THE GOSPEL OF FREEDOM

THE
GOSPEL OF FREEDOM

BY
ROBERT HERRICK
AUTHOR OF “THE MAN WHO WINS,” “LITERARY
LOVE-LETTERS AND OTHER STORIES”

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1898

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1898
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

To
The Memory of
P. S. A.

“Somewhere, surely, afar,

In the sounding labour-house vast

Of being, it practised that strength,

Zealous, beneficent, firm!”

THE GOSPEL OF FREEDOM

PART I

CHAPTER I

Simeon Erard tiptoed deftly across the room, tugging at his thin, sandy heard. Fumbling among the curtains which draped one corner of the best light, he pulled the cord, after carefully eyeing his visitors to see that all were placed properly. The light silk folds fell apart, revealing a small canvas,—a cool deep slit of grey water let into a marble floor, which was cut in two by the languorous reach of a woman’s back done in hard green. The large masses of auburn hair of the bent head floated on the creamy slab. The artist coughed.

“Well!” exclaimed Mrs. Anthon, in a puff of surprise. “A bath-room, I declare!”

“Is that your exhibition-picture?” inquired her brother-in-law, Sebastian Anthon, a little dubiously. Erard took no notice of these wavering remarks. To him they were the necessary comment of the world, to which he habitually paid as marked disrespect as he dared.

“You see, don’t you, Miss Anthon,” his voice was persuasively patronizing, “what I have tried to do? You grasp the difficulties, don’t you? Of course to the crowd it’s nothing but a modern bath, half full of water, with a young woman in it, whose hair is red. But you see the vigor of that leg, the coolness of that water shot with light. You feel it. The artist—and the rare person—will stop before that picture; he will know what it means. And the artist paints for the artist; shouldn’t he, Miss Anthon?”

The young woman thus distinguished by the special appeal waived the responsibility of assent to the last proposition. But she moved away from the little group of suspicious critics, drawing near to the picture, as if she were willing to represent the sympathetic intelligence.

“Yes,” she murmured slyly, “that leg half in the water, half out, is subtle. The flesh gives itself to the coolness.”

Mrs. Anthon began ostentatiously to use her lorgnette on the room. Sebastian Anthon turned one or two canvases to the light.

“Ah!” the young artist responded, “my dear Miss Anthon, you are the right sort; you understand. Don’t you feel that back rippling into the new medium? To do the little bit where the lights change,” he indicated hastily a patch of rough brushwork, “that was the keenest delight of the past year, the best minutes of intense existence, and for that we artists live, don’t we?”

The girl half smiled as if something vaguely humorous crossed her mind, yet again her impulse was to take his part against his antipathetic fellow-countrymen.

“Well, that cornfield didn’t grow in the States, I’d bet!” This ejaculation came from a young man, who had unearthed a sketch in bright yellows. He stood with his cane behind his back, his light coat thrown open, in an attitude of eager expectation, and anxiety to lose nothing that was going on, while hunting for appropriate expression. The dull Paris sunlight of a November afternoon sobered the robust hue of his face and his broad hands. “Eh!” Erard remarked indifferently, “that’s a sketch I made in Calabria, an effort in yellows.” He turned the canvas back to the wall, as if he would take from a child a fragile toy.

“This impressionistic business is beyond me,” the young man remarked defiantly, addressing Mrs. Anthon for support.

“Adela hasn’t done much in it yet,” Mrs. Anthon answered. “You know, Mr. Wilbur, she’s at Jerome’s. He’s good for the drawing, they say, and then he has so many studios, and one is up our way, just behind the Madeleine. And Jerome has such a good class of young women. I couldn’t have Adela running about and living as the common art-students do. No Trilby stuff for me, I said to Sebastian, when he advised me to take Adela over here and let her have a chance to culture herself. Adela rather wanted to try it by herself for a year, but her father made her keep on at Bryn Mawr, that school down near Baltimore, where they wear caps and gowns. But when her father died,—her elder brother was married and living out to Denver, and Walter was just finishing school at Harvard,—I said I couldn’t be left alone. What are children good for, if they’re going to run away to college and to art-schools? It is bad enough to have them marry, but a girl, when she isn’t obliged to work,—and Addie won’t have to teach, I guess—”

Mrs. Anthon was fast unwinding her philosophy of life, in the sympathetic manner of Western Americans, that takes for granted a neighbour’s interest in one’s affairs and does not comprehend reticence. Wilbur was apparently interested. But Miss Anthon, who had practised the power of watching ever for her mother’s garrulous tongue, while she attended to other matters, interfered.

“Mr. Erard will show us his den, mamma. Isn’t the apartment delightful and interesting? It’s an old swell’s house. Louis seize complete, just as it was, without any change. Mr. Erard found it quite by accident, he says, one day when he was wandering about in this quarter among the convents. He came down a side lane that runs into the rue Vaugirard. Just as he was leaving it, his eye happened to fall upon that old cypress in the court. He prowled about and found this nest.”

Animation returned once more to the party. Erard led them from the studio—a fine old room, with open-timbered ceiling, left almost ostentatiously bare—into the adjoining salon. In the sombre studio there had been only the warm woodwork; here were many living qualities,—the lofty windows hung with dark stuffs, the fireplace adorned by a delicate relief of nymphs. In one corner was a spinet, and along the sides of the room couches, with a few low tables and aristocratic chairs. Some little bronzes, one or two pastels, and a cast of a group by a young American sculptor, completed the obvious contents.

The ladies exclaimed. Wilbur observed thoughtfully, “I should think you would rattle around a little.”

“Ah! I don’t live here,” Erard answered airily, pushing open the large folding doors beside the fireplace. “This is my den, and beyond are the bedrooms.”

The inner room was of the same dignified height as the rest of the apartment. A bit of tapestry on one side, and shelves for books and photographs on another, hid the walls. In one corner was a simple ormolu table, where notes lay half opened, and beside it a lounge. A few high-backed chairs, each one a precious find, were ranged like solemn lackeys along the walls. A second piece of tapestry cut off a dimly lighted alcove, where a bed of state could be seen,—“also of the period,” as Erard remarked complacently. The visitors were still admiring when the servant opened the door into the dining salon.

“We will have some punch,” Erard sighed, throwing himself into the deep chair at the head of the table, in which his small figure seemed engulfed. While Pierre, like an attentive mouse, passed the punch and cakes, the Americans let their eyes roam over the room. It was sombre with heavy furniture, but scrupulously confined to “the period,” from the few plates that looked down from the lofty sideboard, to the andirons on the hearth.

“An ideal nest,” Miss Anthon murmured.

“Your man makes such good punch,” Mrs. Anthon added.

“You must have put a mine into this,” Wilbur commented, as he sipped his punch. “Fixed it up for a permanent residence?”

“Ah! I can’t say,” the artist replied negligently. “Paris bores me a good deal. I do my best work at Giverney or San Geminiano. This is a kind of office.”

“Not much like the old garret where genius was once supposed to blossom,” Sebastian Anthon reflected in his weary voice, as if making propositions for himself.

Erard moved uneasily. The gentle old man’s remark contained a special sting.

“That doesn’t go nowadays. To do his best work, the workman must have his proper atmosphere. It was all well enough in the Renaissance for those old fellows to bang about; there was so much going on that was inspiring; so much beauty in the world! But to-day he must cover himself up from the horrid impressions of reality. If he fought with cold and hunger and bad wall-paper, and all that, he would never be fit for his fine work. Either the harsh actualities would blunt his sensitiveness, or he would show that he hadn’t any, that he wasn’t of the temperament.”

