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The Turmoil: A Novel

by Booth Tarkington · English · Gutenberg #1098 · 516,672 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Turmoil: A Novel

Author: Booth Tarkington


        
Release date: November 1, 1997 [eBook #1098]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1098

Credits: Produced by Lois Heiser, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TURMOIL: A NOVEL ***

THE TURMOIL

A NOVEL

By Booth Tarkington

1915.


To Laurel.



CHAPTER I

There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and
wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The stranger
must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt will be upon
him instantly. It will be upon him and within him, since he must breathe
it, and he may care for no further proof that wealth is here better
loved than cleanliness; but whether he cares or not, the negligently
tended streets incessantly press home the point, and so do the flecked
and grimy citizens. At a breeze he must smother in the whirlpools of
dust, and if he should decline at any time to inhale the smoke he has
the meager alternative of suicide.

The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more
riches. He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling
prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained
to one tune: “Wealth! I will get Wealth! I will make Wealth! I will sell
Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty, my garment shall be
dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean--but I
will get Wealth! There shall be no clean thing about me: my wife shall
be dirty and my child shall be dirty, but I will get Wealth!” And yet it
is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the giant really wants is
hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the four winds, for
wealth is in the smoke.

Not so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no
heaving, grimy city; there was but a pleasant big town of neighborly
people who had understanding of one another, being, on the whole, much
of the same type. It was a leisurely and kindly place--“homelike,” it
was called--and when the visitor had been taken through the State Asylum
for the Insane and made to appreciate the view of the cemetery from a
little hill, his host's duty as Baedeker was done. The good burghers
were given to jogging comfortably about in phaetons or in surreys for
a family drive on Sunday. No one was very rich; few were very poor; the
air was clean, and there was time to live.

But there was a spirit abroad in the land, and it was strong here as
elsewhere--a spirit that had moved in the depths of the American soil
and labored there, sweating, till it stirred the surface, rove the
mountains, and emerged, tangible and monstrous, the god of all good
American hearts--Bigness. And that god wrought the panting giant.

In the souls of the burghers there had always been the profound
longing for size. Year by year the longing increased until it became
an accumulated force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We must be Bigger!
Bigness means Money! And the thing began to happen; their longing became
a mighty Will. We must be Bigger! Bigger! Bigger! Get people here! Coax
them here! Bribe them! Swindle them into coming, if you must, but get
them! Shout them into coming! Deafen them into coming! Any kind of
people; all kinds of people! We must be Bigger! Blow! Boost! Brag!
Kill the fault-finder! Scream and bellow to the Most High: Bigness is
patriotism and honor! Bigness is love and life and happiness! Bigness is
Money! We want Bigness!

They got it. From all the states the people came; thinly at first, and
slowly, but faster and faster in thicker and thicker swarms as the quick
years went by. White people came, and black people and brown people
and yellow people; the negroes came from the South by the thousands and
thousands, multiplying by other thousands and thousands faster than
they could die. From the four quarters of the earth the people came,
the broken and the unbroken, the tame and the wild--Germans, Irish,
Italians, Hungarians, Scotch, Welsh, English, French, Swiss, Swedes,
Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russian Jews, Dalmatians, Armenians,
Rumanians, Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese, Chinese, Turks, and
every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there were no Eskimos
nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth might furnish failed
to swim and bubble in this crucible?

With Bigness came the new machinery and the rush; the streets began to
roar and rattle, the houses to tremble; the pavements were worn under
the tread of hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical look of
the faces was lost in something harder and warier; and a cockney
type began to emerge discernibly--a cynical young mongrel barbaric
of feature, muscular and cunning; dressed in good fabrics fashioned
apparently in imitation of the sketches drawn by newspaper comedians.
The female of his kind came with him--a pale girl, shoddy and a little
rouged; and they communicated in a nasal argot, mainly insolences and
elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people showed change: in
place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean, and not
unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors began to
be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much fostered by the
public journals.

The city piled itself high in the center, tower on tower for a nucleus,
and spread itself out over the plain, mile after mile; and in its
vitals, like benevolent bacilli contending with malevolent in the body
of a man, missions and refuges offered what resistance they might to the
saloons and all the hells that cities house and shelter. Temptation
and ruin were ready commodities on the market for purchase by the
venturesome; highwaymen walked the streets at night and sometimes
killed; snatching thieves were busy everywhere in the dusk; while
house-breakers were a common apprehension and frequent reality. Life
itself was somewhat safer from intentional destruction than it was in
medieval Rome during a faction war--though the Roman murderer was more
like to pay for his deed--but death or mutilation beneath the wheels lay
in ambush at every crossing.

The politicians let the people make all the laws they liked; it did
not matter much, and the taxes went up, which is good for politicians.
Law-making was a pastime of the people; nothing pleased them more.
Singular fermentation of their humor, they even had laws forbidding
dangerous speed. More marvelous still, they had a law forbidding smoke!
They forbade chimneys to smoke and they forbade cigarettes to smoke.
They made laws for all things and forgot them immediately; though
sometimes they would remember after a while, and hurry to make new laws
that the old laws should be enforced--and then forget both new and old.
Wherever enforcement threatened Money or Votes--or wherever it was too
much to bother--it became a joke. Influence was the law.

So the place grew. And it grew strong.

Straightway when he came, each man fell to the same worship:

  Give me of thyself, O Bigness:
  Power to get more power!
  Riches to get more riches!
  Give me of thy sweat that I may sweat more!
  Give me Bigness to get more Bigness to myself,
  O Bigness, for Thine is the Power and the Glory! And
       there is no end but Bigness, ever and for ever!



CHAPTER II

The Sheridan Building was the biggest skyscraper; the Sheridan Trust
Company was the biggest of its kind, and Sheridan himself had been the
biggest builder and breaker and truster and buster under the smoke. He
had come from a country cross-roads, at the beginning of the growth, and
he had gone up and down in the booms and relapses of that period; but
each time he went down he rebounded a little higher, until finally,
after a year of overwork and anxiety--the latter not decreased by a
chance, remote but possible, of recuperation from the former in the
penitentiary--he found himself on top, with solid substance under
his feet; and thereafter “played it safe.” But his hunger to get was
unabated, for it was in the very bones of him and grew fiercer.

He was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God's country, as he
called the smoke Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And
when soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. “It's
good! It's good!” he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. “Good, clean
soot; it's our life-blood, God bless it!” The smoke was one of his
great enthusiasms; he laughed at a committee of plaintive housewives who
called to beg his aid against it. “Smoke's what brings your husbands'
money home on Saturday night,” he told them, jovially. “Smoke may hurt
your little shrubberies in the front yard some, but it's the catarrhal
climate and the adenoids that starts your chuldern coughing. Smoke makes
the climate better. Smoke means good health: it makes the people wash
more. They have to wash so much they wash off the microbes. You go
home and ask your husbands what smoke puts in their pockets out o' the
pay-roll--and you'll come around next time to get me to turn out more
smoke instead o' chokin' it off!”

It was Narcissism in him to love the city so well; he saw his reflection
in it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich, strong, and
unquenchably optimistic. From the deepest of his inside all the way out
he believed it was the finest city in the world. “Finest” was his word.
He thought of it as his city as he thought of his family as his family;
and just as profoundly believed his city to be the finest city in
the world, so did he believe his family to be--in spite of his son
Bibbs--the finest family in the world. As a matter of fact, he knew
nothing worth knowing about either.

Bibbs Sheridan was a musing sort of boy, poor in health, and considered
the failure--the “odd one”--of the family. Born during that most
dangerous and anxious of the early years, when the mother fretted and
the father took his chance, he was an ill-nourished baby, and
grew meagerly, only lengthwise, through a feeble childhood. At his
christening he was committed for life to “Bibbs” mainly through lack of
imagination on his mother's part, for though it was her maiden name, she
had no strong affection for it; but it was “her turn” to name the baby,
and, as she explained later, she “couldn't think of anything else she
liked AT ALL!” She offered this explanation one day when the sickly boy
was nine and after a long fit of brooding had demanded some reason for
his name's being Bibbs. He requested then with unwonted vehemence to
be allowed to exchange names with his older brother, Roscoe Conkling
Sheridan, or with the oldest, James Sheridan, Junior, and upon being
refused went down into the cellar and remained there the rest of
that day. And the cook, descending toward dusk, reported that he had
vanished; but a search revealed that he was in the coal-pile, completely
covered and still burrowing. Removed by force and carried upstairs,
he maintained a cryptic demeanor, refusing to utter a syllable of
explanation, even under the lash. This obvious thing was wholly a
mystery to both parents; the mother was nonplussed, failed to trace and
connect; and the father regarded his son as a stubborn and mysterious
fool, an impression not effaced as the years went by.

At twenty-two, Bibbs was physically no more than the outer scaffolding
of a man, waiting for the building to begin inside--a long-shanked,
long-faced, rickety youth, sallow and hollow and haggard, dark-haired
and dark-eyed, with a peculiar expression of countenance; indeed, at
first sight of Bibbs Sheridan a stranger might well be solicitous, for
he seemed upon the point of tears. But to a slightly longer gaze, not
grief, but mirth, was revealed as his emotion; while a more searching
scrutiny was proportionately more puzzling--he seemed about to burst out
crying or to burst out laughing, one or the other, inevitably, but it
was impossible to decide which. And Bibbs never, on any occasion of his
life, either laughed aloud or wept.

He was a “disappointment” to his father. At least that was the parent's
word--a confirmed and established word after his first attempt to make
a “business man” of the boy. He sent Bibbs to “begin at the bottom and
learn from the ground up” in the machine-shop of the Sheridan Automatic
Pump Works, and at the end of six months the family physician sent Bibbs
to begin at the bottom and learn from the ground up in a sanitarium.

“You needn't worry, mamma,” Sheridan told his wife. “There's nothin' the
matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick. I put
him in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about as well
as the next man. Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty alarmists.
Does he think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh and blood? He
makes me tired!”

Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite disease
was incomprehensible to Sheridan. He had a genuine conviction that lack
of physical persistence in any task involving money must be due to some
subtle weakness of character itself, to some profound shiftlessness or
slyness. He understood typhoid fever, pneumonia, and appendicitis--one
had them, and either died or got over them and went back to work--but
when the word “nervous” appeared in a diagnosis he became honestly
suspicious: he had the feeling that there was something contemptible
about it, that there was a nigger in the wood-pile somewhere.

“Look at me,” he said. “Look at what I did at his age! Why, when I was
twenty years old, wasn't I up every morning at four o'clock choppin'
wood--yes! and out in the dark and the snow--to build a fire in a
country grocery store? And here Bibbs has to go and have a DOCTOR
because he can't--Pho! it makes me tired! If he'd gone at it like a man
he wouldn't be sick.”

He paced the bedroom--the usual setting for such parental
discussions--in his nightgown, shaking his big, grizzled head and
gesticulating to his bedded spouse. “My Lord!” he said. “If a little,
teeny bit o' work like this is too much for him, why, he ain't fit for
anything! It's nine-tenths imagination, and the rest of it--well, I
won't say it's deliberate, but I WOULD like to know just how much of
it's put on!”

“Bibbs didn't want the doctor,” said Mrs. Sheridan. “It was when he was
here to dinner that night, and noticed how he couldn't eat anything.
Honey, you better come to bed.”

“Eat!” he snorted. “Eat! It's work that makes men eat! And it's
imagination that keeps people from eatin'. Busy men don't get time for
that kind of imagination; and there's another thing you'll notice
about good health, if you'll take the trouble to look around you Mrs.
Sheridan: busy men haven't got time to be sick and they don't GET sick.
You just think it over and you'll find that ninety-nine per cent. of the
sick people you know are either women or loafers. Yes, ma'am!”

“Honey,” she said again, drowsily, “you better come to bed.”

“Look at the other boys,” her husband bade her. “Look at Jim and Roscoe.
Look at how THEY work! There isn't a shiftless bone in their bodies.
Work never made Jim or Roscoe sick. Jim takes half the load off my
shoulders already. Right now there isn't a harder-workin', brighter
business man in this city than Jim. I've pushed him, but he give me
something to push AGAINST. You can't push 'nervous dyspepsia'! And look
at Roscoe; just LOOK at what that boy's done for himself, and barely
twenty-seven years old--married, got a fine wife, and ready to build
for himself with his own money, when I put up the New House for you and
Edie.”

“Papa, you'll catch cold in your bare feet,” she murmured. “You better
come to bed.”

“And I'm just as proud of Edie, for a girl,” he continued, emphatically,
“as I am of Jim and Roscoe for boys. She'll make some man a mighty good
wife when the time comes. She's the prettiest and talentedest girl in
the United States! Look at that poem she wrote when she was in school
and took the prize with; it's the best poem I ever read in my life, and
she'd never even tried to write one before. It's the finest thing I
ever read, and R. T. Bloss said so, too; and I guess he's a good enough
literary judge for me--turns out more advertisin' liter'cher than any
man in the city. I tell you she's smart! Look at the way she worked me
to get me to promise the New House--and I guess you had your finger
in that, too, mamma! This old shack's good enough for me, but you and
little Edie 'll have to have your way. I'll get behind her and push her
the same as I will Jim and Roscoe. I tell you I'm mighty proud o' them
three chuldern! But Bibbs--” He paused, shaking his head. “Honest,
mamma, when I talk to men that got ALL their boys doin' well and worth
their salt, why, I have to keep my mind on Jim and Roscoe and forget
about Bibbs.”

Mrs. Sheridan tossed her head fretfully upon the pillow. “You did the
best you could, papa,” she said, impatiently, “so come to bed and quit
reproachin' yourself for it.”

He glared at her indignantly. “Reproachin' myself!” he snorted. “I ain't
doin' anything of the kind! What in the name o' goodness would I want
to reproach myself for? And it wasn't the 'best I could,' either. It was
the best ANYBODY could! I was givin' him a chance to show what was
in him and make a man of himself--and here he goes and gets 'nervous
dyspepsia' on me!”

He went to the old-fashioned gas-fixture, turned out the light, and
muttered his way morosely into bed.

“What?” said his wife, crossly, bothered by a subsequent mumbling.

“More like hook-worm, I said,” he explained, speaking louder. “I don't
know what to do with him!”



CHAPTER III

Beginning at the beginning and learning from the ground up was a long
course for Bibbs at the sanitarium, with milk and “zwieback” as the
basis of instruction; and the months were many and tiresome before he
was considered near enough graduation to go for a walk leaning on a
nurse and a cane. These and subsequent months saw the planning, the
building, and the completion of the New House; and it was to that abode
of Bigness that Bibbs was brought when the cane, without the nurse, was
found sufficient to his support.

Edith met him at the station. “Well, well, Bibbs!” she said, as he came
slowly through the gates, the last of all the travelers from that train.
She gave his hand a brisk little shake, averting her eyes after a quick
glance at him, and turning at once toward the passage to the street. “Do
you think they ought to've let you come? You certainly don't look well!”

“But I certainly do look better,” he returned, in a voice as slow as
his gait; a drawl that was a necessity, for when Bibbs tried to speak
quickly he stammered. “Up to about a month ago it took two people to see
me. They had to get me in a line between 'em!”

Edith did not turn her eyes directly toward him again, after her first
quick glance; and her expression, in spite of her, showed a faint,
troubled distaste, the look of a healthy person pressed by some
obligation of business to visit a “bad” ward in a hospital. She was
nineteen, fair and slim, with small, unequal features, but a prettiness
of color and a brilliancy of eyes that created a total impression close
upon beauty. Her movements were eager and restless: there was something
about her, as kind old ladies say, that was very sweet; and there was
something that was hurried and breathless. This was new to Bibbs; it was
a perceptible change since he had last seen her, and he bent upon her
a steady, whimsical scrutiny as they stood at the curb, waiting for an
automobile across the street to disengage itself from the traffic.

“That's the new car,” she said. “Everything's new. We've got four now,
besides Jim's. Roscoe's got two.”

“Edith, you look--” he began, and paused.

“Oh, WE're all well,” she said, briskly; and then, as if something in
his tone had caught her as significant, “Well, HOW do I look, Bibbs?”

“You look--” He paused again, taking in the full length of her--her trim
brown shoes, her scant, tapering, rough skirt, and her coat of brown
and green, her long green tippet and her mad little rough hat in the mad
mode--all suited to the October day.

“How do I look?” she insisted.

“You look,” he answered, as his examination ended upon an incrusted
watch of platinum and enamel at her wrist, “you look--expensive!” That
was a substitute for what he intended to say, for her constraint and
preoccupation, manifested particularly in her keeping her direct
glance away from him, did not seem to grant the privilege of impulsive
intimacies.

“I expect I am!” she laughed, and sidelong caught the direction of his
glance. “Of course I oughtn't to wear it in the daytime--it's an evening
thing, for the theater--but my day wrist-watch is out of gear. Bobby
Lamhorn broke it yesterday; he's a regular rowdy sometimes. Do you want
Claus to help you in?”

“Oh no,” said Bibbs. “I'm alive.” And after a fit of panting subsequent
to his climbing into the car unaided, he added, “Of course, I have to
TELL people!”

“We only got your telegram this morning,” she said, as they began to
move rapidly through the “wholesale district” neighboring the station.
“Mother said she'd hardly expected you this month.”

“They seemed to be through with me up there in the country,” he
explained, gently. “At least they said they were, and they wouldn't keep
me any longer, because so many really sick people wanted to get in. They
told me to go home--and I didn't have any place else to go. It'll be all
right, Edith; I'll sit in the woodshed until after dark every day.”

“Pshaw!” She laughed nervously. “Of course we're all of us glad to have
you back.”

“Yes?” he said. “Father?”

“Of course! Didn't he write and tell you to come home?” She did not turn
to him with the question. All the while she rode with her face directly
forward.

“No,” he said; “father hasn't written.”

She flushed a little. “I expect I ought to've written sometime, or one
of the boys--”

“Oh no; that was all right.”

“You can't think how busy we've all been this year, Bibbs. I often
planned to write--and then, just as I was going to, something would turn
up. And I'm sure it's been just the same way with Jim and Roscoe. Of
course we knew mamma was writing often and--”

“Of course!” he said, readily. “There's a chunk of coal fallen on your
glove, Edith. Better flick it off before it smears. My word! I'd almost
forgotten how sooty it is here.”

“We've been having very bright weather this month--for us.” She blew the
flake of soot into the air, seeming relieved.

He looked up at the dingy sky, wherein hung the disconsolate sun like
a cold tin pan nailed up in a smoke-house by some lunatic, for a
decoration. “Yes,” said Bibbs. “It's very gay.” A few moments later, as
they passed a corner, “Aren't we going home?” he asked.

“Why, yes! Did you want to go somewhere else first?”

“No. Your new driver's taking us out of the way, isn't he?”

“No. This is right. We're going straight home.”

“But we've passed the corner. We always turned--”

“Good gracious!” she cried. “Didn't you know we'd moved? Didn't you know
we were in the New House?”

“Why, no!” said Bibbs. “Are you?”

“We've been there a month! Good gracious! Didn't you know--” She broke
off, flushing again, and then went on hastily: “Of course, mamma's never
been so busy in her life; we ALL haven't had time to do anything but
keep on the hop. Mamma couldn't even come to the station to-day. Papa's
got some of his business friends and people from around the
OLD-house neighborhood coming to-night for a big dinner and
'house-warming'--dreadful kind of people--but mamma's got it all on her
hands. She's never sat down a MINUTE; and if she did, papa would have
her up again before--”

“Of course,” said Bibbs. “Do you like the new place, Edith?”

“I don't like some of the things father WOULD have in it, but it's the
finest house in town, and that ought to be good enough for me! Papa
bought one thing I like--a view of the Bay of Naples in oil that's
perfectly beautiful; it's the first thing you see as you come in the
front hall, and it's eleven feet long. But he would have that old
fruit picture we had in the Murphy Street house hung up in the new
dining-room. You remember it--a table and a watermelon sliced open,
and a lot of rouged-looking apples and some shiny lemons, with two dead
prairie-chickens on a chair? He bought it at a furniture-store years and
years ago, and he claims it's a finer picture than any they saw in the
museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it's horribly out of
date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I caught Bobby Lamhorn
giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too, with Bobby, and then told
papa she agreed with him about its being such a fine thing, and said he
did just right to insist on having it where he wanted it. She makes me
tired! Sibyl!”

Edith's first constraint with her brother, amounting almost to
awkwardness, vanished with this theme, though she still kept her full
gaze always to the front, even in the extreme ardor of her denunciation
of her sister-in-law.

“SIBYL!” she repeated, with such heat and vigor that the name seemed
to strike fire on her lips. “I'd like to know why Roscoe couldn't have
married somebody from HERE that would have done us some good! He could
have got in with Bobby Lamhorn years ago just as well as now, and
Bobby'd have introduced him to the nicest girls in town, but instead of
that he had to go and pick up this Sibyl Rink! I met some awfully
nice people from her town when mamma and I were at Atlantic City, last
spring, and not one had ever heard of the Rinks! Not even HEARD of 'em!”

“I thought you were great friends with Sibyl,” Bibbs said.

“Up to the time I found her out!” the sister returned, with continuing
vehemence. “I've found out some things about Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan
lately--”

“It's only lately?”

“Well--” Edith hesitated, her lips setting primly. “Of course, I
always did see that she never cared the snap of her little finger about
ROSCOE!”

“It seems,” said Bibbs, in laconic protest, “that she married him.”

The sister emitted a shrill cry, to be interpreted as contemptuous
laughter, and, in her emotion, spoke too impulsively: “Why, she'd have
married YOU!”

“No, no,” he said; “she couldn't be that bad!”

“I didn't mean--” she began, distressed. “I only meant--I didn't mean--”

“Never mind, Edith,” he consoled her. “You see, she couldn't have
married me, because I didn't know her; and besides, if she's as
mercenary as all that she'd have been too clever. The head doctor even
had to lend me the money for my ticket home.”

