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Phases of an Inferior Planet

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow · English · Gutenberg #34402 · 528,579 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Phases of an Inferior Planet

Author: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow


        
Release date: November 22, 2010 [eBook #34402]

Language: English

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Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
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produced from images at The Internet Archive)









Phases of an
Inferior Planet

_By_ ELLEN GLASGOW

_Author of "The Descendant"_

[Illustration]

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1898

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

THE DESCENDANT. A Novel. Post 8vo, Cloth,
Ornamental, $1 25.

The writer has a sure touch, a firm and philosophically consistent hold
upon his theme, much delicacy of perception, and a sane sense of humor.
The style, if not of the fastidiously fine school, is fluent and often
brilliant. ... The character drawing is vivid and realistic.--_Boston
Transcript._

The characters here are skilfully drawn, and the drama in which they
take part is unusually novel and impressive. ... The work of an author
who has not written at random, but who has woven into a strong story
some of the cardinal truths of modern science.--_N. Y. Herald._

NEW YORK AND LONDON:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS.

Copyright, 1898, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

TO

CARY McC.

     _"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the
     swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
     nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of
     skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."_




Phase First

    _"Some turned to folly and the sweet works of the flesh."_

                                            --Hymn to Zeus.




CHAPTER I


Along Broadway at six o'clock a throng of pedestrians was stepping
northward. A grayish day was settling into a gray evening, and a
negative lack of color and elasticity had matured into a positive
condition of atmospheric flatness. The air exhaled a limp and insipid
moisture, like that given forth by a sponge newly steeped in an
anaesthetic. Upon the sombre fretwork of leafless trees, bare against
red-brick buildings, drops of water hung trembling, though as yet there
had been no rainfall, and the straggling tufts of grass in the city
parks drooped earthward like the damp and uncurled fringe of a woman's
hair.

Spanning the remote west as a rainbow stretched an unfulfilled pledge of
better things, for beyond the smoke-begrimed battalion of tenement
chimney-pots a faint streak of mauve defined the line of the horizon--an
ineffectual and transparent sheet of rose-tinted vapor, through which
the indomitable neutrality of background was revealed. The city swam in
a sea of mist, and the electric lights, coming slowly into being, must
have seemed to a far-off observer a galaxy of wandering stars that had
burst the woof of heaven and fallen from their allotted spheres to be
caught like blossoms in the white obscurity of fog. Above them their
deserted habitation frowned blackly down with closed doors and
impenetrable walls.

The effect of the immortal transformation of day into night was
singularly elusive. It had come so stealthily that the fleet-footed
hours seemed to have tripped one another in the fever of the race, the
monotonous grayness of their garments shrouding, as they fluttered past,
the form of each sprightly elf.

Along Broadway the throng moved hurriedly. At a distance indescribably
homogeneous, as it passed the lighted windows of shops it was seen to be
composed of individual atoms, and their outlines were relieved against
the garish interiors like a panorama of automatic silhouettes. Then, as
they neared a crossing, a flood of radiant electricity, revealing minute
details of face and figure, the atoms were revivified from automatic
into animal existence.

With an inhuman disregard of caste and custom, the aberrant shadows of
the passers-by met and mingled one into another. A phantasmagoric
procession took place upon the sidewalk. The ethereal accompaniment of
the physical substance of a Wall Street plutocrat glided sedately after
that of a bedizened daughter of the people, whose way, beginning in the
glare of the workhouse, was ending in the dusk of the river; a lady of
quality, whose very shadow seemed pregnant with the odor of spice and
sables, melted before the encroaching presence of a boot-black fresh
from the Bowery; a gentleman of fashion gave place to the dull phantom
of a woman with burning brows and fingers purple with the stain of many
stitches. It was as if each material substance, warm with the lust of
the flesh and reeking with a burnt-offering of vanity, was pursued by
the inevitable presence of a tragic destiny.

At the corner of Seventeenth Street, a girl in a last season's coat left
the crowd and paused before a photographer's window. As she passed from
shadow into light the play of her limbs was suggested by the close folds
of her shabby skirt. She had the light and steadfast gait of one to whom
exercise is as essential as food, and more easily attained.

A man coming from Union Square turned to look at her as she passed.

"That girl is a _danseuse_," he said to his companion, "or she ought to
be. She walks to music."

"Your induction is false," retorted the other. "She happens to be--"

And they passed on.

As the girl paused before the lighted window the outlines of head and
shoulders were accentuated, while the rest of her body remained in
obscurity. Her head was shapely and well poised. Beneath the small toque
of black velvet, an aureole of dry brown hair framed her sensitive
profile like a setting of old mahogany. Even in the half-light
silhouette it could be noticed that eyes, hair, and complexion differed
in tone rather than in color. Her sallow skin blended in peculiar
harmony with the gray-green of her eyes and the brown of her hair. Her
face was long, with irregular features and straight brows. The bones of
cheek and chin were rendered sharper by extreme thinness.

A new photograph of Alvary was displayed, and a small group had
assembled about the window.

The girl looked at it for a moment; then, as some one in the crowd
jostled against her, she turned with an exclamation of annoyance and
entered the shop. Hesitating an instant, she drew a worn purse from her
pocket, looked into it, gave a decisive little shrug, and approached the
counter.

The shop-girl came up, and, recognizing her, nodded.

"Music?" she inquired, glancing at the leather roll which the other
carried.

The girl shook her head slowly.

"No," she replied, "I want a photograph of Alvary--as Lohengrin. Oh, the
Swan Song--"

A man who was sorting a pile of music in the rear of the shop came
forward smiling. He was small and dark and foreign.

"Ah, mademoiselle," he said, "it ees a plaisir for w'ich I live, ees ze
Elsa of your."

The girl smiled in return. In the clear light the glint of green in her
eyes deepened.

"No," she replied, "this is Elsa." She pointed to a photograph in the
case. "This is the only Elsa. I should not dare."

He bowed deprecatingly.

"Zat ees ontil you come," he said. "I live for ze day w'en we sing
togezzer, you an' I. I live to sing wiss you in ze grand opera."

"Ah, monsieur," lamented the girl, regretfully, "one cannot live
forever. The Lord has allotted a term."

She took her change, nodded gayly, and departed.

In the street she passed unheeded. She was as ignored by the crowd
around her as the colorless shadow at her side. Upon a massive woman in
a feather boa a dozen men gazed with evident desire, and after the
sables enveloping the lady of quality the eyes of the boot-black
yearned. But the girl moved among them unnoticed--she was insignificant
and easily overlooked.

A violet falling upon the pavement from the breast of a woman in front
of her, the girl lifted her skirt, and, to avoid crushing it, made a
slight divergence from her path. Then impulsively she turned to rescue
it from the cold sidewalk, but in so doing she stumbled against a man
whose heel had been its Juggernaut. A tiny blot of purple marked the
scene of its destruction.

Over the girl's face a shadow fell; she glanced up and caught the
courteous smile of an acquaintance, and the shadow was lifted. But
before her upward glance tended earthward it rested upon an overdriven
horse standing in the gutter, and the shadow that returned had gathered
to itself the force of a rain-cloud.

An impressionable and emotional temperament cast its light and darkness
upon her features, as the shifting clouds cast their varying shades upon
an evening landscape. With such a face, her moods must be as evanescent
as the colors of a kaleidoscope.

As she neared an electric light she slipped the photograph she carried
from its envelope, and surveyed it with warming eyes. She spoke in a
soft whisper--

"I shall never sing Elsa--never--never! Lehmann is Elsa. But what does
it matter? By the time I reach grand opera I shall have dinners--real
dinners--with napkins the size of a sheet and vegetables of curious
kinds. Then I'll grow fat and become famous. I may even sing Isolde."

She broke into a regretful little sigh. "And Alvary will be too old to
be my Tristan."

At the corner of Twenty-third Street she took a cross-town car. It was
crowded, and, with half-suppressed disgust, she rested the tips of her
fingers upon a leather strap. The gloves covering the fingers were worn
and badly mended, but the touch was delicate.

Something graceful and feminine and fragile in her unsteady figure
caused half a dozen men to rise hastily, and she accepted a proffered
seat with the merest inclination of her head.

With an involuntary coquetry she perceived that, as the newest feminine
arrival, she was being stealthily regarded from behind the wall of
newspapers skirting the opposite seat. She raised her hand to her
loosened hair, half frowned, and glanced at the floor with demure
indifference.

Beside her sat an Irishwoman with a heavy basket and a black bruise upon
her temple. The girl looked at the woman and the bruise with an
expression of repugnance. The repugnance was succeeded by a tidal wave
of self-commiseration. She pitied herself that she was forced to make
use of public means of conveyance. The onions in the Irishwoman's basket
offended her nostrils.

Her gaze returned to her lap. As daintily as she had withdrawn her
person from contact with the woman beside her, she withdrew her finely
strung senses from contact with the odor of onions and the closeness of
the humanity hemming her in.

She sat in disdainful self-absorption. Her sensitive features became
impassive, her head drooped, the green in her eyes faded into gray, and
the lashes obscured them. The shadow of her heavy hair rested like a
veil upon her face.

When the car reached Ninth Avenue she got out, walked to Thirtieth
Street, and crossed westward. Facing her stood the immense and
unpicturesque apartment-house known as "The Gotham"--a monument of human
Philistinism and brownstone-finished effrontery. She entered and passed
through the unventilated hall to the restaurant at the rear.

As she crossed the threshold, a man seated at one of the larger tables
looked up.

"My dear girl," he said, reproachfully, "lateness for dinner at The
Gotham entails serious consequences. We were just planning a
search-party."

His right-hand neighbor spoke warningly. "Don't believe him, Miss Musin;
he refused to get uneasy until he had finished his dinner."

"When one is empty," retorted the first, "one can't get even uneasy.
Anxiety can't be produced from a void."

The girl nodded good-evening, took her seat, and unfolded her napkin.
The first gentleman passed her the butter, the second the water-bottle.
The first was named Nevins. He was fair and pallid, with a long face
that would have been round had nature supplied gratification as well as
instinct. His shoulders were high and narrow, suggesting the perpetual
shrug with which he met his fate. He was starving upon an artistic
career. The second gentleman--Mr. Sellars--was sleek and middle-aged.
Providence had intended him for a poet; life had made of him a
philosopher--and a plumber. He was still a man of sentiment.

At the head of the table sat Mr. Paul--an apostle of pessimism, whose
general flavor marked the pessimist rather than the apostle. The
peculiarity of his face was its construction--the features which should
have gone up coming down, and the features which should have come down
going up. Perhaps had Mr. Paul himself moralized upon the fact, which is
not likely, he would have concluded that it was merely a physical
expression of his mental attitude towards the universe. He had long
since arrived at the belief that whatever came in life was the thing of
all others which should have kept away, and its coming was sufficient
proof of its inappropriateness. He had become a pessimist, not from
passion, but from principle. He had chosen his view of the eternal
condition of things as deliberately as he would have selected the
glasses with which to survey a given landscape. Having made his choice,
he stood to it. No surreptitious favors at the hands of Providence were
able to modify his honest conviction of its general unpleasantness.

The remaining persons at this particular table were of less importance.
There was Miss Ramsey, the journalist, who was pretty and faded and
harassed, and who ate her cold dinner, to which she usually arrived an
hour late, in exhausted silence. Miss Ramsey was one whom, her friends
said, adversity had softened; but Miss Ramsey herself knew that the
softness of adversity is the softness of decay. There was Mr. Ardly, a
handsome young fellow, who did the dramatic column of a large daily, and
who regarded life as a gigantic jag, facing failure with facetiousness
and gout with inconsequence. There was Mr. Morris, who was thin, and Mr.
Mason, who was fat, and Mr. Hogarth, who was neither.

The restaurant consisted of a long and queerly shaped room. It had
originally been divided into two apartments, but when the house had
passed into the present management the partition had been torn down, and
two long and narrow tables marked the line where the division had been.
The walls were dingy and unpapered. Where the plaster was of an unusual
degree of smokiness, several cheap chromos, in cheaper frames, had been
hung, like brilliant patches laid upon a dingy background. Above the
chromos lingered small bunches of evergreen--faded and dried remnants of
the last holiday season--and from the tarnished and fly-specked
chandelier hung a withered spray of mistletoe.

The room was crowded. There was not so much as a vacant seat at the
tables. The hum of voices passed through the doors and into the rumble
of the street without. In a far corner a lady in a blouse of geranium
pink was engaged in catching reckless flies for the sustenance of the
chameleon upon her breast; nearer at hand a gentleman was polishing his
plate and knife with his napkin. It was warm and oppressive, and the
voices sounded shrilly through the glare. The girl whom they had called
"Miss Musin" looked up with absent-minded abruptness.

"I had as soon wear wooden shoes as eat with a pewter fork!" she
remarked, irritably.

Mr. Nevins shook his flaxen head and laid down his spoon.

"So long as it remains a question of forks," he observed, "let us give
thanks. Who knows when it may become one of food?" Then he sighed. "If
it is only a sacrifice of decency, I'm equal to it, but I refuse to live
without food."

"The audacity of youth!" commented Mr. Sellars, the philosopher. "I said
the same at your age. But for taking the conceit out of one, commend me
to experience."

"From a profound study of the subject," broke in Mr. Paul, grimly, "I
have been able to calculate to a nicety that each one of these potatoes,
taken internally, lessens an hour of one's existence. As a method of
self-destruction"--and he proceeded to help himself--"there is none more
efficacious than an exclusive diet of Gotham potatoes. Allow me to pass
them." He looked at Miss Musin, but Mr. Nevins rose to the occasion.

"After such an analysis, my gallantry forbids," and he intercepted the
dish.

The girl glanced up at him.

"Extinction long drawn out is boring," she said. "And is food the only
factor of human life? It may be the most important, I admit, but
important things should not always be talked of."

"I declare it quite staggers me," interrupted a cheerful individual, who
was Mr. Morris, "to think of the number of things that should not be
talked of--some amazingly interesting things, too! Do you know,
sometimes I wonder if social intercourse will not finally be reduced to
a number of persons assembling to sit in silent meditation upon the
subjects which are not to be spoken of? One so soon exhausts the
absolutely correct topics."

"We are a nation of prudes," declared Mr. Paul, with emphasis, "and
there is no vice that rots a people to the core so rapidly as the vice
of prudery. All our good red blood has passed into a limbo of social
ostracism along with ladies' legs."

"I was just thinking," commented Mr. Hogarth, who aspired to the rakish
and achieved the asinine, "that the last-named subject had been
particularly in evidence of late. What with the ballet and the
bicycle--" He blushed and glanced at Miss Musin.

She was smiling. "Oh, I don't object," she said, "so long as they are
well shaped."

Mr. Nevins upheld her from an artistic stand-point.

"I hold," he said, authoritatively, "that indecency can only exist where
beauty is wanting. All beauty is moral. I have noticed in regard to my
models--"

"On the contrary," interrupted Mr. Paul, "there is no such thing as
beauty. It is merely the creation of a diseased imagination pursuing
novelty. We call nature beautiful, but it is only a term we employ to
express a chimera of the senses. Nature is not beautiful. Its colors are
glaringly defective. It is ugly. The universe is ugly. Civilization is
ugly. We are ugly--"

"Oh, Mr. Paul!" said Miss Musin, reproachfully.

"Our one consolation," continued Mr. Paul, in an unmoved voice, "is the
knowledge that if we could possibly have been uglier we should have been
so created. Providence would have seen to it."

"When Providence provided ugliness," put in Mr. Morris, good-naturedly,
"it provided ignorance along with it."

Mr. Ardly, who was eating his dinner with a copy of the _Evening Post_
spread out upon his knees, looked up languidly.

"We are becoming unpleasantly personal," he remarked. "Personalities in
conversation should be avoided as sedulously as onions in soup. They are
stimulating, but vulgar."

Mr. Paul seized the bait of the unconscious thrower with avidity.

"Vulgarity," he announced, with ringing emphasis, "is the most prominent
factor in the universe. It is as essential to our existence as the
original slime from which we and it emanated. If there is one thing more
vulgar than nature, it is civilization. Whatever remnant of innocence
nature left in the mind of man civilization has wiped out. It has
debased the human intellect--"

"And deformed the human figure," interpolated Mr. Nevins, with a sigh.
"Oh, for the days of Praxiteles!"

The emotionless tones of Mr. Paul flowed smoothly on.

"And if there is one thing more vulgar than civilization, it is art."

Mr. Nevins retorted in a voice of storm.

"Sir," he cried, "art is my divinity!"

"A vulgar superstition," commented Mr. Paul, calmly; and he pointed to a
poster beside Mr. Nevins's plate. "You call that art, I suppose?"

Mr. Nevins colored, but met him valiantly. "No," he returned; "I call
that bread and meat."

As the girl next him rose from her chair she bestowed upon him an
approving smile, which he returned with sentimental interest.

"You haven't finished," he remonstrated, in an aside. "My posters aren't
only bread and meat; they are pie--principally pie."

The girl laughed and shook her head.

"And principally pumpkin," she returned. "No, thank you!"

She left the dining-room and mounted the stairs to the fourth landing.
Her room was in the front of the house, and the way to it lay through a
long and dimly lighted corridor, the floor of which was covered with
figured oil-cloth.

As she slipped the key into the lock the door swung back, and a blast of
damp air from the open window blew into her face. She crossed the room
and stood for a moment with her hand upon the sash, looking down into
the street. A train upon the elevated road was passing, and she saw the
profiles of the passengers dark against the lighted interior. Clouds of
white smoke, blown rearward by the engine's breath, hovered about the
track, too light to fall. Then, as the wind chased westward, the clouds
were torn asunder, and stray wreaths, deepening into gray, drifted along
the cross street leading to the river.

The girl reached out and drew in a can of condensed milk from the
fire-escape. Then she lowered the window and turned on the steam-heater
in the corner, which set up a hissing monotone.

The room was small and square. There was a half-worn carpet upon the
floor, and the walls were covered with cheap paper, the conspicuous
feature of which was a sprawling design in green and yellow cornucopias.
In one corner stood a small iron bedstead, partially concealed by a
Japanese screen, which extended nominal protection to the wash-stand as
well. On the wall above the screen an iron hook was visible, from which
hung a couple of bath-towels and a scrubbing-brush suspended by a
string. Nearer the window there was an upright piano, with a scarf of
terra-cotta flung across it and a row of photographs of great singers
arranged along the ledge. Here and there on the furniture vivid bits of
drapery were pinned over barren places.