Erard turned from the attentive old man to the young woman, whose fortune of contemporaneous birth might render her intelligent to the force of his remarks. Moreover, she was a woman, and Simeon Erard’s strong point was his management of women. He got at them on impersonal, sexless grounds. His rambling physique and flattened face were almost repulsive, and he had never quite lost the traces of the dull back alley in Jersey City, whence he had emerged upon the circle of patrons and patronesses who were to attend him on towards fame. With a subtle insight into his own resources, he knew that women would always be useful to him; that they were most excellent working-partners of fame. To have a chorus of women at your command was like subsidizing the press: it was a dangerous weapon to use, but its range was incalculable. And in manipulating women he was skilful enough to exclude the sexual basis. He never appeared to them in the light of a possible husband or lover. Further, he never included a stupid woman in his chorus merely because she made court to him.

Just now it seemed to him better worth while securing a new ally than opening the dangerous question started by the old man. So he led the party back to the salon and begged Miss Anthon to try the spinet. While he explained the working of the instrument, he threw out casually some remarks about music. The young woman struck a few thin chords, that rustled like yellowed parchment in the lofty room; her glance followed the artist as he looked after his guests.

Now he was talking to Wilbur, who was eagerly loquacious. She could catch phrases: “... run over for a few months ... business dull ... had a chance to be fixed up in a little job ... pretty good place ... am a University of Michigan man.” Erard’s little eyes were coolly judging the expansive young man, assigning him to his species, and calculating the exact amount of significance he might contain.

Who was this Erard? She had heard her mother refer often enough to Sebastian Anthon’s “folly” over that “painter-fellow” he had picked up in New York as a tutor for his daughter. She remembered many little details of his career: how her uncle had found him in a print-shop behind the counter, and had encouraged him in his efforts to worm his way through the art-school. Later he had come to Sebastian Anthon’s summer home, on the half-intimate footing of a tutor, and she remembered to have seen him there,—a sullen, ugly lad, with his material and stupid charge. Then Erard had gone abroad, first with Uncle Sebastian, then again for a long period by himself. And her mother accused him of “getting Sebastian to waste good money on pictures and such stuff.”

She was not aware that Erard had done much to justify all the Anthon money that had gone into his career. At least if you counted by tangible evidences! She did not know that one of the first precepts which the protégé had inculcated had been that you should not count by vulgar or tangible proofs, such as books published, pictures painted and sold, articles appearing in magazines, with accompanying checks and drafts.

For Erard’s initial ambition—to paint—had expanded in the atmosphere of Paris, until now it would be hard to say just where he proposed to apply his force.

A professorship in aesthetics, the editorship of a magazine devoted to the arts, the curatorship of a museum,—one or all, might have satisfied his present ambition. Yet he had never quite abandoned actual creative work. Now and then, whenever Sebastian Anthon was becoming unusually restless, some one “evidence” appeared to justify the interest that old Anthon was taking in him. Some clever article on the Salons for an American journal, a little essay on an early Italian master in an English magazine, a portrait of Mrs. George Payne,—the editor’s young wife,—which set the American colony in Paris agog with talk; at the worst, some bit of encouraging gossip from “a man who knew.” Perhaps Erard had been right in not forcing himself; Sebastian Anthon shivered at the thought of how he himself had been forced.

It had been superb in its way, Erard’s campaign thus far, or preparation for campaign. Once in Paris, the very pavement seemed familiar to him, the air in the streets to be intimate. “You are one of us,” it whispered. He prepared leisurely to realize far-reaching projects. He was never idle, and he was rarely dissipated. Quite early, it is probable, he suspected that his organism was not the artist’s; his blood was too thin. But his power was to comprehend, to enjoy and relate. Or, to use the phrase that he found for his patron, “to know the background.” So he had had the audacity to proceed from capital to capital, establishing large siege-lines,—the audacity, when to-morrow might find him at the pawn-shop with nothing to pawn. Perhaps he knew his world better than most; had he had more scrupulous doubts, he would have failed at the outset.

To-day he had asked the Anthons to see his apartment and his new picture; for he still painted, cleverly aware that the world, after all, pays a certain homage to the mystery of creation that it denies to mere knowledge. His guests, however, seemed to be impressed more with the apartment in which he had enveloped himself, by the very vulgar facts of physical appointments, than by his excellent picture. The afternoon had engendered a moral opposition which he must overcome in some way. Sebastian Anthon was especially necessary to him just now; he must spend this winter in Spain. And he would like to have this nice old man fall in with the plan, even if it necessitated including his niece, and, at the worst, the voluble lady her mother.

That person could be heard, above the notes of the spinet, in her monologue to the patient Wilbur. “I shall take Adela to Aix-les-Bains as soon as the season opens. I tell her that what she wants is to know people, to meet pleasant friends, not to spend her year over here fooling about in a studio. I guess she hasn’t any great talent. Walter has set his heart on making a writer of himself, and I guess one genius in the family is enough.” The purple bows on Mrs. Anthon’s new Parisian hat tossed in time with the vehement workings of her short, thick body. She had settled into an aggressive pace.

Erard paused for a moment by her side, and then, as the music faded out, stepped back to Miss Anthon. Her face, which was turned towards the light, wore a look of tolerance, and the restless tapping of one foot upon the marquetry betrayed a stifled criticism of her mother’s chatter.

The young artist noted that the moulding of the face had been begun freely and graciously. Nothing was final. It might be interesting to know where the next few years would place the emphasis. Meantime the impulse of life was throbbing in that face actively, generously. To feel, to understand, and—what is more—to act swiftly,—a promise of such powers it held forth.

“You are working here?” Erard observed. Miss Anthon turned to him with relief.

“Oh! fooling, as the rest do. It seems so utterly silly, but it is better than shopping perpetually, or running about to see things you don’t understand.”

“Did you do much—earlier?” Erard assumed easily the catechist’s place.

“Never—much—of anything,” she confessed slowly. “But I liked it awfully, only papa wanted me to have a sound education first.”

“Quite wise—that papa.”

“Why?”

“Because the chances are that you may know something some day, but there isn’t much chance of your ever doing anything.”

Miss Anthon flushed at this cool estimation of her range by her uncle’s protégé. Yet her good sense and her curiosity kept her from betraying any foolish annoyance, and the two were soon far on in an intimate conversation. Erard’s finality in judgments, and his conjuror’s trick of knowing all about herself without detailed confession, impressed Miss Anthon.

At last the visitors gathered themselves up, and Mrs. Anthon said a distant good-by to their host. Miss Anthon added to her mother’s conventionally expressed hope that they might see Erard again, a pointed invitation. “Come and show me what I ought to know.”

“Would you care to see Degas’s new picture?”

The girl answered with a look, with a flutter of astonishment. Who was this young man who could take her to Degas’s studio? As they moved into the hall, Erard found an opportunity to hand her the last Revue Internationale. “Perhaps you will care to look this over; it’s an article on Degas I wrote last spring.”

Then Pierre, the solemn man-servant, appeared with an old horn lantern, pulled back the long iron bolt, and prepared to escort the guests to the courtyard. In the hall a slender crane, supporting a flickering candle, reached out above the stairs. Erard stood under its shrine-like glimmer, wafting courtly cordialities to the descending guests. As Miss Anthon passed the bend in the stairs Pierre’s lantern threw a dash of light upon her dark strong form, while the plumes in her hat made magnificent shadows upon the stone walls. She swung her loose cape about her, as a young officer years before might have wrapped himself in his military cloak before venturing into the night-blast below. She looked up at him and smiled with the frank recognition one gives to a possible master. The last sound Erard heard, as the great doors creaked open below, was Mrs. Anthon’s shrill babble about dinner.

CHAPTER II

Leaving Wilbur and Mrs. Anthon to find a cab, Miss Anthon and her uncle proceeded across the Quarter by silent side streets, the old man turning instinctively here and there, until suddenly they came out on the Luxembourg gardens.

“I used to live up there,” Mr. Anthon remarked, pointing towards a deserted alley, “in number 75. That was before your father was married, when the family were living in New York. Father gave each of us five thousand dollars when we came of age. John went to St. Louis and began the brick business. I came over here—”

“Why did you give this up?” his niece asked eagerly, with a renewed appreciation of the artist’s delights.

