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The Golden House

by Charles Dudley Warner · English · Gutenberg #3104 · 453,234 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Golden House

Author: Charles Dudley Warner


        
Release date: October 10, 2004 [eBook #3104]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3104

Credits: Produced by David Widger


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Produced by David Widger





THE GOLDEN HOUSE

By Charles Dudley Warner




I

It was near midnight: The company gathered in a famous city studio were
under the impression, diligently diffused in the world, that the end of
the century is a time of license if not of decadence. The situation had
its own piquancy, partly in the surprise of some of those assembled at
finding themselves in bohemia, partly in a flutter of expectation of
seeing something on the border-line of propriety. The hour, the place,
the anticipation of the lifting of the veil from an Oriental and ancient
art, gave them a titillating feeling of adventure, of a moral hazard
bravely incurred in the duty of knowing life, penetrating to its core.
Opportunity for this sort of fruitful experience being rare outside the
metropolis, students of good and evil had made the pilgrimage to this
midnight occasion from less-favored cities. Recondite scholars in the
physical beauty of the Greeks, from Boston, were there; fair women
from Washington, whose charms make the reputation of many a newspaper
correspondent; spirited stars of official and diplomatic life, who have
moments of longing to shine in some more languorous material paradise,
had made a hasty flitting to be present at the ceremony, sustained by
a slight feeling of bravado in making this exceptional descent. But
the favored hundred spectators were mainly from the city-groups of
late diners, who fluttered in under that pleasurable glow which the red
Jacqueminot always gets from contiguity with the pale yellow Clicquot;
theatre parties, a little jaded, and quite ready for something real and
stimulating; men from the clubs and men from studios--representatives of
society and of art graciously mingled, since it is discovered that it is
easier to make art fashionable than to make fashion artistic.

The vast, dimly lighted apartment was itself mysterious, a temple of
luxury quite as much as of art. Shadows lurked in the corners, the ribs
of the roof were faintly outlined; on the sombre walls gleams of color,
faces of loveliness and faces of pain, studies all of a mood or a
passion, bits of shining brass, reflections from lustred ware struggling
out of obscurity; hangings from Fez or Tetuan, bits of embroidery,
costumes in silk and in velvet, still having the aroma of balls a
hundred years ago, the faint perfume of a scented society of ladies
and gallants; a skeleton scarcely less fantastic than the draped wooden
model near it; heavy rugs of Daghestan and Persia, making the footfalls
soundless on the floor; a fountain tinkling in a thicket of japonicas
and azaleas; the stems of palmettoes, with their branches waving in the
obscurity overhead; points of light here and there where a shaded lamp
shone on a single red rose in a blue Granada vase on a toppling stand,
or on a mass of jonquils in a barbarous pot of Chanak-Kallessi; tacked
here and there on walls and hangings, colored memoranda of Capri and of
the North Woods, the armor of knights, trophies of small-arms, crossed
swords of the Union and the Confederacy, easels, paints, and palettes,
and rows of canvases leaning against the wall-the studied litter, in
short, of a successful artist, whose surroundings contribute to the
popular conception of his genius.

On the wall at one end of the apartment was stretched a white canvas; in
front of it was left a small cleared space, on the edge of which, in the
shadow, squatting on the floor, were four swarthy musicians in Oriental
garments, with a mandolin, a guitar, a ney, and a darabooka drum. About
this cleared space, in a crescent, knelt or sat upon the rugs a couple
of rows of men in evening dress; behind them, seated in chairs, a group
of ladies, whose white shoulders and arms and animated faces flashed
out in the semi-obscurity; and in their rear stood a crowd of
spectators--beautiful young gentlemen with vacant faces and the elevated
Oxford shoulders, rosy youth already blase to all this world can offer,
and gray-headed men young again in the prospect of a new sensation. So
they kneel or stand, worshipers before the shrine, expecting the advent
of the Goddess of AEsthetic Culture.

The moment has come. There is a tap on the drum, a tuning of the
strings, a flash of light from the rear of the room inundates the white
canvas, and suddenly a figure is poised in the space, her shadow cast
upon the glowing background.

It is the Spanish dancer!

The apparition evokes a flutter of applause. It is a superb figure, clad
in a high tight bodice and long skirts simply draped so as to show
every motion of the athletic limbs. She seems, in this pose and light,
supernaturally tall. Through her parted lips white teeth gleam, and she
smiles. Is it a smile of anticipated, triumph, or of contempt? Is it the
smile of the daughter of Herodias, or the invitation of a 'ghazeeyeh'?
She pauses. Shall she surprise, or shock, or only please? What shall the
art that is older than the pyramids do for these kneeling Christians?
The drum taps, the ney pipes, the mandolin twangs, her arms are
extended--the castanets clink, a foot is thrust out, the bosom heaves,
the waist trembles. What shall it be--the old serpent dance of the Nile,
or the posturing of decorous courtship when the olives are purple in the
time of the grape harvest? Her head, wreathed with coils of black hair,
a red rose behind the left ear, is thrown back. The eyes flash, there
is a snakelike movement of the limbs, the music hastens slowly in
unison with the quickening pulse, the body palpitates, seems to flash
invitation like the eyes, it turns, it twists, the neck is thrust
forward, it is drawn in, while the limbs move still slowly, tentatively;
suddenly the body from the waist up seems to twist round, with the waist
as a pivot, in a flash of athletic vigor, the music quickens, the arms
move more rapidly to the click of the heated castenets, the steps are
more pronounced, the whole woman is agitated, bounding, pulsing with
physical excitement. It is a Maenad in an access of gymnastic energy.
Yes, it is gymnastics; it is not grace; it is scarcely alluring. Yet
it is a physical triumph. While the spectators are breathless, the fury
ceases, the music dies, and the Spaniard sinks into a chair, panting
with triumph, and inclines her dark head to the clapping of hands and
the bravos. The kneelers rise; the spectators break into chattering
groups; the ladies look at the dancer with curious eyes; a young
gentleman with the elevated Oxford shoulders leans upon the arm of her
chair and fans her. The pose is correct; it is the somewhat awkward
tribute of culture to physical beauty.

To be on speaking terms with the phenomenon was for the moment a
distinction. The young ladies wondered if it would be proper to go
forward and talk with her.

“Why not?” said a wit. “The Duke of Donnycastle always shakes hands with
the pugilists at a mill.”

“It is not so bad”--the speaker was a Washington beauty in an evening
dress that she would have condemned as indecorous for the dancer it is
not so bad as I--”

“Expected?” asked her companion, a sedate man of thirty-five, with the
cynical air of a student of life.

“As I feared,” she added, quickly. “I have always had a curiosity to
know what these Oriental dances mean.”

“Oh, nothing in particular, now. This was an exhibition dance. Of course
its origin, like all dancing, was religious. The fault I find with it
is that it lacks seriousness, like the modern exhibition of the dancing
dervishes for money.”

“Do you think, Mr. Mavick, that the decay of dancing is the reason our
religion lacks seriousness? We are in Lent now, you know. Does this seem
to you a Lenten performance?”

“Why, yes, to a degree. Anything that keeps you up till three o'clock in
the morning has some penitential quality.”

“You give me a new view, Mr. Mavick. I confess that I did not expect to
assist at what New Englanders call an 'evening meeting.' I thought Eros
was the deity of the dance.”

“That, Mrs. Lamon, is a vulgar error. It is an ancient form of worship.
Virtue and beauty are the same thing--the two graces.”

“What a nice apothegm! It makes religion so easy and agreeable.”

“As easy as gravitation.”

“Dear me, Mr. Mavick, I thought this was a question of levitation. You
are upsetting all my ideas. I shall not have the comfort of repenting of
this episode in Lent.”

“Oh yes; you can be sorry that the dancing was not more alluring.”

Meantime there was heard the popping of corks. Venetian glasses filled
with champagne were quaffed under the blessing of sparkling eyes, young
girls, almond-eyed for the occasion, in the costume of Tokyo, handed
round ices, and the hum of accelerated conversation filled the studio.

“And your wife didn't come?”

“Wouldn't,” replied Jack Delancy, with a little bow, before he raised
his glass. And then added, “Her taste isn't for this sort of thing.”

The girl, already flushed with the wine, blushed a little--Jack thought
he had never seen her look so dazzlingly handsome--as she said, “And you
think mine is?”

“Bless me, no, I didn't mean that; that is, you know”--Jack
didn't exactly see his way out of the dilemma--“Edith is a little
old-fashioned; but what's the harm in this, anyway?”

“I did not say there was any,” she replied, with a smile at his
embarrassment. “Only I think there are half a dozen women in the room
who could do it better, with a little practice. It isn't as Oriental as
I thought it would be.”

“I cannot say as to that. I know Edith thinks I've gone into the depths
of the Orient. But, on the whole, I'm glad--” Jack stopped on the verge
of speaking out of his better nature.

“Now don't be rude again. I quite understand that she is not here.”

The dialogue was cut short by a clapping of hands. The spectators took
their places again, the lights were lowered, the illumination was turned
on the white canvas, and the dancer, warmed with wine and adulation,
took a bolder pose, and, as her limbs began to move, sang a wild Moorish
melody in a shrill voice, action and words flowing together into the
passion of the daughter of tents in a desert life. It was all vigorous,
suggestive, more properly religious, Mavick would have said, and the
applause was vociferous.

More wine went about. There was another dance, and then another, a slow
languid movement, half melancholy and full of sorrow, if one might say
that of a movement, for unrepented sin; a gypsy dance this, accompanied
by the mournful song of Boabdil, “The Last Sigh of the Moor.” And
suddenly, when the feelings of the spectators were melted to tender
regret, a flash out of all this into a joyous defiance, a wooing of
pleasure with smiling lips and swift feet, with the clash of cymbals and
the quickened throb of the drum. And so an end with the dawn of a new
day.

It was not yet dawn, however, for the clocks were only striking three
as the assembly, in winter coats and soft wraps, fluttered out to its
carriages, chattering and laughing, with endless good-nights in the
languages of France, Germany, and Spain.

The streets were as nearly deserted as they ever are; here and there a
lumbering market-wagon from Jersey, an occasional street-car with
its tinkling bell, rarer still the rush of a trembling train on the
elevated, the voice of a belated reveler, a flitting female figure at a
street corner, the roll of a livery hack over the ragged pavement. But
mainly the noise of the town was hushed, and in the sharp air the stars,
far off and uncontaminated, glowed with a pure lustre.

Farther up town it was quite still, and in one of the noble houses in
the neighborhood of the Park sat Edith Delancy, married not quite a
year, listening for the roll of wheels and the click of a night-key.




II

Everybody liked John Corlear Delancy, and this in spite of himself, for
no one ever knew him to make any effort to incur either love or hate.
The handsome boy was a favorite without lifting his eyebrows, and he
sauntered through the university, picking his easy way along an elective
course, winning the affectionate regard of every one with whom he came
in contact. And this was not because he lacked quality, or was merely
easy-going and negative or effeminate, for the same thing happened to
him when he went shooting in the summer in the Rockies. The cowboys and
the severe moralists of the plains, whose sedate business in life is to
get the drop on offensive persons, regarded him as a brother. It isn't
a bad test of personal quality, this power to win the loyalty of men who
have few or none of the conventional virtues. These non-moral enforcers
of justice--as they understood it liked Jack exactly as his friends in
the New York clubs liked him--and perhaps the moral standard of approval
of the one was as good as the other.

Jack was a very good shot and a fair rider, and in the climate of
England he might have taken first-rate rank in athletics. But he had
never taken first-rate rank in anything, except good-fellowship. He had
a great many expensive tastes, which he could not afford to indulge,
except in imagination. The luxury of a racing-stable, or a yacht, or a
library of scarce books bound by Paris craftsmen was denied him. Those
who account for failures in life by a man's circumstances, and not by
a lack in the man himself, which is always the secret of failure, said
that Jack was unfortunate in coming into a certain income of twenty
thousand a year. This was just enough to paralyze effort, and not enough
to permit a man to expand in any direction. It is true that he was
related to millions and moved in a millionaire atmosphere, but these
millions might never flow into his bank account. They were not in hand
to use, and they also helped to paralyze effort--like black clouds of
an impending shower that may pass around, but meantime keeps the watcher
indoors.

The best thing that Jack Delancy ever did, for himself, was to marry
Edith Fletcher. The wedding, which took place some eight months before
the advent of the Spanish dancer, was a surprise to many, for the
girl had even less fortune than Jack, and though in and of his society
entirely, was supposed to have ideals. Her family, indeed, was an old
one on the island, and was prominent long before the building of the
stone bridge on Canal Street over the outlet of Collect Pond. Those who
knew Edith well detected in her that strain of moral earnestness which
made the old Fletchers such stanch and trusty citizens. The wonder was
not that Jack, with his easy susceptibility to refined beauty, should
have been attracted to her, or have responded to a true instinct of
what was best for him, but that Edith should have taken up with such a
perfect type of the aimlessness of the society strata of modern life.
The wonder, however, was based upon a shallow conception of the nature
of woman. It would have been more wonderful if the qualities that
endeared Jack to college friends and club men, to the mighty sportsmen
who do not hesitate, in the clubs, to devastate Canada and the United
States of big game, and to the border ruffians of Dakota, should not
have gone straight to the tender heart of a woman of ideals. And when in
all history was there a woman who did not believe, when her heart went
with respect for certain manly traits, that she could inspire and lift a
man into a noble life?

The silver clock in the breakfast-room was striking ten, and Edith was
already seated at the coffee-urn, when Jack appeared. She was as fresh
as a rose, and greeted him with a bright smile as he came behind her
chair and bent over for the morning kiss--a ceremony of affection which,
if omitted, would have left a cloud on the day for both of them, and
which Jack always declared was simply a necessity, or the coffee would
have no flavor. But when a man has picked a rose, it is always a sort
of climax which is followed by an awkward moment, and Jack sat down with
the air of a man who has another day to get through with.

“Were you amused with the dancing--this morning?”

“So, so,” said Jack, sipping his coffee. “It was a stunning place for
it, that studio; you'd have liked that. The Lamons and Mavick and a lot
of people from the provinces were there. The company was more fun than
the dance, especially to a fellow who has seen how good it can be and
how bad in its home.”

“You have a chance to see the Spanish dancer again, under proper
auspices,” said Edith, without looking up.

“How's that?”

“We are invited by Mrs. Brown--”

“The mother of the Bible class at St. Philip's?”

“Yes--to attend a charity performance for the benefit of the Female
Waifs' Refuge. She is to dance.”

“Who? Mrs. Brown?”

Edith paid no attention to this impertinence. “They are to make an
artificial evening at eleven o'clock in the morning.”

“They must have got hold of Mavick's notion that this dance is religious
in its origin. Do you, know if the exercises will open with prayer?”

“Nonsense, Jack. You know I don't intend to go. I shall send a small
check.”

“Well, draw it mild. But isn't this what I'm accused of doing--shirking
my duty of personal service by a contribution?”

“Perhaps. But you didn't have any of that shirking feeling last night,
did you?”

Jack laughed, and ran round to give the only reply possible to such
a gibe. These breakfast interludes had not lost piquancy in all these
months. “I'm half a mind to go to this thing. I would, if it didn't
break up my day so.”

“As for instance?”

“Well, this morning I have to go up to the riding-school to see a
horse--Storm; I want to try him. And then I have to go down to Twist's
and see a lot of Japanese drawings he's got over. Do you know that
the birds and other animals those beggars have been drawing, which
we thought were caricatures, are the real thing? They have eyes sharp
enough to see things in motion--flying birds and moving horses which
we never caught till we put the camera on them. Awfully curious. Then I
shall step into the club a minute, and--”

“Be in at lunch? Bess is coming.”

“Don't wait lunch. I've a lot to do.”

Edith followed him with her eyes, a little wistfully; she heard the
outer door close, and still sat at the table, turning over the pile of
notes at her plate, and thinking of many things--things that it began
to dawn upon her mind could not be done, and things of immediate urgency
that must be done. Life did not seem quite such a simple problem to her
as it had looked a year ago. That there is nothing like experiment to
clear the vision is the general idea, but oftener it is experience
that perplexes. Indeed, Edith was thinking that some things seemed much
easier to her before she had tried them.

As she sat at the table with a faultless morning-gown, with a bunch of
English violets in her bosom, an artist could have desired no better
subject. Many people thought her eyes her best feature; they were large
brown eyes, yet not always brown, green at times, liquid, but never
uncertain, apt to have a smile in them, yet their chief appealing
characteristic was trustfulness, a pure sort of steadfastness, that
always conveyed the impression of a womanly personal interest in the
person upon whom they were fixed. They were eyes that haunted one like a
remembered strain of music. The lips were full, and the mouth was drawn
in such exquisite lines that it needed the clear-cut and emphasized
chin to give firmness to its beauty. The broad forehead, with arching
eyebrows, gave an intellectual cast to a face the special stamp of which
was purity. The nose, with thin open nostrils, a little too strong for
beauty, together with the chin, gave the impression of firmness and
courage; but the wonderful eyes, the inviting mouth, so modified this
that the total impression was that of high spirit and great sweetness
of character. It was the sort of face from which one might expect
passionate love or unflinching martyrdom. Her voice had a quality the
memory of which lingered longer even than the expression of her eyes; it
was low, and, as one might say, a fruity voice, not quite clear, though
sweet, as if veiled in femineity. This note of royal womanhood was also
in her figure, a little more than medium in height, and full of natural
grace. Somehow Edith, with all these good points, had not the
reputation of a belle or a beauty--perhaps for want of some artificial
splendor--but one could not be long in her company without feeling
that she had great charm, without which beauty becomes insipid and even
commonplace, and with which the plainest woman is attractive.

Edith's theory of life, if one may so dignify the longings of a young
girl, had been very simple, and not at all such as would be selected by
the heroine of a romance. She had no mission, nor was she afflicted
by that modern form of altruism which is a yearning for notoriety by
conspicuous devotion to causes and reforms quite outside her normal
sphere of activity. A very sincere person, with strong sympathy for
humanity tempered by a keen perception of the humorous side of things,
she had a purpose, perhaps not exactly formulated, of making the most
out of her own life, not in any outward and shining career, but by a
development of herself in the most helpful and harmonious relations to
her world. And it seemed to her, though she had never philosophized it,
that a marriage such as she believed she had made was the woman's way to
the greatest happiness and usefulness. In this she followed the
dictates of a clear mind and a warm heart. If she had reasoned about
it, considering how brief life is, and how small can be any single
contribution to a better social condition, she might have felt more
strongly the struggle against nature, and the false position involved in
the new idea that marriage is only a kind of occupation, instead of an
ordinance decreed in the very constitution of the human race. With the
mere instinct of femineity she saw the falseness of the assumption that
the higher life for man or woman lies in separate and solitary paths
through the wilderness of this world. To an intelligent angel, seated
on the arch of the heavens, the spectacle of the latter-day
pseudo-philosophic and economic dribble about the doubtful expediency
of having a wife, and the failure of marriage, must seem as ludicrous as
would a convention of birds or of flowers reasoning that the processes
of nature had continued long enough. Edith was simply a natural woman,
who felt rather than reasoned that in a marriage such as her heart
approved she should make the most of her life.

But as she sat here this morning this did not seem to be so simple a
matter as it had appeared. It began to be suspected that in order to
make the most of one's self it was necessary to make the most of many
other persons and things. The stream in its own channel flowed along not
without vexations, friction and foaming and dashings from bank to bank;
but it became quite another and a more difficult movement when it
was joined to another stream, with its own currents and eddies and
impetuosities and sluggishness, constantly liable to be deflected if not
put altogether on another course. Edith was not putting it in this
form as she turned over her notes of invitation and appointments and
engagements, but simply wondering where the time for her life was to
come in, and for Jack's life, which occupied a much larger space than it
seemed to occupy in the days before it was joined to hers. Very curious
this discovery of what another's life really is. Of course the society
life must go on, that had always gone on, for what purpose no one could
tell, only it was the accepted way of disposing of time; and now there
were the dozen ways in which she was solicited to show her interest in
those supposed to be less fortunate in life than herself-the alleviation
of the miseries of her own city. And with society, and charity, and
sympathy with the working classes, and her own reading, and a little
drawing and painting, for which she had some talent, what became of that
comradeship with Jack, that union of interests and affections, which was
to make her life altogether so high and sweet?

This reverie, which did not last many minutes, and was interrupted by
the abrupt moving away of Edith to the writing-desk in her own room, was
caused by a moment's vivid realization of what Jack's interests in life
were. Could she possibly make them her own? And if she did, what would
become of her own ideals?