But with the proof of a sensuous craving for color a latent untidiness
was discernible. Her slippers lay upon the hearth-rug where she had
tossed them when dressing for the street; a box of hair-pins had been
upset upon the bureau, and a half-open drawer revealed a tangled mass of
net veiling.

Throwing her hat and coat upon the bed, the girl turned up the lights,
selected a score of "Lucia" from a portfolio under the piano, and,
seating herself at the music-stool, struck the key-board with sudden
fervor. The light soprano notes rang out, filling the small room with a
frail yet penetrating sweetness. It was a clear and brilliant voice, but
it was a voice in miniature, of which the first freshness was
marred--and it was not the voice for Lucia.

With quick dismay the girl realized it, and rising impatiently, tossed
the score upon the carpet and left the piano.

Standing before the long mirror on the wall, she slipped off her
walking-gown, letting it fall in a black heap to her feet. Then stepping
over it, she kicked it aside and stood with gleaming arms and breast in
the flickering gas-light. She loosened her heavy hair, drawing the pins
from it one by one, until it fell in a brown mane upon her shoulders.

Doffing her conventional dress, she doffed conventionality as well. She
was transformed into something seductive and subtle--something in
woman's flesh as ethereal as sea-foam and as vivid as flame.

She smiled suddenly. Then to a humming accompaniment she twirled upon
her toes, her steps growing faster and faster until her figure was
obscured in the blur of action and her hair flew about her face like the
hair of a painted witch.

The words of the air she hummed came with a dash of bravado from between
her lips:

    "--Ange ou diable,
     Ecume de la mer?"

Still smiling, she sank in an exhausted heap upon the floor.

Then she went to bed and fell asleep, lamenting that her head rested
upon a cotton pillow-slip.




CHAPTER II


In time long past, when the Huguenots were better known, if less
esteemed, an impecunious gentleman of France left his native land for
the sake of faith and fortune.

Lured by that blatant boast of liberty which swelled the throats of the
Western colonies, even while their hands were employed in meting out the
reward of witchcraft and in forging the chains of slavery, he directed
his way towards American soil.

His mission failed, and, in search of theological freedom, he only
succeeded in weaving matrimonial fetters. Amid an unassorted medley of
creeds and customs he came upon the red-cheeked daughter of a Swiss
adventurer--an ambitious pioneer who lived upon the theory that the New
World having been created for the service of its foreign invaders, the
might of the sword was the right of possession.

The gentleman of France, deciding to found a farm and family in the land
of his adoption, awoke suddenly to the knowledge that, to insure the
success of such an enterprise, feminine intervention is a necessary
evil.

Accordingly, he set about his preparations with an economic industry.
Casting his eye upon a tract of land upon a Southern river, he acquired
it for certain services rendered in an unguarded moment to the Swiss
adventurer, who had acquired it in a manner that concerned himself
alone.

The next step of the French gentleman was to build beside the Southern
river a family mansion, whose door he promptly closed upon the Swiss
adventurer, since virtue consists not so much in refusing to benefit by
vice as in refusing to acknowledge the benefit. Not without a sense of
nervous perturbation, he then proceeded to cast his gaze upon the most
promising feminine pledges of progeny. From among a dozen or so of his
fair neighbors he selected, with the experienced eye of a woman-fancier,
the blooming specimen of Swiss buxomness, and, the adventurer coming to
terms, the marriage had been celebrated without the retarding
curtain-raiser of a romantic prelude.

The gentleman's name was Marcel Musin de Biencourt; the lady's has no
place in the following history.

For a period matters progressed in natural sequence. The land was
tilled, the cotton picked, and the lady installed in the best bedroom of
the newly erected mansion. Had she played the part for which nature and
her lord intended her, there is reason to suppose that she would have
become a serviceable instrument in the preservation of the species.

But the gentleman had reckoned without Providence. With the ending of
the year of her bridehood the roses in the lady's cheeks grew waxen, and
she turned with a sigh of relief from the labor of travail to the rest
of the little church-yard upon the hill.

The aspens shivered above her, the river purled between level fields far
down below, and from the uprooted furrows around the dutiful corn put
forth tender sprouts; but the lady had shirked her mission in its first
fulfilment, and with the birth-time of the year she neither rose nor
stirred.

In the best bedroom the dust thickened upon the chintz curtains, and a
weak and sickly hostage to fortune yelled his new throat hoarse with
premonition of the inhospitality of the planet upon which he had been
precipitated.

Disappointed in his estimate of woman's nature, the gentleman of France
decided to economize in material, and to rear a race from the
unpromising specimen in his possession. Faithfully he strove to fulfil
his part, and when the boy reached manhood, he laid himself down beside
his wife upon the hill.

From this time on the family record is biblically concise. Marcel begot
Marcel, and again Marcel begot Marcel, and yet again.

While the root Musin languished, De Biencourt, the lofty family tree,
withered and died, to be forgotten. Neither in history nor in tradition,
nor in the paths of private virtue, was a Musin known to have
distinguished himself. If he took up arms in the American Revolution, he
took them up in a manner unworthy of record; if he favored the
Declaration of Independence, he did not commit his preference to paper;
if he excelled in any way, it was in the way of mediocrity--which is
perhaps the safest way of all.

But extinction was not to be the end of the venturesome blood of the
French gentleman. His spirit animated one of his name to confide to the
care of his ex-slaves the mansion crumbling above his head, and to
become a wanderer in the States which had been so nearly disunited. Like
the minstrels of old, he strung his harp from his shoulder, and
journeyed from South to North and from East to West. His Norman blood
still ran blue in his veins, and his faith was the faith of his fathers.

In his travels he played his passage into the vivacious affections of an
Irish maiden, who wore a rosary about her neck and a cross upon her
sleeve. But these conspicuous badges of Popery failed to chill the
passion of Marcel. And, in truth, if the maiden's heart was as black as
the arch-fiend, her eyes (which is more to the point) were not less blue
than heaven. With an improvidence sufficient to bleach the ghost of his
colonial progenitor, he tossed forebodings into the capacious lap of the
future, and stormed the yielding heart of young Ireland.

Love was lord, and their marriage-bonds were double-locked and barred by
Protestant and Catholic clergy. But there is a power which laughs at
religious locksmiths. Within six months the illusions with which each
had draped the other melted before the fire and brimstone of
ecclesiastical dispute. Between the kisses of their lips each offered
petitions to a patient Omnipotence for the salvation of the other's
soul. As the kisses grew colder the prayers grew warmer. There is a
tendency in man, when he has fallen out with the human brother whom he
has seen, to wax more zealous in his attentions to the Divine Father
whom he has not. To be courteous to one's neighbor is so much more
difficult than to be cringing to one's God.

And then a child was given. In the large family Bible upon the father's
desk the event is recorded in two different hands, and the child was
christened with two different names.

The first reads:

    "MARIE MUSIN, _born April_ 24, 1868."

And the second:

    "MARY ANN MUSIN, _born April_ 24, 1868."

After fifteen years the matter was settled, as were most family matters,
by the child herself.

"I will be both," she said, decisively. "I will be Mariana."

And Mariana she became.

In the same high-handed fashion the theological disputes of the parents
were reduced to trifles as light as air.

"I will be a Presbyterian one Sunday and a Catholic the next," she
concluded, with amiable acquiescence; "only on fast-days and
lecture-nights I'll be a heathen."

For a time these regulations were observed with uncompromising
impartiality, but, upon moving to a smaller town, she foresaw a
diplomatic stroke.

"I think it better," she announced, sweetly, "for one of us to become an
Episcopalian. I have noticed that most of the society people here are
Episcopalians--and in that way the family will be so evenly distributed.
I see that it will be easier for me to make the sacrifice than for
either of you. Of course, I should love to go with you, mamma, but
incense makes me sneeze; and you know, papa, I can't stand
congregational singing. It grates upon my nerves. And I must be
something, for I have so much religious feeling. I will be an
Episcopalian."

She cast herself into the arms of the Church with all the zeal of a
convert. From an artistic stand-point she repudiated insincerity, and,
though cultivated, her professions were as fertile as the most natural
product. Even to herself she scorned to admit that her alliance with a
particular creed was the result of aught but a moral tendency in that
direction. And the burden of the truth was with her. She was as
changeable as wind and as impressionable as wax, and the swelling tide
of sentiment had taken an ecclesiastical turn.

She dressed in sober grays, and attended service with the regularity of
the sexton; she decorated her walls with Madonnas; and she undertook, by
way of the Sunday-school room, to lead a class of eight small boys into
the path of righteousness. She read Christina Rossetti and George
Herbert, and she placed tiny silver crosses, suspended from purple
ribbons, in her school-books.

At the age of sixteen she attached herself to a society whose mission it
was to cultivate, by frequent calls, the religious poor, and she
neglected social observances to retard by her presence the domestic
duties of the indigent members of the community. She descended in a
special detachment upon a series of beer saloons, enforcing the pledge
upon a number of helpless gentlemen, and thereby multiplying the sin of
intemperance by that of perjury. While her mother mended the rents in
her garments, Mariana promoted a circle of stocking-darners for the
inhabitants of the almshouse.

At that period her expression was in perfect harmony with the tenor of
her mind. The dramatic effect was always good.

In the daily school, which she attended when the fancy seized her, she
ruled as a popular fetish. Between the younger children, whom she
terrorized, and the elder, whom she mesmerized, there was an
intermediate class with whom she was in high favor. As a tiny child she
had caught the street songs quicker than any other, and had sung them
better; and to the accompaniment of a hand-organ she could render a
marvellous ballet.

During her tenth year she fell into a passionate friendship for one of
the scholars--a stately girl with phlegmatic eyes of gray. For six
months she paid her lover-like attentions in surreptitious ways, and
expended her pocket-money in nosegays, with which to adorn the desk of
her divinity. She wore a photograph of the gray-eyed girl above her
heart, and lingered for an hour to walk home with her upon Fridays.

The friendship was sundered at last by visits exchanged between them,
and Mariana's emotions became theological.

But this passed also. Vague amatory impulses of old racial meaning were
born. At sixteen she was precipitated into a sentiment for the
photograph, printed by the daily press, of a young fellow who was at
that time in the custody of the State, preparatory to responding to a
charge of highway-robbery. The photograph was romantic, the crime was
also. It was a nineteenth-century attempt at a revival of the part of
Claude Duval.

Mariana attended missions less and meditated more. She divided her time
between her journal and the piano, showing a preference for songs of
riotous sentiment. Without apparent trouble to herself, she grew wan and
mysteriously poetic. She wore picturesque gowns with romantic draperies.
Her hair possessed a charming disorder, the expression of her face
passed from the placid into the intense. The dramatic effect was as good
as ever. Her journal of that year contains a declaration of undying
constancy. The object of this avowal is nominally the young
highwayman--in reality the creation of an over-fertile brain craving the
intoxicant of a great passion. The highwayman was but a picturesque
nucleus round which her dreams clustered and from which they gathered
color. She existed in a maze of the imagination, feasting upon the
unsubstantial food of idealism. Her longings for fame and for love were
so closely interwoven that even in her own mind it was impossible to
disassociate them. If she bedewed her pillow with tears of anguish for
the sake of a man whom she had never seen, and whom, seeing, she would
have passed with averted eyes, the tears were often dried by ecstatic
visions of artistic aspirations. And yet this romance of straw was not
the less intense because it was the creation of overwrought
susceptibilities; perhaps the more so. If real troubles were the only
troubles, how many tortured hearts would be uplifted to the hills. And
Mariana's mystical romance was a _daemon_ that lured her in a dozen
different disguises towards the quicksands of life.

But this passed also and was done with.

Her mother died, and her father married an early love. Mariana, who had
been first, declined to become last. Dissensions followed swiftly, and
the domestic atmosphere only cleared when Mariana departed from the
paternal dwelling-place.

From the small Southern village, under the protection of an elderly
female relation, she had flown to New York in search of theatrical
employment. Failing in her object, she turned desperately to the culture
of her voice, living meanwhile upon a meagre allowance donated by her
father. The elderly female relation had remained with her for a time,
but finding Mariana intractable in minor ways, and foreseeing a future
in which she would serve as cat's-paw for the girl's vagaries, she had
blessed her young relative and departed.

"One must either worship or detest you, my dear," she remarked as a
parting shaft. "And to worship you means to wait upon you, which is
wearing. Your personality is as absorbent as cotton. It absorbs the
individual comfort of those around you. It is very pleasant to be
absorbed, and you do it charmingly; but there is so much to see in the
world, and I'm getting old fast enough."

So she went, leaving Mariana alone in a fourth-story front room of The
Gotham apartment-house.




CHAPTER III


Mr. Nevins once said to Mariana: "You are as elusive as thistle-down
whipped up with snow."

Mariana smiled that radiating, indescribable smile which dawned
gradually from within, deepening until it burst into pervasive wealth of
charm.

"Why snow?" was her query.

Mr. Paul, who apparently had been engrossed in his dinner, glanced up
grimly. "The only possible reason for a metaphor," he observed, "is lack
of reason."

Mr. Nevins dismissed him with a shrug and looked in sentimental
perplexity at Mariana.

"Merely because it is impossible to whip up ice with anything," he
replied.

"I should have supposed," interrupted Mr. Paul, in unabashed
disapproval, "that the same objection would apply to thistle-down. It
would certainly apply to a woman."

Miss Ramsey, who sat opposite, turned her tired eyes upon him.

"Life is not of your opinion, Mr. Paul," she said. "It whips us up with
all kinds of ingredients, and it never seems to realize when we have
been reduced to the proper consistency."

She looked worn and harassed, and had come in to dinner later than
usual. It was the first remark she had made, and, after making it, she
relapsed into silence. Her small red hands trembled as she lifted her
fork, the rebellious lines between her brows grew deeper, and she ate
her dinner with that complete exhaustion which so often passes for
resignation in the eyes of our neighbors. Nervous prostration has
produced more saints than all the sermons since Moses.

Mariana watched her sympathetically. She wondered why the gravy upon
Miss Ramsey's plate congealed sooner than it did upon any one else's,
while the sobbiest potatoes invariably fell to her share.

"A false metaphor!" commented Mr. Paul. "Most metaphors are false. I
don't trust Shakespeare himself when he gets to metaphor. I always skip
them."

"Oh, they have their uses," broke in the cheery tones of the optimist.
"I'm not much on Shakespeare, but I've no doubt he has his uses also. As
for metaphor, it is a convenient way of saying more than you mean."

"So is lying," retorted Mr. Paul, crossly, and the conversation
languished. Mariana ate her dinner and looked at the table-cloth. Mr.
Nevins ate his dinner and looked at Mariana. He regarded her as an
artistic possibility. Her appearance was a source of constant interest
to him, and he felt, were he in the position of nature, with the palette
and brush of an omnipotent colorist, he might blend the harmonious lines
of Mariana's person to better advantage. He resented the fact that her
nose was irregular and her chin too long. He wondered how such a subject
could have been wilfully neglected.

As for himself, he honestly felt that he had wasted no opportunities.
Upon their first acquaintance he had made a poster of Mariana which
undeniably surpassed the original. It represented her in a limp and
scantily made gown of green, with strange reptiles sprawling over it,
relieved against the ardor of a purple sunset. The hair was a marvel of
the imagination.

Mariana had liked it, with the single exception of the reptilian
figures.

"They have such an unpleasant suggestion," was her critical comment. "I
feel quite like Medusa. Couldn't you change them into nice little
butterflies and things?"

Mr. Nevins was afraid he could not. The poster satisfied him as it was.
Miss Musin could not deny, he protested, that he had remodelled her nose
and chin in an eminently successful job, and if the hair and eyes and
complexion in the poster bore close resemblance in color, so did the
hair and eyes and complexion in the original. He had done his best.

Mariana accepted his explanation and went complacently on her way, as
enigmatical as a Chinese puzzle. She was full of swift surprises and
tremulous changes, varying color with her environment; gay one moment,
and sad before the gayety had left her lips--cruel and calm, passionate
and tender--always and ever herself.

Twice a week she went to Signor Morani's for a vocal lesson. Signor
Morani was small and romantic and severe. In his youth he had travelled
as Jenny Lind's barytone, and he had fallen a slave to her voice. He had
worshipped a voice as other men worship a woman. Unlike other men, he
had been faithful for a lifetime--to a voice.

When Mariana had gone to him, an emotional and aspiring soprano of
nineteen, he had listened to her quietly and advised patience.

"You must wait," he said. "All art is waiting."

"I will not wait," said Mariana. "Waiting is starvation."

He looked at her critically.

"More of us starve than the world suspects," he answered. "It is the
privilege of genius. This is a planet, my dear child, where mediocrity
is exalted and genius brought low. It is a living fulfilment of the
scriptural prophecy, 'The first shall be last and the last shall be
first.'" Then he added: "Sing again."

Mariana stood up and sang. His words had depressed her, and her voice
trembled. She looked at him wistfully, her hands hanging at her sides,
her head thrown back. It was an aria from "Faust." He shook his head
slowly.

"You will never be great," he said. "I can give you technique, but not
volume. Your voice will never be great."

With a half-defiant gesture Mariana broke forth again. This time it was
a popular song, with a quick refrain running through it. As she sang she
acted the accompaniment half unconsciously.

Signor Morani frowned as she commenced, and then watched her
attentively. In the fragile little girl, with the changeable eyes of
green and the aureole of shadowless hair, he scented possibilities.

"Your voice will never be great," he repeated; "but you may make men
believe so."

"And you will take me?" pleaded Mariana. She stretched out her beautiful
hands. Her eyes prayed. Her flexible tones drooped.

Signor Morani took her hands in his with kindly reassurance.

"Yes," he said--"yes; it will keep you out of mischief, at least."