Sebastian Anthon turned his blue eyes to her wonderingly. “John thought it best. Art wasn’t much of a career then, and your father rather managed all of us. We had good times in soixante-quinze,” he added musingly, standing still to peer up at the maze of broken roofs.

The girl followed his gaze sympathetically. She could suspect a little more of the story than the old man’s words told. She had felt the iron will that until two years ago when death stepped in, had governed the Anthons. The elder brother’s practical power, his intolerance, his indomitable activity, had bent them all. His little brick business had expanded, until all the Anthons, root and branch, were brick-makers, and each member of the family had his block of brick-stock. The boys, as they came along, were drafted into the business at twenty, and the women were pensioned off. John Anthon had governed the state in St. Louis; Sebastian had been his protesting but faithful satrap in New York.

When John died, leaving bricks at 200, with regular 12 per cent dividends, the business so ably managed that it might run on until man had no further need for bricks, or clay was exhausted, Sebastian Anthon slyly withdrew from his post and looked about for amusement for his declining years. He remembered wistfully how he had once thought of a garret room in Paris, of long days in Barbazon; he could not paint now, and so he had taken to buying pictures.

“And that was why you helped Mr. Erard,” his niece insinuated thoughtfully.

The old man nodded, and added half apologetically, “He can have the life, the hope,—even if he doesn’t do much.” Perhaps Erard had grown to look upon him as a skilful financial agent, who provided both capital and interest. This attitude might be immoral, but the patron received his compensation.

“But he has done something; he will do something,” the young woman replied buoyantly.

“It’s a growth that becomes sterile easily—terribly easily,” her uncle mused. “Perhaps one can’t assist nature, yet to have the chance, that is the great thing.” He looked once more wistfully over the roofs, and then turned into the gardens. He stopped again as they came out behind the palace, with its gracious façade just visible in the twilight and fog. “I used to come out here to walk. There was more going on then everywhere—students and politics. You never knew what might happen.”

When they reached Foyot’s they found Wilbur and Mrs. Anthon already at their oysters. Seated at table with them was a blond young man, Mrs. Anthon’s youngest son, who was examining carefully the wine-card. As his sister came in, he glanced up with the remark,—

“Well, what did you think of Uncle Seb’s little Jew? Wilbur and mamma have been slanging him ever since they came in.”

Mrs. Anthon broke out at once. “Your young friend seems to have made himself comfortable, Sebastian. I suppose painting bath-tubs must pay pretty well. I must say, and I am no prude, as you know, Sebastian, that I can’t understand all this loose art. What good is it for an American to come over here and learn to paint naked women in a bath-tub, so that you can see the water swashing about? They can’t sell such things in America. It’s well enough for once in a while to see ’em over here, but we don’t want that kind of picture to hang up in our homes. I used to say to John, buy good pleasing copies, something that’s elevating, or nice country scenes, but don’t bring any of that modern French trash into my parlours.”

The soup arriving just then, Wilbur had his chance.

“That’s so, Mrs. Anthon. But I suppose they are after something. Erard seems a clever fellow; he believes in himself hard enough, and that’s the way to get there. I must say, though, that I have never found a young fellow who got much permanent improvement out of this foreign business. That wasn’t the way with our fathers, or with our high-class literary men to-day. They made their way first and came over here later on to polish off. Isn’t that about so, Mr. Anthon?”

Sebastian Anthon made no reply. He was watching two young fellows seated on the leather couch near the window. They were gesticulating and pounding the table, emitting dynamic words,—la loi, morale, vrais enthousiasmes.

“Mr. Erard is quite the most interesting man I have ever met,” Miss Anthon pronounced dogmatically, irritated by the bearish atmosphere. “I can’t quite see why we Americans, who are always whooping for success, and pardon everything if it only leads to our ends, should have so many doubts about that same selfishness when used for other things than getting dollars or going into politics. We are dreadfully moral as soon as it comes to art or to anything that doesn’t give a bank account. If I were a man without a cent, I would do precisely what Mr. Erard has done—make the world support me.”

“Live on charity?” Wilbur exclaimed sharply.

“The eternal discussion,” Walter Anthon put in, as if bored. Hitherto he had confined himself to ordering and testing his dinner.

“Yes, why not?” Miss Anthon continued pugnaciously. “If I gave them something back in return, some new sensations or ideas. Don’t you agree with me, Uncle Seb?”

Sebastian Anthon had been sipping his wine meditatively, ignoring alike the food and the talk. “I was thinking,” he said tranquilly, “that just thirty-eight years ago last June, I took my last dinner in Paris over there where those fellows are sitting. It’s changed since then,—I mean the world.” This reflection appeased the argumentative temper, and talk died out.

“I am going to hear Yvette Guilbert,” at last announced young Anthon, with something of a swagger. “Will you go, Wilbur?”

Wilbur responded by a conscious smile and then glanced at the others. “What would the ladies say?”

“Walter wouldn’t think it nice if we were to go,” Miss Anthon answered. “I will go some other time,—when we are all developed.”

Walter looked at his sister suspiciously. “They are doing that kind of thing in London, but it’s safer not. I shouldn’t care to meet my friends—”

Miss Anthon waved her hand deprecatingly. She had heard a good deal about her brother’s friends. He had started “a literary career” in London, very favorably, with a thin volume of verse, some good letters of introduction, and a pleasant manner.

“Well, you won’t come, Wilbur? I shall be busy to-morrow, mother. Will see you some time this week. Good-night.”

Walter Anthon selected his coat and stalked off. Mrs. Anthon looked after him wistfully, as if half inclined to follow her boy. Instead the party drifted into a cab and were put down by the boulevards. Their evenings usually concluded like this at a café, or, more rarely, at the opera.

The boulevard resounded, like an animated river, coursing on swiftly, temptingly. The crowd, even on this dull November evening, was hurrying past, keenly alive about something,—but Miss Anthon was obliged to sit at the little table beside the throng, an ignorant outsider. The scene was perpetually alluring her to experiment in new fields, yet she could never tread the pavement, mistress of herself. This life of idly running hither and thither was merely irritating. The longing to escape from her mother, who lived in another kind of world, even from her uncle and Wilbur, who were not quite in place in Paris, increased until her nerves were sore.

She had never felt this rebellion in St. Louis. Out of the general blur of her past life one important figure loomed everywhere, dominated everything,—her father, John Anthon. That angular, hard-headed man had in many ways substituted his daughter for his wife. She could comprehend, now that her mother was cut off from the usual outlets of neighbourly gossip, how wearisome Mrs. Anthon must have become to the silent persistent man, who had engineered all their fortunes to such comfortable ends. She realized that she had gone to this father for understanding. He was her confidant in her experiences in the little social pool of St. Louis. He had taught her to read intelligently, had provided her with tutors; to escape the nonsense of girls’ schools, he had sent her to Bryn Mawr “in the hope that when middle-life came she would have a few more resources than her mother.” His standards of vitriolic common sense had influenced her girlish choice of friends, had carried her safely through the silly years.

He was honest, she knew, he was direct; he believed in the gospel of work; he endured much in the family; he never had an idea devoid of effort. His life had been one prolonged battle that wrung him to the last reserve of strength. There had been little joy in it but the joy of success.

It was gaunt, that ideal!

Yet all this she had accepted as a type of what a man should be, of how he should treat himself. Moreover, she reasoned that a woman should not be spared the full rigours of the game. Of course the actualities of daily living were disagreeable, but any one who sought to shirk those necessities, who sought to take his existence out of the mill where fate had fixed him, was a mere trifler.

Was she quite sure of that truth, after this day?

When that father died, the demand for sacrifice had come through her mother, and she had not questioned it. What she had gone to Bryn Mawr for was not personal gratification—at least, she thought not—but equipment. She must respond to events, as her father had done many years ago when he took the Anthon affairs in hand, without disguising the unpleasant consequences to herself.