III

It was indeed a busy day for Jack. Great injustice would be done him
if it were supposed that he did not take himself and his occupations
seriously. His mind was not disturbed by trifles. He knew that he had
on the right sort of four-in-hand necktie, with the appropriate pin of
pear-shaped pearl, and that he carried the cane of the season. These
things come by a sort of social instinct, are in the air, as it were,
and do not much tax the mind. He had to hasten a little to keep his
half-past-eleven o'clock appointment at Stalker's stables, and when he
arrived several men of his set were already waiting, who were also busy
men, and had made a little effort to come round early and assist Jack in
making up his mind about the horse.

When Mr. Stalker brought out Storm, and led him around to show his
action, the connoisseurs took on a critical attitude, an attitude of
judgment, exhibited not less in the poise of the head and the serious
face than in the holding of the cane and the planting of legs wide
apart. And the attitude had a refined nonchalance which professional
horsemen scarcely ever attain. Storm could not have received more
critical and serious attention if he had been a cooked terrapin. He
could afford to stand this scrutiny, and he seemed to move about with
the consciousness that he knew more about being a horse than his judges.

Storm was, in fact, a splendid animal, instinct with life from his thin
flaring nostril to his small hoof; black as a raven, his highly groomed
skin took the polish of ebony, and showed the play of his powerful
muscles, and, one might say, almost the nervous currents that thrilled
his fine texture. His large, bold eyes, though not wicked, flamed now
and then with an energy and excitement that gave ample notice that he
would obey no master who had not stronger will and nerve than his own.
It was a tribute to Jack's manliness that, when he mounted him for a
turn in the ring, Storm seemed to recognize the fine quality of both
seat and hand, and appeared willing to take him on probation.

“He's got good points,” said Mr. Herbert Albert Flick, “but I'd like a
straighter back.”

“I'll be hanged, though, Jack,” was Mr. Mowbray Russell's comment, “if
I'd ride him in the Park before he's docked. Say what you like about
action, a horse has got to have style.”

“Moves easy, falls off a little too much to suit me in the quarter,”
 suggested Mr. Pennington Docstater, sucking the head of his cane. “How
about his staying quality, Stalker?”

“That's just where he is, Mr. Docstater; take him on the road, he's a
stayer for all day. Goes like a bird. He'll take you along at the rate
of nine miles in forty-five minutes as long as you want to sit there.”

“Jump?” queried little Bobby Simerton, whose strong suit at the club was
talking about meets and hunters.

“Never refused anything I put him at,” replied Stalker; “takes every
fence as if it was the regular thing.”

Storm was in this way entirely taken to pieces, praised and disparaged,
in a way to give Stalker, it might be inferred from his manner, a
high opinion of the knowledge of these young gentlemen. “It takes a
gentleman,” in fact, Stalker said, “to judge a hoss, for a good hoss
is a gentleman himself.” It was much discussed whether Storm would do
better for the Park or for the country, whether it would be better to
put him in the field or keep him for a roadster. It might, indeed, be
inferred that Jack had not made up his mind whether he should buy a
horse for use in the Park or for country riding. Even more than this
might be inferred from the long morning's work, and that was that
while Jack's occupation was to buy a horse, if he should buy one his
occupation would be gone. He was known at the club to be looking for
the right sort of a horse, and that he knew what he wanted, and was not
easily satisfied; and as long as he occupied this position he was an
object of interest to sellers and to his companions.

Perhaps Mr. Stalker understood this, for when the buyers had gone he
remarked to the stable-boy, “Mr. Delancy, he don't want to buy no hoss.”

When the inspection of the horse was finished it was time for lunch, and
the labors of the morning were felt to justify this indulgence, though
each of the party had other engagements, and was too busy to waste the
time. They went down to the Knickerbocker.

The lunch was slight, but its ordering took time and consideration, as
it ought, for nothing is so destructive of health and mental tone as
the snatching of a mid-day meal at a lunch counter from a bill of fare
prepared by God knows whom. Mr. Russell said that if it took time to
buy a horse, it ought to take at least equal time and care to select the
fodder that was to make a human being wretched or happy. Indeed, a man
who didn't give his mind to what he ate wouldn't have any mind by-and-by
to give to anything. This sentiment had the assent of the table, and was
illustrated by varied personal experience; and a deep feeling prevailed,
a serious feeling, that in ordering and eating the right sort of lunch a
chief duty of a useful day had been discharged.

It must not be imagined from this, however, that the conversation was
about trifles. Business men and operators could have learned something
about stocks and investments, and politicians about city politics.
Mademoiselle Vivienne, the new skirt dancer, might have been surprised
at the intimate tone in which she was alluded to, but she could have got
some useful hints in effects, for her judges were cosmopolitans who had
seen the most suggestive dancing in all parts of the world. It came out
incidentally that every one at table had been “over” in the course of
the season, not for any general purpose, not as a sightseer, but to look
at somebody's stables, or to attend a wedding, or a sale of etchings, or
to see his bootmaker, or for a little shooting in Scotland, just as one
might run down to Bar Harbor or Tuxedo. It was only an incident in a
busy season; and one of the fruits of it appeared to be as perfect a
knowledge of the comparative merits of all the ocean racers and captains
as of the English and American stables and the trainers. One not
informed of the progress of American life might have been surprised to
see that the fad is to be American, with a sort of patronage of things
and ways foreign, especially of things British, a large continental
kind of attitude, begotten of hearing much about Western roughing it,
of Alaska, of horse-breeding and fruit-raising on the Pacific, of the
Colorado River Canon. As for stuffs, well yes, London. As for style, you
can't mistake a man who is dressed in New York.

The wine was a white Riesling from California. Docstater said his
attention had been called to it by Tom Dillingham at the Union, who had
a ranch somewhere out there. It was declared to be sound and palatable;
you know what you are drinking. This led to a learned discussion of the
future of American wines, and a patriotic impulse was given to the
trade by repeated orders. It was declared that in American wines lay the
solution of the temperance question. Bobby Simerton said that Burgundy
was good enough for him, but Russell put him down, as he saw the light
yellow through his glass, by the emphatic affirmation that plenty of
cheap American well-made wine would knock the bottom out of all the
sentimental temperance societies and shut up the saloons, dry up all
those not limited to light wines and beer. It was agreed that the
saloons would have to go.

This satisfactory conclusion was reached before the coffee came on and
the cigarettes, and the sound quality of the Riesling was emphasized by
a pony of cognac.

It is fortunate when the youth of a country have an ideal. No nation is
truly great without a common ideal, capable of evoking enthusiasm and
calling out its energies. And where are we to look for this if not in
the youth, and especially in those to whom fortune and leisure give an
opportunity of leadership? It is they who can inspire by their example,
and by their pursuits attract others to a higher conception of the
national life. It may take the form of patriotism, as in this country,
pride in the great republic, jealousy of its honor and credit, eagerness
for its commanding position among the nations, patriotism which will
show itself, in all the ardor of believing youth, in the administration
of law, in the purity of politics, in honest local government, and in a
noble aspiration for the glory of the country. It may take the form
of culture, of a desire that the republic-liable, like all self-made
nations, to worship wealth-should be distinguished not so much by a
vulgar national display as by an advance in the arts, the sciences, the
education that adorns life, in the noble spirit of humanity, and in the
nobler spirit of recognition of a higher life, which will be content
with no civilization that does not tend to make the country for every
citizen a better place to live in today than it was yesterday. Happy is
the country, happy the metropolis of that country, whose fortunate young
men have this high conception of citizenship!

What is the ideal of their country which these young men cherish? There
was a moment--was there not for them?--in the late war for the Union,
when the republic was visible to them in its beauty, in its peril, and
in a passion of devotion they were eager--were they not?--to follow the
flag and to give their brief lives to its imperishable glory. Nothing is
impossible to a nation with an ideal like that. It was this flame that
ran over Europe in the struggle of France against a world in arms. It
was this national ideal that was incarnate in Napoleon, as every great
idea that moves the world is sooner or later incarnated. What was it
that we saw in Washington on his knees at Valley Forge, or blazing with
wrath at the cowardice on Monmouth? in Lincoln entering Richmond with
bowed head and infinite sorrow and yearning in his heart? An embodiment
of a great national idea and destiny.

In France this ideal burns yet like a flame, and is still evoked by
a name. It is the passion of glory, but the desire of a nation, and
Napoleon was the incarnation of passion. They say that he is not dead as
others are dead, but that he may come again and ride at the head of his
legions, and strike down the enemies of France; that his bugle will call
the youth from every hamlet, that the roll of his drum will transform
France into a camp, and the grenadiers will live again and ride with
him, amid hurrahs, and streaming tears, and shouts of “My Emperor! Oh,
my Emperor!” Is it only a legend? But the spirit is there; not a boy
but dreams of it, not a girl but knots the thought in with her holiday
tricolor. That is to have an abiding ideal, and patiently to hold it, in
isolation, in defeat, even in an overripe civilization.

We believe--do we not?--in other triumphs than those of the drum and
the sword. Our aspirations for the republic are for a nobler example of
human society than the world has yet seen. Happy is the country, and the
metropolis of the country, whose youth, gilded only by their virtues,
have these aspirations.

When the party broke up, the street lamps were beginning to twinkle here
and there, and Jack discovered to his surprise that the Twiss business
would have to go over to another day. It was such a hurrying life in New
York. There was just time for a cup of tea at Mrs. Trafton's. Everybody
dropped in there after five o'clock, when the duties of the day were
over, with the latest news, and to catch breath before rushing into the
program of the evening.

There were a dozen ladies in the drawing-room when Jack entered, and his
first impression was that the scream of conversation would be harder to
talk against than a Wagner opera; but he presently got his cup of tea,
and found a snug seat in the chimney-corner by Miss Tavish; indeed, they
moved to it together, and so got a little out of the babel. Jack thought
the girl looked even prettier in her walking-dress than when he saw her
at the studio; she had style, there was no doubt about that; and then,
while there was no invitation in her manner, one felt that she was a
woman to whom one could easily say things, and who was liable at any
moment to say things interesting herself.

“Is this your first appearance since last night, Mr. Delancy?”

“Oh no; I've been racing about on errands all day. It is very restful to
sit down by a calm person.”

“Well, I never shut my eyes till nine o'clock. I kept seeing that
Spanish woman whirl around and contort, and--do you mind my telling
you?--I couldn't just help it, I” (leaning forward to Jack) “got up and
tried it before the glass. There! Are you shocked?”

“Not so much shocked as excluded,” Jack dared to say. “But do you
think--“.

“Yes, I know. There isn't anything that an American girl cannot do. I've
made up my mind to try it. You'll see.”

“Will I?”

“No, you won't. Don't flatter yourself. Only girls. I don't want men
around.”

“Neither do I,” said Jack, honestly.

Miss Tavish laughed. “You are too forward, Mr. Delancy. Perhaps some
time, when we have learned, we will let in a few of you, to look in
at the door, fifty dollars a ticket, for some charity. I don't see why
dancing isn't just as good an accomplishment as playing the harp in a
Greek dress.”

“Nor do I; I'd rather see it. Besides, you've got Scripture warrant
for dancing off the heads of people. And then it is such a sweet way
of doing a charity. Dancing for the East Side is the best thing I have
heard yet.”

“You needn't mock. You won't when you find out what it costs you.”

“What are you two plotting?” asked Mrs. Trafton, coming across to the
fireplace.

“Charity,” said Jack, meekly.

“Your wife was here this morning to get me to go and see some of her
friends in Hester Street.”

“You went?”

“Not today. It's awfully interesting, but I've been.”

“Edith seems to be devoted to that sort of thing,” remarked Miss Tavish.

“Yes,” said Jack, slowly, “she's got the idea that sympathy is better
than money; she says she wants to try to understand other people's
lives.”

“Goodness knows, I'd like to understand my own.”

“And were you trying, Mr. Delancy, to persuade Miss Tavish into that
sort of charity?”

“Oh dear, no,” said Jack; “I was trying to interest the East End in
something, for the benefit of Miss Tavish.”

“You'll find that's one of the most expensive remarks you ever made,”
 retorted Miss Tavish, rising to go.

“I wish Lily Tavish would marry,” said Mrs. Trafton, watching the girl's
slender figure as it passed through the portiere; “she doesn't know what
to do with herself.”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, she'd be a lovely wife for somebody;”
 and then he added, as if reminiscently, “if he could afford it.
Good-by.”

“That's just a fashion of talking. I never knew a time when so many
people afforded to do what they wanted to do. But you men are all alike.
Good-by.”

When Jack reached home it was only a little after six o'clock, and as
they were not to go out to dine till eight, he had a good hour to rest
from the fatigues of the day, and run over the evening papers and
dip into the foreign periodicals to catch a topic or two for the
dinner-table.

“Yes, sir,” said the maid, “Mrs. Delancy came in an hour ago.”




IV

Edith's day had been as busy as Jack's, notwithstanding she had put
aside several things that demanded her attention. She denied herself
the morning attendance on the Literature Class that was raking over the
eighteenth century. This week Swift was to be arraigned. The last time
when Edith was present it was Steele. The judgment, on the whole, had
been favorable, and there had been a little stir of tenderness among the
bonnets over Thackeray's comments on the Christian soldier. It seemed
to bring him near to them. “Poor Dick Steele!” said the essayist. Edith
declared afterwards that the large woman who sat next to her, Mrs.
Jerry Hollowell, whispered to her that she always thought his name
was Bessemer; but this was, no doubt, a pleasantry. It was a beautiful
essay, and so stimulating! And then there was bouillon, and time to look
about at the toilets. Poor Steele, it would have cheered his life
to know that a century after his death so many beautiful women, so
exquisitely dressed, would have been concerning themselves about him.
The function lasted two hours. Edith made a little calculation. In five
minutes she could have got from the encyclopaedia all the facts in the
essay, and while her maid was doing her hair she could have read five
times as much of Steele as the essayist read. And, somehow, she was not
stimulated, for the impression seemed to prevail that now Steele was
disposed of. And she had her doubts whether literature would, after all,
prove to be a permanent social distraction. But Edith may have been too
severe in her judgment. There was probably not a woman in the class that
day who did not go away with the knowledge that Steele was an author,
and that he lived in the eighteenth century. The hope for the country is
in the diffusion of knowledge.

Leaving the class to take care of Swift, Edith went to the managers'
meeting at the Women's Hospital, where there was much to do of very
practical work, pitiful cases of women and children suffering through no
fault of their own, and money more difficult to raise than sympathy. The
meeting took time and thought. Dismissing her carriage, and relying on
elevated and surface cars, Edith then took a turn on the East Side, in
company with a dispensary physician whose daily duty called her into
the worst parts of the town. She had a habit of these tours before her
marriage, and, though they were discouragingly small in direct results,
she gained a knowledge of city life that was of immense service in her
general charity work. Jack had suggested the danger of these excursions,
but she had told him that a woman was less liable to insult in the East
Side than in Fifth Avenue, especially at twilight, not because the East
Side was a nice quarter of the city, but because it was accustomed to
see women who minded their own business go about unattended, and the
prowlers had not the habit of going there. She could even relate cases
of chivalrous protection of “ladies” in some of the worst streets.

What Edith saw this day, open to be seen, was not so much sin as
ignorance of how to live, squalor, filthy surroundings acquiesced in
as the natural order, wonderful patience in suffering and deprivation,
incapacity, ill-paid labor, the kindest spirit of sympathy and
helpfulness of the poor for each other. Perhaps that which made the
deepest impression on her was the fact that such conditions of living
could seem natural to those in them, and that they could get so much
enjoyment of life in situations that would have been simple misery to
her.

The visitors were in a foreign city. The shop signs were in foreign
tongues; in some streets all Hebrew. On chance news-stands were
displayed newspapers in Russian, Bohemian, Arabic, Italian, Hebrew,
Polish, German-none in English. The theatre bills were in Hebrew or
other unreadable type. The sidewalks and the streets swarmed with noisy
dealers in every sort of second-hand merchandise--vegetables that had
seen a better day, fish in shoals. It was not easy to make one's way
through the stands and push-carts and the noisy dickering buyers and
sellers, who haggled over trifles and chaffed good-naturedly and were
strictly intent on their own affairs. No part of the town is more
crowded or more industrious. If youth is the hope of the country, the
sight was encouraging, for children were in the gutters, on the house
steps, at all the windows. The houses seemed bursting with humanity, and
in nearly every room of the packed tenements, whether the inmates
were sick or hungry, some sort of industry was carried on. In the damp
basements were junk-dealers, rag-pickers, goose-pickers. In one noisome
cellar, off an alley, among those sorting rags, was an old woman of
eighty-two, who could reply to questions only in a jargon, too proud
to beg, clinging to life, earning a few cents a day in this foul
occupation. But life is sweet even with poverty and rheumatism and
eighty years. Did her dull eyes, turning inward, see the Carpathian
Hills, a free girlhood in village drudgery and village sports, then a
romance of love, children, hard work, discontent, emigration to a New
World of promise? And now a cellar by day, the occupation of cutting
rags for carpets, and at night a corner in a close and crowded room on a
flock bed not fit for a dog. And this was a woman's life.

Picturesque foreign women going about with shawls over their heads
and usually a bit of bright color somewhere, children at their games,
hawkers loudly crying their stale wares, the click of sewing-machines
heard through a broken window, everywhere animation, life, exchange
of rough or kindly banter. Was it altogether so melancholy as it might
seem? Not everybody was hopelessly poor, for here were lawyers' signs
and doctors' signs--doctors in whom the inhabitants had confidence
because they charged all they could get for their services--and thriving
pawnbrokers' shops. There were parish schools also--perhaps others; and
off some dark alley, in a room on the ground-floor, could be heard
the strident noise of education going on in high-voiced study and
recitation. Nor were amusements lacking--notices of balls, dancing this
evening, and ten-cent shows in palaces of legerdemain and deformity.

It was a relenting day in March; patches of blue sky overhead, and the
sun had some quality in its shining. The children and the caged birds
at the open windows felt it-and there were notes of music here and there
above the traffic and the clamor. Turning down a narrow alley, with a
gutter in the centre, attracted by festive sounds, the visitors came
into a small stone-paved court with a hydrant in the centre surrounded
by tall tenement-houses, in the windows of which were stuffed the
garments that would no longer hold together to adorn the person. Here an
Italian girl and boy, with a guitar and violin, were recalling la bella
Napoli, and a couple of pretty girls from the court were footing it as
merrily as if it were the grape harvest. A woman opened a lower room
door and sharply called to one of the dancing girls to come in, when
Edith and the doctor appeared at the bottom of the alley, but her tone
changed when she recognized the doctor, and she said, by way of apology,
that she didn't like her daughter to dance before strangers. So
the music and the dance went on, even little dots of girls and boys
shuffling about in a stiff-legged fashion, with applause from all
the windows, and at last a largesse of pennies--as many as five
altogether--for the musicians. And the sun fell lovingly upon the pretty
scene.

But then there were the sweaters' dens, and the private rooms where half
a dozen pale-faced tailors stitched and pressed fourteen and sometimes
sixteen hours a day, stifling rooms, smelling of the hot goose and
steaming cloth, rooms where they worked, where the cooking was done,
where they ate, and late at night, when overpowered with weariness,
lay down to sleep. Struggle for life everywhere, and perhaps no more
discontent and heart-burning and certainly less ennui than in the
palaces on the avenues.

The residence of Karl Mulhaus, one of the doctor's patients, was typical
of the homes of the better class of poor. The apartment fronted on a
small and not too cleanly court, and was in the third story. As Edith
mounted the narrow and dark stairways she saw the plan of the house.
Four apartments opened upon each landing, in which was the common
hydrant and sink. The Mulhaus apartment consisted of a room large enough
to contain a bed, a cook-stove, a bureau, a rocking-chair, and two
other chairs, and it had two small windows, which would have more freely
admitted the southern sun if they had been washed, and a room adjoining,
dark, and nearly filled by a big bed. On the walls of the living room
were hung highly colored advertising chromos of steamships and palaces
of industry, and on the bureau Edith noticed two illustrated newspapers
of the last year, a patent-medicine almanac, and a volume of Schiller.
The bureau also held Mr. Mulhaus's bottles of medicine, a comb which
needed a dentist, and a broken hair-brush. What gave the room, however,
a cheerful aspect were some pots of plants on the window-ledges, and
half a dozen canary-bird cages hung wherever there was room for them.

None of the family happened to be at home except Mr. Mulhaus, who
occupied the rocking-chair, and two children, a girl of four years and a
boy of eight, who were on the floor playing “store” with some blocks
of wood, a few tacks, some lumps of coal, some scraps of paper, and
a tangle of twine. In their prattle they spoke, the English they had
learned from their brother who was in a store.

