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A Little Journey in the World

by Charles Dudley Warner · English · Gutenberg #3103 · 529,442 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Little Journey in the World

Author: Charles Dudley Warner


        
Release date: October 10, 2004 [eBook #3103]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3103

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LITTLE JOURNEY IN THE WORLD ***



Produced by David Widger





A LITTLE JOURNEY IN THE WORLD

By Charles Dudley Warner




INTRODUCTORY SKETCH

The title naturally suggested for this story was “A Dead Soul,” but it
was discarded because of the similarity to that of the famous novel by
Nikolai Gogol--“Dead Souls”--though the motive has nothing in common
with that used by the Russian novelist. Gogol exposed an extensive fraud
practiced by the sale, in connection with lands, of the names of “serfs”
 (called souls) not living, or “dead souls.”

This story is an attempt to trace the demoralization in a woman's soul
of certain well-known influences in our existing social life. In no
other way could certain phases of our society be made to appear so
distinctly as when reflected in the once pure mirror of a woman's soul.

The character of Margaret is the portrait of no one woman. But it was
suggested by the career of two women (among others less marked) who had
begun life with the highest ideals, which had been gradually eaten
away and destroyed by “prosperous” marriages and association with
unscrupulous methods of acquiring money.

The deterioration was gradual. The women were in all outward conduct
unchanged, the conventionalities of life were maintained, the graces
were not lost, the observances of the duties of charities and of
religion were even emphasized, but worldliness had eaten the heart out
of them, and they were “dead souls.” The tragedy of the withered
life was a thousand-fold enhanced by the external show of prosperous
respectability.

The story was first published (in 1888) in Harper's Monthly. During its
progress--and it was printed as soon as each installment was ready (a
very poor plan)--I was in receipt of the usual letters of sympathy,
or protest, and advice. One sympathetic missive urged the removal
of Margaret to a neighboring city, where she could be saved by being
brought under special Christian influences. The transfer, even in a
serial, was impossible, and she by her own choice lived the life she had
entered upon.

And yet, if the reader will pardon the confidence, pity intervened to
shorten it. I do not know how it is with other writers, but the persons
that come about me in a little drama are as real as those I meet in
every-day life, and in this case I found it utterly impossible to go on
to what might have been the bitter, logical development of Margaret's
career. Perhaps it was as well. Perhaps the writer should have no
despotic power over his creations, however slight they are. He may
profitably recall the dictum of a recent essayist that “there is no
limit to the mercy of God.”

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

Hartford, August 11, 1899.




A LITTLE JOURNEY IN THE WORLD




I

We were talking about the want of diversity in American life, the lack
of salient characters. It was not at a club. It was a spontaneous
talk of people who happened to be together, and who had fallen into an
uncompelled habit of happening to be together. There might have been
a club for the study of the Want of Diversity in American Life. The
members would have been obliged to set apart a stated time for it, to
attend as a duty, and to be in a mood to discuss this topic at a set
hour in the future. They would have mortgaged another precious portion
of the little time left us for individual life. It is a suggestive
thought that at a given hour all over the United States innumerable
clubs might be considering the Want of Diversity in American Life.
Only in this way, according to our present methods, could one expect
to accomplish anything in regard to this foreign-felt want. It seems
illogical that we could produce diversity by all doing the same thing at
the same time, but we know the value of congregate effort. It seems to
superficial observers that all Americans are born busy. It is not so.
They are born with a fear of not being busy; and if they are intelligent
and in circumstances of leisure, they have such a sense of their
responsibility that they hasten to allot all their time into portions,
and leave no hour unprovided for. This is conscientiousness in women,
and not restlessness. There is a day for music, a day for painting, a
day for the display of tea-gowns, a day for Dante, a day for the Greek
drama, a day for the Dumb Animals' Aid Society, a day for the Society
for the Propagation of Indians, and so on. When the year is over, the
amount that has been accomplished by this incessant activity can hardly
be estimated. Individually it may not be much. But consider where
Chaucer would be but for the work of the Chaucer clubs, and what
an effect upon the universal progress of things is produced by the
associate concentration upon the poet of so many minds.

A cynic says that clubs and circles are for the accumulation of
superficial information and unloading it on others, without much
individual absorption in anybody. This, like all cynicism, contains
only a half-truth, and simply means that the general diffusion
of half-digested information does not raise the general level of
intelligence, which can only be raised to any purpose by thorough
self-culture, by assimilation, digestion, meditation. The busy bee is
a favorite simile with us, and we are apt to overlook the fact that
the least important part of his example is buzzing around. If the hive
simply got together and buzzed, or even brought unrefined treacle from
some cyclopaedia, let us say, of treacle, there would be no honey added
to the general store.

It occurred to some one in this talk at last to deny that there was
this tiresome monotony in American life. And this put a new face on
the discussion. Why should there be, with every race under the heavens
represented here, and each one struggling to assert itself, and no
homogeneity as yet established even between the people of the oldest
States? The theory is that democracy levels, and that the anxious
pursuit of a common object, money, tends to uniformity, and that
facility of communication spreads all over the land the same fashion
in dress; and repeats everywhere the same style of house, and that
the public schools give all the children in the United States the same
superficial smartness. And there is a more serious notion, that in a
society without classes there is a sort of tyranny of public opinion
which crushes out the play of individual peculiarities, without which
human intercourse is uninteresting. It is true that a democracy is
intolerant of variations from the general level, and that a new society
allows less latitude in eccentricities to its members than an old
society.

But with all these allowances, it is also admitted that the difficulty
the American novelist has is in hitting upon what is universally
accepted as characteristic of American life, so various are the types in
regions widely separated from each other, such different points of view
are had even in conventionalities, and conscience operates so variously
on moral problems in one community and another. It is as impossible for
one section to impose upon another its rules of taste and propriety
in conduct--and taste is often as strong to determine conduct as
principle--as it is to make its literature acceptable to the other. If
in the land of the sun and the jasmine and the alligator and the fig,
the literature of New England seems passionless and timid in face of the
ruling emotions of life, ought we not to thank Heaven for the diversity
of temperament as well as of climate which will in the long-run save us
from that sameness into which we are supposed to be drifting?

When I think of this vast country with any attention to local
developments I am more impressed with the unlikenesses than with the
resemblances. And besides this, if one had the ability to draw to the
life a single individual in the most homogeneous community, the product
would be sufficiently startling. We cannot flatter ourselves, therefore,
that under equal laws and opportunities we have rubbed out the
saliencies of human nature. At a distance the mass of the Russian people
seem as monotonous as their steppes and their commune villages, but the
Russian novelists find characters in this mass perfectly individualized,
and, indeed, give us the impression that all Russians are irregular
polygons. Perhaps if our novelists looked at individuals as intently,
they might give the world the impression that social life here is as
unpleasant as it appears in the novels to be in Russia.

This is partly the substance of what was said one winter evening before
the wood fire in the library of a house in Brandon, one of the lesser
New England cities. Like hundreds of residences of its kind, it stood
in the suburbs, amid forest-trees, commanding a view of city spires
and towers on the one hand, and on the other of a broken country of
clustering trees and cottages, rising towards a range of hills which
showed purple and warm against the pale straw-color of the winter
sunsets. The charm of the situation was that the house was one of many
comfortable dwellings, each isolated, and yet near enough together to
form a neighborhood; that is to say, a body of neighbors who respected
each other's privacy, and yet flowed together, on occasion, without the
least conventionality. And a real neighborhood, as our modern life is
arranged, is becoming more and more rare.

I am not sure that the talkers in this conversation expressed their
real, final sentiments, or that they should be held accountable for what
they said. Nothing so surely kills the freedom of talk as to have some
matter-of-fact person instantly bring you to book for some impulsive
remark flashed out on the instant, instead of playing with it and
tossing it about in a way that shall expose its absurdity or show its
value. Freedom is lost with too much responsibility and seriousness, and
the truth is more likely to be struck out in a lively play of assertion
and retort than when all the words and sentiments are weighed. A person
very likely cannot tell what he does think till his thoughts are exposed
to the air, and it is the bright fallacies and impulsive, rash ventures
in conversation that are often most fruitful to talker and listeners.
The talk is always tame if no one dares anything. I have seen the most
promising paradox come to grief by a simple “Do you think so?” Nobody, I
sometimes think, should be held accountable for anything said in private
conversation, the vivacity of which is in a tentative play about the
subject. And this is a sufficient reason why one should repudiate any
private conversation reported in the newspapers. It is bad enough to be
held fast forever to what one writes and prints, but to shackle a man
with all his flashing utterances, which may be put into his mouth by
some imp in the air, is intolerable slavery. A man had better be silent
if he can only say today what he will stand by tomorrow, or if he may
not launch into the general talk the whim and fancy of the moment. Racy,
entertaining talk is only exposed thought, and no one would hold a man
responsible for the thronging thoughts that contradict and displace each
other in his mind. Probably no one ever actually makes up his mind until
he either acts or puts out his conclusion beyond his recall. Why
should one be debarred the privilege of pitching his crude ideas into a
conversation where they may have a chance of being precipitated?

I remember that Morgan said in this talk that there was too much
diversity. “Almost every church has trouble with it--the different
social conditions.”

An Englishman who was present pricked-up his ears at this, as if he
expected to obtain a note on the character of Dissenters. “I thought all
the churches here were organized on social affinities?” he inquired.

“Oh, no; it is a good deal a matter of vicinage. When there is a
real-estate extension, a necessary part of the plan is to build a church
in the centre of it, in order to--”

“I declare, Page,” said Mrs. Morgan, “you'll give Mr. Lyon a totally
erroneous notion. Of course there must be a church convenient to the
worshipers in every district.”

“That is just what I was saying, my dear: As the settlement is not drawn
together on religious grounds, but perhaps by purely worldly motives,
the elements that meet in the church are apt to be socially incongruous,
such as cannot always be fused even by a church-kitchen and a
church-parlor.”

“Then it isn't the peculiarity of the church that has attracted to
it worshipers who would naturally come together, but the church is a
neighborhood necessity?” still further inquired Mr. Lyon.

“All is,” I ventured to put in, “that churches grow up like
schoolhouses, where they are wanted.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Morgan; “I'm talking about the kind of
want that creates them. If it's the same that builds a music hall, or a
gymnasium, or a railway waiting-room, I've nothing more to say.”

“Is it your American idea, then, that a church ought to be formed only
of people socially agreeable together?” asked the Englishman.

“I have no American idea. I am only commenting on facts; but one of
them is that it is the most difficult thing in the world to reconcile
religious association with the real or artificial claims of social
life.”

“I don't think you try much,” said Mrs. Morgan, who carried along
her traditional religious observance with grateful admiration of her
husband.

Mr. Page Morgan had inherited money, and a certain advantageous position
for observing life and criticising it, humorously sometimes, and without
any serious intention of disturbing it. He had added to his fair fortune
by marrying the daintily reared daughter of a cotton-spinner, and he had
enough to do in attending meetings of directors and looking out for his
investments to keep him from the operation of the State law regarding
vagrants, and give greater social weight to his opinions than if he had
been compelled to work for his maintenance. The Page Morgans had been a
good deal abroad, and were none the worse Americans for having come
in contact with the knowledge that there are other peoples who are
reasonably prosperous and happy without any of our advantages.

“It seems to me,” said Mr. Lyon, who was always in the conversational
attitude of wanting to know, “that you Americans are disturbed by the
notion that religion ought to produce social equality.”

Mr. Lyon had the air of conveying the impression that this question
was settled in England, and that America was interesting on account of
numerous experiments of this sort. This state of mind was not
offensive to his interlocutors, because they were accustomed to it in
transatlantic visitors. Indeed, there was nothing whatever offensive,
and little defensive, in Mr. John Lyon. What we liked in him, I
think, was his simple acceptance of a position that required neither
explanation nor apology--a social condition that banished a sense of his
own personality, and left him perfectly free to be absolutely truthful.
Though an eldest son and next in succession to an earldom, he was still
young. Fresh from Oxford and South Africa and Australia and British
Columbia he had come to study the States with a view of perfecting
himself for his duties as a legislator for the world when he should be
called to the House of Peers. He did not treat himself like an earl,
whatever consciousness he may have had that his prospective rank made it
safe for him to flirt with the various forms of equality abroad in this
generation.

“I don't know what Christianity is expected to produce,” Mr. Morgan
replied, in a meditative way; “but I have an idea that the early
Christians in their assemblies all knew each other, having met elsewhere
in social intercourse, or, if they were not acquainted, they lost sight
of distinctions in one paramount interest. But then I don't suppose they
were exactly civilized.”

“Were the Pilgrims and the Puritans?” asked Mrs. Fletcher, who now
joined the talk, in which she had been a most animated and stimulating
listener, her deep gray eyes dancing with intellectual pleasure.

“I should not like to answer 'no' to a descendant of the Mayflower. Yes,
they were highly civilized. And if we had adhered to their methods, we
should have avoided a good deal of confusion. The meeting-house, you
remember, had a committee for seating people according to their quality.
They were very shrewd, but it had not occurred to them to give the best
pews to the sitters able to pay the most money for them. They escaped
the perplexity of reconciling the mercantile and the religious ideas.”

“At any rate,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “they got all sorts of people inside
the same meeting-house.”

“Yes, and made them feel they were all sorts; but in those, days they
were not much disturbed by that feeling.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Mr. Lyon, “that in this country you have
churches for the rich and other churches for the poor?”

“Not at all. We have in the cities rich churches and poor churches, with
prices of pews according to the means of each sort, and the rich are
always glad to have the poor come, and if they do not give them the best
seats, they equalize it by taking up a collection for them.”

“Mr. Lyon,” Mrs. Morgan interrupted, “you are getting a travesty of
the whole thing. I don't believe there is elsewhere in the world such a
spirit of Christian charity as in our churches of all sects.”

“There is no doubt about the charity; but that doesn't seem to make the
social machine run any more smoothly in the church associations. I'm
not sure but we shall have to go back to the old idea of considering the
churches places of worship, and not opportunities for sewing-societies,
and the cultivation of social equality.”

“I found the idea in Rome,” said Mr. Lyon, “that the United States is
now the most promising field for the spread and permanence of the Roman
Catholic faith.”

“How is that?” Mr. Fletcher asked, with a smile of Puritan incredulity.

“A high functionary at the Propaganda gave as a reason that the United
States is the most democratic country and the Roman Catholic is the most
democratic religion, having this one notion that all men, high or low,
are equally sinners and equally in need of one thing only. And I must
say that in this country I don't find the question of social equality
interfering much with the work in their churches.”

“That is because they are not trying to make this world any better, but
only to prepare for another,” said Mrs. Fletcher.

“Now, we think that the nearer we approach the kingdom-of-heaven idea on
earth, the better off we shall be hereafter. Is that a modern idea?”

“It is an idea that is giving us a great deal of trouble. We've got
into such a sophisticated state that it seems easier to take care of the
future than of the present.”

“And it isn't a very bad doctrine that if you take care of the present,
the future will take care of itself,” rejoined Mrs. Fletcher.

“Yes, I know,” insisted Mr. Morgan; “it's the modern notion of
accumulation and compensation--take care of the pennies and the pounds
will take care of themselves--the gospel of Benjamin Franklin.”

“Ah,” I said, looking up at the entrance of a newcomer, “you are just
in time, Margaret, to give the coup de grace, for it is evident by Mr.
Morgan's reference, in his Bunker Hill position, to Franklin, that he is
getting out of powder.”

The girl stood a moment, her slight figure framed in the doorway, while
the company rose to greet her, with a half-hesitating, half-inquiring
look in her bright face which I had seen in it a thousand times.




II

I remember that it came upon me with a sort of surprise at the
moment that we had never thought or spoken much of Margaret Debree as
beautiful. We were so accustomed to her; we had known her so long, we
had known her always. We had never analyzed our admiration of her.
She had so many qualities that are better than beauty that we had not
credited her with the more obvious attraction. And perhaps she had just
become visibly beautiful. It may be that there is an instant in a girl's
life corresponding to what the Puritans called conversion in the soul,
when the physical qualities, long maturing, suddenly glow in an
effect which we call beauty. It cannot be that women do not have a
consciousness of it, perhaps of the instant of its advent. I remember
when I was a child that I used to think that a stick of peppermint candy
must burn with a consciousness of its own deliciousness.

Margaret was just turned twenty. As she paused there in the doorway her
physical perfection flashed upon me for the first time. Of course I do
not mean perfection, for perfection has no promise in it, rather the sad
note of limit, and presently recession. In the rounded, exquisite lines
of her figure there was the promise of that ineffable fullness and
delicacy of womanhood which all the world raves about and destroys and
mourns. It is not fulfilled always in the most beautiful, and perhaps
never except to the woman who loves passionately, and believes she is
loved with a devotion that exalts her body and soul above every other
human being.

It is certain that Margaret's beauty was not classic. Her features
were irregular even to piquancy. The chin had strength; the mouth was
sensitive and not too small; the shapely nose with thin nostrils had an
assertive quality that contradicted the impression of humility in the
eyes when downcast; the large gray eyes were uncommonly soft and clear,
an appearance of alternate tenderness and brilliancy as they were veiled
or uncovered by the long lashes. They were gently commanding eyes, and
no doubt her most effective point. Her abundant hair, brown with a touch
of red in it in some lights, fell over her broad forehead in the fashion
of the time. She had a way of carrying her head, of throwing it back at
times, that was not exactly imperious, and conveyed the impression
of spirit rather than of mere vivacity. These details seem to me all
inadequate and misleading, for the attraction of the face that made
it interesting is still undefined. I hesitate to say that there was a
dimple near the corner of her mouth that revealed itself when she smiled
lest this shall seem mere prettiness, but it may have been the keynote
of her face. I only knew there was something about it that won the
heart, as a too conscious or assertive beauty never does. She may have
been plain, and I may have seen the loveliness of her nature, which I
knew well, in features that gave less sign of it to strangers. Yet I
noticed that Mr. Lyon gave her a quick second glance, and his manner was
instantly that of deference, or at least attention, which he had shown
to no other lady in the room. And the whimsical idea came into my
mind--we are all so warped by international possibilities--to observe
whether she did not walk like a countess (that is, as a countess ought
to walk) as she advanced to shake hands with my wife. It is so easy to
turn life into a comedy!

Margaret's great-grandmother--no, it was her great-great-grandmother,
but we have kept the Revolutionary period so warm lately that it seems
near--was a Newport belle, who married an officer in the suite of
Rochambeau what time the French defenders of liberty conquered the women
of Rhode Island. After the war was over, our officer resigned his love
of glory for the heart of one of the loveliest women and the care of the
best plantation on the Island. I have seen a miniature of her, which
her lover wore at Yorktown, and which he always swore that Washington
coveted--a miniature painted by a wandering artist of the day, which
entirely justifies the French officer in his abandonment of the trade of
a soldier. Such is man in his best estate. A charming face can make him
campaign and fight and slay like a demon, can make a coward of him,
can fill him with ambition to win the world, and can tame him into the
domesticity of a drawing-room cat. There is this noble capacity in man
to respond to the divinest thing visible to him in this world. Etienne
Debree became, I believe, a very good citizen of the republic, and in
'93 used occasionally to shake his head with satisfaction to find that
it was still on his shoulders. I am not sure that he ever visited Mount
Vernon, but after Washington's death Debree's intimacy with our
first President became a more and more important part of his life and
conversation. There is a pleasant tradition that Lafayette, when he was
here in 1784, embraced the young bride in the French manner, and that
this salute was valued as a sort of heirloom in the family.

I always thought that Margaret inherited her New England conscience from
her great-great-grandmother, and a certain esprit or gayety--that is,
a sub-gayety which was never frivolity--from her French ancestor. Her
father and mother had died when she was ten years old, and she had
been reared by a maiden aunt, with whom she still lived. The combined
fortunes of both required economy, and after Margaret had passed her
school course she added to their resources by teaching in a public
school. I remember that she taught history, following, I suppose, the
American notion that any one can teach history who has a text-book, just
as he or she can teach literature with the same help. But it happened
that Margaret was a better teacher than many, because she had not
learned history in school, but in her father's well-selected library.

There was a little stir at Margaret's entrance; Mr. Lyon was introduced
to her, and my wife, with that subtle feeling for effect which women
have, slightly changed the lights. Perhaps Margaret's complexion or her
black dress made this readjustment necessary to the harmony of the room.
Perhaps she felt the presence of a different temperament in the little
circle.