It was a primitive religion blindly taught and blindly followed.

Just what could she do for her mother, now that she had made this sacrifice of her independence? Her brothers had expected it; in the general emotional drawing together of the family after Mr. Anthon’s death, it had not seemed so impossible. Had her father, however, expected it? He had left her an independent fortune. There might be an implication in that fact.

St. Louis, without that father and without any definite goal except to make herself companionable to her mother, had soon become intolerable. The college youths, home for vacation, appeared more childish than ever; the staid young men in business, more wooden. In desperation, one day, she found herself on the point of accepting a young lawyer, for the sole reason, when she paused to reflect, that he agreed with her in finding St. Louis arid. The fathers and mothers of the present turbulent generation had toiled out their days, and at night had been content to sit dully on the great stone stoops, or in the stuffy parlours, merely idle, until the morrow of renewed effort. The children had their energy, and yet refused the old task. So, naturally enough, she had entered into Sebastian Anthon’s plan of a year in Europe,—a convenient solution for every American family in doubt or distress.

The file of carriages had thinned out; the theatres had opened. Waiters were standing listlessly in the doors of the cafés. Mrs. Anthon was saying,—

“Don’t be a fool, Sebastian, over that fellow. He is a worthless young man. I told you five years ago, ‘Sebastian, you are perverting that young man. Give him a place in the brick company, and let him earn his salt, as you have done, as John did.’ But you were weak and amiable, and the Erard kind get around you.”

Miss Anthon smiled at the idea of Erard in bricks. Moreover, wasn’t all this talk about Mr. Simeon Erard’s manner of livelihood rather vulgar and impertinent? Here in Paris it was easy to slip away from her harsh creed of common prejudices. Erard seemed to her the most interesting figure on her horizon, and she was tempted to accept him for what he could give her, for what he had given her already.

She rose hastily, stifled, eager to step out on the boulevard, to follow the throng. “I will walk back to the hotel, mamma, if Mr. Wilbur will go with me.”

The young man got up with an air of relief, and the two started down the boulevard in the direction of the Avenue de l’Opera. He offered her his arm awkwardly, noticing that the other men and women were promenading linked together. Miss Anthon laughed: “We’re Americans and needn’t do it!”

She strode out, every muscle responding joyously, after the inert hours. Her eyes turned here and there, inspecting the faces in the cafés, the crowded omnibuses, the idle throng. One need not reflect here: the river of life coursed swiftly, merrily.

CHAPTER III

As the two neared the opera house, Miss Anthon walked more leisurely and paid some attention to her companion. The night was soft for November; she had no wish to immure herself in the close hotel.

“Paris takes me out of my skin,” she said half apologetically. “The whole thing absorbs me; every one seems to be living so eagerly.”

“Puttering about, I should say. They are like a lot of children!” her companion replied unenthusiastically. He had been born on a farm in upper Michigan—he called it Michigāān—and had ridden his pony to school six miles each day, after doing “father’s chores.” A month of Paris had not rubbed off his peasant suspiciousness. As if in defence of his truculent attitude, he added, “You hit me pretty hard, Miss Anthon,—what you said about Americans appreciating only the success of dollars and politics.”

“Why?” The girl focussed her attention wonderingly on her companion.

“That’s what I am after, always have been, since I began teaching elocution and literature up in the old Michigan school. I taught there two years,” he continued simply, with the homely, unconscious conceit of a man interested in his own drama, yet who can relish the picturesqueness of it. “Then I saw my way to some college learning, and in one way or another I kept at the state university for four years. One summer I peddled dry-goods in Iowy and Nebrasky. Another I sold ploughs in Texas.”

His companion sauntered slowly, keeping a sympathetic silence. There was a pleasant kind of brag in his simple epic.

“But I got my chance one red-hot August day, when I met Joe Dinsmore in the smoking-car of a C. B. & Q. train, crossing a Kansas prairie. Big Joe was on his way to look over a piece of land that had come back on a client of his on a mortgage. He took to me, and we rode over to see the sand-heap his man had lent twenty thousand on. The mortgage called it ‘fertile farming land.’ Dinsmore swore and then laughed when he’d seen the miles of drouth and blasted grass and corn. But I got out of the buggy and scraped a hole in the hot ground. Then I took a look at the air; my! it just waltzed and sang over our heads, fit to blister the paint on the team. Well, we drove on, Dinsmore mad, and me quiet, until we came to the Waralla River. Then I smiled.”

His face relaxed at the memory, and he pushed his tall silk hat back to a rakish angle, unconscious of the city, of the whirling carriages, of everything save that vital moment of triumph out on the arid prairie.

“Dinsmore was mopping his head and growling: ‘Rantoul was a blankish eastern idiot; he might as well throw up the sponge. Two square miles of this ash-heap!’

“But,” in the fervour of his tale, Wilbur turned squarely to the girl, “I smiled at him. ‘Dinsmore,’ I said, ‘you know how to draw a brief and run a caucus and bluff a jury,—and perhaps a few other things,—but you don’t understand this game.’ ‘Well,’ he growled, ‘what have you got to offer?’ ‘Irrigation,’ I said; and he howled. ‘Irrigate, you damn fool, when the banks of that cussed river are twenty-five feet high on either side, and no coal within two hundred miles!’

“Then I explained myself. I told him how I and a classmate at Michigan one spring invented just the machine for this. ‘It’s working to-day on father’s farm up in northern Michigan.’ ‘How long will it take us to git there?’ he jerked out. ‘Three days.’ Well, the old wheel we had rigged up, Jim Center and me, was there pumping away like the day we left it, when Dinsmore and I drove over from the station.”

Here Wilbur, in his excitement, had stopped at a deserted brasserie, and taking two chairs from the nearest table, he described minutely the water-hoister with all its superb points. Miss Anthon sank into a chair. They were near the hotel now, and the tale absorbed her.

“Dinsmore looked it over; he said nothing; then he started it running; then he looked it over again. ‘My boy,’ he said, as we walked up to the house, ‘there is a desk for you in my office in Chicago. You read law. Some day you will be managing a “Water-Hoister Company.”’ That was near three years ago.”

Wilbur ordered a bock. After one sip he put the glass down and went on. There were delightful appendices to this epic. Dinsmore had tried to cheat him, but—

“I held him up in his own office, on the tenth floor of the Sears building. ‘A square deal,’ I said, ‘or you don’t get out of this office.’ And Dinsmore has done the right thing ever since.”

Miss Anthon’s blood ran in little throbs as he described this primitive arrangement in the tenth floor of an office-building, where the old eel of a politician had been foiled by his sharp clerk.

“Then Dinsmore tried to do Rantoul on his land, when he saw what a fat thing we had. But,” here the young fellow smiled in appreciation of his astuteness rather than of his honesty, “Rantoul has his third now.”

Later Wilbur had gone to Washington as secretary for an Illinois boss, and while there had arranged the patents and started the Water-Hoister Improvement Company. Center was remembered.

“I gave him a quarter of my third. He is teaching school up Minnesota way. Some day he will be a rich man and won’t know what has struck him.”

“How can you be spared?” Miss Anthon asked, as the story seemed to end in the air. “How did you dare to run over here for three months and be so far away from your schemes?”

Wilbur laughed and was silent for a moment, with that look of seeing around a corner which comes into the faces of shrewd, new men.

“Well, Miss Anthon,” he gazed at her frankly, as if she would compel his inmost secrets, “I’m not quite fit for what’s ahead, not even with what I got over there at the old school. I mean to get into bigger things than this water-hoister affair. So it won’t hurt me to have a look around; it’s about the last time I shall have a chance. And I worked hard at the job, got Rantoul’s affairs all cleared up, his creditors satisfied. There’s nothing to do now, but wait for the factory to turn out the machines. I shall be starting back soon when the time comes to boom. And,” he added jocularly, “Paris is good enough for me when I’m not in shirtsleeves.”