“I didn't mean anything unpleasant about YOU,” Edith babbled. “I only
meant I thought she was the kind of girl who was so simply crazy to
marry somebody she'd have married anybody that asked her.”

“Yes, yes,” said Bibbs, “it's all straight.” And, perceiving that
his sister's expression was that of a person whose adroitness has set
matters perfectly to rights, he chuckled silently.

“Roscoe's perfectly lovely to her,” she continued, a moment later. “Too
lovely! If he'd wake up a little and lay down the law, some day, like a
MAN, I guess she'd respect him more and learn to behave herself!”

“'Behave'?”

“Oh, well, I mean she's so insincere,” said Edith, characteristically
evasive when it came to stating the very point to which she had led, and
in this not unique of her sex.

Bibbs contented himself with a non-committal gesture. “Business
is crawling up the old streets,” he said, his long, tremulous hand
indicating a vasty structure in course of erection. “The boarding-houses
come first and then the--”

“That isn't for shops,” she informed him. “That's a new investment of
papa's--the 'Sheridan Apartments.'”

“Well, well,” he murmured. “I supposed 'Sheridan' was almost well enough
known here already.”

“Oh, we're well enough known ABOUT!” she said, impatiently. “I guess
there isn't a man, woman, child, or nigger baby in town that doesn't
know who we are. But we aren't in with the right people.”

“No!” he exclaimed. “Who's all that?”

“Who's all what?”

“The 'right people.'”

“You know what I mean: the best people, the old families--the people
that have the real social position in this town and that know they've
got it.”

Bibbs indulged in his silent chuckle again; he seemed greatly amused. “I
thought that the people who actually had the real what-you-may-call-it
didn't know it,” he said. “I've always understood that it was very
unsatisfactory, because if you thought about it you didn't have it, and
if you had it you didn't know it.”

“That's just bosh,” she retorted. “They know it in this town, all right!
I found out a lot of things, long before we began to think of building
out in this direction. The right people in this town aren't always the
society-column ones, and they mix around with outsiders, and they don't
all belong to any one club--they're taken in all sorts into all their
clubs--but they're a clan, just the same; and they have the clan feeling
and they're just as much We, Us and Company as any crowd you read about
anywhere in the world. Most of 'em were here long before papa came, and
the grandfathers of the girls of my age knew each other, and--”

“I see,” Bibbs interrupted, gravely. “Their ancestors fled together
from many a stricken field, and Crusaders' blood flows in their veins. I
always understood the first house was built by an old party of the name
of Vertrees who couldn't get along with Dan'l Boone, and hurried away to
these parts because Dan'l wanted him to give back a gun he'd lent him.”

Edith gave a little ejaculation of alarm. “You mustn't repeat that
story, Bibbs, even if it's true. The Vertreeses are THE best family, and
of course the very oldest here; they were an old family even before
Mary Vertrees's great-great-grandfather came west and founded this
settlement. He came from Lynn, Massachusetts, and they have relatives
there YET--some of the best people in Lynn!”

“No!” exclaimed Bibbs, incredulously.

“And there are other old families like the Vertreeses,” she went on,
not heeding him; “the Lamhorns and the Kittersbys and the J. Palmerston
Smiths--”

“Strange names to me,” he interrupted. “Poor things! None of them have
my acquaintance.”

“No, that's just it!” she cried. “And papa had never even heard the name
of Vertrees! Mrs. Vertrees went with some anti-smoke committee to see
him, and he told her that smoke was what made her husband bring home his
wages from the pay-roll on Saturday night! HE told us about it, and I
thought I just couldn't live through the night, I was so ashamed! Mr.
Vertrees has always lived on his income, and papa didn't know him, of
course. They're the stiffist, most elegant people in the whole town. And
to crown it all, papa went and bought the next lot to the old Vertrees
country mansion--it's in the very heart of the best new residence
district now, and that's where the New House is, right next door to
them--and I must say it makes their place look rather shabby! I met Mary
Vertrees when I joined the Mission Service Helpers, but she never did
any more than just barely bow to me, and since papa's break I doubt if
she'll do that! They haven't called.”

“And you think if I spread this gossip about Vertrees the First stealing
Dan'l Boone's gun, the chances that they WILL call--”

“Papa knows what a break he made with Mrs. Vertrees. I made him
understand that,” said Edith, demurely, “and he's promised to try and
meet Mr. Vertrees and be nice to him. It's just this way: if we don't
know THEM, it's practically no use in our having built the New House;
and if we DO know them and they're decent to us, we're right with the
right people. They can do the whole thing for us. Bobby Lamhorn told
Sibyl he was going to bring his mother to call on her and on mamma, but
it was weeks ago, and I notice he hasn't done it; and if Mrs. Vertrees
decides not to know us, I'm darn sure Mrs Lamhorn'll never come. That's
ONE thing Sibyl didn't manage! She SAID Bobby offered to bring his
mother--”

“You say he is a friend of Roscoe's?” Bibbs asked.

“Oh, he's a friend of the whole family,” she returned, with a petulance
which she made an effort to disguise. “Roscoe and he got acquainted
somewhere, and they take him to the theater about every other night.
Sibyl has him to lunch, too, and keeps--” She broke off with an angry
little jerk of the head. “We can see the New House from the second
corner ahead. Roscoe has built straight across the street from us, you
know. Honestly, Sibyl makes me think of a snake, sometimes--the way
she pulls the wool over people's eyes! She honeys up to papa and gets
anything in the world she wants out of him, and then makes fun of him
behind his back--yes, and to his face, but HE can't see it! She got
him to give her a twelve-thousand-dollar porch for their house after it
was--”

“Good heavens!” said Bibbs, staring ahead as they reached the corner and
the car swung to the right, following a bend in the street. “Is that the
New House?”

“Yes. What do you think of it?”

“Well,” he drawled, “I'm pretty sure the sanitarium's about half a size
bigger; I can't be certain till I measure.”

And a moment later, as they entered the driveway, he added, seriously:
“But it's beautiful!”



CHAPTER IV

It was gray stone, with long roofs of thick green slate. An architect
who loved the milder “Gothic motives” had built what he liked: it was to
be seen at once that he had been left unhampered, and he had wrought a
picture out of his head into a noble and exultant reality. At the same
time a landscape-designer had played so good a second, with ready-made
accessories of screen, approach and vista, that already whatever look
of newness remained upon the place was to its advantage, as showing at
least one thing yet clean under the grimy sky. For, though the smoke was
thinner in this direction, and at this long distance from the heart
of the town, it was not absent, and under tutelage of wind and weather
could be malignant even here, where cows had wandered in the meadows and
corn had been growing not ten years gone.

Altogether, the New House was a success. It was one of those architects'
successes which leave the owners veiled in privacy; it revealed nothing
of the people who lived in it save that they were rich. There are houses
that cannot be detached from their own people without protesting: every
inch of mortar seems to mourn the separation, and such a house--no
matter what be done to it--is ever murmurous with regret, whispering the
old name sadly to itself unceasingly. But the New House was of a kind
to change hands without emotion. In our swelling cities, great places
of its type are useful as financial gauges of the business tides;
rich families, one after another, take title and occupy such houses as
fortunes rise and fall--they mark the high tide. It was impossible to
imagine a child's toy wagon left upon a walk or driveway of the New
House, and yet it was--as Bibbs rightly called it--“beautiful.”

What the architect thought of the “Golfo di Napoli,” which hung in its
vast gold revel of rococo frame against the gray wood of the hall, is to
be conjectured--perhaps he had not seen it.

“Edith, did you say only eleven feet?” Bibbs panted, staring at it, as
the white-jacketed twin of a Pullman porter helped him to get out of his
overcoat.

“Eleven without the frame,” she explained. “It's splendid, don't you
think? It lightens things up so. The hall was kind of gloomy before.”

“No gloom now!” said Bibbs.

“This statue in the corner is pretty, too,” she remarked. “Mamma and I
bought that.” And Bibbs turned at her direction to behold, amid a
grove of tubbed palms, a “life-size,” black-bearded Moor, of a plastic
composition painted with unappeasable gloss and brilliancy. Upon his
chocolate head he wore a gold turban; in his hand he held a gold-tipped
spear; and for the rest, he was red and yellow and black and silver.

“Hallelujah!” was the sole comment of the returned wanderer, and Edith,
saying she would “find mamma,” left him blinking at the Moor. Presently,
after she had disappeared, he turned to the colored man who stood
waiting, Bibbs's traveling-bag in his hand. “What do YOU think of it?”
 Bibbs asked, solemnly.

“Gran'!” replied the servitor. “She mighty hard to dus'. Dus' git in all
'em wrinkles. Yessuh, she mighty hard to dus'.”

“I expect she must be,” said Bibbs, his glance returning reflectively
to the black bull beard for a moment. “Is there a place anywhere I could
lie down?”

“Yessuh. We got one nem spare rooms all fix up fo' you, suh. Right up
staihs, suh. Nice room.”

He led the way, and Bibbs followed slowly, stopping at intervals to
rest, and noting a heavy increase in the staff of service since the
exodus from the “old” house. Maids and scrubwomen were at work under the
patently nominal direction of another Pullman porter, who was profoundly
enjoying his own affectation of being harassed with care.

“Ev'ything got look spick an' span fo' the big doin's to-night,” Bibbs's
guide explained, chuckling. “Yessuh, we got big doin's to-night! Big
doin's!”

The room to which he conducted his lagging charge was furnished in
every particular like a room in a new hotel; and Bibbs found it
pleasant--though, indeed, any room with a good bed would have
seemed pleasant to him after his journey. He stretched himself flat
immediately, and having replied “Not now” to the attendant's offer to
unpack the bag, closed his eyes wearily.

White-jacket, racially sympathetic, lowered the window-shades and made
an exit on tiptoe, encountering the other white-jacket--the harassed
overseer--in the hall without. Said the emerging one: “He mighty shaky,
Mist' Jackson. Drop right down an' shet his eyes. Eyelids all black.
Rich folks gotta go same as anybody else. Anybody ast me if I change
'ith 'at ole boy--No, suh! Le'm keep 'is money; I keep my black skin an'
keep out the ground!”

Mr. Jackson expressed the same preference. “Yessuh, he look tuh me like
somebody awready laid out,” he concluded. And upon the stairway landing,
near by, two old women, on all-fours at their work, were likewise
pessimistic.

“Hech!” said one, lamenting in a whisper. “It give me a turn to see him
go by--white as wax an' bony as a dead fish! Mrs. Cronin, tell me: d'it
make ye kind o' sick to look at um?”

“Sick? No more than the face of a blessed angel already in heaven!”

“Well,” said the other, “I'd a b'y o' me own come home t' die once--”
 She fell silent at a rustling of skirts in the corridor above them.

It was Mrs. Sheridan hurrying to greet her son.

She was one of those fat, pink people who fade and contract with age
like drying fruit; and her outside was a true portrait of her. Her
husband and her daughter had long ago absorbed her. What intelligence
she had was given almost wholly to comprehending and serving those
two, and except in the presence of one of them she was nearly always
absent-minded. Edith lived all day with her mother, as daughters do; and
Sheridan so held his wife to her unity with him that she had long ago
become unconscious of her existence as a thing separate from his. She
invariably perceived his moods, and nursed him through them when she
did not share them; and she gave him a profound sympathy with the inmost
spirit and purpose of his being, even though she did not comprehend it
and partook of it only as a spectator. They had known but one actual
altercation in their lives, and that was thirty years past, in the early
days of Sheridan's struggle, when, in order to enhance the favorable
impression he believed himself to be making upon some capitalists, he
had thought it necessary to accompany them to a performance of “The
Black Crook.” But she had not once referred to this during the last ten
years.

Mrs. Sheridan's manner was hurried and inconsequent; her clothes rustled
more than other women's clothes; she seemed to wear too many at a time
and to be vaguely troubled by them, and she was patting a skirt down
over some unruly internal dissension at the moment she opened Bibbs's
door.

At sight of the recumbent figure she began to close the door softly,
withdrawing, but the young man had heard the turning of the knob and the
rustling of skirts, and he opened his eyes.

“Don't go, mother,” he said. “I'm not asleep.” He swung his long legs
over the side of the bed to rise, but she set a hand on his shoulder,
restraining him; and he lay flat again.

“No,” she said, bending over to kiss his cheek, “I just come for a
minute, but I want to see how you seem. Edith said--”

“Poor Edith!” he murmured. “She couldn't look at me. She--”

“Nonsense!” Mrs. Sheridan, having let in the light at a window, came
back to the bedside. “You look a great deal better than what you did
before you went to the sanitarium, anyway. It's done you good; a body
can see that right away. You need fatting up, of course, and you haven't
got much color--”

“No,” he said, “I haven't much color.”

“But you will have when you get your strength back.”

“Oh yes!” he responded, cheerfully. “THEN I will.”

“You look a great deal better than what I expected.”

“Edith must have a great vocabulary!” he chuckled.

“She's too sensitive,” said Mrs. Sheridan, “and it makes her exaggerate
a little. What about your diet?”

“That's all right. They told me to eat anything.”

“Anything at all?”

“Well--anything I could.”

“That's good,” she said, nodding. “They mean for you just to build up
your strength. That's what they told me the last time I went to see you
at the sanitarium. You look better than what you did then, and that's
only a little time ago. How long was it?”

“Eight months, I think.”

“No, it couldn't be. I know it ain't THAT long, but maybe it was
longer'n I thought. And this last month or so I haven't had scarcely
even time to write more than just a line to ask how you were gettin'
along, but I told Edith to write, the weeks I couldn't, and I asked
Jim to, too, and they both said they would, so I suppose you've kept up
pretty well on the home news.”

“Oh yes.”

“What I think you need,” said the mother, gravely, “is to liven up a
little and take an interest in things. That's what papa was sayin' this
morning, after we got your telegram; and that's what'll stimilate your
appetite, too. He was talkin' over his plans for you--”

“Plans?” Bibbs, turning on his side, shielded his eyes from the light
with his hand, so that he might see her better. “What--” He paused.
“What plans is he making for me, mother?”

She turned away, going back to the window to draw down the shade.
“Well, you better talk it over with HIM,” she said, with perceptible
nervousness. “He better tell you himself. I don't feel as if I had any
call, exactly, to go into it; and you better get to sleep now, anyway.”
 She came and stood by the bedside once more. “But you must remember,
Bibbs, whatever papa does is for the best. He loves his chuldern and
wants to do what's right by ALL of 'em--and you'll always find he's
right in the end.”

He made a little gesture of assent, which seemed to content her; and
she rustled to the door, turning to speak again after she had opened it.
“You get a good nap, now, so as to be all rested up for to-night.”

“You--you mean--he--” Bibbs stammered, having begun to speak too
quickly. Checking himself, he drew a long breath, then asked, quietly,
“Does father expect me to come down-stairs this evening?”

“Well, I think he does,” she answered. “You see, it's the
'house-warming,' as he calls it, and he said he thinks all our chuldern
ought to be around us, as well as the old friends and other folks. It's
just what he thinks you need--to take an interest and liven up. You
don't feel too bad to come down, do you?”

“Mother?”

“Well?”

“Take a good look at me,” he said.

“Oh, see here!” she cried, with brusque cheerfulness. “You're not so bad
off as you think you are, Bibbs. You're on the mend; and it won't do you
any harm to please your--”

“It isn't that,” he interrupted. “Honestly, I'm only afraid it might
spoil somebody's appetite. Edith--”

“I told you the child was too sensitive,” she interrupted, in turn.
“You're a plenty good-lookin' enough young man for anybody! You look
like you been through a long spell and begun to get well, and that's all
there is to it.”

“All right. I'll come to the party. If the rest of you can stand it, I
can!”

“It 'll do you good,” she returned, rustling into the hall. “Now take
a nap, and I'll send one o' the help to wake you in time for you to get
dressed up before dinner. You go to sleep right away, now, Bibbs!”

Bibbs was unable to obey, though he kept his eyes closed. Something
she had said kept running in his mind, repeating itself over and over
interminably. “His plans for you--his plans for you--his plans for
you--his plans for you--” And then, taking the place of “his plans for
you,” after what seemed a long, long while, her flurried voice came
back to him insistently, seeming to whisper in his ear: “He loves his
chuldern--he loves his chuldern--he loves his chuldern”--“you'll find
he's always right--you'll find he's always right--” Until at last, as he
drifted into the state of half-dreams and distorted realities, the voice
seemed to murmur from beyond a great black wing that came out of the
wall and stretched over his bed--it was a black wing within the room,
and at the same time it was a black cloud crossing the sky, bridging the
whole earth from pole to pole. It was a cloud of black smoke, and out
of the heart of it came a flurried voice whispering over and over, “His
plans for you--his plans for you--his plans for you--” And then there
was nothing.

He woke refreshed, stretched himself gingerly--as one might have a care
against too quick or too long a pull upon a frayed elastic--and, getting
to his feet, went blinking to the window and touched the shade so that
it flew up, letting in a pale sunset.

He looked out into the lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the
next house, as Edith's grandiose phrase came to mind, “the old Vertrees
country mansion.” It stood in a broad lawn which was separated from the
Sheridans' by a young hedge; and it was a big, square, plain old box
of a house with a giant salt-cellar atop for a cupola. Paint had been
spared for a long time, and no one could have put a name to the color of
it, but in spite of that the place had no look of being out at heel, and
the sward was as neatly trimmed as the Sheridans' own.

The separating hedge ran almost beneath Bibbs's window--for this wing of
the New House extended here almost to the edge of the lot--and, directly
opposite the window, the Vertreeses' lawn had been graded so as to make
a little knoll upon which stood a small rustic “summer-house.” It was
almost on a level with Bibbs's window and not thirty feet away; and
it was easy for him to imagine the present dynasty of Vertreeses
in grievous outcry when they had found this retreat ruined by the
juxtaposition of the parvenu intruder. Probably the “summer-house” was
pleasant and pretty in summer. It had the look of a place wherein little
girls had played for a generation or so with dolls and “housekeeping,”
 or where a lovely old lady might come to read something dull on warm
afternoons; but now in the thin light it was desolate, the color of
dust, and hung with haggard vines which had lost their leaves.

Bibbs looked at it with grave sympathy, probably feeling some kinship
with anything so dismantled; then he turned to a cheval-glass beside the
window and paid himself the dubious tribute of a thorough inspection. He
looked the mirror up and down, slowly, repeatedly, but came in the end
to a long and earnest scrutiny of the face. Throughout this cryptic
seance his manner was profoundly impersonal; he had the air of an
entomologist intent upon classifying a specimen, but finally he appeared
to become pessimistic. He shook his head solemnly; then gazed again
and shook his head again, and continued to shake it slowly, in complete
disapproval.

“You certainly are one horrible sight!” he said, aloud.

And at that he was instantly aware of an observer. Turning quickly,
he was vouchsafed the picture of a charming lady, framed in a
rustic aperture of the “summer-house” and staring full into his
window--straight into his eyes, too, for the infinitesimal fraction of
a second before the flashingly censorious withdrawal of her own.
Composedly, she pulled several dead twigs from a vine, the manner of her
action conveying a message or proclamation to the effect that she was in
the summer-house for the sole purpose of such-like pruning and tending,
and that no gentleman could suppose her presence there to be due to any
other purpose whatsoever, or that, being there on that account, she
had allowed her attention to wander for one instant in the direction of
things of which she was in reality unconscious.

Having pulled enough twigs to emphasize her unconsciousness--and at the
same time her disapproval--of everything in the nature of a Sheridan
or belonging to a Sheridan, she descended the knoll with maintained
composure, and sauntered toward a side-door of the country mansion of
the Vertreeses. An elderly lady, bonneted and cloaked, opened the door
and came to meet her.

“Are you ready, Mary? I've been looking for you. What were you doing?”

“Nothing. Just looking into one of Sheridans' windows,” said Mary
Vertrees. “I got caught at it.”

“Mary!” cried her mother. “Just as we were going to call! Good heavens!”

“We'll go, just the same,” the daughter returned. “I suppose those women
would be glad to have us if we'd burned their house to the ground.”

“But WHO saw you?” insisted Mrs. Vertrees.

“One of the sons, I suppose he was. I believe he's insane, or something.
At least I hear they keep him in a sanitarium somewhere, and never talk
about him. He was staring at himself in a mirror and talking to himself.
Then he looked out and caught me.”

“What did he--”

“Nothing, of course.”

“How did he look?”

“Like a ghost in a blue suit,” said Miss Vertrees, moving toward the
street and waving a white-gloved hand in farewell to her father, who
was observing them from the window of his library. “Rather tragic and
altogether impossible. Do come on, mother, and let's get it over!”

And Mrs. Vertrees, with many misgivings, set forth with her daughter for
their gracious assault upon the New House next door.



CHAPTER V

Mr. Vertrees, having watched their departure with the air of a man who
had something at hazard upon the expedition, turned from the window and
began to pace the library thoughtfully, pending their return. He was
about sixty; a small man, withered and dry and fine, a trim little
sketch of an elderly dandy. His lambrequin mustache--relic of a
forgotten Anglomania--had been profoundly black, but now, like his
smooth hair, it was approaching an equally sheer whiteness; and though
his clothes were old, they had shapeliness and a flavor of mode. And for
greater spruceness there were some jaunty touches; gray spats, a narrow
black ribbon across the gray waistcoat to the eye-glasses in a pocket,
a fleck of color from a button in the lapel of the black coat, labeling
him the descendant of patriot warriors.