I never can tell exactly what it is that guides her in regard to the
influence of light and color upon the intercourse of people, upon their
conversation, making it take one cast or another. Men are susceptible
to these influences, but it is women alone who understand how to produce
them. And a woman who has not this subtle feeling always lacks charm,
however intellectual she may be; I always think of her as sitting in the
glare of disenchanting sunlight as indifferent to the exposure as a man
would be. I know in a general way that a sunset light induces one kind
of talk and noonday light another, and I have learned that talk always
brightens up with the addition of a fresh crackling stick to the fire.
I shouldn't have known how to change the lights for Margaret, although I
think I had as distinct an impression of her personality as had my wife.
There was nothing disturbing in it; indeed, I never saw her otherwise
than serene, even when her voice betrayed strong emotion. The quality
that impressed me most, however, was her sincerity, coupled with
intellectual courage and clearness that had almost the effect of
brilliancy, though I never thought of her as a brilliant woman.

“What mischief have you been attempting, Mr. Morgan?” asked Margaret, as
she took a chair near him. “Were you trying to make Mr. Lyon comfortable
by dragging in Bunker Hill?”

“No; that was Mr. Fairchild, in his capacity as host.”

“Oh, I'm sure you needn't mind me,” said Mr. Lyon, good-humoredly. “I
landed in Boston, and the first thing I went to see was the Monument. It
struck me as so odd, you know, that the Americans should begin life by
celebrating their first defeat.”

“That is our way,” replied Margaret, quickly. “We have started on a new
basis over here; we win by losing. He who loses his life shall find
it. If the red slayer thinks he slays he is mistaken. You know the
Southerners say that they surrendered at last simply because they got
tired of beating the North.”

“How odd!”

“Miss Debree simply means,” I exclaimed, “that we have inherited from
the English an inability to know when we are whipped.”

“But we were not fighting the battle of Bunker Hill, or fighting about
it, which is more serious, Miss Debree. What I wanted to ask you was
whether you think the domestication of religion will affect its power in
the regulation of conduct.”

“Domestication? You are too deep for me, Mr. Morgan. I don't any
more understand you than I comprehend the writers who write about the
feminization of literature.”

“Well, taking the mystery out of it, the predominant element of worship,
making the churches sort of good-will charitable associations for the
spread of sociability and good-feeling.”

“You mean making Christianity practical?”

“Partially that. It is a part of the general problem of what women are
going to make of the world, now they have got hold of it, or are getting
hold of it, and are discontented with being women, or with being treated
as women, and are bringing their emotions into all the avocations of
life.”

“They cannot make it any worse than it has been.”

“I'm not sure of that. Robustness is needed in churches as much as in
government. I don't know how much the cause of religion is advanced
by these church clubs of Christian Endeavor if that is the name,
associations of young boys and girls who go about visiting other like
clubs in a sufficiently hilarious manner. I suppose it's the spirit of
the age. I'm just wondering whether the world is getting to think more
of having a good time than it is of salvation.”

“And you think woman's influence--for you cannot mean anything else--is
somehow taking the vigor out of affairs, making even the church a soft,
purring affair, reducing us all to what I suppose you would call a mush
of domesticity.”

“Or femininity.”

“Well, the world has been brutal enough; it had better try a little
femininity now.”

“I hope it will not be more cruel to women.”

“That is not an argument; that is a stab. I fancy you are altogether
skeptical about woman. Do you believe in her education?”

“Up to a certain point, or rather, I should say, after a certain point.”

“That's it,” spoke up my wife, shading her eyes from the fire with
a fan. “I begin to have my doubts about education as a panacea. I've
noticed that girls with only a smattering--and most of them in the
nature of things can go, no further--are more liable to temptations.”

“That is because 'education' is mistaken for the giving of information
without training, as we are finding out in England,” said Mr. Lyon.

“Or that it is dangerous to awaken the imagination without a heavy
ballast of principle,” said Mr. Morgan.

“That is a beautiful sentiment,” Margaret exclaimed, throwing back
her head, with a flash from her eyes. “That ought to shut out women
entirely. Only I cannot see how teaching women what men know is going to
give them any less principle than men have. It has seemed to me a long
while that the time has come for treating women like human beings, and
giving them the responsibility of their position.”

“And what do you want, Margaret?” I asked.

“I don't know exactly what I do want,” she answered, sinking back in her
chair, sincerity coming to modify her enthusiasm. “I don't want to go to
Congress, or be a sheriff, or a lawyer, or a locomotive engineer. I
want the freedom of my own being, to be interested in everything in the
world, to feel its life as men do. You don't know what it is to have an
inferior person condescend to you simply because he is a man.”

“Yet you wish to be treated as a woman?” queried Mr. Morgan.

“Of course. Do you think I want to banish romance out of the world?”

“You are right, my dear,” said my wife. “The only thing that makes
society any better than an industrial ant-hill is the love between women
and men, blind and destructive as it often is.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Morgan, rising to go, “having got back to first
principles--”

“You think it is best to take your husband home before he denies even
them,” Mr. Morgan added.

When the others had gone, Margaret sat by the fire, musing, as if no
one else were in the room. The Englishman, still alert and eager for
information, regarded her with growing interest. It came into my mind
as odd that, being such an uninteresting people as we are, the English
should be so curious about us. After an interval, Mr. Lyon said:

“I beg your pardon, Miss Debree, but would you mind telling me whether
the movement of Women's Rights is gaining in America?”

“I'm sure I don't know, Mr. Lyon,” Margaret replied, after a pause, with
a look of weariness. “I'm tired of all the talk about it. I wish men and
women, every soul of them, would try to make the most of themselves, and
see what would come of that.”

“But in some places they vote about schools, and you have conventions--”

“Did you ever attend any kind of convention yourself, Mr. Lyon?”

“I? No. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Neither did I. But you have a right to, you know. I should
like to ask you one question, Mr. Lyon,” the girl, continued, rising.

“Should be most obliged.”

“Why is it that so few English women marry Americans?”

“I--I never thought of that,” he stammered, reddening. “Perhaps--perhaps
it's because of American women.”

“Thank you,” said Margaret, with a little courtesy. “It's very nice of
you to say that. I can begin to see now why so many American women marry
Englishmen.”

The Englishman blushed still more, and Margaret said good-night.

It was quite evident the next day that Margaret had made an impression
on our visitor, and that he was struggling with some new idea.

“Did you say, Mrs. Fairchild,” he asked my wife, “that Miss Debree is a
teacher? It seems very odd.”

“No; I said she taught in one of our schools. I don't think she is
exactly a teacher.”

“Not intending always to teach?”

“I don't suppose she has any definite intentions, but I never think of
her as a teacher.”

“She's so bright, and--and interesting, don't you think? So American?”

“Yes; Miss Debree is one of the exceptions.”

“Oh, I didn't mean that all American women were as clever as Miss
Debree.”

“Thank you,” said my wife. And Mr. Lyon looked as if he couldn't see why
she should thank him.

The cottage in which Margaret lived with her aunt, Miss Forsythe,
was not far from our house. In summer it was very pretty, with its
vine-shaded veranda across the front; and even in winter, with the
inevitable raggedness of deciduous vines, it had an air of refinement,
a promise which the cheerful interior more than fulfilled. Margaret's
parting word to my wife the night before had been that she thought
her aunt would like to see the “chrysalis earl,” and as Mr. Lyon had
expressed a desire to see something more of what he called the “gentry”
 of New England, my wife ended their afternoon walk at Miss Forsythe's.

It was one of the winter days which are rare in New England, but of
which there had been a succession all through the Christmas holidays.
Snow had not yet come, all the earth was brown and frozen, whichever
way you looked the interlacing branches and twigs of the trees made a
delicate lace-work, the sky was gray-blue, and the low-sailing sun had
just enough heat to evoke moisture from the frosty ground and suffuse
the atmosphere into softness, in which all the landscape became poetic.
The phenomenon known as “red sunsets” was faintly repeated in the
greenish crimson glow along the violet hills, in which Venus burned like
a jewel.

There was a fire smoldering on the hearth in the room they entered,
which seemed to be sitting-room, library, parlor, all in one; the
old table of oak, too substantial for ornament, was strewn with late
periodicals and pamphlets--English, American, and French--and with books
which lay unarranged as they were thrown down from recent reading. In
the centre was a bunch of red roses in a pale-blue Granada jug. Miss
Forsythe rose from a seat in the western window, with a book in her
hand, to greet her callers. She was slender, like Margaret, but taller,
with soft brown eyes and hair streaked with gray, which, sweeping
plainly aside from her forehead in a fashion then antiquated, contrasted
finely with the flush of pink in her cheeks. This flush did not suggest
youth, but rather ripeness, the tone that comes with the lines made in
the face by gentle acceptance of the inevitable in life. In her quiet
and self-possessed manner there was a little note of graceful timidity,
not perhaps noticeable in itself, but in contrast with that unmistakable
air of confidence which a woman married always has, and which in the
unrefined becomes assertive, an exaggerated notion of her importance, of
the value added to her opinions by the act of marriage. You can see it
in her air the moment she walks away from the altar, keeping step to
Mendelssohn's tune. Jack Sharpley says that she always seems to be
saying, “Well, I've done it once for all.” This assumption of the
married must be one of the hardest things for single women to bear in
their self-congratulating sisters.

I have no doubt that Georgiana Forsythe was a charming girl, spirited
and handsome; for the beauty of her years, almost pathetic in its
dignity and self-renunciation, could not have followed mere prettiness
or a commonplace experience. What that had been I never inquired, but it
had not soured her. She was not communicative nor confidential, I fancy,
with any one, but she was always friendly and sympathetic to the trouble
of others, and helpful in an undemonstrative way. If she herself had
a secret feeling that her life was a failure, it never impressed
her friends so, it was so even, and full of good offices and quiet
enjoyment. Heaven only knows, however, the pathos of this apparently
undisturbed life. For did a woman ever live who would not give all the
years of tasteless serenity, for one year, for one month, for one hour,
of the uncalculating delirium of love poured out upon a man who returned
it? It may be better for the world that there are these women to whom
life has still some mysteries, who are capable of illusions and the
sweet sentimentality that grows out of a romance unrealized.

Although the recent books were on Miss Forsythe's table, her tastes and
culture were of the past age. She admired Emerson and Tennyson. One may
keep current with the news of the world without changing his principles.
I imagine that Miss Forsythe read without injury to herself the
passionate and the pantheistic novels of the young women who have come
forward in these days of emancipation to teach their grandmothers a new
basis of morality, and to render meaningless all the consoling epitaphs
on the mossy New England gravestones. She read Emerson for his
sweet spirit, for his belief in love and friendship, her simple
Congregationalist faith remaining undisturbed by his philosophy, from
which she took only a habit of toleration.

“Miss Debree has gone to church,” she said, in answer to Mr. Lyon's
glance around the room.

“To vespers?”

“I believe they call it that. Our evening meetings, you know, only begin
at early candlelight.”

“And you do not belong to the Church?”

“Oh, yes, to the ancient aristocratic church of colonial times,” she
replied, with a little smile of amusement. “My niece has stepped off
Plymouth Rock.”

“And was your religion founded on Plymouth Rock?”

“My niece says so when I rally her deserting the faith of her fathers,”
 replied Miss Forsythe, laughing at the working of the Episcopalian mind.

“I should like to understand about that; I mean about the position of
Dissenters in America.”

“I'm afraid I could not help you, Mr. Lyon. I fancy an Englishman would
have to be born again, as the phrase used to be, to comprehend that.”

While Mr. Lyon was still unsatisfied on this point, he found the
conversation shifted to the other side. Perhaps it was a new experience
to him that women should lead and not follow in conversation. At any
rate, it was an experience that put him at his ease. Miss Forsythe was a
great admirer of Gladstone and of General Gordon, and she expressed
her admiration with a knowledge that showed she had read the English
newspapers.

“Yet I confess I don't comprehend Gladstone's conduct with regard to
Egypt and Gordon's relief,” she said.

“Perhaps,” interposed my wife, “it would have been better for Gordon if
he had trusted Providence more and Gladstone less.”

“I suppose it was Gladstone's humanity that made him hesitate.”

“To bombard Alexandria?” asked Mr. Lyon, with a look of asperity.

“That was a mistake to be expected of a Tory, but not of Mr. Gladstone,
who seems always seeking the broadest principles of justice in his
statesmanship.”

“Yes, we regard Mr. Gladstone as a very great man, Miss Forsythe. He
is broad enough. You know we consider him a rhetorical phenomenon.
Unfortunately he always 'muffs' anything he touches.”

“I suspected,” Miss Forsythe replied, after a moment, “that party spirit
ran as high in England as it does with us, and is as personal.”

Mr. Lyon disclaimed any personal feeling, and the talk drifted into a
comparison of English and American politics, mainly with reference to
the social factor in English politics, which is so little an element
here.

In the midst of the talk Margaret came in. The brisk walk in the rosy
twilight had heightened her color, and given her a glowing expression
which her face had not the night before, and a tenderness and softness,
an unworldliness, brought from the quiet hour in the church.

          “My lady comes at last,
          Timid and stepping fast,
          And hastening hither,
          Her modest eyes downcast.”

She greeted the stranger with a Puritan undemonstrativeness, and as if
not exactly aware of his presence.

“I should like to have gone to vespers if I had known,” said Mr. Lyon,
after an embarrassing pause.

“Yes?” asked the girl, still abstractedly. “The world seems in a vesper
mood,” she added, looking out the west windows at the red sky and the
evening star.

In truth Nature herself at the moment suggested that talk was an
impertinence. The callers rose to go, with an exchange of neighborhood
friendliness and invitations.

“I had no idea,” said Mr. Lyon, as they walked homeward, “what the New
World was like.”




III

Mr. Lyon's invitation was for a week. Before the end of the week I
was called to New York to consult Mr. Henderson in regard to a railway
investment in the West, which was turning out more permanent than
profitable. Rodney Henderson--the name later became very familiar to the
public in connection with a certain Congressional investigation--was a
graduate of my own college, a New Hampshire boy, a lawyer by profession,
who practiced, as so many American lawyers do, in Wall Street, in
political combinations, in Washington, in railways. He was already known
as a rising man.

When I returned Mr. Lyon was still at our house. I understood that my
wife had persuaded him to extend his visit--a proposal he was little
reluctant to fall in with, so interested had he become in studying
social life in America. I could well comprehend this, for we are all
making a “study” of something in this age, simple enjoyment being
considered an unworthy motive. I was glad to see that the young
Englishman was improving himself, broadening his knowledge of life, and
not wasting the golden hours of youth. Experience is what we all need,
and though love or love-making cannot be called a novelty, there is
something quite fresh about the study of it in the modern spirit.

Mr. Lyon had made himself very agreeable to the little circle, not less
by his inquiring spirit than by his unaffected manners, by a kind
of simplicity which women recognize as unconscious, the result of an
inherited habit of not thinking about one's position. In excess it may
be very disagreeable, but when it is combined with genuine good-nature
and no self-assertion, it is attractive. And although American women
like a man who is aggressive towards the world and combative, there is
the delight of novelty in one who has leisure to be agreeable, leisure
for them, and who seems to their imagination to have a larger range in
life than those who are driven by business--one able to offer the peace
and security of something attained.

There had been several little neighborhood entertainments, dinners at
the Morgans' and at Mrs. Fletcher's, and an evening cup of tea at Miss
Forsythe's. In fact Margaret and Mr. Lyon had been thrown much together.
He had accompanied her to vespers, and they had taken a wintry walk
or two together before the snow came. My wife had not managed it--she
assured me of that; but she had not felt authorized to interfere; and
she had visited the public library and looked into the British Peerage.
Men were so suspicious. Margaret was quite able to take care of herself.
I admitted that, but I suggested that the Englishman was a stranger in
a strange land, that he was far from home, and had perhaps a weakened
sense of those powerful social influences which must, after all, control
him in the end. The only response to this was, “I think, dear, you'd
better wrap him up in cotton and send him back to his family.”

Among her other activities Margaret was interested in a mission school
in the city, to which she devoted an occasional evening and Sunday
afternoons. This was a new surprise for Mr. Lyon. Was this also a part
of the restlessness of American life? At Mrs. Howe's german the other
evening the girl had seemed wholly absorbed in dress, and the gayety of
the serious formality of the occasion, feeling the responsibility of
it scarcely less than the “leader.” Yet her mind was evidently much
occupied with the “condition of women,” and she taught in a public
school. He could not at all make it out. Was she any more serious about
the german than about the mission school? It seemed odd at her age
to take life so seriously. And was she serious in all her various
occupations, or only experimenting? There was a certain mocking humor in
the girl that puzzled the Englishman still more.

“I have not seen much of your life,” he said one night to Mr.
Morgan; “but aren't most American women a little restless, seeking an
occupation?”

“Perhaps they have that appearance; but about the same number find it,
as formerly, in marriage.”

“But I mean, you know, do they look to marriage as an end so much?”

“I don't know that they ever did look to marriage as anything but a
means.”

“I can tell you, Mr. Lyon,” my wife interrupted, “you will get no
information out of Mr. Morgan; he is a scoffer.”

“Not at all, I do assure you,” Morgan replied. “I am just a humble
observer. I see that there is a change going on, but I cannot comprehend
it. When I was young, girls used to go in for society; they danced their
feet off from seventeen to twenty-one. I never heard anything about any
occupation; they had their swing and their fling, and their flirtations;
they appeared to be skimming off of those impressionable, joyous years
the cream of life.”

“And you think that fitted them for the seriousness of life?” asked his
wife.

“Well, I am under the impression that very good women came out of that
society. I got one out of that dancing crowd who has been serious enough
for me.”

“And little enough you have profited by it,” said Mrs. Morgan.

“I'm content. But probably I'm old-fashioned. There is quite another
spirit now. Girls out of pinafores must begin seriously to consider some
calling. All their flirtation from seventeen to twenty-one is with some
occupation. All their dancing days they must go to college, or in some
way lay the foundation for a useful life. I suppose it's all right. No
doubt we shall have a much higher style of women in the future than we
ever had in the past.”

“You allow nothing,” said Mrs. Fletcher, “for the necessity of earning
a living in these days of competition. Women never will come to their
proper position in the world, even as companions of men, which you
regard as their highest office, until they have the ability to be
self-supporting.”

“Oh, I admitted the fact of the independence of women a long time ago.
Every one does that before he comes to middle life. About the shifting
all round of this burden of earning a living, I am not so sure. It does
not appear yet to make competition any less; perhaps competition would
disappear if everybody did earn his own living and no more. I wonder,
by-the-way, if the girls, the young women, of the class we seem to be
discussing ever do earn as much as would pay the wages of the servants
who are hired to do the housework in their places?”

“That is a most ignoble suggestion,” I could not help saying, “when you
know that the object in modern life is the cultivation of the mind, the
elevation of women, and men also, in intellectual life.”

“I suppose so. I should like to have asked Abigail Adams's opinion on
the way to do it.”

“One would think,” I said, “that you didn't know that the spinning-jenny
and the stocking-knitter had been invented. Given these, the women's
college was a matter of course.”

“Oh, I'm a believer in all kinds of machinery anything to save labor.
Only, I have faith that neither the jenny nor the college will change
human nature, nor take the romance out of life.”

“So have I,” said my wife. “I've heard two things affirmed: that women
who receive a scientific or professional education lose their faith,
become usually agnostics, having lost sensitiveness to the mysteries of
life.”

“And you think, therefore, that they should not have a scientific
education?”

“No, unless all scientific prying into things is a mistake. Women may be
more likely at first to be upset than men, but they will recover their
balance when the novelty is worn off. No amount of science will entirely
change their emotional nature; and besides, with all our science, I
don't see that the supernatural has any less hold on this generation
than on the former.”

“Yes, and you might say the world was never before so credulous as it is
now. But what was the other thing?”

“Why, that co-education is likely to diminish marriages among
the co-educated. Daily familiarity in the classroom at the most
impressionable age, revelation of all the intellectual weaknesses and
petulances, absorption of mental routine on an equality, tend to destroy
the sense of romance and mystery that are the most powerful attractions
between the sexes. It is a sort of disenchanting familiarity that rubs
off the bloom.”

“Have you any statistics on the subject?”

“No. I fancy it is only a notion of some old fogy who thinks education
in any form is dangerous for women.”

