust members of the smart set were cantering about the bridle paths, and now and then a carriage turned a corner; but the people who preferred the Park for its own sake to the Park of the afternoon drive were, evidently, but few. Vane felt quite neglected; he was still able to count the number of times that he had bowed to familiars. The deserted state of the Park somewhat discounted the tonic effects of its morning freshness. Nature was nothing unless it was a background for man. The country was a place from which you could come to town. Still—there was really nothing better to do, this fine morning. He rather dreaded the thought of his rooms after the brilliance of the night.

His meditations ceased at approach of a girlish figure on horseback, a groom at a discreet distance behind.

It was Miss Vanlief.

He saw that she saw him, yet he saw no welcome in her eyes. He rapped for the hansom to stop; got out, and waved his hat elaborately at the young woman. She, in sheer politeness, had reined in her horse.

"A sweet day," he minced, "and jolly luck my meeting you! Thought it was rather dull in the old Park, till you turned up. Sweet animal you're on." He looked up with that air that, the night before, had been so bewitching. Somehow, as the girl eyed him, he felt haggard. She was not smiling, not the least little bit.