Miss Anthon’s face glowed with her excitement over the story. It touched her imagination: money-getting, it seemed, might be another affair than taciturn, reserved old John Anthon had made it. Wilbur brought out the romance. And she pardoned the hero’s genial complacency in his own cleverness, his colossal confidence that the world and he had been made just so that he might bring about his combinations. His tolerance of the old world, in spite of his suspicion, was also fine. She got up, regretfully, aware for the first time that it was not quite the place for her,—the Boulevard des Capucines at ten o’clock, sitting with a young man who sipped a bock.

A few moments later she bade him good-night, and shook hands heartily, with a kind of recognition for the interest he had given her. Life must be made to march, and whoever gratified this craving would get his meed of generous acknowledgment. And Wilbur felt a little of the elation of the dominant male. He was not making love; he had too little submissiveness to be a lover. Rather, he had impressed himself, and that was a necessity of his nature.

CHAPTER IV

Mr. Walter Anthon had cultivated his little garden of aspirations industriously and with flattering results. He had lately been taken on as an occasional writer for the Standard and was intimate with the younger gods who supported the New National review. To his surprise his American birth had facilitated his course: it was easier to be nice to an American (as Lady Dorant had frankly told him) than to one of your own people, for you weren’t responsible for the stranger if you took him up. Again to his surprise he had found that the London world took seriously his newspaper articles on European traits. These outpourings of his first two years in London had just appeared in book form. And he had come to his family straight from Norwood, the home of the great novelist Maxwell.

Neither his family, nor Yvette Guilbert,—nor yet the custom of showing himself in Paris once in so often,—had brought him across the channel. He was eager to see Miss Molly Parker, who had occupied his heart intermittently during his calf years in America. One visit, he reflected as he waited in the chill salon of the Passy villa, would probably satisfy whatever sentiment had survived.

“Well, well, it is so nice to see you, and here in Europe,” Miss Parker emitted her welcome as she half ran down the long room. The clear, soft tones that seemed always to carry a caress, or rather a pervading sensation of warmth, invigorated the most commonplace words. Walter Anthon had always felt the immediate charm, but when once away he recalled the words, it was impossible to find anything not merely ordinary. The woman created something original out of the simple events and words of dull life. When she had disappeared the creation fell into emptiness.

The creating power lay in the slight, well-defined form, in the fine hair—that just missed being red gold—which waved over the high brows and played with the ears and neck, and in the little curves of fulness of the cheeks and neck, above all in the full grey-blue eyes which took such an absorbing interest in all things. She was a woman, now and always,—that fact so dominant in her presence eliminated any discussion of beauty. Some people, unimaginative and literal, called her plain, and talked about hands and feet and a waist much too ample, and features too heavy, and many other details, but those who had suffered her charm and remembered it, smiled—she would inspire a scarecrow.

“And how do you do, after all these months?” In the warmth of her special welcome Anthon forgot the little arrangement about his attitude to Miss Parker which he had made with himself. “I came from London to see you.”

“No, not really.” Miss Parker laughed as if it were a delicious fib, but one she would like to believe. “That was very good of you!”

“You were going out?”

“Yes, and we will go together. To the Louvre. Just think, I have been here six weeks, and I have peeped into the Louvre but once. Mrs. Ormiston Dexter—she’s my aunt whom I am travelling with—has been so miserable, and the children all had to go to the dentist’s. But we shall have such a beautiful time—you will take me to see just what is best. I like to be shown things so!” Her eager eyes looked out like a child’s over the prospect of a new toy. “Tell me about your year in London. What have you been doing? You never sent me any of your articles.”

Anthon twisted his moustache and evaded the last reproach.

“I’ve met a lot of people, the right kind, who are in things,” and he detailed a list of names naïvely. “They have been awfully kind and nice to me.”

“Of course,” Miss Parker responded slyly. She was so sympathetic, Mrs. Ormiston Dexter declared, that she would hobnob with the devil and take his views of the universe—for the time.

“So you will be a big literary man, and write books or become an editor and live in London.”

“Not so fast,” the young man protested. “You will make me poet laureate before you are done. I’m on the road, that is all. Now I must do something good, really good, you know, to justify all the belief those fellows have in me. But I knew enough not to stay in America. It’s the only way, to come over here and get in, get to be known and have your work talked about by the world, not write for the provinces.”

“That’s us?” Miss Parker inquired.

“Not you,” Anthon smiled; “you belong to the woods.”

“Thank you! You mean the backwoods.”

“And you?” Anthon asked.

“We’ve done Germany and northern Italy. So many hotels and people and pictures and towns and cities. It has been great!” Anthon could see her at the Grand Hotel this or that, calling all the lap-dogs by their pet names, and on good terms with nearly every comer, from the fat Polish countess to the gentlemanly English loafer. “But Italy was best,” her eyes softened dreamily. “The dear people, with their fat little babies, and those stagey mountains. It was like going to the opera all day long. Shall we start?”

Miss Parker chatted briskly at him, unawed by his importance, while they crawled down the Champs Elysées on the imperiale of an omnibus. She had scoffed at the idea of taking a cab, and forced Anthon to run the risk of being observed by his acquaintances as he swayed to and fro and clutched at his tall hat. It took them a good while to escape the importunate guides, the venders of photographs, and the other obstructions that beset the great palace.

“It’s like a dance-hall outside and a tomb in,” Miss Parker reflected. “All these bronzes in this heavy-arched room are such a cold welcome. They seem like a procession of the dead drawn up to receive you.”

When they came to the grand staircase, with its glorious crown of the Niké, Anthon brought out some classical learning to amuse his companion with.

“What a lovely body, and what splendid wings, real angels’ wings,” she exclaimed unheedingly.

They paused before the mutilated Botticelli frescos, and spent some minutes tracing out the dim outlines of figures, until he persisted in comparing her with the virgin being led to the altar. Then they idly sauntered into the neighbouring French rooms, those succeeding caverns of past echoes, each one with its special manner, its own atmosphere, its individual way of putting together the minute details of life. Here and there were copyists, lazily working, chiefly old women and men,—antiquated professors who had returned to the idols of their youth. The Madame Le Bruns, the Watteaus, and Chardonels came out on the new canvases with a metallic lustre, an indecency of corporeal resurrection.

Anthon made no pretence of looking at pictures. A few schools only appealed to him, and he liked the National Gallery on pay-days when you were likely to meet people you knew and had plenty of elbow-room. This nursery-maid expedition was purely for the girl’s sake; he watched her as she peered here and there and made audacious remarks. As they came out into the square hall beyond the Watteaus and Chardonels, Anthon caught sight of his uncle leaning over to examine a portrait. His manner was absorbed, as if the place had put a spell upon him and he was dreaming.

“Let’s go in here,” Walter Anthon said hurriedly. “The old man there is my uncle, and he is a dreadful bore.”

They found themselves in the bustle of the modern French room. Here were younger copyists, ragged boys and girls, dowdy women, who idled about from easel to easel gossiping in loud tones.

“I don’t believe he was a bore,” Miss Parker remarked thoughtfully, “he looked like such a nice old gentleman, and rather tired.”

“All my family are bores,” Anthon replied deprecatingly. Miss Parker opened her eyes in surprise. “Except possibly my sister—I don’t know what she will do with herself. She will probably do something idiotic, though. You ought to know her; you might do her some good, teach her to take herself more simply.”

“Do you think so?” Miss Parker asked timidly.

They were standing in a corner near a small Corot that was being painfully copied by an anæmic-looking young fellow.

“I never come here,” her companion continued irrelevantly, “without wondering what all these poor devils think they are doing”; he glanced about at the copyists.