“Yes, and I fancy that co-education will have about as much effect on
life generally as that solemn meeting of a society of intelligent
and fashionable women recently in one of our great cities, who met to
discuss the advisability of limiting population.”

“Great Scott!” I exclaimed, “this is an interesting age.”

I was less anxious about the vagaries of it when I saw the very
old-fashioned way in which the international drama was going on in our
neighborhood. Mr. Lyon was increasingly interested in Margaret's mission
work. Nor was there much affectation in this. Philanthropy, anxiety
about the working-classes, is nowhere more serious or in the fashion
than it is in London. Mr. Lyon, wherever he had been, had made a special
study of the various aid and relief societies, especially of the work
for young waifs and strays.

One Sunday afternoon they were returning from the Bloom Street
Mission. Snow covered the ground, the sky was leaden, and the air had a
penetrating chill in it far more disagreeable than extreme cold.

“We also,” Mr. Lyon was saying, in continuation of a conversation, “are
making a great effort for the common people.”

“But we haven't any common people here,” replied Margaret, quickly.
“That bright boy you noticed in my class, who was a terror six months
ago, will no doubt be in the City Council in a few years, and likely
enough mayor.”

“Oh, I know your theory. It practically comes to the same thing,
whatever you call it. I couldn't see that the work in New York differed
much from that in London. We who have leisure ought to do something for
the working-classes.”

“I sometimes doubt if it is not all a mistake most of our charitable
work. The thing is to get people to do something for themselves.”

“But you cannot do away with distinctions?”

“I suppose not, so long as so many people are born vicious, or
incompetent, or lazy. But, Mr. Lyon, how much good do you suppose
condescending charity does?” asked Margaret, firing up in a way the girl
had at times. “I mean the sort that makes the distinctions more evident.
The very fact that you have leisure to meddle in their affairs may be
an annoyance to the folks you try to help by the little palliatives of
charity. What effect upon a wretched city neighborhood do you suppose is
produced by the advent in it of a stylish carriage and a lady in silk,
or even the coming of a well-dressed, prosperous woman in a horse-car,
however gentle and unassuming she may be in this distribution of
sympathy and bounty? Isn't the feeling of inequality intensified? And
the degrading part of it may be that so many are willing to accept this
sort of bounty. And your men of leisure, your club men, sitting in the
windows and seeing the world go by as a spectacle-men who never did an
hour's necessary work in their lives--what effect do you suppose the
sight of them has upon men out of work, perhaps by their own fault,
owing to the same disposition to be idle that the men in the club
windows have?”

“And do you think it would be any better if all were poor alike?”

“I think it would be better if there were no idle people. I'm half
ashamed that I have leisure to go every time I go to that mission. And
I'm almost sorry, Mr. Lyon, that I took you there. The boys knew you
were English. One of them asked me if you were a 'lord' or a 'juke'
or something. I cannot tell how they will take it. They may resent the
spying into their world of an 'English juke,' and they may take it in
the light of a show.”

Mr. Lyon laughed. And then, perhaps after a little reflection upon the
possibility that the nobility was becoming a show in this world, he
said:

“I begin to think I'm very unfortunate, Miss Debree. You seem to remind
me that I am in a position in which I can do very little to help the
world along.”

“Not at all. You can do very much.”

“But how, when whatever I attempt is considered a condescension? What
can I do?”

“Pardon me,” and Margaret turned her eyes frankly upon him. “You can be
a good earl when your time comes.”

Their way lay through the little city park. It is a pretty place in
summer--a varied surface, well planted with forest and ornamental trees,
intersected by a winding stream. The little river was full now, and ice
had formed on it, with small openings here and there, where the dark
water, hurrying along as if in fear of arrest, had a more chilling
aspect than the icy cover. The ground was white with snow, and all the
trees were bare except for a few frozen oak-leaves here and there, which
shivered in the wind and somehow added to the desolation. Leaden clouds
covered the sky, and only in the west was there a gleam of the departing
winter day.

Upon the elevated bank of the stream, opposite to the road by which they
approached, they saw a group of people--perhaps twenty-drawn closely
together, either in the sympathy of segregation from an unfeeling world,
or for protection from the keen wind. On the hither bank, and leaning on
the rails of the drive, had collected a motley crowd of spectators,
men, women, and boys, who exhibited some impatience and much curiosity,
decorous for the most part, but emphasized by occasional jocose remarks
in an undertone. A serious ceremony was evidently in progress. The
separate group had not a prosperous air. The women were thinly clad for
such a day. Conspicuous in the little assembly was a tall, elderly man
in a shabby long coat and a broad felt hat, from under which his white
hair fell upon his shoulders. He might be a prophet in Israel come out
to testify to an unbelieving world, and the little group around him,
shaken like reeds in the wind, had the appearance of martyrs to a cause.
The light of another world shone in their thin, patient faces. Come,
they seemed to say to the worldlings on the opposite bank--come and see
what happiness it is to serve the Lord. As they waited, a faint tune
was started, a quavering hymn, whose feeble notes the wind blew away of
first, but which grew stronger.

Before the first stanza was finished a carriage appeared in the rear of
the group. From it descended a middle-aged man and a stout woman, and
they together helped a young girl to alight. She was clad all in white.
For a moment her thin, delicate figure shrank from the cutting wind.
Timid, nervous, she glanced an instant at the crowd and the dark icy
stream; but it was only a protest of the poor body; the face had the
rapt, exultant look of joyous sacrifice.

The tall man advanced to meet her, and led her into the midst of the
group.

For a few moments there was prayer, inaudible at a distance. Then the
tall man, taking the girl by the hand, advanced down the slope to the
stream. His hat was laid aside, his venerable locks streamed in the
breeze, his eyes were turned to heaven; the girl walked as in a vision,
without a tremor, her wide-opened eyes fixed upon invisible things.
As they moved on, the group behind set up a joyful hymn in a kind of
mournful chant, in which the tall man joined with a strident voice.
Fitfully the words came on the wind, in an almost heart-breaking wail:

   “Beyond the smiling and the weeping I shall be soon;
   Beyond the waking and the sleeping,
   Beyond the sowing and the reaping, I shall be soon.”

They were near the water now, and the tall man's voice sounded out loud
and clear:

“Lord, tarry not, but come!”

They were entering the stream where there was an opening clear of ice;
the footing was not very secure, and the tall man ceased singing, but
the little band sang on:

   “Beyond the blooming and the fading I shall be soon.”

The girl grew paler and shuddered. The tall man sustained her with
an attitude of infinite sympathy, and seemed to speak words of
encouragement. They were in the mid-stream; the cold flood surged about
their waists. The group sang on:

   “Beyond the shining and the shading,
   Beyond the hoping and the dreading, I shall be soon.”

The strong, tender arms of the tall man gently lowered the white form
under the cruel water; he staggered a moment in the swift stream,
recovered himself, raised her, white as death, and the voices of the
wailing tune came:

   “Love, rest, and home
   Sweet hope! Lord, tarry not, but come!”

And the tall man, as he struggled to the shore with his almost
insensible burden, could be heard above the other voices and the wind
and the rush of the waters:

   “Lord, tarry not, but come!”

The girl was hurried into the carriage, and the group quickly dispersed.
“Well, I'll be--” The tender-hearted little wife of the rough man in the
crowd who began that sentence did not permit him to finish it. “That'll
be a case for a doctor right away,” remarked a well-known practitioner
who had been looking on.

Margaret and Mr. Lyon walked home in silence. “I can't talk about it,”
 she said. “It's such a pitiful world.”




IV

In the evening, at our house, Margaret described the scene in the park.

“It's dreadful,” was the comment of Miss Forsythe. “The authorities
ought not to permit such a thing.”

“It seemed to me as heroic as pitiful, aunt. I fear I should be
incapable of making such a testimony.”

“But it was so unnecessary.”

“How do we know what is necessary to any poor soul? What impressed
me most strongly was that there is in the world still this longing to
suffer physically and endure public scorn for a belief.”

“It may have been a disappointment to the little band,” said Mr. Morgan,
“that there was no demonstration from the spectators, that there was no
loud jeering, that no snowballs were thrown by the boys.”

“They could hardly expect that,” said I; “the world has become so
tolerant that it doesn't care.”

“I rather think,” Margaret replied, “that the spectators for a
moment came under the spell of the hour, and were awed by something
supernatural in the endurance of that frail girl.”

“No doubt,” said my wife, after a little pause. “I believe that there
is as much sense of mystery in the world as ever, and as much of what
we call faith, only it shows itself eccentrically. Breaking away from
traditions and not going to church have not destroyed the need in the
minds of the mass of people for something outside themselves.”

“Did I tell you,” interposed Morgan--“it is almost in the line of your
thought--of a girl I met the other day on the train? I happened to be
her seat-mate in the car-thin face, slight little figure--a commonplace
girl, whom I took at first to be not more than twenty, but from the
lines about her large eyes she was probably nearer forty. She had in
her lap a book, which she conned from time to time, and seemed to be
committing verses to memory as she looked out the window. At last I
ventured to ask what literature it was that interested her so much, when
she turned and frankly entered into conversation. It was a little Advent
song-book. She liked to read it on the train, and hum over the tunes.
Yes, she was a good deal on the cars; early every morning she rode
thirty miles to her work, and thirty miles back every evening. Her work
was that of clerk and copyist in a freight office, and she earned nine
dollars a week, on which she supported herself and her mother. It was
hard work, but she did not mind it much. Her mother was quite feeble.
She was an Adventist. 'And you?' I asked. 'Oh, yes; I am. I've been
an Adventist twenty years, and I've been perfectly happy ever since
I joined--perfectly,' she added, turning her plain face, now radiant,
towards me. 'Are you one?' she asked, presently. 'Not an immediate
Adventist,' I was obliged to confess. 'I thought you might be, there
are so many now, more and more.' I learned that in our little city there
were two Advent societies; there had been a split on account of some
difference in the meaning of original sin. 'And you are not discouraged
by the repeated failure of the predictions of the end of the world?' I
asked. 'No. Why should we be? We don't fix any certain day now, but
all the signs show that it is very near. We are all free to think as
we like. Most of our members now think it will be next year.'--'I
hope not!' I exclaimed. 'Why?' she asked, turning to me with a look of
surprise. 'Are you afraid?' I evaded by saying that I supposed the good
had nothing to fear. 'Then you must be an Adventist, you have so much
sympathy.'--'I shouldn't like to have the world come to an end next
year, because there are so many interesting problems, and I want to see
how they will be worked out.'--'How can you want to put it off'--and
there was for the first time a little note of fanaticism in her
voice--'when there is so much poverty and hard work? It is such a hard
world, and so much suffering and sin. And it could all be ended in a
moment. How can you want it to go on?' The train approached the station,
and she rose to say good-by. 'You will see the truth some day,' she
said, and went away as cheerful as if the world was actually destroyed.
She was the happiest woman I have seen in a long time.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is an age of both faith and credulity.”

“And nothing marks it more,” Morgan added, “than the popular expectation
among the scientific and the ignorant of something to come out of the
dimly understood relation of body and mind. It is like the expectation
of the possibilities of electricity.”

“I was going on to say,” I continued, “that wherever I walk in the city
of a Sunday afternoon, I am struck with the number of little meetings
going on, of the faithful and the unfaithful, Adventists, socialists,
spiritualists, culturists, Sons and Daughters of Edom; from all the open
windows of the tall buildings come notes of praying, of exhortation,
the melancholy wail of the inspiring Sankey tunes, total abstinence
melodies, over-the-river melodies, songs of entreaty, and songs of
praise. There is so much going on outside of the regular churches!”

“But the churches are well attended,” suggested my wife.

“Yes, fairly, at least once a day, and if there is sensational
preaching, twice. But there is nothing that will so pack the biggest
hall in the city as the announcement of inspirational preaching by some
young woman who speaks at random on a text given her when she steps
upon the platform. There is something in her rhapsody, even when it is
incoherent, that appeals to a prevailing spirit.”'

“How much of it is curiosity?” Morgan asked. “Isn't the hall just as
jammed when the clever attorney of Nothingism, Ham Saversoul, jokes
about the mysteries of this life and the next?”

“Very likely. People like the emotional and the amusing. All the same,
they are credulous, and entertain doubt and belief on the slightest
evidence.”

“Isn't it natural,” spoke up Mr. Lyon, who had hitherto been silent,
“that you should drift into this condition without an established
church?”

“Perhaps it's natural,” Morgan retorted, “that people dissatisfied with
an established religion should drift over here. Great Britain, you know,
is a famous recruiting-ground for our socialistic experiments.”

“Ah, well,” said my wife, “men will have something. If what is
established repels to the extent of getting itself disestablished, and
all churches should be broken up, society would somehow precipitate
itself again spiritually. I heard the other day that Boston, getting a
little weary of the Vedas, was beginning to take up the New Testament.”

“Yes,” said Morgan, “since Tolstoi mentioned it.”

After a little the talk drifted into psychic research, and got lost in
stories of “appearances” and “long-distance” communications. It appeared
to me that intelligent people accepted this sort of story as true on
evidence on which they wouldn't risk five dollars if it were a question
of money. Even scientists swallow tales of prehistoric bones on
testimony they would reject if it involved the title to a piece of real
estate.

Mr. Lyon still lingered in the lap of a New England winter as if it had
been Capua. He was anxious to visit Washington and study the politics
of the country, and see the sort of society produced in the freedom of
a republic, where there was no court to give the tone and there were no
class lines to determine position. He was restless under this sense of
duty. The future legislator for the British Empire must understand the
Constitution of its great rival, and thus be able to appreciate the
social currents that have so much to do with political action.

In fact he had another reason for uneasiness. His mother had written
him, asking why he stayed so long in an unimportant city, he who had
been so active a traveler hitherto. Knowledge of the capitals was what
he needed. Agreeable people he could find at home, if his only object
was to pass the time. What could he reply? Could he say that he had
become very much interested in studying a schoolteacher--a very charming
school-teacher? He could see the vision raised in the minds of his
mother and of the earl and of his elder sister as they should read this
precious confession--a vision of a schoolma'am, of an American girl, and
an American girl without any money at that, moving in the little orbit
of Chisholm House. The thing was absurd. And yet why was it absurd? What
was English politics, what was Chisholm House, what was everybody
in England compared to this noble girl? Nay, what would the world be
without her? He grew hot in thinking of it, indignant at his relations
and the whole artificial framework of things.

The situation was almost humiliating. He began, to doubt the stability
of his own position. Hitherto he had met no obstacle: whatever he had
desired he had obtained. He was a sensible fellow, and knew the world
was not made for him; but it certainly had yielded to him in everything.
Why did he doubt now? That he did doubt showed him the intensity of
his interest in Margaret. For love is humble, and undervalues self in
contrast with that which it desires. At this touchstone rank, fortune,
all that go with them, seemed poor. What were all these to a woman's
soul? But there were women enough, women enough in England, women more
beautiful than Margaret, doubtless as amiable and intellectual. Yet now
there was for him only one woman in the world. And Margaret showed no
sign. Was he about to make a fool of himself? If she should reject him
he would seem a fool to himself. If she accepted him he would seem a
fool to the whole circle that made his world at home. The situation was
intolerable. He would end it by going.

But he did not go. If he went today he could not see her tomorrow. To a
lover anything can be borne if he knows that he shall see her tomorrow.
In short, he could not go so long as there was any doubt about her
disposition towards him.

And a man is still reduced to this in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, notwithstanding all our science, all our analysis of the
passion, all our wise jabber about the failure of marriage, all our
commonsense about the relation of the sexes. Love is still a personal
question, not to be reasoned about or in any way disposed of except in
the old way. Maidens dream about it; diplomats yield to it; stolid
men are upset by it; the aged become young, the young grave, under its
influence; the student loses his appetite--God bless him! I like to
hear the young fellows at the club rattle on bravely, indifferent to
the whole thing--skeptical, in fact, about it. And then to see them,
one after another, stricken down, and looking a little sheepish and
not saying much, and by-and-by radiant. You would think they owned the
world. Heaven, I think, shows us no finer sarcasm than one of these
young skeptics as a meek family man.

Margaret and Mr. Lyon were much together.

And their talk, as always happens when two persons find themselves
much together, became more and more personal. It is only in books that
dialogues are abstract and impersonal. The Englishman told her about
his family, about the set in which he moved--and he had the English
frankness in setting it out unreservedly--about the life he led at
Oxford, about his travels, and so on to what he meant to do in the
world. Margaret in return had little to tell, her own life had been
so simple--not much except the maidenly reserves, the discontents with
herself, which interested him more than anything else; and of the
future she would not speak at all. How can a woman, without being
misunderstood? All this talk had a certain danger in it, for sympathy
is unavoidable between two persons who look ever so little into each
other's hearts and compare tastes and desires.

“I cannot quite understand your social life over here,” Mr. Lyon was
saying one day. “You seem to make distinctions, but I cannot see exactly
for what.”

“Perhaps they make themselves. Your social orders seem able to resist
Darwin's theory, but in a republic natural selection has a better
chance.”

“I was told by a Bohemian on the steamer coming over that money in
America takes the place of rank in England.”

“That isn't quite true.”

“And I was told in Boston by an acquaintance of very old family and
little fortune that 'blood' is considered here as much as anywhere.”

“You see, Mr. Lyon, how difficult it is to get correct information about
us. I think we worship wealth a good deal, and we worship family a good
deal, but if any one presumes too much upon either, he is likely to come
to grief. I don't understand it very well myself.”

“Then it is not money that determines social position in America?”

“Not altogether; but more now than formerly. I suppose the distinction
is this: family will take a person everywhere, money will take him
almost everywhere; but money is always at this disadvantage--it takes
more and more of it to gain position. And then you will find that it is
a good deal a matter of locality. For instance, in Virginia and Kentucky
family is still very powerful, stronger than any distinction in letters
or politics or success in business; and there is a certain diminishing
number of people in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, who cultivate a good
deal of exclusiveness on account of descent.”

“But I am told that this sort of aristocracy is succumbing to the new
plutocracy.”

“Well, it is more and more difficult to maintain a position without
money. Mr. Morgan says that it is a disheartening thing to be an
aristocrat without luxury; he declares that he cannot tell whether the
Knickerbockers of New York or the plutocrats are more uneasy just now.
The one is hungry for social position, and is morose if he cannot buy
it; and when the other is seduced by luxury and yields, he finds that
his distinction is gone. For in his heart the newly rich only respects
the rich. A story went about of one of the Bonanza princes who had built
his palace in the city, and was sending out invitations to his first
entertainment. Somebody suggested doubts to him about the response.
'Oh,' he said, 'the beggars will be glad enough to come!'”

“I suppose, Mr. Lyon,” said Margaret, demurely, “that this sort of thing
is unknown in England?”

“Oh, I couldn't say that money is not run after there to some extent.”

“I saw a picture in Punch of an auction, intended as an awful satire on
American women. It struck me that it might have two interpretations.”

“Yes, Punch is as friendly to America as it is to the English
aristocracy.”

“Well, I was only thinking that it is just an exchange of commodities.
People will always give what they have for what they want. The Western
man changes his pork in New York for pictures. I suppose that--what do
you call it?--the balance of trade is against us, and we have to send
over cash and beauty.”

“I didn't know that Miss Debree was so much of a political economist.”

“We got that out of books in school. Another thing we learned is that
England wants raw material; I thought I might as well say it, for it
wouldn't be polite for you.”

“Oh, I'm capable of saying anything, if provoked. But we have got away
from the point. As far as I can see, all sorts of people intermarry, and
I don't see how you can discriminate socially--where the lines are.”

Mr. Lyon saw the moment that he had made it that this was a suggestion
little likely to help him. And Margaret's reply showed that he had lost
ground.

“Oh, we do not try to discriminate--except as to foreigners. There is a
popular notion that Americans had better marry at home.”

“Then the best way for a foreigner to break your exclusiveness is to be
naturalized.” Mr. Lyon tried to adopt her tone, and added, “Would you
like to see me an American citizen?”

“I don't believe you could be, except for a little while; you are too
British.”

“But the two nations are practically the same; that is, individuals of
the nations are. Don't you think so?”

“Yes, if one of them gives up all the habits and prejudices of a
lifetime and of a whole social condition to the other.”

“And which would have to yield?”

“Oh, the man, of course. It has always been so. My
great-great-grandfather was a Frenchman, but he became, I have always
heard, the most docile American republican.”

“Do you think he would have been the one to give in if they had gone to
France?”