And it had kept her out of mischief. It had opened a channel for her
emotions. Like a tide, the romanticism of her nature veered towards art.
She became the most fanatical of devotees. She breathed it and lived it.
In her heart it transplanted all other religions, and the aestheticism of
its expression gained a marvellous hold upon her faith. Above the little
mosaic altar at her bedside she enshrined a bust of Wagner, and she
worshipped it as some more orthodox believer had once worshipped an
enshrined Madonna. At midnight she held devotional services all alone,
sitting before the piano, bending to the uses of a litany the
intellectual rhapsodies of Beethoven or the sensuous repinings of
Chopin, while the little red flame sent up praise and incense from dried
rose leaves and cinnamon to the memories of dead musicians. She
introduced a rare, sensuous beauty into this new worship, as she had
introduced it into the old. She typified the Church when, in its fresh
young passion, and suffused with the dying splendors of paganism, it
turned from the primitive exercises of its founders and revived the
worship of the gracious Madonna of Old Egypt in the worship of the
Madonna of Nazareth, and the flower-scented feasts of Venus in the
Purification of the Virgin. There existed in the girl an unsatisfied
restlessness of self, resulting in the desire for complete submergence
of soul in idea. Her nature veered constantly from extreme to extreme;
there was no semblance of a saner medium, and as a system must have
exponents, the high priests and priestesses of art became her lesser
divinities.

She began to haunt the Metropolitan Opera-house. From the fifth gallery
she looked down every evening upon an Italian or German landscape. She
herself trembled like a harp swept by invisible fingers; she grew pale
with Marguerite, wept over the dead Juliet, and went mad with the
madness of Lucia.

When the voice of that fair Bride of Lammermoor who sang for us that
season was borne to her on the notes of a flute which flagged beneath
the exceeding sweetness of the human notes they carried, Mariana grasped
the railing with her quivering hands and bowed her head in an ecstasy of
appreciation. It was the ecstasy with which a monk in mediaeval days must
have thrilled when he faced in a dim cathedral some beautiful and
earthly Virgin of the great Raphael. It was the purest form of sensuous
self-abnegation. Then, as the curtain fell, she would rise and step
gropingly towards the door, cast into sudden darkness. Wrapped in that
mental state as in a mantle, she would descend the stairs and pass out
into the street. At such times she was as far removed from the existence
to which she was returning as was the poor mad Lucia herself. And then
in the night she would awake and sing softly to herself in the
stillness, lying with seraphic eyes and hands clasped upon her breast,
until the morning sun flashed into her face and the day began.

There was also a tragic side to her emotions. Her past inheritance of
ages of image-worshippers laid hold upon her. From being merely symbols
of art the singers became divinities in their own right. She haunted
their hotels for fleeting glimpses of them. She bought their photographs
with the money which should have gone for a winter hat. She would gladly
have kissed the dust upon which they trod. After her first hearing of
"Tristan and Isolde," she placed the prima donna's photograph beneath
the bust of Wagner, and worshipped her for weeks as a bright particular
star.

In the evening she attended the opera alone. Returning when it was over,
she crossed Broadway, boarded a car, and, reaching The Gotham, toiled up
to the fourth landing. She was innocent of prudery, and she went
unharmed. Perhaps her complete absorption in something beyond herself
was her safeguard. At all events, she brushed men by, glanced at them
with unseeing eyes, and passed placidly on her way.

Mariana was famished for romance, but not for the romance of the street.
She had an instinctive aversion to things common and of vulgar intent.
Her unsatisfied desire was but the craving of a young and impressionable
heart for untried emotion. It was the poetry of living she thirsted
for--poetry in aesthetic proportions, with a careful adjustment of light
and shade. She desired harmonious effects and exquisite schemes of
color, all as appropriate settings to a romance which she could arrange
and blend in treatment as an artist arranges models of still life. So,
for a time, she expended herself upon great singers. A new tenor
appeared as Edgardo. Upon the stage he was dark and fierce and
impassioned. He made an adorable lover. He sang to Lucia, not to the
audience, and he threw half his arias into his eyes. Mariana was
enraptured. She fell desperately in love. During the day she went about
in meditative abstraction; during the night she turned upon her little
cotton pillow-slip, and wept to think how far below him she must ever
remain. She even wished herself a chorus girl, that she might intercept
his glances. She grew frantically jealous of the prima donna, whom,
also, she adored. She imagined innumerable romances in which he enacted
upon the stage of life the part of Edgardo. Then, through the kindness
of Signor Morani, she was introduced to the object of her regard, and
the awakening was abrupt. He was fat and commonplace. He proved to be
the faithful husband of a red-faced little German wife, and the devoted
father of a number of red-faced German children. He possessed no
qualities for romantic development, and Mariana recovered.

For a period her susceptibilities abated. The wave of activity spent its
violence. Life flowed for her like a meadow stream, sensitive to faint
impressions from a passing breeze, but calm when the breeze was afar.

Upon a night of "Carmen" she saw from the fifth gallery a velvet rose
fall from the prima donna's bosom to the stage. When the curtain fell
she rushed madly down and begged it of an usher. She carried it home,
and hung it upon the wall above her bed. At night, before falling
asleep, she would draw the curtains aside, and, in the electric light
that flooded the room, cast her eyes upon the vivid bit of color. In the
early morning she would awake, and, raising herself upon her elbow,
touch it reverently with her hand. It was homage rendered to her own
ambition.

At The Gotham, her bare little chamber, with its garish wall-paper, was
a source of acute discomfort to her. Once, after a long spell of
pneumonia, she had fallen into a fit of desperation, and had attacked
the paper with a breakfast-knife. The result was a square of whitewashed
wall above the bureau. An atmosphere of harmony was so necessary to her
growth that she seemed to droop and pine in uncongenial environment. In
the apartment-house, with its close, unventilated halls, its creaking
elevator, its wretchedly served dinners, she had always felt strangely
ill at ease. Her last prayer at night was that the morrow might see her
transplanted to richer soil, her first thought upon awakening was that
the coming day was pregnant with possibilities. Life in its entirety,
life with passionate color and emotional fulfilment, was the food she
craved.

Of Mariana, Mr. Ardly had made a laborious and profound analysis.

"That young person is a self-igniting taper," he had concluded. "If some
one doesn't apply the match, she will go off of her own accord--and she
will burn herself out before time has cast a wet blanket upon her."

He himself was a self-contained young fellow, who, like a greater before
him, followed with wisdom both wine and women. His life was regulated by
a theory which he had propounded in youth and attempted to practice in
maturer years. The theory asserted that experience was the one reliable
test of existing conditions. "I refused to believe that alcohol was an
intoxicant," he had once said, "until I tested it."

When Mariana first arrived, he surprised in his heart an embryonic
sentiment concerning her, and proceeded to crush it as coolly as he
would have crushed a fly that encroached upon the private domain of his
person.

"I have no dissipations," he explained, when discussing the affair with
Mariana. "I neither drink nor love."

"Which is unwise," retorted Mariana. "I do both in moderation. And a man
who has never been in love is always a great school-boy. I should be
continually expecting him to tread upon my gown or to break my fan.
Sentiment is the greatest civilizer of the race. If I were you I would
begin immediately."

"I dislike all effort," returned Ardly, gravely, "and love is cloying.
Over-loving produces mental indigestion, as over-eating produces
physical. I have suffered from it, and experience has made me
abstemious. I shall abstain from falling in love with you."

"What a pity!" sighed Mariana, lifting her lashes.

"Well, I can't agree with you," argued Ardly, "and I don't regret it. I
am very comfortable as I am."

"I am not," retorted Mariana. "I detest the dinners. Who could be
comfortable on overdone mutton and cold potatoes?"

"Even in the matter of food I am without prejudices," declared the
other. "I had as soon want a good dinner and have a poor one as have a
good one and want none. These are the only conditions with which I am
acquainted. There may be estates where things are more equally adjusted,
but I know nothing of them; I have not experienced them."

Mariana sighed. "You are as depressing as Mr. Paul," she complained.

"I only speak of what I know," explained Ardly, complacently. "Upon
other matters I have no opinions, and I calmly repeat that I have found
appetite and gratification to be situated upon opposite sides of a
revolving globe. When one's up the other's down."

"I shall cut a passage through," said Mariana. "If life doesn't equalize
things, I will."

"And I will watch the process," remarked Ardly, indolently.

It was shortly after this that Mariana went to Long Island for a
holiday, spending a couple of weeks in the cottage of an acquaintance,
who, by dint of successive matrimonial ventures, had succeeded in
reaching the equilibrium to which Mariana aspired.

Upon returning to New York the girl found her distaste for The Gotham to
have trebled. When she had toiled up the dingy stairway and installed
herself in her old place, she sat upon her trunk and looked about her.
Never had the room appeared so dull, so desperately plain. The close
odor caused by lack of ventilation offended her nostrils, and yet she
hesitated to fling back the shutters and reveal the rusty balcony with
its spindling fire-escape, beyond which stretched the sombre outlook,
the elevated road looming like a skeleton in the foreground. The door
into the hall was ajar, and she could see a dull expanse of corridor,
lighted day and night by a solitary and ineffectual electric jet.

A sob stuck in her throat, and, crossing to the window, she raised it
and threw back the shutters, letting in a thin stream of dust and
sunshine. Her geranium stood where she had left it, and its withered and
yellow leaves smote her with accusing neglect.

"Oh, you poor thing!" she cried, in an impulsive burst of pity.

Then she saw that it had been freshly watered, and that its famished
leaves were unfolding. Turning her eyes, they encountered a row of small
pots containing seedlings which lined her neighbor's window, encroaching
slightly upon her own possession. Before them a man was standing, a
watering-can in one hand, a small trowel in the other. As Mariana
stepped upon the fire-escape he turned in evident resentment, glanced at
her indifferently, and resumed his task of invigoration.

The afternoon sun shone full upon him, and Mariana saw him plainly. He
was young, with stooping shoulders, and he wore a cheap and shabby suit
of clothes, with apparent disregard of their quality. His face was thin
and cleanly shaven, there was a nervous tension about the mouth, and the
hair, falling dark and heavy upon the temples, lent a haggardness to his
colorless and burned-out profile. It was a face in which the poetic
principle was obscured by an ascetic veneering. In his whole appearance
was borne out the suggestion flashing from the eyes--a suggestion of
mental sustentation upon physical force.

Mariana regarded him mutely. Her gaze was almost tragic in its
intensity. For a moment her lips quivered and her fingers interlaced.
Then she retreated into her room, slamming the shutters after her.
Throwing herself into a chair, she buried her face in her hands.

"I--I can't have even that to myself!" she said, and burst into tears.




CHAPTER IV


Mariana's neighbor sat in his room. He sat motionless, his head resting
upon his hands, his arms resting upon an office desk, which was plainly
finished and of cheap walnut. At his left elbow a lamp cast an
illumination upon his relaxed and exhausted figure, upon the straight,
dark hair, upon the bulging brow, and upon the sinewy and squarely
shaped hands, with their thin and nervous fingers.

The desk upon which he leaned was covered with a litter of closely
written letter-sheets, and at the back a row of pigeon-holes contained
an unassorted profusion of manuscripts.

The walls of the room were lined with roughly constructed shelves of
painted wood, which were filled to overflowing with well-worn volumes in
English, French, and German, Oken's _Die Zeugung_ upon the north side
confronting Darwin's _The Variation of Animals and Plants Under
Domestication_ upon the south. A cabinet in one corner contained a
number of alcoholic specimens of embryonic development, and a small
table near by supported a microscope and several instruments for
physiological experiments. Above the mantel, perhaps arranged in
freakish disregard of superstition, hung a skull and a pair of
cross-bones, and beneath them a series of photographs illustrating the
evolution of rudimentary nervous systems.

Upon the hearth, within convenient reach of the desk, stood a small
spirit-stove, and on it a coffee-pot, which emitted a strong and
stimulating aroma. Beside it a table was spread, with the remains of a
cold supper and an unused cup and saucer.

The man lifted his head from his hands, turned up the wick of the lamp,
and took up his pen.

From without came the rumble of the elevated road and the shrill cries
of a newsboy proclaiming the redundant virtues of the _Evening Post_. A
warm August breeze, entering at the open window, which was raised from
the floor, caused the flame of the lamp to flicker slightly. Outside
upon the fire-escape the young plants were arranged in rows of
systematic precision, their tender leaves revealed in the narrow path of
lamplight leading from the heated room to the iron railing overlooking
the street. With absent-minded elaboration the man drew an irregular
line upon the paper before him. The line bore no relation whatever to
the heading of the paper, which was written in a remarkably firm and
heavy hand, and read:

     "Transmission of Acquired Characteristics."

Suddenly he laid the pen aside, and rose, wiping the moisture from his
brow with his handkerchief. Then he threw off his coat and drew up his
shirt-sleeves. It was oppressively warm, and the lamp seemed to possess
the heating qualities of a Latrobe stove. For a couple of minutes he
walked slowly up and down the uncarpeted floor. From the adjoining room
came the sound of a piano and a woman singing. He shook his head
impatiently, but the sound continued, and he yawned and stretched his
arms with resentful resignation. After which he lifted the coffee-pot
from the little stove and filled the cup upon the table.

Returning to his seat, he drank his coffee slowly, allowing his
abstracted gaze to wander through the window and into the city night
without. Upon the drawn shades of the opposite tenement-house he could
trace the shadows of men and women passing to and fro like the
unsubstantial outlines of figures remembered in a dream. His thoughts
fluttered restlessly. He was tired. Yes, but the coffee would get him
into shape again, and he must work. It was barely ten o'clock. The day
had been trying. The experiments made in the college laboratory had been
unsuccessful. He had gone about them wrongly. Professor Myers had been
mistaken in his calculations. It was unfortunate. The opportunity for
work had been excellent, and in September, when the session began, his
lectures at that infernal Woman's College would take a good two hours
daily, to say nothing of the preparations. What a bore it would be! If
he had only money enough to follow out his work independently he might
make a splendid success of it. True, he had spent enough on those
travels and excavations in Egypt and Assyria to have supported an
ordinary Philistine in comfort for an ordinary lifetime. But he did not
regret them. They had given balance to his judgment, and he had acquired
an immense amount of information. And those studies in Ancient India.
Why, they had even more direct bearing upon his theories. Involuntarily
his glance strayed round the book-lined walls and to the manuscripts in
his desk. He devoured the closely written, almost illegible pages with
insatiable eyes--eyes stricken with the mania for knowledge. The bronzed
and sallow face he turned towards the light was suffused with the glow
of a consuming purpose. In its deep-eyed, thin-lipped severity of
drawing, every sensuous curve had been erased by lines of toil.

He set the cup aside and returned to his work. From a drawer of his desk
he drew a thick volume, consisting of a number of legal-cap sheets,
bound with a systematic regard for subject. Upon the cover was written
in printed letters: "Notes," and beneath: "A History of Man, with
Special Application of the Science of Ontogeny."

After consulting this briefly he laid it away and fell to writing. From
the adjoining room still came the sound of a woman singing. The voice
was light and flippant.

"Damn it!" said the man, suddenly, with angry impatience. He said it
vehemently, looking up from his work with nervous irritability. At the
same moment there came a slight tap at his door.

He laid aside his pen, rose, and opened it. Mr. Paul stood upon the
outside.

"Well, Mr. Algarcife," he began, grimly, "you see I have broken a
life-long principle and taken a man at his word. I came for the book you
spoke of."

Algarcife welcomed him impatiently. "So I suppose I must prove your
principle relative, if not erroneous," he answered. His voice was
singularly full and clear. "It was _Milligan on the Vocabulary of
Aboriginal Tasmanians_, was it not? Yes, I think it will aid you."

Mr. Paul came in and they sat down. Algarcife offered him coffee and
cigars, but he declined. He sat stiffly in his chair and looked at the
other with cynical interest.

"You write all night on this lye, I suppose?" he said, abruptly. "A
combined production of brains and coffee."

Algarcife lighted his pipe and leaned back in his chair, blowing gray
circles of smoke upon the atmosphere.

"You are right," he responded; "I find I do my best work after midnight,
when I am drunk on caffeine or coffee. I suppose it will do for me in
the end."

Mr. Paul returned his indifferent gaze with one of severity. "You are
all nerves as it is," he said. "You haven't an ounce of good barbarian
blood in your body--merely a colorless machine for ratiocination. I tell
you, there is no bigger fool than the man who, because he possesses a
few brains, forgets that he is an animal."

The other laughed abstractedly.

"What wholesome truths you deliver," he said. "I think Luther must have
had your manner. Well, if I were in your place, I should probably say
the same, though less forcibly. But they are theories. You see, I argue
this way: with one man's mind and one man's power of work, I could never
accomplish what I have before me--any more than poor Buckle, with the
brain of a giant, could accomplish what he undertook. It is too big for
a single man in this stage of development. So, with one man's mind, I
intend to do six men's amount of labor. If I hold out, I will have my
reward; if I go to pieces, I shall at least have the satisfaction of a
good fight."

His voice was distinct and forcible, with a widely varied range of
expression.

There was a second tap at the door, and Mr. Nevins entered, looking
depressed and ill-humored.

"Hello, Anthony!" he called. "What! is Mr. Paul squandering your
midnight oil? You should have sent him to bed long ago."

"It is not my hour for retiring," responded Mr. Paul.

Anthony interrupted pacifically.

"Mr. Paul is exhorting me," he said, "and I have no doubt that, with
slight modifications, his sermon may be adapted to your case. He
predicts brain-softening and general senility."

"An inspired prophecy," returned Mr. Nevins, crossly, "and savoring of
Jeremiah. As for myself, it is but common justice that a man who has
conscientiously refused the cultivation of the mind should not be called
upon to lose what he doesn't possess." Then he grew suddenly cheerful.
"Confound it! What's the use of being a philosopher on paper when you
can be one in practice. What's the use of dying when you can eat,
drink, and be merry?"

"Eating," remarked Mr. Paul, with depressing effect, "produces
dyspepsia, drinking produces gout."

"And thought, paresis," added Anthony, lightly. "They are all merely
different forms of dissipation. I have chosen mine; Nevins has chosen
his. Only, as a matter of taste, I'd rather die by work than wine.
Personally, I prefer consumption to apoplexy."

"There is such a thing as the means justifying the end," responded Mr.
Nevins, in reckless ill-humor. "And it is a great principle. If I wasn't
a fool, I'd make a bonfire of my brush and palette, and start afresh on
a level with my appetite. I would become the apostle of good-living,
which means fast living. I tell you, an hour of downright devilment is
worth all the art since Adam. Aristippus is greater than Raphael."

"What has gone wrong?" demanded Algarcife, soothingly. "Too much purple
in the 'Andromeda'? I always said that purple was the imperial color of
his satanic majesty. If you had followed the orthodox art of your
college days, and hadn't gone wandering after strange gods, you might
have escaped a dash of that purple melancholia."