The room was not like him, being cheerful and hideous, whereas Mr.
Vertrees was anxious and decorative. Under a mantel of imitation black
marble a merry little coal-fire beamed forth upon high and narrow
“Eastlake” bookcases with long glass doors, and upon comfortable,
incongruous furniture, and upon meaningless “woodwork” everywhere,
and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings which Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees
sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years of possession, as
“very fine things.” They had been the first people in town to possess
Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had rested, but they still
had a feeling that in all such matters they were in the van; and when
Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the walls of other people's
houses he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted follower; and if he
found an edition of Bulwer Lytton accompanying the Landseers as a final
corroboration of culture, he would say, inevitably, “Those people know
good pictures and they know good books.”

The growth of the city, which might easily have made him a millionaire,
had ruined him because he had failed to understand it. When towns begin
to grow they have whims, and the whims of a town always ruin somebody.
Mr. Vertrees had been most strikingly the somebody in this case. At
about the time he bought the Landseers, he owned, through inheritance,
an office-building and a large house not far from it, where he spent the
winter; and he had a country place--a farm of four hundred acres--where
he went for the summers to the comfortable, ugly old house that was his
home now, perforce, all the year round. If he had known how to sit
still and let things happen he would have prospered miraculously; but,
strangely enough, the dainty little man was one of the first to fall
down and worship Bigness, the which proceeded straightway to enact the
role of Juggernaut for his better education. He was a true prophet of
the prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and
buying bad. He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers
and read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained
milkers milked her dry and then ate her. He sold the office-building and
the house in town to buy a great tract of lots in a new suburb; then
he sold the farm, except the house and the ground about it, to pay the
taxes on the suburban lots and to “keep them up.” The lots refused to
stay up; but he had to do something to keep himself and his family up,
so in despair he sold the lots (which went up beautifully the next year)
for “traction stock” that was paying dividends; and thereafter he ceased
to buy and sell. Thus he disappeared altogether from the commercial
surface at about the time James Sheridan came out securely on top; and
Sheridan, until Mrs. Vertrees called upon him with her “anti-smoke”
 committee, had never heard the name.

Mr. Vertrees, pinched, retired to his Landseers, and Mrs. Vertrees
“managed somehow” on the dividends, though “managing” became more and
more difficult as the years went by and money bought less and less. But
there came a day when three servitors of Bigness in Philadelphia took
greedy counsel with four fellow-worshipers from New York, and not long
after that there were no more dividends for Mr. Vertrees. In fact, there
was nothing for Mr. Vertrees, because the “traction stock” henceforth
was no stock at all, and he had mortgaged his house long ago to help
“manage somehow” according to his conception of his “position in
life”--one of his own old-fashioned phrases. Six months before the
completion of the New House next door, Mr. Vertrees had sold his horses
and the worn Victoria and “station-wagon,” to pay the arrears of his two
servants and re-establish credit at the grocer's and butcher's--and a
pair of elderly carriage-horses with such accoutrements are not very
ample barter, in these days, for six months' food and fuel and service.
Mr. Vertrees had discovered, too, that there was no salary for him in
all the buzzing city--he could do nothing.

It may be said that he was at the end of his string. Such times do come
in all their bitterness, finally, to the man with no trade or craft, if
his feeble clutch on that slippery ghost, Property, shall fail.

The windows grew black while he paced the room, and smoky twilight
closed round about the house, yet not more darkly than what closed round
about the heart of the anxious little man patrolling the fan-shaped zone
of firelight. But as the mantel clock struck wheezily six there was the
rattle of an outer door, and a rich and beautiful peal of laughter went
ringing through the house. Thus cheerfully did Mary Vertrees herald her
return with her mother from their expedition among the barbarians.

She came rushing into the library and threw herself into a deep chair by
the hearth, laughing so uncontrollably that tears were in her eyes. Mrs.
Vertrees followed decorously, no mirth about her; on the contrary,
she looked vaguely disturbed, as if she had eaten something not quite
certain to agree with her, and regretted it.

“Papa! Oh, oh!” And Miss Vertrees was fain to apply a handkerchief upon
her eyes. “I'm SO glad you made us go! I wouldn't have missed it--”

Mrs. Vertrees shook her head. “I suppose I'm very dull,” she said,
gently. “I didn't see anything amusing. They're most ordinary, and the
house is altogether in bad taste, but we anticipated that, and--”

“Papa!” Mary cried, breaking in. “They asked us to DINNER!”

“What!”

“And I'm GOING!” she shouted, and was seized with fresh paroxysms.
“Think of it! Never in their house before; never met any of them but the
daughter--and just BARELY met her--”

“What about you?” interrupted Mr. Vertrees, turning sharply upon his
wife.

She made a little face as if positive now that what she had eaten would
not agree with her. “I couldn't!” she said. “I--”

“Yes, that's just--just the way she--she looked when they asked her!”
 cried Mary, choking. “And then she--she realized it, and tried to turn
it into a cough, and she didn't know how, and it sounded like--like a
squeal!”

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Vertrees, much injured, “that Mary will have an
uproarious time at my funeral. She makes fun of--”

Mary jumped up instantly and kissed her; then she went to the mantel
and, leaning an elbow upon it, gazed thoughtfully at the buckle of her
shoe, twinkling in the firelight.

“THEY didn't notice anything,” she said. “So far as they were concerned,
mamma, it was one of the finest coughs you ever coughed.”

“Who were 'they'?” asked her father. “Whom did you see?”

“Only the mother and daughter,” Mary answered. “Mrs. Sheridan is dumpy
and rustly; and Miss Sheridan is pretty and pushing--dresses by the
fashion magazines and talks about New York people that have
their pictures in 'em. She tutors the mother, but not very
successfully--partly because her own foundation is too flimsy and partly
because she began too late. They've got an enormous Moor of painted
plaster or something in the hall, and the girl evidently thought it was
to her credit that she selected it!”

“They have oil-paintings, too,” added Mrs. Vertrees, with a glance of
gentle pride at the Landseers. “I've always thought oil-paintings in a
private house the worst of taste.”

“Oh, if one owned a Raphael or a Titian!” said Mr. Vertrees, finishing
the implication, not in words, but with a wave of his hand. “Go on,
Mary. None of the rest of them came in? You didn't meet Mr. Sheridan
or--” He paused and adjusted a lump of coal in the fire delicately with
the poker. “Or one of the sons?”

Mary's glance crossed his, at that, with a flash of utter comprehension.
He turned instantly away, but she had begun to laugh again.

“No,” she said, “no one except the women, but mamma inquired about the
sons thoroughly!”

“Mary!” Mrs. Vertrees protested.

“Oh, most adroitly, too!” laughed the girl. “Only she couldn't help
unconsciously turning to look at me--when she did it!”

“Mary Vertrees!”

“Never mind, mamma! Mrs. Sheridan and Miss Sheridan neither of THEM
could help unconsciously turning to look at me--speculatively--at the
same time! They all three kept looking at me and talking about the
oldest son, Mr. James Sheridan, Junior. Mrs. Sheridan said his father is
very anxious 'to get Jim to marry and settle down,' and she assured me
that 'Jim is right cultivated.' Another of the sons, the youngest one,
caught me looking in the window this afternoon; but they didn't seem
to consider him quite one of themselves, somehow, though Mrs. Sheridan
mentioned that a couple of years or so ago he had been 'right sick,'
and had been to some cure or other. They seemed relieved to bring the
subject back to 'Jim' and his virtues--and to look at me! The other
brother is the middle one, Roscoe; he's the one that owns the new house
across the street, where that young black-sheep of the Lamhorns, Robert,
goes so often. I saw a short, dark young man standing on the porch with
Robert Lamhorn there the other day, so I suppose that was Roscoe. 'Jim'
still lurks in the mists, but I shall meet him to-night. Papa--” She
stepped nearer to him so that he had to face her, and his eyes were
troubled as he did. There may have been a trouble deep within her own,
but she kept their surface merry with laughter. “Papa, Bibbs is the
youngest one's name, and Bibbs--to the best of our information--is a
lunatic. Roscoe is married. Papa, does it have to be Jim?”

“Mary!” Mrs. Vertrees cried, sharply. “You're outrageous! That's a
perfectly horrible way of talking!”

“Well, I'm close to twenty-four,” said Mary, turning to her. “I haven't
been able to like anybody yet that's asked me to marry him, and maybe I
never shall. Until a year or so ago I've had everything I ever wanted in
my life--you and papa gave it all to me--and it's about time I began
to pay back. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do anything--but
something's got to be done.”

“But you needn't talk of it like THAT!” insisted the mother,
plaintively. “It's not--it's not--”

“No, it's not,” said Mary. “I know that!”

“How did they happen to ask you to dinner?” Mr. Vertrees inquired,
uneasily. “'Stextrawdn'ry thing!”

“Climbers' hospitality,” Mary defined it. “We were so very cordial and
easy! I think Mrs. Sheridan herself might have done it just as any kind
old woman on a farm might ask a neighbor, but it was Miss Sheridan who
did it. She played around it awhile; you could see she wanted to--she's
in a dreadful hurry to get into things--and I fancied she had an idea it
might impress that Lamhorn boy to find us there to-night. It's a sort of
house-warming dinner, and they talked about it and talked about it--and
then the girl got her courage up and blurted out the invitation. And
mamma--” Here Mary was once more a victim to incorrigible merriment.
“Mamma tried to say yes, and COULDN'T! She swallowed and squealed--I
mean you coughed, dear! And then, papa, she said that you and she had
promised to go to a lecture at the Emerson Club to-night, but that her
daughter would be delighted to come to the Big Show! So there I am,
and there's Mr. Jim Sheridan--and there's the clock. Dinner's at
seven-thirty!”

And she ran out of the room, scooping up her fallen furs with a gesture
of flying grace as she sped.

When she came down, at twenty minutes after seven, her father stood in
the hall, at the foot of the stairs, waiting to be her escort through
the dark. He looked up and watched her as she descended, and his gaze
was fond and proud--and profoundly disturbed. But she smiled and nodded
gaily, and, when she reached the floor, put a hand on his shoulder.

“At least no one could suspect me to-night,” she said. “I LOOK rich,
don't I, papa?”

She did. She had a look that worshipful girl friends bravely called
“regal.” A head taller than her father, she was as straight and jauntily
poised as a boy athlete; and her brown hair and her brown eyes were
like her mother's, but for the rest she went back to some stronger and
livelier ancestor than either of her parents.

“Don't I look too rich to be suspected?” she insisted.

“You look everything beautiful, Mary,” he said, huskily.

“And my dress?” She threw open her dark velvet cloak, showing a splendor
of white and silver. “Anything better at Nice next winter, do you
think?” She laughed, shrouding her glittering figure in the cloak again.
“Two years old, and no one would dream it! I did it over.”

“You can do anything, Mary.”

There was a curious humility in his tone, and something more--a
significance not veiled and yet abysmally apologetic. It was as if
he suggested something to her and begged her forgiveness in the same
breath.

And upon that, for the moment, she became as serious as he. She lifted
her hand from his shoulder and then set it back more firmly, so that he
should feel the reassurance of its pressure.

“Don't worry,” she said, in a low voice and gravely. “I know exactly
what you want me to do.”



CHAPTER VI

It was a brave and lustrous banquet; and a noisy one, too, because there
was an orchestra among some plants at one end of the long dining-room,
and after a preliminary stiffness the guests were impelled to
converse--necessarily at the tops of their voices. The whole company
of fifty sat at a great oblong table, improvised for the occasion by
carpenters; but, not betraying itself as an improvisation, it seemed
a permanent continent of damask and lace, with shores of crystal and
silver running up to spreading groves of orchids and lilies and
white roses--an inhabited continent, evidently, for there were three
marvelous, gleaming buildings: one in the center and one at each end,
white miracles wrought by some inspired craftsman in sculptural icing.
They were models in miniature, and they represented the Sheridan
Building, the Sheridan Apartments, and the Pump Works. Nearly all the
guests recognized them without having to be told what they were, and
pronounced the likenesses superb.

The arrangement of the table was visibly baronial. At the head sat the
great Thane, with the flower of his family and of the guests about him;
then on each side came the neighbors of the “old” house, grading down to
vassals and retainers--superintendents, cashiers, heads of departments,
and the like--at the foot, where the Thane's lady took her place as a
consolation for the less important. Here, too, among the thralls and
bondmen, sat Bibbs Sheridan, a meek Banquo, wondering how anybody could
look at him and eat.

Nevertheless, there was a vast, continuous eating, for these were
wholesome folk who understood that dinner meant something intended
for introduction into the system by means of an aperture in the face,
devised by nature for that express purpose. And besides, nobody looked
at Bibbs.

He was better content to be left to himself; his voice was not strong
enough to make itself heard over the hubbub without an exhausting
effort, and the talk that went on about him was too fast and too
fragmentary for his drawl to keep pace with it. So he felt relieved when
each of his neighbors in turn, after a polite inquiry about his health,
turned to seek livelier responses in other directions. For the talk
went on with the eating, incessantly. It rose over the throbbing of the
orchestra and the clatter and clinking of silver and china and glass,
and there was a mighty babble.

“Yes, sir! Started without a dollar.”... “Yellow flounces on the
overskirt--“... “I says, 'Wilkie, your department's got to go bigger
this year,' I says.”... “Fifteen per cent. turnover in thirty-one
weeks.”... “One of the biggest men in the biggest--“... “The wife says
she'll have to let out my pants if my appetite--“... “Say, did you see
that statue of a Turk in the hall? One of the finest things I ever--“...
“Not a dollar, not a nickel, not one red cent do you get out o' me,' I
says, and so he ups and--“... “Yes, the baby makes four, they've lost
now.”... “Well, they got their raise, and they went in big.”... “Yes,
sir! Not a dollar to his name, and look at what--“... “You wait! The
population of this town's goin' to hit the million mark before she
stops.”... “Well, if you can show me a bigger deal than--”

And through the interstices of this clamoring Bibbs could hear the
continual booming of his father's heavy voice, and once he caught the
sentence, “Yes, young lady, that's just what did it for me, and that's
just what'll do it for my boys--they got to make two blades o' grass
grow where one grew before!” It was his familiar flourish, an old
story to Bibbs, and now jovially declaimed for the edification of Mary
Vertrees.

It was a great night for Sheridan--the very crest of his wave. He sat
there knowing himself Thane and master by his own endeavor; and his big,
smooth, red face grew more and more radiant with good will and with the
simplest, happiest, most boy-like vanity. He was the picture of health,
of good cheer, and of power on a holiday. He had thirty teeth, none
bought, and showed most of them when he laughed; his grizzled hair was
thick, and as unruly as a farm laborer's; his chest was deep and big
beneath its vast facade of starched white linen, where little diamonds
twinkled, circling three large pearls; his hands were stubby and strong,
and he used them freely in gestures of marked picturesqueness; and,
though he had grown fat at chin and waist and wrist, he had not lost the
look of readiness and activity.

He dominated the table, shouting jocular questions and railleries at
every one. His idea was that when people were having a good time they
were noisy; and his own additions to the hubbub increased his pleasure,
and, of course, met the warmest encouragement from his guests. Edith had
discovered that he had very foggy notions of the difference between a
band and an orchestra, and when it was made clear to him he had held out
for a band until Edith threatened tears; but the size of the orchestra
they hired consoled him, and he had now no regrets in the matter.

He kept time to the music continually--with his feet, or pounding on the
table with his fist, and sometimes with spoon or knife upon his plate
or a glass, without permitting these side-products to interfere with the
real business of eating and shouting.

“Tell 'em to play 'Nancy Lee'!” he would bellow down the length of
the table to his wife, while the musicians were in the midst of the
“Toreador” song, perhaps. “Ask that fellow if they don't know 'Nancy
Lee'!” And when the leader would shake his head apologetically in answer
to an obedient shriek from Mrs. Sheridan, the “Toreador” continuing
vehemently, Sheridan would roar half-remembered fragments of “Nancy
Lee,” naturally mingling some Bizet with the air of that uxorious
tribute.

“Oh, there she stands and waves her hands while I'm away! A sail-er's
wife a sail-er's star should be! Yo ho, oh, oh! Oh, Nancy, Nancy, Nancy
Lee! Oh, Na-hancy Lee!”

“HAY, there, old lady!” he would bellow. “Tell 'em to play 'In the
Gloaming.' In the gloaming, oh, my darling, la-la-lum-tee--Well, if they
don't know that, what's the matter with 'Larboard Watch, Ahoy'? THAT'S
good music! That's the kind o' music I like! Come on, now! Mrs. Callin,
get 'em singin' down in your part o' the table. What's the matter you
folks down there, anyway? Larboard watch, ahoy!”

“What joy he feels, as--ta-tum-dum-tee-dee-dum steals. La-a-r-board
watch, ahoy!”

No external bubbling contributed to this effervescence; the Sheridans'
table had never borne wine, and, more because of timidity about it than
conviction, it bore none now; though “mineral waters” were copiously
poured from bottles wrapped, for some reason, in napkins, and proved
wholly satisfactory to almost all of the guests. And certainly no wine
could have inspired more turbulent good spirits in the host. Not even
Bibbs was an alloy in this night's happiness, for, as Mrs. Sheridan had
said, he had “plans for Bibbs”--plans which were going to straighten out
some things that had gone wrong.

So he pounded the table and boomed his echoes of old songs, and then,
forgetting these, would renew his friendly railleries, or perhaps,
turning to Mary Vertrees, who sat near him, round the corner of the
table at his right, he would become autobiographical. Gentlemen less
naive than he had paid her that tribute, for she was a girl who inspired
the autobiographical impulse in every man who met her--it needed but the
sight of her.

The dinner seemed, somehow, to center about Mary Vertrees and the
jocund host as a play centers about its hero and heroine; they were the
rubicund king and the starry princess of this spectacle--they paid court
to each other, and everybody paid court to them. Down near the
sugar Pump Works, where Bibbs sat, there was audible speculation and
admiration. “Wonder who that lady is--makin' such a hit with the old
man.” “Must be some heiress.” “Heiress? Golly, I guess I could stand it
to marry rich, then!”

Edith and Sibyl were radiant: at first they had watched Miss Vertrees
with an almost haggard anxiety, wondering what disasterous effect
Sheridan's pastoral gaieties--and other things--would have upon her,
but she seemed delighted with everything, and with him most of all.
She treated him as if he were some delicious, foolish old joke that
she understood perfectly, laughing at him almost violently when he
bragged--probably his first experience of that kind in his life. It
enchanted him.

As he proclaimed to the table, she had “a way with her.” She had,
indeed, as Roscoe Sheridan, upon her right, discovered just after the
feast began. Since his marriage three years before, no lady had bestowed
upon him so protracted a full view of brilliant eyes; and, with the
look, his lovely neighbor said--and it was her first speech to him--

“I hope you're very susceptible, Mr. Sheridan!”

Honest Roscoe was taken aback, and “Why?” was all he managed to say.

She repeated the look deliberately, which was noted, with a
mystification equal to his own, by his sister across the table. No one,
reflected Edith, could image Mary Vertrees the sort of girl who would
“really flirt” with married men--she was obviously the “opposite of all
that.” Edith defined her as a “thoroughbred,” a “nice girl”; and the
look given to Roscoe was astounding. Roscoe's wife saw it, too, and
she was another whom it puzzled--though not because its recipient was
married.

“Because!” said Mary Vertrees, replying to Roscoe's monosyllable. “And
also because we're next-door neighbors at table, and it's dull times
ahead for both of us if we don't get along.”

Roscoe was a literal young man, all stocks and bonds, and he had been
brought up to believe that when a man married he “married and settled
down.” It was “all right,” he felt, for a man as old as his father to
pay florid compliments to as pretty a girl as this Miss Vertrees, but
for himself--“a young married man”--it wouldn't do; and it wouldn't
even be quite moral. He knew that young married people might have
friendships, like his wife's for Lamhorn; but Sibyl and Lamhorn never
“flirted”--they were always very matter-of-fact with each other. Roscoe
would have been troubled if Sibyl had ever told Lamhorn she hoped he was
susceptible.

“Yes--we're neighbors,” he said, awkwardly.

“Next-door neighbors in houses, too,” she added.

“No, not exactly. I live across the street.”

“Why, no!” she exclaimed, and seemed startled. “Your mother told me this
afternoon that you lived at home.”

“Yes, of course I live at home. I built that new house across the
street.”

“But you--” she paused, confused, and then slowly a deep color came into
her cheek. “But I understood--”

“No,” he said; “my wife and I lived with the old folks the first year,
but that's all. Edith and Jim live with them, of course.”

“I--I see,” she said, the deep color still deepening as she turned from
him and saw, written upon a card before the gentleman at her left the
name, “Mr. James Sheridan, Jr.” And from that moment Roscoe had little
enough cause for wondering what he ought to reply to her disturbing
coquetries.

Mr. James Sheridan had been anxiously waiting for the dazzling visitor
to “get through with old Roscoe,” as he thought of it, and give a
bachelor a chance. “Old Roscoe” was the younger, but he had always been
the steady wheel-horse of the family. Jim was “steady” enough, but was
considered livelier than Roscoe, which in truth is not saying much for
Jim's liveliness. As their father habitually boasted, both brothers were
“capable, hard-working young business men,” and the principal difference
between them was merely that which resulted from Jim's being still a
bachelor. Physically they were of the same type: dark of eyes and of
hair, fresh-colored and thick-set, and though Roscoe was several inches
taller than Jim, neither was of the height, breadth, or depth of the
father. Both wore young business men's mustaches, and either could have
sat for the tailor-shop lithographs of young business men wearing “rich
suitings in dark mixtures.”

Jim, approving warmly of his neighbor's profile, perceived her access of
color, which increased his approbation. “What's that old Roscoe saying
to you, Miss Vertrees?” he asked. “These young married men are mighty
forward nowadays, but you mustn't let 'em make you blush.”

“Am I blushing?” she said. “Are you sure?” And with that she gave him
ample opportunity to make sure, repeating with interest the look wasted
upon Roscoe. “I think you must be mistaken,” she continued. “I think
it's your brother who is blushing. I've thrown him into confusion.”

“How?”