“Perhaps not. And then the marriage would have been unhappy. Did
you never take notice that a woman's happiness, and consequently the
happiness of marriage, depends upon a woman's having her own way in all
social matters? Before our war all the men who married down South took
the Southern view, and all the Southern women who married up North held
their own, and sensibly controlled the sympathies of their husbands.”

“And how was it with the Northern women who married South, as you say?”

“Well, it must be confessed that a good many of them adapted themselves,
in appearance at least. Women can do that, and never let anyone see they
are not happy and not doing it from choice.”

“And don't you think American women adapt themselves happily to English
life?”

“Doubtless some; I doubt if many do; but women do not confess mistakes
of that kind. Woman's happiness depends so much upon the continuation of
the surroundings and sympathies in which she is bred. There are always
exceptions. Do you know, Mr. Lyon, it seems to me that some people do
not belong in the country where they were born. We have men who ought to
have been born in England, and who only find themselves really they go
there. There are who are ambitious, and court a career different from
any that a republic can give them. They are not satisfied here. Whether
they are happy there I do not know; so few trees, when at all grown,
will bear transplanting.”

“Then you think international marriages are a mistake?”

“Oh, I don't theorize on subjects I am ignorant of.”

“You give me very cold comfort.”

“I didn't know,” said Margaret, with a laugh that was too genuine to be
consoling, “that you were traveling for comfort; I thought it was for
information.”

“And I am getting a great deal,” said Mr. Lyon, rather ruefully. “I'm
trying to find out where. I ought to have been born.”

“I'm not sure,” Margaret said, half seriously, “but you would have been
a very good American.”

This was not much of an admission, after all, but it was the most that
Margaret had ever made, and Mr. Lyon tried to get some encouragement out
of it. But he felt, as any man would feel, that this beating about the
bush, this talk of nationality and all that, was nonsense; that if a
woman loved a man she wouldn't care where he was born; that all the
world would be as nothing to him; that all conditions and obstacles
society and family could raise would melt away in the glow of a real
passion. And he wondered for a moment if American girls were not
“calculating”--a word to which he had learned over here to attach a new
and comical meaning.




V

The afternoon after this conversation Miss Forsythe was sitting reading
in her favorite window-seat when Mr. Lyon was announced. Margaret was
at her school. There was nothing un usual in this afternoon call; Mr.
Lyon's visits had become frequent and informal; but Miss Forsythe had a
nervous presentiment that something important was to happen, that showed
itself in her greeting, and which was perhaps caught from a certain new
diffidence in his manner.

Perhaps the maiden lady preserves more than any other this
sensitiveness, inborn in women, to the approach of the critical moment
in the affairs of the heart. The day may some time be past when she--is
sensitive for herself--philosophers say otherwise--but she is easily
put in a flutter by the affair of another. Perhaps this is because the
negative (as we say in these days) which takes impressions retains all
its delicacy from the fact that none of them have ever been developed,
and perhaps it is a wise provision of nature that age in a heart
unsatisfied should awaken lively apprehensive curiosity and sympathy
about the manifestation of the tender passion in others. It certainly
is a note of the kindliness and charity of the maiden mind that its
sympathies are so apt to be most strongly excited in the success of the
wooer. This interest may be quite separable from the common feminine
desire to make a match whenever there is the least chance of it. Miss
Forsythe was not a match-maker, but Margaret herself would not have been
more embarrassed than she was at the beginning of this interview.

When Mr. Lyon was seated she made the book she had in her hand the
excuse for beginning a talk about the confidence young novelists seem
to have in their ability to upset the Christian religion by a fictitious
representation of life, but her visitor was too preoccupied to join in
it. He rose and stood leaning his arm upon the mantel-piece, and looking
into the fire, and said, abruptly, at last:

“I called to see you, Miss Forsythe, to--to consult you about your
niece.”

“About her career?” asked Miss Forsythe, with a nervous consciousness of
falsehood.

“Yes, about her career; that is, in a way,” turning towards her with a
little smile.

“Yes?”

“You must have seen my interest in her. You must have known why I stayed
on and on. But it was, it is, all so uncertain. I wanted to ask your
permission to speak my mind to her.”

“Are you quite sure you know your own mind?” asked Miss Forsythe,
defensively.

“Sure--sure; I have never had the feeling for any other woman I have for
her.”

“Margaret is a noble girl; she is very independent,” suggested Miss
Forsythe, still avoiding the point.

“I know. I don't ask you her feeling.” Mr. Lyon was standing quietly
looking down into the coals. “She is the only woman in the world to me.
I love her. Are you against me?” he asked, suddenly looking up, with a
flush in his face.

“Oh, no! no!” exclaimed Miss Forsythe, with another access of timidity.
“I shouldn't take the responsibility of being against you, or--or
otherwise. It is very manly in you to come to me, and I am sure I--we
all wish nothing but your own happiness. And so far as I am concerned--”

“Then I have your permission?” he asked, eagerly.

“My permission, Mr. Lyon? why, it is so new to me, I scarcely realized
that I had any permission,” she said, with a little attempt at
pleasantry. “But as her aunt--and guardian, as one may say--personally
I should have the greatest satisfaction to know that Margaret's destiny
was in the hands of one we all esteem and know as we do you.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Mr. Lyon, coming forward and seizing her
hand.

“But you must let me say, let me suggest, that there are a great many
things to be thought of. There is such a difference in education, in all
the habits of your lives, in all your relations. Margaret would never be
happy in a position where less was accorded to her than she had all her
life. Nor would her pride let her take such a position.”

“But as my wife--”

“Yes, I know that is sufficient in your mind. Have you consulted your
mother, Mr. Lyon?”

“Not yet.”

“And have you written to any one at home about my niece?”

“Not yet.”

“And does it seem a little difficult to do so?” This was a probe that
went even deeper than the questioner knew. Mr. Lyon hesitated, seeing
again as in a vision the astonishment of his family. He was conscious of
an attempt at self-deception when he replied:

“Not difficult, not at all difficult, but I thought I would wait till I
had something definite to say.”

“Margaret is, of course, perfectly free to act for herself. She has a
very ardent nature, but at the same time a great deal of what we call
common sense. Though her heart might be very much engaged, she would
hesitate to put herself in any society which thought itself superior to
her. You see I speak with great frankness.”

It was a new position for Mr. Lyon to find his prospective rank
seemingly an obstacle to anything he desired. For a moment the
whimsicality of it interrupted the current of his feeling. He thought of
the probable comments of the men of his London club upon the drift his
conversation was taking with a New England spinster about his fitness
to marry a school-teacher. With a smile that was summoned to hide
his annoyance, he said, “I don't see how I can defend myself, Miss
Forsythe.”

“Oh,” she replied, with an answering smile that recognized his view of
the humor of the situation, “I was not thinking of you, Mr. Lyon, but of
the family and the society that my niece might enter, to which rank is
of the first importance.”

“I am simply John Lyon, Miss Forsythe. I may never be anything else.
But if it were otherwise, I did not suppose that Americans objected to
rank.”

It was an unfortunate speech, felt to be so the instant it was uttered.
Miss Forsythe's pride was touched, and the remark was not softened to
her by the air of half banter with which the sentence concluded. She
said, with a little stillness and formality: “I fear, Mr. Lyon, that
your sarcasm is too well merited. But there are Americans who make a
distinction between rank and blood. Perhaps it is very undemocratic, but
there is nowhere else more pride of family, of honorable descent, than
here. We think very much of what we call good blood. And you will
pardon me for saying that we are accustomed to speak of some persons
and families abroad which have the highest rank as being thoroughly bad
blood. If I am not mistaken, you also recognize the historic fact of
ignoble blood in the owners of noble titles. I only mean, Mr. Lyon,” she
added, with a softening of manner, “that all Americans do not think that
rank covers a multitude of sins.”

“Yes, I think I get your American point of view. But to return to
myself, if you will allow me; if I am so fortunate as to win Miss
Debree's love, I have no fear that she would not win the hearts of all
my family. Do you think that my--my prospective position would be an
objection to her?”

“Not your position, no; if her heart were engaged. But expatriation,
involving a surrender of all the habits and traditions and associations
of a lifetime and of one's kindred, is a serious affair. One would need
to be very much in love”--and Miss Forsythe blushed a little as she said
it--“to make such a surrender.”

“I know. I am sure I love her too much to wish to bring any change in
her life that would ever cause her unhappiness.”

“I am glad to feel sure of that.”

“And so I have your permission?”

“Most sincerely,” said Miss Forsythe, rising and giving him her hand. “I
could wish nothing better for Margaret than union with a man like you.
But whatever I wish, you two have your destiny in your own hands.” Her
tone was wholly frank and cordial, but there was a wistful look in
her face, as of one who knew how roughly life handles all youthful
enthusiasms.

When John Lyon walked away from her door his feelings were very much
mixed. At one instant his pride rebelled against the attitude he had
just assumed. But this was only a flash, which he put away as unbecoming
a man towards a true woman. The next thought was one of unselfish
consideration for Margaret herself. He would not subject her to any
chance of social mortifications. He would wait. He would return home
and test his love by renewing his lifelong associations, and by the
reception his family would give to his proposal. And the next moment
he saw Margaret as she had become to him, as she must always be to him.
Should he risk the loss of her by timidity? What were all these paltry
considerations to his love?

Was there ever a young man who could see any reasons against the
possession of the woman he loved? Was there ever any love worth the name
that could be controlled by calculations of expediency? I have no doubt
that John Lyon went through the usual process which is called weighing
a thing in the mind. It is generally an amusing process, and it is
consoling to the conscience. The mind has little to do with it except
to furnish the platform on which the scales are set up. A humorist says
that he must have a great deal of mind, it takes him so long to make
it up. There is the same apparent deliberation where love is concerned.
Everything “contra” is carefully placed in one scale of the balance, and
it is always satisfactory and convincing to see how quickly it kicks the
beam when love is placed in the other scale. The lightest love in the
world, under a law as invariable as gravitation, is heavier than any
other known consideration. It is perhaps doing injustice to Mr. Lyon not
to dwell upon this struggle in his mind, and to say that in all honesty
he may not have known that the result of it was predetermined. But
interesting and commendable as are these processes of the mind, I
confess that I should have respected him less if the result had not been
predetermined. And this does not in any way take from him the merit of a
restless night and a tasteless breakfast.

Philosophizers on this topic say that a man ought always to be able
to tell by a woman's demeanor towards him whether she is favorably
inclined, and that he need run no risk. Little signs, the eyes alone,
draw people together, and make formal language superfluous. This theory
is abundantly sustained by examples, and we might rest on it if all
women knew their own minds, and if, on the other hand, they could always
tell whether a man was serious before he made a definite avowal. There
is another notion, fortunately not yet extinct, that the manliest thing
a man can do is to take his life in his hand, pay the woman he loves
the highest tribute in his power by offering her his heart and name,
and giving her the definite word that may be the touchstone to reveal to
herself her own feeling. In our conventional life women must move behind
a mask in a world of uncertainties. What wonder that many of them learn
in their defensive position to play a game, and sometimes experiment
upon the honest natures of their admirers! But even this does not
absolve the chivalrous man from the duty of frankness and explicitness.
Life seems ideal in that far country where the handsome youth stops
his carriage at the gate of the vineyard, and says to the laughing girl
carrying a basket of grapes on her head, “My pretty maid, will you marry
me?” And the pretty maid, dropping a courtesy, says, “Thank you, sir; I
am already bespoken,” or “Thank you; I will consider of it when I know
you better.”

Not for a moment, I suppose, is a woman ever ignorant of a man's
admiration of her, however uncertain she may be of his intentions, and
it was with an unusual flutter of the heart that Margaret received
Mr. Lyon that afternoon. If she had doubts, they were dissipated by a
certain constraint in his manner, and the importance he seemed to
be attaching to his departure, and she was warned to go within her
defenses. Even the most complaisant women like at least the appearance
of a siege.

“I'm off tomorrow,” he said, “for Washington. You know you recommended
it as necessary to my American education.”

“Yes. We send Representatives and strangers there to be educated. I have
never been there myself.”

“And do you not wish to go?”

“Very much. All Americans want to go to Washington. It is the great
social opportunity; everybody there is in society. You will be able to
see there, Mr. Lyon, how a republican democracy manages social life.

“Do you mean to say there are no distinctions?”

“Oh, no; there are plenty of official distinctions, and a code that is
very curious and complicated, I believe. But still society is open.”

“It must be--pardon me--a good deal like a mob.”

“Well, our mobs of that sort are said to be very well behaved. Mr.
Morgan says that Washington is the only capital in the world where the
principle of natural selection applies to society; that it is there
shown for the first time that society is able to take care of itself in
the free play of democratic opportunities.”

“It must be very interesting to see that.”

“I hope you will find it so. The resident diplomats, I have heard,
say that they find society there more agreeable than at any other
capital--at least those who have the qualities to make themselves
agreeable independent of their rank.”

“Is there nothing like a court? I cannot see who sets the mode.”

“Officially there may be something like a court, but it can be only
temporary, for the personnel of it is dissolved every four years. And
society, always forming and reforming, as the voters of the republic
dictate, is almost independent of the Government, and has nothing of the
social caste of Berlin or London.”

“You make quite an ideal picture.”

“Oh, I dare say it is not at all ideal; only it is rather fluid, and
interesting, to see how society, without caste and subject to such
constant change, can still be what is called 'society.' And I am told
that while it is all open in a certain way, it nevertheless selects
itself into agreeable groups, much as society does elsewhere. Yes, you
ought to see what a democracy can do in this way.”

“But I am told that money makes your aristocracy here.”

“Very likely rich people think they are an aristocracy. You see, Mr.
Lyon, I don't know much about the great world. Mrs. Fletcher, whose late
husband was once a Representative in Washington, says that life is
not nearly so simple there as it used to be, and that rich men in the
Government, vying with rich men who have built fine houses and who live
there permanently without any Government position, have introduced
an element of expense and display that interferes very much with the
natural selection of which Mr. Morgan speaks. But you will see. We are
all right sorry to have you leave us,” Margaret added, turning towards
him with frank, unclouded eyes.

“It is very good in you to say so. I have spent here the most delightful
days of my life.”

“Oh, that is charming flattery. You will make us all very conceited.”

“Don't mock me, Miss Debree. I hoped I had awakened something more
valuable to me than conceit,” Lyon said, with a smile.

“You have, I assure you: gratitude. You have opened quite another world
to us. Reading about foreign life does not give one at all the same
impression of it that seeing one who is a part of it does.”

“And don't you want to see that life for yourself? I hope some time--”

“Of course,” Margaret said, interrupting; “all Americans expect to go to
Europe. I have a friend who says she should be mortified if she reached
heaven and there had to confess that she never had seen Europe. It is
one of the things that is expected of a person. Though you know now that
the embarrassing question that everybody has to answer is, 'Have you
been to Alaska?' Have you been to Alaska, Mr. Lyon?”

This icy suggestion seemed very inopportune to Lyon. He rose and walked
a step or two, and stood by the fire facing her. He confessed, looking
down, that he had not been in Alaska, and he had no desire to go there.
“In fact, Miss Debree,” he said, with effort at speaking lightly, “I
fear I am not in a geographical mood today. I came to say good-by,
and--and--”

“Shall I call my aunt?” said Margaret, rising also.

“No, I beg; I had something to say that concerns us; that is, that
concerns myself. I couldn't go away without knowing from you--that is,
without telling you--”

The color rose in Margaret's cheek, and she made a movement of
embarrassment, and said, with haste: “Some other time; I beg you will
not say--I trust that I have done nothing that--”

“Nothing, nothing,” he went on quickly; “nothing except to be yourself;
to be the one woman”--he would not heed her hand raised in a gesture of
protest; he stood nearer her now, his face flushed and his eyes eager
with determination--“the one woman I care for. Margaret, Miss Debree, I
love you!”

Her hand that rested on the table trembled, and the hot blood rushed to
her face, flooding her in an agony of shame, pleasure, embarrassment,
and anger that her face should contradict the want of tenderness in
her eyes. In an instant self-possession came back to her mind, but not
strength to her body, and she sank into the chair, and looking up, with
only pity in her eyes, said, “I am sorry.”

Lyon stopped; his heart seemed to stand still; the blood left his face;
for an instant the sunshine left the world. It was a terrible blow, the
worst a man can receive--a bludgeon on the head is nothing to it. He
half turned, he looked again for an instant at the form that was more
to him than all the world besides, unable to face the dreadful loss, and
recovering speech, falteringly said, “Is that all?”

“That is all, Mr. Lyon,” Margaret answered, not looking up, and in a
voice that was perfectly steady.

He turned to go mechanically, and passed to the door in a sort of daze,
forgetful of all conventionality; but habit is strong, and he turned
almost immediately back from the passage. Margaret was still sitting,
with no recognition of his departure.

“I beg you will make my excuses, and say good-by to Miss Forsythe. I
had mentioned it to her. I thought perhaps she had told you, perhaps--I
should like to know if it is anything about difference in--in
nationality, about family, or--”

“No, no,” said Margaret; “this could never be anything but a personal
question with me. I--”

“But you said, 'some other time:' Might I ever expect--”

“No, no; there is no other time; do not go on. It can only be painful.”

And then, with a forced cheerfulness: “You will no doubt thank me some
day. Your life must be so different from mine. And you must not doubt my
esteem, my appreciation,” (her sense of justice forced this from her),
“my good wishes. Good-by.” She gave him her hand. He held it for a
second, and then was gone.

She heard his footstep, rapid and receding. So he had really gone! She
was not sorry--no. If she could have loved him! She sank back in her
chair.

No, she could not love him. The man to command her heart must be of
another type. But the greatest experience in a woman's life had come to
her here, just now, in this commonplace room. A man had said he
loved her. A thousand times as a girl she had dreamed of that, hardly
confessing it to herself, and thought of such a scene, and feared it.
And a man had said that he loved her. Her eyes grew tenderer and her
face burned at the thought. Was it with pleasure? Yes, and with womanly
pain. What an awful thing it was! Why couldn't he have seen? A man had
said he loved her. Perhaps it was not in her to love any one. Perhaps
she should live on and on like her aunt Forsythe. Well, it was over; and
Margaret roused herself as her aunt entered the room.

“Has Mr. Lyon been here?”

“Yes; he has just gone. He was so sorry not to see you and say good-by.
He left ever so many messages for you.”

“And” (Margaret was moving as if to go) “did he say nothing--nothing to
you?”

“Oh yes, he said a great deal,” answered this accomplished hypocrite,
looking frankly in her aunt's eyes. “He said how delightful his visit
had been, and how sorry he was to go.”

“And nothing else, Margaret?”

“Oh yes; he said he was going to Washington.” And the girl was gone from
the room.




VI

Margaret hastened to her chamber. Was the air oppressive? She opened the
window and sat down by it. A soft south wind was blowing, eating away
the remaining patches of snow; the sky was full of fleecy clouds. Where
do these days come from in January? Why should nature be in a melting
mood? Margaret instinctively would have preferred a wild storm,
violence, anything but this elemental languor. Her emotion was
incredible to herself.

It was only an incident. It had all happened in a moment, and it was
over. But it was the first of the kind in a woman's life. The thrilling,
mysterious word had been dropped into a woman's heart. Hereafter she
would be changed. She never again would be as she was before. Would her
heart be hardened or softened by the experience? She did not love him;
that was clear. She had done right; that was clear. But he had said he
loved her. Unwittingly she was following him in her thought. She had
rejected plain John Lyon, amiable, intelligent, unselfish, kindly,
deferential. She had rejected also the Earl of Chisholm, a conspicuous
position, an honorable family, luxury, a great opportunity in life. It
came to the girl in a flash. She moved nervously in her chair. She put
down the thought as unworthy of her. But she had entertained it for a
moment. In that second, ambition had entered the girl's soul. She had
a glimpse of her own nature that seemed new to her. Was this, then,
the meaning of her restlessness, of her charitable activities, of her
unconfessed dreams of some career? Ambition had entered her soul in
a definite form. She expelled it. It would come again in some form or
other. She was indignant at herself as she thought of it. How odd it
was! Her privacy had been invaded. The even tenor of her life had been
broken. Henceforth would she be less or more sensitive to the suggestion
of love, to the allurements of ambition? Margaret tried, in accordance
with her nature, to be sincere with herself.