“I feel some better today,” said Mr. Mulhaus, brightening up as the
visitors entered, “but the cough hangs on. It's three months since
this weather that I haven't been out, but the birds are a good deal
of company.” He spoke in German, and with effort. He was very thin and
sallow, and his large feverish eyes added to the pitiful look of his
refined face. The doctor explained to Edith that he had been getting
fair wages in a type-foundry until he had become too weak to go any
longer to the shop.

It was rather hard to have to sit there all day, he explained to the
doctor, but they were getting along. Mrs. Mulhaus had got a job of
cleaning that day; that would be fifty cents. Ally--she was twelve--was
learning to sew. That was her afternoon to go to the College Settlement.
Jimmy, fourteen, had got a place in a store, and earned two dollars a
week.

“And Vicky?” asked the doctor.

“Oh, Vicky,” piped up the eight-year-old boy. “Vicky's up to the
'stution”--the hospital was probably the institution referred to--“ever
so long now. I seen her there, me and Jim did. Such a bootifer place!
'Nd chicken!” he added. “Sis got hurt by a cart.”

Vicky was seventeen, and had been in a fancy store.

“Yes,” said Mulhaus, in reply to a question, “it pays pretty well
raising canaries, when they turn out singers. I made fifteen dollars
last year. I hain't sold much lately. Seems 's if people stopped wanting
'em such weather. I guess it 'll be better in the spring.”

“No doubt it will be better for the poor fellow himself before spring,”
 said the doctor as they made their way down the dirty stairways. “Now
I'll show you one of my favorites.”

They turned into a broader street, one of the busy avenues, and passing
under an archway between two tall buildings, entered a court of back
buildings. In the third story back lived Aunt Margaret. The room was
scarcely as big as a ship's cabin, and its one window gave little light,
for it opened upon a narrow well of high brick walls. In the only chair
Aunt Margaret was seated close to the window. In front of her was a
small work-table, with a kerosene lamp on it, but the side of the
room towards which she looked was quite occupied by a narrow
couch--ridiculously narrow, for Aunt Margaret was very stout. There was
a thin chest of drawers on the other side, and the small coal stove that
stood in the centre so nearly filled the remaining space that the two
visitors were one too many.

“Oh, come in, come in,” said the old lady, cheerfully, when the door
opened. “I'm glad to see you.”

“And how goes it?” asked the doctor.

“First rate. I'm coming on, doctor. Work's been pretty slack for two
weeks now, but yesterday I got work for two days. I guess it will be
better now.”

The work was finishing pantaloons. It used to be a good business before
there was so much cutting in.

“I used to get fifteen cents a pair, then ten; now they don't pay but
five. Yes, the shop furnishes the thread.”

“And how many pairs can you finish in a day?” asked Edith.

“Three--three pairs, to do 'em nice--and they are very particular--if I
work from six in the morning till twelve at night. I could do more, but
my sight ain't what it used to be, and I've broken my specs.”

“So you earn fifteen cents a day?”

“When I've the luck to get work, my lady. Sometimes there isn't any. And
things cost so much. The rent is the worst.”

It appeared that the rent was two dollars and a half a month. That must
be paid, at any rate. Edith made a little calculation that on a flush
average of ninety cents a week earned, and allowing so many cents for
coal and so many cents for oil, the margin for bread and tea must be
small for the month. She usually bought three cents' worth of tea at a
time.

“It is kinder close,” said the old lady, with a smile. “The worst is,
my feet hurt me so I can't stir out. But the neighbors is real kind. The
little boy next room goes over to the shop and fetches my pantaloons and
takes 'em back. I can get along if it don't come slack again.”

Sitting all day by that dim window, half the night stitching by a
kerosene lamp; lying for six hours on that narrow couch! How to account
for this old soul's Christian resignation and cheerfulness! “For,” said
the doctor, “she has seen better days; she has moved in high society;
her husband, who died twenty years ago, was a policeman. What the
old lady is doing is fighting for her independence. She has only one
fear--the almshouse.”

It was with such scenes as these in her eyes that Edith went to her
dressing-room to make her toilet for the Henderson dinner.




V

It was the first time they had dined with the Hendersons. It was Jack's
doings. “Certainly, if you wish it,” Edith had said when the invitation
came. The unmentioned fact was that Jack had taken a little flier in
Oshkosh, and a hint from Henderson one evening at the Union, when the
venture looked squally, had let him out of a heavy loss into a small
profit, and Jack felt grateful.

“I wonder how Henderson came to do it?” Jack was querying, as he and old
Fairfax sipped their five-o'clock “Manhattan.”

“Oh, Henderson likes to do a good-natured thing still, now and then. Do
you know his wife?”

“No. Who was she?”

“Why, old Eschelle's daughter, Carmen; of course you wouldn't know; that
was ten years ago. There was a good deal of talk about it at the time.”

“How?”

“Some said they'd been good friends before Mrs. Henderson's death.”

“Then Carmen, as you call her, wasn't the first?”

“No, but she was an easy second. She's a social climber; bound to get
there from the start.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Devilish. She's a little thing. I saw her once at Homburg, on the
promenade with her mother.

“The kind of sweet blonde, I said to myself, that would mix a man up in
a duel before he knew where he was.”

“She must be interesting.”

“She was always clever, and she knows enough to play a straight game and
when to propitiate. I'll bet a five she tells Henderson whom to be good
to when the chance offers.”

“Then her influence on him is good?”

“My dear sir, she gets what she wants, and Henderson is going to the...
well, look at the lines in his face. I've known Henderson since he came
fresh into the Street. He'd rarely knife a friend when his first wife
was living. Now, when you see the old frank smile on his face, it's put
on.”

It was half-past eight when Mr. Henderson with Mrs. Delancy on his
arm led the way to the diningroom. The procession was closed by Mrs.
Henderson and Mr. Delancy. The Van Dams were there, and Mrs. Chesney
and the Chesney girls, and Miss Tavish, who sat on Jack's right, but
the rest of the guests were unknown to Jack, except by name. There was
a strong dash of the Street in the mixture, and although the Street
was tabooed in the talk, there was such an emanation of aggressive
prosperity at the table that Jack said afterwards that he felt as if he
had been at a meeting of the board.

If Jack had known the house ten years ago, he would have noticed certain
subtle changes in it, rather in the atmosphere than in many alterations.
The newness and the glitter of cost had worn off. It might still be
called a palace, but the city had now a dozen handsomer houses, and
Carmen's idea, as she expressed it, was to make this more like a home.
She had made it like herself. There were pictures on the walls that
would not have hung there in the late Mrs. Henderson's time; and the
prevailing air was that of refined sensuousness. Life, she said, was
her idea, life in its utmost expression, untrammeled, and yes, a little
Greek. Freedom was perhaps the word, and yet her latest notion was
simplicity. The dinner was simple. Her dress was exceedingly simple,
save that it had in it somewhere a touch of audacity, revealing in a
flash of invitation the hidden nature of the woman. She knew herself
better than any one knew her, except Henderson, and even he was forced
to laugh when she travestied Browning in saying that she had one
soul-side to face the world with, one to show the man she loved, and
she declared he was downright coarse when on going out of the door he
muttered, “But it needn't be the seamy side.” The reported remark of
some one who had seen her at church that she looked like a nun made
her smile, but she broke into a silvery laugh when she head Van Dam's
comment on it, “Yes, a devil of a nun.”

The library was as cozy as ever, but did not appear to be used much as
a library. Henderson, indeed, had no time to add to his collection or
enjoy it. Most of the books strewn on the tables were French novels or
such American tales as had the cachet of social riskiness. But Carmen
liked the room above all others. She enjoyed her cigarette there, and
had a fancy for pouring her five-o'clock tea in its shelter. Books
which had all sorts of things in them gave somehow an unconventional
atmosphere to the place, and one could say things there that one
couldn't say in a drawing-room.

Henderson himself, it must be confessed, had grown stout in the ten
years, and puffy under the eyes. There were lines of irritation in his
face and lines of weariness. He had not kept the freshness of youth so
well as Carmen, perhaps because of his New England conscience. To his
guest he was courteous, seemed to be making an effort to be so,
and listened with well-assumed interest to the story of her day's
pilgrimage. At length he said, with a smile, “Life seems to interest
you, Mrs. Delancy.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Edith, looking up brightly; “doesn't it you?”

“Why, yes; not life exactly, but things, doing things--conflict.”

“Yes, I can understand that. There is so much to be done for everybody.”

Henderson looked amused. “You know in the city the gospel is that
everybody is to be done.”

“Well,” said Edith, not to be diverted, “but, Mr. Henderson, what is it
all for--this conflict? Perhaps, however, you are fighting the devil?”

“Yes, that's it; the devil is usually the other fellow. But, Mrs.
Delancy,” added Henderson, with an accent of seriousness, “I don't know
what it's all for. I doubt if there is much in it.”

“And yet the world credits you with finding a great deal in it.”

“The world is generally wrong. Do you understand poker, Mrs. Delancy?
No! Of course you do not. But the interest of the game isn't so much in
the cards as in the men.”

“I thought it was the stakes.”

“Perhaps so. But you want to win for the sake of winning. If I gambled
it would be a question of nerve. I suppose that which we all enjoy is
the exercise of skill in winning.”

“And not for the sake of doing anything--just winning? Don't you get
tired of that?” asked Edith, quite simply.

There was something in Edith's sincerity, in her fresh enthusiasm about
life, that appeared to strike a reminiscent note in Henderson. Perhaps
he remembered another face as sweet as hers, and ideals, faint and long
ago, that were once mixed with his ideas of success. At any rate, it was
with an accent of increased deference, and with a look she had not seen
in his face before, that he said:

“People get tired of everything. I'm not sure but it would interest me
to see for a minute how the world looks through your eyes.” And then he
added, in a different tone, “As to your East Side, Mrs. Henderson tried
that some years ago.”

“Wasn't she interested?”

“Oh, very much. For a time. But she said there was too much of it.” And
Edith could detect no tone of sarcasm in the remark.

Down at the other end of the table, matters were going very smoothly.
Jack was charmed with his hostess. That clever woman had felt her way
along from the heresy trial, through Tuxedo and the Independent Theatre
and the Horse Show, until they were launched in a perfectly free
conversation, and Carmen knew that she hadn't to look out for thin ice.

“Were you thinking of going on to the Conventional Club tonight, Mr.
Delancy?” she was saying.

“I don't belong,” said Jack. “Mrs. Delancy said she didn't care for it.”

“Oh, I don't care for it, for myself,” replied Carmen.

“I do,” struck in Miss Tavish. “It's awfully nice.”

“Yes, it does seem to fill a want. Why, what do you do with your
evenings, Mr. Delancy?”

“Well, here's one of them.”

“Yes, I know, but I mean between twelve o'clock and bedtime.”

“Oh,” said Jack, laughing out loud, “I go to bed--sometimes.”

“Yes, 'there's always that. But you want some place to go to after the
theatres and the dinners; after the other places are shut up you want to
go somewhere and be amused.”

“Yes,” said Jack, falling in, “it is a fact that there are not many
places of amusement for the rich; I understand. After the theatres you
want to be amused. This Conventional Club is--”

“I tell you what it is. It's a sort of Midnight Mission for the rich.
They never have had anything of the kind in the city.”

“And it's very nice,” said Miss Tavish, demurely.

“The performers are selected. You can see things there that you want
to see at other places to which you can't go. And everybody you know is
there.”

“Oh, I see,” said Jack. “It's what the Independent Theatre is trying to
do, and what all the theatrical people say needs to be done, to elevate
the character of the audiences, and then the managers can give better
plays.”

“That's just it. We want to elevate the stage,” Carmen explained.

“But,” continued Jack, “it seems to me that now the audience is select
and elevated, it wants to see the same sort of things it liked to see
before it was elevated.”

“You may laugh, Mr. Delancy,” replied Carmen, throwing an earnest
simplicity into her eyes, “but why shouldn't women know what is going on
as well as men?”

“And why,” Miss Tavish asked, “will the serpentine dances and the London
topical songs do any more harm to women than to men?”

“And besides, Mr. Delancy,” Carmen said, chiming in, “isn't it just as
proper that women should see women dance and throw somersaults on the
stage as that men should see them? And then, you know, women are such a
restraining influence.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” said Jack. “I thought the Conventional
was for the benefit of the audience, not for the salvation of the
performers.”

“It's both. It's life. Don't you think women ought to know life? How are
they to take their place in the world unless they know life as men know
it?”

“I'm sure I don't know whose place they are to take, the serpentine
dancer's or mine,” said Jack, as if he were studying a problem. “How
does your experiment get on, Miss Tavish?”

Carmen looked up quickly.

“Oh, I haven't any experiment,” said Miss Tavish, shaking her head.
“It's just Mr. Delancy's nonsense.”

“I wish I had an experiment. There is so little for women to do. I wish
I knew what was right.” And Carmen looked mournfully demure, as if life,
after all, were a serious thing with her.

“Whatever Mrs. Henderson does is sure to be right,” said Jack,
gallantly.

Carmen shot at him a quick sympathetic glance, tempered by a grateful
smile. “There are so many points of view.”

Jack felt the force of the remark as he did the revealing glance. And he
had a swift vision of Miss Tavish leading him a serpentine dance, and of
Carmen sweetly beckoning him to a pleasant point of view. After all it
doesn't much matter. Everything is in the point of view.

After dinner and cigars and cigarettes in the library, the talk dragged
a little in duets. The dinner had been charming, the house was lovely,
the company was most agreeable. All said that. It had been so somewhere
else the night before that, and would be the next night. And the ennui
of it all! No one expressed it, but Henderson could not help looking it,
and Carmen saw it. That charming hostess had been devoting herself to
Edith since dinner. She was so full of sympathy with the East-Side work,
asked a hundred questions about it, and declared that she must take it
up again. She would order a cage of canaries from that poor German for
her kitchen. It was such a beautiful idea. But Edith did not believe in
her one bit. She told Jack afterwards that “Mrs. Henderson cares no more
for the poor of New York than she does for--”

“Henderson?” suggested Jack.

“Oh, I don't know anything about that. Henderson has only one idea--to
get the better of everybody, and be the money king of New York. But I
should not wonder if he had once a soft spot in his heart. He is better
than she is.”

It was still early, lacked half an hour of midnight, and the night was
before them. Some one proposed the Conventional. “Yes,” said Carmen;
“all come to our box.” The Van Dams would go, Miss Tavish, the Chesneys;
the suggestion was a relief to everybody. Only Mr. Henderson pleaded
important papers that must have his attention that night. Edith said
that she was too tired, but that her desertion must not break up the
party.

“Then you will excuse me also,” said Jack, a little shade of
disappointment in his face.

“No, no,” said Edith, quickly; “you can drop me on the way. Go, by all
means, Jack.”

“Do you really want me to go, dear?” said Jack, aside.

“Why of course; I want you to be happy.”

And Jack recalled the loving look that accompanied these words, later
on, as he sat in the Henderson box at the Conventional, between Carmen
and Miss Tavish, and saw, through the slight haze of smoke, beyond the
orchestra, the praiseworthy efforts of the Montana Kicker, who had
just returned with the imprimatur of Paris, to relieve the ennui of the
modern world.

The complex affair we call the world requires a great variety of people
to keep it going. At one o'clock in the morning Carmen and our friend
Mr. Delancy and Miss Tavish were doing their part. Edith lay awake
listening for Jack's return. And in an alley off Rivington Street a
young girl, pretty once, unknown to fortune but not to fame, was about
to render the last service she could to the world by leaving it.

The impartial historian scarcely knows how to distribute his pathos. By
the electric light (and that is the modern light) gayety is almost as
pathetic as suffering. Before the Montana girl hit upon the happy device
that gave her notoriety, her feet, whose every twinkle now was worth a
gold eagle, had trod a thorny path. There was a fortune now in the whirl
of her illusory robes, but any day--such are the whims of fashion--she
might be wandering again, sick at heart, about the great city, knocking
at the side doors of variety shows for any engagement that would give
her a pittance of a few dollars a week. How long had Carmen waited on
the social outskirts; and now she had come into her kingdom, was she
anything but a tinsel queen? Even Henderson, the great Henderson, did
the friends of his youth respect him? had he public esteem? Carmen used
to cut out the newspaper paragraphs that extolled Henderson's domestic
virtue and his generosity to his family, and show them to her lord, with
a queer smile on her face. Miss Tavish, in the nervous consciousness of
fleeting years, was she not still waiting, dashing here and there like a
bird in a net for the sort of freedom, audacious as she was, that seemed
denied her? She was still beautiful, everybody said, and she was sought
and flattered, because she was always merry and good-natured. Why should
Van Dam, speaking of women, say that there were horses that had been set
up, and checked up and trained, that held their heads in an aristocratic
fashion, moved elegantly, and showed style, long after the spirit had
gone out of them? And Jack himself, happily married, with a comfortable
income, why was life getting flat to him? What sort of career was it
that needed the aid of Carmen and the serpentine dancer? And why not,
since it is absolutely necessary that the world should be amused?

We are in no other world when we enter the mean tenement in the alley
off Rivington Street. Here also is the life of the town. The room is
small, but it contains a cook-stove, a chest of drawers, a small table,
a couple of chairs, and two narrow beds. On the top of the chest are
a looking-glass, some toilet articles, and bottles of medicine. The
cracked walls are bare and not clean. In one of the beds are two
children, sleeping soundly, and on the foot of it is a middle-aged
woman, in a soiled woolen gown with a thin figured shawl drawn about her
shoulders, a dirty cap half concealing her frowzy hair; she looks tired
and worn and sleepy. On the other bed lies a girl of twenty years, a
woman in experience. The kerosene lamp on the stand at the head of the
bed casts a spectral light on her flushed face, and the thin arms that
are restlessly thrown outside the cover. By the bedside sits the doctor,
patient, silent, and watchful. The doctor puts her hand caressingly
on that of the girl. It is hot and dry. The girl opens her eyes with a
startled look, and says, feebly:

“Do you think he will come?”

“Yes, dear, presently. He never fails.”

The girl closed her eyes again, and there was silence. The dim rays of
the lamp, falling upon the doctor, revealed the figure of a woman of
less than medium size, perhaps of the age of thirty or more, a plain
little body, you would have said, who paid the slightest possible
attention to her dress, and when she went about the city was not to be
distinguished from a working-woman. Her friends, indeed, said that she
had not the least care for her personal appearance, and unless she was
watched, she was sure to go out in her shabbiest gown and most battered
hat. She wore tonight a brown ulster and a nondescript black bonnet
drawn close down on her head and tied with black strings. In her lap
lay her leathern bag, which she usually carried under her arm, that
contained medicines, lint, bandages, smelling-salts, a vial of ammonia,
and so on; to her patients it was a sort of conjurer's bag, out of which
she could produce anything that an emergency called for.

Dr. Leigh was not in the least nervous or excited. Indeed, an artist
would not have painted her as a rapt angelic visitant to this abode of
poverty. This contact with poverty and coming death was quite in her
ordinary experience. It would never have occurred to her that she was
doing anything unusual, any more than it would have occurred to the
objects of her ministrations to overwhelm her with thanks. They trusted
her, that was all. They met her always with a pleasant recognition. She
belonged perhaps to their world. Perhaps they would have said that “Dr.
Leigh don't handsome much,” but their idea was that her face was good.
That was what anybody would have said who saw her tonight, “She has such
a good face;” the face of a woman who knew the world, and perhaps was
not very sanguine about it, had few illusions and few antipathies, but
accepted it, and tried in her humble way to alleviate its hardships,
without any consciousness of having a mission or making a sacrifice.

Dr. Leigh--Miss Ruth Leigh--was Edith's friend. She had not come from
the country with an exalted notion of being a worker among the poor
about whom so much was written; she had not even descended from some
high circle in the city into this world, moved by a restless enthusiasm
for humanity. She was a woman of the people, to adopt a popular phrase.
From her childhood she had known them, their wants, their sympathies,
their discouragements; and in her heart--though you would not discover
this till you had known her long and well--there was a burning sympathy
with them, a sympathy born in her, and not assumed for the sake of
having a career. It was this that had impelled her to get a medical
education, which she obtained by hard labor and self-denial. To her this
was not a means of livelihood, but simply that she might be of service
to those all about her who needed help more than she did. She didn't
believe in charity, this stout-hearted, clearheaded little woman; she
meant to make everybody pay for her medical services who could pay; but
somehow her practice was not lucrative, and the little salary she got
as a dispensary doctor melted away with scarcely any perceptible
improvement in her own wardrobe. Why, she needed nothing, going about as
she did.