"You're a proper fellow," returned Mr. Nevins, with disgust. "Who was it
that won that last debate in '82 by a glowing defence of Christianity
against agnosticism, and, when the Reverend Miles lit out about the new
orator in his flock, floored him with: 'Was that good? Then what a
magnificent thing I could have made of the other side!'"

Mr. Paul had opened his book, and glanced up with candid lack of
interest. Anthony laughed languidly.

"I saw Miles some weeks ago," he said, "and he is still talking about my
'defection,' as he calls it. I couldn't convince him that I was merely
the counsel for a weak case, and that I was always an agnostic at
heart."

Mr. Nevins lighted a cigar in silence. Then he nodded abruptly towards
the wall. "What's that noise?" he demanded, irritably.

"That," replied Algarcife, "is a fiend in woman's form, who makes night
hideous. I can't begin to work until she sings herself hoarse, and she
doesn't do that until midnight. Verily, she is possessed of seven
devils, and singing devils at that."

Mr. Nevins was listening attentively. His irritability had vanished.

"Why, it's Mariana!" he exclaimed. "Bless her pretty throat! An hour of
Mariana is worth all the spoken or unspoken thoughts of--of Marcus
Aurelius, to say nothing of Solomon."

Mr. Paul closed his book and looked up gravely. "A worthy young woman,"
he observed, "though a trifle fast. As for Solomon, his wisdom has been
greatly exaggerated."

"Fast!" protested Mr. Nevins. "She's as fast as--as Mr. Paul--"

"Your insinuation is absurd," returned Mr. Paul, stiffly. But Mr. Nevins
was not to be suppressed.

"Then don't display your ignorance of such matters. As for this St.
Anthony, he thinks every woman who walks the New York streets a bleached
pattern of virtue. I don't believe he'd know a painted Jezebel unless
she wore a scarlet letter."

Anthony turned upon him resentfully. "Confound it, Nevins," he said, "I
am not a born fool!"

"Only an innocent," retorted Mr. Nevins, complacently.

A resounding rap upon the panels of the door interrupted them. Mr.
Nevins rose.

"That's Ardly," he said. "He and I are doing New York to-night."

Ardly came inside, and stood with his hand upon the door-knob.

"Come on, Nevins," he said. "I've got to do a column on that new
_danseuse_. She dances like a midge, but, by Jove! she has a figure to
swear by--"

"And escape perjury," added Mr. Nevins. "Mariana says it is false."

"Mariana," replied Ardly, "is a sworn enemy to polite illusions. She
surveys the stage through a microscope situated upon the end of a
lorgnette. It is a mistake. One should never look at a woman through
glasses unless they be rose-colored ones. A man preserves this
principle, and his faith in plumpness and curves along with it; a woman
penetrates to the padding and powder. Come on, Nevins."

Mr. Nevins followed him into the hall, and then turned to look in again.
"Algarcife, won't you join us on a jolly little drunk? Won't you, Mr.
Paul?"

When they had gone, and Mr. Paul had gone likewise, though upon a
different way, Anthony heated the coffee, drank two cups, and resumed
his work.

"Taken collectively," he remarked, "the human race is a consummate
nuisance. What a deuced opportunity for work the last man will
have--only, most likely, he'll be an ass."

The next day he passed Mariana on the stairs without seeing her. He was
returning from the college laboratory, and his mind was full of his
experiments. Later in the afternoon, when he watered his plants, he
turned his can, in absent-minded custom, upon the geranium, and saw that
there was a scarlet bloom among the leaves. The sight pleased him. It
was as if he had given sustenance to a famished life.

But Mariana, engrossed in lesser things, had seen him upon the stairs
and upon the balcony. She still cherished an unreasonable resentment at
what she considered his trespass upon her individual rights; and yet,
despite herself, the trenchant quality in the dark, massive-browed face
had not been without effect upon her. The ascetic self-repression that
chastened his lips, and the utter absence of emotion in the mental heat
of his glance tantalized her in its very unlikeness to her own nature.
She, who thrilled into responsive joy or gloom at reflected light or
shade, found her quick senses awake to each passing impression, and had
learned to recognize her neighbor's step upon the stair; while he,
wrapped in an intellectual trance, created his environment at will, and
was as oblivious of the girl at the other end of the fire-escape as he
was to the articles of furniture in his room.

It was as if semi-barbarism, in all its exuberance of undisciplined
emotion, had converged with the highest type of modern civilization--the
civilization in which the flesh is degraded from its pedestal and forced
to serve as a jangled vehicle for the progress of the mind.

The next night, as Algarcife stood at his window looking idly down upon
the street below, he heard the sound of a woman sobbing in the adjoining
room. His first impulse was to hasten in the direction from whence the
sound came. He curbed the impulse with a shake.

"Hang it," he said, "it is no business of mine!"

But the suppressed sobbing from the darkness beyond invited him with its
enlistment of his quick sympathies.

The electric light, falling upon the fire-escape, cast inky shadows from
end to end. They formed themselves into dense outlines, which shivered
as if stirred by a phantom breeze.

He turned and went back to his desk. Upon the table he had spread the
supper of which he intended partaking at eleven o'clock. For an unknown
reason he had conceived an aversion to the restaurant in the basement,
and seldom entered it. He slept late in the day and worked at night,
and his meals were apt to be at irregular hours.

He wrote a line, and rose and went back to the window. For an instant he
stood and listened, then stepped out upon the fire-escape and walked
across the shivering shadows towards the open window beyond.

Upon the little door beneath the window a girl was leaning, her head
bowed upon her outstretched arm. The light in the room beyond was low,
but he could see distinctly the slight outlines of her figure and the
confusion of her heavy hair. She was sobbing softly.

"I beg your pardon," he said, the sympathetic quality in his voice
dominating, "but I am sure that I can help you."

His forcible self-confidence exercised a compelling effect. The girl
lifted her head and looked at him. Tears stood in her eyes, and as the
electric light caught the clear drops they cast out scintillant flashes.
Against the dim interior her head, with its nimbus of hair, had the
droop and poise of the head of a mediaeval saint.

"Oh, but you don't know how unhappy I am!" she said.

He spoke as he would have spoken to Mr. Paul in the same circumstances.
"You have no one to whom you can go?"

"No."

"Then tell me about it."

His tone was that in which a physician might inquire the condition of a
patient's digestion. It was absolutely devoid of the recognition of sex.

"Oh, I have worked so hard!" said Mariana.

"Yes?"

"And I hoped to sing in opera, and--Morani tells me that--it will be
impossible."

"Ah!" In the peculiar power of his voice the exclamation had the warmth
of a handshake.

Mariana rested her chin upon her clasped hands and looked at him. "He
says it must be a music-hall--or--or nothing," she added.

He was silent for a moment. He felt that it was a case in which his
sympathy could be exceeded only by his ignorance. "And this is why you
are unhappy?" he asked. "Is there nothing else?"

She gave a little sob. "I am tired," she said. "My allowance hasn't
come--and I missed my dinner, and I am--hungry."

Algarcife responded with relieved cheerfulness.

"Why, we are prepared for that," he said. "I was just sitting down to my
supper, and you will join me."

In his complete estrangement from the artificial restraints of society,
it seemed to him the simplest of possible adjustments of the difficulty.
He felt that his intervention had not been wholly without beneficial
results.

Mariana glanced swiftly up into his face.

"Come!" he said; and she rose and followed him.




CHAPTER V


As Mariana crossed the threshold the light dazzled her, and she raised
her hand to her eyes. Then she lowered it and looked at him between
half-closed lids. It was a trick of mannerism which heightened the
subtlety of her smile. In the deep shadows cast by her lashes her eyes
were untranslatable.

"You are very hospitable," she said.

"A virtue which covers a multitude of sins," he answered, pleasantly.
"If you will make yourself at home, I'll fix things up a bit."

He opened the doors of the cupboard and took out a plate and a cup and
saucer, which he placed before her. "I am sorry I can't offer you a
napkin," he said, apologetically, "but they allow me only one a day, and
I had that at luncheon."

Mariana laughed merrily. The effects of recent tears were visible only
in the added lustre of her glance and the pallor of her face. She had
grown suddenly mirthful.

"Don't let's be civilized!" she pleaded. "I abhor civilization. It
invented so many unnecessary evils. Barbarians didn't want napkins; they
wanted only food. I am a barbarian."

Algarcife cut the cold chicken and passed her the bread and butter.

"Why, none of us are really civilized, you know," he returned,
dogmatically. "True, we have a thin layer of hypocrisy, which we call
civilization. It prompts us to sugar-coat the sins which our forefathers
swallowed in the rough; that is all. It is purely artificial. In a
hundred thousand years it may get soaked in, and then the artificial
refinement will become real and civilization will set in."

Mariana leaned forward with a pretty show of interest. She did not quite
understand what he meant, but she adapted herself instinctively to
whatever he might mean.

"And then?" she questioned.

"And then we will realize that to be civilized is to shrink as
instinctively from inflicting as from enduring pain. Sympathy is merely
a quickening of the imagination, in which state we are able to propel
ourselves mentally into conditions other than our own." His manner was
aggressive in its self-assertiveness. Then he smiled, regarded her with
critical keenness, and lifted the coffee-pot.

"I sha'n't give you coffee," he said, "because it is not good for you.
You need rest. Why, your hands are trembling! You shall have milk
instead."

"I don't like milk," returned Mariana, fretfully. "I'd rather have
coffee, please. I want to be stimulated."

"But not artificially," he responded. His gaze softened. "This is my
party, you know," he said, "and it isn't polite to ask for what is not
offered you. Come here."

He had risen and was standing beside his desk. Mariana went up to him.
The power of his will had enthralled her, and she felt strangely
submissive. Her coquetry she recognized as an unworthy weapon, and it
was discarded. She grew suddenly shy and nervous, and stood before him
in the flushed timidity of a young feminine thing.

He had taken a bottle from a shelf and was measuring some dark liquid
into a wine-glass. As Mariana reached him he took her hand with frank
kindliness. In his cool and composed touch there was not so much as a
suggestion of sexual difference. The possibility that, as a woman, she
possessed an attraction for him, as a man, was ignored in its entirety.

"You have cried half the evening?"

"Yes."

"Drink this." His tone was peremptory.

He gave her the glass, watching her as she looked into it, with the
gleam of a smile in his intent regard. Mariana hesitated an instant.
Then she drank it with a slight grimace.

"Your hospitality has taken an unpleasant turn," she remarked. "You
might at least give me something to destroy the taste."

He laughed and pointed to a plate of grapes, and they sat down to
supper.

The girl glanced about the room critically. Then she looked at her
companion.

"I don't quite like your room," she observed. "It is grewsome."

"It is a work-shop," he answered. "But your dislike is pure nonsense.
Skulls and cross-bones are as natural in their way as flesh and blood.
Nothing in nature is repellent to the mind that follows her."

Mariana repressed a shudder. "I have no doubt that toads are natural
enough in their way," she returned, "but I don't like the way of toads."

Anthony met her serious protest lightly.

"You are a beautiful subject for morbid psychology," he said. "Why,
toads are eminently respectable creatures, and if we regard them without
prejudice, we will discover that, as a point of justice, they have an
equal right with ourselves to the possession of this planet. Only, right
is not might, you know."

"But I love beautiful things," protested Mariana. She looked at him
wistfully, like a child desiring approbation. There was an amber light
in her eyes.

He smiled upon her.

"So do I," he made answer; "but to me each one of those nice little
specimens is a special revelation of beauty."

The girl broke her bread daintily. "You misunderstand me," she said,
with flattering earnestness and a deprecatory inflection in her voice.
Her head drooped sideways on its slender throat. There was a virginal
illusiveness about her that tinged with seriousness the lightness of her
words. "Surely you love art," she said.

"Oh, I like painting, if that is what you mean," he answered,
carelessly, though her image in his eyes was relieved against a sudden
warmth. "That is, I like Raphael and Murillo and a few of the modern
French fellows. As for music, I don't know one note from another. The
only air I ever caught was 'In the Fragrant Summer-time,' and that was
an accident. I thought it was 'Maryland.'"

Mariana did not smile. She shrank from him, and he felt as if he had
struck her.

"It isn't worth your thinking of," he said, "nor am I."

Mariana protested with her restless hands.

"Oh, but I can't help thinking of it," she answered. "It is dreadful.
Why, such things are a part of my religion!"

He returned her startled gaze with one of amusement.

"I might supply you with an alphabetical dictionary of my peculiar
vices. An unabridged edition would serve for a criminal catalogue as
well. A--Acrimony, Adhesiveness, Atheism, Aggressiveness, Aggravation,
Ambition, Artfulness--"

"Oh, stop!" cried Mariana. "You bewilder me."

He leaned back in his chair and fixed his intent gaze upon her. His eyes
were so deeply set as to be almost indistinguishable, but in the spell
of lamplight she saw that the pupils differed in color, one having a
hazel cast, while the other was of a decided gray.

"Why, I thought you displayed an interest in the subject!" he rejoined.
"You lack the genius of patience."

"Patience," returned Mariana, with a swift change of manner, "is only
lack of vitality. I haven't an atom of it."

A shade of the nervous irritability, which appeared from apparently no
provocation, was in his voice as he answered:

"There is nothing fate likes better than to drill it into us. And it is
not without its usefulness. If patience is the bugbear of youth, it is
the panacea of middle age. We learn to sit and wait as we learn to
accept passivity for passion and indifference for belief. The worst of
it is that it is a lesson which none of us may skip and most of us are
forced to learn by heart." He spoke slowly, his voice softened. Beneath
the veneering of philosophic asceticism, the scarlet veins of primeval
nature were still palpitant. The chill lines of self-restraint in his
face might, in the whirlwind of strong passions, become ingulfed in
chaos.

With an effort Mariana threw off the spell of his personality. She
straightened herself with an energetic movement. From the childlike her
manner passed to the imperious. Her head poised itself proudly, her eyes
darkened, her lips lost their pliant curve and grew audacious.

"That is as grewsome as your room," she said. "Let's talk of pleasant
things."

The changes in her mystified Algarcife. He regarded her gravely. "Of
yourself, or of myself?" he demanded.

"The first would only display your ignorance. I should prefer the
latter. Begin, please." She had grown vivid.

He spoke jestingly. "Here goes. Name, Algarcife. Christened Anthony.
Age, twenty-seven years, three weeks, ten days. Height, five feet eleven
inches. Complexion, anaemic. Physique, bad. Disposition, worse. Manners,
still worse. Does the exactness of my information satisfy you?"

"No;" she enveloped him in her smile. "You haven't told me anything I
want to know. I could have guessed your height, and your manners I have
tested. What were you doing before I came in?"

"Cursing my luck."

"And before that?" She leaned forward eagerly.

"Dogging at a theory of heredity which will reconcile Darwin's gemmules,
Weismann's germ-plasm, and Galton's stirp."

She wrinkled her brows in perplexity. Her show of interest had not fled.
A woman who cannot talk of the things she knows nothing about might as
well be a man.

"And you will do it?" she asked. He had a sudden consciousness that no
one had ever been quite so in sympathy with him as this elusive little
woman with the changeable eyes.

"Well, I hardly think so," he said. "At any rate, I expect to discover
what Spencer would call the germ of truth in each one of them, and then
I suppose I'll formulate a theory of my own which will contain the best
in all of them."

Her manner did not betray her ignorance of his meaning.

"And you will explain it all to me when it is finished?" she asked.

His smile cast a light upon her.

"If you wish it," he answered, "but I had no idea that you cared for
such things."

"You did not know me," she responded, reproachfully. "I am very, very
ignorant, but I want so much to learn." Then her voice regained its
brightness. "And you have read all these books?" she questioned.

He followed with his eyes her swift gestures.

"Those," he answered, pointing to the north shelves, "I have skimmed.
Those behind you, I have read; and those," he nodded towards his right,
"I know word for word."

"And what do you do?" The delicacy of her manner imbued the question
with unconscious flattery.

"I--oh, I eke out an existence with the assistance of the Bodley
College."

"What have you to do with it? Oh, I beg your pardon! I had forgotten we
were almost strangers."

He answered, naturally.

"It is my unhappy fate to endeavor to instil a few brains and a good
deal of information into the heads of sixty-one young females."

"And don't you like them?" queried Mariana, eagerly.

"I do not."

"Why?"

"What an inquisitor you are, to be sure!"

"But tell me," she pleaded.

"Why?" he demanded, in his turn.

She lowered her lashes, looking at her quiet hands.

"Because I want so much to know."

His smiling eyes were probing her. "Tell me why."

She raised her lashes suddenly and returned his gaze. There was a
wistful sincerity in her eyes.

"I wish to know," she said, slowly, "so that I may not be like them."

For a moment he regarded her silently. Then he spoke. "My reasons are
valid. They giggle; they flirt; and they put candy in my pockets."

"And you don't like women at all?"

"I like nice, sensible women, who wear square-toed shoes, and who don't
distort themselves with corsets."

The girl put out her pretty foot in its pointed and high-heeled slipper.
Then she shook her head with mock seriousness.

"I don't suppose you think that very sensible?" she remarked.

He looked at it critically.

"Well, hardly. No, it isn't in the least sensible, but it--it is very
small, isn't it?"

"Oh yes," responded Mariana, eagerly. She felt a sudden desire to flaunt
her graces in his face. He was watching the play of her hands, but she
became conscious, with an aggrieved surprise, that he was not thinking
of them.

"But you don't like just mere--mere women?" she asked, gravely.

"Are you a mere--mere woman?"

"Yes."

"Then I like them."

The radiance that overflowed her eyes startled him.

"But you aren't just a mere--mere man," she volunteered.

"But I am--a good deal merer, in fact, than many others. I am a shape of
clay."

"Then I like shapes of clay," said Mariana.

For an instant they looked at each other in silence. In Mariana's
self-conscious eyes there was a soft suffusion of shyness; in his
subjective ones there was the quickening of an involuntary interest.

"Then we agree most amicably," he remarked, quietly. As she rose he
stood facing her. "It is time for your sleep and my work," he added, and
held out his hand.

As Mariana placed her own within it she flashed whitely with a sudden
resentment of his cool dismissal.

"Good-night!" she said.

He looked down at her as she lingered before him. "I want to be of use
to you," he said, frankly, "but things have an unfortunate way of
slipping my memory. If at any time I can serve you, just come to the
fire-escape and call me."