After all, what nonsense it was! Nothing really had happened. A stranger
of a few weeks before had declared himself. She did not love him; he
was no more to her than any other man. It was a common occurrence. Her
judgment accorded with her feeling in what she had done. How was she to
know that she had made a mistake, if mistake it was? How was she to know
that this hour was a crisis in her life? Surely the little tumult would
pass; surely the little whisper of worldliness could not disturb her
ideals. But all the power of exclusion in her mind could not exclude the
returning thought of what might have been if she had loved him. Alas! in
that moment was born in her heart something that would make the idea of
love less simple than it had been in her mind. She was heart-free,
but her nature was too deep not to be profoundly affected by this
experience.

Looking back upon this afternoon in the light of after-years, she
probably could not feel--no one could say--that she had done wrong. How
was she to tell? Why is it that to do the right thing is often to make
the mistake of a life? Nothing could have been nobler than for Margaret
indignantly to put aside a temptation that her heart told her was
unworthy. And yet if she had yielded to it?

I ought to ask pardon, perhaps, for dwelling upon a thing so slight as
the entrance of a thought in a woman's life. For as to Margaret, she
seemed unchanged. She made no sign that anything unusual had occurred.
We only knew that Mr. Lyon went away less cheerful than he usually was,
that he said nothing of returning in response to our invitations, and
that he seemed to anticipate nothing but the fulfillment of a duty in
his visit to Washington.

What had happened was regarded as only an episode. In fact, however, I
doubt if there are any episodes in our lives, any asides, that do not
permanently affect our entire career. Are not the episodes, the casual
thoughts, the fortuitous, unplanned meetings, the brief and maybe at the
moment unnoted events, those which exercise the most influence on our
destiny? To all observation the career of Lyon, and not of Margaret, was
most affected by their interview. But often the implanting of an idea
in the mind is more potent than the frustration of a plan or the
gratification of a desire, so hidden are the causes that make character.

For some time I saw little of Margaret. Affairs in which I was not alone
or chiefly concerned took me from home. One of the most curious and
interesting places in the world is a Chamber in the business heart of
New York--if that scene of struggle and passion can be said to have a
heart--situated midway where the currents of eagerness to acquire the
money of other people, not to make it, ceaselessly meet and dash against
each other. If we could suppose there was a web covering this region,
spun by the most alert and busy of men to catch those less alert and
more productive, here in this Chamber would sit the ingenious spiders.
But the analogy fails, for spiders do not prey upon each other.
Scientists say that the human system has two nerve-centres--one in the
brain, to which and from which are telegraphed all movements depending
upon the will, and another in the small of the back, the centre of the
involuntary operations of respiration, digestion, and so on. It may be
fanciful to suppose that in the national system Washington is the one
nervous centre and New York the other. And yet it does sometimes seem
that the nerves and ganglions in the small of the back in the commercial
metropolis act automatically and without any visible intervention of
intelligence. For all that, their operations may be as essential as
the other, in which the will-power sometimes gets into a deadlock, and
sometimes telegraphs the most eccentric and incomprehensible orders.
Puzzled by these contradictions, some philosophers have said that there
may be somewhere outside of these two material centres another power
that keeps affairs moving along with some steadiness.

This noble Chamber has a large irregular area of floor space, is very
high, and has running round three sides a narrow elevated gallery, from
which spectators can look down upon the throng below. Upon a raised dais
at one side sits the presiding genius of the place, who rules very much
as Jupiter was supposed to govern the earthly swarms, by letting things
run and occasionally launching a thunderbolt. High up on one side, in
an Olympian seclusion, away from the noise and the strife, sits a Board,
calm as fate, and panoplied in the responsibility of chance, whose
function seems to be that of switch-shifters in their windowed cubby at
a network of railway intersections--to prevent collisions.

At both ends of the floor and along one side are narrow railed-off
spaces full of clerks figuring at desks, of telegraph operators clicking
their machines, of messenger-boys arriving and departing in haste, of
unprivileged operators nervously watching the scene and waiting the
chance of a word with some one on the floor; through noiseless swinging
doors men are entering and departing every moment--men in a hurry, men
with anxious faces, conscious that the fate of the country is in their
hands. On the floor itself are five hundred, perhaps a thousand, men,
gathered for the most part in small groups about little stands upon
the summit of which is a rallying legend, talking, laughing, screaming,
good-natured, indifferent, excited, running hither and thither in
response to changing figures in the checker-board squares on the great
wall opposite--calm, cynical one moment, the next violently agitated,
shouting, gesticulating, rushing together, shaking their fists in a
tumult of passion which presently subsides.

The swarms ebb and flow about these little stands--bees, not bringing
any honey, but attracted to the hive where it is rumored most honey is
to be had. By habit some always stand or sit about a particular hive,
waiting for the show of comb. By-and-by there is a stir; the crowd
thickens; one beardless youth shouts out the figure “one-half”; another
howls, “three-eighths.” The first one nods. It is done. The electric
wire running up the stand quivers and takes the figure, passes it to all
the other wires, transmits it to every office and hotel in the city, to
all the “tickers” in ten thousand chambers and “bucketshops” and
offices in the republic. Suddenly on the bulletin-boards in New Orleans,
Chicago, San Francisco, Podunk, Liverpool, appear the mysterious
“three-eighths,” electrifying the watchers of these boards, who begin to
jabber and gesticulate and “transact business.” It is wonderful.

What induced the beardless young man to make this “investment” in
“three-eighths”--who can tell? Perhaps he had heard, as he came into
the room, that the Secretary of the Treasury was going to make a call of
Fives; perhaps he had heard that Bismarck had said that the French blood
was too thin and needed a little more iron; perhaps he had heard that a
norther in Texas had killed a herd of cattle, or that two grasshoppers
had been seen in the neighborhood of Fargo, or that Jay Hawker had been
observed that morning hurrying to his brokers with a scowl on his face
and his hat pulled over his eyes. The young man sold what he did not
have, and the other young man bought what he will never get.

This is business of the higher and almost immaterial sort, and has
an element of faith in it, and, as one may say, belief in the unseen,
whence it is characterized by an expression--“dealing in futures.” It
is not gambling, for there are no “chips” used, and there is no
roulette-table in sight, and there are no piles of money or piles of
anything else. It is not a lottery, for there is no wheel at which
impartial men preside to insure honest drawings, and there are no
predestined blanks and prizes, and the man who buys and the man who
sells can do something, either in the newspapers or elsewhere, to affect
the worth of the investment, whereas in a lottery everything depends
upon the turn of the blind wheel. It is not necessary, however, to
attempt a defense of the Chamber. It is one of the recognized ways of
becoming important and powerful in this world. The privilege of the
floor--a seat, as it is called--in this temple of the god Chance to be
Rich is worth more than a seat in the Cabinet. It is not only true that
a fortune may be made here in a day or lost here in a day, but that a
nod and a wink here enable people all over the land to ruin others
or ruin themselves with celerity. The relation of the Chamber to the
business of the country is therefore evident. If an earthquake should
suddenly sink this temple and all its votaries into the bowels of the
earth, with all its nervousness and all its electricity, it is appalling
to think what would become of the business of the country.

Not far from this vast Chamber, where great financial operations are
conducted on the highest principles of honor, and with the strictest
regard to the Marquis of Dusenbury's rules, there is another less
pretentious Chamber, known as “open,” a sort of overflow meeting. Those
who have not quite left hope behind can go in here. Here are the tickers
communicating with the Chamber, tended by lads, who transfer the figures
to big blackboards on the wall. In front of these boards sit, from
morning to night, rows, perhaps relays, of men intently or listlessly
watching the figures. Many of them, who seldom make a sign, come here
from habit; they have nowhere else to go. Some of them were once lords
in the great Chamber, who have been, as the phrase is, “cleaned out.”
 There is a gray-bearded veteran in seedy clothes, with sunken fiery
eyes, who was once many times a millionaire, was a power in the Board,
followed by reporters, had a palace in the Avenue, and drove to his
office with coachman and footman in livery, and his wife headed the list
of charities. Now he spends his old age watching this blackboard, and
considers it a good day that brings him five dollars and his car-fare.
At one end of the low-ceiled apartment are busy clerks behind a counter,
alert and cheerful. If one should go through a side door and down a
passage he might encounter the smell of rum. Smart young men, clad in
the choicest raiment from the misfit counters, with greed stamped
on their astute faces, bustle about, watch the blackboards, and make
investments with each other. Middle-aged men in slouch hats lounge
around with hungry eyes. The place is feverish rather than exciting. A
tall fellow, whose gait and clothes proclaim him English, with a hard
face and lack-lustre eyes, saunters about; his friends at home suppose
he is making his fortune in America. A dapper young gentleman, quite in
the mode, and with the quick air of prosperity, rapidly enters the room
and confers with a clerk at the counter. He has the run of the Chamber,
and is from the great house of Flamm and Slamm. Perhaps he is taking a
“flier” on his own account, perhaps he represents his house in a side
transaction; there are so many ways open to enterprising young men in the
city; at any rate, his entrance is regarded as significant: This is not
a hospital for the broken down and “cleaned out” of the Chamber, but
it is a place of business, which is created and fed by the incessant
“ticker.” How men existed or did any business at all before the advent
of the “ticker” is a wonder.

But the Chamber, the creator of low-pressure and high-pressure, the
inspirer of the “ticker,” is the great generator of business. Here I
found Henderson in the morning hour, and he came up to me on the call of
a messenger. He approached, nonchalant and smiling as usual. “Do you see
that man,” he said, as we stood a moment looking down, “sitting there
on a side bench--big body, small head, hair grayish, long beard
parted--apparently taking no interest in anything?

“That's Flink, who made the corner in O. B.--one of the longest-headed
operators in the Chamber. He is about the only man who dare try a
hold with Jay Hawker. And for some reason or another, though they have
apparent tussles, Hawker rather favors him. Five years ago he could
just raise money enough to get into the Chamber. Now he is reckoned at
anywhere from five to ten millions. I was at his home the other night.
Everybody was there. I had a queer feeling, in all the magnificence,
that the sheriff might be in there in ten days. Yet he may own a good
slice of the island in ten years. His wife, whom I complimented, and who
thanked me for coming, said she had invited none but the reshershy.”

“He looks like a rascal,” I ventured to remark.

“Oh, that is not a word used in the Chamber. He is called a 'daisy.'
I was put into his pew in church the other Sunday, and the preacher
described him and his methods so exactly that I didn't dare look at him.
When we came out he whispered, 'That was rather hard on Slack; he must
have felt it.' These men rather like that sort of preaching.”

“I don't come here often,” Henderson resumed, as we walked away. “The
market is flat today. There promised to be a little flurry in L. and P.,
and I looked in for a customer.”

We walked to his down-town club to lunch. Everybody, I noticed, seemed
to know Henderson, and his presence was hailed with a cordial smile,
a good-humored nod, or a hearty grasp of the hand. I never knew a more
prepossessing man; his bonhomie was infectious. Though his demeanor was
perfectly quiet and modest, he carried the air of good-fellowship. He
was entirely frank, cordial, and had that sort of sincerity which one
can afford to have who does not take life too seriously. Tall--at least
six feet-with a well-shaped head set on square shoulders, brown hair
inclined to curl, large blue eyes which could be merry or exceedingly
grave, I thought him a picture of manly beauty. Good-natured, clever,
prosperous, and not yet thirty. What a dower!

After we had disposed of our little matter of business, which I confess
was not exactly satisfactory to me, although when I was told that “the
first bondholders will be obliged to come in,” he added that “of course
we shall take care of our friends,” we went to his bachelor quarters
uptown. “I want you to see,” he said, “how a hermit lives.”

The apartments were not my idea of a hermitage--except in the city.
A charming library, spacious, but so full as to be cozy, with an open
fire; chamber, dressing-room, and bathroom connecting, furnished with
everything that a luxurious habit could suggest and good taste would not
refuse, made a retreat that could almost reconcile a sinner to solitude.
There were a few good paintings, many rare engravings, on the walls, a
notable absence, even in the sleeping-room, of photographs of actresses
and professional beauties, but here and there souvenirs of travel
and evidences that the gentler sex had contributed the skill of their
slender fingers to the cheerfulness of the bachelor's home. Scattered
about were the daily and monthly products of the press, the newest
sensations, the things talked about at dinners, but the walls for
the most part were lined with books that are recognized as the proper
possessions of the lover of books, and most of them in exquisite
bindings. Less care, I thought, had been given in the collection to
“sets” of “standards” than to those that are rare, or for some reason,
either from distinguished ownership or autograph notes, have a peculiar
value.

In this atmosphere, when we were prepared to take our ease, the talk was
no longer of stocks, or railways, or schemes, but of books. Whether or
not Henderson loved literature I did not then make up my mind, but he
had a passion for books, especially for rare and first editions; and
the delight with which he exhibited his library, the manner in which he
handled the books that he took down one after the other, the sparkle
in his eyes over a “find” or a bargain, gave me a side of his character
quite different from that I should have gained by seeing him “in the
street” only. He had that genuine respect and affection for a “book”
 which has become almost traditional in these days of cheap and flimsy
publications, a taste held by scholars and collectors, and quite beyond
the popular comprehension. The respect for a book is essential to the
dignity and consideration of the place of literature in the world, and
when books are treated with no more regard than the newspaper, it is a
sign that literature is losing its power. Even the collector, who may
read little and care more for the externals than for the soul of his
favorites, by the honor he pays them, by the solicitude he expends
upon their preservation without spot, by the lavishness of expense upon
binding, contributes much to the dignity of that art which preserves
for the race the continuity of its thought and development. If Henderson
loved books merely as a collector whose taste for luxury and expense
takes this direction, his indulgence could not but have a certain
refining influence. I could not see that he cultivated any decided
specialty, but he had many rare copies which had cost fabulous prices,
the possession of which gives a reputation to any owner. “My shelves
of Americana,” he said, “are nothing like Goodloe's, who has a lot of
scarce things that I am hoping to get hold of some day. But there's a
little thing” (it was a small coffee-colored tract of six leaves, upon
which the binder of the city had exercised his utmost skill) “which
Goodloe offered me five hundred dollars for the other day. I picked it
up in a New Hampshire garret.” Not the least interesting part of the
collection was first editions of American authors--a person's value to
a collector is often in proportion to his obscurity--and what most
delighted him among them were certain thin volumes of poetry, which
the authors since becoming famous had gone to a good deal of time and
expense to suppress. The world seems to experience a lively pleasure in
holding a man to his early follies. There were many examples of superb
binding, especially of exquisite tooling on hog-skin covers--the
appreciation of which has lately greatly revived. The recent rage for
bindings has been a sore trouble to students and collectors in special
lines, raising the prices of books far beyond their intrinsic value. I
had a charming afternoon in Henderson's library, an enjoyment not much
lessened at the time by experiencing in it, with him, rather a sense of
luxury than of learning. It is true, one might pass an hour altogether
different in the garret of a student, and come away with quite other
impressions of the pageant of life.

At five o'clock his stylish trap was sent around from the boarding
stable, and we drove in the Park till twilight. Henderson handling
the reins, and making a part of that daily display which is too
heterogeneous to have distinction, reverted quite naturally to the
tone of worldliness and tolerant cynicism which had characterized his
conversation in the morning. If the Park and the moving assemblage had
not the air of distinction, it had that of expense, which is quite as
attractive to many. Here, as downtown, my companion seemed to know and
be known by everybody, returning the familiar salutes of brokers and
club men, receiving gracious bows from stout matrons, smiles and nods
from pretty women, and more formal recognition from stately and stiff
elderly men, who sat bolt-upright beside their wives and tried to look
like millionaires. For every passerby Henderson had a quick word of
characterization sufficiently amusing, and about many a story which
illuminated the social life of the day. It was wonderful how many of
this chance company had little “histories”--comic, tragic, pitiful,
interesting enough for the pages of a novel.

“There is a young lady”--Henderson touched his hat, and I caught
a glimpse of golden hair and a flash of dark eyes out of a mass of
furs--“who has no history: the world is all before her.”

“Who is that?”

“The daughter of old Eschelle--Carmen Eschelle--the banker and
politician, you remember; had a diplomatic position abroad, and the girl
was educated in Europe. She is very clever. She and her mother have more
money than they ought to know what to do with.”

“That was the celebrated Jay Hawker” ( a moment after), “in the modest
coupe--not much display about him.”

“Is he recognized by respectable people?”

“Recognized?” Henderson laughed. “He's a power. There are plenty of
people who live by trying to guess what he is going to do. Hawker isn't
such a bad fellow. Other people have used the means he used to get
rich and haven't succeeded. They are not held up to point a moral. The
trouble is that Hawker succeeded. Of course, it's a game. He plays as
fair as anybody.”

“Yes,” Henderson resumed, walking his horses in sight of the obelisk,
which suggested the long continuance of the human race, “it is the same
old game, and it is very interesting to those who are in it. Outsiders
think it is all greed. In the Chamber it is a good deal the love of the
game, to watch each other, to find out a man's plans, to circumvent him,
to thwart him, to start a scheme and manipulate it, to catch somebody,
to escape somebody; it is a perpetual excitement.”

“The machine in the Chamber appears to run very smoothly,” I said.
“Oh, that is a public register and indicator. The system back of it
is comprehensive, and appears to be complicated, but it is really very
simple. Spend an hour some day in the office of Flamm and Slamm, and
you will see a part of the system. There are, always a number of men
watching the blackboard, figures on which are changed every minute by
the attendants. Telegrams are constantly arriving from every part of
the Union, from all over the continent, from all the centres in Europe,
which are read by some one connected with the firm, and then displayed
for the guidance of the watchers of the blackboard. Upon this news one
or another says, 'I think I'll buy,' or 'I think I'll sell,' so and so.
His order is transmitted instantly to the Chamber. In two minutes the
result comes back and appears upon the blackboard.”

“But where does the news come from?”

“From the men whose special business it is to pick it up or make it.
They are inside of politics, of the railways, of the weather bureau,
everywhere. The other day in Chicago I sat some time in a broker's
office with others watching the market, and dropped into conversation
with a bright young fellow, at whose right hand, across the rail, was
a telegraph operator at the end of a private wire. Soon a man came in
quietly, and whispered in the ear of my neighbor and went out. The young
fellow instantly wrote a despatch and handed it to the operator, and
turning to me, said, 'Now watch the blackboard.'

“In an incredibly short space of time a fall in a leading railway
showed on the blackboard. 'What was it?' I asked. 'Why, that man was the
general freight manager of the A. B. road. He told me that they were
to cut rates. I sent it to New York by a private wire.' I learned by
further conversation that my young gentleman was a Manufacturer of News,
and that such was his address and intelligence that though he was not
a member of the broker's firm, he made ten thousand a year in the
business. Soon another man came in, whispered his news, and went away.
Another despatch--another responsive change in the figures. 'That,'
explained my companion, 'was a man connected with the weather bureau. He
told me that there would be a heavy frost tonight in the Northwest.'”

“Do they sell the weather?” I asked, very much amused.

“Yes, twice; once over a private wire, and then to the public, after the
value of it has been squeezed out, in the shape of predictions. Oh, the
weather bureau is worth all the money it costs, for business purposes.
It is a great auxiliary.”

Dining that evening with Henderson at his club, I had further
opportunity to study a representative man. He was of a good New
Hampshire family, exceedingly respectable without being distinguished.
Over the chimney-place in the old farmhouse hung a rusty Queen Anne that
had been at the taking of Louisburg. His grandfather shouldered a musket
at Bunker Hill; his father, the youngest son, had been a judge as
well as a farmer, and noted for his shrewdness and reticence. Rodney,
inheriting the thrift of his ancestors, had pushed out from his home,
adapting this thrift to the modern methods of turning it to account. He
had brought also to the city the stamina of three generations of plain
living--a splendid capital, by which the city is constantly reinforced,
and which one generation does not exhaust, except by the aid of extreme
dissipation. With sound health, good ability, and fair education, he had
the cheerful temperament which makes friends, and does not allow their
misfortunes to injure his career. Generous by impulse, he would rather
do a favor than not, and yet he would be likely to let nothing interfere
with any object he had in view for himself. Inheriting a conventional
respect for religion and morality, he was not so bigoted as to rebuke
the gayety of a convivial company, nor so intractable as to make him an
uncomfortable associate in any scheme, according to the modern notions
of business, that promised profit. His engaging manner made him popular,
and his good-natured adroitness made him successful. If his early
experience of life caused him to be cynical, he was not bitterly so; his
cynicism was of the tolerant sort that does not condemn the world and
withdraw from it, but courts it and makes the most of it, lowering his
private opinion of men in proportion as he is successful in the game he
plays with them. At this period I could see that he had determined to be
successful, and that he had not determined to be unscrupulous. He would
only drift with the tide that made for fortune. He enjoyed the world--a
sufficient reason why the world should like him. His business morality
was gauged by what other people do in similar circumstances. In short,
he was a product of the period since the civil war closed, that great
upheaval of patriotic feeling and sacrifice, which ended in so much
expansion and so many opportunities. If he had remained in New Hampshire
he would probably have been a successful politician, successful not only
in keeping in place, but in teaching younger aspirants that serving
the country is a very good way to the attainment of luxury and the
consideration that money brings. But having chosen the law as a
stepping-stone to the lobby, to speculation, and the manipulation of
chances, he had a poor opinion of politics and of politicians. His
success thus far, though considerable, had not been sufficient to create
for him powerful enemies, so that he may be said to be admired by all
and feared by none. In the general opinion he was a downright good
fellow and amazingly clever.