She laughed, and then, leaning to him a little, said in a tone as
confidential as she could make it, under cover of the uproar. “By trying
to begin with him a courtship I meant for YOU!”

This might well be a style new to Jim; and it was. He supposed it a
nonsensical form of badinage, and yet it took his breath. He realized
that he wished what she said to be the literal truth, and he was
instantly snared by that realization.

“By George!” he said. “I guess you're the kind of girl that can say
anything--yes, and get away with it, too!”

She laughed again--in her way, so that he could not tell whether she was
laughing at him or at herself or at the nonsense she was talking; and
she said: “But you see I don't care whether I get away with it or not.
I wish you'd tell me frankly if you think I've got a chance to get away
with YOU?”

“More like if you've got a chance to get away FROM me!” Jim was inspired
to reply. “Not one in the world, especially after beginning by making
fun of me like that.”

“I mightn't be so much in fun as you think,” she said, regarding him
with sudden gravity.

“Well,” said Jim, in simple honesty, “you're a funny girl!”

Her gravity continued an instant longer. “I may not turn out to be funny
for YOU.”

“So long as you turn out to be anything at all for me, I expect I can
manage to be satisfied.” And with that, to his own surprise, it was his
turn to blush, whereupon she laughed again.

“Yes,” he said, plaintively, not wholly lacking intuition, “I can see
you're the sort of girl that would laugh the minute you see a man really
means anything!”

“'Laugh'!” she cried, gaily. “Why, it might be a matter of life and
death! But if you want tragedy, I'd better put the question at once,
considering the mistake I made with your brother.”

Jim was dazed. She seemed to be playing a little game of mockery and
nonsense with him, but he had glimpses of a flashing danger in it;
he was but too sensible of being outclassed, and had somewhere a
consciousness that he could never quite know this giddy and alluring
lady, no matter how long it pleased her to play with him. But he
mightily wanted her to keep on playing with him.

“Put what question?” he said, breathlessly.

“As you are a new neighbor of mine and of my family,” she returned,
speaking slowly and with a cross-examiner's severity, “I think it would
be well for me to know at once whether you are already walking out with
any young lady or not. Mr. Sheridan, think well! Are you spoken for?”

“Not yet,” he gasped. “Are you?”

“NO!” she cried, and with that they both laughed again; and the pastime
proceeded, increasing both in its gaiety and in its gravity.

Observing its continuance, Mr. Robert Lamhorn, opposite, turned from a
lively conversation with Edith and remarked covertly to Sibyl that Miss
Vertrees was “starting rather picturesquely with Jim.” And he added,
languidly, “Do you suppose she WOULD?”

For the moment Sibyl gave no sign of having heard him, but seemed
interested in the clasp of a long “rope” of pearls, a loop of which she
was allowing to swing from her fingers, resting her elbow upon the table
and following with her eyes the twinkle of diamonds and platinum in the
clasp at the end of the loop. She wore many jewels. She was pretty,
but hers was not the kind of prettiness to be loaded with too sumptuous
accessories, and jeweled head-dresses are dangerous--they may emphasize
the wrongness of the wearer.

“I said Miss Vertrees seems to be starting pretty strong with Jim,”
 repeated Mr. Lamhorn.

“I heard you.” There was a latent discontent always somewhere in her
eyes, no matter what she threw upon the surface of cover it, and just
now she did not care to cover it; she looked sullen. “Starting any
stronger than you did with Edith?” she inquired.

“Oh, keep the peace!” he said, crossly. “That's off, of course.”

“You haven't been making her see it this evening--precisely,” said
Sibyl, looking at him steadily. “You've talked to her for--”

“For Heaven's sake,” he begged, “keep the peace!”

“Well, what have you just been doing?”

“SH!” he said. “Listen to your father-in-law.”

Sheridan was booming and braying louder than ever, the orchestra having
begun to play “The Rosary,” to his vast content.

“I COUNT THEM OVER, LA-LA-TUM-TEE-DUM,” he roared, beating the measures
with his fork. “EACH HOUR A PEARL, EACH PEARL TEE-DUM-TUM-DUM--What's
the matter with all you folks? Why'n't you SING? Miss Vertrees, I bet a
thousand dollars YOU sing! Why'n't--”

“Mr. Sheridan,” she said, turning cheerfully from the ardent Jim, “you
don't know what you interrupted! Your son isn't used to my rough ways,
and my soldier's wooing frightens him, but I think he was about to say
something important.”

“I'll say something important to him if he doesn't!” the father
threatened, more delighted with her than ever. “By gosh! if I was his
age--or a widower right NOW--”

“Oh, wait!” cried Mary. “If they'd only make less noise! I want Mrs.
Sheridan to hear.”

“She'd say the same,” he shouted. “She'd tell me I was mighty slow if I
couldn't get ahead o' Jim. Why, when I was his age--”

“You must listen to your father,” Mary interrupted, turning to Jim, who
had grown red again. “He's going to tell us how, when he was your age,
he made those two blades of grass grow out of a teacup--and you could
see for yourself he didn't get them out of his sleeve!”

At that Sheridan pounded the table till it jumped. “Look here, young
lady!” he roared. “Some o' these days I'm either goin' to slap you--or
I'm goin' to kiss you!”

Edith looked aghast; she was afraid this was indeed “too awful,” but
Mary Vertrees burst into ringing laughter.

“Both!” she cried. “Both! The one to make me forget the other!”

“But which--” he began, and then suddenly gave forth such stentorian
trumpetings of mirth that for once the whole table stopped to listen.
“Jim,” he roared, “if you don't propose to that girl to-night I'll send
you back to the machine-shop with Bibbs!”

And Bibbs--down among the retainers by the sugar Pump Works, and
watching Mary Vertrees as a ragged boy in the street might watch a rich
little girl in a garden--Bibbs heard. He heard--and he knew what his
father's plans were now.



CHAPTER VII

Mrs. Vertrees “sat up” for her daughter, Mr. Vertrees having retired
after a restless evening, not much soothed by the society of his
Landseers. Mary had taken a key, insisting that he should not come for
her and seeming confident that she would not lack for escort; nor did
the sequel prove her confidence unwarranted. But Mrs. Vertrees had a
long vigil of it.

She was not the woman to make herself easy--no servant had ever seen her
in a wrapper--and with her hair and dress and her shoes just what they
had been when she returned from the afternoon's call, she sat through
the slow night hours in a stiff little chair under the gaslight in her
own room, which was directly over the “front hall.” There, book in hand,
she employed the time in her own reminiscences, though it was her belief
that she was reading Madame de Remusat's.

Her thoughts went backward into her life and into her husband's; and the
deeper into the past they went, the brighter the pictures they brought
her--and there is tragedy. Like her husband, she thought backward
because she did not dare think forward definitely. What thinking forward
this troubled couple ventured took the form of a slender hope which
neither of them could have borne to hear put in words, and yet they
had talked it over, day after day, from the very hour when they heard
Sheridan was to build his New House next door. For--so quickly does
any ideal of human behavior become an antique--their youth was of the
innocent old days, so dead! of “breeding” and “gentility,” and no craft
had been more straitly trained upon them than that of talking about
things without mentioning them. Herein was marked the most vital
difference between Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees and their big new neighbor.
Sheridan, though his youth was of the same epoch, knew nothing of such
matters. He had been chopping wood for the morning fire in the country
grocery while they were still dancing.

It was after one o'clock when Mrs. Vertrees heard steps and the delicate
clinking of the key in the lock, and then, with the opening of the door,
Mary's laugh, and “Yes--if you aren't afraid--to-morrow!”

The door closed, and she rushed up-stairs, bringing with her a breath
of cold and bracing air into her mother's room. “Yes,” she said, before
Mrs. Vertrees could speak, “he brought me home!”

She let her cloak fall upon the bed, and, drawing an old red-velvet
rocking-chair forward, sat beside her mother after giving her a light
pat upon the shoulder and a hearty kiss upon the cheek.

“Mamma!” Mary exclaimed, when Mrs. Vertrees had expressed a hope that
she had enjoyed the evening and had not caught cold. “Why don't you ask
me?”

This inquiry obviously made her mother uncomfortable. “I don't--” she
faltered. “Ask you what, Mary?”

“How I got along and what he's like.”

“Mary!”

“Oh, it isn't distressing!” said Mary. “And I got along so fast--” She
broke off to laugh; continuing then, “But that's the way I went at it,
of course. We ARE in a hurry, aren't we?”

“I don't know what you mean,” Mrs. Vertrees insisted, shaking her head
plaintively.

“Yes,” said Mary, “I'm going out in his car with him to-morrow
afternoon, and to the theater the next night--but I stopped it there.
You see, after you give the first push, you must leave it to them while
YOU pretend to run away!”

“My dear, I don't know what to--”

“What to make of anything!” Mary finished for her. “So that's all
right! Now I'll tell you all about it. It was gorgeous and deafening and
tee-total. We could have lived a year on it. I'm not good at figures,
but I calculated that if we lived six months on poor old Charlie and Ned
and the station-wagon and the Victoria, we could manage at least twice
as long on the cost of the 'house-warming.' I think the orchids alone
would have lasted us a couple of months. There they were, before me, but
I couldn't steal 'em and sell 'em, and so--well, so I did what I could!”

She leaned back and laughed reassuringly to her troubled mother. “It
seemed to be a success--what I could,” she said, clasping her hands
behind her neck and stirring the rocker to motion as a rhythmic
accompaniment to her narrative. “The girl Edith and her sister-in-law,
Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan, were too anxious about the effect of things on me.
The father's worth a bushel of both of them, if they knew it. He's
what he is. I like him.” She paused reflectively, continuing, “Edith's
'interested' in that Lamhorn boy; he's good-looking and not stupid, but
I think he's--” She interrupted herself with a cheery outcry: “Oh! I
mustn't be calling him names! If he's trying to make Edith like him, I
ought to respect him as a colleague.”

“I don't understand a thing you're talking about,” Mrs. Vertrees
complained.

“All the better! Well, he's a bad lot, that Lamhorn boy; everybody's
always known that, but the Sheridans don't know the everybodies that
know. He sat between Edith and Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan. SHE'S like those
people you wondered about at the theater, the last time we went--dressed
in ball-gowns; bound to show their clothes and jewels SOMEwhere! She
flatters the father, and so did I, for that matter--but not that way. I
treated him outrageously!”

“Mary!”

“That's what flattered him. After dinner he made the whole regiment of
us follow him all over the house, while he lectured like a guide on the
Palatine. He gave dimensions and costs, and the whole b'ilin' of 'em
listened as if they thought he intended to make them a present of the
house. What he was proudest of was the plumbing and that Bay of Naples
panorama in the hall. He made us look at all the plumbing--bath-rooms
and everywhere else--and then he made us look at the Bay of Naples. He
said it was a hundred and eleven feet long, but I think it's more. And
he led us all into the ready-made library to see a poem Edith had taken
a prize with at school. They'd had it printed in gold letters and framed
in mother-of-pearl. But the poem itself was rather simple and wistful
and nice--he read it to us, though Edith tried to stop him. She was
modest about it, and said she'd never written anything else. And then,
after a while, Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan asked me to come across the street
to her house with them--her husband and Edith and Mr. Lamhorn and Jim
Sheridan--”

Mrs. Vertrees was shocked. “'Jim'!” she exclaimed. “Mary, PLEASE--”

“Of course,” said Mary. “I'll make it as easy for you as I can,
mamma. Mr. James Sheridan, Junior. We went over there, and Mrs. Roscoe
explained that 'the men were all dying for a drink,' though I noticed
that Mr. Lamhorn was the only one near death's door on that account.
Edith and Mrs. Roscoe said they knew I'd been bored at the dinner. They
were objectionably apologetic about it, and they seemed to think NOW we
were going to have a 'good time' to make up for it. But I hadn't been
bored at the dinner, I'd been amused; and the 'good time' at Mrs.
Roscoe's was horribly, horribly stupid.”

“But, Mary,” her mother began, “is--is--” And she seemed unable to
complete the question.

“Never mind, mamma. I'll say it. Is Mr. James Sheridan, Junior, stupid?
I'm sure he's not at all stupid about business. Otherwise--Oh, what
right have I to be calling people 'stupid' because they're not exactly
my kind? On the big dinner-table they had enormous icing models of the
Sheridan Building--”

“Oh, no!” Mrs. Vertrees cried. “Surely not!”

“Yes, and two other things of that kind--I don't know what. But, after
all, I wondered if they were so bad. If I'd been at a dinner at a palace
in Italy, and a relief or inscription on one of the old silver pieces
had referred to some great deed or achievement of the family, I
shouldn't have felt superior; I'd have thought it picturesque and
stately--I'd have been impressed. And what's the real difference? The
icing is temporary, and that's much more modest, isn't it? And why is
it vulgar to feel important more on account of something you've done
yourself than because of something one of your ancestors did? Besides,
if we go back a few generations, we've all got such hundreds of
ancestors it seems idiotic to go picking out one or two to be proud of
ourselves about. Well, then, mamma, I managed not to feel superior to
Mr. James Sheridan, Junior, because he didn't see anything out of place
in the Sheridan Building in sugar.”

Mrs. Vertrees's expression had lost none of its anxiety pending the
conclusion of this lively bit of analysis, and she shook her head
gravely. “My dear, dear child,” she said, “it seems to me--It looks--I'm
afraid--”

“Say as much of it as you can, mamma,” said Mary, encouragingly. “I can
get it, if you'll just give me one key-word.”

“Everything you say,” Mrs. Vertrees began, timidly, “seems to have the
air of--it is as if you were seeking to--to make yourself--”

“Oh, I see! You mean I sound as if I were trying to force myself to like
him.”

“Not exactly, Mary. That wasn't quite what I meant,” said Mrs. Vertrees,
speaking direct untruth with perfect unconsciousness. “But you said
that--that you found the latter part of the evening at young Mrs.
Sheridan's unentertaining--”

“And as Mr. James Sheridan was there, and I saw more of him than at
dinner, and had a horribly stupid time in spite of that, you think I--”
 And then it was Mary who left the deduction unfinished.

Mrs. Vertrees nodded; and though both the mother and the daughter
understood, Mary felt it better to make the understanding definite.

“Well,” she asked, gravely, “is there anything else I can do? You and
papa don't want me to do anything that distresses me, and so, as this is
the only thing to be done, it seems it's up to me not to let it distress
me. That's all there is about it, isn't it?”

“But nothing MUST distress you!” the mother cried.

“That's what I say!” said Mary, cheerfully. “And so it doesn't. It's all
right.” She rose and took her cloak over her arm, as if to go to her own
room. But on the way to the door she stopped, and stood leaning against
the foot of the bed, contemplating a threadbare rug at her feet.
“Mother, you've told me a thousand times that it doesn't really matter
whom a girl marries.”

“No, no!” Mrs. Vertrees protested. “I never said such a--”

“No, not in words; I mean what you MEANT. It's true, isn't it, that
marriage really is 'not a bed of roses, but a field of battle'? To get
right down to it, a girl could fight it out with anybody, couldn't she?
One man as well as another?”

“Oh, my dear! I'm sure your father and I--”

“Yes, yes,” said Mary, indulgently. “I don't mean you and papa. But
isn't it propinquity that makes marriages? So many people say so, there
must be something in it.”

“Mary, I can't bear for you to talk like that.” And Mrs. Vertrees
lifted pleading eyes to her daughter--eyes that begged to be spared. “It
sounds--almost reckless!”

Mary caught the appeal, came to her, and kissed her gaily. “Never fret,
dear! I'm not likely to do anything I don't want to do--I've always been
too thorough-going a little pig! And if it IS propinquity that does our
choosing for us, well, at least no girl in the world could ask for more
than THAT! How could there be any more propinquity than the very house
next door?”

She gave her mother a final kiss and went gaily all the way to the door
this time, pausing for her postscript with her hand on the knob. “Oh,
the one that caught me looking in the window, mamma, the youngest one--”

“Did he speak of it?” Mrs. Vertrees asked, apprehensively.

“No. He didn't speak at all, that I saw, to any one. I didn't meet him.
But he isn't insane, I'm sure; or if he is, he has long intervals when
he's not. Mr. James Sheridan mentioned that he lived at home when he was
'well enough'; and it may be he's only an invalid. He looks dreadfully
ill, but he has pleasant eyes, and it struck me that if--if one were
in the Sheridan family”--she laughed a little ruefully--“he might be
interesting to talk to sometimes, when there was too much stocks and
bonds. I didn't see him after dinner.”

“There must be something wrong with him,” said Mrs. Vertrees. “They'd
have introduced him if there wasn't.”

“I don't know. He's been ill so much and away so much--sometimes people
like that just don't seem to 'count' in a family. His father spoke of
sending him back to a machine-shop of some sort; I suppose he meant
when the poor thing gets better. I glanced at him just then, when Mr.
Sheridan mentioned him, and he happened to be looking straight at me;
and he was pathetic-looking enough before that, but the most tragic
change came over him. He seemed just to die, right there at the table!”

“You mean when his father spoke of sending him to the shop place?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Sheridan must be very unfeeling.”

“No,” said Mary, thoughtfully, “I don't think he is; but he might be
uncomprehending, and certainly he's the kind of man to do anything he
once sets out to do. But I wish I hadn't been looking at that poor boy
just then! I'm afraid I'll keep remembering--”

“I wouldn't.” Mrs. Vertrees smiled faintly, and in her smile there
was the remotest ghost of a genteel roguishness. “I'd keep my mind on
pleasanter things, Mary.”

Mary laughed and nodded. “Yes, indeed! Plenty pleasant enough, and
probably, if all were known, too good--even for me!”

And when she had gone Mrs. Vertrees drew a long breath, as if a burden
were off her mind, and, smiling, began to undress in a gentle reverie.



CHAPTER VIII

Edith, glancing casually into the “ready-made” library, stopped
abruptly, seeing Bibbs there alone. He was standing before the
pearl-framed and golden-lettered poem, musingly inspecting it. He read
it:

                  FUGITIVE

  I will forget the things that sting:
    The lashing look, the barbed word.
  I know the very hands that fling
    The stones at me had never stirred
  To anger but for their own scars.
    They've suffered so, that's why they strike.
  I'll keep my heart among the stars
    Where none shall hunt it out.  Oh, like
  These wounded ones I must not be,
    For, wounded, I might strike in turn!
  So, none shall hurt me.  Far and free
    Where my heart flies no one shall learn.

“Bibbs!” Edith's voice was angry, and her color deepened suddenly as she
came into the room, preceded by a scent of violets much more powerful
than that warranted by the actual bunch of them upon the lapel of her
coat.

Bibbs did not turn his head, but wagged it solemnly, seeming depressed
by the poem. “Pretty young, isn't it?” he said. “There must have been
something about your looks that got the prize, Edith; I can't believe
the poem did it.”

She glanced hurriedly over her shoulder and spoke sharply, but in a
low voice: “I don't think it's very nice of you to bring it up at all,
Bibbs. I'd like a chance to forget the whole silly business. I didn't
want them to frame it, and I wish to goodness papa'd quit talking about
it; but here, that night, after the dinner, didn't he go and read it
aloud to the whole crowd of 'em! And then they all wanted to know what
other poems I'd written and why I didn't keep it up and write some more,
and if I didn't, why didn't I, and why this and why that, till I thought
I'd die of shame!”

“You could tell 'em you had writer's cramp,” Bibbs suggested.

“I couldn't tell 'em anything! I just choke with mortification every
time anybody speaks of the thing.”

Bibbs looked grieved. “The poem isn't THAT bad, Edith. You see, you were
only seventeen when you wrote it.”

“Oh, hush up!” she snapped. “I wish it had burnt my fingers the first
time I touched it. Then I might have had sense enough to leave it where
it was. I had no business to take it, and I've been ashamed--”

“No, no,” he said, comfortingly. “It was the very most flattering thing
ever happened to me. It was almost my last flight before I went to the
machine-shop, and it's pleasant to think somebody liked it enough to--”

“But I DON'T like it!” she exclaimed. “I don't even understand it--and
papa made so much fuss over its getting the prize, I just hate it! The
truth is I never dreamed it'd get the prize.”

“Maybe they expected father to endow the school,” Bibbs murmured.

“Well, I had to have something to turn in, and I couldn't write a LINE!
I hate poetry, anyhow; and Bobby Lamhorn's always teasing me about how
I 'keep my heart among the stars.' He makes it seem such a mushy kind of
thing, the way he says it. I hate it!”

“You'll have to live it down, Edith. Perhaps abroad and under another
name you might find--”

“Oh, hush up! I'll hire some one to steal it and burn it the first
chance I get.” She turned away petulantly, moving to the door. “I'd like
to think I could hope to hear the last of it before I die!”

“Edith!” he called, as she went into the hall.

“What's the matter?”

“I want to ask you: Do I really look better, or have you just got used
to me?”

“What on earth do you mean?” she said, coming back as far as the
threshold.

“When I first came you couldn't look at me,” Bibbs explained, in his
impersonal way. “But I've noticed you look at me lately. I wondered if
I'd--”

“It's because you look so much better,” she told him, cheerfully. “This
month you've been here's done you no end of good. It's the change.”

“Yes, that's what they said at the sanitarium--the change.”

“You look worse than 'most anybody I ever saw,” said Edith, with supreme
candor. “But I don't know much about it. I've never seen a corpse in my
life, and I've never even seen anybody that was terribly sick, so you
mustn't judge by me. I only know you do look better, I'm glad to say.
But you're right about my not being able to look at you at first. You
had a kind of whiteness that--Well, you're almost as thin, I suppose,
but you've got more just ordinarily pale; not that ghastly look. Anybody
could look at you now, Bibbs, and no--not get--”

“Sick?”

“Well--almost that!” she laughed. “And you're getting a better color
every day, Bibbs; you really are. You're getting along splendidly.”

“I--I'm afraid so,” he said, ruefully.