She sat--now waiting for the end; and the good face, so full of sympathy
for the living, had no hope in it. Just another human being had come
to the end of her path--the end literally. It was so everyday. Somebody
came to the end, and there was nothing beyond. Only it was the end, and
that was peace. One o'clock--half-past one. The door opened softly. The
old woman rose from the foot of the bed with a start and a low “Herr!
gross Gott.” It was Father Damon. The girl opened her eyes with a
frightened look at first, and then an eager appeal. Dr. Leigh rose to
make room for him at the bedside. They bowed as he came forward, and
their eyes met. She shook her head. In her eyes was no expectation, no
hope. In his was the glow of faith. But the eyes of the girl rested upon
his face with a rapt expression. It was as if an angel had entered the
room.

Father Damon was a young man, not yet past thirty, slender, erect.
He had removed as he came in his broad-brimmed soft hat. The hair
was close-cut, but not tonsured. He wore a brown cassock, falling in
straight lines, and confined at the waist with a white cord. From
his neck depended from a gold chain a large gold cross. His face was
smooth-shaven, thin, intellectual, or rather spiritual; the nose long,
the mouth straight, the eyes deep gray, sometimes dreamy and puzzling,
again glowing with an inner fervor. A face of long vigils and the
schooled calmness of repressed energy. You would say a fanatic of God,
with a dash of self-consciousness. Dr. Leigh knew him well. They met
often on their diverse errands, and she liked, when she could, to go to
vespers in the little mission chapel of St. Anselm, where he ministered.
It was not the confessional that attracted her, that was sure; perhaps
not altogether the service, though that was soothing in certain moods;
but it was the noble personality of Father Damon. He was devoted to the
people as she was, he understood them; and for the moment their passion
of humanity assumed the same aspect, though she knew that what he saw,
or thought he saw, lay beyond her agnostic vision.

Father Damon was an Englishman, a member of a London Anglican order, who
had taken the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, who had
been for some years in New York, and had finally come to live on the
East Side, where his work was. In a way he had identified himself with
the people; he attended their clubs; he was a Christian socialist; he
spoke on the inequalities of taxation; the strikers were pretty sure of
his sympathy; he argued the injustice of the present ownership of land.
Some said that he had joined a lodge of the Knights of Labor. Perhaps
it was these things, quite as much as his singleness of purpose and his
spiritual fervor, that drew Dr. Leigh to him with a feeling that verged
on devotion. The ladies up-town, at whose tables Father Damon was an
infrequent guest, were as fully in sympathy with this handsome and
aristocratic young priest, and thought it beautiful that he should
devote himself to the poor and the sinful; but they did not see why he
should adopt their views.

It was at the mission that Father Damon had first seen the girl. She had
ventured in not long ago at twilight, with her cough and her pale face,
in a silk gown and flower-garden of a hat, and crept into one of the
confessional boxes, and told him her story.

“Do you think, Father,” said the girl, looking up wistfully, “that I
can--can be forgiven?”

Father Damon looked down sadly, pitifully. “Yes, my daughter, if you
repent. It is all with our Father. He never refuses.”

He knelt down, with his cross in his hand, and in a low voice repeated
the prayer for the dying. As the sweet, thrilling voice went on in
supplication the girl's eyes closed again, and a sweet smile played
about her mouth; it was the innocent smile of the little girl long ago,
when she might have awakened in the morning and heard the singing of
birds at her window.

When Father Damon arose she seemed to be sleeping. They all stood in
silence for a moment.

“You will remain?” he asked the doctor.

“Yes,” she said, with the faintest wan smile on her face. “It is I, you
know, who have care of the body.”

At the door he turned and said, quite low, “Peace be to this house!”




VI

Father Damon came dangerously near to being popular. The austerity
of his life and his known self-chastening vigils contributed to this
effect. His severely formal, simple ecclesiastical dress, coarse in
material but perfect in its saintly lines, separated him from the world
in which he moved so unostentatiously and humbly, and marked him as
one who went about doing good. His life was that of self-absorption and
hardship, mortification of the body, denial of the solicitation of the
senses, struggling of the spirit for more holiness of purpose--a life
of supplication for the perishing souls about him. And yet he was so
informed with the modern spirit that he was not content, as a zealot
formerly might have been, to snatch souls out of the evil that is in
the world, but he strove to lessen the evil. He was a reformer. It was
probably this feature of his activity, and not his spiritual mission,
that attracted to him the little group of positivists on the East
Side, the demagogues of the labor lodges, the practical workers of the
working-girls' clubs, and the humanitarian agnostics like Dr. Leigh,
who were literally giving their lives without the least expectation of
reward. Even the refined ethical-culture groups had no sneer for Father
Damon. The little chapel of St. Anselm was well known. It was always
open. It was plain, but its plainness was not the barrenness of a
non-conformist chapel. There were two confessionals; a great bronze lamp
attached to one of the pillars scarcely dispelled the obscurity, but
cast an unnatural light upon the gigantic crucifix that hung from a
beam in front of the chancel. There were half a dozen rows of backless
benches in the centre of the chapel. The bronze lamp, and the candles
always burning upon the altar, rather accented than dissipated the heavy
shadows in the vaulted roof. At no hour was it empty, but at morning
prayer and at vespers the benches were apt to be filled, and groups
of penitents or spectators were kneeling or standing on the floor. At
vespers there were sure to be carriages in front of the door, and among
the kneeling figures were ladies who brought into these simple services
for the poor something of the refinement of grace as it is in the higher
circles. Indeed, at the hour set apart for confession, there were in the
boxes saints from up-town as well as sinners from the slums. Sometimes
the sinners were from up-town and the saints from the slums.

When the organ sounded, and through a low door in the chancel the priest
entered, preceded by a couple of acolytes, and advanced swiftly to the
reading-desk, there was an awed hush in the congregation. One would not
dare to say that there was a sentimental feeling for the pale face and
rapt expression of the devotee. It was more than that. He had just come
from some scene of suffering, from the bed of one dying; he was weary
with watching. He was faint with lonely vigils; he was visibly carrying
the load of the poor and the despised. Even Ruth Leigh, who had dropped
in for half an hour in one of her daily rounds--even Ruth Leigh, who had
in her stanch, practical mind a contempt for forms and rituals, and
no faith in anything that she could not touch, and who at times was
indignant at the efforts wasted over the future of souls concerning
which no one knew anything, when there were so many bodies, which had
inherited disease and poverty and shame, going to worldly wreck before
so-called Christian eyes--even she could scarcely keep herself from
adoring this self-sacrificing spirit. The woes of humanity grieved
him as they grieved her, and she used to say she did not care what he
believed so long as he gave his life for the needy.

It was when he advanced to the altar-rail to speak that the man best
appeared. His voice, which was usually low and full of melody, could be
something terrible when it rose in denunciation of sin. Those who had
traveled said that he had the manner of a preaching friar--the simple
language, so refined and yet so homely and direct, the real, the
inspired word, the occasional hastening torrent of words. When he had
occasion to address one of the societies of ladies for the promotion of
something among the poor, his style and manner were simplicity itself.
One might have said there was a shade of contempt in his familiar and
not seldom slightly humorous remarks upon society and its aims and
aspirations, about which he spoke plainly and vigorously. And this was
what the ladies liked. Especially when he referred to the pitifulness
of class distinctions, in the light of the example of our Lord, in our
short pilgrimage in this world. This unveiling and denunciation made
them somehow feel nearer to their work, and, indeed, while they sat
there, co-workers with this apostle of righteousness.

Perhaps there was something in the priestly dress that affected not only
the congregation in the chapel, but all the neighborhood in which Father
Damon lived. There was in the long robe, with its feminine lines, an
assurance to the women that he was set apart and not as others
were; and, on the other hand, the semi-feminine suggestion of the
straight-falling garment may have had for the men a sort of appeal for
defense and even protection. It is certain, at any rate, that Father
Damon had the confidence of high and low, rich and poor. The forsaken
sought him out, the hungry went to him, the dying sent for him, the
criminal knocked at the door of his little room, even the rich reprobate
would have opened his bad heart to him sooner than to any one else. It
is evident, therefore, that Father Damon was dangerously near to being
popular. Human vanity will feed on anything within its reach, and there
has been discovered yet no situation that will not minister to its
growth. Suffering perhaps it prefers, and contumely and persecution.
Are not opposition, despiteful anger, slander even, rejection of men,
stripes even, if such there could be in these days, manna to the devout
soul consciously set apart for a mission? But success, obsequiousness,
applause, the love of women, the concurrent good opinion of all
humanitarians, are these not almost as dangerous as persecution? Father
Damon, though exalted in his calling, and filled with a burning zeal,
was a sincere man, and even his eccentricities of saintly conduct
expressed to his mind only the high purpose of self-sacrifice. Yet he
saw, he could not but see, the spiritual danger in this rising tide of
adulation. He fought against its influence, he prayed against it, he
tried to humiliate himself, and his very humiliations increased the
adulation. He was perplexed, almost ashamed, and examined himself to
see how it was that he himself seemed to be thwarting his own work.
Sometimes he withdrew from it for a week together, and buried himself in
a retreat in the upper part of the island. Alas! did ever a man escape
himself in a retreat? It made him calm for the moment. But why was it,
he asked himself, that he had so many followers, his religion so few?
Why was it, he said, that all the humanitarians, the reformers, the
guilds, the ethical groups, the agnostics, the male and female knights,
sustained him, and only a few of the poor and friendless knocked, by his
solicitation, at the supernatural door of life? How was it that a woman
whom he encountered so often, a very angel of mercy, could do the things
he was doing, tramping about in the misery and squalor of the great city
day and night, her path unilluminated by a ray from the future life?

Perhaps he had been remiss in his duty. Perhaps he was letting a vague
philanthropy take the place of a personal solicitude for individual
souls. The elevation of the race! What had the land question to do with
the salvation of man? Suppose everybody on the East Side should become
as industrious, as self-denying, as unselfish as Ruth Leigh, and yet
without belief, without hope! He had accepted the humanitarian situation
with her, and never had spoken to her of the eternal life. What
unfaithfulness to his mission and to her! It should be so no longer.

It was after one of his weeks of retreat, at the close of vesper
service, that Dr. Leigh came to him. He had been saying in his little
talk that poverty is no excuse for irreligion, and that all aid in the
hardship of this world was vain and worthless unless the sinner laid
hold on eternal life. Dr. Leigh, who was laboring with a serious
practical problem, heard this coldly, and with a certain contempt for
what seemed to her a vague sort of consolation.

“Well,” he said, when she came to him in the vestry, with a drop from
the rather austere manner in which he had spoken, “what can I do for
you?”

“For me, nothing, Father Damon. I thought perhaps you would go round
with me to see a pretty bad case. It is in your parish.”

“Ah, did they send for me? Do they want spiritual help?”

“First the natural, then the spiritual,” she replied, with a slight tone
of sarcasm in her voice. “That's just like a priest,” she was thinking.
“I do not know what to do, and something must be done.”

“Did you report to the Associated Charities?”

“Yes. But there's a hitch somewhere. The machine doesn't take hold. The
man says he doesn't want any charity, any association, treating him
like a pauper. He's off peddling; but trade is bad, and he's been away a
week. I'm afraid he drinks a little.”

“Well?”

“The mother is sick in bed. I found her trying to do some fine
stitching, but she was too weak to hold up the muslin. There are five
young children. The family never has had help before.”

Father Damon put on his hat, and they went out together, and for some
time picked their way along the muddy streets in silence.

At length he asked, in a softened voice, “Is the mother a Christian?”

“I didn't ask,” she replied shortly. “I found her crying because the
children were hungry.”

Father Damon, still under the impression of his neglect of duty, did not
heed her warning tone, but persisted, “You have so many opportunities,
Dr. Leigh, in your visits of speaking a word.”

“About what?” she asked, refusing to understand, and hardened at the
slightest sign of what she called cant.

“About the necessity of repentance and preparation for another life,” he
answered, softly but firmly. “You surely do not think human beings are
created just for this miserable little experience here?”

“I don't know. I have too much to do with the want and suffering I
see to raise anxieties about a world of which no one can possibly know
anything.”

“Pardon me,” he persisted, “have you no sense of incompleteness in
this life, in your own life? no inward consciousness of an undying
personality?”

The doctor was angry for a moment at this intrusion. It had seemed
natural enough for Father Damon to address his exhortations to the poor
and sinful of his mission. She admired his spirit, she had a certain
sympathy with him; for who could say that ministering to minds diseased
might not have a physical influence to lift these people into a more
decent and prosperous way of living? She had thought of herself as
working with him to a common end. But for him now to turn upon her,
absolutely ignoring the solid, rational, and scientific ground on which
he knew, or should know, she stood, and to speak to her as one of the
“lost,” startled her, and filled her with indignation. She had on her
lips a sarcastic reply to the effect that even if she had a soul, she
had not taken up her work in the city as a means of saving it; but
she was not given to sarcasm, and before she spoke she looked at her
companion, and saw in the eyes a look of such genuine humble feeling,
contradicting the otherwise austere expression of his face, that her
momentary bitterness passed away.

“I think, Father Damon,” she said, gently, “we had better not talk
of that. I don't have much time for theorizing, you know, nor much
inclination,” she added.

The priest saw that for the present he could make no progress, and after
a little silence the conversation went back to the family they were
about to visit.

They found the woman better--at least, more cheerful. Father Damon
noticed that there were medicines upon the stand, and that there were
the remains of a meal which the children had been eating. He turned to
the doctor. “I see that you have been providing for them.”

“Oh, the eldest boy had already been out and begged a piece of bread
when I came. Of course they had to have something more at once. But it
is very little that I can do.”

He sat down by the bed, and talked with the mother, getting her story,
while the doctor tidied up the room a bit, and then, taking the youngest
child in her lap and drawing the others about her, began to tell a story
in a low voice. Presently she was aware that the priest was on his knees
and saying a prayer. She stopped in her story, and looked out through
the dirty window into the chill and dark area.

“What is he doing?” whispered one of the children.

“I don't know,” she said, and a sort of chill came over her heart. It
all seemed a mockery, in these surroundings.

When he rose he said to the woman, “We will see that you do not want
till your husband comes back.”

“And I will look in tomorrow,” said the doctor.

When they were in the street, Father Damon thanked her for calling his
attention to the case, thanked her a little formally, and said that
he would make inquiries and have it properly attended to. And then he
asked: “Is your work ended for the day? You must be tired.”

“Oh, no; I have several visits to make. I'm not tired. I rather think it
is good for me, being out-of-doors so much.” She thanked him, and said
good-by.

For a moment he stood and watched the plain, resolute little woman
threading her way through the crowded and unclean street, and then
slowly walked away to his apartment, filled with sadness and perplexity.

The apartment which he occupied was not far from the mission chapel,
and it was the one clean spot among the ill-kept tenements; but as to
comfort, it was not much better than the cell of an anchorite. Of this,
however, he was not thinking as he stretched himself out on his pallet
to rest a little from the exhausting labors of the day. Probably it did
not occur to him that his self-imposed privations lessened his strength
for his work.

He was thinking of Ruth Leigh. What a rare soul! And yet apparently she
did not think or care whether she had a soul. What could be the spring
of her incessant devotion? If ever woman went about doing good in an
unselfish spirit it was she. Yet she confessed her work hopeless. She
had no faith, no belief in immortality, no expectation of any reward,
nothing to offer to anybody beyond this poor life. Was this the
enthusiasm of humanity, of which he heard so much? But she did not seem
to have any illusions, or to be burned up by enthusiasm. She just kept
on. Ah, he thought, what a woman she would be if she were touched by the
fire of faith!

Meantime, Ruth Leigh went on her round. One day was like another, except
that every day the kaleidoscope of misery showed new combinations,
new phases of suffering and incompetence, and there was always a fresh
interest in that. For years now this had been her life, in the chill of
winter and the heat of summer, without rest or vacation. The amusements,
the social duties, the allurements of dress and society, that so much
occupied the thoughts of other women, did not seem to come into her
life. For books she had little time, except the books of her specialty.
The most exciting novels were pale compared with her daily experiences
of real life. Almost her only recreation was a meeting of the
working-girls, a session of her labor lodge, or an assembly at the
Cooper Union, where some fiery orator, perhaps a priest, or a clever
agitator, a working-man glib of speech, who had a mass of statistics at
the end of his tongue, who read and discussed, in some private club of
zealots of humanity, metaphysics, psychology, and was familiar with the
whole literature of labor and socialism, awoke the enthusiasm of the
discontented or the unemployed, and where men and women, in clear but
homely speech, told their individual experiences of wrong and injustice.
There was evidence in all these demonstrations and organizations that
the world was moving, and that the old order must change.

Years and years the little woman had gone on with her work, and she
frankly confessed to Edith, one day when they were together going her
rounds, that she could see no result from it all. The problem of poverty
and helplessness and incapacity seemed to her more hopeless than when
she began. There might be a little enlightenment here and there, but
there was certainly not less misery. The state of things was worse than
she thought at first; but one thing cheered her: the people were better
than she thought. They might be dull and suspicious in the mass, but she
found so much patience, unselfishness, so many people of good hearts and
warm affections.

“They are the people,” she said, “I should choose for friends. They are
natural, unsophisticated. And do you know,” she went on, “that what most
surprises me is the number of reading, thoughtful people among those
who do manual labor. I doubt if on your side of town the best books, the
real fundamental and abstruse books, are so read and discussed, or the
philosophy of life is so seriously considered, as in certain little
circles of what you call the working-classes.”

“Isn't it all very revolutionary?” asked Edith.

“Perhaps,” replied the doctor, dryly. “But they have no more fads than
other people. Their theories seem to them not only practical, but they
try to apply them to actual legislation; at any rate, they discriminate
in vagaries. You would have been amused the other night in a small
circle at the lamentations over a member--he was a car-driver--who was
the authoritative expositor of Schopenhauer, because he had gone off
into Theosophy. It showed such weakness.”

“I have heard that the members of that circle were Nihilists.”

“The club has not that name, but probably the members would not care
to repudiate the title, or deny that they were Nihilists
theoretically--that is, if Nihilism means an absolute social and
political overturning in order that something better may be built up.
And, indeed, if you see what a hopeless tangle our present situation is,
where else can the mind logically go?”

“It is pitiful enough,” Edith admitted. “But all this movement you speak
of seems to me a vague agitation.”

“I don't think,” the doctor said, after a moment, “that you appreciate
the intellectual force that is in it all, or allow for the fermenting
power in the great discontented mass of these radical theories on the
problem of life.”

This was a specimen of the sort of talk that Edith and the doctor often
drifted into in their mission work. As Ruth Leigh tramped along late
this afternoon in the slush of the streets, from one house of sickness
and poverty to another, a sense of her puny efforts in this great mass
of suffering and injustice came over her anew. Her indignation rose
against the state of things. And Father Damon, who was trying to save
souls, was he accomplishing anything more than she? Why had he been so
curt with her when she went to him for help this afternoon? Was he just
a narrow-minded, bigoted priest? A few nights before she had heard him
speak on the single tax at a labor meeting. She recalled his eloquence,
his profound sympathy with the cause of the people, the thrilling,
pathetic voice, the illumination of his countenance, the authority, the
consecration in his attitude and dress; and he was transfigured to her
then, as he was now in her thought, into an apostle of humanity. Alas!
she thought, what a leader he would be if he would break loose from his
superstitious traditions!




VII

The acquaintance between the house of Henderson and the house of Delancy
was not permitted to languish. Jack had his reasons for it, which may
have been financial, and Carmen had her reasons, which were probably
purely social. What was the good of money if it did not bring social
position? and what, on the other hand, was the good of social position
if you could not use it to get money?

In his recent association with the newly rich, Jack's twenty thousand
a year began to seem small. In fact, in the lowering of the rate of
interest and the shrinkage of securities, it was no longer twenty
thousand a year. This would have been a matter of little consequence
in the old order. His lot was not cast among the poor; most of his
relations had solid fortunes, and many of them were millionaires, or
what was equivalent to that, before the term was invented. But they made
little display; none at all merely for the purpose of exhibition, or to
gain or keep social place. In this atmosphere in which he was born Jack
floated along without effort, with no demand upon him to keep up with
a rising standard of living. Even impecuniosity, though inconvenient,
would not have made him lose caste.