VII

In youth, as at the opera, everything seems possible. Surely it is not
necessary to choose between love and riches. One may have both, and
the one all the more easily for having attained the other. It must be a
fiction of the moralists who construct the dramas that the god of love
and the god of money each claims an undivided allegiance. It was in
some wholly legendary, perhaps spiritual, world that it was necessary to
renounce love to gain the Rhine gold. The boxes at the Metropolitan did
not believe this. The spectators of the boxes could believe it still
less. For was not beauty there seen shining in jewels that have a market
value, and did not love visibly preside over the union, and make it
known that his sweetest favors go with a prosperous world? And yet, is
the charm of life somewhat depending upon a sense of its fleetingness,
of its phantasmagorial character, a note of coming disaster, maybe, in
the midst of its most seductive pageantry, in the whirl and glitter and
hurry of it? Is there some subtle sense of exquisite satisfaction in
snatching the sweet moments of life out of the very delirium of it, that
must soon end in an awakening to bankruptcy of the affections, and the
dreadful loss of illusions? Else why do we take pleasure--a pleasure so
deep that it touches the heart like melancholy--in the common drama
of the opera? How gay and joyous is the beginning! Mirth, hilarity,
entrancing sound, brilliant color, the note of a trumpet calling to
heroism, the beseeching of the concordant strings, and the soft flute
inviting to pleasure; scenes placid, pastoral, innocent; light-hearted
love, the dance on the green, the stately pageant in the sunlit streets,
the court, the ball, the mad splendor of life. And then love becomes
passion, and passion thwarted hurries on to sin, and sin lifts to the
heights of the immortal, sweetly smiling gods, and plunges to the depths
of despair. In vain the orchestra, the inevitable accompaniment of life,
warns and pleads and admonishes; calm has gone, and gayety has gone;
there is no sweetness now but in the wildness of surrender and of
sacrifice. How sad are the remembered strains that aforetime were
incentives to love and promises of happiness! Gloom settles upon the
scene; Mephisto, the only radiant one, flits across it, and mocks
the poor broken-hearted girl clinging to the church door. There is
a dungeon, the chanting of the procession of tonsured priests, the
passing-bell. Seldom appears the golden bridge over which the baffled
and tired pass into Valhalla.

Do we like this because it is life, or because there is a certain
satisfaction in seeing the tragedy which impends over all, pervades
the atmosphere, as it were, and adds something of zest to the mildest
enjoyment? Should we go away from the mimic stage any, better and
stronger if the drama began in the dungeon and ended on the greensward,
with innocent love and resplendent beauty in possession of the Rhine
gold?

How simple, after all, was the created world on the stage to the real
world in the auditorium, with its thousand complexities and dramatic
situations, and if the little knot of players of parts for an hour
could have had leisure to be spectators of the audience, what a deeper
revelation of life would they not have seen! For the world has never
assembled such an epitome of itself, in its passion for pleasure and its
passion for display, as in the modern opera, with its ranks and tiers
of votaries from the pit to the dome. I fancy that even Margaret, whose
love for music was genuine, was almost as much fascinated by the greater
spectacle as by the less.

It was a crowded night, for the opera was one that appealed to the
senses and stimulated them to activity, and left the mind free to pursue
its own schemes; in a word, orchestra and the scenes formed a sort of
accompaniment and interpreter to the private dramas in the boxes. The
opera was made for society, and not society for the opera. We occupied a
box in the second tier--the Morgans, Margaret, and my wife. Morgan said
that the glasses were raised to us from the parquet and leveled at us
from the loges because we were a country party, but he well enough knew
whose fresh beauty and enthusiastic young face it was that drew the fire
when the curtain fell on the first act, and there was for a moment a
little lull in the hum of conversation.

“I had heard,” Morgan was saying, “that the opera was not acclimated in
New York; but it is nearly so. The audience do not jabber so loud nor
so incessantly as at San Carlo, and they do not hum the airs with the
singers--”

“Perhaps,” said my wife, “that is because they do not know the airs.”

“But they are getting on in cultivation, and learning how to assert the
social side of the opera, which is not to be seriously interfered with
by the music on the stage.”

“But the music, the scenery, were never before so good,” I replied to
these cynical observations.

“That is true. And the social side has risen with it. Do you know what
an impudent thing the managers did the other night in protesting against
the raising of the lights by which the house was made brilliant and the
cheap illusions of the stage were destroyed? They wanted to make the
house positively gloomy for the sake of a little artificial moonlight on
the painted towers and the canvas lakes.”

As the world goes, the scene was brilliant, of course with republican
simplicity. The imagination was helped by no titled names any more than
the eye was by the insignia of rank, but there was a certain glow of
feeling, as the glass swept the circle, to know that there were ten
millions in this box, and twenty in the next, and fifty in the next,
attested well enough by the flash of jewels and the splendor of attire,
and one might indulge a genuine pride in the prosperity of the republic.
As for beauty, the world, surely, in this later time, had flowered
here--flowered with something of Aspasia's grace and something of the
haughty coldness of Agrippina. And yet it was American. Here and there
in the boxes was a thoroughbred portrait by Copley--the long shapely
neck, the sloping shoulders, the drooping eyelids, even to the gown in
which the great-grandmother danced with the French officers.

“Who is that lovely creature?” asked Margaret, indicating a box
opposite.

I did not know. There were two ladies, and behind them I had no
difficulty in making out Henderson and--Margaret evidently had not seen
him Mr. Lyon. Almost at the same moment Henderson recognized me, and
signaled for me to come to his box. As I rose to do so, Mrs. Morgan
exclaimed: “Why, there is Mr. Lyon! Do tell him we are here.” I saw
Margaret's color rise, but she did not speak.

I was presented to Mrs. Eschelle and her daughter; in the latter I
recognized the beauty who had flashed by us in the Park. The elder lady
inclined to stoutness, and her too youthful apparel could not mislead
one as to the length of her pilgrimage in this world, nor soften the
hard lines of her worldly face-lines acquired, one could see, by a
social struggle, and not drawn there by an innate patrician insolence.

“We are glad to see a friend of Mr. Henderson's,” she said, “and of Mr.
Lyon's also. Mr. Lyon has told us much of your charming country home.
Who is that pretty girl in your box, Mr. Fairchild?”

Miss Eschelle had her glass pointed at Margaret as I gave the desired
information.

“How innocent!” she murmured. “And she's quite in the style--isn't she,
Mr. Lyon?” she asked, turning about, her sweet mobile face quite the
picture of what she was describing. “We are all innocent in these days.”

“It is a very good style,” I said.

“Isn't it becoming?” asked the girl, making her dark eyes at once merry
and demure.

Mr. Lyon was looking intently at the opposite box, and a slight shade
came over his fine face. “Ah, I see!”

“I beg your pardon, Miss Eschelle,” he said, after a second, “I hardly
know which to admire most, the beauty, or the wit, or the innocence of
the American women.”

“There is nothing so confusing, though, as the country innocence,” the
girl said, with the most natural air; “it never knows where to stop.”

“You are too absurd, Carmen,” her mother interposed; “as if the town
girl did!”

“Well, mamma, there is authority for saying that there is a time for
everything, only one must be in the fashion, you know.”

Mr. Lyon looked a little dubious at this turn of the talk; Mr. Henderson
was as evidently amused at the girl's acting. I said I was glad to see
that goodness was in fashion.

“Oh, it often is. You know we were promised a knowledge of good as
well as evil. It depends upon the point of view. I fancy, now, that
Mr. Henderson tolerates the good--that is the reason we get on so well
together; and Mr. Lyon tolerates the evil--that's the reason he likes
New York. I have almost promised him that I will have a mission school.”

The girl looked quite capable of it, or of any other form of devotion.
Notwithstanding her persistent banter, she had a most inviting innocence
of manner, almost an ingenuousness, that well became her exquisite
beauty. And but for a tentative daring in her talk, as if the gentle
creature were experimenting as to how far one could safely go, her
innocence might have seemed that of ignorance.

It came out in the talk that Mr. Lyon had been in Washington for a week,
and would return there later on.

“We had a claim on him,” said Mrs. Eschelle, “for his kindness to us
in London, and we are trying to convince him that New York is the real
capital.”

“Unfortunately,” added Miss Eschelle, looking up in Mr. Lyon's face,
“he visited Brandon first, and you seem to have bewitched him with your
simple country ways. I can get him to talk of nothing else.”

“You mean to say,” Mr. Lyon replied, with the air of retorting, “that
you have asked me about nothing else.”

“Oh, you know we felt a little responsible for you; and there is no
place so dangerous as the country. Now here you are protected--we put
all the wickedness on the stage, and learn to recognize and shun it.”

“It may be wicked,” said her mother, “but it is dull. Don't you find it
so, Mr. Henderson? I am passionately fond of Wagner, but it is too noisy
for anything tonight.”

“I notice, dear,” the dutiful daughter replied for all of us, “that you
have to raise your voice. But there is the ballet. Let us all listen
now.”

Mr. Lyon excused himself from going with me, saying that he would call
at our hotel, and I took Henderson. “I shall count the minutes you are
going to lose,” the girl said as we went out-to our box. The lobbies
in the interact were thronged with men--for the most part the young
speculators of the Chamber turned into loungers in the foyer--knowing,
alert, attitudinizing in the extreme of the mode, unable even in this
hour to give beauty the preference to business, well knowing, perhaps,
that beauty itself in these days has a fine eye for business.

I liked Henderson better in our box than in his own. Was it because
the atmosphere was more natural and genuine? Or was it Margaret's
transparent nature, her sincere enjoyment of the scene, her evident
pleasure in the music, the color, the gayety of the house, that made
him drop the slight cynical air of the world which had fitted him so
admirably a moment before? He already knew my wife and the Morgans, and,
after the greetings were made, he took a seat by Margaret, quite content
while the act was going on to watch its progress in the play of her
responsive features. How quickly she felt, how the frown followed the
smile, how, she seemed to weigh and try to apprehend the meaning of what
went on--how her every sense enjoyed life!

“It is absurd,” she said, turning her bright face to him when the
curtain dropped, “to be so interested in fictitious trouble.”

“I'm not so sure that it is,” he replied, in her own tone; “the opera is
a sort of pulpit, and not seldom preaches an awful sermon--more plainly
than the preacher dares to make it.”

“But not in nomine Dei.”

“No. But who can say what is most effective? I often wonder, as I watch
the congregations coming from the churches on the Avenue, if they are
any more solemnized than the audiences that pour out of this house. I
confess that I cannot shake off 'Lohengrin' in a good while after I hear
it.”

“And so you think the theatres have a moral influence?”

“Honestly”--and I heard his good-natured laugh--“I couldn't swear to
that. But then we don't know what New York might be without them.”

“I don't know,” said Margaret, reflectively, “that my own good impulses,
such as I have, are excited by anything I see on the stage; perhaps I
am more tolerant, and maybe toleration is not good. I wonder if I should
grow worldly, seeing more of it?”

“Perhaps it is not the stage so much as the house,” Henderson replied,
beginning to read the girl's mind.

“Yes, it would be different if one came alone and saw the play,
unconscious of the house, as if it were a picture. I think it is the
house that disturbs one, makes one restless and discontented.”

“I never analyzed my emotions,” said Henderson, “but when I was a boy
and came to the theatre I well remember that it made me ambitious; every
sort of thing seemed possible of attainment in the excitement of the
crowded house, the music, the lights, the easy successes on the stage;
nothing else is more stimulating to a lad; nothing else makes the world
more attractive.”

“And does it continue to have the same effect, Mr. Henderson?”

“Hardly,” and he smiled; “the illusion goes, and the stage is about as
real as the house--usually less interesting. It can hardly compete with
the comedy in the boxes.”

“Perhaps it is lack of experience, but I like the play for itself.”

“Oh yes; desire for the dramatic is natural. People will have it
somehow. In the country village where there are no theatres the people
make dramas out of each other's lives; the most trivial incidents are
magnified and talked about--dramatized, in short.”

“You mean gossiped about?”

“Well, you may call it gossip--nothing can be concealed; everybody knows
about everybody else; there is no privacy; everything is used to create
that illusory spectacle which the stage tries to give. I think that
in the country village a good theatre would be a wholesome influence,
satisfy a natural appetite indicated by the inquisition into the affairs
of neighbors, and by the petty scandal.”

“We are on the way to it,” said Mr. Morgan, who sat behind them; “we
have theatricals in the church parlors, which may grow into a nineteenth
century substitute for the miracle-plays. You mustn't, Margaret, let Mr.
Henderson prejudice you against the country.”

“No,” said the latter, quickly; “I was only trying to defend the city.
We country people always do that. We must base our theatrical life on
something in nature.”

“What is the difference, Mr. Henderson,” asked Margaret, “between the
gossip in the boxes and the country gossip you spoke of?”

“In toleration mainly, and lack of exact knowledge. It is here rather
cynical persiflage, not concentrated public opinion.”

“I don't follow you,” said Morgan. “It seems to me that in the city
you've got gossip plus the stage.”

“That is to say, we have the world.”

“I don't like to believe that,” said Margaret, seriously--“your
definition of the world.”

“You make me see that it was a poor jest,” he said, rising to go.
“By-the-way, we have a friend of yours in our box tonight--a young
Englishman.”

“Oh, Mr. Lyon. We were all delighted with him. Such a transparent,
genuine nature!”

“Tell him,” said my wife, “that we should be happy to see him at our
hotel.”

When Henderson came back to his box Carmen did not look up, but she
said, indifferently: “What, so soon? But your absence has made one
person thoroughly miserable. Mr. Lyon has not taken his eyes off you. I
never saw such an international attachment.”

“What more could I do for Miss Eschelle than to leave her in such
company?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Lyon. “Miss Eschelle must believe that I
thoroughly appreciate Mr. Henderson's self-sacrifice. If I occasionally
looked over where he was, I assure you it was in pity.”

“You are both altogether too self-sacrificing,” the beauty replied,
turning to Henderson a look that was sweetly forgiving. “They who sin
much shall be forgiven much, you know.”

“That leaves me,” Mr. Lyon answered, with a laugh, “as you say over
here, out in the cold, for I have passed a too happy evening to feel
like a transgressor.”

“The sins of omission are the worst sort,” she retorted.

“You see what you must do to be forgiven,” Henderson said to Lyon, with
that good-natured smile that was so potent to smooth away sharpness.

“I fear I can never do enough to qualify myself.” And he also laughed.

“You never will,” Carmen answered, but she accompanied the doubt with a
witching smile that denied it.

“What is all this about forgiveness?” asked Mrs. Eschelle, turning to
them from regarding the stage.

“Oh, we were having an experience meeting behind your back, mamma, only
Mr. Henderson won't tell his experience.”

“Miss Eschelle is in such a forgiving humor tonight that she absolves
before any one has a chance to confess,” he replied.

“Don't you think I am always so, Mr. Lyon?”

Mr. Lyon bowed. “I think that an opera-box with Miss Eschelle is the
easiest confessional in the world.”

“That's something like a compliment. You see” (to Henderson) “how much
you Americans have to learn.”

“Will you be my teacher?”

“Or your pupil,” the girl said, in a low voice, standing near him as she
rose.

The play was over. In the robing and descending through the corridors
there were the usual chatter, meaning looks, confidential asides. It is
always at the last moment, in the hurry, as in a postscript, that woman
says what she means, or what for the moment she wishes to be thought to
mean. In the crowd on the main stairway the two parties saw each other
at a distance, but without speaking.

“Is it true that Lyon is 'epris' there?” Carmen whispered to Henderson
when she had scanned and thoroughly inventoried Margaret.

“You know as much as I do.”

“Well, you did stay a long time,” she said, in a lower tone.

As Margaret's party waited for their carriage she saw Mrs. Eschelle and
her daughter enter a shining coach, with footman and coachman in livery.
Henderson stood raising his hat. A little white hand was shaken to him
from the window, and a sweet, innocent face leaned forward--a face with
dark, eyes and golden hair, lit up with a radiant smile. That face for
the moment was New York to Margaret, and New York seemed a vain show.

Carmen threw herself back in her seat as if weary. Mrs. Eschelle sat
bolt-upright.

“What in the world, child, made you go on so tonight?”

“I don't know.”

“What made you snub Mr. Lyon so often?”

“Did I? He won't mind much. Didn't you see, mother, that he was distrait
the moment he espied that girl? I'm not going to waste my time. I know
the signs. No fisheries imbroglio for me, thank you.”

“Fish? Who said anything about fish?”

“Oh, the international business. Ask Mr. Henderson to explain it. The
English want to fish in our waters, I believe. I think Mr. Lyon has had
a nibble from a fresh-water fish. Perhaps it's the other way, and he's
hooked. There be fishers of men, you know, mother.”

“You are a strange child, Carmen. I hope you will be civil to both of
them.” And they rode on in silence.




VIII

In real life the opera or the theatre is only the prologue to the
evening. Our little party supped at Delgardo's. The play then begins.
New York is quite awake by that time, and ready to amuse itself. After
the public duty, the public attitudinizing, after assisting at the
artificial comedy and tragedy which imitate life under a mask, and
suggest without satisfying, comes the actual experience. My gentle
girl--God bless your sweet face and pure heart!--who looked down from
the sky-parlor at the Metropolitan upon the legendary splendor of the
stage, and the alluring beauty and wealth of the boxes, and went home
to create in dreams the dearest romance in a maiden's life, you did not
know that for many the romance of the night just began when the curtain
fell.

The streets were as light as day. At no other hour were the pavements so
thronged, was there such a crush of carriages, such a blockade of cars,
such running, and shouting, greetings and decorous laughter, such a
swirl of pleasurable excitement. Never were the fashionable cafes and
restaurants so crowded and brilliant. It is not a carnival time; it is
just the flow and ebb of a night's pleasure, an electric night which has
all of the morning except its peace, a night of the gayest opportunity
and unlimited possibility.

At each little table was a drama in progress, light or serious--all the
more serious for being light at the moment and unconsidered. Morgan, who
was so well informed in the gossip of society and so little involved in
it--some men have this faculty, which makes them much more entertaining
than the daily newspaper--knew the histories of half the people in the
room. There were an Italian marquis and his wife supping together like
lovers, so strong is the force of habit that makes this public life
necessary even when the domestic life is established. There is a man
who shot himself rather seriously on the doorsteps of the beauty who
rejected him, and in a year married the handsome and more wealthy
woman who sits opposite him in that convivial party. There is a
Russian princess, a fair woman with cool observant eyes, making herself
agreeable to a mixed company in three languages. In this brilliant light
is it not wonderful how dazzlingly beautiful the women are--brunettes in
yellow and diamonds, blondes in elaborately simple toilets, with only
a bunch of roses for ornament, in the flush of the midnight hour, in
a radiant glow that even the excitement and the lifted glass cannot
heighten? That pretty girl yonder--is she wife or widow?--slight and
fresh and fair, they say has an ambition to extend her notoriety by
going upon the stage; the young lady with her, who does not seem to fear
a public place, may be helping her on the road. The two young gentlemen,
their attendants, have the air of taking life more seriously than the
girls, but regard with respectful interest the mounting vivacity of
their companions, which rises and sparkles like the bubbles in the
slender glasses which they raise to their lips with the dainty grace of
practice. The staid family parties who are supping at adjoining tables
notice this group with curiosity, and express their opinion by elevated
eyebrows.