“'Afraid so'! Well, if you aren't the queerest! I suppose you mean
father might send you back to the machine-shop if you get well enough.
I heard him say something about it the night of the--” The jingle of
a distant bell interrupted her, and she glanced at her watch. “Bobby
Lamhorn! I'm going to motor him out to look at a place in the country.
Afternoon, Bibbs!”

When she had gone, Bibbs mooned pessimistically from shelf to shelf,
his eye wandering among the titles of the books. The library consisted
almost entirely of handsome “uniform editions”: Irving, Poe, Cooper,
Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, Burns, Longfellow, Tennyson, Hume, Gibbon,
Prescott, Thackeray, Dickens, De Musset, Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert,
Goethe, Schiller, Dante, and Tasso. There were shelves and shelves
of encyclopedias, of anthologies, of “famous classics,” of “Oriental
masterpieces,” of “masterpieces of oratory,” and more shelves of
“selected libraries” of “literature,” of “the drama,” and of “modern
science.” They made an effective decoration for the room, all these
big, expensive books, with a glossy binding here and there twinkling a
reflection of the flames that crackled in the splendid Gothic fireplace;
but Bibbs had an impression that the bookseller who selected them
considered them a relief, and that white-jacket considered them a
burden of dust, and that nobody else considered them at all. Himself, he
disturbed not one.

There came a chime of bells from a clock in another part of the house,
and white-jacket appeared beamingly in the doorway, bearing furs.
“Awready, Mist' Bibbs,” he announced. “You' ma say wrap up wawm f' you'
ride, an' she cain' go with you to-day, an' not f'git go see you' pa at
fo' 'clock. Aw ready, suh.”

He equipped Bibbs for the daily drive Dr. Gurney had commanded; and in
the manner of a master of ceremonies unctuously led the way. In the
hall they passed the Moor, and Bibbs paused before it while white-jacket
opened the door with a flourish and waved condescendingly to the
chauffeur in the car which stood waiting in the driveway.

“It seems to me I asked you what you thought about this 'statue' when I
first came home, George,” said Bibbs, thoughtfully. “What did you tell
me?”

“Yessuh!” George chuckled, perfectly understanding that for some unknown
reason Bibbs enjoyed hearing him repeat his opinion of the Moor. “You
ast me when you firs' come home, an' you ast me nex' day, an' mighty
near ev'y day all time you been here; an' las' Sunday you ast me
twicet.” He shook his head solemnly. “Look to me mus' be somep'm might
lamiDAL 'bout 'at statue!”

“Mighty what?”

“Mighty lamiDAL!” George, burst out laughing. “What DO 'at word mean,
Mist' Bibbs?”

“It's new to me, George. Where did you hear it?”

“I nev' DID hear it!” said George. “I uz dess sittin' thinkum to myse'f
an' she pop in my head--'lamiDAL,' dess like 'at! An' she soun' so good,
seem like she GOTTA mean somep'm!”

“Come to think of it, I believe she does mean something. Why, yes--”

“Do she?” cried George. “WHAT she mean?”

“It's exactly the word for the statue,” said Bibbs, with conviction, as
he climbed into the car. “It's a lamiDAL statue.”

“Hiyi!” George exulted. “Man! Man! Listen! Well, suh, she mighty lamiDAL
statue, but lamiDAL statue heap o' trouble to dus'!”

“I expect she is!” said Bibbs, as the engine began to churn; and a moment later he was swept from sight.

George turned to Mist' Jackson, who had been listening benevolently in
the hallway. “Same he aw-ways say, Mist' Jackson--'I expec' she is!'
Ev'y day he try t' git me talk 'bout 'at lamiDAL statue, an' aw-ways,
las' thing HE say, 'I expec' she is!' You know, Mist' Jackson, if he git
well, 'at young man go' be pride o' the family, Mist' Jackson. Yes-suh,
right now I pick 'im fo' firs' money!”

“Look out with all 'at money, George!” Jackson warned the enthusiast.
“White folks 'n 'is house know 'im heap longer'n you. You the on'y man
bettin' on 'im!”

“I risk it!” cried George, merrily. “I put her all on now--ev'y cent!
'At boy's go' be flower o' the flock!”

This singular prophecy, founded somewhat recklessly upon gratitude for
the meaning of “lamiDAL,” differed radically from another prediction
concerning Bibbs, set forth for the benefit of a fair auditor some
twenty minutes later.

Jim Sheridan, skirting the edges of the town with Mary Vertrees
beside him, in his own swift machine, encountered the invalid upon
the highroad. The two cars were going in opposite directions, and the
occupants of Jim's had only a swaying glimpse of Bibbs sitting alone on
the back seat--his white face startlingly white against cap and collar
of black fur--but he flashed into recognition as Mary bowed to him.

Jim waved his left hand carelessly. “It's Bibbs, taking his
constitutional,” he explained.

“Yes, I know,” said Mary. “I bowed to him, too, though I've never met
him. In fact, I've only seen him once--no, twice. I hope he won't think
I'm very bold, bowing to him.”

“I doubt if he noticed it,” said honest Jim.

“Oh, no!” she cried.

“What's the trouble?”

“I'm almost sure people notice it when I bow to them.”

“Oh, I see!” said Jim. “Of course they would ordinarily, but Bibbs is
funny.”

“Is he? How?” she asked. “He strikes me as anything but funny.”

“Well, I'm his brother,” Jim said, deprecatingly, “but I don't know what
he's like, and, to tell the truth, I've never felt exactly like I WAS
his brother, the way I do Roscoe. Bibbs never did seem more than half
alive to me. Of course Roscoe and I are older, and when we were boys we
were too big to play with him, but he never played anyway, with boys his
own age. He'd rather just sit in the house and mope around by himself.
Nobody could ever get him to DO anything; you can't get him to do
anything now. He never had any LIFE in him; and honestly, if he is my
brother, I must say I believe Bibbs Sheridan is the laziest man God ever
made! Father put him in the machine-shop over at the Pump Works--best
thing in the world for him--and he was just plain no account. It made
him sick! If he'd had the right kind of energy--the kind father's got,
for instance, or Roscoe, either--why, it wouldn't have made him sick.
And suppose it was either of them--yes, or me, either--do you think any
of us would have stopped if we WERE sick? Not much! I hate to say it,
but Bibbs Sheridan'll never amount to anything as long as he lives.”

Mary looked thoughtful. “Is there any particular reason why he should?”
 she asked.

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “You don't mean that, do you? Don't you
believe in a man's knowing how to earn his salt, no matter how much
money his father's got? Hasn't the business of this world got to be
carried on by everybody in it? Are we going to lay back on what we've
got and see other fellows get ahead of us? If we've got big things
already, isn't it every man's business to go ahead and make 'em bigger?
Isn't it his duty? Don't we always want to get bigger and bigger?”

“Ye-es--I don't know. But I feel rather sorry for your brother. He
looked so lonely--and sick.”

“He's gettin' better every day,” Jim said. “Dr. Gurney says so. There's
nothing much the matter with him, really--it's nine-tenths imaginary.
'Nerves'! People that are willing to be busy don't have nervous
diseases, because they don't have time to imagine 'em.”

“You mean his trouble is really mental?”

“Oh, he's not a lunatic,” said Jim. “He's just queer. Sometimes he'll
say something right bright, but half the time what he says is 'way off
the subject, or else there isn't any sense to it at all. For instance,
the other day I heard him talkin' to one of the darkies in the hall. The
darky asked him what time he wanted the car for his drive, and anybody
else in the world would have just said what time they DID want it, and
that would have been all there was to it; but here's what Bibbs says,
and I heard him with my own ears. 'What time do I want the car?' he
says. 'Well, now, that depends--that depends,' he says. He talks slow
like that, you know. 'I'll tell you what time I want the car, George,'
he says, 'if you'll tell ME what you think of this statue!' That's
exactly his words! Asked the darky what he thought of that Arab Edith
and mother bought for the hall!”

Mary pondered upon this. “He might have been in fun, perhaps,” she
suggested.

“Askin' a darky what he thought of a piece of statuary--of a work
of art! Where on earth would be the fun of that? No, you're just
kind-hearted--and that's the way you OUGHT to be, of course--”

“Thank you, Mr. Sheridan!” she laughed.

“See here!” he cried. “Isn't there any way for us to get over this
Mister and Miss thing? A month's got thirty-one days in it; I've managed
to be with you a part of pretty near all the thirty-one, and I think you
know how I feel by this time--”

She looked panic-stricken immediately. “Oh, no,” she protested, quickly.
“No, I don't, and--”

“Yes, you do,” he said, and his voice shook a little. “You couldn't help
knowing.”

“But I do!” she denied, hurriedly. “I do help knowing. I mean--Oh,
wait!”

“What for? You do know how I feel, and you--well, you've certainly
WANTED me to feel that way--or else pretended--”

“Now, now!” she lamented. “You're spoiling such a cheerful afternoon!”

“'Spoilin' it!'” He slowed down the car and turned his face to her
squarely. “See here, Miss Vertrees, haven't you--”

“Stop! Stop the car a minute.” And when he had complied she faced him as
squarely as he evidently desired her to face him. “Listen. I don't want
you to go on, to-day.”

“Why not?” he asked, sharply.

“I don't know.”

“You mean it's just a whim?”

“I don't know,” she repeated. Her voice was low and troubled and honest,
and she kept her clear eyes upon his.

“Will you tell me something?”

“Almost anything.”

“Have you ever told any man you loved him?”

And at that, though she laughed, she looked a little contemptuous. “No,”
 she said. “And I don't think I ever shall tell any man that--or ever
know what it means. I'm in earnest, Mr. Sheridan.”

“Then you--you've just been flirting with me!” Poor Jim looked both
furious and crestfallen.

“Not one bit!” she cried. “Not one word! Not one syllable! I've meant
every single thing!”

“I don't--”

“Of course you don't!” she said. “Now, Mr. Sheridan, I want you to start
the car. Now! Thank you. Slowly, till I finish what I have to say. I
have not flirted with you. I have deliberately courted you. One thing
more, and then I want you to take me straight home, talking about the
weather all the way. I said that I do not believe I shall ever 'care'
for any man, and that is true. I doubt the existence of the kind of
'caring' we hear about in poems and plays and novels. I think it must be
just a kind of emotional TALK--most of it. At all events, I don't feel
it. Now, we can go faster, please.”

“Just where does that let me out?” he demanded. “How does that excuse
you for--”

“It isn't an excuse,” she said, gently, and gave him one final look,
wholly desolate. “I haven't said I should never marry.”

“What?” Jim gasped.

She inclined her head in a broken sort of acquiescence, very humble,
unfathomably sorrowful.

“I promise nothing,” she said, faintly.

“You needn't!” shouted Jim, radiant and exultant. “You needn't! By
George! I know you're square; that's enough for me! You wait and promise
whenever you're ready!”

“Don't forget what I asked,” she begged him.

“Talk about the weather? I will! God bless the old weather!” cried the
happy Jim.



CHAPTER IX

Through the open country Bibbs was borne flying between brown fields
and sun-flecked groves of gray trees, to breathe the rushing, clean
air beneath a glorious sky--that sky so despised in the city, and so
maltreated there, that from early October to mid-May it was impossible
for men to remember that blue is the rightful color overhead.

Upon each of Bibbs's cheeks there was a hint of something almost
resembling a pinkishness; not actual color, but undeniably its phantom.
How largely this apparition may have been the work of the wind upon his
face it is difficult to calculate, for beyond a doubt it was partly the
result of a lady's bowing to him upon no more formal introduction than
the circumstance of his having caught her looking into his window a
month before. She had bowed definitely; she had bowed charmingly. And it
seemed to Bibbs that she must have meant to convey her forgiveness.

There had been something in her recognition of him unfamiliar to
his experience, and he rode the warmer for it. Nor did he lack the
impression that he would long remember her as he had just seen her: her
veil tumultuously blowing back, her face glowing in the wind--and that
look of gay friendliness tossed to him like a fresh rose in carnival.

By and by, upon a rising ground, the driver halted the car, then backed
and tacked, and sent it forward again with its nose to the south and the
smoke. Far before him Bibbs saw the great smudge upon the horizon,
that nest of cloud in which the city strove and panted like an engine
shrouded in its own steam. But to Bibbs, who had now to go to the very
heart of it, for a commanded interview with his father, the distant
cloud was like an implacable genius issuing thunderously in smoke from
his enchanted bottle, and irresistibly drawing Bibbs nearer and nearer.

They passed from the farm lands, and came, in the amber light of
November late afternoon, to the farthermost outskirts of the city; and
here the sky shimmered upon the verge of change from blue to gray;
the smoke did not visibly permeate the air, but it was there,
nevertheless--impalpable, thin, no more than the dust of smoke. And
then, as the car drove on, the chimneys and stacks of factories came
swimming up into view like miles of steamers advancing abreast, every
funnel with its vast plume, savage and black, sweeping to the horizon,
dripping wealth and dirt and suffocation over league on league already
rich and vile with grime.

The sky had become only a dingy thickening of the soiled air; and a roar
and clangor of metals beat deafeningly on Bibbs's ears. And now the car
passed two great blocks of long brick buildings, hideous in all ways
possible to make them hideous; doorways showing dark one moment and
lurid the next with the leap of some virulent interior flame, revealing
blackened giants, half naked, in passionate action, struggling with
formless things in the hot illumination. And big as these shops were,
they were growing bigger, spreading over a third block, where two new
structures were mushrooming to completion in some hasty cement process
of a stability not over-reassuring. Bibbs pulled the rug closer about
him, and not even the phantom of color was left upon his cheeks as he
passed this place, for he knew it too well. Across the face of one of
the buildings there was an enormous sign: “Sheridan Automatic Pump Co.,
Inc.”

Thence they went through streets of wooden houses, all grimed, and
adding their own grime from many a sooty chimney; flimsey wooden houses
of a thousand flimsy whimsies in the fashioning, built on narrow lots
and nudging one another crossly, shutting out the stingy sunlight from
one another; bad neighbors who would destroy one another root and branch
some night when the right wind blew. They were only waiting for that
wind and a cigarette, and then they would all be gone together--a pinch
of incense burned upon the tripod of the god.

Along these streets there were skinny shade-trees, and here and there
a forest elm or walnut had been left; but these were dying. Some people
said it was the scale; some said it was the smoke; and some were sure
that asphalt and “improving” the streets did it; but Bigness was in
too Big a hurry to bother much about trees. He had telegraph-poles
and telephone-poles and electric-light-poles and trolley-poles by the
thousand to take their places. So he let the trees die and put up his
poles. They were hideous, but nobody minded that; and sometimes the
wires fell and killed people--but not often enough to matter at all.

Thence onward the car bore Bibbs through the older parts of the
town where the few solid old houses not already demolished were in
transition: some, with their fronts torn away, were being made into
segments of apartment-buildings; others had gone uproariously into
trade, brazenly putting forth “show-windows” on their first floors,
seeming to mean it for a joke; one or two with unaltered facades peeped
humorously over the tops of temporary office buildings of one story
erected in the old front yards. Altogether, the town here was like a
boarding-house hash the Sunday after Thanksgiving; the old ingredients
were discernible.

This was the fringe of Bigness's own sanctuary, and now Bibbs reached
the roaring holy of holies itself. The car must stop at every crossing
while the dark-garbed crowds, enveloped in maelstroms of dust, hurried
before it. Magnificent new buildings, already dingy, loomed hundreds of
feet above him; newer ones, more magnificent, were rising beside them,
rising higher; old buildings were coming down; middle-aged buildings
were coming down; the streets were laid open to their entrails and men
worked underground between palisades, and overhead in metal cobwebs
like spiders in the sky. Trolley-cars and long interurban cars, built to
split the wind like torpedo-boats, clanged and shrieked their way
round swarming corners; motor-cars of every kind and shape known to
man babbled frightful warnings and frantic demands; hospital ambulances
clamored wildly for passage; steam-whistles signaled the swinging of
titanic tentacle and claw; riveters rattled like machine-guns; the
ground shook to the thunder of gigantic trucks; and the conglomerate
sound of it all was the sound of earthquake playing accompaniments for
battle and sudden death. On one of the new steel buildings no work
was being done that afternoon. The building had killed a man in the
morning--and the steel-workers always stop for the day when that
“happens.”

And in the hurrying crowds, swirling and sifting through the
brobdingnagian camp of iron and steel, one saw the camp-followers and
the pagan women--there would be work to-day and dancing to-night. For
the Puritan's dry voice is but the crackling of a leaf underfoot in the
rush and roar of the coming of the new Egypt.

Bibbs was on time. He knew it must be “to the minute” or his father
would consider it an outrage; and the big chronometer in Sheridan's
office marked four precisely when Bibbs walked in. Coincidentally with
his entrance five people who had been at work in the office, under
Sheridan's direction, walked out. They departed upon no visible or
audible suggestion, and with a promptness that seemed ominous to
the new-comer. As the massive door clicked softly behind the elderly
stenographer, the last of the procession, Bibbs had a feeling that
they all understood that he was a failure as a great man's son, a
disappointment, the “queer one” of the family, and that he had been
summoned to judgment--a well-founded impression, for that was exactly
what they understood.

“Sit down,” said Sheridan.

It is frequently an advantage for deans, school-masters, and worried
fathers to place delinquents in the sitting-posture. Bibbs sat.

Sheridan, standing, gazed enigmatically upon his son for a period of
silence, then walked slowly to a window and stood looking out of it, his
big hands, loosely hooked together by the thumbs, behind his back. They
were soiled, as were all other hands down-town, except such as might be
still damp from a basin.

“Well, Bibbs,” he said at last, not altering his attitude, “do you know
what I'm goin' to do with you?”

Bibbs, leaning back in his chair, fixed his eyes contemplatively upon
the ceiling. “I heard you tell Jim,” he began, in his slow way. “You
said you'd send him to the machine-shop with me if he didn't propose to
Miss Vertrees. So I suppose that must be your plan for me. But--”

“But what?” said Sheridan, irritably, as the son paused.

“Isn't there somebody you'd let ME propose to?”

That brought his father sharply round to face him. “You beat the devil!
Bibbs, what IS the matter with you? Why can't you be like anybody else?”

“Liver, maybe,” said Bibbs, gently.

“Boh! Even ole Doc Gurney says there's nothin' wrong with you
organically. No. You're a dreamer, Bibbs; that's what's the matter,
and that's ALL the matter. Oh, not one o' these BIG dreamers that put
through the big deals! No, sir! You're the kind o' dreamer that just
sets out on the back fence and thinks about how much trouble there must
be in the world! That ain't the kind that builds the bridges, Bibbs;
it's the kind that borrows fifteen cents from his wife's uncle's
brother-in-law to get ten cent's worth o' plug tobacco and a nickel's
worth o' quinine!”

He put the finishing touch on this etching with a snort, and turned
again to the window.

“Look out there!” he bade his son. “Look out o' that window! Look at the
life and energy down there! I should think ANY young man's blood would
tingle to get into it and be part of it. Look at the big things young
men are doin' in this town!” He swung about, coming to the mahogany desk
in the middle of the room. “Look at what I was doin' at your age! Look
at what your own brothers are doin'! Look at Roscoe! Yes, and look
at Jim! I made Jim president o' the Sheridan Realty Company last
New-Year's, with charge of every inch o' ground and every brick and
every shingle and stick o' wood we own; and it's an example to any young
man--or ole man, either--the way he took ahold of it. Last July we found
out we wanted two more big warehouses at the Pump Works--wanted 'em
quick. Contractors said it couldn't be done; said nine or ten months
at the soonest; couldn't see it any other way. What'd Jim do? Took the
contract himself; found a fellow with a new cement and concrete process;
kept men on the job night and day, and stayed on it night and day
himself--and, by George! we begin to USE them warehouses next week! Four
months and a half, and every inch fireproof! I tell you Jim's one o'
these fellers that make miracles happen! Now, I don't say every young
man can be like Jim, because there's mighty few got his ability, but
every young man can go in and do his share. This town is God's own
country, and there's opportunity for anybody with a pound of energy and
an ounce o' gumption. I tell you these young business men I watch just
do my heart good! THEY don't set around on the back fence--no, sir! They
take enough exercise to keep their health; and they go to a baseball
game once or twice a week in summer, maybe, and they're raisin' nice
families, with sons to take their places sometime and carry on the
work--because the work's got to go ON! They're puttin' their life-blood
into it, I tell you, and that's why we're gettin' bigger every minute,
and why THEY'RE gettin' bigger, and why it's all goin' to keep ON
gettin' bigger!”

He slapped the desk resoundingly with his open palm, and then, observing
that Bibbs remained in the same impassive attitude, with his eyes still
fixed upon the ceiling in a contemplation somewhat plaintive, Sheridan
was impelled to groan. “Oh, Lord!” he said. “This is the way you always
were. I don't believe you understood a darn word I been sayin'! You
don't LOOK as if you did. By George! it's discouraging!”

“I don't understand about getting--about getting bigger,” said Bibbs,
bringing his gaze down to look at his father placatively. “I don't see
just why--”

“WHAT?” Sheridan leaned forward, resting his hands upon the desk and
staring across it incredulously at his son.

“I don't understand--exactly--what you want it all bigger for?”

“Great God!” shouted Sheridan, and struck the desk a blow with his
clenched fist. “A son of mine asks me that! You go out and ask the
poorest day-laborer you can find! Ask him that question--”

“I did once,” Bibbs interrupted; “when I was in the machine-shop. I--”

“Wha'd he say?”

“He said, 'Oh, hell!'” answered Bibbs, mildly.

“Yes, I reckon he would!” Sheridan swung away from the desk. “I reckon
he certainly would! And I got plenty sympathy with him right now,
myself!”

“It's the same answer, then?” Bibbs's voice was serious, almost
tremulous.

“Damnation!” Sheridan roared. “Did you ever hear the word Prosperity,
you ninny? Did you ever hear the word Ambition? Did you ever hear the
word PROGRESS?”