"No," answered the girl, pettishly, "certainly not."

His brow wrinkled. "That was rude, I know," he rejoined, "but I meant it
honestly."

"I have no doubt of it."

As she turned to go he detained her with a compelling touch.

"You aren't angry?"

"No."

"And you forgive me?"

"I have nothing to forgive. Indeed, I am grateful for your charity."

He surveyed her in puzzled scrutiny. "Well, I am sure I sha'n't forget
you," he said. "Yes, I am quite sure of it."

"What a marvellous memory!" exclaimed Mariana, crossly, and she stepped
out upon the fire-escape.

"Good-night!" he called.

"Good-night!" she responded, and entered her room.

"He is very rude," she whispered as she closed the shutters. In the
half-light she undressed and sat in her night-gown, brushing the heavy
tangles of her hair. Then she lighted the flame before the little altar
and said her prayers; kneeling with bowed head. As she turned off the
light she spoke again. "I am not sure that I don't like rudeness," she
added.

Meanwhile Algarcife had watched her vanish into the shadows, a smile
lightening the gravity of his face. When she had disappeared he turned
to his desk. With his singular powers of concentration, he had not taken
up his pen before all impressions save those relating to the subject in
hand had been banished from his mind. His expression was buoyant and
alert. Turning over his papers, he passed with a sense of reinvigoration
to the matter before him.

"Yes; I think, after all, that a strongly modified theory of pangenesis
may survive," he said.




CHAPTER VI


At the extreme end of the corridor upon which Mariana's door opened
there was a small apartment occupied by three young women from the
South, who were bent upon aims of art.

They had moved in a month before, and had celebrated a room-warming by
asking Mariana and several of the other lodgers to a feast of beer and
pretzels. Since then the girl had seen them occasionally. She knew that
they lived in a semi-poverty-stricken Bohemia, and that the pretty one
with pink cheeks and a ragged and uncurled fringe of hair, whose name
was Freighley, worked in Mr. Nevins's studio and did chrysanthemums in
oils. She had once heard Mr. Nevins remark that she was a pupil worth
having, and upon asking, "Has she talent?" had met with, "Not a bit, but
she's pretty."

"Then it is a pity she isn't a model," said Mariana.

"An example of the eternal contrariness of things," responded Mr.
Nevins. "All the good-looking ones want to paint and all the ugly ones
want to be painted." Then he rumpled his flaxen head. "In this
confounded century everything is in the wrong place, from a woman to her
waist-line."

After this Mariana accompanied Miss Freighley on students' day to the
Metropolitan Museum, and watched her make a laborious copy of "The
Christian Martyr." Upon returning she was introduced to Miss Hill and
Miss Oliver, who shared the apartment, and was told to make herself at
home.

Then, one rainy Saturday afternoon there was a knock at her door, and,
opening it, she found Miss Freighley upon the outside.

"It is our mending afternoon," she said, "and we want you to come and
sit with us. If you have any sewing to do, just bring it."

Mariana picked up her work-basket, and, finding that her thimble was
missing, began rummaging in a bureau-drawer.

"I never mend anything until I go to put it on," she said. "It saves so
much trouble."

Then she found her thimble and followed Miss Freighley into the hall.

Miss Freighley laughed in a pretty, inconsequential way. She had a soft,
monotonous voice, and spoke with a marked elimination of vowel sounds.

"We take the last Saturday of the month," she said. "Only Juliet and I
do Gerty's things, because she can't sew, and she cleans our palettes
and brushes in return."

She swung open the door of the apartment, and they entered a room which
served as studio and general lounging-room in one.

A tall girl, sitting upon the hearth-rug beside a heap of freshly
laundered garments, stood up and held out a limp, thin hand.

"I told Carrie she would find you," she said, speaking with a slight
drawl and an affected listlessness.

She was angular, with a consumptive chest and narrow shoulders. She wore
her hair--which was vivid, like flame, with golden ripples in the
undulations--coiled confusedly upon the crown of her head. Her name was
Juliet Hill. A mistaken but well-known colorist had once traced in her a
likeness to Rossetti's "Beata Beatrix." The tracing had resulted in the
spoiling of a woman without the making of an artist.

Mariana threw herself upon a divan near the hearth-rug and looked down
upon the pile of clothes.

"What a lot of them!" she observed, sympathetically.

Miss Hill drew a stocking from the heap and ran her darning-egg into the
heel to locate a hole.

"It is, rather," she responded, "but we never mend until everything we
have is in rags. I couldn't find a single pair of stockings this
morning, so I knew it was time."

"If you had looked into Gerty's bureau-drawer you might have found
them," said Miss Freighley, seating herself upon the end of the divan.
"Gerty never marks her things, and somehow she gets all of ours.
Regularly once a month I institute a search through her belongings, and
discover more of my clothes than I knew I possessed. Here, give me that
night-gown, Juliet. The laundress tore every bit of lace off the sleeve.
What a shame!"

Mariana removed a guitar from the couch and leaned back among the
pillows, glancing about the room. The walls were covered with coarse
hangings, decorated in vague outlines of flying cranes and vaguer
rushes. Here and there were tacked groups of unframed water-colors and
drawings in charcoal--all crude and fanciful and feminine. Upon a small
shelf above the door stood a plaster bust, and upon it a dejected and
moth-eaten raven--the relic of a past passion for taxidermy. In the
centre of the room were several easels, a desk, with Webster's
Unabridged for a foot-stool, and a collection of palettes, half-used
tubes of paint, and unassorted legs and arms in plaster.

"How do you ever find anything?" asked Mariana, leaning upon her arm.

"We don't," responded a small, dark girl, coming from the tiny kitchen
with a dish of cooling caramels in her hand; "we don't find, we just
lose." She placed the dish upon the table and drew up a chair. "I would
mortgage a share of my life if I could turn my old mammy loose in here
for an hour."

"Gerty used to be particular," explained Miss Freighley; "but it is a
vicious habit, and we broke her of it. Even now it attacks her at
intervals, and she gets out a duster and goes to work."

"I can't write in a mess," interrupted Miss Oliver, a shade ruefully. "I
haven't written a line since I came to New York." Then she sighed. "I
only wish I hadn't written a word before coming. At home I thought I was
a genius; now I know I am a fool."

"I have felt the same way," said Mariana, sympathetically, "but it
doesn't last. The first stage-manager I went to I almost fell at his
feet; the next almost fell at mine. Neither of them gave me a place, but
they taught me the value of men."

"I don't think it's worth learning," returned Miss Oliver, passing her
caramels. "Try one, and see if they are hard."

"Poor Gerty!" drawled Miss Hill, watching Mariana bite the caramel. "She
faces editors and all kinds of bad characters. Her views of life are
depressing."

"They are not views," remonstrated Miss Oliver, "they are facts. Facts
are always depressing, except when they are maddening."

"I have begged her to leave off writing and take to water-color or china
painting," said Miss Freighley, cheerfully, "but she won't."

"How can she?" asked Mariana.

"Of course I can't," retorted Miss Oliver, shortly. "I never had a
paint-brush in my hand in my life, except when I was cleaning it."

Miss Freighley laid her sewing aside and stretched her arms.

"It only requires a little determination," she said, "and I have it. I
got tired of Alabama. I couldn't come to New York without an object, so
I invented one. It was as good as any other, and I stuck to it."

Miss Hill shook her head, and her glorious hair shone like amber.

"Art is serious," she said, slowly. She was just entering the life-class
at the Art League.

"But the artist is not," returned Miss Freighley, "and one can be an
artist without having any art. I am. They think at home I am learning to
paint pictures to go on the parlor wall in place of the portraits that
were burned in the war. But I am not. I am here because I love New York,
and--"

"Claude Nevins," concluded Miss Oliver.

Mariana looked up with interest. "How nice!" she said. "He told me you
were awfully pretty."

Miss Freighley blushed and laughed.

"Nonsense!" she rejoined; "but Gerty is so faithful to her young fellow
down South that it has gone to her brain."

"I am faithful because I have no opportunity for faithlessness," sang
Gerty to an accompaniment she was picking upon the guitar. "I have been
in love one--two--six times since I came to New York. Once it was with
an editor, who accepted my first story. He was short and thick and
gray-haired, but I loved him. Once it was with that dark, ill-fed man
who rooms next to Mariana. He almost knocked me down upon the stairway
and forgot to apologize. I have forgotten the honorable others, as the
Japanese say, but I know it is six times, because whenever it happened I
made a little cross-mark on my desk, and there are six of them."

"It must have been Mr. Ardly," said Mariana. "I never look at him
without thinking what an adorable lover he would make."

"He has such nice hands," said Miss Oliver. "I do like a man with nice
hands."

"And he is clean-shaven," added Miss Freighley. "I detest a man with a
beard."

Miss Hill crossed her thin ankles upon the hearth.

"Love should be taken seriously," she said, with a wistful look in her
dark eyes.

Miss Freighley's pretty, inconsequent laugh broke in.

"That is one of Juliet's platitudes," she said. "But, my dear, it
shouldn't be taken seriously. Indeed, it shouldn't be taken at
all--except in cases of extreme _ennui_, and then in broken doses. The
women who take men seriously--and taking love means taking men, of
course--sit down at home and grow shapeless and have babies galore. To
grow shapeless is the fate of the woman who takes sentiment seriously.
It is a more convincing argument against it than all the statistics of
the divorce court--"

"For the Lord's sake, Carrie, beware of woman's rights," protested Miss
Oliver. "That is exactly what Mrs. Simpson said in her lecture on 'Our
Tyrant, Man.' Why, those dear old aunts of yours in Alabama have
inserted an additional clause in their Litany: 'From intemperance, evil
desires, and woman's suffrage, good Lord deliver us!' They are grounded
in the belief that the new woman is an _edition de luxe_ of the devil."

Mariana rose and shook out her skirts. "I must go," she said, "and you
haven't done a bit of work."

"So we haven't," replied Miss Hill, picking up her needle. "But take
some caramels--do."

Mariana took a caramel and went out into the hall. Algarcife's door was
open, and he was standing upon the threshold talking to Claude Nevins.

As Mariana passed, Nevins smiled and called to her:

"I say, Miss Musin, here is a vandal who complains that you make night
hideous."

Algarcife scowled.

"Nevins is a fool," he retorted, "and if he doesn't know it, he ought to
be told so."

"Thanks," returned Nevins, amiably, "but I have long since learned not
to believe anything I hear."

Anthony's irritation increased. "I should have thought the presumptive
evidence sufficient to overcome any personal bias," he replied.

Nevins spread out his hands with an imperturbable shrug.

"My dear fellow, I never found my conclusions upon presumptive evidence.
Had I done so, I should hold life to be a hollow mockery--whereas I am
convinced that it is a deuced solid one."

"You are so bad-tempered--both of you," said Mariana; "but, Mr.
Algarcife, do you really object to my singing? I can't keep silent, you
know."

Algarcife smiled.

"I never supposed that you could," he answered. "And as for music, I had
as soon listen to you as to--to Patti."

"Not that he values your accomplishments more, but Patti's less,"
observed Nevins, placidly.

"On the other hand, I should say that Miss Musin would make decidedly
the less noise," said Anthony.

"He's a brute, isn't he, Mariana?" asked Nevins--and added, "Now I never
said you made anything hideous, did I?"

Mariana laughed, looking a little vexed. "If you wouldn't always repeat
everything you hear other people say, it would be wiser," she responded,
tartly.

"Such is the reward of virtue," sighed Nevins. "All my life I have been
held as responsible for other people's speeches as for my own. And all
from a conscientious endeavor to let my neighbors see themselves as
others see them--"

Algarcife smiled good-humoredly. "Whatever bad qualities Nevins may
possess," he said, "he has at least the courage of his convictions--"

Nevins shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know about the convictions," he rejoined, "but I've got the
courage all right." Then he looked at Mariana. "Is that an implement of
housewifery that I see?" he demanded.

"I have been to a darning-party," she answered, "but we didn't darn
anything--not even circumstances."

"Lucky circumstances!" ejaculated Nevins. Then he lowered his voice. "I
should not have believed it of you," he protested; "to attend a
darning-party, and to leave not only me, but my socks, outside."

Mariana flushed angrily.

"You are insufferable," she said, "and you haven't a particle of
tact--not a particle. Only yesterday I heard you tell Mr. Morris that
his head looked like an advertisement for sapolio, and the day before
you told Miss Freighley that I said she didn't know how to dress her
hair."

"It was true," said Nevins. "You can't make a liar of me, Mariana."

"I wish you wouldn't call me Mariana," she retorted; and he went upon
his way with a lament.

As Mariana laid her hand upon her door-knob she looked at Anthony.

"Mr. Algarcife," she said, "do you really mind my singing so very much?"

From the end of the corridor Nevins's voice was heard chanting:

    "How fickle women are,
     Fickle as falling star."

"I wish that Nevins would attend to his own affairs," Algarcife
responded. "As for me, you may dance a break-down every night of your
life, and, if it amuses you, I'll grin and bear it."




CHAPTER VII


During Algarcife's first term at college, a fellow fraternity man
remarked of him that he resembled the eternal void, in that he might
have been anything and was nothing. Algarcife accepted the criticism
with a shrug.

"Wait and see," he responded, shortly, and the fraternity man had waited
and had seen.

In that first year Anthony succeeded in sowing a supply of wild oats
sufficient for the domestication of the species. He was improvident from
principle and reckless from an inborn distrust of accepted dogmas. "I
shall live as I please," he replied, in answer to the warnings of a
classmate, "and I shall think as I damn please."

For a year he went about his dissipations in a kind of inquiring ardor.
He called it "seeing life," and he pursued his observations with entire
obliviousness to public regard, but with philosophic concern as to the
accuracy of the information obtained. He was known to have got drunk
upon whiskey and light wine in order to test the differences in effect,
and it was rumored that he made love to the homeliest and most virtuous
daughter of the saloon-keeper that he might convince himself whether her
virtue was the logical resultant of her homeliness. Into all experiments
he carried an entire absence of prejudice, and a half-defiant acceptance
of consequences.

"It is a sheer waste of time," said John Driscoll, of the Senior class.
"You haven't learned the first principle of scientific dissipation.
Instead of plunging into excesses, you stroll into them. By Jove! if you
broke every command in the Decalogue, you would appear to sin in
moderation."

Algarcife laughed. "I am going to reform," he said. "I am not enough of
an artist to see the aesthetic values of vice. Let's become decent. It is
more economical."

It was at this time that he reduced his living expenses one-half, and
appropriated the surplus funds to the support of a young mechanic, whose
health had collapsed in the struggle to work his way to a university
degree. "He not only gave it," declared the young mechanic, in a burst
of gratitude, "but he gave it without knowing that he did a generous
thing."

When Algarcife left college that summer he followed Driscoll to his
cabin in the Adirondacks and spent several months botanizing. The chance
application to science decided the tenor of his mind, and, upon his
return to study, he refused to bow beneath the weight of authority
hurled upon him. He denounced the classics and a classical training.
Several courses he declared superficial, and he mastered various systems
of moral philosophy that he might refute the fallacies of the professor.
The brilliancy which he had frittered during the preceding year was
turned into newer channels, and the closeness of his reliance upon
inductive reasoning caused him to become at once a source of amusement
to his classmates and of annoyance to his instructor. To see him rise in
class, his face charged with the nervous vigor which seized him in
moments of excitement, his keen glance riveted upon the professor as he
mercilessly dissected his utterances, was an event which, to his
fellow-students, rendered even old Monckton's lectures of interest.

Then he took a prominent part in a debating society. With a readiness
which his friends declared to spring from love of logic, his enemies
from lack of principle, he accepted either side of a given argument, and
had been known to undertake at once the negative and the affirmative,
detecting his own weaknesses as ruthlessly as he had detected those of
old Monckton.

Before leaving college, and at the urgency of his guardian, he had
carried through with dogged distaste a course in dogmatic theology. It
was then that he fell into the way of writing theses from opposite sides
of a subject, and when handing in a treatise upon "Historical Evidences
of Christianity," or "The Pelagian Heresy," it was invariably
accompanied by the remark: "I wish you'd look over that 'Lack of
Historical Evidences,' or 'Defence of Pelagianism,' at the same time.
You know, I always do the other side."

And it was "the other side" which finally drove him out of theology and
his guardian into despair. Whether it was an argument in moral
philosophy, a mooted question in Egyptology, or a stand in current
politics, Algarcife was ready with what his classmates called "the
damned eternal opposition." It was even said that a facetious professor,
in remarking to his class that it was "a fine day," had turned in
absent-minded custom and called upon Mr. Algarcife for "the other side,"
an appeal which drew a howl of approbation from hilarious students.

Anthony was not popular at college, though his friends were steadfast.
It was not until later years, when life had tempered the incisive irony
of his speech and endowed him with the diplomacy of indifference, that
men fell beneath the attraction of his personality. At that time he was
looked upon in an ominous light, and the scintillant scepticism which he
carried fearlessly into every department of knowledge caused him to be
regarded as one who might prove himself to be an enemy to society. Even
his voice, which long afterwards exerted so potent an influence, had
not then gained its varied range and richness of expression.

So, when, years later, the public lauded the qualities they had formerly
condemned, there was no inconsistence--since life is more colored by
points of view than by principles. At the end of his theological course
he had delivered an address, at the request of his class, upon the
"Christian Revelation." When it was over he went into his guardian's
room, the flame of a long determination in his eyes. The paper which he
had read was still in his hands, and he laid it upon the table as he
spoke.

"It can't be," he said. "I give it up."

The man whom he addressed rose slowly and faced him, standing, a tall,
gaunt figure in his clerical coat. His hair was white, and at a first
glance he presented the impression of a statue modelled in plaster, so
much did the value of form outweigh that of color in his appearance. In
meeting his eyes an observer would, perhaps, have gained a conception of
expression rather than shade. One would have said that the eyes were
benevolent, not that they were gray or blue. His forehead was high and
somewhat narrow, three heavy furrows running diagonally between the
eyebrows--ruts left by the constant passage of perplexities. He was
called Father Speares, and was an impassioned leader of the High Church
movement.

"Do you mean it?" he asked, slowly--"that you give up your faith?"

Algarcife's brow wrinkled in sudden irritation. "That I have given up
long ago," he answered. "If I ever had any, it was an ingrafted product.
What I do mean is that I give up the Church--that I give up
theology--that I give up religion."