“Perhaps they love it.” Then she changed the topic as if aware that Anthon did not show himself at his best in his criticism of life. “Do you know a Mr. Erard?”

“My uncle knows enough about him! Devilish clever, they say. He never got on well in London, though. Something of a cad, I fancy; but I am told he knows pictures. What do you know of him?”

“I met a younger brother once. He was in a mill and got sick. I visited the family and grew to know them. Peter Erard was such a nice fellow; too good for his place. He was twenty-two and had ten dollars a week. That was what the family lived on. They talked about this older brother in Paris, who seemed such a great man in their eyes.”

“My uncle helped him on, I believe. My mother is down on the old man for spending his money on the fellow. He doesn’t paint so much as he writes about art.”

The two passed across the great square room with its fervour of national art, its striking high-pitched tone, and nervous crowd.

“There’s Adela now,” Anthon exclaimed when they had entered the Long Gallery. Miss Parker looked quickly over to the tall young woman who was gazing perplexedly at a Titian. A meagre-looking man in eyeglasses was evidently discussing the picture, his fingers running up and down before the frame as if he were feeling the thing in its joints. Every now and then he applied a pair of small opera-glasses to some detail and then stepped back to his companion.

Walter Anthon walked over and spoke to his sister. She glanced up as if annoyed at any break in the mental condition, looked over to Miss Parker, measuring her swiftly, then nodded to her brother. A moment more they had crossed the room, and Anthon presented his sister.

“You were very good to come.” Miss Parker looked up at the other woman trustingly, as if to say, “Of course you are bored to be disturbed, but I want you to like me, and I guess we shall make it all right.”

“You seem so interested over there,” she continued, as Miss Anthon stood examining her without protesting or indulging in polite phrases. “Don’t let me break it up.”

“Mr. Erard was explaining to me why the picture is not a Titian. It is very complex, and I was absorbed. But I am glad to meet you.” She smiled back at the smaller woman. “Won’t you come over too, if you are interested in pictures. He took me first to a real Titian, and we spent nearly an hour over it until I got hold of some of Titian’s characteristics. Now we are examining this fellow.”

Erard merely nodded to the newcomers, and continued his broken monologue, largely to himself, partly to Miss Anthon.

“You see how stiffly this arm is drawn. You couldn’t move that arm: it doesn’t exist. Now in the real Titian I had a feeling in my right arm, a tightening up of the muscles as if they wanted to grasp the sword. This is wooden, like a piece of lath. I pass over the dead black: that may be due to the restorer. But in the application of light, Miss Anthon, you must feel how much inferior this is to the Titian. There the light was flecked on, boldly, in points. Here there is a hard, white line, mechanically traced over the corslet. The effect of the Titian is dazzling; this is metallic. And the head, Miss Anthon,—this is half a head. Just as if you should split a skull and veneer the features to the canvas. There is no back part. Now in the Titian you could feel the rounded head; you could pat it, and fill it in for yourself. There is air all about it.”

Miss Anthon followed his least motion, absorbed as over a mathematical problem in tracing his induction. “Yes, I see,” she murmured.

“Let’s have another look at the real Titian.” Erard moved off.

“Why! they still call this a Titian, too,” Miss Parker exclaimed incredulously. Erard shrugged his shoulders. “It will take them five years to get the label off. When I first came to Paris, they used to call this thing a Giorgione. Only last year they labelled it Bonifazio.”

“Then the labels aren’t right,” Miss Parker remarked naïvely.

“Sometimes,” Erard replied with a smile. Miss Parker remained absorbed in this new aspect of the world,—that it wasn’t always what it pretended to be. If a thing was said, printed; if it could be seen in a book,—why it must be so. If you were to suspect the evidence of your simple senses, what a bewildering world this would be!

Erard said little more when they came to the Titian. He studied it thoughtfully with his glasses, remarking at last. “The forefinger isn’t his, nor the thumb. Some bungler put that on. Well, you have seen enough for one day, Miss Anthon. Don’t look at any more pictures.”

Miss Parker made a little face of disappointed surprise: she was greatly interested in this new oracle. But Miss Anthon accepted his decision as final, though her robust zest had not been appeased. She turned to reëxamine Miss Parker; the two women chatted, as they passed down the crowded gallery instinctively testing each other, much as Erard had tested the pictures. When they reached the Salon Carré, they paused as if satisfied with their preliminary trial. Miss Anthon dismissed her companion with unceremonious directness. “I want to see you again, and I shall try to find you at Passy. Good-by.”

“She’s got pretty thick with him already,” Anthon remarked, as Erard disappeared with his sister. Miss Anthon was saying to her companion: “You have made me see so much!”

“Yes, you can see, when you are told to look,” Erard assented quizzically. “If you can keep on using your eyes and not your ‘intuitions,’ you may know something about pictures some day.”

“If you would—” she began humbly.

“Stuff!” Erard cut her short irritably. “I might teach to-day what I should deny to-morrow. Use your own wits, and hold your tongue. There is nothing so wonderful about art—in certain aspects, no Eleusinian mystery.”

She was afraid to make another remark lest she might blunder. What Mr. Simeon Erard judged to be stupid was coming to have an immense weight with her. She felt grateful to him for not snubbing her badly.

CHAPTER V

Miss Anthon continued to spend a few desultory hours in the fashionable studio behind the Madeleine. Erard’s raillery made the work appear more futile than ever, yet the engagement was a convenient excuse. At least once a day she could escape from Mrs. Anthon’s rasping companionship, and the dressmakers and milliners and aimless scurryings to and fro. Her uncle Sebastian had hinted, also, that the first sign of restlessness on her part would precipitate a move to Nice, or some other watering-place. And, so long as Erard condescended to take an interest in her case, she was loth to leave Paris.

On brisk days, when the pervasive fog was lifted up and shoved behind the surrounding hills, Miss Anthon gave Jerome’s the slip and snatched a few hours for long walks. In this way she had taken Wilbur out to the little house in Passy where Miss Molly Parker spent the burden of the day over Mrs. Ormiston Dexter’s children. Wilbur and Miss Parker had dashed into a surprising intimacy from the first. Miss Anthon watched enviously the skilful American girl lead Wilbur through his most stalwart paces.

One could not help being intimate with this young woman. She was like a green field in June; when she smiled one felt at home, as one did in nature.

“You are so immensely human,” Miss Anthon had been moved to say, as they left, taking Miss Parker’s hands and looking into her startled eyes.

“Why? I’m just like the others,” Miss Parker replied, troubled.

“With a difference,” Miss Anthon sighed. “It’s all straight to you; there is no doubt, no hesitation.”

“Oh, lots! I am awfully poor, and if it weren’t for Aunt Nan, I’d have to teach school or keep books or—get married.”

“Money is so unimportant!” the other girl announced disdainfully.

“Oh, my lady, nothing, a mere trifle. Comprenez, Monsieur Fifi,” Miss Parker mimicked the air of disdain, taking the little black spaniel into her lap. “C’est rien du tout, du tout, this matter of money. C’est une bagatelle, milady a dite. Que pensez-vous?”

“Au revoir, you child.” Miss Anthon kissed her.

“Bon jour, milady.”

Once out on the grey street, Miss Anthon turned to Wilbur for appreciation. “Well?”

“She’s a good girl,” Wilbur remarked abstractedly.

“That’s all!”

“That’s enough, isn’t it? She’s the sort to go through fire for one, and cook and sew and play with one, too. She’s about right.”

This explanation mollified Miss Anthon a little. “You make her out a companionable animal! Isn’t there anything more?”

“I guess so,” Wilbur replied, swinging his cane. Evidently neither Miss Parker nor women in general appealed to him just then. Miss Anthon watched his moody manner sympathetically. He touched her on sides little known to herself, awakening vague instincts, appealing to a primitive nature that did not lie far below the surface of her character. His practical sense, his imagination in material issues, his enjoyment of the hearty meal in daily life, pleased her. She liked the heavy frame, the square face with its ordinary plainness and healthy tints. His tolerance of fine-art tickled her humour. To him Erard’s profound seriousness over these matters of adornment was ridiculous; he never allowed any conventional appreciation to disturb him. The face value of the world, as he looked at it, was quite satisfactory.