He flung himself into a chair after the outburst, his big chest surging,
his throat tumultuous with gutteral incoherences. “Now then,” he said,
huskily, when the anguish had somewhat abated, “what do you want to do?”

“Sir?”

“What do you WANT to do, I said.”

Taken by surprise, Bibbs stammered. “What--what do--I--what--”

“If I'd let you do exactly what you had the whim for, what would you
do?”

Bibbs looked startled; then timidity overwhelmed him--a profound
shyness. He bent his head and fixed his lowered eyes upon the toe of his
shoe, which he moved to and fro upon the rug, like a culprit called to
the desk in school.

“What would you do? Loaf?”

“No, sir.” Bibbs's voice was almost inaudible, and what little sound it
made was unquestionably a guilty sound. “I suppose I'd--I'd--”

“Well?”

“I suppose I'd try to--to write.”

“Write what?”

“Nothing important--just poems and essays, perhaps.”

“That all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see,” said his father, breathing quickly with the restraint he was
putting upon himself. “That is, you want to write, but you don't want to
write anything of any account.”

“You think--”

Sheridan got up again. “I take my hat off to the man that can write
a good ad,” he said, emphatically. “The best writin' talent in this
country is right spang in the ad business to-day. You buy a magazine for
good writin'--look on the back of it! Let me tell you I pay money for
that kind o' writin'. Maybe you think it's easy. Just try it! I've tried
it, and I can't do it. I tell you an ad's got to be written so it makes
people do the hardest thing in this world to GET 'em to do: it's got to
make 'em give up their MONEY! You talk about 'poems and essays.' I tell
you when it comes to the actual skill o' puttin' words together so as to
make things HAPPEN, R. T. Bloss, right here in this city, knows more in
a minute than George Waldo Emerson ever knew in his whole life!”

“You--you may be--” Bibbs said, indistinctly, the last word smothered in
a cough.

“Of COURSE I'm right! And if it ain't just like you to want to take up
with the most out-o'-date kind o' writin' there is! 'Poems and essays'!
My Lord, Bibbs, that's WOMEN'S work! You can't pick up a newspaper
without havin' to see where Mrs. Rumskididle read a paper on 'Jane
Eyre,' or 'East Lynne,' at the God-Knows-What Club. And 'poetry'! Why,
look at Edith! I expect that poem o' hers would set a pretty high-water
mark for you, young man, and it's the only one she's ever managed to
write in her whole LIFE! When I wanted her to go on and write some more
she said it took too much time. Said it took months and months. And
Edith's a smart girl; she's got more energy in her little finger than
you ever give me a chance to see in your whole body, Bibbs. Now look
at the facts: say she could turn out four or five poems a year and you
could turn out maybe two. That medal she got was worth about fifteen
dollars, so there's your income--thirty dollars a year! That's a fine
success to make of your life! I'm not sayin' a word against poetry. I
wouldn't take ten thousand dollars right now for that poem of Edith's;
and poetry's all right enough in its place--but you leave it to the
girls. A man's got to do a man's work in this world!”

He seated himself in a chair at his son's side and, leaning over, tapped
Bibbs confidentially on the knee. “This city's got the greatest future
in America, and if my sons behave right by me and by themselves they're
goin' to have a mighty fair share of it--a mighty fair share. I love
this town. It's God's own footstool, and it's made money for me every
day right along, I don't know how many years. I love it like I do my own
business, and I'd fight for it as quick as I'd fight for my own family.
It's a beautiful town. Look at our wholesale district; look at any
district you want to; look at the park system we're puttin' through,
and the boulevards and the public statuary. And she grows. God! how she
grows!” He had become intensely grave; he spoke with solemnity. “Now,
Bibbs, I can't take any of it--nor any gold or silver nor buildings nor
bonds--away with me in my shroud when I have to go. But I want to leave
my share in it to my boys. I've worked for it; I've been a builder and
a maker; and two blades of grass have grown where one grew before,
whenever I laid my hand on the ground and willed 'em to grow. I've built
big, and I want the buildin' to go on. And when my last hour comes I
want to know that my boys are ready to take charge; that they're fit
to take charge and go ON with it. Bibbs, when that hour comes I want
to know that my boys are big men, ready and fit to take hold of big things.
Bibbs, when I'm up above I want to know that the big share I've made
mine, here below, is growin' bigger and bigger in the charge of my
boys.”

He leaned back, deeply moved. “There!” he said, huskily. “I've never
spoken more what was in my heart in my life. I do it because I want you
to understand--and not think me a mean father. I never had to talk that
way to Jim and Roscoe. They understood without any talk, Bibbs.”

“I see,” said Bibbs. “At least I think I do. But--”

“Wait a minute!” Sheridan raised his hand. “If you see the least bit
in the world, then you understand how it feels to me to have my son set
here and talk about 'poems and essays' and such-like fooleries. And you
must understand, too, what it meant to start one o' my boys and have
him come back on me the way you did, and have to be sent to a sanitarium
because he couldn't stand work. Now, let's get right down to it, Bibbs.
I've had a whole lot o' talk with ole Doc Gurney about you, one time
another, and I reckon I understand your case just about as well as he
does, anyway! Now here, I'll be frank with you. I started you in harder
than what I did the other boys, and that was for your own good, because
I saw you needed to be shook up more'n they did. You were always kind of
moody and mopish--and you needed work that'd keep you on the jump. Now,
why did it make you sick instead of brace you up and make a man of you
the way it ought of done? I pinned ole Gurney down to it. I says, 'Look
here, ain't it really because he just plain hated it?' 'Yes,' he says,
'that's it. If he'd enjoyed it, it wouldn't 'a' hurt him. He loathes it,
and that affects his nervous system. The more he tries it, the more he
hates it; and the more he hates it, the more injury it does him.' That
ain't quite his words, but it's what he meant. And that's about the way
it is.”

“Yes,” said Bibbs, “that's about the way it is.”

“Well, then, I reckon it's up to me not only to make you do it, but to
make you like it!”

Bibbs shivered. And he turned upon his father a look that was almost
ghostly. “I can't,” he said, in a low voice. “I can't.”

“Can't go back to the shop?”

“No. Can't like it. I can't.”

Sheridan jumped up, his patience gone. To his own view, he had reasoned
exhaustively, had explained fully and had pleaded more than a father
should, only to be met in the end with the unreasoning and mysterious
stubbornness which had been Bibbs's baffling characteristic from
childhood. “By George, you will!” he cried. “You'll go back there and
you'll like it! Gurney says it won't hurt you if you like it, and he
says it'll kill you if you go back and hate it; so it looks as if it
was about up to you not to hate it. Well, Gurney's a fool! Hatin' work
doesn't kill anybody; and this isn't goin' to kill you, whether you hate
it or not. I've never made a mistake in a serious matter in my life,
and it wasn't a mistake my sendin' you there in the first place. And
I'm goin' to prove it--I'm goin' to send you back there and vindicate my
judgment. Gurney says it's all 'mental attitude.' Well, you're goin'
to learn the right one! He says in a couple more months this fool thing
that's been the matter with you'll be disappeared completely and you'll
be back in as good or better condition than you were before you ever
went into the shop. And right then is when you begin over--right in that
same shop! Nobody can call me a hard man or a mean father. I do the best
I can for my chuldern, and I take full responsibility for bringin' my
sons up to be men. Now, so far, I've failed with you. But I'm not goin'
to keep ON failin'. I never tackled a job YET I didn't put through, and
I'm not goin' to begin with my own son. I'm goin' to make a MAN of you.
By God! I am!”

Bibbs rose and went slowly to the door, where he turned. “You say you
give me a couple of months?” he said.

Sheridan pushed a bell-button on his desk. “Gurney said two months more
would put you back where you were. You go home and begin to get yourself
in the right 'mental attitude' before those two months are up! Good-by!”

“Good-by, sir,” said Bibbs, meekly.



CHAPTER X

Bibbs's room, that neat apartment for transients to which the “lamidal”
 George had shown him upon his return, still bore the appearance of
temporary quarters, possibly because Bibbs had no clear conception
of himself as a permanent incumbent. However, he had set upon the
mantelpiece the two photographs that he owned: one, a “group” twenty
years old--his father and mother, with Jim and Roscoe as boys--and the
other a “cabinet” of Edith at sixteen. And upon a table were the books
he had taken from his trunk: Sartor Resartus, Virginibus Puerisque,
Huckleberry Finn, and Afterwhiles. There were some other books in the
trunk--a large one, which remained unremoved at the foot of the bed,
adding to the general impression of transiency. It contained nearly all
the possessions as well as the secret life of Bibbs Sheridan, and Bibbs
sat beside it, the day after his interview with his father, raking over
a small collection of manuscripts in the top tray. Some of these he
glanced through dubiously, finding little comfort in them; but one made
him smile. Then he shook his head ruefully indeed, and ruefully began to
read it. It was written on paper stamped “Hood Sanitarium,” and bore the
title, “Leisure.”

  A man may keep a quiet heart at seventy miles an hour, but not if
  he is running the train.  Nor is the habit of contemplation a useful
  quality in the stoker of a foundry furnace; it will not be found to
  recommend him to the approbation of his superiors.  For a profession
  adapted solely to the pursuit of happiness in thinking, I would
  choose that of an invalid:  his money is time and he may spend it on
  Olympus.  It will not suffice to be an amateur invalid.  To my way
  of thinking, the perfect practitioner must be to all outward
  purposes already dead if he is to begin the perfect enjoyment of
  life.  His serenity must not be disturbed by rumors of recovery; he
  must lie serene in his long chair in the sunshine.  The world must
  be on the other side of the wall, and the wall must be so thick and
  so high that he cannot hear the roaring of the furnace fires and the
  screaming of the whistles.  Peace--

Having read so far as the word “peace,” Bibbs suffered an interruption
interesting as a coincidence of contrast. High voices sounded in the
hall just outside his door; and it became evident that a woman's quarrel
was in progress, the parties to it having begun it in Edith's room, and
continuing it vehemently as they came out into the hall.

“Yes, you BETTER go home!” Bibbs heard his sister vociferating, shrilly.
“You better go home and keep your mind a little more on your HUSBAND!”

“Edie, Edie!” he heard his mother remonstrating, as peacemaker.

“You see here!” This was Sibyl, and her voice was both acrid and
tremulous. “Don't you talk to me that way! I came here to tell Mother
Sheridan what I'd heard, and to let her tell Father Sheridan if she
thought she ought to, and I did it for your own good.”

“Yes, you did!” And Edith's gibing laughter tooted loudly. “Yes, you
did! YOU didn't have any other reason! OH no! YOU don't want to break it
up between Bobby Lamhorn and me because--”

“Edie, Edie! Now, now!”

“Oh, hush up, mamma! I'd like to know, then, if she says her new friends
tell her he's got such a reputation that he oughtn't to come here, what
about his not going to HER house. How--”

“I've explained that to Mother Sheridan.” Sibyl's voice indicated that
she was descending the stairs. “Married people are not the same. Some
things that should be shielded from a young girl--”

This seemed to have no very soothing effect upon Edith. “'Shielded from
a young girl'!” she shrilled. “You seem pretty willing to be the shield!
You look out Roscoe doesn't notice what kind of a shield you are!”

Sibyl's answer was inaudible, but Mrs. Sheridan's flurried attempts at
pacification were renewed. “Now, Edie, Edie, she means it for your good,
and you'd oughtn't to--”

“Oh, hush up, mamma, and let me alone! If you dare tell papa--”

“Now, now! I'm not going to tell him to-day, and maybe--”

“You've got to promise NEVER to tell him!” the girl cried, passionately.

“Well, we'll see. You just come back in your own room, and we'll--”

“No! I WON'T 'talk it over'! Stop pulling me! Let me ALONE!” And Edith,
flinging herself violently upon Bibbs's door, jerked it open, swung
round it into the room, slammed the door behind her, and threw herself,
face down, upon the bed in such a riot of emotion that she had no
perception of Bibbs's presence in the room. Gasping and sobbing in a
passion of tears, she beat the coverlet and pillows with her clenched
fists. “Sneak!” she babbled aloud. “Sneak! Snake-in-the-grass! Cat!”

Bibbs saw that she did not know he was there, and he went softly toward
the door, hoping to get away before she became aware of him; but some
sound of his movement reached her, and she sat up, startled, facing him.

“Bibbs! I thought I saw you go out awhile ago.”

“Yes. I came back, though. I'm sorry--”

“Did you hear me quarreling with Sibyl?”

“Only what you said in the hall. You lie down again, Edith. I'm going
out.”

“No; don't go.” She applied a handkerchief to her eyes, emitted a sob,
and repeated her request. “Don't go. I don't mind you; you're quiet,
anyhow. Mamma's so fussy, and never gets anywhere. I don't mind you at
all, but I wish you'd sit down.”

“All right.” And he returned to his chair beside the trunk. “Go ahead
and cry all you want, Edith,” he said. “No harm in that!”

“Sibyl told mamma--OH!” she began, choking. “Mary Vertrees had mamma and
Sibyl and I to tea, one afternoon two weeks or so ago, and she had some
women there that Sibyl's been crazy to get in with, and she just laid
herself out to make a hit with 'em, and she's been running after 'em
ever since, and now she comes over here and says THEY say Bobby Lamhorn
is so bad that, even though they like his family, none of the nice
people in town would let him in their houses. In the first place, it's
a falsehood, and I don't believe a word of it; and in the second place
I know the reason she did it, and, what's more, she KNOWS I know it! I
won't SAY what it is--not yet--because papa and all of you would think
I'm as crazy as she is snaky; and Roscoe's such a fool he'd probably
quit speaking to me. But it's true! Just you watch her; that's all I
ask. Just you watch that woman. You'll see!”

As it happened, Bibbs was literally watching “that woman.” Glancing from
the window, he saw Sibyl pause upon the pavement in front of the old
house next door. She stood a moment, in deep thought, then walked
quickly up the path to the door, undoubtedly with the intention
of calling. But he did not mention this to his sister, who, after
delivering herself of a rather vague jeremiad upon the subject of her
sister-in-law's treacheries, departed to her own chamber, leaving him to
his speculations. The chief of these concerned the social elasticities
of women. Sibyl had just been a participant in a violent scene; she had
suffered hot insult of a kind that could not fail to set her quivering
with resentment; and yet she elected to betake herself to the presence
of people whom she knew no more than “formally.” Bibbs marveled. Surely,
he reflected, some traces of emotion must linger upon Sibyl's face or in
her manner; she could not have ironed it all quite out in the three or
four minutes it took her to reach the Vertreeses' door.

And in this he was not mistaken, for Mary Vertrees was at that moment
wondering what internal excitement Mrs. Roscoe Sheridan was striving to
master. But Sibyl had no idea that she was allowing herself to exhibit
anything except the gaiety which she conceived proper to the manner of a
casual caller. She was wholly intent upon fulfilling the sudden purpose
that brought her, and she was no more self-conscious than she was finely
intelligent. For Sibyl Sheridan belonged to a type Scriptural in its
antiquity. She was merely the idle and half-educated intriguer who may
and does delude men, of course, and the best and dullest of her own sex
as well, finding invariably strong supporters among these latter. It is
a type that has wrought some damage in the world and would have wrought
greater, save for the check put upon its power by intelligent women
and by its own “lack of perspective,” for it is a type that never sees
itself. Sibyl followed her impulses with no reflection or question--it
was like a hound on the gallop after a master on horseback. She had not
even the instinct to stop and consider her effect. If she wished to make
a certain impression she believed that she made it. She believed that
she was believed.

“My mother asked me to say that she was sorry she couldn't come down,”
 Mary said, when they were seated.

Sibyl ran the scale of a cooing simulance of laughter, which she had
been brought up to consider the polite thing to do after a remark
addressed to her by any person with whom she was not on familiar terms.
It was intended partly as a courtesy and partly as the foundation for an
impression of sweetness.

“Just thought I'd fly in a minute,” she said, continuing the cooing to
relieve the last doubt of her gentiality. “I thought I'd just behave
like REAL country neighbors. We are almost out in the country, so far
from down-town, aren't we? And it seemed such a LOVELY day! I wanted
to tell you how much I enjoyed meeting those nice people at tea that
afternoon. You see, coming here a bride and never having lived here
before, I've had to depend on my husband's friends almost entirely, and
I really've known scarcely anybody. Mr. Sheridan has been so engrossed
in business ever since he was a mere boy, why, of course--”

She paused, with the air of having completed an explanation.

“Of course,” said Mary, sympathetically accepting it.

“Yes. I've been seeing quite a lot of the Kittersbys since that
afternoon,” Sibyl went on. “They're really delightful people. Indeed
they are! Yes--”

She stopped with unconscious abruptness, her mind plainly wandering to
another matter; and Mary perceived that she had come upon a definite
errand. Moreover, a tensing of Sibyl's eyelids, in that moment of
abstraction as she looked aside from her hostess, indicated that the
errand was a serious one for the caller and easily to be connected
with the slight but perceptible agitation underlying her assumption of
cheerful ease. There was a restlessness of breathing, a restlessness of
hands.

“Mrs. Kittersby and her daughter were chatting about some of the people
here in town the other day,” said Sibyl, repeating the cooing and
protracting it. “They said something that took ME by surprise! We were
talking about our mutual friend, Mr. Robert Lamhorn--”

Mary interrupted her promptly. “Do you mean 'mutual' to include my
mother and me?” she asked.

“Why, yes; the Kittersbys and you and all of us Sheridans, I mean.”

“No,” said Mary. “We shouldn't consider Mr. Robert Lamhorn a friend of
ours.”

To her surprise, Sibyl nodded eagerly, as if greatly pleased. “That's
just the way Mrs. Kittersby talked!” she cried, with a vehemence that
made Mary stare. “Yes, and I hear that's the way ALL you old families
here speak of him!”

Mary looked aside, but otherwise she was able to maintain her composure.
“I had the impression he was a friend of yours,” she said; adding,
hastily, “and your husband's.”

“Oh yes,” said the caller, absently. “He is, certainly. A man's
reputation for a little gaiety oughtn't to make a great difference to
married people, of course. It's where young girls are in question. THEN
it may be very, very dangerous. There are a great many things safe and
proper for married people that might be awf'ly imprudent for a young
girl. Don't you agree, Miss Vertrees?”

“I don't know,” returned the frank Mary. “Do you mean that you intend
to remain a friend of Mr. Lamhorn's, but disapprove of Miss Sheridan's
doing so?”

“That's it exactly!” was the naive and ardent response of Sibyl. “What
I feel about it is that a man with his reputation isn't at all suitable
for Edith, and the family ought to be made to understand it. I tell
you,” she cried, with a sudden access of vehemence, “her father ought to
put his foot down!”

Her eyes flashed with a green spark; something seemed to leap out and
then retreat, but not before Mary had caught a glimpse of it, as one
might catch a glimpse of a thing darting forth and then scuttling back
into hiding under a bush.

“Of course,” said Sibyl, much more composedly, “I hardly need say that
it's entirely on Edith's account that I'm worried about this. I'm as
fond of Edith as if she was really my sister, and I can't help fretting
about it. It would break my heart to have Edith's life spoiled.”

This tune was off the key, to Mary's ear. Sibyl tried to sing with
pathos, but she flatted.

And when a lady receives a call from another who suffers under the
stress of some feeling which she wishes to conceal, there is not
uncommonly developed a phenomenon of duality comparable to the effect
obtained by placing two mirrors opposite each other, one clear and
the other flawed. In this case, particularly, Sibyl had an imperfect
consciousness of Mary. The Mary Vertrees that she saw was merely
something to be cozened to her own frantic purpose--a Mary Vertrees who
was incapable of penetrating that purpose. Sibyl sat there believing
that she was projecting the image of herself that she desired to
project, never dreaming that with every word, every look, and every
gesture she was more and more fully disclosing the pitiable truth to
the clear eyes of Mary. And the Sibyl that Mary saw was an overdressed
woman, in manner half rustic, and in mind as shallow as a pan, but
possessed by emotions that appeared to be strong--perhaps even violent.
What those emotions were Mary had not guessed, but she began to suspect.

“And Edith's life WOULD be spoiled,” Sibyl continued. “It would be a
dreadful thing for the whole family. She's the very apple of Father
Sheridan's eye, and he's as proud of her as he is of Jim and Roscoe. It
would be a horrible thing for him to have her marry a man like Robert
Lamhorn; but he doesn't KNOW anything about him, and if somebody doesn't
tell him, what I'm most afraid of is that Edith might get his consent
and hurry on the wedding before he finds out, and then it would be too
late. You see, Miss Vertrees, it's very difficult for me to decide just
what it's my duty to do.”

“I see,” said Mary, looking at her thoughtfully, “Does Miss Sheridan
seem to--to care very much about him?”

“He's deliberately fascinated her,” returned the visitor, beginning to
breathe quickly and heavily. “Oh, she wasn't difficult! She knew she
wasn't in right in this town, and she was crazy to meet the people that
were, and she thought he was one of 'em. But that was only the start
that made it easy for him--and he didn't need it. He could have done
it, anyway!” Sibyl was launched now; her eyes were furious and her voice
shook. “He went after her deliberately, the way he does everything; he's
as cold-blooded as a fish. All he cares about is his own pleasure, and
lately he's decided it would be pleasant to get hold of a piece of real
money--and there was Edith! And he'll marry her! Nothing on earth can
stop him unless he finds out she won't HAVE any money if she marries
him, and the only person that could make him understand that is Father
Sheridan. Somehow, that's got to be managed, because Lamhorn is going to
hurry it on as fast as he can. He told me so last night. He said he was
going to marry her the first minute he could persuade her to it--and
little Edith's all ready to be persuaded!” Sibyl's eyes flashed green
again. “And he swore he'd do it,” she panted. “He swore he'd marry Edith
Sheridan, and nothing on earth could stop him!”