All this was changing now. Since the introduction of a new element even
the conservative old millions had begun to feel the stir of uneasiness,
and to launch out into extravagance in rivalry with the new millions.
Even with his relations Jack began to feel that he was poor. It did not
spur him to do anything, to follow the example, for instance, of the
young fellows from the country, who were throwing themselves into Wall
Street with the single purpose of becoming suddenly rich, but it made
him uneasy. And when he was with the Hendersons, or Miss Tavish,
whose father, though not newly rich, was one of the most aggressive
of speculators, and saw how easily every luxurious desire glided into
fulfillment, he felt for the first time in his life the emotion of
envy. It seemed then that only unlimited money could make the world
attractive. Why, even to keep up with the unthinking whims of Miss
Tavish would bankrupt him in six months. That little spread at Wherry's
for the theatre party the other night, though he made light of it to
Edith, was almost the price he couldn't afford to pay for Storm. He had
a grim thought that midwinter flowers made dining as expensive as dying.
Carmen, whom nothing escaped, complimented him on his taste, quite aware
that he couldn't afford it, and, apropos, told him of a lady in Chicago
who, hearing that the fashion had changed, wrote on her dinner cards,
“No flowers.” It was only a matter of course for these people to build a
new country-house in any spot that fashion for the moment indicated, to
equip their yachts for a Mediterranean voyage or for loitering down the
Southern coast, to give a ball that was the talk of the town, to make up
a special train of luxurious private cars for Mexico or California. Even
at the clubs the talk was about these things and the opportunities for
getting them.

There was a rumor about town that Henderson was a good deal extended.
It alarmed a hundred people, not on Henderson's account, but their own.
When one of them consulted Uncle Jerry, that veteran smiled.

“Oh, I guess Henderson's all right. But I wouldn't wonder if it meant a
squeeze. Of course if he's extended, it's an excuse for settling up, and
the shorts will squeal. I've seen Henderson extended a good many times,”
 and the old man laughed. “Don't you worry about him.”

This opinion, when reported, did not seem to quiet Jack's fears, who
saw his own little venture at the mercy of a sweeping Street game. It
occurred to him that he possibly might get a little light on the matter
by dropping in that afternoon and taking a quiet cup of tea with Mrs.
Henderson.

He found her in the library. Outdoors winter was slouching into spring
with a cold drizzle, with a coating of ice on the pavements-animating
weather for the medical profession. Within, there was the glow of warmth
and color that Carmen liked to create for herself. In an entrancing
tea-gown, she sat by a hickory fire, with a fresh magazine in one hand
and a big paper-cutter in the other. She rose at Jack's entrance, and,
extending her hand, greeted him with a most cordial smile. It was
so good of him! She was so lonesome! He could himself see that the
lonesomeness was dissipated, as she seated him in a comfortable chair
by the fire, and then stood a moment looking at him, as if studying his
comfort. She was such a domestic woman!

“You look tired, monsieur,” she said, as she passed behind his chair and
rested the tip of her forefinger for a second on his head. “I shall make
you a cup of tea at once.”

“Not tired, but bothered,” said Jack, stretching out his legs.

“I know,” she replied; “it's a bothering world.” She was still behind
him, and spoke low, but with sympathy. “I remember, it's only one lump.”

He could feel her presence, so womanly and friendly. “I don't care what
people say,” he was thinking, “she's a good-hearted little thing,
and understands men.” He felt that he could tell her anything,
almost anything that he could tell a man. She was sympathetic and not
squeamish.

“There,” she said, handing him the tea and looking down on him.

The cup was dainty, the fragrance of the tea delicious, the woman
exquisite.

“I'm better already,” said Jack, with a laugh.

She made a cup for herself, handed him the cigarettes, lit one for
herself, and sat on a low stool not far from him.

“Now what is it?”

“Oh, nothing--a little business worry. Have you heard any Street rumor?”

“Rumor?” she repeated, with a little start. And then, leaning forward,
“Do you mean that about Mr. Henderson in the morning papers?”

“Yes.”

Carmen, relieved, gave a liquid little laugh, and then said, with a
change to earnestness: “I'm going to trust you, my friend. Henderson
put it in himself! He told me so this morning when I asked him about it.
This is just between ourselves.”

Jack said, “Of course,” but he did not look relieved. The clever
creature divined the situation without another word, for there was no
turn in the Street that she was not familiar with. But there was no
apparent recognition of it, except in her sympathetic tone, when she
said: “Well, the world is full of annoyances. I'm bothered myself--and
such a little thing.”

“What is it?”

“Oh nothing, not even a rumor. You cannot do anything about it. I
don't know why I should tell you. But I will.” And she paused a moment,
looking down in an innocent perplexity. “It's just this: I am on the
Foundlings' Board with Mrs. Schuyler Blunt, and I don't know her, and
you can't think how awkward it is having to meet her every week in that
stiff kind of way.” She did not go on to confide to Jack how she had
intrigued to get on the board, and how Mrs. Schuyler Blunt, in the most
well-bred manner, had practically ignored her.

“She's an old friend of mine.”

“Indeed! She's a charming woman.”

“Yes. We were great cronies when she was Sadie Mack. She isn't a genius,
but she is good-hearted. I suppose she is on all the charity boards in
the city. She patronizes everything,” Jack continued, with a smile.

“I'm sure she is,” said Carmen, thinking that however good-hearted she
might be she was very “snubby.” “And it makes it all the more awkward,
for I am interested in so many things myself.”

“I can arrange all that,” Jack said, in an off-hand way. Carmen's look
of gratitude could hardly be distinguished from affection. “That's easy
enough. We are just as good friends as ever, though I fancy she doesn't
altogether approve of me lately. It's rather nice for a fellow, Mrs.
Henderson, to have a lot of women keeping him straight, isn't it?” asked
Jack, in the tone of a bad boy.

“Yes. Between us all we will make a model of you. I am so glad now that
I told you.”

Jack protested that it was nothing. Why shouldn't friends help each
other? Why not, indeed, said Carmen, and the talk went on a good deal
about friendship, and the possibility of it between a man and a woman.
This sort of talk is considered serious and even deep, not to say
philosophic. Carmen was a great philosopher in it. She didn't know, but
she believed, it seemed natural, that every woman should have one man
friend. Jack rose to go.

“So soon?” And it did seem pathetically soon. She gave him her hand, and
then by an impulse she put her left hand over his, and looked up to him
in quite a business way.

“Mr. Delancy, don't you be troubled about that rumor we were speaking
of. It will be all right. Trust me.”

He understood perfectly, and expressed both his understanding and his
gratitude by bending over and kissing the little hand that lay in his.

When he had gone, Carmen sat a long time by the fire reflecting. It
would be sweet to humiliate the Delancy and Schuyler Blunt set, as
Henderson could. But what would she gain by that? It would be sweeter
still to put them under obligations, and profit by that. She had endured
a good many social rebuffs in her day, this tolerant little woman, and
the sting of their memory could only be removed when the people who had
ignored her had to seek social favors she could give. If Henderson only
cared as much for such things as she did! But he was at times actually
brutal about it. He seemed to have only one passion. She herself liked
money, but only for what it would bring. Henderson was like an old
Pharaoh, who was bound to build the biggest pyramid ever built to his
memory; he hated to waste a block. But what was the good of that when
one had passed beyond the reach of envy?

Revolving these deep things in her mind, she went to her dressing-room
and made an elaborate toilet for dinner. Yet it was elaborately simple.
That sort needed more study than the other. She would like to be the
Carmen of ten years ago in Henderson's eyes.

Her lord came home late, and did not dress for dinner. It was often
so, and the omission was usually not allowed to pass by Carmen without
notice, to which Henderson was sure to growl that he didn't care to be
always on dress parade. Tonight Carmen was all graciousness and warmth.
Henderson did not seem to notice it. He ate his dinner abstractedly, and
responded only in monosyllables to her sweet attempts at conversation.
The fact was that the day had been a perplexing one; he was engaged in
one of his big fights, a scheme that aroused all his pugnacity and taxed
all his resources. He would win--of course; he would smash everybody,
but he would win. When he was in this mood Carmen felt that she was like
a daisy in the path of a cyclone. In the first year of their marriage
he used to consult her about all his schemes, and value her keen
understanding. She wondered why he did not now. Did he distrust even
her, as he did everybody else? Tonight she asked no questions. She was
unruffled by his short responses to her conversational attempts; by her
subtle, wifely manner she simply put herself on his side, whatever the
side was.

In the library she brought him his cigar, and lighted it. She saw that
his coffee was just as he liked it. As she moved about, making things
homelike, Henderson noticed that she was more Carmenish than he had
seen her in a long time. The sweet ways and the simple toilet must be by
intention. And he knew her so well. He began to be amused and softened.
At length he said, in his ordinary tone, “Well, what is it?”

“What is what, dear?”

“What do you want?”

Carmen looked perplexed and sweetly surprised. There is nothing so
pitiful about habitual hypocrisy as that it never deceives anybody. It
was not the less painful now that Carmen knew that Henderson knew her to
the least fibre of her self-seeking soul, and that she felt that there
were currents in his life that she could not calculate. A man is so much
more difficult to understand than a woman, she reflected. And yet he
is so susceptible that he can be managed even when he knows he is being
managed. Carmen was not disconcerted for a moment. She replied, with her
old candor:

“What an idea! You give me everything I want before I know what it is.”

“And before I know it either,” he responded, with a grim smile. “Well,
what is the news today?”

“Just the same old round. The Foundlings' Board, for one thing.”

“Are you interested in foundlings?”

“Not much,” said Carmen, frankly. “I'm interested in those that find
them. I told you how hateful that Mrs. Schuyler Blunt is.”

“Why don't you cut her? Why don't you make it uncomfortable for her?”

“I can't find out,” she said, with a laugh, dropping into the language
of the Street, “anything she is short in, or I would.”

“And you want me to get a twist on old Blunt?” and Henderson roared with
laughter at the idea.

“No, indeed. Dear, you are just a goose, socially. It is nothing to you,
but you don't understand what we women have to go through. You don't
know how hard it is--that woman!”

“What has she done?”

“Nothing. That's just it. What do you say in the Street--freeze? Well,
she is trying to freeze me out.”

Henderson laughed again. “Oh, I'll back you against the field.”

“I don't want to be backed,” said Carmen; “I want some sympathy.”

“Well, what is your idea?”

“I was going to tell you. Mr. Delancy dropped in this afternoon for a
cup of tea--”

“Oh!”

“Yes, and he knows Mrs. Schuyler Blunt well; they are old friends, and
he is going to arrange it.”

“Arrange what?”

“Why, smooth everything out, don't you know. But, Rodney, I do want you
to do something for me; not for me exactly, but about this. Won't you
look out for Mr. Delancy in this deal?”

“Seems to me you are a good deal interested in Jack Delancy,” said
Henderson, in a sneering tone. The remark was a mistake, for it gave
Carmen the advantage, and he did not believe it was just. He knew that
Carmen was as passionless as a diamond, whatever even she might pretend
for a purpose.

“Aren't you ashamed!” she cried, with indignation, and her eyes flared
for an instant and then filled with tears. “And I try so hard.”

“But I can't look out for all the lame ducks.”

“He isn't a duck,” said Carmen, using her handkerchief; “I'd hate him
for a duck. It's just to help me, when you know, when you know--and it
is so hard,” and the tears came again.

Did Henderson believe? After all, what did it matter? Perhaps, after
all, the woman had a right to her game, as he had to his.

“Oh, well,” he said, “don't take on about it. I'll fix it. I'll make a
memorandum this minute. Only don't you bother me in the future with too
many private kites.”

Carmen dried her eyes. She did not look triumphant; she just looked
sweet and grateful, like a person who had been helped. She went over and
kissed her lord on the forehead, and sat on the arm of his chair, not
too long, and then patted him on the shoulder, and said he was a good
fellow, and she was a little bother, and so went away like a dutiful
little wife.

And Henderson sat looking into the fire and musing, with the feeling
that he had been at the theatre, and that the comedy had been
beautifully played.

His part of the play was carried out next day in good faith. One of the
secrets of Henderson's success was that he always did what he said he
would do. This attracted men to him personally, and besides he found,
as Bismarck did, that it was more serviceable to him than lying, for the
crafty world usually banks upon insincerity and indirectness. But while
he kept his word he also kept his schemes to himself, and executed them
with a single regard to his own interest and a Napoleonic selfishness.
He did not lie to enemy or friend, but he did not spare either when
either was in his way. He knew how to appeal to the self-interest of his
fellows, and in time those who had most to do with him trusted him least
when he seemed most generous in his offers.

When, the next day, his secretary reported to him briefly that Delancy
was greatly elated with the turn things had taken for him, and was going
in again, Henderson smiled sardonically, and said, “It was the worst
thing I could have done for him.”

Jack, who did not understand the irony of his temporary rescue, and
had little experience of commercial integrity, so called, was intent on
fulfilling his part of the understanding with Carmen. This could best be
effected by a return dinner to the Hendersons. The subject was broached
at breakfast in an off-hand manner to Edith.

It was not an agreeable subject to Edith, that was evident; but it was
not easy for her to raise objections to the dinner. She had gone to
the Hendersons' to please Jack, in her policy of yielding in order to
influence him; but having accepted the hospitality, she could not object
to returning it. The trouble was in making the list.

“I do not know,” said Edith, “who are the Hendersons' friends.”

“Oh, that doesn't matter. Ask our friends. If we are going to do a thing
to please them, no use in doing it half-way, so as to offend them, by
drawing social lines against them.”

“Well, suggest.”

“There's Mavick; he'll be over from Washington next week.”

“That's good; and, oh, I'll ask Father Damon.”

“Yes; he'll give a kind of flavor to it. I shouldn't wonder if he would
like to meet such a man as Henderson.”

“And then the Van Dams and Miss Tavish; they were at Henderson's, and
would help to make it easy.”

“Yes; well, let's see. The Schuyler Blunts?”

“Oh, they wouldn't do at all. They wouldn't come. She wouldn't think of
going to the Hendersons'.”

“But she would come to us. I don't think she would mind once in a way.”

“But why do you want them?”

“I don't want them particularly; but it would no doubt please the
Hendersons more than any other thing we could do-and, well, I don't want
to offend Henderson just now. It's a little thing, anyway. What's the
use of all this social nonsense? We are not responsible for either the
Hendersons or the Blunts being in the world. No harm done if they don't
come. You invite them, and I'll take the responsibility.”

So it was settled, against Edith's instinct of propriety, and the dinner
was made up by the addition of the elder Miss Chesney. And Jack did
persuade Mrs. Blunt to accept. In fact, she had a little curiosity to
see the man whose name was in the newspapers more prominently than that
of the President.

It was a bright thought to secure Mr. Mavick. Mr. Thomas Mavick was
socially one of the most desirable young men of the day. Matrimonially
he was not a prize, for he was without fortune and without powerful
connections. He had a position in the State Department. Originally he
came from somewhere in the West, it was said, but he had early obtained
one or two minor diplomatic places; he had lived a good deal abroad; he
had traveled a little--a good deal, it would seem, from his occasional
Oriental allusions. He threw over his past a slight mystery, not too
much; and he always took himself seriously. His salary was sufficient to
set up a bachelor very comfortably who always dined out; he dressed in
the severity of the fashion; he belonged only to the best clubs, where
he unbent more than anywhere else; he was credited with knowing a good
deal more than he would tell. It was believed, in fact, that he had a
great deal of influence. The President had been known to send for him on
delicate personal business with regard to appointments, and there were
certain ticklish diplomatic transactions that he was known to have
managed most cleverly. His friends could see his hand in state papers.
This he disclaimed, but he never denied that he knew the inside of
whatever was going on in Washington. Even those who thought him a snob
said he was clever. He had perfectly the diplomatic manner, and the
reserve of one charged with grave secrets. Whatever he disclosed was
always in confidence, so that he had the reputation of being as discreet
as he was knowing. With women he was of course a favorite, for he knew
how to be confidential without disclosing anything, and the hints
he dropped about persons in power simply showed that he was secretly
manoeuvring important affairs, and could make the most interesting
revelations if he chose. His smile and the shake of his head at the club
when talk was personal conveyed a world of meaning. Tom Mavick was, in
short, a most accomplished fellow. It was evident that he carried on
the State Department, and the wonder to many was that he was not in a
position to do it openly. His social prestige was as mysterious as his
diplomatic, but it was now unquestioned, and he might be considered as
one of the first of a class who are to reconcile social and political
life in this country.




VIII

Looking back upon this dinner of the Delancys, the student of human
affairs can see how Providence uses small means for the accomplishment
of its purposes. Of all our social contrivances, the formal dinner is
probably the cause of more anxiety in the arrangement, of more weariness
in the performance, and usually of less satisfaction in the retrospect
than any other social function. However carefully the guests are
selected, it lacks the spontaneity that gives intellectual zest to the
chance dining together of friends. This Delancy party was made up for
reasons which are well understood, and it seemed to have been admirably
well selected; and yet the moment it assembled it was evident that it
could not be very brilliant or very enjoyable. Doubtless you, madam,
would have arranged it differently, and not made it up of such
incongruous elements.

As a matter of fact, scarcely one of those present would not have had
more enjoyment somewhere else. Father Damon, whose theory was that the
rich needed saving quite as much as the poor, would nevertheless
have been in better spirits sitting down to a collation with the
working-women in Clinton Place. It was a good occasion for the cynical
observation of Mr. Mavick, but it was not a company that he could take
in hand and impress with his mysterious influence in public affairs.
Henderson was not in the mood, and would have had much more ease over
a chop and a bottle of half-and-half with Uncle Jerry. Carmen, socially
triumphant, would have been much more in her element at a petit
souper of a not too fastidious four. Mrs. Schuyler Blunt was in the
unaccustomed position of having to maintain a not too familiar and not
too distant line of deportment. Edith and Jack felt the responsibility
of having put an incongruous company on thin conventional ice. It was
only the easy-going Miss Tavish and two or three others who carried
along their own animal spirits and love of amusement who enjoyed the
chance of a possible contretemps.

And yet the dinner was providentially arranged. If these people had not
met socially, this history would have been different from what it must
be. The lives of several of them were appreciably modified by this
meeting. It is too much to say that Father Damon's notion of the means
by which such men as Henderson succeed was changed, but personal contact
with the man may have modified his utterances about him, and he may have
turned his mind to the uses to which his wealth might be applied rather
than to the means by which he obtained it. Carmen's ingenuous interest
in his work may have encouraged the hope that at least a portion of this
fortune might be rescued to charitable uses. For Carmen, dining with
Mrs. Schuyler Blunt was a distinct gain, and indirectly opened many
other hitherto exclusive doors. That lady may not have changed her
opinion about Carmen, but she was good-natured and infected by the
incoming social tolerance; and as to Henderson, she declared that he was
an exceedingly well-bred man, and she did not believe half the stories
about him. Henderson himself at once appreciated the talents of Mavick,
gauged him perfectly, and saw what services he might be capable of
rendering at Washington. Mr. Mavick appreciated the advantage of a
connection with such a capitalist, and of having open to him another
luxurious house in New York. At the dinner-table Carmen and Mr. Mavick
had not exchanged a dozen remarks before these clever people felt that
they were congenial spirits. It was in the smoking-room that Henderson
and Mavick fell into an interesting conversation, which resulted in an
invitation for Mavick to drop in at Henderson's office in the morning.
The dinner had not been a brilliant one. Henderson found it not easy to
select topics equally interesting to Mrs. Delancy and Mrs. Blunt, and
finally fell into geographical information to the latter about Mexico
and Honduras. For Edith, the sole relief of the evening was an exchange
of sympathy with Father Damon, and she was too much preoccupied to enjoy
that. As for Carmen, placed between Jack and Mr. Mavick, and conscious
that the eyes of Mrs. Blunt were on her, she was taking a subdued role,
which Jack found much less attractive than her common mood. But this was
not her only self-sacrifice of the evening. She went without her usual
cigarette.

To Edith the dinner was a revelation of new difficulties in the life
she proposed for herself, though they were rather felt than distinctly
reasoned about. The social atmosphere was distasteful; its elements were
out of harmony with her ideals. Not that this society was new to her,
but that she saw it in a new light. Before her marriage all these
things had been indifferent to this high-spirited girl. They were merely
incidents of the social state into which she was born, and she pursued
her way among them, having a tolerably clear conception of what her own
life should be, with little recognition of their tendencies. Were only
her own life concerned, they would still be indifferent to her. But
something had happened. That which is counted the best thing in life had
come to her, that best thing which is the touchstone of character as
it is of all conditions, and which so often introduces inextricable
complications. She had fallen in love with Jack Delancy and married him.