The other flinched suddenly. He put out one frail, white hand as if in
protest.

"I--I cannot believe it," he said.

"And yet I have been honest."

"Honest! Yes, I suppose so. Honest--" he lifted the paper from the table
and unfolded it mechanically. "And yet you could write this?"

Anthony shook his head impatiently. "I was but a special pleader with
the side assigned, and you knew it."

"But I did not know your power--nor do you. It convinced me--convinced
me, though I came with the knowledge that your words were empty--empty
and rotten--"

"They were words. The case was given me, and I defended it as a lawyer
defends a client. What else could I do?"

Father Speares sighed and passed his hand across his brow.

"It is not the first disappointment of my life," he said, "but it is the
greatest."

Algarcife was looking through the open window to the sunlight falling
upon the waving grass. A large butterfly, with black and yellow wings,
was dancing above a clump of dandelions.

"I am sorry," he said, more gently--"sorry for that--but it can't be
helped. I am not a theologian, but a scientist; I am not a believer, but
an agnostic; I am not a priest, but a man."

"But you are young. The pendulum may swing back--"

"Never," said Algarcife--"never." He lifted his head, looking into the
other's eyes. "Don't you see that when a man has once conceived the
magnitude of the universe he can never bow his head to a creed? Don't
you see that when he has grasped the essential verity in all religions
he no longer allies himself to a single one? Don't you see that when he
has realized the dominance of law in religions--the law of their growth
and decay, of their evolution and dissolution, when he has once grasped
the fact that man creates, and is not created by, his god--don't you see
that he can never bind himself to the old beliefs?"

"I see that he can awake to the knowledge of the spiritual life as well
as to the physical--that he can grasp the existence of a vital ethical
principle in nature. I shall pray for you, and I shall hope--"

Algarcife frowned. "I am sick of it," he said--"sick to death. To please
you, I plodded away at theology for three solid years. To please you, I
weighed assumptions as light as air. To please you, I read all the rot
of all the Fathers--and I am sick of it. I shall live my own life in my
own way."

"And may God help you!" said the elder man; and then, "Where will you
go?"

"To Egypt--to India--to the old civilizations."

"And then?"

"I do not know. I shall work and I shall succeed--with or without the
help of God."

And he had gone. During the next few years he travelled in Africa and
Asia, when the sudden loss of his income recalled him to America.
Finding it fruitless to rebel, he resigned himself philosophically,
secured a position as instructor in a woman's college, made up an annual
deficit by writing for the scientific reviews, and continued his
studies. His physical nature he believed he had rendered quiescent.

Some days after his encounter with Mariana he came upon her again. He
had just entered the park at the Seventy-second Street entrance, on his
way from his lecture at the Bodley College. The battered bonnet of a
beggar-woman had blown beneath the horses' hoofs in the drive, and he
had stopped to rescue it, when he heard his name called, and saw Mariana
beside him.

She spoke impulsively.

"I have been watching you," she said.

He looked at her in perplexity.

"Indeed! And what have you discovered?"

"I discovered that you are a gentleman."

He laughed outright.

"Your powers of intuition are positively miraculous," he replied.

She upbraided him with a glance.

"You are unkind," she said.

"Am I?"

"You are unkind to me." Her manner had grown subtly personal. He felt
suddenly as if he had known her from the beginning of time and through
various transmigrations.

"You laugh at me," she added. "You were kinder to that woman--"

He broke in upon her, perplexity giving place to amusement.

"Oh!" he said; "so that is what you mean! Why, if you were to lose your
hat, I shouldn't laugh, I assure you."

Mariana walked on silently. Her eyes were bent upon the gray sidewalk,
there was a faint flush in her face. A line of men seated upon the
benches beside the way surveyed her with interest.

"Miss Musin!"

Her face quickened.

"I have a confession to make."

She looked up inquiringly. A finger of sunlight pierced the branches of
an elm and pointed to her upraised face.

"I have rather bad manners," he went on. "It is a failing which you must
accept as you accept the color of my hair--"

Mariana smiled.

"I say just what I think," he added.

Mariana frowned.

"That is what I complain of," she responded. Then she laughed so
brightly that a tiny child, toddling with a toy upon the walk, looked up
and clapped its hands.

His eyes warmed.

"But you will take me for better or for worse?" he demanded.

"Could it be better?" she asked, demurely.

"That is a matter of opinion."

They left the park and turned into a cross-town street. The distant
blocks sloped down into the blue blur of the river, from which several
gaunt, gray masts rose like phantom wrecks evolved from the mist. Beyond
them the filmy outline of the opposite shore was revealed.

Suddenly Mariana stopped.

"This is Morani's, and I must go in." She held out her hand.

"How is the voice?" he asked.

"I am nursing it. Some day you shall hear it."

"I have heard it," he responded.

She smiled.

"Oh, I forgot. You are next door. Well, some day you shall hear it in
opera."

"Shall I?"

"And I shall sing Elsa with Alvary. My God! I would give ten years of my
life for that--to sing with Alvary."

He smiled at the warmth in her words and, as he smiled he became
conscious that her artistic passion ignited the fire of a more material
passion in himself. A fugitive desire seized him to possess the woman
before him, body and brain. From the quivering of his pulses he knew
that the physical nature he had drugged had stirred in response to a
passing appeal.

"Good-bye," said Mariana. She tripped lightly up the brown-stone steps.
As she opened the outer door she turned with a smile and a nod. Then the
door closed and he went on his way. But the leaping of his pulses was
not appeased.




CHAPTER VIII


One morning, several days later, Mariana, looking from her window, saw
Anthony standing upon the fire-escape. He had thrown a handful of crumbs
to a swarm of noisy sparrows quarrelling about his feet.

As he stood there with the morning sunlight flashing upon his face and
gilding the dark abundance of his hair, the singularly mystic beauty of
his appearance was brought into bold relief. It was a beauty which
contained no suggestion of physical supremacy. He seemed the survival of
a lost type--of those purified prophets of old who walked with God and
trampled upon the flesh which was His handiwork. It was the striking
contrast between the intellectual tenor of his mind and its physical
expression which emphasized his personality. To the boldest advance in
scientific progress he had the effect of uniting a suggestion of that
poetized mysticism which constitutes the charm of a remote past. With
the addition of the yellow robe and a beggar's bowl, he might have been
transformed into one of the Enlightened of nigh on three thousand years
ago, and have followed the Blessed One upon his pilgrimage towards
Nirvana. The modernity of his mind was almost tantalizing in its
inconsistency with his external aspect.

Mariana, looking through the open window, smiled unconsciously. Anthony
glanced up, saw her, and nodded.

"Good-morning," he called. "Won't you come out and help quiet these
rogues?"

Mariana opened the little door beneath the window and stepped outside.
She looked shy and girlish, and the flutter with which she greeted him
had a quaint suggestion of flattery.

He came towards her, and they stood together beside the railing. Beneath
them the noise of trade and traffic went on tumultuously. Overhead the
sky was of a still, intense blueness, the horizon flecked by several
church-spires, which rose sharply against the burning remoteness. Across
the tenement roofs lines of drying garments fluttered like banners.

Mariana, in her cotton gown of dull blue, cast a slender shadow across
the fire-escape. In the morning light her eyes showed gray and limpid.
The sallow tones of her skin were exaggerated, and the peculiar harmony
of hair and brows and complexion was strongly marked. She was looking
her plainest, and she knew it.

But Anthony did not. He had seen her, perhaps, half a dozen times, and
upon each occasion he had discovered his previous conceptions of her to
be erroneous. Her extreme mobility of mood and manner at once perplexed
and attracted him. Yesterday he had resolved her character into a
compound of surface emotions. Now he told himself that she was cool and
calm and sweetly reasonable.

"I am glad you like sparrows," she said, "because nobody else does, and,
somehow, it doesn't seem fair. You do like them, don't you?"

"I believe," he answered, "that I have two passions beyond the usual
number with which man is supplied--a passion for books and a passion for
animals. I can't say I have a special regard for sparrows, but I like
them. They are hardy little fellows, though a trifle pugnacious, and
they have learned the value of co-operation."

"I had a canary," remarked Mariana, with pathos, "but it died.
Everything that belongs to me always dies, sooner or later."

He laughed, looking at her with quizzical humor. "Do you expect them to
escape the common fate?" he demanded; and then: "If there is anything
that could give me an attack of horrors sooner than a dancing dog--and
there isn't--it would be a bird in a cage. I left my last lodgings
because my neighbor kept a mocking-bird outside of her window. If it had
been a canary I might have endured it, but I knew that if I stayed there
a week longer I should break in and set that bird free. I used to hear
it at night beating itself against the cage."

"Oh, hush!" said Mariana, putting her hands to her ears. She wondered
vaguely at his peculiar sensitiveness of sympathy. It was a type of
manhood that she had not before encountered--one as unlike the jovial,
fox-hunting heroes of her childish days as mind is unlike matter. She
remembered that among them such expressions would have been regarded as
a mark of effeminacy and ruthlessly laughed to scorn. She even
remembered that her own father had denounced a prohibition of
prize-fighting as "mawkish rot." This eccentric type of nervous vigor,
in which all remnants of semi-barbarism were apparently extinguished,
possessed a fascination for her in its very strangeness. In his
character all those active virtues around which her youthful romances
were woven held no place. Patriotism was modified into a sense of
general humanity; chivalry was tempered into commonplace politeness. She
did not know that the force which attracted her was but a dominant
mentality; that where the mind holds sway the character is modified
accordingly. With a great expenditure of nerve force those attributes
which result from physical hardihood occupy a less prominent part. In
Anthony she beheld, without knowing it, a forced and abnormal result of
existing conditions. Nature often foreshadows a coming civilization by
an advance-guard of individuals. As a supreme test she places a century
before his time the victim of her experiments in vivisection. And a
character that might have fitted with uncut edges into the circle of
existence, had he but been permitted to insert himself at the proper
moment, has often been trampled into nothingness by the incessant trend
of the inopportune. The priest of the coming generation is the pariah of
the present, and the dogma of to-morrow the heresy of to-day.

To Mariana's ignorant eyes Anthony seemed one in whom passion had been
annihilated. In reality it was only smothered beneath the weight of a
strenuous will. Let the pressure be removed, and it would burst forth
the fiercer for its long confinement, ingulfing perhaps the whole
organism in its destructive flame.

"Oh, hush!" Mariana had said, and turned from him. "You seem to delight
in unpleasant things. I make it a point to believe that suffering and
death do not exist. I _know_ they do, but I _believe_ they do not."

He drew nearer. Across his face she saw a sudden flash--so vivid that it
seemed the awakening of a dormant element in his nature. "You are
wonderfully vital," he said. "There is as much life in you as there is
in a dozen of us poor effete mortals. What is your secret?"

The girl leaned her arm upon the railing and rested her chin in her
hand. She looked up at him and her eyes grew darker. "It is the pure
animal love of existence," she answered. "I love the world. I love
living and breathing, and feeling the blood quicken in my veins. I love
dancing and singing and eating and sleeping. The simple sensuousness of
life is delicious to me. If I could not be a queen, I had rather be a
beggar upon the road-side than to be nothing. If I could not be a human
being, I had rather be a butterfly in the sunshine than not to be at
all. So long as I had the blue sky and the air and the world about me I
could not be miserable. It is life--life in its physical
fulfilment--that I love. So long as they leave me the open world I can
be happy. Only, if I were taken and shut up in an ugly dungeon I should
want to die. And even then there would be hope."

She had spoken passionately, the words coming quickly from between her
parted lips. She seemed so light and etherealized as to be almost
bodiless. The materialistic philosophy to which she gave utterance was
spiritualized by her own illusiveness.

For an instant she hesitated, looking across the tenement roofs to the
horizon beyond. Then she went on: "I am different from you--oh, so
different! Where you think, I feel. You are all mind, I am all senses. I
am only fulfilling my place in nature when I am hearing or seeing or
feeling beautiful things. My sense of beauty is my soul."

Anthony watched her with steadfast intentness. He had never before seen
her in this mood, and it was a new surprise to him. His former
generalizations were displaced.

But if he had known it, the present aspect was a result of his own
influence upon Mariana. In a moment of contrition for small deceptions,
she had been precipitated into an extravagant self-abasement.

"You are disappointed," she added, presently, meeting his gaze. "You
expected something different, but I am shallow, and I can't help it." It
was like her that in the tendency to self-depreciation she was as
sincere as she had been in the former tendency to self-esteem.

And perhaps Anthony was the juster judge of the two. He was certainly
the more dispassionate.

"I have told you," concluded Mariana, with an eager catch at the
redeeming grace, "because I want to be truthful."

"My dear girl," responded Anthony, a warm friendliness in his voice,
"you might have spared yourself this little piece of analysis. It is as
useless as most morbid rot of the kind. It doesn't in the least affect
what I think of you, and what I do think of you is of little
consequence."

"But what do you think?" demanded Mariana.

"I think that you know yourself just a little less well than you know
that old lady wheeling her cart of vegetables in the street below. Had
she, by the way, known herself a little better she would not have flown
into such a rage because she spilled a few. If we knew ourselves we
would see that things are not very much our fault, after all, and that a
few slips the more or less on our uphill road are very little matter."

Mariana glowed suddenly. She looked up at him, a woman's regard for
power warming her eyes. To her impressionable temperament there seemed
an element of sublimity in his ethical composure.

"Teach me," she said, simply. Anthony smiled. If he seemed a Stoic to
Mariana, it was not because he was one, and perhaps he was conscious of
it. But our conceptions of others are colored solely by their attitudes
towards ourselves, and not in the least by their attitudes towards the
universe, which, when all is said, is of far less consequence.

"I should have first to learn the lesson myself," he answered.

"Would you, if you could?" asked Mariana.

For an instant he looked at her thoughtfully. "Teach you what?" he
questioned. "Teach you to endure instead of to enjoy? To know instead of
to believe? To play with skulls and cross-bones instead of with flowers
and sunshine? No, I think not."

Mariana grew radiant. She felt a desire to force from him a reluctant
confession of liking. "Why wouldn't you?" she demanded.

"Well, on the whole, I think your present point of view better suited to
you. And everything, after all, is in the point of view." He leaned
against the railing, looking down into the street. "Look over and tell
me what you see. Is it not the color of those purple egg-plants in the
grocer's stall? the pretty girl in that big hat, standing upon the
corner? the roguish faces of those ragamuffins at play? Well, I see
these, but I see also the drooping figure of the woman beside the stall;
the consumptive girl with the heavy bundle, going from her work; the
panting horses that draw the surface cars."

They both gazed silently from the balcony. Then Mariana turned away. "It
is the hour for my music," she said. "I must go."

The sunlight caught the nimbus around her head and brightened it with
veins of gold.

"All joy goes with you," he answered, lightly. "And I shall return to
work."

"All frivolity, you mean," laughed Mariana, and she left him with a
nod.




CHAPTER IX


According to the theory that vices are but virtues run to seed,
moderation was the dominant characteristic of Anthony Algarcife. At the
time of his meeting with Mariana, his natural tendencies, whatever they
may have been, were atrophied in the barren soil of long
self-repression. It is only when one is freed from the prejudices
engendered by the play of the affections that one's horizon is unbroken
by a vision of the objects in the foreground, and the forest is no
longer lost in consideration of the trees.

And it was under the spell of this moderation that Mariana had fallen.
Her own virtues were of that particular quality of which the species is
by no means immutable, and of which the crossing often produces an
opposite variety, since a union of negative virtues has not infrequently
begotten a positive vice. But Mariana's character, of which at that time
even the verdict of society had not deprived her, possessed a jewel in
its inconsistency. Her very faults were rendered generous by their
vivacity, and redeemed her from inflexibility, that most unforgivable
trait in womanhood, which, after all, is merely firmness crystallized.
And as the lack of formativeness in Mariana left her responsive to the
influences beneath which she came, so the anger of yesterday was
tempered into the tenderness of to-day, and her nature modified by the
changes rung upon her moods.

So far, the influence of Anthony had worked for good. The girl was
startled at the wave of gentleness which pervaded her. With a sudden
fervor she strained towards an indistinct ideal of goodness, an ideal
borrowed in its sanctity from a superficial study of Thomas a Kempis,
and in its unreality from the faded recollection of certain
Sunday-school literature read in her childhood. She aspired to be good
almost as much as she had once aspired to be famous, and set about it
with quite as unprincipled an abandon. But her ambition for holiness was
ill-timed. An excess of virtue is often as disastrous a form of
dissipation as an excess of vice, and the wreck of one's neighbor's
peace of mind no less to be deplored than the wreck of one's own
physique. For a fool may jog shoulder to shoulder with a comfortable
sinner, but it takes a philosopher to support the presence of an
unmitigated saint.

So it was as well that Mariana's aspirations were short-lived. She
confessed them to Anthony, and they were overruled.

"My dear girl," he said, "stop fasting, and don't wear away your knees
at prayer. All the breath in your body isn't going to affect the
decision of Omniscience. The only duty you owe to the universe is to
scatter as much pleasure in life as you can. Eat good red beef and ward
off anaemia, and give the time you have wasted in devotions to exercise
and fresh air. If we are all doomed to hell, you can't turn the earth
out of its track by bodily maceration. Evil plus evil doesn't equal
good."

Mariana ceased praying and went out to walk. She was conscious of
strange quickenings of sympathy. She loved the world and the people that
passed her and the children laughing in the gutter. She bought a pot of
primroses from the flower-stall at the corner, and, having spent a
week's car-fare, walked a couple of miles in the sun to carry them to a
rheumatic old lady who had once been kind to her. With patient
good-humor she sat an hour in the sick-room, and, when she left, the
rheumatic old lady kissed and blessed her.

The praise stirred her pulses with pleasure. She wondered if she might
not become a Sister of Charity and spend her life in ministering to
others, and when a ragged boot-black in the street begged for a dime she
gave him the money she had saved for a pair of gloves, and glorified the
sacrifice by the smile of a Saint Elizabeth. She felt that she would
like to give some one the coat from her back, and, as she passed in and
out of the crowd around her, her heart stirred in imaginative sympathy
for humanity. That vital recognition of the fellowship of man which is
as transient as it is inspiring, uplifted her. She wished that some one
from the crowd would single her out, saying, "I am wretched, comfort
me!" or, "I am starving, feed me!"