Margaret leaned back in her chair and regarded the whole in a musing'
frame of mind. I think she apprehended nothing of it except the light,
the color, the beauty, the movement of gayety. For her the notes of the
orchestra sounded through it all--the voices of the singers, the hum of
the house; it was all a spectacle and a play. Why should she not enjoy
it? There was something in the nature of the girl that responded to
this form of pleasure--the legitimate pleasure the senses take in being
gratified. “It is so different,” she said to me, “from the pleasure
one has in an evening by the fire. Do you know, even Mr. Morgan seems
worldly here.”

It was a deeper matter than she thought, this about worldliness, which
had been raised in Margaret's mind. Have we all double natures, and do
we simply conform to whatever surrounds us? Is there any difference in
kind between the country worldliness and the city worldliness? I do
not suppose that Margaret formulated any of these ideas in words. Her
knowledge of the city had hitherto been superficial. It was a place
for shopping, for a day in a picture exhibition, for an evening in
the theatre, no more a part of her existence than a novel or a book of
travels: of the life of the town she knew nothing. That night in her
room she became aware for the first time of another world, restless,
fascinating, striving, full of opportunities. What must London be?

If we could only note the first coming into the mind of a thought that
changes life and re-forms character--supposing that every act and every
new departure has this subtle beginning--we might be less the sport of
circumstances than we seem to be. Unnoted, the desire so swiftly follows
the thought and juggles with the will.

The next day Mr. Henderson left his card and a basket of roses. Mr. Lyon
called. It was a constrained visit. Margaret was cordially civil, and I
fancied that Mr. Lyon would have been more content if she had been less
so. If he were a lover, there was little to please him in the exchange
of the commonplaces of the day.

“Yes,” he was saying to my wife, “perhaps I shall have to change my mind
about the simplicity of your American life. It is much the same in New
York and London. It is only a question of more or less sophistication.”

“Mr. Henderson tells us,” said my wife, “that you knew the Eschelles in
London.”

“Yes. Miss Eschelle almost had a career there last season.”

“Why almost?”

“Well--you will pardon me--one needs for success in these days to be not
only very clever, but equally daring. It is every day more difficult to
make a sensation.”

“I thought her, across the house,” Margaret said, “very pretty and
attractive. I did not know you were so satirical, Mr. Lyon. Do you mean
that one must be more daring, as you call it, in London than in New
York?”

“I hope it will not hurt your national pride, Miss Debree, if I say that
there is always the greater competition in the larger market.”

“Oh, my pride,” Margaret answered, “does not lie in that direction.”

“And to do her justice, I don't think Miss Eschelle's does, either. She
appears to be more interested now in New York than in London.”

He laughed as he said this, and Margaret laughed also, and then stopped
suddenly, thinking of the roses that came that morning. Could she be
comparing the Londoner with the handsome American who sat by her side at
the opera last night? She was half annoyed with herself at the thought.

“And are not you also interested in New York, Mr. Lyon?” my wife asked.

“Yes, moderately so, if you will permit me to say it.” It was an
effort on his part to keep up the conversation, Margaret was so wholly
unresponsive; and afterwards, knowing how affairs stood with them, I
could understand his well-bred misery. The hardest thing in the world
is to suffer decorously and make no sign in the midst of a society which
insists on stoicism, no matter how badly one is hurt. The Society for
First Aid to the Injured hardens its heart in these cases. “I have
never seen another place,” he continued, “where the women are so busy
in improving themselves. Societies, clubs, parlor lectures, readings,
recitations, musicales, classes--it fatigues one to keep in sight of
them. Every afternoon, every evening, something. I doubt if men are
capable of such incessant energy, Mrs. Fairchild.”

“And you find they have no time to be agreeable?”

“Quite the contrary. There is nothing they are not interesting in,
nothing about which they cannot talk, and talk intensely. They absorb
everything, and have the gift of acquiring intelligence without, as
one of them told me, having to waste time in reading. Yes, it is a most
interesting city.”

The coming in of Mr. Morgan gave another turn to the talk. He had
been to see a rural American play, an exhibition of country life and
character, constructed in absolute disregard of any traditions of the
stage.

“I don't suppose,” Mr. Morgan said, “a foreigner would understand it; it
would be impossible in Paris, incomprehensible in London.”

“Yes, I saw it,” said Mr. Lyon, thus appealed to. “It was very odd, and
seemed to amuse the audience immensely. I suppose one must be familiar
with American farm life to see the points of it. I confess that while I
sat there, in an audience so keenly in sympathy with the play--almost a
part of it, one might say--I doubted if I understood your people as well
as I thought I did when I had been here a week only. Perhaps this is the
beginning of an American drama.”

“Some people say that it is.”

“But it is so local!”

“Anything that is true must be true to local conditions, to begin with.
The only question is, is it true to human nature? What puzzled me in
this American play was its raising the old question of nature and art.
You've seen Coquelin? Well, that is acting, as artificial as a sonnet,
the perfection of training, skill in an art. You never doubt that he is
performing in a play for the entertainment of an audience. You have the
same enjoyment of it that you have of a picture--a picture, I mean,
full of character and sentiment, not a photograph. But I don't think of
Denman Thompson as an actor trained to perfection in a dramatic school,
but as a New Hampshire farmer. I don't admire his skill; I admire him.
There is plenty that is artificial, vulgarly conventional, in his play,
plenty of imitation of the rustic that shows it is imitation, but he is
the natural man. If he is a stage illusion, he does not seem so to me.”
 “Probably to an American audience only he does not,” Mr. Lyon remarked.

“Well, that is getting to be a tolerably large audience.”

“I doubt if you will change the laws of art,” said Mr. Lyon, rising to
go.

“We shall hope to see you again at our house,” my wife said.

“You are very good. I should like it; but my time is running out.”

“If you cannot come, you may leave your adieus with Miss Debree, who is
staying some time in the city,” my wife said, evidently to Margaret's
annoyance. But she could do no less than give him her city address,
though the information was not accompanied by any invitation in her
manner.

Margaret was to stay some time with two maiden ladies, old friends of
her mother, the Misses Arbuser. The Arbusers were people of consequence
in their day, with a certain social prestige; in fact, the excellent
ladies were two generations removed from successful mercantile life,
which in the remote prospective took on an old-family solidity. Nowhere
else in the city could Margaret have come closer in contact with a
certain phase of New York life in which women are the chief actors--a
phase which may be a transition, and may be only a craze. It is not so
much a condescension of society to literature as it is a discovery that
literature and art, in the persons of those who produce both, may be
sources of amusement, or perhaps, to be just, of the enlargement of
the horizon and the improvement of the mind. The society mind was never
before so hospitable to new ideas and new sensations. Charities, boards
of managers, missions, hospitals, news-rooms, and lodging-houses for the
illiterate and the homeless--these are not sufficient, even with
balls, dancing classes, and teas, for the superfluous energies of
this restless, improving generation; there must be also radical clubs,
reading classes, study classes, ethical, historical, scientific,
literary lectures, the reading of papers by ladies of distinction and
gentlemen of special attainments--an unremitting pursuit of culture and
information. Curiosity is awake. The extreme of social refinement and
a mild Bohemianism almost touch. It passes beyond the affectation of
knowing persons who write books and write for the press, artists in
paint and artists in music. “You cannot be sure in the most exclusive
circle”--it was Carmen Eschelle who said this--“that you will not meet
an author or even a journalist.” Not all the women, however, adore
letters or affect enthusiasm at drawing-room lectures; there are some
bright and cynical ones who do not, who write papers themselves, and
have an air of being behind the scenes.

Margaret had thought that she was fully occupied in the country, with
her teaching, her reading, her literature and historical clubs, but
she had never known before what it was to be busy and not have time for
anything, always in pursuit of some new thing, and getting a fragment
here and there; life was a good deal like reading the dictionary and
remembering none of the words. And it was all so cosmopolitan and
all-embracingly sympathetic. One day it was a paper by a Servian
countess on the social life of the Servians, absorbingly interesting
both in itself and because it was a countess who read it; and this was
followed by the singing of an Icelandic tenor and a Swedish soprano, and
a recital on the violin by a slight, red-haired, middle-aged woman from
London. All the talents seem to be afloat and at the service of the
strenuous ones who are cultivating themselves.

The first function at which Margaret assisted in the long drawing-rooms
of the Arbusers was a serious one--one that combined the charm of
culture with the temptations of benevolence. The rooms were crowded
with the fashion of the town, with a sprinkling of clergymen and of thin
philanthropic gentlemen in advanced years. It was a four-o'clock, and
the assembly had the cheerfulness of a reception, only that the display
of toilets was felt to be sanctified by a purpose. The performance
opened with a tremendous prelude on the piano by Herr Bloomgarten, who
had been Liszt's favorite pupil; indeed, it was whispered that Liszt had
said that, old as he was, he never heard Bloomgarten without learning
something. There was a good deal of subdued conversation while the
pianist was in his extreme agony of execution, and a hush of extreme
admiration--it was divine, divine, ravishing--when he had finished. The
speaker was a learned female pundit from India, and her object was to
interest the women of America in the condition of their unfortunate
Hindoo sisters. It appeared that thousands and tens of thousands of them
were doomed to early and lifelong widowhood, owing to the operation
of cruel caste laws, which condemned even girls betrothed to deceased
Brahmins to perpetual celibacy. This fate could only be alleviated by
the education and elevation of women. And money was needed for schools,
especially for medical schools, which would break down the walls of
prejudice and enfranchise the sex. The appeal was so charmingly made
that every one was moved by it, especially the maiden ladies present,
who might be supposed to enter into the feelings of their dusky sisters
beyond the seas. The speaker said, with a touch of humor that always
intensifies a serious discourse, that she had been told that in one of
the New England States there was a superfluity of unmarried women; but
this was an entirely different affair; it was a matter of choice with
these highly educated and accomplished women. And the day had come
when woman could make her choice! At this there was a great clapping
of hands. It was one thing to be free to lead a life of single
self-culture, and quite another to be compelled to lead a single
fife without self-culture. The address was a great success, and much
enthusiasm spread abroad for the cause of the unmarried women of India.

In the audience were Mrs. Eschelle and her daughter. Margaret and Carmen
were made acquainted, and were drawn together by curiosity, and perhaps
by a secret feeling of repulsion. Carmen was all candor and sweetness,
and absorbingly interested in the women of India, she said. With
Margaret's permission she would come and see her, for she believed they
had common friends.

It would seem that there could not be much sympathy between natures so
opposed, persons who looked at life from such different points of view,
but undeniably Carmen had a certain attraction for Margaret. The New
Englander, whose climate is at once his enemy and his tonic, always
longs for the tropics, which to him are a region of romance, as Italy is
to the German. In his nature, also, there is something easily awakened
to the allurements of a sensuous existence, and to a desire for a freer
experience of life than custom has allowed him. Carmen, who showed to
Margaret only her best side--she would have been wise to exhibit
no other to Henderson, but women of her nature are apt to cheapen
themselves with men--seemed an embodiment of that graceful gayety and
fascinating worldliness which make the world agreeable.

One morning, a few days after the Indian function, Margaret was alone in
her own cozy sitting-room. Nothing was wanting that luxury could suggest
to make it in harmony with a beautiful woman, nothing that did not
flatter and please, or nurse, perhaps, a personal sense of beauty,
and impart that glow of satisfaction which comes when the senses are
adroitly ministered to. Margaret had been in a mood that morning to
pay extreme attention to her toilet. The result was the perfection of
simplicity, of freshness, of maiden purity, enhanced by the touch of
art. As she surveyed herself in the pier-glass, and noted the refined
lines of the morning-gown which draped but did not conceal the more
exquisite lines of her figure, and adjusted a rose in her bosom, she did
not feel like a Puritan, and, although she may not have noted the fact,
she did not look like one. It was not a look of vanity that she threw
into the mirror, or of special self-consciousness; in her toilet she
had obeyed only her instinct (that infallible guide in a woman of
refinement), and if she was conscious of any emotion, it was of the
stirring within her of the deepest womanly nature.

In fact, she was restless. She flung herself into an easy-chair before
the fire, and took up a novel. It was a novel with a religious problem.
In vain she tried to be interested in it. At home she would have
absorbed it eagerly; they would have discussed it; the doubts and
suggestions in it would have assumed the deepest personal importance. It
might have made an era in her thoughtful country life. Here it did not
so appeal to her; it seemed unreal and shadowy in a life that had so
much more of action than of reflection in it. It was a life fascinating
and exciting, and profoundly unsatisfactory. Yet, after all, it was more
really life than that placid vegetation in the country. She felt that in
the whirl of only a few days of it--operas, receptions, teas, readings,
dances, dinners, where everybody sparkled with a bewildering brilliancy,
and yet from which one brought away nothing but a sense of strain; such
gallantry, such compliments, such an easy tossing about of every topic
under heaven; such an air of knowing everything, and not caring about
anything very much; so much mutual admiration and personal satisfaction!
She liked it, and perhaps was restless because she liked it. To be
admired, to be deferred to--was there any harm in that? Only, if one
suffers admiration today, it becomes a necessity tomorrow. She began to
feel the influence of that life which will not let one stand still for
a moment. If it is not the opera, it is a charity; if it is not a lover,
it is some endowed cot in a hospital. There must be something going on
every day, every hour.

Yes, she was restless, and could not read. She thought of Mr. Henderson.
He had called formally. She had seen him, here and there, again and
again. He had sought her out in all companies; his face had broken into
a smile when he met her; he had talked with her lightly, gayly; she
remembered the sound of his voice; she had learned to know his figure in
a room among a hundred; and she blushed as she remembered that she had
once or twice followed him with her eyes in a throng. He was, to
be sure, nothing to her; but he was friendly; he was certainly
entertaining; he was a part, somehow, of this easy-flowing life.

Miss Eschelle was announced. Margaret begged that she would come
upstairs without ceremony. The mutual taking-in of the pretty street
costume and the pretty morning toilet was the work of a moment--the
photographer has invented no machine that equals a woman's eyes for such
a purpose.

“How delightful it is! how altogether charming!” and Margaret felt that
she was included with the room in this admiration. “I told mamma that
I was coming to see you this morning, even if I missed the Nestors'
luncheon. I like to please myself sometimes. Mamma says I'm frivolous,
but do you know”--the girls were comfortably seated by the fire, and
Carmen turned her sweet face and candid eyes to her companion--“I get
dreadfully tired of all this going round and round. No, I don't even
go to the Indigent Mothers' Home; it's part of the same thing, but I
haven't any gift that way. Ah, you were reading--that novel.”

“Yes; I was trying to read it; I intend to read it.”

“Oh, we have had it! It's a little past now, but it has been all the
rage. Everybody has read it; that is, I don't know that anybody has read
it, but everybody has been talking about it. Of course somebody must
have read it, to set the thing agoing. And it has been discussed to
death. I sometimes feel as if I had changed my religion half a dozen
times in a fortnight. But I haven't heard anything about it for a week.
We have taken up the Hindoo widows now, you know.” And the girl laughed,
as if she knew she were talking nonsense.

“And you do not read much in the city?” Margaret asked, with an
answering smile.

“Yes; in the summer. That is, some do. There is a reading set. I don't
know that they read much, but there is a reading set. You know,
Miss Debree, that when a book is published--really published, as Mr.
Henderson says--you don't need to read it. Somehow it gets into the air
and becomes common property. Everybody hears the whole thing. You can
talk about it from a notice. Of course there are some novels that one
must read in order to understand human nature. Do you read French?”

“Yes; but not many French novels; I cannot.”

“Nor can I,” said Carmen, with a sincere face. “They are too realistic
for me.” She was at the moment running over in her mind a “situation” in
a paper-covered novel turned down on her nightstand. “Mr. Henderson says
that everybody condemns the French novels, and that people praise the
novels they don't read.”

“You know Mr. Henderson very well?”

“Yes; we've known him a long time. He is the only man I'm afraid of.”

“Afraid of?”

“Well, you know he is a sort of Club man; that style of man provokes
your curiosity, for you never can tell how much such men know. It makes
you a little uneasy.”

Carmen was looking into the fire, as if abstractedly reflecting upon
the nature of men in general, but she did not fail to notice a slight
expression of pain on Margaret's face.

“But there is your Mr. Lyon--”

Margaret laughed. “You do me too much honor. I think you discovered him
first.”

“Well, our Mr. Lyon.” Carmen was still looking into the fire. “He is
such a good young man!”

Margaret did not exactly fancy this sort of commendation, and she
replied, with somewhat the tone of defending him, “We all have the
highest regard for Mr. Lyon.”

“Yes, and he is quite gone on Brandon, I assure you. He intends to do a
great deal of good in the world. I think he spends half his time in
New York studying, he calls it, our charitable institutions. Mamma
reproaches me that I don't take more interest in philanthropy. That is
her worldly side. Everybody has a worldly side. I'm as worldly as I can
be”--this with a look of innocence that denied the self-accusation--“but
I haven't any call to marry into Exeter Hall and that sort of thing.
That is what she means--dear mamma. Are you High-Church or evangelical?”
 she asked, after a moment, turning to Margaret?

Margaret explained that she was neither.

“Well, I am High-Church, and Mr. Lyon is evangelical-Church evangelical.
There couldn't be any happiness, you know, without harmony in religious
belief.”

“I should think not,” said Margaret, now quite recovering herself. “It
must be a matter of great anxiety to you here.”

Carmen was quick to note the change of tone, and her face beamed with
merriment as she rose.

“What nonsense I've been talking! I did not intend to go into such deep
things. You must not mind what I said about Mr.--(a little pause to
read Margaret's face)--Mr. Lyon. We esteem him as much as you do. How
charming you are looking this morning! I wish I had your secret of
not letting this life tell on one.” And she was gone in a shower of
compliments and smiles and caressing ways. She had found out what she
came to find out. Mr. Henderson needs watching, she said to herself.

The interview, as Margaret thought it over, was amusing, but it did not
raise her spirits. Was everybody worldly and shallow? Was this the sort
of woman whom Mr. Henderson fancied? Was Mr. Henderson the sort of man
to whom such a woman would be attracted?




IX

It was a dinner party in one of the up-town houses--palaces--that
begin to repeat in size, spaciousness of apartments, and decoration the
splendor of the Medicean merchant princes. It is the penalty that we pay
for the freedom of republican opportunity that some must be very rich.
This is the logical outcome of the open chance for everybody to be
rich--and it is the surest way to distinction. In a free country the
course must be run, and it is by the accumulation of great wealth that
one can get beyond anxiety, and be at liberty to indulge in republican
simplicity.

Margaret and Miss Arbuser were ushered in through a double row of
servants in livery--shortclothes and stockings--in decorous vacuity--an
array necessary to bring into relief the naturalness and simplicity of
the entertainers. Vulgarity, one can see, consists in making one's self
a part of the display of wealth: the thing to be attained is personal
simplicity on a background of the richest ostentation. It is difficult
to attain this, and theory says that it takes three generations for a
man to separate himself thus from his display. It was the tattle of the
town that the first owner of the pictures in the gallery of the Stott
mansion used to tell the prices to his visitors; the third owner is
quite beyond remembering them. He might mention, laughingly, that the
ornamented shovel in the great fireplace in the library was decorated by
Vavani--it was his wife's fancy. But he did not say that the ceiling
in the music-room was painted by Pontifex Lodge, or that six Italian
artists had worked four years making the Corean room, every inch of
it exquisite as an intaglio--indeed, the reporters had made the town
familiar with the costly facts.

The present occupants understood quite well the value of a background:
the house swarmed with servants--retainers, one might say. Margaret, who
was fresh from her history class, recalled the days of Elizabeth, when
a man's importance was gauged by the retinue of servitors and men and
women in waiting. And this is, after all, a better test of wealth than
a mere accumulation of things and cost of decoration; for though men and
women do not cost so much originally as good pictures--that is, good men
and women--everybody knows that it needs more revenue to maintain
them. Though the dinner party was not large, there was to be a dance
afterwards, and for every guest was provided a special attendant.

The dinner was served in the state dining-room, to which Mr. Henderson
had the honor of conducting Margaret. Here prevailed also the same
studied simplicity. The seats were for sixteen. The table went to the
extremity of elegant plainness, no crowding, no confusion of colors
under the soft lights; if there was ostentation anywhere, it was in the
dazzling fineness of the expanse of table-linen, not in the few rare
flowers, or the crystal, or the plate, which was of solid gold, simply
modest. The eye is pleased by this chastity--pure whiteness, the glow of
yellow, the slight touch of sensuous warmth in the rose. The dinner
was in keeping, short, noiselessly served under the eye of the maitre
d'hotel, few courses, few wines; no anxiety on the part of the host and
hostess--perhaps just a little consciousness that everything was simple
and elegant, a little consciousness of the background; but another
generation will remove that.