The first effect of this was to awake and enlarge what philosophers
would call her enthusiasm of humanity. The second effect was to show
her--and this was what this little dinner emphasized--that she had put
limitations upon herself and taken on unthought-of responsibilities. To
put this sort of life one side, or make it secondary to her own idea
of a useful and happy life, would have been easy but for one thing--she
loved Jack. This philosophic reasoning about it does her injustice. It
did not occur to her that she could go her way and let him go his way.
Nor must it be supposed that the problem seemed as grave to her as
it really was--the danger of frittering away her own higher nature in
faithfulness to one of the noblest impulses of that nature. Yet this is
the way that so many trials of life come, and it is the greatest test
of character. She felt--as many women do feel--that if she retained her
husband's love all would be well, and the danger involved to herself
probably did not cross her mind.

But what did cross her mind was that these associations meant only evil
for Jack, and that to be absorbed in the sort of life that seemed to
please him was for her to drift away from all her ideals.

A confused notion of all this was in her thoughts when she talked with
Father Damon, while the gentlemen were in the smoking-room. She asked
him about his mission.

“The interest continues,” he replied; “but your East Side, Mrs. Delancy,
is a puzzling place.”

“How so?”

“Perhaps you'll laugh if I say there is too much intelligence.”

Edith did laugh, and then said: “Then you'd better move your mission
over to this side. Here is a field of good, unadulterated worldliness.
But what, exactly, do you mean?”

“Well, the attempt of science to solve the problem of sin and
wretchedness. What can you expect when the people are socialists and
their leaders agnostics?”

“But I thought you were something of a socialist yourself!”

“So I am,” he said, frankly, “when I see the present injustice, the
iniquitous laws and combinations that leave these people so little
chance. They are ignorant, and expect the impossible; but they are right
in many things, and I go with them. But my motive is not theirs. I hope
not. There is no hope except in a spiritual life. Materialism down at
the bottom of society is no better than materialism at the top. Do you
know,” he went on, with increased warmth, “that pessimism is rather the
rule over that side, and that many of those who labor most among the
poor have the least hope of ever making things substantially better?”

“But such unselfish people as Dr. Leigh do a great deal of good,” Edith
suggested.

“Yes,” he said reflecting--“yes, I have no doubt. I don't understand it.
She is not hopeful. She sees nothing beyond. I don't know what keeps her
up.”

“Love of humanity, perhaps.”

“I wish the phrase had never been invented. Religion of humanity! The
work is to save the souls of those people.”

“But,” said Edith, with a flush of earnestness “but, Father Damon, isn't
human love the greatest power to save?”

The priest looked at the girl. His face softened, and he said, more
gently, “I don't know. Of the soul, yes. But human love is so apt to
stand in the way of the higher life.”

In her soul Edith resented this as an ascetic and priestly view; but she
knew his devotion to that humanity which he in vain tried to eliminate
from his austere life, and she turned the talk lightly by saying, “Ah,
that is your theory. But I am coming over soon, and shall expect you and
Dr. Leigh to take me about.”


The next morning Mr. Mavick's card gave him instant admission to the
inner office of Mr. Henderson, the approach to whom was more carefully
guarded than that to the President of the United States. This was not
merely necessary to save him from the importunities of cranks who might
carry concealed dynamite arguments, but as well to protect him from
hundreds of business men with whom he was indirectly dealing, and with
whom he wished to evade explanations. He thoroughly understood the
advantages of delay. He also understood the value of the mystery that
attends inaccessibility. Even Mr. Mavick himself was impressed by the
show of ceremony, by the army of clerks, and by the signs of complete
organization. He knew that the visitor was specially favored who
penetrated these precincts so far as to get an interview, usually
fruitless, with Henderson's confidential man. This confidential man
was a very grave and confidence-begetting person, who dealt out dubious
hints and promises, and did not at all mind when Henderson found it
necessary to repudiate as unauthorized anything that had been apparently
said in his name. To be sure, this gave a general impression that
Henderson was an inscrutable man to deal with, but at the same time
it was confessed that his spoken word could be depended on. Anything
written might, it is true, lead to litigation, and this gave rise to a
saying in the Street that Henderson's word was better than his bond.

Henderson was not a politician, but he was a friend of politicians. It
was said that he contributed about equally to both sides in a political
campaign, and that this showed patriotism more than partisanship. It was
for his interest to have friends on both sides in Congress, and friends
in the Cabinet, and it was even hinted that he was concerned to have
men whose economic and financial theories accorded with his own on the
Supreme Bench. He had unlimited confidence in the power of money. His
visitor of the morning was not unlike him in many respects. He also was
not a politician. He would have described himself as a governmental
man, and had a theory of running the government with as little popular
interference as possible. He regarded himself as belonging to the
governing class.

Between these two men, who each had his own interests in view, there was
naturally an apparent putting aside of reserve.

“I was very glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Mavick,” said Henderson,
cordially. “I have known of you for a long time.”

“Yes? I've been in the employ of the government for some time.”

“And I suppose it pays pretty well,” said Henderson, smilingly.

“Oh, extravagantly,” Mavick rejoined, in the same spirit. “You just
about get your board and clothes out of government. Your washing is
another thing. You are expected, you know, to have your washing done
where you vote.”

“Well, it's a sure thing.”

“Yes, till you are turned out. You know the theory at Washington is that
virtue is its own reward. Tom Fakeltree says it's enough.”

“I wonder how he knows?”

“Observation, probably. Tom startled a dinner table the other day with
the remark that when a man once gives himself up to the full enjoyment
of a virtuous life, it seems strange to him that more people do not
follow his example.”

“The trouble with the virtue of Washington is that it always wants to
interfere with other people's business. Fellows like Tom are always
hunting up mares' nests in order to be paid for breaking them up.”

“I can't say about Tom,” rejoined Mavick. “I suppose it is necessary to
live.”

“I suppose so. And that goes along with another proposition--that the
successful have no rights which the unsuccessful are bound to respect.
As soon as a man gets ahead,” Henderson continued, with a tone of
bitterness, “the whole pack are trying to pull him down. A capitalist
is a public enemy. Why, look at that Hodge bill! Strikes directly at the
ability of the railways to develop the country. Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” Mavick admitted; “the drawer of it was good enough to consult me
on its constitutionality. It's a mighty queer bill.”

“It can't get through the Senate,” said Henderson; “but it's a bother.
Such schemes are coming up all the time, and they unsettle business.
These fellows need watching.”

“And managing,” added Mavick.

“Exactly. I can't be in Washington all the time. And I need to know what
is going on every twenty-four hours from the inside. I can't rely on
politicians or lobbyists.”

“Well,” said Mr. Mavick, in his easiest manner, “that's easy enough. You
want a disinterested friend.”

Henderson nodded, but did not even smile, and the talk went on about
other measures, and confidentially about certain men in Washington,
until, after twenty minutes' conversation, the two men came to a perfect
understanding. When Mavick arose to go they shook hands even more
cordially than at first, and Henderson said:

“Well, I expect to hear from you, and remember that our house will
always be your home in the city.”




IX

It seemed very fortunate to Jack Delancy that he should have such
a clever woman as Carmen for his confidante, a man so powerful as
Henderson as his backer, and a person so omniscient as Mavick for his
friend. No combination could be more desirable for a young man who
proposed to himself a career of getting money by adroit management and
spending it in pure and simple self-indulgence. There are plenty of men
who have taken advantage of like conditions to climb from one position
to another, and have then kicked down the ladders behind them as fast as
they attained a new footing. It was Jack's fault that he was not one of
these. You could scarcely dignify his character by saying that he had
an aim, except to saunter through life with as little personal
inconvenience as possible. His selfishness was boneless. It was not
by any means negative, for no part of his amiable nature was better
developed than regard for his own care and comfort; but it was not
strong enough to give him Henderson's capacity for hard work and even
self-denial, nor Mavick's cool, persevering skill in making a way for
himself in the world. Why was not Edith his confidante? His respect for
her was undoubted; his love for her was unquestioned; his trust in her
was absolute. And yet with either Carmen or Miss Tavish he fell into
confidential revelations of himself which instinctively he did not make
to Edith. The explanation of this is on the surface, and it is the key
to half the unhappiness in domestic life. He felt that Edith was not in
sympathy with the associations and the life he was leading. The pitiful
and hopeless part of it is that if she had been in sympathy with them,
Jack would have gone on in his frivolous career at an accelerated pace.
It was not absence of love, it was not unfaithfulness, that made Jack
enjoy the hours he spent with Carmen, or with the pleasing and not too
fastidious Miss Tavish, with a zest that was wanting to his hours at
home. If he had been upon a sinking steamboat with the three women,
and could have saved only one of them, he would not have had a moment's
hesitation in rescuing Edith and letting the other two sink out of his
life. The character is not unusual, nor the situation uncommon. What is
a woman to do? Her very virtues are enemies of her peace; if she appears
as a constant check and monitor, she repels; if she weakly acquiesces,
the stream will flow over both of them. The dilemma seems hopeless.

It would be a mistake to suppose that either Edith or Jack put their
relations in any such definite shape as this. He was unthinking. She was
too high-spirited, too confident of her position, to be assailed by
such fears. And it must be said, since she was a woman, that she had
the consciousness of power which goes along with the possession of
loveliness and keen wit. Those who knew her best knew that under her
serenity was a gay temperament, inherited from the original settlers of
Manhattan, an abounding enjoyment of life, and capacity for passion. It
was early discovered in her childhood that little Edith had a will of
her own.

Lent was over. It was the time of the twittering of sparrows, of the
opening of windows, of putting in order the little sentimental spots
called “squares,” where the poor children get their idea of forests, and
the rich renew their faint recollections of innocence and country life;
when the hawkers go about the streets, and the hand-organs celebrate the
return of spring and the possibility of love. Even the idle felt that it
was a time for relaxation and quiet.

“Have you answered Miss Tavish's invitation?” asked Jack one morning at
the breakfast-table.

“Not yet. I shall decline today for myself.”

“Why? It's for charity.”

“Well, my charity extends to Miss Tavish. I don't want to see her
dance.”

“That leaves me in a nice hole. I said I'd go.”

“And why not? You go to a good many places you don't take me--the clubs,
brokers' offices, Stalker's, the Conventional, and--”

“Oh, go on. Why do you object to my going to see this dance?”

“My dear Jack,” said Edith, “I haven't objected the least in the world;”
 and her animated face sparkled with a smile, which seemed to irritate
Jack more than a frown would have done.

“I don't see why you set yourself up. I'll bet Miss Tavish will raise
more money for the Baxter Street Guild, yes, and do more good, than you
and the priest and that woman doctor slopping about on the East Side in
six months.”

“Very likely,” replied Edith, still with the same good-humored smile.
“But, Jack, it's delightful to see your philanthropic spirit stirred up
in this way. You ought to be encouraged. Why don't you join Miss Tavish
in this charity? I have no doubt that if it was advertised that Miss
Tavish and Mr. Jack Delancy would dance for the benefit of an East Side
guild in the biggest hall in the city, there wouldn't be standing room.”

“Oh, bosh!” said Jack, getting up from his chair and striding about the
room, with more irritation than he had ever shown to Edith before. “I
wouldn't be a prude.”

Edith's eyes flashed and her face flushed, but her smile came back in
a moment, and she was serene again. “Come here, Jack. Now, old fellow,
look me straight in the eyes, and tell me if you would like to have
me dance the serpentine dance before a drawing-room full of gossiping
women, with, as you say, just a few men peeping in at the doors.”

Jack did look, and the serene eyes, yet dancing with amusement at the
incongruous picture, seemed to take a warmer glow of love and pleading.

“Oh, hang it! that's different,” and he stooped and gave her an awkward
kiss.

“I'm glad you know it's different,” she said, with a laugh that had not
a trace of mockery in it; “and since you do, you'd better go along and
do your charity, and I'll stay at home, and try to be--different when
you come back.”

And Jack went; with a little feeling of sheepishness that he would not
have acknowledged at the time, and he found himself in a company where
he was entirely at his ease. He admired the dancing of the blithe,
graceful girl, he applauded her as the rest did with hand-clapping and
bravas, and said it was ravishing. It all suited him perfectly. And
somehow, in the midst of it all, in the sensuous abandon of this
electric-light eccentricity at mid-day, he had a fleeting vision of
something very different, of a womanhood of another sort, and a flush
came to his face for a moment as he imagined Edith in a skirt dance
under the gaze of this sensation-loving society. But this was only for
a moment. When he congratulated Miss Tavish his admiration was entirely
sincere; and the girl, excited with her physical triumph, seemed to him
as one emancipated out of acquired prudishness into the Greek enjoyment
of life. Miss Tavish, who would not for the world have violated one of
the social conventions of her set, longed, as many women do, for the
sort of freedom and the sort of applause which belongs to women who
succeed upon the stage. Not that she would have forfeited her position
by dancing at a theatre for money; but; within limits, she craved the
excitement, the abandon, the admiration, that her grace and passion
could win. This was not at all the ambition which led the Egyptian queen
Hatshepsu to assume the dress of a man, but rather that more famous
aspiration which led the daughter of Herodias, in a pleasure-loving
court, to imitate and excel the professional dancing-girls. If in
this inclination of the women of the day, which is not new, but has
characterized all societies to which wealth has brought idleness, there
was a note of demoralization, it did not seem so to Jack, who found the
world day by day more pleasing and more complaisant.

As the months went by, everything prospered with him on his drifting
voyage. Of all voyages, that is the easiest to make which has no port
in view, that depends upon the varying winds, if the winds happen to
be soft and the chance harbors agreeable. Jack was envied, thanks to
Henderson. He was lucky in whatever he touched. Without any change in
his idle habits, and with no more attention to business than formerly,
money came to him so freely that he not only had a complacent notion
that he was a favorite of fortune, but the idea of his own importance
in the financial world increased enormously, much to the amusement of
Mavick, when he was occasionally in the city, to whom he talked
somewhat largely of his operations, and who knew that he had no more
comprehension of the sweep of Henderson's schemes than a baby has of the
stock exchange when he claps his hands with delight at the click of the
ticker.

His prosperity was visible. It showed in the increase of his accounts
at the Union, in his indifference to limits in the game of poker, in a
handsome pair of horses which he insisted on Edith's accepting for her
own use, in an increased scale of living at home, in the hundred ways
that a man of fashion can squander money in a luxurious city. If he
did not haunt the second-hand book-shops or the stalls of dealers in
engravings, or bring home as much bric-a-brac as he once had done, it
was because his mind was otherwise engaged; his tailor's bills were
longer, and there were more expensive lunches at the clubs, at which
there was a great deal of sage talk about stocks and combinations, and
much wisdom exhibited in regard to wines; and then there were the little
suppers at Wherry's after the theatres, which a bird could have eaten
and a fish have drunken, and only a spendthrift have paid for.

“It is absurd,” Edith had said one night after their return. “It makes
us ridiculous in the eyes of anybody but fools.” And Jack had flared up
about it, and declared that he knew what he could afford, and she had
retorted that as for her she would not countenance it. And Jack had
attempted to pass it off lightly, at last, by saying, “Very well then,
dear, if you won't back me, I shall have to rely upon my bankers.”
 At any rate, neither Carmen nor Miss Tavish took him to task. They
complimented him on his taste, and Carmen made him feel that she
appreciated his independence and his courage in living the life that
suited him. She knew, indeed, how much he made in his speculations, how
much he lost at cards; she knew through him the gossip of the clubs,
and venturing herself not too far at sea, liked to watch the undertow of
fashionable life. And she liked Jack, and was not incapable of throwing
him a rope when the hour came that he was likely to be swept away by
that undertow.

It was remarked at the Union, and by the men in the Street who knew him,
that Jack was getting rapid. But no one thought the less of him for his
pace--that is, no one appeared to, for this sort of estimate of a man
is only tested by his misfortunes, when the day comes that he must seek
financial backing. In these days he was generally in an expansive mood,
and his free hand and good-humor increased his popularity. There were
those who said that there were millions of family money back of Jack,
and that he had recently come in for something handsome.

But this story did not deceive Major Fairfax, whose business it was to
know to a dot the standing of everybody in society, in which he was a
sort of oracle and privileged favorite. No one could tell exactly how
the Major lived; no one knew the rigid economy that he practiced; no one
had ever seen his small dingy chamber in a cheap lodging-house. The name
of Fairfax was as good as a letter of introduction in the metropolis,
and the Major had lived on it for years, on that and a carefully nursed
little income--an habitue of the club, and a methodical cultivator of
the art of dining out. A most agreeable man, and perhaps the wisest man
in his generation in those things about which it would be as well not to
know anything.

Seated one afternoon in his favorite corner for street observation, by
the open window, with the evening paper in his hand, in the attitude of
one expecting the usual five o'clock cocktail, he hailed Jack, who was
just coming down-stairs from a protracted lunch.

“I say, Delancy, what's this I hear?”

“About what?” said Jack, sauntering along to a seat opposite the Major,
and touching a bell on the little table as he sat down. Jack's face was
flushed, but he talked with unusual slowness and distinctness. “What
have you heard, Major?”

“That you have bought Benham's yacht.”

“No, I haven't; but I was turning the thing over in my mind,” Jack
replied, with the air of a man declining an appointment in the Cabinet.
“He offers it cheap.”

“My dear boy, there is no such thing as a cheap yacht, any more than
there is a cheap elephant.”

“It's better to buy than build,” Jack insisted. “A man's got to have
some recreation.”

“Recreation! Why don't you charter a Fifth Avenue stage and take your
friends on a voyage to the Battery? That'll make 'em sick enough.”
 It was a misery of the Major's life that, in order to keep in with
necessary friends, he had to accept invitations for cruises on yachts,
and pretend he liked it. Though he had the gout, he vowed he would
rather walk to Newport than go round Point Judith in one of those
tipping tubs. He had tried it, and, as he said afterwards, “The devil of
it was that Mrs. Henderson and Miss Tavish sympathized with me. Gad! it
takes away a person's manhood, that sort of thing.”

The Major sipped his bitters, and then added: “Or I'll tell you what;
if you must do something, start a newspaper--the drama, society, and
letters, that sort of thing, with pictures. I heard Miss Tavish say she
wished she had a newspaper.”

“But,” said Jack, with gravity, “I'm not buying a yacht for Miss
Tavish.”

“I didn't suppose you were. Devilish fine girl, though. I don't care who
you buy it for if you don't buy it for yourself. Why don't you buy it
for Henderson? He can afford it.”

“I'd like to know what you mean, Major Fairfax!” cried Jack. “What
business--”

“There!” exclaimed the Major, sinking back in his chair, with a softened
expression in his society beaten face. “It's no use of nonsense, Jack.
I'm an average old sinner, and I'm not old enough yet to like a milksop.
But I've known you since you were so high, and I knew your father; he
used to stay weeks on my plantation when we were both younger. And your
mother--that was a woman!--did me a kindness once when I was in a d---d
tight place, and I never forgot it. See here, Jack, if I had money
enough I'd buy a yacht and put Carmen and Miss Tavish on it, and send
them off on the longest voyage there is.”

“Who's been talking?” exclaimed Jack, touched a little, but very much
offended.

“The town, Jack. Don't mind the talk. People always talk. I suppose
people talk about me: At your age I should have been angry too at a hint
even from an old friend. But I've learned. It doesn't pay. I don't get
angry any more. Now there's Henderson--”

“What have you got against Henderson?”

“Nothing. He is a very good fellow, for that sort of man. But, Lord!
Henderson is a big machine. You might as well try to stand in with a
combination of gang-saws, or to make friends with the Department of the
Interior. Look at the men who have gone in with Henderson from time
to time. The ground is strewn with them. He's got no more feeling in
business than a reaper-and-binder.”

“I don't know what Henderson's got to do with my having a yacht.”

“I beg your pardon, Jack; it's none of my business. Only I do not put my
investments”--Jack smiled faintly, as if the conversation were taking
a humorous turn--“at the mercy of Henderson's schemes. If I did, I
wouldn't try to run a yacht at the same time. I should be afraid that
some day when I got to sea I should find myself out of coal. You know,
my boy, that the good book says you cannot serve two masters.”

“Nobody ever accused you of that, Major,” retorted Jack, with a laugh.
“But what two have you in mind?”

“Oh, I don't mean anything personal. I just use names as typical. Say
Henderson and Carmen.” And the Major leaned back and tapped his fingers
together, as if he were putting a general proposition.

Jack flushed, and then thought a moment--it would be ridiculous to get
angry with old Fairfax--and then said: “Major, if I were you, I wouldn't
have anything to do with either of them. You'll spoil your digestion.”

“Umph!” the Major grunted, as he rose from his chair. “This is an age of
impudence. There's no more respect for gray hair than if it were dyed.
I cannot waste any more time on you. I've got an early dinner. Devilish
uphill work trying to encourage people who dine at seven. But, my boy,
think on these things, as the saint says.”