But no one did so. They looked at her with indifferent eyes, and her
impulses recoiled upon themselves. At that moment she felt capable of
complete self-abnegation in the cause of mankind, and even commonplace
goodness possessed an attraction. But she realized that the desire to
sacrifice is short-lived, and that, after all, it is easier to lay down
one's life for the human race than to endure the idiosyncrasies of its
atoms.

To us who adopt the proprieties as a profession and wear respectability
for a mantle, unauthorized impulses in any form are to be contemned, and
Mariana, flushed with generous desires, was as unacceptable as Mariana
submerged in self.

After paying a couple of calls the girl's spirit of altruism evaporated.
It was warm and close, and the sun made her head ache, while the fatigue
from the unusual exercise produced a fit of ill-humor. She wondered why
she had left her room, and then looked at her soiled gloves and
regretted her encounter with the boot-black. The recollection of the
pot of primroses and the week's car-fare caused her even more annoyance.

A block from The Gotham she ran upon Jerome Ardly, and her irritation
vanished.

"Hello!" he ejaculated, "you are as white as a sheet. Too much September
sun. Had luncheon?"

"Yes," responded Mariana; and she added, plaintively, "I am so tired. I
have walked myself to death--and all for nothing."

"Form of monomania?" he inquired, sympathetically. "Nothing short of
arrant idiocy would take any one out for nothing on a day like this."

Mariana looked at him and laughed. "I have been paying calls," she said.
"I went to see Mrs. Simpson and she told me all about the rights of
women. It was very instructive."

"If they resemble the rights of man," remarked Ardly, "they are not to
be seen, heard, or felt."

"Ah, but it is all the fault of men," responded Mariana; "she told me
so. She said that men were the only things that kept us back."

Ardly laughed.

"And you?" he inquired.

"I! Oh, I agreed with her! I told her that if men hindered us we would
stamp them out."

"The devil you did!" retorted Ardly. "I know of no one better fitted for
the job. You will begin on your fellow-lodgers, I suppose. As if you had
not been treading on our hearts for the last year!"

Mariana lowered her parasol and entered The Gotham. As she mounted the
stairs she turned towards him. The time had been when the presence of
Jerome Ardly had caused a flutter among the tremulous strings of her
heart, but that had been before Anthony crossed her horizon. And yet
coquetry was not extinguished. "_Our?_" she emphasized, smiling.

Ardly grasped at the hand which lay upon the railing, but Mariana eluded
him.

"Why, all of us," he returned, with unabashed good-nature--"poor devils
that we are! Myself, Nevins, Mr. Paul, to say nothing of Algarcife."

Mariana's color rose swiftly. "Oh, nonsense!" she laughed, and sped
upward.

Upon the landing Mr. Nevins opened the door of his studio and greeted
them.

"I say, Miss Musin, won't you come and have a look at 'Andromeda'?"

Mariana entered the studio, and Ardly followed her. In the centre of the
room a tea-table was spread, and Miss Freighley, a smear of yellow ochre
on the sleeve where she had accidentally wiped her brush, was engaged in
brewing the beverage. Upon the hearth-rug Juliet Hill was standing, her
tall, undeveloped figure and vivid hair relieved against a dull-brown
hanging, and around the "Andromeda" a group of youthful artists were
gathered.

"How delightful!" exclaimed Mariana, genially. She kissed Miss
Freighley, and pressed the extended hands of the others with
demonstrative cordiality.

"Oh, if I could only paint!" she said to Miss Freighley, in affectionate
undertones. "If I could only go about with a box of brushes, without
feeling silly, and wear a smudge of paint upon my sleeve without being
dishonest." And she wiped Miss Freighley's sleeve upon her handkerchief.

"Thanks," responded that young lady, amiably; "but you can carry a
music-roll, you know, which is much handier and a good deal tidier."

Mariana had turned to the "Andromeda." "Oh, Mr. Ponsonby!" she remarked,
to one of the group surrounding it, "don't you uphold me in thinking the
shadows upon the throat too heavy?"

Mr. Ponsonby protested that he would uphold her in any statement she
might choose to make, so long as he was not expected to agree with her.
Mariana appealed to Mr. Nevins, who declared that he would agree with
her in any matter whatsoever, so long as he was not expected to change
his "Andromeda."

Mariana frowned. "Mr. Ardly thinks as I do--now don't you?"

Ardly sauntered over to them.

"Why, of course," he assented. "That shadow was put on with a pitchfork.
I am positively surprised at you, Nevins."

"On your conscience?" demanded Mariana.

"Haven't any," protested Ardly, indolently. "Left it in Boston. It is
indigenous to the soil, and won't bear transplanting."

"Miss Ramsey brought hers with her," replied Mariana, with a smile. "It
worries her dreadfully. It is just like a ball on the leg of a convict.
She has to drag it wherever she goes, and it makes her awfully tired
sometimes."

"A good Bohemian conscience is the only variety worth possessing,"
observed Mr. Nevins. "It changes color with every change of scene and
revolves upon an axis. Hurrah for Bohemia!"

"Hear! hear!" cried Mariana, gayly. She lifted a glass of sherry, and,
lighting a cigarette, sprang upon the music-stool. Mr. Ponsonby drew up
a chair and seated himself at the piano, and, blowing a cloud of smoke
about her head, Mariana sang a rollicking song of the street.

As she finished, the door opened and Algarcife stood upon the threshold.
For a moment he gazed at the scene--at Mariana poised upon the
music-stool with upraised arms, her hat hanging by an elastic from her
shoulder, her head circled by wreaths of cigarette smoke, her eyes
reckless. His look was expressive of absolute amazement. Innocent as the
scene was in reality, to him it seemed an orgy of abandon, and there
was not a man in the room who would not have understood Mariana at that
moment better than he did.

"I beg your pardon, Nevins," he said, abruptly. "No, I won't come in."
And the door closed.

But Mariana had seen his face, and, with a flutter of impulse and a
precipitate rush, she was after him.

"Mr. Algarcife!" Her voice broke.

He turned and faced her.

"What is it?"

"You--you looked so shocked!" she cried.

She stood before him, breathless and warm, the smoking cigarette still
in her hand.

"Throw that away!" he said.

She took a step forward, struggling like a netted bird beneath the spell
of his power.

"How absurd!" she said, softly. The cigarette dropped from her fingers
to the floor.

He laughed. His eyes burned steadily upon her. Before his gaze her
lashes wavered and fell, but not until she had seen the flashing of
latent impulse in his face.

"But you dropped it," he said.

"Yes."

"Why did you?"

Mariana made a desperate effort at her old fearlessness. It failed her.
Her eyes were upon the floor, but she felt his gaze piercing her fallen
lids. She spoke hurriedly.

"Because--because I did," she answered.

He came a step nearer. She felt that the passion in his glance was
straining at the leash of self-control. She did not know that desire was
insurgent against the dominion of will, and was waging a combat with
fire and sword.

She put up her hands.

"You are my friend," she said. Her tones faltered. The haze of idealism
with which he had surrounded her was suffused with a roseate glow. He
caught her hands. His face had grown dark and set, and the lines upon
his forehead seemed ineffaceable.

Mariana was conscious of a sudden uplifting within her. It was as if her
heart had broken into song. She stood motionless, her hands closing upon
his detaining ones. Her face was vivid with animation, and there was a
suggestion of frank surrender in her attitude. He caught his breath
sharply. Then his accustomed composure fell upon him. His mouth relaxed
its nervous tension, and the electric current which had burned his
fingers was dissipated.

At the other end of the corridor a door opened and shut, and some one
came whistling along the hall.

"It is Mr. Sellars," said Mariana, smiling. "I recognize his whistling
two blocks away, because it is always out of tune. He thinks he is
whistling 'Robin Hood,' but he is mistaken."

"Is he?" asked Anthony, abstractedly. His mind was less agile than
Mariana's, and he found more difficulty in spanning the space between
sentiment and comic opera.

Mr. Sellars greeted them cheerfully and passed on.

"I must go," said Mariana. "I promised to dine with Miss Ramsey."

There was an aggrieved note in her voice, but it had no connection with
Anthony. With the passing of the enjoyment of emotion for the sake of
the mental exaltation which accompanied it, the dramatic instinct
reasserted itself. She even experienced a mild resentment against fate
that the emotional altitude she had craved should have been revealed to
her in the damp and unventilated corridor of The Gotham apartment-house.
At a glance from Anthony the resentment would have vanished, and Mariana
have been swept once more into a maze of romanticism. But he did not
look at her, and the half-conscious demand for scenic effects was
unsatisfied.

"Yes," said Anthony, "it is late." His voice sounded hushed and
constrained, and, as he stood aside to allow her to pass, he looked
beyond and not at the girl.

She turned from him and entered her room.




CHAPTER X


Mariana found Miss Ramsey lying at length upon the hearth-rug in her
tiny sitting-room, her head resting upon an eider-down cushion.

At the girl's entrance she looked up nervously. "I can't rest," she
said, with a plaintive intonation, "and I am so tired. But when I shut
my eyes I see spread before me all the work I've got to do to-morrow."

She sat up, passing her hand restlessly across her forehead. In her
appearance there might be detected an almost fierce renunciation of
youth. Her gown was exaggerated in severity, and her colorless and
uncurled hair was strained from her forehead and worn in a tight knot
upon the crown of her head. The prettiness of her face was almost
aggressive amid contrasting disfigurements.

Miss Ramsey belonged to that numerous army of women who fulfil life as
they fulfil an appointment at the dentist's--with a desperate sense of
duty and shaken nerves. And beside such commonplace tragedies all
dramatic climaxes show purposeless. The saints of old, who were
sanctified by fire and sword, might well shrink from the martyrdom
sustained, smiling, by many who have endured the rack of daily despair.
To be a martyr for an hour is so much less heroic than to be a man for a
lifetime.

But in Miss Ramsey's worn little body, incased in its network of nerves,
there was the passionless determination of her Puritan ancestors. Life
had been thrust upon her, and she accepted it. In much the same spirit
she would have accepted hell. Perhaps, in meeting the latter, a little
cheerfulness might have been added to positive pain--since of all
tragedies her present tragedy of unfulfilment was the most tragic of
all.

Mariana knelt beside her and kissed her with quick sympathy.

"I can't rest," repeated the elder woman, fretfully. "I can't rest for
thinking of the work I must do to-morrow."

"Don't think of it," remonstrated Mariana. "This isn't to-morrow, so
there is no use thinking of it."

In Miss Ramsey's eyes there shone a flicker of girlishness which, had
fate willed it, might have irradiated her whole face.

"I have been wondering," added Mariana, softly, "what you need, and I
believe it is a canary. I will buy you a canary when my allowance
comes."

For the girl had looked into her own heart and had read an unwritten
law. She had seen sanctification through love, and she felt that a woman
may owe her salvation to a canary.

"How could I care for it?" asked the other, a little wistfully. "I have
no time. But it would be nice to own something."

Then they left the hearth-rug and ate dinner, and Mariana drove the
overhanging cloud from Miss Ramsey's eyes. The desire to be first with
all who surrounded her had prompted her to ingratiate herself in every
heart that throbbed and ached within. The Gotham, from little,
overworked Miss Ramsey to the smaller and more overworked maid who
dusted her chamber.

After dinner, when Mariana returned to her room, she found a letter
awaiting her. It was from her father, and, as was usual with his
utterances, it was straight and to the mark.

"I have met with reverses," it stated, "and the family is growing large.
In my present position I find it impossible to continue your allowance,
and I think that, on the whole, your duty is at home. My wife has much
care with the children, and you would be of service in educating them."

Mariana dropped the letter and sat motionless. In a flash she realized
all that it meant. It meant returning to drudgery and hideous monotony.
It meant returning to the house she hated and to the atmosphere that
stifled her. It meant a colorless life of poverty and sordid
self-denial. It meant relinquishing her art and Anthony.

With a rush of impulse she stepped out upon the fire-escape, the letter
fluttering in her hand.

"Mr. Algarcife!" she called, softly.

As his figure darkened the lighted space between the window-sashes she
went towards him. He faced her in surprise. "What is it?" he inquired,
abruptly.

Mariana held out the letter, and then followed him as he re-entered his
room.

"I cannot do it!" she said, passionately. "I cannot! I cannot!"

Without heeding her, Anthony unfolded the letter, read it and reread it
with judicial composure; after which he folded it again, placed it in
the envelope, and stood holding it in his right hand. The only visible
effect it produced upon him was a nervous twitching of his thin lips.

"And what have you decided?" he asked, slowly.

Mariana interlaced her fingers impatiently. She looked small and white,
and excitement caused her eyes to appear abnormally large. Her features
quivered and her tone was tremulous.

"I will not go back," she protested. "I will not! Oh, I will not!"

"Is it so bad?" He still held the letter.

"Bad! It is worse than--than anything. If I had stayed there I should
have gone mad. It was paralyzing me inch by inch. Oh, if you could only
know what it is--a dusty, dirty little house, smelling of cabbage, a
troop of screaming children, and quarrels all day long."

He met her outburst with a remonstrative gesture, but there was a mellow
light in his eyes and his face had softened. As if resenting a voluntary
restraint, he shook back a lock of hair that had fallen upon his
forehead.

"But your father?"

Mariana looked at him as if he represented the bar of judgment and she
were pleading her cause. She spoke with feverish conviction.

"Oh, he doesn't want me! If you only knew what a relief it was to him
when I came away. Things were so much quieter. He likes his wife and I
hate her, so we don't agree. There is never any peace when I am
there--never."

"And the children?" His eyes met Mariana's, and again his lips twitched
nervously. He held the check-rein of desire with a relentless hand, but
the struggle told.

"They are horrid," responded Mariana, insistently. "They are all hers.
If they had really belonged to me, I wouldn't have left them, but they
didn't, not one. And I won't teach them. I'd rather teach the children
of that shoemaker across the way. I'd rather scrub the streets."

Anthony smiled, and the tenderness in his eyes rained upon her. The fact
that she had thrown herself upon his sympathy completed the charm she
exercised over him.

Still he held himself in hand.

"You know of nothing that could call you back?" he asked.

"Nothing," answered Mariana. "I shouldn't like to starve, but I'd almost
as soon starve as live on cabbage." Then she faced him tragically. "My
father's wife is a very coarse woman. She has cabbage one day and onions
the next."

The smile in Anthony's eyes deepened. "It would be impossible to select
a more wholesome article of food than the latter," he observed.

But Mariana was unmoved.

"Before I left, it was horrible," she continued. "Whenever onions were
served I would leave the table. My father's wife would get angry and
that would make me angry."

"A congenial family."

"But when we get angry we quarrel. It is our nature to do so." She
lifted her lashes. "And when we quarrel we talk a great deal, and some
of us talk very loud. That is unpleasant, isn't it?"

"Very," Algarcife commented. "I find, by the way, that I am beginning to
harbor a sympathy for your father's wife."

Mariana stared at him and shook her head.

"I wasn't nice to her," she admitted, "but she is such a loud woman. I
am never nice to people I dislike--but I don't dislike many."

She smiled. Algarcife took a step forward, but checked himself. "We will
talk it over--to-morrow," he said, and his voice sounded cold from
constraint.

"I won't go back," protested Mariana. "I--I will marry Mr. Paul first."

He held out his hand, and it closed firmly over the one she gave him.
"You will not do that, at all events," he said; "for Mr. Paul's sake, as
well as your own."

Then he drew aside, and Mariana went back to her room.

Anthony recrossed the window-sill and paced slowly up and down the
uncarpeted floor. His head was bent and his gaze preoccupied, but there
was composure in his bearing. He had sent the girl away that he might
think before acting. Not that he was not fully aware what the result of
his meditation would be, but that for six years he had been in training
to resist impulse, and the habit was strong. But there are things
stronger than habit, and emotion is among them. In a man who has neither
squandered feeling in excesses nor succumbed to the allurement of the
senses, passion, when once aroused, is trebly puissant, and is apt to
sweep all lesser desires as chaff before the whirlwind. In the love of
such a man there is of necessity the freshness of adolescence and the
tenacity of maturity. When one has not expended lightly the fulness of
desire, the supply is constantly augmented, and its force will be in
proportion to the force of the pressure by which it has been restrained.
Algarcife, pacing to and fro between his book-lined walls, felt the
current of his being straining towards emotion, and knew that the
dominance of will was over. In the realization there existed a tinge of
regret, and with the rationality which characterized his mental attitude
he lamented that the pulseless sanity of his past was broken. And yet he
loved Mariana--loved her with a love that would grow with his growth and
strengthen with his weakness. He bowed his head, and his hands clinched,
while the edge of his blood was sharpened. He beheld her eyes, curtains
veiling formless purity--he felt the touch of her hands, the breath of
her lips--he heard the rustle of her skirts--and the virginal femininity
of her hovered like an atmosphere about him.

Presently he crossed to the fire-escape, stepped outside, hesitated an
instant, and then went to Mariana's window. The shutters were closed,
but the light burned behind them.

"Mariana!" he called; and again, "Mariana!"

Through the slats of the shutters the figure of Mariana was visible in
high relief against the brightness.

"What is it?" she asked, coming nearer.

He spoke slowly and with constraint.

"Mariana, you will not marry Mr. Paul."

She laughed. The sound was like wine in his blood, and constraint was
shattered.

"Is there any obstacle?" she inquired.

"There will be," he answered, and his voice rang clear.

"What?" She was leaning against the shutters. He felt her breath upon
his brow.

"You will marry me."

"Oh!" gasped Mariana, and was silent.

Suddenly he surrendered self-control. "Open the shutters," he said.

The shutters were unfastened, they swung back, and Mariana came out. She
looked very young, her hair hung about her shoulders, and in the dim
light her face showed small and white. For a moment they stood
motionless, each dumb before the knowledge of the other's dominance.
Anthony looked at her in heated silence. His face was pale, his eyes
glowing.

"Mariana!" He did not move nearer, but his voice thrilled her like a
caress. She shrank from him, and a heavy shadow fell between them.

"Mariana, you will marry me?" In the stillness following his words she
heard the sharpness of his breathing.

"I--I am not good enough," said Mariana.

"My saint!"

As if impelled, she leaned towards him, and he caught her in his arms.
Beneath them the noise of traffic went on, and with it the hunger and
the thirst and the weariness, but they stood above it all, and he felt
the beating of her pulses as he held her.