And then Mary understood. Her lips parted and she stared at the babbling
creature incredulously, a sudden vivid picture in her mind, a canvas of
unconscious Sibyl's painting. Mary beheld it with pity and horror: she
saw Sibyl clinging to Robert Lamhorn, raging, in a whisper, perhaps--for
Roscoe might have been in the house, or servants might have heard.
She saw Sibyl entreating, beseeching, threatening despairingly, and
Lamhorn--tired of her--first evasive, then brutally letting her have the
truth; and at last, infuriated, “swearing” to marry her rival. If Sibyl
had not babbled out the word “swore” it might have been less plain.

The poor woman blundered on, wholly unaware of what she had confessed.
“You see,” she said, more quietly, “whatever's going to be done ought to
be done right away. I went over and told Mother Sheridan what I'd heard
about Lamhorn--oh, I was open and aboveboard! I told her right before
Edith. I think it ought all to be done with perfect frankness, because
nobody can say it isn't for the girl's own good and what her best friend
would do. But Mother Sheridan's under Edith's thumb, and she's afraid
to ever come right out with anything. Father Sheridan's different. Edith
can get anything she wants out of him in the way of money or ordinary
indulgence, but when it comes to a matter like this he'd be a steel
rock. If it's a question of his will against anybody else's he'd make
his will rule if it killed 'em both! Now, he'd never in the world let
Lamhorn come near the house again if he knew his reputation. So, you
see, somebody's got to tell him. It isn't a very easy position for me,
is it, Miss Vertrees?”

“No,” said Mary, gravely.

“Well, to be frank,” said Sibyl, smiling, “that's why I've come to you.”

“To ME!” Mary frowned.

Sibyl rippled and cooed again. “There isn't ANYBODY ever made such a hit
with Father Sheridan in his life as you have. And of course we ALL
hope you're not going to be exactly an outsider in the affairs of the
family!” (This sally with another and louder effect of laughter). “And
if it's MY duty, why, in a way, I think it might be thought yours, too.”

“No, no!” exclaimed Mary, sharply.

“Listen,” said Sibyl. “Now suppose I go to Father Sheridan with this
story, and Edith says it's not true; suppose she says Lamhorn has a
good reputation and that I'm repeating irresponsible gossip, or suppose
(what's most likely) she loses her temper and says I invented it, then
what am I going to do? Father Sheridan doesn't know Mrs. Kittersby and
her daughter, and they're out of the question, anyway. But suppose I
could say: 'All right, if you want proof, ask Miss Vertrees. She came
with me, and she's waiting in the next room right now, to--”

“No, no,” said Mary, quickly. “You mustn't--”

“Listen just a minute more,” Sibyl urged, confidingly. She was on easy
ground now, to her own mind, and had no doubt of her success. “You
naturally don't want to begin by taking part in a family quarrel, but
if YOU take part in it, it won't be one. You don't know yourself what
weight you carry over there, and no one would have the right to say you
did it except out of the purest kindness. Don't you see that Jim and
his father would admire you all the more for it? Miss Vertrees, listen!
Don't you see we OUGHT to do it, you and I? Do you suppose Robert
Lamhorn cares a snap of his finger for her? Do you suppose a man like
him would LOOK at Edith Sheridan if it wasn't for the money?” And again
Sibyl's emotion rose to the surface. “I tell you he's after nothing on
earth but to get his finger in that old man's money-pile, over there,
next door! He'd marry ANYBODY to do it. Marry Edith?” she cried. “I tell
you he'd marry their nigger cook for THAT!”

She stopped, afraid--at the wrong time--that she had been too vehement,
but a glance at Mary reassured her, and Sibyl decided that she had
produced the effect she wished. Mary was not looking at her; she was
staring straight before her at the wall, her eyes wide and shining. She
became visibly a little paler as Sibyl looked at her.

“After nothing on earth but to get his finger in that old man's
money-pile, over there, next door!” The voice was vulgar, the words were
vulgar--and the plain truth was vulgar! How it rang in Mary Vertrees's
ears! The clear mirror had caught its own image clearly in the flawed
one at last.

Sibyl put forth her best bid to clench the matter. She offered her
bargain. “Now don't you worry,” she said, sunnily, “about this setting
Edith against you. She'll get over it after a while, anyway, but if she
tried to be spiteful and make it uncomfortable for you when you drop in
over there, or managed so as to sort of leave you out, why, I've got a
house, and Jim likes to come there. I don't THINK Edith WOULD be that
way; she's too crazy to have you take her around with the smart crowd,
but if she DID, you needn't worry. And another thing--I guess you won't
mind Jim's own sister-in-law speaking of it. Of course, I don't know
just how matters stand between you and Jim, but Jim and Roscoe are about
as much alike as two brothers can be, and Roscoe was very slow making up
his mind; sometimes I used to think he actually never WOULD. Now, what
I mean is, sisters-in-law can do lots of things to help matters on like
that. There's lots of little things can be said, and lots--”

She stopped, puzzled. Mary Vertrees had gone from pale to scarlet, and
now, still scarlet indeed, she rose, without a word of explanation, or
any other kind of word, and walked slowly to the open door and out of
the room.

Sibyl was a little taken aback. She supposed Mary had remembered
something neglected and necessary for the instruction of a servant, and
that she would return in a moment; but it was rather a rude excess of
absent-mindedness not to have excused herself, especially as her guest
was talking. And, Mary's return being delayed, Sibyl found time to think
this unprefaced exit odder and ruder than she had first considered it.
There might have been more excuse for it, she thought, had she been
speaking of matters less important--offering to do the girl all the
kindness in her power, too!

Sibyl yawned and swung her muff impatiently; she examined the sole of
her shoe; she decided on a new shape of heel; she made an inventory
of the furniture of the room, of the rugs, of the wall-paper and
engravings. Then she looked at her watch and frowned; went to a window
and stood looking out upon the brown lawn, then came back to the chair
she had abandoned, and sat again. There was no sound in the house.

A strange expression began imperceptibly to alter the planes of her
face, and slowly she grew as scarlet as Mary--scarlet to the ears. She
looked at her watch again--and twenty-five minutes had elapsed since she
had looked at it before.

She went into the hall, glanced over her shoulder oddly; then she let
herself softly out of the front door, and went across the street to her
own house.

Roscoe met her upon the threshold, gloomily. “Saw you from the window,”
 he explained. “You must find a lot to say to that old lady.”

“What old lady?”

“Mrs. Vertrees. I been waiting for you a long time, and I saw the
daughter come out, fifteen minutes ago, and post a letter, and then walk
on up the street. Don't stand out on the porch,” he said, crossly.
“Come in here. There's something it's come time I'll have to talk to you
about. Come in!”

But as she was moving to obey he glanced across at his father's house
and started. He lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the setting sun,
staring fixedly. “Something's the matter over there,” he muttered, and
then, more loudly, as alarm came into his voice, he said, “What's the
matter over there?”

Bibbs dashed out of the gate in an automobile set at its highest speed,
and as he saw Roscoe he made a gesture singularly eloquent of calamity,
and was lost at once in a cloud of dust down the street. Edith had
followed part of the way down the drive, and it could be seen that she
was crying bitterly. She lifted both arms to Roscoe, summoning him.

“By George!” gasped Roscoe. “I believe somebody's dead!”

And he started for the New House at a run.



CHAPTER XI

Sheridan had decided to conclude his day's work early that afternoon,
and at about two o'clock he left his office with a man of affairs from
foreign parts, who had traveled far for a business conference with
Sheridan and his colleagues. Herr Favre, in spite of his French name,
was a gentleman of Bavaria. It was his first visit to our country, and
Sheridan took pleasure in showing him the sights of the country's finest
city. They got into an open car at the main entrance of the Sheridan
Building, and were driven first, slowly and momentously, through the
wholesale district and the retail district; then more rapidly they
inspected the packing-houses and the stock-yards; then skirmished over
the “park system” and “boulevards”; and after that whizzed through the
“residence section” on their way to the factories and foundries.

“All cray,” observed Herr Favre, smilingly.

“'Cray'?” echoed Sheridan. “I don't know what you mean. 'Cray'?”

“No white,” said Herr Favre, with a wave of his hand toward the
long rows of houses on both sides of the street. “No white lace
window-curtains; all cray lace window-curtains.”

“Oh. I see!” Sheridan laughed indulgently. “You mean 'GRAY.' No, they
ain't, they're white. I never saw any gray ones.”

Herr Favre shook his head, much amused. “There are NO white ones,”
 he said. “There is no white ANYTHING in your city; no white
window-curtains, no white house, no white peeble!” He pointed upward.
“Smoke!” Then he sniffed the air and clasped his nose between forefinger
and thumb. “Smoke! Smoke ef'rywhere. Smoke in your insites.” He tapped
his chest. “Smoke in your lunks!”

“Oh! SMOKE!” Sheridan cried with gusto, drawing in a deep breath and
patently finding it delicious. “You BET we got smoke!”

“Exbensif!” said Herr Favre. “Ruins foliage; ruins fabrics. Maybe in
summer it iss not so bad, but I wonder your wifes will bear it.”

Sheridan laughed uproariously. “They know it means new spring hats for
'em!”

“They must need many, too!” said the visitor. “New hats, new all things,
but nothing white. In Munchen we could not do it; we are a safing
peeble.”

“Where's that?”

“In Munchen. You say 'Munich.'”

“Well, I never been to Munich, but I took in the Mediterranean trip,
and I tell you, outside o' some right good scenery, all I saw was mighty
dirty and mighty shiftless and mighty run-down at the heel. Now comin'
right down TO it, Mr. Farver, wouldn't you rather live here in this town
than in Munich? I know you got more enterprise up there than the part of
the old country I saw, and I know YOU'RE a live business man and you're
associated with others like you, but when it comes to LIVIN' in a place,
wouldn't you heap rather be here than over there?”

“For me,” said Herr Favre, “no. Here I should not think I was living. It
would be like the miner who goes into the mine to work; nothing else.”

“We got a good many good citizens here from your part o' the world. THEY
like it.”

“Oh yes.” And Herr Favre laughed deprecatingly. “The first generation,
they bring their Germany with them; then, after that, they are
Americans, like you.” He tapped his host's big knee genially. “You are
patriot; so are they.”

“Well, I reckon you must be a pretty hot little patriot yourself, Mr.
Farver!” Sheridan exclaimed, gaily. “You certainly stand up for your
own town, if you stick to sayin' you'd rather live there than you would
here. Yes, SIR! You sure are some patriot to say THAT--after you've seen
our city! It ain't reasonable in you, but I must say I kind of admire
you for it; every man ought to stick up for his own, even when he sees
the other fellow's got the goods on him. Yet I expect way down deep in
your heart, Mr. Farver, you'd rather live right here than any place else
in the world, if you had your choice. Man alive! this is God's country,
Mr. Farver, and a blind man couldn't help seein' it! You couldn't stand
where you do in a business way and NOT see it. Soho, boy! Here we are.
This is the big works, and I'll show you something now that'll make your
eyes stick out!”

They had arrived at the Pump Works; and for an hour Mr. Favre was
personally conducted and personally instructed by the founder and
president, the buzzing queen bee of those buzzing hives.

“Now I'll take you for a spin in the country,” said Sheridan, when at
last they came out to the car again. “We'll take a breezer.” But, with
his foot on the step, he paused to hail a neat young man who came out
of the office smiling a greeting. “Hello, young fellow!” Sheridan said,
heartily. “On the job, are you, Jimmie? Ha! They don't catch you OFF of
it very often, I guess, though I do hear you go automobile-ridin' in
the country sometimes with a mighty fine-lookin' girl settin' up beside
you!” He roared with laughter, clapping his son upon the shoulder.
“That's all right with me--if it is with HER! So, Jimmie? Well, when we
goin' to move into your new warehouses? Monday?”

“Sunday, if you want to,” said Jim.

“No!” cried his father, delighted. “Don't tell me you're goin' to keep
your word about dates! That's no way to do contractin'! Never heard of a
contractor yet didn't want more time.”

“They'll be all ready for you on the minute,” said Jim. “I'm going over
both of 'em now, with Links and Sherman, from foundation to roof. I
guess they'll pass inspection, too!”

“Well, then, when you get through with that,” said his father, “you go
and take your girl out ridin'. By George! you've earned it! You tell
her you stand high with ME!” He stepped into the car, waving a waggish
farewell, and when the wheels were in motion again, he turned upon his
companion a broad face literally shining with pride. “That's my boy
Jimmie!” he said.

“Fine young man, yes,” said Herr Favre.

“I got two o' the finest boys,” said Sheridan, “I got two o' the finest
boys God ever made, and that's a fact, Mr. Farver! Jim's the oldest, and
I tell you they got to get up the day before if they expect to catch HIM
in bed! My other boy, Roscoe, he's always to the good, too, but Jim's
a wizard. You saw them two new-process warehouses, just about finished?
Well, JIM built 'em. I'll tell you about that, Mr. Farver.” And he
recited this history, describing the new process at length; in fact, he
had such pride in Jim's achievement that he told Herr Favre all about it
more than once.

“Fine young man, yes,” repeated the good Munchner, three-quarters of an
hour later. They were many miles out in the open country by this time.

“He is that!” said Sheridan, adding, as if confidentially: “I got a fine
family, Mr. Farver--fine chuldern. I got a daughter now; you take her
and put her anywhere you please, and she'll shine up with ANY of 'em.
There's culture and refinement and society in this town by the car-load,
and here lately she's been gettin' right in the thick of it--her and my
daughter-in-law, both. I got a mighty fine daughter-in-law, Mr. Farver.
I'm goin' to get you up for a meal with us before you leave town, and
you'll see--and, well, sir, from all I hear the two of 'em been holdin'
their own with the best. Myself, I and the wife never had time for much
o' that kind o' doin's, but it's all right and good for the chuldern;
and my daughter she's always kind of taken to it. I'll read you a poem
she wrote when I get you up at the house. She wrote it in school and
took the first prize for poetry with it. I tell you they don't make 'em
any smarter'n that girl, Mr. Farver. Yes, sir; take us all round, we're
a pretty happy family; yes, sir. Roscoe hasn't got any chuldern yet,
and I haven't ever spoke to him and his wife about it--it's kind of
a delicate matter--but it's about time the wife and I saw some
gran'-chuldern growin' up around us. I certainly do hanker for about
four or five little curly-headed rascals to take on my knee. Boys, I
hope, o' course; that's only natural. Jim's got his eye on a mighty
splendid-lookin' girl; lives right next door to us. I expect you heard
me joshin' him about it back yonder. She's one of the ole blue-bloods
here, and I guess it was a mighty good stock--to raise HER! She's one
these girls that stand right up and look at you! And pretty? She's
the prettiest thing you ever saw! Good size, too; good health and good
sense. Jim'll be just right if he gets her. I must say it tickles ME
to think o' the way that boy took ahold o' that job back yonder. Four
months and a half! Yes, sir--”

He expanded this theme once more; and thus he continued to entertain
the stranger throughout the long drive. Darkness had fallen before they
reached the city on their return, and it was after five when Sheridan
allowed Herr Favre to descend at the door of his hotel, where boys were
shrieking extra editions of the evening paper.

“Now, good night, Mr. Farver,” said Sheridan, leaning from the car to
shake hands with his guest. “Don't forget I'm goin' to come around and
take you up to--Go on away, boy!”

A newsboy had thrust himself almost between them, yelling, “Extry!
Secon' Extry. Extry, all about the horrable acciDENT. Extry!”

“Get out!” laughed Sheridan. “Who wants to read about accidents? Get
out!”

The boy moved away philosophically. “Extry! Extry!” he shrilled. “Three
men killed! Extry! Millionaire killed! Two other men killed! Extry!
Extry!”

“Don't forget, Mr. Farver,” Sheridan completed his interrupted
farewells. “I'll come by to take you up to our house for dinner. I'll be
here for you about half-past five to-morrow afternoon. Hope you 'njoyed
the drive much as I have. Good night--good night!” He leaned back,
speaking to the chauffer. “Now you can take me around to the Central
City barber-shop, boy. I want to get a shave 'fore I go up home.”

“Extry! Extry!” screamed the newsboys, zig-zagging among the crowds like
bats in the dusk. “Extry! All about the horrable acciDENT! Extry!” It
struck Sheridan that the papers sent out too many “Extras”; they printed
“Extras” for all sorts of petty crimes and casualties. It was a mistake,
he decided, critically. Crying “Wolf!” too often wouldn't sell the
goods; it was bad business. The papers would “make more in the long
run,” he was sure, if they published an “Extra” only when something of
real importance happened.

“Extry! All about the hor'ble AX'nt! Extry!” a boy squawked under his
nose, as he descended from the car.

“Go on away!” said Sheridan, gruffly, though he smiled. He liked to see
the youngsters working so noisily to get on in the world.

But as he crossed the pavement to the brilliant glass doors of the
barber-shop, a second newsboy grasped the arm of the one who had thus
cried his wares.

“Say, Yallern,” said this second, hoarse with awe, “'n't chew know who
that IS?”

“Who?”

“It's SHERIDAN!”

“Jeest!” cried the first, staring insanely.

At about the same hour, four times a week--Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
and Saturday--Sheridan stopped at this shop to be shaved by the head
barber. The barbers were negroes, he was their great man, and it was
their habit to give him a “reception,” his entrance being always the
signal for a flurry of jocular hospitality, followed by general excesses
of briskness and gaiety. But it was not so this evening.

The shop was crowded. Copies of the “Extra” were being read by men
waiting, and by men in the latter stages of treatment. “Extras” lay upon
vacant seats and showed from the pockets of hanging coats.

There was a loud chatter between the practitioners and their recumbent
patients, a vocal charivari which stopped abruptly as Sheridan opened
the door. His name seemed to fizz in the air like the last sputtering
of a firework; the barbers stopped shaving and clipping; lathered men
turned their prostrate heads to stare, and there was a moment of amazing
silence in the shop.

The head barber, nearest the door, stood like a barber in a tableau. His
left hand held stretched between thumb and forefinger an elastic section
of his helpless customer's cheek, while his right hand hung poised above
it, the razor motionless. And then, roused from trance by the door's
closing, he accepted the fact of Sheridan's presence. The barber
remembered that there are no circumstances in life--or just after
it--under which a man does not need to be shaved.

He stepped forward, profoundly grave. “I be through with this man in the
chair one minute, Mist' Sheridan,” he said, in a hushed tone. “Yessuh.”
 And of a solemn negro youth who stood by, gazing stupidly, “You goin'
RESIGN?” he demanded in a fierce undertone. “You goin' take Mist'
Sheridan's coat?” He sent an angry look round the shop, and the barbers,
taking his meaning, averted their eyes and fell to work, the murmur of
subdued conversation buzzing from chair to chair.

“You sit down ONE minute, Mist' Sheridan,” said the head barber, gently.
“I fix nice chair fo' you to wait in.”

“Never mind,” said Sheridan. “Go on get through with your man.”

“Yessuh.” And he went quickly back to his chair on tiptoe, followed by
Sheridan's puzzled gaze.

Something had gone wrong in the shop, evidently. Sheridan did not know
what to make of it. Ordinarily he would have shouted a hilarious demand
for the meaning of the mystery, but an inexplicable silence had been
imposed upon him by the hush that fell upon his entrance and by the odd
look every man in the shop had bent upon him.

Vaguely disquieted, he walked to one of the seats in the rear of the
shop, and looked up and down the two lines of barbers, catching quickly
shifted, furtive glances here and there. He made this brief survey after
wondering if one of the barbers had died suddenly, that day, or the
night before; but there was no vacancy in either line.

The seat next to his was unoccupied, but some one had left a copy of
the “Extra” there, and, frowning, he picked it up and glanced at it. The
first of the swollen display lines had little meaning to him:

  Fatally Faulty.  New Process Roof Collapses Hurling Capitalist to
  Death with Inventor.  Seven Escape When Crash Comes.  Death Claims--

Thus far had he read when a thin hand fell upon the paper, covering the
print from his eyes; and, looking up, he saw Bibbs standing before him,
pale and gentle, immeasurably compassionate.

“I've come for you, father,” said Bibbs. “Here's the boy with your coat
and hat. Put them on and come home.”

And even then Sheridan did not understand. So secure was he in the
strength and bigness of everything that was his, he did not know what
calamity had befallen him. But he was frightened.

Without a word, he followed Bibbs heavily out throught the still shop,
but as they reached the pavement he stopped short and, grasping his
son's sleeve with shaking fingers, swung him round so that they stood
face to face.

“What--what--” His mouth could not do him the service he asked of it, he
was so frightened.

“Extry!” screamed a newsboy straight in his face. “Young North Side
millionaire insuntly killed! Extry!”

“Not--JIM!” said Sheridan.

Bibbs caught his father's hand in his own.

“And YOU come to tell me that?”

Sheridan did not know what he said. But in those first words and in the
first anguish of the big, stricken face Bibbs understood the unuttered
cry of accusation:

“Why wasn't it you?”



CHAPTER XII

Standing in the black group under gaunt trees at the cemetery, three
days later, Bibbs unwillingly let an old, old thought become definite
in his mind: the sickly brother had buried the strong brother, and Bibbs
wondered how many million times that had happened since men first made a
word to name the sons of one mother. Almost literally he had buried his
strong brother, for Sheridan had gone to pieces when he saw his dead
son. He had nothing to help him meet the shock, neither definite
religion nor “philosophy” definite or indefinite. He could only beat his
forehead and beg, over and over, to be killed with an ax, while his wife
was helpless except to entreat him not to “take on,” herself adding a
continuous lamentation. Edith, weeping, made truce with Sibyl and saw to
it that the mourning garments were beyond criticism. Roscoe was dazed,
and he shirked, justifying himself curiously by saying he “never had
any experience in such matters.” So it was Bibbs, the shy outsider, who
became, during this dreadful little time, the master of the house; for
as strange a thing as that, sometimes, may be the result of a death. He
met the relatives from out of town at the station; he set the time
for the funeral and the time for meals; he selected the flowers and
he selected Jim's coffin; he did all the grim things and all the other
things. Jim had belonged to an order of Knights, who lengthened the
rites with a picturesque ceremony of their own, and at first Bibbs
wished to avoid this, but upon reflection he offered no objection--he
divined that the Knights and their service would be not precisely a
consolation, but a satisfaction to his father. So the Knights led the
procession, with their band playing a dirge part of the long way to the
cemetery; and then turned back, after forming in two lines, plumed
hats sympathetically in hand, to let the hearse and the carriages pass
between.