And the old fellow limped away. There was one good thing about the
Major. He stood up in church every Sunday and read his prayers, like a
faithful old sinner as he was.

Jack, sobered by the talk, walked home in a very irritated mood, blaming
everybody except himself. For old Fairfax's opinion he didn't care, but
evidently the old fellow represented a lot of gossip. He wished people
would mind their own business. His irritation was a little appeased by
Edith's gay and loving greeting; but she, who knew every shade of his
face, saw it.

“Have you had a worrying day?”

“No; not specially. I've had an hour of old Fairfax, who hasn't any
business of his own to attend to.”

“Oh, nobody minds the Major,” Edith said, as she gave him a shake and
another kiss; but a sharp pang went through her heart, for she guessed
what had happened, since she had had a visit that afternoon from another
plain-speaking person.

They were staying late in town. Edith, who did not care to travel far,
was going presently to a little cottage by the sea, and Mrs. Schuyler
Blunt had looked in for a moment to say good-by before she went up to
her Lenox house.

“It's only an old farmhouse made over,” Mrs. Blunt was saying; “hardly
smart enough to ask anybody to, but we hope to have you and Jack there
some time.”

“That would be very nice. I hear Lenox is more beautiful than ever.”

“Yes, it is, and about as difficult to get into as the kingdom of
heaven. It's being spoiled for moderate people. The Hendersons and the
Van Dams and that sort are in a race to see who shall build houses with
the biggest rooms, and give the most expensive entertainments. It's all
show. The old flavor has gone.”

“But they cannot spoil the scenery.”.

“My child, they are the scenery. You can't see anything else. It doesn't
bother me, but some of my old neighbors are just ruining themselves
trying to keep the pace. I do think the Americans are the biggest fools
on earth.”

“Father Damon says the trouble is we haven't any middle class for a
balance.”

“Yes, that's the English of it. But it's a pity that fashion has got
hold of the country, and is turning our summers into a worry and a
burden. I thought years ago when we went to Lenox that it was a
good thing the country was getting to be the fashion; but now it's
fashionable, and before we know it every desirable spot will be what
they call syndicated. Miss Tavish says she is coming to visit the
Hendersons there.”

“I thought she went to Bar Harbor.”

“But she is coming down for part of the season. These people don't stay
anywhere. Just long enough in one place to upset everything with their
extravagance. That's the reason I didn't ask you and Jack up this
summer.”

“Thank you, we couldn't go, you know,” said Edith, simply, and then,
with curiosity in her eyes, asked; “but I don't quite understand what's
the reason.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Blunt, as if nerving herself up to say what must be
said, “I thought perhaps you wouldn't like to be where they are.”

“I don't know why I should or why I should not,” Edith replied.

“Nor have Jack with them,” continued Mrs. Blunt, stoutly.

“What do you mean, Mrs. Blunt?” cried Edith, her brown eyes flaming.

“Don't turn on me, Edith dear. I oughtn't to have said anything. But I
thought it was my duty. Of course it is only talk.”

“Well?”

“That Jack is always with one or the other of those women.”

“It is false!” cried Edith, starting up, with tears now in her eyes;
“it's a cruel lie if it means anything wrong in Jack. So am I with those
women; so are you. It's a shame. If you hear any one say such things,
you can tell them for me that I despise them.”

“I said it was a shame, all such talk. I said it was nonsense. But,
dear, as a friend, oughtn't I to tell you?” And the kind-hearted gossip
put her arm round Edith, and kept saying that she perfectly understood
it, and that nobody really meant anything. But Edith was crying now,
with a heart both hurt and indignant.

“It's a most hateful world, I know,” Mrs. Blunt answered; “but it's the
best we have, and it's no use to fret about it.”

When the visitor had gone, Edith sat a long time in misery. It was the
first real shock of her married life. And in her heart she prayed. For
Jack? Oh no. The dear girl prayed for herself, that suspicions might not
enter her heart. She could not endure that the world should talk thus of
him. That was all. And when she had thought it all over and grown
calm, she went to her desk and wrote a note to Carmen. It asked Mrs.
Henderson, as they were so soon to leave town, to do her the favor to
come round informally and lunch with her the next day, and afterwards
perhaps a little drive in the Park.




X

Jack was grateful for Edith's intervention. He comprehended that she had
stepped forward as a shield to him in the gossip about Carmen. He showed
his appreciation in certain lover-like attentions and in a gayety of
manner, but it was not in his nature to feel the sacrifice she had made
or its full magnanimity; he was relieved, and in a manner absolved.
Another sort of woman might have made him very uncomfortable. Instead of
being rebuked he had a new sense of freedom.

“Not one woman in a thousand would have done it,” was the comment of
Major Fairfax when he heard of the drive in the Park. “Gad! most of
'em would have cut Carmen dead and put Jack in Coventry, and then there
would have been the devil to pay. It takes quality, though; she's such
a woman as Jack's mother. If there were not one of them now and then
society would deliquesce.” And the Major knew, for his principal
experience had been with a deliquescent society.

Whether Carmen admired Mrs. Delancy or thought her weak it is impossible
to say, but she understood the advances made and responded to them, for
they fell in perfectly with her social plans. She even had the face
to eulogize Mrs. Delancy to Jack, her breadth of view, her lack of
prejudice, and she had even dared to say, “My dear friend, she is too
good for us,” and Jack had not protested, but with a laugh had accepted
the implication of his position on a lower moral level. Perhaps he did
not see exactly what it meant, this being on confidential terms about
his wife with another woman; all he cared for at the moment was that the
comradeship of Miss Tavish and Carmen was agreeable to him. They were
no restraint upon him. So long as they remained in town the exchange of
civilities was kept up. Carmen and Miss Tavish were often at his house,
and there was something reassuring to Jack in the openness with which
affairs went on.

Early in June Edith went down to their rented cottage on the south Long
Island shore. In her delicate health the doctor had recommended the
seaside, and this locality as quiet and restful, and not too far from
the whirl of the city. The place had a charm of its own, the charm,
namely, of a wide sky, illimitable, flashing, changing sea, rolling in
from the far tropical South with its message of romance to the barren
Northern shore, and the pure sand dunes, the product of the whippings of
tempests and wild weather. The cottage was in fact an old farmhouse, not
an impertinent, gay, painted piece of architecture set on the sand like
a tent for a month, but a solid, ugly, fascinating habitation, with
barns and outhouses, and shrubs, and an old garden--a place with a salty
air friendly to delicate spring blossoms and summer fruits and foliage.
If it was a farmhouse, the sea was an important part of the farm, and
the low-ceiled rooms suggested cabins; it required little imagination to
fancy that an East-Indian ship had some time come ashore and settled
in the sand, that it had been remodeled and roofed over, and its sides
pierced with casement windows, over which roses had climbed in order to
bind the wanderer to the soil. It had been painted by the sun and the
wind and the salt air, so that its color depended upon the day, and it
was sometimes dull and almost black, or blue-black, under a lowering
sky, and again a golden brown, especially at sunset, and Edith, feeling
its character rather than its appearance to ordinary eyes, had named it
the Golden House. Nature is such a beautiful painter of wood.

With Edith went one of her Baltimore cousins, a young kindergarten
teacher of fine intelligence and sympathetic manner, who brought to
her work a long tradition of gentle breeding and gayety and
simplicity--qualities which all children are sure to recognize. What a
hopeful thing it is, by-the-way, in the world, that all conditions of
people know a lady at sight! Jack found the place delightful. He liked
its quaintness, the primitiveness of the farmer-fisherman neighbors, he
liked the sea. And then he could run up to the city any morning and back
at night. He spent the summer with Edith at the Golden House. This was
his theory. When he went to town in the morning he expected to return at
night. But often he telegraphed in the afternoon that he was detained by
business; he had to see Henderson, or Mavick was over from Washington.
Occasionally, but not often, he missed the train. He had too keen a
sense of the ridiculous to miss the train often. When he was detained
over for two or three days, or the better part of the week, he wrote
Edith dashing, hurried letters, speaking of ever so many places he had
been to and ever so many people he had seen--yes, Carmen and Miss Tavish
and everybody who was in town, and he did not say too much about the hot
city and its discomforts.

Henderson's affairs kept him in town, Miss Tavish still postponed Bar
Harbor, and Carmen willingly remained. She knew the comfort of a big New
York house when the season is over, when no social duties are required,
and one is at leisure to lounge about in cool costumes, to read or
dream, to open the windows at night for the salt breeze from the bay, to
take little excursions by boat or rail, to dine al fresco in the garden
of some semi-foreign hotel, to taste the unconventional pleasures of the
town, as if one were in some foreign city. She used to say that New York
in matting and hollands was almost as nice as Buda-Pesth. These were
really summer nights, operatic sorts of nights, with music floating in
the air, gay groups in the streets, a stage imitation of nature in the
squares with the thick foliage and the heavy shadows cast on the asphalt
by the electric lights, the brilliant shops, the nonsense of the summer
theatres, where no one expected anything, and no one was disappointed,
the general air of enjoyment, and the suggestion of intrigue. Sometimes,
when Mavick was over, a party was made up for the East Side, to see the
foreign costumes, the picturesque street markets, the dime museums, and
the serious, tragical theatres of the people. The East Side was left
pretty much to itself, now that the winter philanthropists had gone
away, and was enjoying its summer nights and its irresponsible poverty.

They even looked in at Father Damon's chapel, the dimly lighted fragrant
refuge from the world and from sin. Why not? They were interested in the
morals of the region. Had not Miss Tavish danced for one of the guilds;
and had not Carmen given Father Damon a handsome check in support of
his mission? It was so satisfactory to go into such a place and see
the penitents kneeling here and there, the little group of very plainly
dressed sinners attracted by Father Damon's spiritual face and unselfish
enthusiasm. Carmen said she felt like kneeling at one of the little
boxes and confessing--the sins of her neighbors. And then the
four--Carmen, Miss Tavish, Mavick, and Jack--had a little supper
at Wherry's, which they enjoyed all the more for the good action of
visiting the East Side--a little supper which lasted very late, and was
more and more enjoyed as it went on, and was, in fact, so gay that when
the ladies were set down at their houses, Jack insisted on dragging
Mavick off to the Beefsteak Club and having something manly to drink;
and while they drank he analyzed the comparative attractions of Carmen
and Miss Tavish; he liked that kind of women, no nonsense in them; and
presently he wandered a little and lost the cue of his analysis, and,
seizing Mavick by the arm, and regarding him earnestly, in a burst of
confidence declared that, notwithstanding all appearances, Edith was the
dearest girl in the world.

It was at this supper that the famous society was formed, which the
newspapers ridiculed, and which deceived so many excellent people in New
York because it seemed to be in harmony with the philanthropic endeavor
of the time, but which was only an expression of the Mephistophelian
spirit of Carmen--the Society for Supplying Two Suspenders to Those who
have only One.

By the end of June there was no more doubt about the heat of the town
than about its odors. The fashionable residence part was dismantled and
deserted. At least miles and miles of houses seemed to be closed.
Few carriages were seen in this quarter, the throngs of fashion had
disappeared, comparatively few women were about, and those that appeared
in the Sunday promenade were evidently sight-seers and idlers from other
quarters; the throng of devotees was gone from the churches, and indeed
in many of them services were suspended till a more convenient season.
The hotels, to be sure, were full of travelers, and the club-houses
had more habitues than usual, and were more needed by the members whose
families had gone into the country.

Notwithstanding the silence and vacation aspect of up-town, the public
conveyances were still thronged, and a census would have shown no such
diminution of population as seemed. Indeed, while nobody was in town,
except accidentally, the greater portion of it presented a more animated
appearance than usual, especially at night, on account of the open
windows, the groups on door-steps and curb-stones, and the restless
throng in the streets-buyers and sellers and idlers. To most this
outdoor life was a great enjoyment, and to them the unclean streets with
the odors and exhalations of decay were homelike and congenial. Nor did
they seem surprised that a new country should so completely reproduce
the evil smells and nastiness of the old civilization. It was
all familiar and picturesque. Work still went on in the crowded
tenement-houses, and sickness simply changed its character, death
showing an increased friendliness to young children. Some impression
was of course made by the agents of various charities, the guilds and
settlements bravely strove at their posts, some of the churches kept
their flags flying on the borders of the industrial districts, the Good
Samaritans of the Fresh-air Fund were active, the public dispensaries
did a thriving business, and the little band of self-sacrificing
doctors, most of them women, went their rounds among the poor, the sick,
and the friendless.

Among them Ruth Leigh was one who never took a vacation. There was no
time for it. The greater the heat, the more noisome the town, the more
people became ill from decaying food and bad air and bad habits, the
more people were hungry from improvidence or lack of work, the more were
her daily visits a necessity; and though she was weary of her monotonous
work, and heart-sick at its small result in such a mass, there never
came a day when she could quit it. She made no reputation in her
profession by this course; perhaps she awoke little gratitude from those
she served, and certainly had not so much of their confidence as the
quacks who imposed upon them and took their money; and she was not
heartened much by hope of anything better in this world or any other;
and as for pay, if there was enough of that to clothe her decently, she
apparently did not spend it on herself.

It was, in short, wholly inexplicable that this little woman should
simply go about doing good, without any ulterior purpose whatever, not
even notoriety. Did she love these people? She did not ever say anything
about that. In the Knights of Labor circle, and in the little clubs
for the study of social questions, which she could only get leisure to
attend infrequently, she was not at all demonstrative about any religion
of humanity. Perhaps she simply felt that she was a part of these
people, and that whether they rejected her or received her, there was
nothing for her to do but to give herself to them. She would probably
have been surprised if Father Damon had told her that she was in this
following a great example, and there might have been a tang of agnostic
bitterness in her reply. When she thought of it the condition seemed to
her hopeless, and the attitude of what was called civilization
towards it so remorseless and indifferent, and that of Christianity so
pharisaical. If she ever lost her temper, it was when she let her mind
run in this nihilistic channel, in bitterness against the whole social
organization, and the total outcome of civilization so far as the mass
of humanity is concerned.

One day Father Damon climbed up to the top of a wretched tenement in
Baxter Street in search of a German girl, an impulsive and pretty girl
of fifteen, whom he had missed for several days at the chapel services.
He had been in the room before. It was not one of the worst, for though
small and containing a cook-stove, a large bed, and a chest of drawers,
there was an attempt to make it tidy. In a dark closet opening out from
it was another large bed. As he knocked and opened the door, he saw that
Gretchen was not at home. Her father sat in a rocking-chair by an open
window, on the sill of which stood a pot of carnations, the Easter gift
of St. George's, a wax-faced, hollow-eyed man of gentle manners, who
looked round wearily at the priest. The mother was washing clothes in a
tub in one corner; in another corner was a half-finished garment from a
slop-shop. The woman alternated the needle at night and the tub in the
daytime. Seated on the bed, with a thin, sick child in her arms, was
Dr. Leigh. As she looked up a perfectly radiant smile illuminated her
usually plain face, an unworldly expression of such purity and
happiness that she seemed actually beautiful to the priest, who stopped,
hesitating, upon the threshold.

“Oh, you needn't be afraid to come in, Father Damon,” she cried out; “it
isn't contagious--only rash.”

Father Damon, who would as readily have walked through a pestilence
as in a flower-garden, only smiled at this banter, and replied, after
speaking to the sick man, and returning in German the greeting of the
woman, who had turned from the tub, “I've no doubt you are disappointed
that it isn't contagious!” And then, to the mother: “Where is Gretchen?
She doesn't come to the chapel.”

“Nein,” replied the woman, in a mixture of German and English, “it don't
come any more in dot place; it be in a shtore now; it be good girl.”

“What, all day?”

“Yaas, by six o'clock, and abends so spate. Not much it get, but my man
can't earn nothing any more.” And the woman, as she looked at him, wiped
her eyes with the corner of her apron.

“But, on Sunday?” Father Damon asked, still further.

“Vell, it be so tired, and goed up by de Park with Dick Loosing and dem
oder girls.”

“Don't you think it better, Father Damon,” Dr. Leigh interposed, “that
Gretchen should have fresh air and some recreation on Sunday?”

“Und such bootiful tings by de Museum,” added the mother.

“Perhaps,” said he, with something like a frown on his face, and then
changed the subject to the sick child. He did not care to argue the
matter when Dr. Leigh was present, but he resolved to come again and
explain to the mother that her daughter needed some restraining power
other than her own impulse, and that without religious guidance she was
pretty certain to drift into frivolous and vulgar if not positively bad
ways. The father was a free-thinker; but Father Damon thought he had
some hold on the mother, who was of the Lutheran communion, but had
followed her husband so far as to become indifferent to anything but
their daily struggle for life. Yet she had a mother's instinct about the
danger to her daughter, and had been pleased to have her go to Father
Damon's chapel.

And, besides, he could not bring himself in that presence to seem
to rebuke Ruth Leigh. Was she not practically doing what his Lord
did--going about healing the sick, sympathizing with the poor and
the discouraged, taking upon herself the burden of the disconsolate,
literally, without thought of self, sharing, as it were, the misery and
sin of this awful city? And today, for the first time, he seemed to
have seen the woman in her--or was it the saint? and he recalled
that wonderful illumination of her plain face that made her actually
beautiful as she looked up from the little waif of humanity she held in
her arms. It had startled him, and struck a new chord in his heart, and
planted a new pang there that she had no belief in a future life.

It did not occur to him that the sudden joy in her face might have been
evoked by seeing him, for it was a long time since she had seen him. Nor
did he think that the pang at his heart had another cause than religious
anxiety. Ah, priest and worldly saint, how subtle and enduring are the
primal instincts of human nature!

“Yes,” he said, as they walked away, in reply to her inquiry as to his
absence, “I have been in retreat a couple of weeks.”

“I suppose,” she said, softly, “you needed the rest; though,” and she
looked at him professionally, “if you will allow me to say it, it seems
to me that you have not rested enough.”

“I needed strength”--and it was the priest that spoke--“in meditation
and prayer to draw upon resources not my own.”

“And in fasting, too, I dare say,” she added, with a little smile.

“And why not?” he asked.

“Pardon me,” she said; “I don't pretend to know what you need. I need
to eat, though Heaven knows it's hard enough to keep up an appetite down
here. But it is physical endurance you need for the work here. Do you
think fasting strengthens you to go through your work night and day?”

“I know I couldn't do it on my own strength.” And Dr. Leigh recalled
times when she had seen him officiating in the chapel apparently
sustained by nothing but zeal and pure spirit, and wondered that he did
not faint and fall. And faint and fall he did, she was sure, when the
service was over.

“Well, it may be necessary to you, but not as an example to these
people. I see enough involuntary fasting.”

“We look at these people from different points of view, I fear.”
 And after a moment he said: “But, doctor, I wanted to ask you about
Gretchen. You see her?”

“Occasionally. She works too many hours, but she seems to be getting on
very well, and brings her mother all she earns.”

“Do you think she is able to stand alone?”

Dr. Leigh winced a little at this searching question, for no one knew
better than she the vulgarizing influence of street life and chance
associations upon a young girl, and the temptations. She was even forced
to admit the value in the way of restraint, as a sort of police force,
of the church and priestly influence, especially upon girls at the
susceptible age. But she knew that Father Damon meant something more
than this, and so she answered:

“But people have got to stand alone. She might as well begin.”

“But she is so young.”

“Yes, I know. She is in the way of temptation, but so long as she works
industriously, and loves her mother, and feels the obligation, which the
poor very easily feel, of doing her share for the family, she is not
in so much moral danger as other girls of her age who lead idle and
self-indulgent lives. The working-girls of the city learn to protect
themselves.”

“And you think this is enough, without any sort of religion--that this
East Side can go on without any spiritual life?”

Ruth Leigh made a gesture of impatience. In view of the actual struggle
for existence she saw around her, this talk seemed like cant. And she
said:

“I don't know that anything can go on. Let me ask you a question, Father
Damon. Do you think there is any more spirituality, any more of the
essentials of what you call Christianity, in the society of the other
side than there is on the East Side?”

“It is a deep question, this of spirituality,” replied Father Damon, who
was in the depths of his proselyting action a democrat and in sympathy
with the people, and rated quite at its full value the conventional
fashion in religion. “I shouldn't like to judge, but there is a great
body of Christian men and women in this city who are doing noble work.”

“Yes,” replied the little doctor, bitterly, “trying to save themselves.
How many are trying to save others--others except the distant and
foreign sinners?”

“You surely cannot ignore,” replied the father, still speaking mildly,
“the immense amount of charitable work done by the churches!”