If to Margaret's country apprehension the conversation was not quite up
to the level of the dinner and the house--what except that of a circle
of wits, who would be out of place there, could be?--the presence of Mr.
Henderson, who devoted himself to her, made the lack unnoticed. The
talk ran, as usual, on the opera, Wagner, a Christmas party at Lenox,
at Tuxedo, somebody's engagement, some lucky hit in the Exchange, the
irritating personalities of the newspapers, the last English season, the
marriage of the Duchess of Bolinbroke, a confidential disclosure of who
would be in the Cabinet and who would have missions, a jocular remark
across the table about a “corner” (it is impossible absolutely here, as
well as at a literary dinner, to sink the shop), the Sunday opening of
galleries--anything to pass the hour, the ladies contributing most of
the vivacity and persiflage.

“I saw you, Mr. Henderson”--it was Mrs. Laflamme raising her voice--“the
other night in a box with a very pretty woman.”

“Yes--Miss Eschelle.”

“I don't know them. We used to hear of them in Naples, Venice, various
places; they were in Europe some time; I believe. She was said to be
very entertaining--and enterprising.”

“Well, I suppose they have seen something of the world. The other lady
was her mother. And the man with us--that might interest you more, Mrs.
Laflamme, was Mr. Lyon, who will be the Earl of Chisholm.”

“Ah! Then I suppose she has money?”

“I never saw any painful evidence of poverty. But I don't think Mr. Lyon
is fortune-hunting. He seems to be after information and--goodness.”

Margaret flushed a little, but apparently Henderson did not notice it.
Then she said (after Mrs. Laflamme had dropped the subject with the
remark that he had come to the right place), “Miss Eschelle called on me
yesterday.”

“And was, no doubt, agreeable.”

“She was, as Mrs. Laflamme says, entertaining. She quoted you a good
deal.”

“Quoted me? For what?”

“As one would a book, as a familiar authority.”

“I suppose I ought to be flattered, if you will excuse the street
expression, to have my stock quotable. Perhaps you couldn't tell whether
Miss Eschelle was a bull or a bear in this case?”

“I don't clearly know what that is. She didn't offer me any,” said
Margaret, in a tone of carrying on the figure without any personal
meaning.

“Well, she is a bit of an operator. A good many women here amuse
themselves a little in stocks.”

“It doesn't seem to me very feminine.”

“No? But women generally like to' take risks and chances. In countries
where lotteries are established they always buy tickets.”

“Ah! then they only risk what they have. I think women are more prudent
and conservative than men.”

“No doubt. They are conservatives usually. But when they do go in for
radical measures and risks, they leave us quite behind.” Mr. Henderson
did not care to extend the conversation in this direction, and he asked,
abruptly, “Are you finding New York agreeable, Miss Debree?”

“Yes. Yes and no. One has no time to one's self. Do you understand
why it is, Mr. Henderson, that one can enjoy the whole day and then be
thoroughly dissatisfied with it?”

“Perfectly; when the excitement is over.”

“And then I don't seem to be myself here. I have a feeling of having
lost myself.”

“Because the world is so big?”

“Not that. Do you know, the world seems much smaller here than at home.”

“And the city appears narrow and provincial?”

“I cannot quite explain it. The interests of life don't seem so
large--the questions, I mean, what is going on in Europe, the
literature, the reforms, the politics. I get a wider view when I stand
off--at home. I suppose it is more concentrated here. And, oh dear, I'm
so stupid! Everybody is so alert in little things, so quick to turn a
compliment, and say a bright thing. While I am getting ready to say
what I really think about Browning, for instance, he is disposed of in a
sentence.”

“That is because you try to say what you really think.”

“If one don't, what's the use of talk?”

“Oh, to pass the time.”

Margaret looked up to see if Henderson was serious. There was a smile of
amusement on his face, but not at all offensive, because the woman saw
that it was a look of interest also.

“Then I sha'n't be serious any more,” she said, as there was a movement
to quit the table.

“That lays the responsibility on me of being serious,” he replied, in
the same light tone.

Later they were wandering through the picture-gallery together.
A gallery of modern pictures appeals for the most part to the
senses--represents the pomps, the color, the allurements of life.
It struck Henderson forcibly that this gallery, which he knew well,
appeared very different looking at it with Miss Debree from what it
would if he had been looking at it with Miss Eschelle. There were some
pictures that he hurried past, some technical excellences only used for
sensuous effects--that he did not call attention to as he might have
done with another. Curiously enough, he found himself seeking sentiment,
purity. If the drawing was bad, Margaret knew it; if a false note was
struck, she saw it. But she was not educated up to a good many of the
suggestions of the gallery. Henderson perceived this, and his manner
to her became more deferential and protective. It was a manner to which
every true woman responds, and Margaret was happy, more herself, and
talked with a freedom and gayety, a spice of satire, and a note of
reality that made her every moment more attractive to her companion.
In her, animation the charm of her unworn beauty blazed upon him with a
direct personal appeal. He hardly cared to conceal his frank admiration.
She, on her part, was thinking, what could Miss Eschelle mean by saying
that she was afraid of him?

“Does the world seem any larger here, Miss Debree?” he asked, as they
had lingeringly made the circuit of the room and passed out through the
tropical conservatory to join the rest of the company.

“Yes--away from people.”

“Then it is not numbers, I am glad to know, that make a world.”

She did not reply. But when he encountered her, robed for departure, at
the foot of the stairway, she gave him her hand in good-night, and their
eyes met for a moment.

I wonder if that was the time? Probably not. I fancy that when the right
day came she confessed that the moment was when she first saw him enter
their box at the opera.

Henderson walked down the avenue slowly, hearing the echo of his own
steps in the deserted street. He was in no haste to reach home. It
was such a delightful evening-snowing a little, and cold, but so
exhilarating. He remembered just how she turned her head as she got into
the carriage. She had touched his arm lightly once in the gallery to
call his attention to a picture. Yes, the world was larger, larger, by
one, and it would seem large--her image came to him distinctly--if she
were the only one.

Henderson was under the spell of this evening when the next, in response
to a note asking him to call for a moment on business, he was shown into
the Eschelle drawing-room. It was dimly lighted, but familiarity with
the place enabled him without difficulty to find his way down the
long suite, rather overcrowded with luxurious furniture, statuary, and
pictures on easels, to the little library at the far end glowing in a
rosy light.

There, ensconced in a big chair, a book in her hand, one pretty foot on
the fender, sat Carmen, in a grayish, vaporous toilet, which took a warm
hue from the color of the spreading lamp-shades. On the carved table
near was a litter of books and of nameless little articles, costly and
coquettish, which assert femininity, even in a literary atmosphere.
Over the fireplace hung a picture of spring--a budding girl, smiling and
winning, in a semi-transparent raiment, advancing with swift steps to
bring in the season of flowers and of love. The hand that held the book
rested upon the arm of the chair, a finger inserted in the place where
she had been reading, her rounded white arm visible to the elbow, and
Carmen was looking into the fire in the attitude of reflection upon a
suggestive passage.

Women have so many forms of attraction, different women are attractive
in so many different ways, moods are so changing, beauty is so
undefinable, and has so many weapons. And yet men are called inconstant!

It was not until Henderson had time to take in the warmth of this
domestic picture that Carmen rose.

“It is so good of you to come, with all your engagements. Mamma is
excused with a headache, but she has left me power of attorney to ask
questions about our little venture.”

“I hope the attorney will not put me through a cross-examination.”

“That depends upon how you have been behaving, Mr. Henderson. I'm not
very cross yet. Now, sit there so that I can look at you and see how
honest you are.”

“Do you want me to put on my business or my evening expression?”

“Oh, the first, if you mean business.”

“Well, your stocks are going up.”

“That's nice. You are so lucky! Everything goes up with you. Do you know
what they say of you.

“Nothing bad, I hope.”

“That everything you touch turns to gold. That you will be one of the
nabobs of New York in ten years.”

“That's a startling destiny.”

“Isn't it? I don't like it.” The girl seemed very serious. “I'd like
you to be distinguished. To be in the Cabinet. To be minister--go to
England. But one needs a great deal of money for that, to go as one
ought to go. What a career is open to a man in this country if he has
money!”

“But I don't care for politics.”

“Who does? But position. You can afford that if you have money enough.
Do you know, Mr. Henderson, I think you are dull.”

“Thank you. I reckoned you'd find it out.”

“The other night at the Nestor ball a lady--no, I won't tell you who she
is--asked me if I knew who that man was across the room; such an air
of distinction; might be the new British Minister. You know, I almost
blushed when I said I did know him.”

“Well?”

“You see what people expect of you. When a man looks distinguished and
is clever, and knows how to please if he likes, he cannot help having a
career, unless he is afraid to take the chances.”

Henderson was not conscious of ever being wanting in this direction.
The picture conjured up by the ingenious girl was not unfamiliar to his
mind, and he understood quite well the relation to it that Carmen had in
her mind; but he did not take the lead offered. Instead, he took refuge
in the usual commonplace, and asked, “Wouldn't you like to have been a
man?”

“Heaven forbid! I should be too wicked. It is responsibility enough to
be a woman. I did not expect such a banality from you. Do you think, Mr.
Henderson, we had better sell?”

“Sell what?”

“Our stocks. You are so occupied that I thought they might fall when you
are up in the clouds somewhere.”

“No, I shall not forget.”

“Well, such things happen. I might forget you if it were not for the
stocks.”

“Then I shall keep the stocks, even if they fall.”

“And we should both fall together. That would be some compensation. Not
much. Going to smash with you would be something like going to church
with Mr. Lyon. It might have a steadying effect.”

“What has come over you tonight, Carmen?” Henderson asked, leaning
forward with an expression of half amusement, half curiosity.

“I've been thinking--doesn't that astonish you?--about life. It is
very serious. I got some new views talking with that Miss Debree from
Brandon. Chiefly from what she didn't say. She is such a lovely girl,
and just as unsophisticated--well, as we are. I fear I shocked her by
telling her your opinion of French novels.”

“You didn't tell her that I approved of all the French novels you read?”

“Oh no! I didn't say you approved of any. It sort of came out that you
knew about them. She is so downright and conscientious. I declare I felt
virtuous shivers running all over me all the time I was with her. I'm
conscientious myself. I want everybody to know the worst of me. I wish
I could practice some concealment. But she rather discourages me. She
would take the color out of a career. She somehow doesn't allow for
color, I could see. Duty, duty--that is the way she looks at life. She'd
try to keep me up to it; no playing by the way. I liked her very much. I
like people not to have too much toleration. She would be just the wife
for some nice country rector.”

“Perhaps I ought to tell her your plan for her? I dined with her last
night at the Stotts'.”

“Yes?” Carmen had been wondering if he would tell her of that. “Was it
very dull?”

“Not very. There was music, distant enough not to interfere with
conversation, and the gallery afterwards.”

“It must have been very exhilarating. You talked about the Duchess of
Bolinbroke, and the opera, and Prince Talleyrand, and the corner in
wheat--dear me, I know, so decorous! And you said Miss Debree was
there?”

“I had the honor of taking her out.”

“Mr. Henderson”--the girl had risen to adjust the lamp-shade, and
now stood behind his chair with her arm resting on it, so that he was
obliged to turn his head backward to see her--“Mr. Henderson, do you
know you are getting to be a desperate flirt?” The laughing eyes looking
into his said that was not such a desperate thing to do if he chose the
right object.

“Who taught me?” He raised his left hand. She did not respond to the
overture, except to snap the hand with her index-finger, and was back in
her chair again, regarding him demurely.

“I think we shall go abroad soon.” The little foot was on the fender
again, and the face had the look of melancholy resolution.

“And leave Mr. Lyon without any protection here?” The remark was made in
a tone of good-humored raillery, but for some reason it seemed to sting
the girl.

“Pshaw!” she said. “How can you talk such nonsense? You,” and she rose
to her feet in indignation--“you to advise an American girl to sell
herself for a title--the chance of a title. I'm ashamed of you!”

“Why, Carmen,” he replied, flushing, “I advised nothing of the sort. I
hadn't the least idea. I don't care a straw for Mr. Lyon.”

“That's just it; you don't care,” sinking into her seat, still
unappeased. “I think I'll tell Mr. Lyon that he will have occupation
enough to keep him in this country if he puts his money into that scheme
you were talking over the other night.”

Henderson was in turn annoyed. “You can tell him anything you like.
I'm no more responsible for his speculations than for his domestic
concerns.”

“Now you are offended. It's not nice of you to put me in the wrong when
you know how impulsive I am. I wish I didn't let my feelings run away
with me.” This said reflectively, and looking away from him. And
then, turning towards him with wistful, pleading eyes: “Do you know, I
sometimes wish I had never seen you. You have so much power to make a
person very bad or very good.”

“Come, come,” said Henderson, rising, “we mustn't quarrel about an
Englishman--such old friends.”

“Yes, we are very old friends.” The girl rose also, and gave him her
hand. “Perhaps that's the worst of it. If I should lose your esteem I
should go into a convent.” She dropped his hand, and snatching a bunch
of violets from the table, fixed them in his button-hole, looking up in
his face with vestal sweetness. “You are not offended?”

“Not a bit; not the least in the world,” said Henderson, heartily,
patting the hand that still lingered upon his lapel.

When he had gone, Carmen sank into her chair with a gesture of vexation,
and there were hard lines in her sweet face. “What an insensible stick!”
 Then she ran up-stairs to her mother, who sat in her room reading one of
the town-weeklies, into which some elderly ladies look for something to
condemn.

“Well?”

“Such a stupid evening! He is just absorbed in that girl from Brandon. I
told him we were going abroad.”

“Going abroad! You are crazy, child. New York is forty times as
amusing.”

“And forty times as tiresome. I'm sick of it. Mamma, don't you think it
would be only civil to ask Mr. Lyon to a quiet dinner before he goes?”

“Certainly. That is what I said the other day. I thought you--”

“Yes, I was ill-natured then. But I want to please you. And we really
ought to be civil.”

One day is so like another in the city. Every day something new, and,
the new the same thing over again. And always the expectation that it
will be different tomorrow. Nothing is so tiresome as a kaleidoscope,
though it never repeats itself.

Fortunately there are two pursuits that never pall--making money and
making love.

Henderson had a new object in life, though the new one did not sensibly
divert him from the old; it rather threw a charming light over it, and
made the possibilities of it more attractive. In all his schemes he
found the thought of Margaret entering. Why should it not have been
Carmen? he sometimes thought. She thoroughly understood him. She would
never stand in the way of his most daring ambitions with any scruples.
Her conscience would never nag his. She would be ambitious for a career
for him. Would she care for him or the career? How clever she was! And
affectionate? She would be if she had a heart.

He was not balancing the two. What man ever does, in fact? It was
simply because Margaret had a heart that he loved her, that she seemed
necessary to him. He was quite capable of making a match for his
advancement, but he felt strong enough to make one for his own pleasure.
And if there are men so worldly as not to be attracted to unworldliness
in a woman, Henderson was not one of them. If his heart had not
dictated, his brain would have told him the value of the sympathy of a
good woman.

He was a very busy man, in the thick of the struggle for a great
fortune. It did not occur to him to reflect whether she would approve
all the methods he resorted to, but all the women he knew liked success,
and the thought of her invigorated him. If she once loved him, she would
approve what he did.

He saw much of her in those passing days--days that went like a dream
to one of them at least. He was a welcome guest at the Arbusers', but
he saw little of Margaret alone. It did not matter. A chance look is a
volume; a word is a library. They saw each other; they heard each other.
And then passion grows almost as well in the absence as in the presence
of the object. Imagination then has free play. A little separation
sometimes will fan it into a flame.

The days went by, and Margaret's visit was over. I am obliged to say
that the leave-taking was a gay one, as full of laughter as it was of
hope. Brandon was such a little way off. Henderson often had business
there. The Misses Arbuser said, “Of course.” And Margaret said he must
not forget that she lived there. Even when she bade her entertainers an
affectionate good-by, she could not look very unhappy.

Spring was coming. That day in the cars there were few signs of it
on the roadside to be seen, but the buds were swelling. And Margaret,
neglecting the book which lay on her lap, and looking out the window,
felt it in all her veins.




X

It is said that the world is created anew for every person who is in
love. There is therefore this constant miracle of a new heavens and a
new earth. It does not depend upon the seasons. The subtle force which
is in every human being, more or less active, has this power, as if
love were somehow a principle pervading nature itself, and capable of
transforming it. Is this a divine gift? Can it be used more than once?
Once spent, does the world to each succeeding experimenter in it become
old and stale? We say the world is old. In one sense, the real sense
to every person, it is no older than the lives lived in it at any given
time. If it is always passing away, it is always being renewed. Every
time a youth looks love in a maiden's eyes, and sees the timid appealing
return of the universal passion, the world for those two is just as
certainly created as it was on the first morning, in all its color,
odor, song, freshness, promise. This is the central mystery of life.

Unconsciously to herself, Margaret had worked this miracle. Never before
did the little town look so bright; never before was there exactly such
a color on the hills-sentiment is so pale compared with love; never
before did her home appear so sweet; never before was there such a fine
ecstasy in the coming of spring.

For all this, home-coming, after the first excitement of arrival is
over, is apt to be dull. The mind is so occupied with other emotions
that the friends even seem a little commonplace and unresponsive, and
the routine is tame. Out of such a whirl of new experiences to
return and find that nothing has happened; that the old duties and
responsibilities are waiting! Margaret had eagerly leaped from the
carriage to throw herself into her aunt's arms-what a sweet welcome it
is, that of kin!--and yet almost before the greeting was over she felt
alone. There was that in the affectionate calmness of Miss Forsythe that
seemed to chill the glow and fever of passion in her new world. And she
had nothing to tell. Everything had changed, and she must behave as if
nothing had happened. She must take up her old life--the interests of
the neighborhood. Even the little circle of people she loved appeared
distant from her at the moment; impossible it seemed to bring them into
the rushing current of her life. Their joy in getting her back again she
could not doubt, nor the personal affection with which she was welcomed.
But was the New England atmosphere a little cold? What was the flavor
she missed in it all? The next day a letter came. The excuse for it was
the return of a fan which Mr. Henderson had carried off in his pocket
from the opera. What a wonderful letter it was--his handwriting, the
first note from him! Miss Forsythe saw in it only politeness. For
Margaret it outweighed the town of Brandon. It lay in her lap as she
sat at her chamber window looking out over the landscape, which was
beginning to be flushed with a pale green. There was a robin on the
lawn, and a blackbird singing in the pine. “Go not, happy day,” she
said, with tears in her eyes. She took up the brief letter and read it
again. Was he really hers, “truly”? And she answered the letter, swiftly
and with no hesitation, but with a throbbing heart. It was a civil
acknowledgment; that was all. Henderson might have lead it aloud in the
Exchange. But what color, what charming turns of expression, what
of herself, had the girl put into it, that gave him such a thrill of
pleasure when he read it? What secret power has a woman to make a common
phrase so glow with her very self?

Here was something in her life that was her own, a secret, a hope,
and yet a tremulous anticipation to be guarded almost from herself. It
colored everything; it was always, whatever she was doing or saying,
present, like an air that one unconsciously hums for days after it has
caught his fancy. Blessed be the capacity of being fond and foolish! If
that letter was under her pillow at night, if this new revelation was
last in her thought as she fell asleep, if it mingled with the song of
the birds in the spring morning, as some great good pervading the world,
is there anything distinguishing in such an experience that it should be
dwelt on? And if there were questionings and little panics of doubt, did
not these moments also reveal Margaret to herself more certainly than
the hours of happy dreaming?

Questionings no doubt there were, and, later, serious questionings;
for habit is almost as strong as love, and the old ways of life and of
thought will reassert themselves in a thoughtful mind, and reason will
insist on analyzing passion and even hope.

Gradually the home life and every-day interests began to assume their
natural aspect and proportions. It was so sweet and sane, this home
life, interesting and not feverish. There was time for reading, time for
turning over things in the mind, time for those interchanges of feeling
and of ideas, by the fireside; she was not required to be always on
dress parade, in mind or perso

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