“Mighty fine-lookin' men,” said Sheridan, brokenly. “They all--all liked
him. He was--” His breath caught in a sob and choked him. “He was--a
Grand Supreme Herald.”

Bibbs had divined aright.

“Dust to dust,” said the minister, under the gaunt trees; and at that
Sheridan shook convulsively from head to foot. All of the black group
shivered, except Bibbs, when it came to “Dust to dust.” Bibbs stood
passive, for he was the only one of them who had known that thought as a
familiar neighbor; he had been close upon dust himself for a long, long
time, and even now he could prophesy no protracted separation between
himself and dust. The machine-shop had brought him very close, and if
he had to go back it would probably bring him closer still; so close--as
Dr. Gurney predicted--that no one would be able to tell the difference
between dust and himself. And Sheridan, if Bibbs read him truly, would
be all the more determined to “make a man” of him, now that there was
a man less in the family. To Bibbs's knowledge, no one and nothing had
ever prevented his father from carrying through his plans, once he had
determined upon them; and Sheridan was incapable of believing that any
plan of his would not work out according to his calculations. His nature
unfitted him to accept failure. He had the gift of terrible persistence,
and with unflecked confidence that his way was the only way he would
hold to that way of “making a man” of Bibbs, who understood very well,
in his passive and impersonal fashion, that it was a way which might
make, not a man, but dust of him. But he had no shudder for the thought.

He had no shudder for that thought or for any other thought. The
truth about Bibbs was in the poem which Edith had adopted: he had so
thoroughly formed the over-sensitive habit of hiding his feelings that
no doubt he had forgotten--by this time--where he had put some of them,
especially those which concerned himself. But he had not hidden his
feelings about his father where they could not be found. He was strange
to his father, but his father was not strange to him. He knew that
Sheridan's plans were conceived in the stubborn belief that they would
bring about a good thing for Bibbs himself; and whatever the result was
to be, the son had no bitterness. Far otherwise, for as he looked at the
big, woeful figure, shaking and tortured, an almost unbearable pity laid
hands upon Bibbs's throat. Roscoe stood blinking, his lip quivering;
Edith wept audibly; Mrs. Sheridan leaned in half collapse against her
husband; but Bibbs knew that his father was the one who cared.

It was over. Men in overalls stepped forward with their shovels, and
Bibbs nodded quickly to Roscoe, making a slight gesture toward the line
of waiting carriages. Roscoe understood--Bibbs would stay and see the
grave filled; the rest were to go. The groups began to move away over
the turf; wheels creaked on the graveled drive; and one by one the
carriages filled and departed, the horses setting off at a walk. Bibbs
gazed steadfastly at the workmen; he knew that his father kept looking
back as he went toward the carriage, and that was a thing he did not
want to see. But after a little while there were no sounds of wheels
or hoofs on the gravel, and Bibbs, glancing up, saw that every one had
gone. A coupe had been left for him, the driver dozing patiently.

The workmen placed the flowers and wreaths upon the mound and about
it, and Bibbs altered the position of one or two of these, then stood
looking thoughtfully at the grotesque brilliancy of that festal-seeming
hillock beneath the darkening November sky. “It's too bad!” he half
whispered, his lips forming the words--and his meaning was that it was
too bad that the strong brother had been the one to go. For this was
his last thought before he walked to the coupe and saw Mary Vertrees
standing, all alone, on the other side of the drive.

She had just emerged from a grove of leafless trees that grew on a
slope where the tombs were many; and behind her rose a multitude of the
barbaric and classic shapes we so strangely strew about our graveyards:
urn-crowned columns and stone-draped obelisks, shop-carved angels and
shop-carved children poising on pillars and shafts, all lifting--in
unthought pathos--their blind stoniness toward the sky. Against such
a background, Bibbs was not incongruous, with his figure, in black, so
long and slender, and his face so long and thin and white; nor was the
undertaker's coupe out of keeping, with the shabby driver dozing on the
box and the shaggy horses standing patiently in attitudes without
hope and without regret. But for Mary Vertrees, here was a grotesque
setting--she was a vivid, living creature of a beautiful world. And a
graveyard is not the place for people to look charming.

She also looked startled and confused, but not more startled and
confused than Bibbs. In “Edith's” poem he had declared his intention of
hiding his heart “among the stars”; and in his boyhood one day he had
successfully hidden his body in the coal-pile. He had been no comrade
of other boys or of girls, and his acquaintances of a recent period were
only a few fellow-invalids and the nurses at the Hood Sanitarium. All
his life Bibbs had kept himself to himself--he was but a shy onlooker in
the world. Nevertheless, the startled gaze he bent upon the
unexpected lady before him had causes other than his shyness and her
unexpectedness. For Mary Vertrees had been a shining figure in the
little world of late given to the view of this humble and elusive
outsider, and spectators sometimes find their hearts beating faster than
those of the actors in the spectacle. Thus with Bibbs now. He started
and stared; he lifted his hat with incredible awkwardness, his fingers
fumbling at his forehead before they found the brim.

“Mr. Sheridan,” said Mary, “I'm afraid you'll have to take me home with
you. I--” She stopped, not lacking a momentary awkwardness of her own.

“Why--why--yes,” Bibbs stammered. “I'll--I'll be de--Won't you get in?”

In that manner and in that place they exchanged their first words. Then
Mary without more ado got into the coupe, and Bibbs followed, closing
the door.

“You're very kind,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “I should have had
to walk, and it's beginning to get dark. It's three miles, I think.”

“Yes,” said Bibbs. “It--it is beginning to get dark. I--I noticed that.”

“I ought to tell you--I--” Mary began, confusedly. She bit her lip, sat
silent a moment, then spoke with composure. “It must seem odd, my--”

“No, no!” Bibbs protested, earnestly. “Not in the--in the least.”

“It does, though,” said Mary. “I had not intended to come to the
cemetery, Mr. Sheridan, but one of the men in charge at the house came
and whispered to me that 'the family wished me to'--I think your sister
sent him. So I came. But when we reached here I--oh, I felt that perhaps
I--”

Bibbs nodded gravely. “Yes, yes,” he murmured.

“I got out on the opposite side of the carriage,” she continued. “I mean
opposite from--from where all of you were. And I wandered off over in
the other direction; and I didn't realize how little time it takes.
From where I was I couldn't see the carriages leaving--at least I didn't
notice them. So when I got back, just now, you were the only one here.
I didn't know the other people in the carriage I came in, and of course
they didn't think to wait for me. That's why--”

“Yes,” said Bibbs, “I--” And that seemed all he had to say just then.

Mary looked out through the dusty window. “I think we'd better be going
home, if you please,” she said.

“Yes,” Bibbs agreed, not moving. “It will be dark before we get there.”

She gave him a quick little glance. “I think you must be very tired,
Mr. Sheridan; and I know you have reason to be,” she said, gently. “If
you'll let me, I'll--” And without explaining her purpose she opened the
door on her side of the coupe and leaned out.

Bibbs started in blank perplexity, not knowing what she meant to do.

“Driver!” she called, in her clear voice, loudly. “Driver! We'd like to
start, please! Driver! Stop at the house just north of Mr. Sheridan's,
please.” The wheels began to move, and she leaned back beside Bibbs
once more. “I noticed that he was asleep when we got in,” she said. “I
suppose they have a great deal of night work.”

Bibbs drew a long breath and waited till he could command his voice.
“I've never been able to apologize quickly,” he said, with his
accustomed slowness, “because if I try to I stammer. My brother Roscoe
whipped me once, when we were boys, for stepping on his slate-pencil.
It took me so long to tell him it was an accident, he finished before I
did.”

Mary Vertrees had never heard anything quite like the drawling, gentle
voice or the odd implication that his not noticing the motionless state
of their vehicle was an “accident.” She had formed a casual impression
of him, not without sympathy, but at once she discovered that he was
unlike any of her cursory and vague imaginings of him. And suddenly she
saw a picture he had not intended to paint for sympathy: a sturdy boy
hammering a smaller, sickly boy, and the sickly boy unresentful. Not
that picture alone; others flashed before her. Instantaneously she had a
glimpse of Bibbs's life and into his life. She had a queer feeling, new
to her experience, of knowing him instantly. It startled her a little;
and then, with some surprise, she realized that she was glad he had sat
so long, after getting into the coupe, before he noticed that it had
not started. What she did not realize, however, was that she had made
no response to his apology, and they passed out of the cemetery gates,
neither having spoken again.

Bibbs was so content with the silence he did not know that it was
silence. The dusk, gathering in their small inclosure, was filled with a
rich presence for him; and presently it was so dark that neither of the
two could see the other, nor did even their garments touch. But neither
had any sense of being alone. The wheels creaked steadily, rumbling
presently on paved streets; there were the sounds, as from a distance,
of the plod-plod of the horses; and sometimes the driver became audible,
coughing asthmatically, or saying, “You, JOE!” with a spiritless flap of
the whip upon an unresponsive back. Oblongs of light from the lamps
at street-corners came swimming into the interior of the coupe and,
thinning rapidly to lances, passed utterly, leaving greater darkness.
And yet neither of these two last attendants at Jim Sheridan's funeral
broke the silence.

It was Mary who preceived the strangeness of it--too late. Abruptly she
realized that for an indefinite interval she had been thinking of her
companion and not talking to him. “Mr. Sheridan,” she began, not knowing
what she was going to say, but impelled to say anything, as she realized
the queerness of this drive--“Mr. Sheridan, I--”

The coupe stopped. “You, JOE!” said the driver, reproachfully, and
climbed down and opened the door.

“What's the trouble?” Bibbs inquired.

“Lady said stop at the first house north of Mr. Sheridan's, sir.”

Mary was incredulous; she felt that it couldn't be true and that it
mustn't be true that they had driven all the way without speaking.

“What?” Bibbs demanded.

“We're there, sir,” said the driver, sympathetically. “Next house north
of Mr. Sheridan's.”

Bibbs descended to the curb. “Why, yes,” he said. “Yes, you seem to
be right.” And while he stood staring at the dimly illuminated front
windows of Mr. Vertrees's house Mary got out, unassisted.

“Let me help you,” said Bibbs, stepping toward her mechanically; and she
was several feet from the coupe when he spoke.

“Oh no,” she murmured. “I think I can--” She meant that she could get
out of the coupe without help, but, perceiving that she had already
accomplished this feat, she decided not to complete the sentence.

“You, JOE!” cried the driver, angrily, climbing to his box. And he
rumbled away at his team's best pace--a snail's.

“Thank you for bringing me home, Mr. Sheridan,” said Mary, stiffly. She
did not offer her hand. “Good night.”

“Good night,” Bibbs said in response, and, turning with her, walked
beside her to the door. Mary made that a short walk; she almost ran.
Realization of the queerness of their drive was growing upon her,
beginning to shock her; she stepped aside from the light that fell
through the glass panels of the door and withheld her hand as it touched
the old-fashioned bell-handle.

“I'm quite safe, thank you,” she said, with a little emphasis. “Good
night.”

“Good night,” said Bibbs, and went obediently. When he reached the
street he looked back, but she had vanished within the house.

Moving slowly away, he caromed against two people who were turning out
from the pavement to cross the street. They were Roscoe and his wife.

“Where are your eyes, Bibbs?” demanded Roscoe. “Sleep-walking, as
usual?”

But Sibyl took the wanderer by the arm. “Come over to our house for a
little while, Bibbs,” she urged. “I want to--”

“No, I'd better--”

“Yes. I want you to. Your father's gone to bed, and they're all quiet
over there--all worn out. Just come for a minute.”

He yielded, and when they were in the house she repeated herself with
real feeling: “'All worn out!' Well, if anybody is, YOU are, Bibbs! And
I don't wonder; you've done every bit of the work of it. You mustn't get
down sick again. I'm going to make you take a little brandy.”

He let her have her own way, following her into the dining-room, and
was grateful when she brought him a tiny glass filled from one of the
decanters on the sideboard. Roscoe gloomily poured for himself a much
heavier libation in a larger glass; and the two men sat, while Sibyl
leaned against the sideboard, reviewing the episodes of the day and
recalling the names of the donors of flowers and wreaths. She pressed
Bibbs to remain longer when he rose to go, and then, as he persisted,
she went with him to the front door. He opened it, and she said:

“Bibbs, you were coming out of the Vertreeses' house when we met you.
How did you happen to be there?”

“I had only been to the door,” he said. “Good night, Sibyl.”

“Wait,” she insisted. “We saw you coming out.”

“I wasn't,” he explained, moving to depart. “I'd just brought Miss
Vertrees home.”

“What?” she cried.

“Yes,” he said, and stepped out upon the porch, “that was it. Good
night, Sibyl.”

“Wait!” she said, following him across the threshold. “How did that
happen? I thought you were going to wait while those men filled
the--the--” She paused, but moved nearer him insistently.

“I did wait. Miss Vertrees was there,” he said, reluctantly. “She
had walked away for a while and didn't notice that the carriages were
leaving. When she came back the coupe waiting for me was the only one
left.”

Sibyl regarded him with dilating eyes. She spoke with a slow
breathlessness. “And she drove home from Jim's funeral--with you!”

Without warning she burst into laughter, clapped her hand ineffectually
over her mouth, and ran back uproariously into the house, hurling the
door shut behind her.



CHAPTER XIII

Bibbs went home pondering. He did not understand why Sibyl had laughed.
The laughter itself had been spontaneous and beyond suspicion, but it
seemed to him that she had only affected the effort to suppress it and
that she wished it to be significant. Significant of what? And why had
she wished to impress upon him the fact of her overwhelming amusement?
He found no answer, but she had succeeded in disturbing him, and he
wished that he had not encountered her.

At home, uncles, aunts, and cousins from out of town were wandering
about the house, several mournfully admiring the “Bay of Naples,” and
others occupied with the Moor and the plumbing, while they waited for
trains. Edith and her mother had retired to some upper fastness, but
Bibbs interviewed Jackson and had the various groups of relatives
summoned to the dining-room for food. One great-uncle, old Gideon
Sheridan from Boonville, could not be found, and Bibbs went in search of
him. He ransacked the house, discovering the missing antique at last
by accident. Passing his father's closed door on tiptoe, Bibbs heard
a murmurous sound, and paused to listen. The sound proved to be a
quavering and rickety voice, monotonously bleating:

“The Lo-ord givuth and the Lo-ord takuth away! We got to remember that;
we got to remember that! I'm a-gittin' along, James; I'm a-gittin'
along, and I've seen a-many of 'em go--two daughters and a son the Lord
give me, and He has taken all away. For the Lo-ord givuth and the Lo-ord
takuth away! Remember the words of Bildad the Shuhite, James. Bildad the
Shuhite says, 'He shall have neither son nor nephew among his people,
nor any remaining in his dwellings.' Bildad the Shuhite--”

Bibbs opened the door softly. His father was lying upon the bed, in
his underclothes, face downward, and Uncle Gideon sat near by, swinging
backward and forward in a rocking-chair, stroking his long white beard
and gazing at the ceiling as he talked. Bibbs beckoned him urgently, but
Uncle Gideon paid no attention.

“Bildad the Shuhite spake and he says, 'If thy children have sinned
against Him and He have cast them away--'”

There was a muffled explosion beneath the floor, and the windows
rattled. The figure lying face downward on the bed did not move, but
Uncle Gideon leaped from his chair. “My God!” he cried. “What's that?”

There came a second explosion, and Uncle Gideon ran out into the hall.
Bibbs went to the head of the great staircase, and, looking down,
discovered the source of the disturbance. Gideon's grandson, a boy
of fourteen, had brought his camera to the funeral and was taking
“flash-lights” of the Moor. Uncle Gideon, reassured by Bibbs's
explanation, would have returned to finish his quotation from Bildad the
Shuhite, but Bibbs detained him, and after a little argument persuaded
him to descend to the dining-room whither Bibbs followed, after closing
the door of his father's room.

He kept his eye on Gideon after dinner, diplomatically preventing
several attempts on the part of that comforter to reascend the stairs;
and it was a relief to Bibbs when George announced that an automobile
was waiting to convey the ancient man and his grandson to their train.
They were the last to leave, and when they had gone Bibbs went sighing
to his own room.

He stretched himself wearily upon the bed, but presently rose, went to
the window, and looked for a long time at the darkened house where
Mary Vertrees lived. Then he opened his trunk, took therefrom a small
note-book half filled with fragmentary scribblings, and began to write:

  Laughter after a funeral.  In this reaction people will laugh at
  anything and at nothing.  The band plays a dirge on the way to the
  cemetery, but when it turns back, and the mourning carriages are
  out of hearing, it strikes up, “Darktown is Out To-night.”  That
  is natural--but there are women whose laughter is like the whirring
  of whips.  Why is it that certain kinds of laughter seem to spoil
  something hidden away from the laughers?  If they do not know of
  it, and have never seen it, how can their laughter hurt it?  Yet it
  does.  Beauty is not out of place among grave-stones.  It is not
  out of place anywhere.  But a woman who has been betrothed to a
  man would not look beautiful at his funeral.  A woman might look
  beautiful, though, at the funeral of a man whom she had known and
  liked.  And in that case, too, she would probably not want to talk
  if she drove home from the cemetery with his brother:  nor would
  she want the brother to talk.  Silence is usually either stupid or
  timid.  But for a man who stammers if he tries to talk fast, and
  drawls so slowly, when he doesn't stammer, that nobody has time to
  listen to him, silence is advisable.  Nevertheless, too much silence
  is open to suspicion.  It may be reticence, or it may be a vacuum.
  It may be dignity, or it may be false teeth.

  Sometimes an imperceptible odor will become perceptible in a small
  inclosure, such as a closed carriage.  The ghost of gasoline rising
  from a lady's glove might be sweeter to the man riding beside her
  than all the scents of Arcady in spring.  It depends on the lady--
  but there ARE!  Three miles may be three hundred miles, or it may
  be three feet.  When it is three feet you have not time to say a
  great deal before you reach the end of it.  Still, it may be that
  one should begin to speak.

  No one could help wishing to stay in a world that holds some of
  the people that are in this world.  There are some so wonderful
  you do not understand how the dead COULD die.  How could they let
  themselves?  A falling building does not care who falls with it.
  It does not choose who shall be upon its roof and who shall not.
  Silence CAN be golden?  Yes.  But perhaps if a woman of the world
  should find herself by accident sitting beside a man for the length
  of time it must necessarily take two slow old horses to jog three
  miles, she might expect that man to say something of some sort!
  Even if she thought him a feeble hypochondriac, even if she had
  heard from others that he was a disappointment to his own people,
  even if she had seen for herself that he was a useless and
  irritating encumbrance everywhere, she might expect him at least
  to speak--she might expect him to open his mouth and try to make
  sounds, if he only barked.  If he did not even try, but sat every
  step of the way as dumb as a frozen fish, she might THINK him a
  frozen fish.  And she might be right.  She might be right if she
  thought him about as pleasant a companion as--as Bildad the Shuhite!

Bibbs closed his note-book, replacing it in his trunk. Then, after a
period of melancholy contemplation, he undressed, put on a dressing-gown
and slippers, and went softly out into the hall--to his father's door.
Upon the floor was a tray which Bibbs had sent George, earlier in the
evening, to place upon a table in Sheridan's room--but the food was
untouched. Bibbs stood listening outside the door for several minutes.
There came no sound from within, and he went back to his own room and to
bed.

In the morning he woke to a state of being hitherto unknown in his
experience. Sometimes in the process of waking there is a little
pause--sleep has gone, but coherent thought has not begun. It is
a curious half-void, a glimpse of aphasia; and although the person
experiencing it may not know for that instant his own name or age or
sex, he may be acutely conscious of depression or elation. It is the
moment, as we say, before we “remember”; and for the first time in
Bibbs's life it came to him bringing a vague happiness. He woke to a
sense of new riches; he had the feeling of a boy waking to a birthday.
But when the next moment brought him his memory, he found nothing that
could explain his exhilaration. On the contrary, under the circumstances
it seemed grotesquely unwarranted. However, it was a brief visitation
and was gone before he had finished dressing. It left a little trail,
the pleased recollection of it and the puzzle of it, which remained
unsolved. And, in fact, waking happily in the morning is not usually
the result of a drive home from a funeral. No wonder the sequence evaded
Bibbs Sheridan!

His father had gone when he came down-stairs. “Went on down to 's
office, jes' same,” Jackson informed him. “Came sat breakfas'-table, all
by 'mself; eat nothin'. George bring nice breakfas', but he di'n' eat
a thing. Yessuh, went on down-town, jes' same he yoosta do. Yessuh, I
reckon putty much ev'y-thing goin' go on same as it yoosta do.”

It struck Bibbs that Jackson was right. The day passed as other days had
passed. Mrs. Sheridan and Edith were in black, and Mrs. Sheridan cried
a little, now and then, but no other external difference was to be
seen. Edith was quiet, but not noticeably depressed, and at lunch proved
herself able to argue with her mother upon the propriety of receiving
calls in the earliest stages of “mourning.” Lunch was as usual--for Jim
and his father had always lunched down-town--and the afternoon was as
usual. Bibbs went for his drive, and his mother went with him, 

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