“Yes, I know; charity, charity, the condescension of the rich to the
poor. What we want are understanding, fellowship, and we get alms! If
there is so much spirituality as you say, and Christianity is what you
say it is today, how happens it that this side is left in filth and
misery and physical wretchedness? You know what it is, and you know the
luxury elsewhere. And you think to bridge over the chasm between classes
with flowers, in pots, yes, and Bible-readers and fashionable visitors
and little aid societies--little palliatives for an awful state of
things. Why, look at it! Last winter the city authorities hauled off the
snow and the refuse from the fashionable avenues, and dumped it down in
the already blockaded and filthy side streets, and left us to struggle
with the increased pneumonia and diphtheria, and general unsanitary
conditions. And you wonder that the little nihilist groups and labor
organizations and associations of agnostics, as you call them, meeting
to study political economy and philosophy, say that the existing state
of things has got to be overturned violently, if those who have the
power and the money continue indifferent.”

“I do not wonder,” replied Father Damon, sadly. “The world is evil, and
I should be as despairing as you are if I did not know there was another
life and another world. I couldn't bear it. Nobody could.”

“And all you've got to offer, then, to this mass of wretchedness,
poverty, ignorance, at close quarters with hunger and disease, is to
grin and bear it, in hope of a reward somewhere else!”

“I think you don't quite--”

The doctor looked up and saw a look of pain on the priest's face.

“Oh,” she hastened to say, almost as impetuously as she had spoken
before, “I don't mean you--I don't mean you. I know what you do. Pardon
me for speaking so. I get so discouraged sometimes.” They stood still a
moment, looking up and down the hot, crowded, odorful street they were
in, with its flaunting rags of poverty and inefficiency. “I see so
little result of what I can do, and there is so little help.”

“I know,” said the father, as they moved along. “I don't see how you can
bear it alone.”

This touched a sore spot, and aroused Ruth Leigh's combativeness. It
seemed to her to approach the verge of cant again. But she knew the
father's absolute sincerity; she felt she had already said too much; and
she only murmured, as if to herself, “If we could only know.” And
then, after a moment, she asked, “Do you, Father Damon, see any sign of
anything better here?”

“Yes, today.” And he spoke very slowly and hesitatingly. “If you will
excuse the personality of it. When I entered that room today, and saw
you with that sick child in your arms, and comprehended what it all
meant, I had a great wave of hope, and I knew, just then, that there is
coming virtue enough in the world to redeem it.”

Ruth was confounded. Her heart seemed to stand still, and then the hot
blood flowed into her face in a crimson flood. “Ah,” escaped from her
lips, and she walked on more swiftly, not daring to look up. This from
him! This recognition from the ascetic father! If one of her dispensary
comrades had said it, would she have been so moved?

And afterwards, when she had parted from him, and gone to her little
room, the hot flush again came to her neck and brow, and she saw his
pale, spiritual face, and could hear the unwonted tenderness of his
voice. Yes, Father Damon had said it of her.




XI

The question has been very much discussed whether the devil, in
temperate latitudes, is busier in the summer or in the winter. When
Congress and the various State legislatures are in session, and the
stock and grain exchanges are most active, and society is gayest,
and the churches and benevolent and reformatory associations are most
aggressive--at this season, which is the cool season, he seems to be
most animated and powerful.

But is not this because he is then most opposed? The stream may not
flow any faster because it is dammed, but it exhibits at the obstructed
points greater appearance of agitation. Many people are under the
impression that when they stop fighting there is a general truce:
There is reason to believe that the arch enemy is pleased with this
impression, that he likes a truce, and that it is his best opportunity,
just as the weeds in the garden, after a tempest, welcome the sun and
the placidity of the elements. It is well known that in summer virtue
suffers from inertia, and that it is difficult to assemble the members
of any vigilant organization, especially in cities, where the flag of
the enemy is never lowered. But wherever the devil is there is always a
quorum present for business. It is not his plan to seek an open fight,
and many observers say that he gains more ground in summer than in any
other season, and this notwithstanding people are more apt to lose their
tempers, and even become profane, in the aggravations of what is known
as spring than at any other time. The subject cannot be pursued here,
but there is ground for supposing that the devil prefers a country where
the temperature is high and pretty uniform.

At any rate, it is true that the development of character is not
arrested by any geniality or languor of nature. By midsummer the
Hendersons were settled in Lenox, where the Blunts had long been, and
Miss Tavish and her party of friends were at Bar Harbor. Henderson was
compelled to be in the city most of the time, and Jack Delancy fancied
that business required his presence there also; but he had bought a
yacht, and contemplated a voyage, with several of the club men, up
the Maine coast. “No, I thank you,” Major Fairfax had said; “I know an
easier way to get to Bar Harbor.”

Jack was irritable and restless, to be sure, in the absence of the
sort of female society he had become accustomed to; but there were many
compensations in his free-and-easy bachelor life, in his pretense of
business, which consisted in watching the ticker, as it is called, in
an occasional interview with Henderson, and in the floating summer
amusements of the relaxed city. There was nothing unusual in this
life except that he needed a little more stimulation, but this was
not strange in the summer, and that he devoted more time to poker--but
everybody knows that a person comes out about even in the game of poker
if he keeps at it long enough--there was nothing unusual in this, only
it was giving Jack a distaste for the quiet and it seemed to him the
restraint of the Golden House down by the sea. And he was more irritable
there than elsewhere. It is so difficult to estimate an interior
deterioration of this sort, for Jack was just as popular with his
comrades as ever, and apparently more prosperous.

It is true that Jack had had other ideas when he was courting Edith
Fletcher, and at moments, at any rate, different aspirations from any he
had now. With her at that time there had been nobler aspirations about
life. But now she was his wife. That was settled. And not only that, but
she was the best woman he knew; and if she were not his wife, he would
spare no effort to win her. He felt sure of that. He did not put it to
himself in the way an Oriental would do, “That is finished”; but it was
an act done--a good act--and here was his world again, with a hundred
interests, and there were people besides Edith to be thought of, other
women and men, and affairs. Because a man was married, was he to be shut
up to one little narrow career, that of husband? Probably it did not
occur to him that women take a different view of this in the singleness
of their purpose and faith. Edith, for instance, knew or guessed that
Jack had no purpose in life that was twenty-four hours old; but she had
faith--and no amount of observation destroys this faith in women--that
marriage would inspire him with energy and ambition to take a man's
place in the world.

With most men marriage is un fait accompli. Jack had been lucky, but
there was, no doubt, truth in an observation of Mavick's. One night as
they sat at the club Jack had asked him a leading question, apropos of
Henderson's successful career: “Mavick, why don't you get married?”
 “I have never,” he replied, with his usual cynical deliberation, “been
obliged to. The fact is, marriage is a curb-bit. Some horses show off
better with it, and some are enraged and kick over the traces. I cannot
decide which I would be.”

“That's true enough,” said Jack, “from a bachelor's point of view of
independence, but it's really a question of matching.”

“The most difficult thing in the world--in horses. Just about impossible
in temperament and movement, let alone looks. Most men are lucky if they
get, like Henderson, a running mate.”

“I see,” said Jack, who knew something about the Henderson household,
“your idea of a pair is that they should go single.”

Mavick laughed, and said something about the ideas of women changing so
much lately that nobody could tell what the relation of marriage would
become, and Jack, who began to feel that he was disloyal, changed the
subject. To do him justice, he would have been ashamed for Edith to hear
this sort of flippant and shallow talk, which wouldn't have been at all
out of place with Carmen or Miss Tavish.

“I wanted to ask you, Mavick, as a friend, do you think Henderson is
square?”

“How square?”

“Well, safe?”

“Nobody is safe. Henderson is as safe as anybody. You can rely on what
he says. But there's a good deal he doesn't say. Anything wrong?”

“Not that I know. I've been pretty lucky. But the fact is, I've gone in
rather deep.”

“Well, it's a game. Henderson plays it, as everybody does, for himself.
I like Henderson. He plays to win, and generally does. But, you know, if
one man wins, somebody else has got to lose in this kind of industry.”

“But Henderson looks out for his friends?”

“Yes--when it doesn't cost too much. Times may come when a man has to
look out for himself. Wealth isn't made out of nothing. There must be
streams into the reservoir. These great accumulations of one--you
can see that--must be made up of countless other men's small savings.
There's Uncle Jerry. He operates a good deal with Henderson, and they'd
incline to help each other out. But Uncle Jerry says he's got a small
pond of his own, and he's careful not to connect it with Henderson's
reservoir.”

“What do you think of Missouri?”

“What do I think of the Milky Way? It doesn't much matter to me what
becomes of Missouri, unless Henderson should happen to get smashed
in it, and that isn't what he is there for. But when you look at the
combinations, and the dropping-off of roads that have been drained, and
the scaling down in refunding, and the rearranging, and the strikes,
how much chance do you think the small fry stand? I don't doubt that
Henderson will make a big thing out of it, and there will be lots of
howling by those who were not so smart, and the newspapers will say
that Henderson was too strong for them. What we respect nowadays are
adroitness and strength.”

“It's an exciting game,” Mavick continued, after a moment's pause. “Let
me know if you get uneasy. But I'll tell you what it is, Jack; if I had
a comfortable income, I wouldn't risk it in any speculation. There is a
good deal that is interesting going on in this world, and I like to be
in it; but the best plan for a man who has anything is, as Uncle Jerry
says, to sail close and salt down.”

The fact was that Mavick's connection with Henderson was an appreciable
addition to his income, and it was not a bad thing for Henderson.
Mavick's reputation for knowing the inside of everything and being
close-mouthed actually brought him confidences; that which at first
was a clever assumption became a reality, and his reputation was so
established for being behind the scenes that he was not believed when he
honestly professed ignorance of anything. His modest disclaimer merely
increased the impression that he was deep. Henderson himself had
something of the Bismarck trait of brutal, contemptuous frankness.
Mavick was never brutal and never contemptuous, but he had a cynical
sort of frankness, which is a good deal more effectual in a business
way than the oily, plausible manner which on 'Change, as well as in
politics, is distrusted as hypocrisy. Now Uncle Jerry Hollowell was
neither oily nor frank; he was long-headed and cautious, and had a
reputation for shrewdness and just enough of plasticity of conscience
to remove him out of the list of the impracticable and over-scrupulous.
This reputation that business men and politicians acquire would be
a very curious study. The world is very complacent, and apparently
worships success and votes for smartness, but it would surprise some
of our most successful men to know what a real respect there is in the
community, after all, for downright integrity.

Even Jack, who fell into the current notion of his generation of young
men that the Henderson sort of morality was best adapted to quick
success, evinced a consciousness of want of nobility in the course he
was pursuing by not making Edith his confidante. He would have said, of
course, that she knew nothing about business, but what he meant was that
she had a very clear conception of what was honest. All the evidences of
his prosperity, shown in his greater freedom of living, were sore trials
to her. She belonged to that old class of New-Yorkers who made trade
honorable, like the merchants of Holland and Venice, and she knew
also that Jack's little fortune had come out of honest toil and strict
business integrity. Could there be any happiness in life in any other
course?

It seemed cruel to put such a problem as this upon a young woman hardly
yet out of girlhood, in the first flush of a new life, which she had
dreamed should be so noble and high and so happy, in the period which
is consecrated by the sweetest and loveliest visions and hopes that ever
come into a woman's life.

As the summer wore on to its maximum of heat and discomfort in the city,
Edith, who never forgot to measure the hardships of others by her own
more fortunate circumstances, urged Dr. Leigh to come away from her
labors and rest a few days by the sea. The reply was a refusal, but
there was no complaint in the brief business-like note. One might have
supposed that it was the harvest-time of the doctor, if he had not known
that she gathered nothing for herself. There had never been so much
sickness, she wrote, and such an opportunity for her. She was learning
a great deal, especially about some disputed contagious diseases. She
would like to see Mrs. Delancy, and she wouldn't mind a breath of
air that was more easily to be analyzed than that she existed in, but
nothing could induce her to give up her cases. All that appeared in her
letter was her interest in her profession.

Father Damon, who had been persuaded by Edith's urgency to go down with
Jack for a few days to the Golden House, seemed uncommonly interested in
the reasons of Dr. Leigh's refusal to come.

“I never saw her,” he said, “so cheerful. The more sickness there is,
the more radiant she is. I don't mean,” he added, laughing, “in apparel.
Apparently she never thinks of herself, and positively she seems to take
no time to eat or sleep. I encounter her everywhere. I doubt if she ever
sits down, except when she drops in at the mission chapel now and then,
and sits quite unmoved on a bench by the door during vespers.”

“Then she does go there?” said Edith.

“That is a queer thing. She would promptly repudiate any religious
interest. But I tell her she is a bit of a humbug. When I speak about
her philanthropic zeal, she says her interest is purely scientific.”

“Anyway, I believe,” Jack put in, “that women doctors are less mercenary
than men. I dare say they will get over that when the novelty of coming
into the profession has worn off.”

“That is possible,” said Father Damon; “but that which drives women into
professions now is the desire to do something rather than the desire
to make something. Besides, it is seldom, in their minds, a finality;
marriage is always a possibility.”

“Yes,” replied Edith, “and the probability of having to support a
husband and family; then they may be as mercenary as men are.”

“Still, the enthusiasm of women,” Father Damon insisted, “in hospital
and outdoor practice, the singleness of their devotion to it, is in
contrast to that of the young men-doctors. And I notice another thing
in the city: they take more interest in philanthropic movements, in the
condition of the poor, in the labor questions; they dive eagerly into
philosophic speculations, and they are more aggressively agnostics.
And they are not afraid of any social theories. I have one friend, a
skillful practitioner they tell me, a linguist, and a metaphysician,
a most agreeable and accomplished woman, who is in theory an extreme
nihilist, and looks to see the present social and political order
upset.”

“I don't see,” Jack remarked, “what women especially are to gain by such
a revolution.”

“Perhaps independence, Jack,” replied Edith. “You should hear my club
of working-girls, who read and think much on these topics, talk of these
things.”

“Yes,” said Father Damon, “you toss these topics about, and discuss them
in the magazines, and fancy you are interested in socialistic movements.
But you have no idea how real and vital they are, and how the dumb
discontent of the working classes is being formulated into ideas. It is
time we tried to understand each other.”

Not all the talk was of this sort at the Golden House. There were
three worlds here--that of Jack, to which Edith belonged by birth and
tradition and habit; that of which we have spoken, to which she belonged
by profound sympathy; and that of Father Damon, to which she belonged by
undefined aspiration. In him was the spiritual element asserting itself
in a mediaeval form, in a struggle to mortify and deny the flesh and
yet take part in modern life. Imagine a celibate and ascetic of the
fifteenth century, who knew that Paradise must be gained through poverty
and privation and suffering, interesting himself in the tenement-house
question, in labor leagues, and the single tax.

Yet, hour after hour, in those idle summer days, when nature was in a
mood that suggested grace and peace, when the waves lapsed along the
shore and the cicada sang in the hedge, did Father Damon unfold to Edith
his ideas of the spiritualization of modern life through a conviction of
its pettiness and transitoriness. How much more content there would be
if the poor could only believe that it matters little what happens here
if the heart is only pure and fixed on the endless life.

“Oh, Father Damon,” replied Edith, with a grave smile, “I think your
mission ought to be to the rich.”

“Yes,” he replied, for he also knew his world, “if I wanted to make my
ideas fashionable; but I want to make them operative. By-and-by,”
 he added, also with a smile, “we will organize some fishermen and
carpenters and tailors on a mission to the rich.”

Father Damon's visit was necessarily short, for his work called him back
to town, and perhaps his conscience smote him a little for indulging in
this sort of retreat. By the middle of August Jack's yacht was ready,
and he went with Mavick and the Van Dams and some other men of the
club on a cruise up the coast. Edith was left alone with her Baltimore
friend.

And yet not alone. As she lay in her hammock in those dreamy days a new
world opened to her. It was not described in the chance romance she took
up, nor in the volume of poems she sometimes held in her hand, with a
finger inserted in the leaves. Of this world she felt herself the centre
and the creator, and as she mused upon its mysteries, life took a new,
strange meaning to her. It was apt to be a little hazy off there in the
watery horizon, and out of the mist would glide occasionally a boat, and
the sun would silver its sails, and it would dip and toss for half
an hour in the blue, laughing sea, and then disappear through the
mysterious curtain. Whence did it come? Whither had it gone? Was life
like that? Was she on the shore of such a sea, and was this new world
into which she was drifting only a dream? By her smile, by the momentary
illumination that her sweet thoughts made in her lovely, hopeful face,
you knew that it was not. Who can guess the thoughts of a woman at such
a time? Are the trees glad in the spring, when the sap leaps in their
trunks, and the buds begin to swell, and the leaves unfold in soft
response to the creative impulse? The miracle is never old nor
commonplace to them, nor to any of the human family. The anticipation
of life is eternal. The singing of the birds, the blowing of the south
wind, the sparkle of the waves, all found a response in Edith's heart,
which leaped with joy. And yet there was a touch of melancholy in it
all, the horizon was so vast, and the mist of uncertainty lay along it.
Literature, society, charities, all that she had read and experienced
and thought, was nothing to this, this great unknown anxiety and bliss,
this saddest and sweetest of all human experiences. She prayed that
she might be worthy of this great distinction, this responsibility and
blessing.

And Jack, dear Jack, would he love her more?




XII

Although Father Damon had been absent from his charge only ten days, it
was time for him to return. If he had not a large personal following,
he had a wide influence. If comparatively few found their way to his
chapel, he found his way to many homes; his figure was a familiar one
in the streets, and his absence was felt by hundreds who had no personal
relations with him, but who had become accustomed to seeing him go about
on his errands of encouragement, and probably had never realized how
much the daily sight of him had touched them. The priestly dress, which
may once have provoked a sneer at his effeminacy, had now a suggestion
of refinement, of unselfish devotion, of consecration to the service of
the unfortunate, his spiritual face appealed to their better natures,
and the visible heroism that carried his frail figure through labors
that would have worn out the stoutest physique stirred in the hearts of
the rudest some comprehension of the reality of the spirit.

It may not have occurred to them that he was of finer clay than
they--perhaps he was not--but his presence was in their minds a
subtle connection and not a condescending one, rather a confession of
brotherhood, with another world and another view of life. They may not
have known that their hearts were stirred because he had the gift of
sympathy.

And was it an unmanly trait that he evoked in men that sentiment of
chivalry which is never wanting in the roughest community for a pure
woman? Wherever Father Damon went there was respect for his purity and
his unselfishness, even among those who would have been shamefaced if
surprised in any exhibition of softness.

And many loved him, and many depended on him. Perhaps those who most
depended on him were the least worthy, and those who loved him most were
least inclined to sacrifice their own reasonable view of life to his
own sublimated spiritual conception. It was the spirit of the man they
loved, and not the creed of the priest. The little chapel in its subdued
lights and shadows, with confessionals and crosses and candles and
incense, was as restful a refuge as ever to the tired and the dependent;
but wanting his inspiring face and voice, it was not the same thing,
and the attendance always fell away when he was absent. There was needed
there more than elsewhere the living presence.

He was missed, and the little world that missed him was astray. The
first day of his return his heart was smitten by the thinness of
the congregation. Had he, then, accomplished nothing; had he made no
impression, established in his shifting flock no habit of continuance in
well-doing that could survive even his temporary withdrawal? The fault
must be his. He had not sufficiently humiliated and consecrated
himself, and put under all strength of the flesh and trust in worldly
instrumentalities. There must be more prayer, more vigils, more fasting,
before the power would come back to him to draw these wandering minds
to the light. And so in the heat of this exhausting August, at the time
when his body most needed re-enforcement for the toil he required of it,
he was more rigid in his spiritual tyranny and contempt of it.

Ruth Leigh was not dependent upon Father Damon, but she also learned how
long ten days could be without a sight of him. When she looked into his
chapel occasionally she realized, as never before, how much in the
air his ceremonies and his creed were. There was nothing there for her
except his memory. And she knew when she stepped in there, for her cool,
reasoning mind was honest, that it was the thought of him that drew her
to the place, and that going there was a sentimental indulgence. What
she would have said was that she admired, loved Father Damon on account
of his love for humanity. It was a common saying of all the professional
women in her set, and of the working-girls, that they loved Father
Damon. It is a comfort to women to be able to give their affection
freely where conventionalities and circumstances make the return of it
in degree unlikely.

At the close of a debilitating day Dr. Leigh found herself in the
neighborhood of the mission chapel. She was tired and needed to rest
somewhere. She knew that Father Damon had returned, but she had not seen
him, and a double motive drew her steps. The atte

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