The day was soft for December. Mount Julien towered up beyond the river, close at hand, its fortifications lightly covered by a mantle of snow. As they came out on the Place de l’Etoile the broad avenues seemed alive with cabs. The vivacity of the scene in which she had no real share rendered her sombre.

“You had a great chance,” she said at last, sighing unconsciously.

Wilbur smiled. “There are always plenty more.”

“For a man, for men such as you!”

“I guess for women, too.”

“Nonsense,” she took him up sharply. “A husband, or a vocation badly filled. What chance is there for me?” She gave her egotism rein recklessly.

“You are pretty well off.” Wilbur never wasted emotion over cultivated evils.

“Yes, too well! My brick-stock will always make me incapable of doing anything rash.”

“Oh!” Wilbur turned a more curious eye on his companion. “That’s the rub. You want more?”

“Or less.”

“Why don’t you try our new company? Dinsmore writes that the stock was issued last week. We have put only a little on the market.”

“Perhaps I shall want to take a hand. Could you get me some?”

“Earnest?”

She looked at him defiantly.

“You’ll have to ask your uncle. I know where you could get some—old Rantoul. But you had better stay in bricks. They’re safer.”

The two laughed and changed the subject. She had no very definite idea why she desired to take risks, to be richer than she was at present. It was a longing for the risk itself, as much as anything, for having a share in the palpitations of the world.

After déjeuner, when she broached the subject to her uncle, Sebastian Anthon pooh-poohed; his brother had trained him well. Brick-stock was a family god. To sell it, to dabble in other enterprises, was like trading in the family reputation. Opposition, however, made the girl truculent.

“Uncle Seb, did you never want to do anything but the safe thing?”

The old man smiled at her. “I always want the others to do the safe thing.”

“Do you think it would make a nice world if every one did the safe thing and rested there?”

“I don’t know,” he mused, “there are always plenty to do the unsafe thing, to make the ventures—and the world is not an over-nice place.”

She looked at him without replying.

“Adela, I am afraid you will explode some day. Put the explosion off, lessen it, deaden it. Some one is generally hurt when there is an explosion.”

She laughed at his figure. A few days later, however, the matter came up again unexpectedly. It was between the acts at the opera. Miss Anthon and Wilbur were walking up and down the foyer, having left Mrs. Anthon over a cooling drink.

“Do you want that stock?” Wilbur remarked abruptly. “When you first spoke of it the other day, it meant nothing to me,” he explained. “But Dinsmore has been acting queerly, booming things before they are ripe. Perhaps he thinks he can get out and take his profits before we have had a real trial and are on a safe footing. I must cut home at once, and try to keep my end up. Now Center and I control a third; Rantoul has another third. Dinsmore runs Rantoul. I must run Rantoul—you see?”

The girl nodded.

“This is only a side-show for Dinsmore,” Wilbur continued moodily, “but it’s my chance. I must have a hand on Rantoul; if I can’t bully him, buy him out.”

Miss Anthon understood swiftly the implications. She might become Wilbur’s partner. Boldly stated, such a proposition sounded indelicate, but this imputation amused her.

“How much would that take?”

“About fifty thousand.”

That was a sobering answer. One-third of her brick-stock, and bricks paid their assured twelve per cent. For a moment she trembled and was inclined to take refuge in Uncle Sebastian’s advice. Then her blood leapt again to her pulses. Some bars of Tristan surged through her, inciting her to venture, to play with the world somehow.

“Once in the saddle,” continued Wilbur, speciously, “and given a proper time for development, your fifty thousand ought to more than double.”

“And if I don’t do it,” her eyes questioned him.

“Why! I take my chances of finding somebody else who will,” he retaliated. His assurance in his own control of this world’s affairs made it impossible for him to realize the risk he was urging her to take.

“I’ll do it.” Miss Anthon caught her breath. “I will put fifty thousand in the company. I am of age, twenty-two. All my family are independent. I shall have enough left, in—in case—”

Wilbur looked puzzled at all this confession.

“And I do it because I believe in you. I want to share with you in your fight and feel that I count for something in this world.”

This was also a little vague and childish. Wilbur on his part showed no signs of obligation. He had treated her as openly as he would the best of his friends, and all at once they seemed to grow intimate. He unfolded swiftly his course of action, the reasons for his belief in the future. When the bell sounded, and they were back once more in the cramped loge, Miss Anthon felt indebted to him already for this chance of equality.

The next morning she announced her decision to her mother and uncle, almost indifferently, as they were eating breakfast in their private salon. Mrs. Anthon screamed. “Ada, you are crazed! Sebastian, she shan’t do it. There was my aunt’s husband—he sold his stock at 75 in the panic of eighty-three, against poor John’s advice—” It was a long story, this tale of the aunt’s husband—and well known in the family. Adela Anthon listened dreamily. She had always rather sympathized with Isaac Nash for daring to rebel against the autocrat.

Sebastian Anthon’s protest, backed up by business details, by unfavourable remarks on skyrocket companies, was more weighty. At last he said wearily: “Why do you want to bother with money matters? It’s a tiresome business at best, and when you are pleasantly out of it, all safe, why can’t you use your energies in some other way?”

“How?” the young woman gazed at him searchingly. He shifted uneasily and glanced at his sister-in-law. “In art?” Miss Anthon pursued, “in encouraging young artists instead of young financiers?”

“You have begun to explode, Adela,” the old man replied with gentle humour. “Be careful about it, and remember, it doesn’t pay, it doesn’t pay.”

“Does the other thing pay?”

He was silent.

When Wilbur came by appointment an hour later, Mrs. Anthon restrained herself with difficulty from breaking out in reproaches. Her daughter watched her closely, with a determined face. She had to content herself by rushing past Wilbur brusquely without a word of greeting or good-by.

Wilbur was not too blind to see that he was persona non grata; Sebastian Anthon’s chill politeness was enough to indicate the family attitude. But his absorption in the plans for the coming campaign made it easy to take Mrs. Anthon’s snub and the old man’s suspicious airs. When the two young people were left alone, Wilbur remarked apologetically,—

“You have been awfully plucky.”

“What about?” Miss Anthon replied shortly.

“The row your new investment has made. I am sorry your mother and uncle don’t see it the way we do; but, then, they couldn’t be expected to.”

“No, they couldn’t.”

“Well, let ’em wait a year,—wait six months,—and they’ll whistle a different tune. But you,” Wilbur looked at her with frank admiration, the first time he had done so without other preoccupation. He had all along taken it for granted that she was “a live girl,” as he would have called her in Michigan. Now she appeared to him as more than that; she was as full of venture, as keenly alive, as he, besides being competent in the woman’s part of knowing how to dress and to talk entertainingly on many topics. He appreciated the fact that she had been able to handle both him and Erard impartially. As they talked over the last details,—he was to leave that night for Southampton,—the idea of her courage and her cleverness brought out his admiration increasingly. She seemed to have mastered the fine details of the irrigation problem. She knew as well as he the ins and outs of Dinsmore’s character, and she gave him shrewd advice how to play his cards.

When all was talked out, Wilbur found it difficult to make the good-by. He was anxious to express many shades of feeling at once, and he felt incapable of the necessary delicacy.

“You have been a sandy friend,” he began.

“Stop,” she laughed. “Remember I am a partner, and we mustn’t have any sentiment.”

“That’s all right,” he rose to her point, “but if I need another spur in my side I’ve got it; and when we’ve made the game, I shall know who gave me the boost at the right moment.”

“And I—who made life interesting when it began to hang heavy; and to whom I owe my princely fortune!”

A woman could be very chummy with Wilbur without opening the way to emotional complexities. His education in a part of the world where women are accepted as comrades (with certain advantages of sex) made him companionable. He had always acted with young women on a frankly human basis at home, or in his university; he had seen so little of them in the conventional attitude that he was never the lover. Nevertheless, this good-by included long pauses. At last he said,—

“When the stock is selling at one twenty-five you will see me again. Not before. And,” he proceeded slowly, “then I shall have another scheme to propose.”

Miss Anthon was vexed with herself at her sudden blush.

“I haven’t any business to be talking now about—well— I can’t help, though, letting you know how it stands.”

“Perhaps it would be best not to complicate affairs,” Miss Anthon responded coldly, having gained control of the situation once more.

“No, no, but,” he added irrelevantly, “you are a great woman. You can get what you have a mind to. Good-by.”

He held out his hand. She shook it cordially, exhilarated by his frank appreciation. “And a quick return, shall I say?”

His face beamed; in a moment she was angry with herself for her unconsidered remark. “Why, of course I am anxious to hear that my stock is selling at one twenty-five. But perhaps a letter would do as well.”

Yet when he had gone, his solid presence and dominating assurance once out of the stuffy little room of rasping red velours, she had a strange sensation of emptiness. Wilbur’s connection with the ordinary facts of existence seemed so immediate and normal. She was more convinced than ever that she had done shrewdly in linking her fortunes with his. Whatever came of the dollars, she would be a larger woman from having grasped hands intimately with this plain person.

CHAPTER VI

After Wilbur’s departure for Chicago on his quest for two fortunes, Miss Anthon came to see much of Simeon Erard; she accepted him more easily, now that the young business man’s normal humour was not present to supply a good-natured criticism. Erard was training her, she told Mrs. Anthon when she was in a provoking mood. He was teaching her what to see and how to see it. More subtly, he was training her in values.

Erard had shown her the famous new picture by Degas; what was more exciting, had presented the painter himself. One clear day he had taken her out to a quiet studio at Passy, where she had seen a great master at work on a fresco for an American building. Again, they had visited old Sader at work on his marvellous gates, which had been on the way for a dozen years. Sader seemed to her a very undistinguished person,—thickset, with a long grizzled beard, and like a tradesman in his cotton blouse. The sculptor shut the door after them and locked it; and, as if to waive commonplaces, pointed to the famous gates. While she was speculating over these huge clay panels, which seemed to her roughly broken by scrolls and dashes, Sader mumbled, “One is Fire; the other Water—Dante.” Then Erard pointed here and there to strange little figures, flung on, stuck on carelessly, as if attached to the panels by chance when finished. Each figure, part worm, part man, seemed to writhe in agony. When her eyes wandered over the gates, they presented the blur she had first caught. She felt disappointed with herself and ashamed of her feeble imagination.

Erard and Sader came to her rescue by calling her attention to other pieces of work,—heads of children, fauns, half-completed allegories. In an adjoining room a young man, who looked like an intelligent workman, was slowly chiselling at the curls of a head. Erard pointed out another subject, which she thought was half-finished,—a delicate head emerging, as from a lake, out of the hard white block. The pure bold outline of the face, the features scraped to an ascetic thinness, were accentuated by the roughness of the unfinished marble. Near by was a group, a man and a woman in a convulsive embrace, half caught in the marble, half emergent, as if struggling in all their tense limbs to escape from the bondage of the stone.

“That’s his trick,” whispered Erard, when Sader had withdrawn to the gates. “A kind of impressionism in marble. He does a lot of these little things. You can call ’em what you like,—Adam and Eve, Paolo and Francesca, Life and Death.”

Miss Anthon looked puzzled and hopeless at his blasphemy. Authority still counted for much in her mind. The sculptor returned to bow them out, with the same fat, complacent smile with which he had welcomed them.

“The old fool will live to see his stuff despised,” Erard remarked carelessly, when they were on the street again. “They are all trying to tell their story in another language, straining to utter the impossible. But Matthews isn’t. He’s the American you made so much of in New York and Chicago. He doesn’t try any experiments,—he knows too much finance for that,—but he tells the whole story. Dancing girls and little boys and Venuses,—the usual outfit, as Wilbur would say.”

Then they crossed the Quarter to Matthews’ studio, which was a much more habitable place than Sader’s chilly shed. They found the sculptor entertaining a fashionably dressed woman and her escort. This Mrs. Warmister, whom Erard seemed to know rather intimately, was poking about the studio in a nervous manner, emitting now and then admiring exclamations. The young man with an impressive manner—Erard called him Salters—tried clumsily to follow her inconsequential chatter. The sculptor smoked a cigarette with a bored air, while engaging in the elusive talk. “This kind of person infests the studios,” Erard whispered to his companion, indicating the voluble Mrs. Warmister. “She booms Matthews, socially, and all that.”

After a short chat with Matthews, who made Miss Anthon feel that she was at an afternoon tea, they drove back towards the busy avenues along the river.

“He makes his ten thousand a year,” Erard commented. “Nothing there you couldn’t take in at a glance. The glorification of the obvious.” In the intervals of street-racket Erard’s phrases dropped like little pieces of hail. “But he is on a safer road than old Sader. He has stuck to the tradition of his art, not tried to paint with a chisel or to tell stories with a brush.”

Miss Anthon was depressed and silent. The conflict of theories and ideals, instead of exciting her, as at first, was subduing. “There’s something suggestive to me in Sader’s place, though,” she remonstrated at last. “We are all striving for some kind of freedom, for some escape, and his figures make you feel that impulse.”

When the cab stopped at her hotel, she remembered gratefully that Mrs. Anthon had sallied forth with an acquaintance for the afternoon.

“So you are searching for the means to express an unutterable longing?” Erard questioned mischievously, when they were alone.

She looked at him restlessly before replying, then said impulsively,—

“Shall I ever do anything? Tell me—what is there for me?”

She was leaning on her folded arms, her short coat thrown open negligently, her hat laid aside. Her black eyes gleamed with the intense interest of her appeal. Erard measured her face before he replied. Her hair waved back over her head in thick, rich brown masses. The upper part of the face was thin, mobile, but he noticed for the first time that the chin and jaw over-balanced the other features.

“Why are you anxious to get more than the phrases? to talk ‘art’ fluently when you are over there?”—he pointed vaguely across the boulevard. “You can do that now pretty well. When you are married, and have your palace in St. Louis or Chicago, you can pay ten times what it’s worth for the truck you buy of us. You can become the patroness.”

Miss Anthon drew back, hurt, vexed at her childish confidence. “At least I shall know what to look for in those I patronize. And I am not as simple as you seem to think.”

The sting pleased Erard. “You have come into the procession too late to do anything,” he continued more seriously. “You should have begun with your parents and your grandparents; they became unfortunately prosperous and lived where their senses were dulled.”

“Can I not make up for them?”

“Only in part. We Americans like to think, as your friend Wilbur does, that we can get anything on earth we want. Europe is our Sphinx; we never penetrate the riddle. While we are making toys, up springs some offspring of these ‘effete’ nations and accomplishes like a giant.”

“Some American women do succeed. There is Mrs. Ralston Brown,” Miss Anthon retorted defiantly. She had gone to the master for confession, and he dealt her out sneers. “And why were the salons last spring full of foreign work? Why do the French critics howl for protection for French artists?”

“Do you want to paint jaunty, slap-dash portraits like Mrs. Brown’s ‘A Poet’? Because if you do, I will promise you a picture in the Champ de Mars in five years.”

The bewildered expression settled down on her face again. Mrs. Ralston Brown was an instance of feminine ability of which she was proud.

“No, no,” Erard continued, sipping at his tea. “Don’t believe the journalists of life. Really we Americans have done nothing but journalism in the arts. Certainly many of the ‘smart’ things in the salons this season, every season, are signed with American names.”