"Say you love me," he pleaded--"say it." His breath burned her forehead.

"Oh, don't you see?" she asked--"don't you see?"

She lifted her head and he took her hands and drew her from the darkness
into the light and looked into her eyes. They shone like lamps
illuminating an altar, and the altar was his own.

"Yes," he said; "but say it."

Mariana was silent for an instant, and when she spoke her voice was
vibrant with passion.

"You are my love, and I love you," she answered. "And I?"

"The desire of my eyes."

She came nearer, laying one hand upon his arm. He did not move, and his
arm hung motionless, but his eyes were hot.

"I am yours," she said, slowly, "for ever and ever, to have and to hold,
to leave or to take--yours utterly."




CHAPTER XI


The news of Mariana's engagement was received without enthusiasm in The
Gotham. A resentment against innovations of so sweeping an order was
visible in the bearing of a number of the lodgers, and Mr. Nevins was
heard publicly expressing his disapproval. "I never got comfortably
settled anywhere in my life," he announced, "that somebody didn't step
in and disarrange matters. At the last place the head waiter married the
cook, and now Algarcife is marrying Mariana. After our discovering her,
too. I say, it's a beastly shame!"

Mr. Ardly was of one mind with him; so was Mr. Morris. Alone, of all the
table, Mr. Paul stood firm upon the opposite side. An hour after the
news was out he encountered Algarcife upon the stairs and smiled
compassionately.

"I have heard with concern," he began, stiffly, "that you contemplate
taking a serious step."

"Indeed?" returned Anthony, with embarrassment. "I believe I do
contemplate something of the kind, but I had hoped to get it over before
anybody heard of it."

"Such things travel fast," commented Mr. Paul, cheerfully. "I think I
may say that I was in possession of the fact five minutes after your
ultimate decision was reached. It is a serious step, as I have said. As
for the young woman, I have no doubt of her worthiness, though I have
heard contrary opinions--"

"Who has dared?" demanded Anthony.

"Merely opinions, my dear sir, and the right of private judgment is what
we stand on. But, I repeat, I have no doubt of her uprightness. It is
not the individual, sir, but the office. It is the office that is at
fault."

Mr. Paul passed on, and upon the next landing Algarcife found Mr. Nevins
in wait.

"Look here, Algarcife," he remonstrated, "I don't call this fair play,
you know! I've had my eye on Mariana for the last twelve months!"

A thunder-cloud broke upon Anthony's brow. "Then you will be kind enough
to remove it!" he retorted, angrily.

"Oh, come off!" protested Mr. Nevins. "Why, Mariana and I were chums
before you darkened this blessed Gotham! She'd have married me long ago
if I'd had the funds."

"Confound you!" exclaimed Anthony. "Can't you hold your tongue?"

Mr. Nevins smiled amiably and spread out his hands.

"No, I cannot," he answered, imperturbably. "Say, old man, don't get
riled! You'll let me appear at the wedding, won't you?"

Algarcife strode on in a rage, which was not appeased by Ardly's voice
singing out from his open door.

"Congratulations, Algarcife! You are a lucky dog! Like to change shoes."

Upon the balcony he found Mariana, with a blossom of scarlet geranium in
her hair. She stretched out both hands and flashed him a smile like a
caress. "You look positively furious," she observed.

Algarcife's sensitiveness had caused him to treat Mariana much as he
would have treated a Galatea in Dresden, had one been in his possession.
But Claude Nevins had annoyed him, and he spoke irritably.

"I wish you would have nothing to do with that fellow Nevins," he said.

"Why, what has he done?"

"Done? Why, he's an ass--a consummate ass! He told me he had his eye on
you!"

Mariana's laugh pealed out. She raised her hand and brushed the heavy
hair from his forehead. Then she tried to brush the lines from his brow,
but they would not go.

"Why, he's going to give me a supper the night before our marriage," she
said; "that is, they all are--Mr. Ardly, Mr. Sellars, and the rest. They
made a pot of money for it, and each one of them contributed a share,
and it is quite a large pot. We are to have champagne, and I am to sing,
and so will Mr. Nevins. I wanted them to ask you, but Mr. Nevins said
you'd be a damper, and Mr. Ardly said you would be bored."

"Probably," interpolated Anthony.

"But I insisted I wanted you, so Mr. Ardly said they would have to have
you, and Mr. Nevins said they'd have Mr. Paul, if I made a point of it;
but they thought I might give them one jolly evening before settling
down, so I said I would."

"You will do nothing of the kind," retorted Algarcife.

"But they are so anxious. It will be such a dreadful disappointment to
them."

"I will not have it."

"But I've done it before."

"Don't tell me of it. You want to go, and without me?"

"Of course I'd rather you should be there, but it is cruel to disappoint
them," Mariana objected, "when they have made such a nice pot of money."

"But I do not like it," said Anthony.

Mariana laughed into his eyes. "Then you sha'n't have it," she said, and
leaned against the railing and touched his arm with her fingers. "Say
you love me, and I will not go," she added.

Anthony did not touch the hand that lay upon his arm. His mood was too
deep for caresses.

"If you knew how I love you," he said, slowly--"if you only knew! There
is no happiness in it; it is agony. I am afraid--afraid for the first
time in my life--afraid of losing you."

"You shall never lose me."

"It is a horrible thing, this fear--this fear for something outside of
yourself!" He spoke with a sudden, half-fierce possession. "You are
mine," he said, "and you love me!"

Mariana pressed closer to his side. "If I had not come," she began,
softly, "you would have read and worked and fed the sparrows, and you
would never have known it."

"But you came." The hand upon the railing relaxed. "My mother was a
Creole," he continued. "She came from New Orleans to marry my father,
and died because the North was cold and her heart was in the South. You
are my South, and the world is cold, for my heart is in you."

"I have wanted love all my life," said Mariana, "and now I have found
it. I have thought before that I had it, but it was only a shadow. This
is real. As real as myself--as real as this railing. I feel glad--oh, so
glad!--and I feel tender. I should like to pray and go softly. I should
like to make that old woman at the flower-stall happy and to freshen the
withered flowers. I should like to kiss the children playing on the
sidewalk. See how merry they look," and she leaned far over. "I should
like to pat the head of that yellow dog in the gutter. I should like to
make the whole world glad--because of you."

"Mariana!"

"The world is beautiful, and I love you; but I am sorry--oh, so
sorry!--for the people in the street."

"Forget them, beloved, and think of me."

"But you taught me to think of them."

"I will teach you to think of me."

"That I have learned by heart."

"Mariana!"

They stood with locked hands upon the balcony, and the roar of the
elevated road came up to them, and the old flower-woman put up her
withered flowers and went her way, and the children's laughter grew
fainter upon the air, and the yellow dog gnawed at a rock that it took
for a bone; and the great, great wheel ground on, grinding to each man
and to each dog according to his kind his share of the things written
and unwritten in the book of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

A week later they were married. Mariana had coveted a church ceremony,
and Anthony had desired a registrar's office, so they compromised, and
the service was read in Mr. Speares's study.

"I should have dearly liked the 'Lohengrin March' and stained-glass
windows," remarked Mariana, a little regretfully, as they walked
homeward. "It seems as if something were missing. I can't tell just
what."

"What does it matter?" asked Algarcife, cheerfully. "A street corner and
an organ-grinder would have answered my purpose, had he been legally
empowered to pronounce the blessing. It is all rot, I suppose, but I'd
face every priest and rabbi in New York if they could bind us closer."

He smiled at Mariana. His eager face looked almost boyish, and he walked
with the confident air of one who is sure of his pathway.

"But they could not," added Mariana, and they both laughed, because they
were young and life was before them.

They retained the rooms in The Gotham with the fire-escape outside the
windows, though Anthony found that his income, after deducting a portion
for Mariana's expenses, was barely sufficient. He had not realized
before how complete was his reliance for existence upon the Bodley
College. Even in the thrill of his first happiness there was a haunting
vision of Mariana reduced to poverty and himself powerless. He
endeavored to insure an independent livelihood by contributing
semi-scientific articles to various reviews, but the work was
uncongenial, and he felt it to be a failure. The basis of his mental
attitude was too firmly embedded to yield superficial product, and he
tasted the knowledge that, had he known less, he might have lived
easier.

At this time his great work was laid aside, a sacrifice to necessity,
and he spent his days and nights in unmurmuring toil for the sake of
Mariana. He was willing to labor, so long as he might love in the
intervals of rest.

As for Mariana, she was vividly alive. Beneath the warmth of emotion her
nature expanded into fulfilment, and with fulfilment awoke the subtle
charm of her personality.

"Have you seen Mariana?" inquired Nevins of Ardly one day. "If so, you
have seen a woman in love."

Ardly smiled and flicked the ashes from his cigar.

"Is she?" he asked, cynically; "or is it that the froth of sentiment
above her heart is troubled and she believes the depth of passion is
stirred? I have lived, my dear fellow, as you probably know, and I have
seen strange things, but the strangest of these is the way of a maid
with a man."

"Be that as it may, she is charming," returned Nevins. "And Algarcife
ought to thank his stars, though why she married him is a mystery I
relegate to the general unravelling of judgment-day."

"She probably had sense enough to appreciate the most brilliant man in
New York," concluded Ardly, loyally, as he took up a volume of
Maupassant and departed.

And that Mariana did appreciate Algarcife was not to be questioned. She
threw herself into the worship of him with absolute disregard of all
retarding interests. When he was near, she lavished demonstrations upon
him; when he was away, she sat with folded hands and dreamed day-dreams.
She had given up her music, and she even went so far as to declare that
she would give up her acquaintances, that they might be sufficient unto
each other. For his sake she discussed theories which she did not
understand, and accepted doctrines of which she had once been
intolerant. That emotional energy which had led her imagination into
devious ways had at last, she told herself, found its appropriate
channel. Even the stringent economy which was forced upon them was
turned into merriment by the play of Mariana's humor.

"Life must only be taken seriously," she said, "when it has ceased to be
a jest, and that will be when one has grown too dull to see the
point--for the point is always there."

"And sometimes it pricks," laughed Anthony.




CHAPTER XII


In an up-town block, a stone's-throw west of Fifth Avenue, stands the
Church of the Immaculate Conception. It is a newly erected structure of
gray stone, between two rows of expressionless tenements, and, despite
the aggressive finality emphasized in its architecture, wearing a
general air of holding its ground by sheer force of stolidity.

The interior of the church is less suggestive of modernity, and bears,
on the whole, a surface relationship to a mediaeval cathedral. The purple
light filtering through the stained-glass windows is, in its essential
quality, a European importation, and the altar-piece is a passable
reproduction of a painting of Murillo's.

More than fifty years ago the church, then an unpretentious building of
red brick, endowed neither with rood-screen nor waxen candles, had
called to its rectorship the Reverend Clement Speares, a youthful leader
of the ritualistic element in Episcopalianism. Father Speares heard the
call and accepted the charge, and within a dozen years he had succeeded
in trebling the number of his congregation, and in exchanging the
red-brick building for the present Church of the Immaculate Conception,
with its mystic light of mediaevalism.

The congregation, of that class who toil not, neither spin, but before
whose raiment Easter lilies falter, was fashionable, and also wealthy.
The single-hearted zeal which its priest had put into fifty years of
service had failed to wean his flock from a taste for the flesh-pots.
In return for the generosity with which they supported their place of
worship and its appurtenances, they claimed the indefeasible right to
regulate their own attire and to reserve their pews from the
encroachment of aliens. They were willing to erect a mission chapel in
the slums, but they submitted to no trespassing upon the exclusiveness
of their accustomed preserves.

Father Speares, who, had his temporal power been in proportion to his
ecclesiastical influence, would have thrown open the Holy of Holies to
the beggar in the street, and have knelt with equal charity between the
Pharisees and Publicans, resigned himself to the recognition of
spiritual caste, and devoted his days to Fifth Avenue and his evenings
to the Bowery.

To his honor be it said that he made no more valiant stand for the
salvation of the one than of the other. A soul was a soul to him, and
personal cleanliness a matter of taste.

He was a man of resolute convictions and unswerving purpose. If he did
not possess eloquence of speech, he possessed sincerity of mind, which
is quite as rare, and very nearly as effective. He had a benevolent
countenance combined with a sympathetic manner, and the combination
exercised a charm over those of his hearers who attended his church in
the endeavor to narcotize troublesome nerves. Unconsciously, by his
adoption of celibacy from the mother church, he had borrowed from the
elder faith the powerful weapon of romanticism, exciting the imaginative
qualities, while he emphasized the maxim of the right of private
judgment by rejecting the dogma of papal infallibility.

But since the Church of the Immaculate Conception had risen into being
with Father Speares, there was an Ishmaelitish rumor afloat that with
Father Speares it would pass away. Father Speares himself was not
insensible to the danger, and with the fervor of an enthusiast he
labored to perpetuate the ceremonials his soul loved. With the force of
a revelation there was borne upon him the conception that on him and his
successors rested the mission to impel the conservative wing of
Episcopalianism into that assimilation to Roman Catholicism whose
resultant is the Ritualistic movement. Unto this end he had spent more
than fifty years of labor. At the close of the nineteenth century he
stood a picturesque and pathetic figure, combating with a mediaeval
eloquence the advancing spirit of his time, a representative of the lost
age of faith lingering far into the new-found age of rationalism.

When Anthony Algarcife, a young orphan, had been sent to him, he had
taken the child into his confidence.

"I will help you," the boy had said, enthusiastically--"I will help
you." And he rolled up his little shirt-sleeves in the desire to settle
spiritual differences in the good old fashion of physical force.

Father Speares had smiled and patted him upon the shoulder. "Please God,
you shall, my boy!" he had answered, and had made the child a
white-robed acolyte, that he might ignite by youthful hands the fires of
faith.

Anthony had been a disappointment, he had said, but of the bitterness of
the disappointment he had made no mention. Beneath his teaching he had
seen the young mind unfold and expand strenuously, and then, while his
eager eyes were watching, he had seen it shoot from him and beyond his
grasp, trampling his cherished convictions beneath ruthless feet.

"It is all rubbish," Anthony had declared in the first intolerance of
his youth. "The mental world is filled with a lot of decaying theology,
which has been accumulating for centuries. It remains for us to sweep it
away."

"And you would sweep me with it," said Father Speares, a little
bitterly.

"The ground must be cleared," returned Anthony. "You are sitting upon
the rubbish, as a miser in Pompeii might have sat upon his gold while
Vesuvius overflowed. It is wiser to flee and leave hoarded treasure to
be ingulfed. That the rubbish was once sound theology, I grant, but it
has crumbled, and its usefulness of a thousand years ago will not it
save from the ash-heap of outgrown ideas to-day."

Father Speares sighed and set his lips. "The boy is young," he said,
with the yearning self-deception of age. "It will pass, and he will
return the stronger for his wandering."

But the event had not borne out his prophecy. It did not pass, and
Anthony did not return.

"It is my head," he explained, half irritably. "There is a wall of
scepticism surrounding my brain, through which only the toughest facts
may penetrate. I am minus the faculty of credulity."

"Or reverence," Father Speares added, reproachfully. "You regard
spiritual things as a deaf man regards sound or a blind man sight."

Anthony's irritation triumphed.

"Or as a man awake regards a dream," he suggested. "The film of
superstition has cleared from my eyes, and I see. The truth is that I
regard all religions exactly as you regard all except the one which you
inherited. An accident of birth has made you a Christian instead of a
Moslem or a Brahman, that is all."

"And a twist of the mind has made you an atheist."

"As you please--atheist, agnostic, sceptic, what you will. It only means
that you offer me an irrational assumption, and I reject it. It is the
custom of you theologians to fit ugly epithets to your opponents,
whereas the denial of Christianity no more argues atheism than the
denial of Confucianism does. It merely proves that a man refuses to
acknowledge any one of the gods which men have created, and that he
leaves the ultimate essence outside his generalizations. Such a man has
learned the first lesson in knowledge--the lesson of his own ignorance."

"And has missed the greater lesson of the wisdom of God."

Algarcife shrugged his shoulders.

"It is no use," he said; "I can't believe, and I wouldn't if I could."

So he had gone from Father Speares into the world. Virile, strenuous,
and possessed with intellectual passion, he had closed the doors of his
mind upon commonplaces, and with the improvidence from which mental
stamina failed to redeem him had wedded himself to poverty and science.

Five years after leaving Father Speares's roof he returned with Mariana
at his side.

"We have come to be married," he announced.

Father Speares gasped and suggested prudence. "It is unwise," he
remonstrated--"it is utterly unwise."

"I agree with you," admitted Anthony. "It is unwise, and we know it; but
there is nothing else to be done--is there, Mariana?"

Mariana looked into Father Speares's face and smiled.

"Of course you are right," she said, "and we are very foolish, but--but
there really isn't anything else to do."

And Father Speares was silenced. He looked at the license a little
ruefully, read the service, and sent them off with a benediction.

"God knows, I wish you happiness," he assured Mariana when she kissed
him.

Several months later, meeting Algarcife on Broadway, he repeated the
words.

"I am happy," returned Algarcife, emphatically. "Mariana is an angel."

"I am glad to hear it," said Father Speares, and he sighed irrelevantly.
"A good woman is a jewel of rare value."

The term "good woman," applied to Mariana, gave Anthony a sense of
unfitness. Mariana was certainly a jewel, but, somehow, it had never
occurred to him to look upon her as a "good woman."

"She is very charming," he remarked, quietly.

Father Speares was regarding him critically. "You are not looking well,"
he said. "Is it work or worry?"

Algarcife shook his head impatiently. "I--oh, I am all right," he
rejoined. "A little extra work, that's all."

"Your book?"

Algarcife's face contracted, and the harassed expression about his mouth
deepened.

"No, not my book," he answered, hastily. "I've put that aside for a
while. I am trying a hand at bread-winning."

"With satisfactory results, I hope."

Anthony's laugh was slightly constrained.

"Why, certainly! Am I the man to fail?"

"I don't know," commented Father Speares--"I don't know. I never thought
of you in that light, somehow. But if I can help you, remember that you
were once my boy."

Anthony held out his hand quickly, his voice trembling.

"You are generous--generous as you have always been, but--I am all
right."

They parted, Algarcife turning into a cross street. He walked slowly,
and the harassed lines did not fade from his mouth. He seemed to have
grown older within the last few months, and the fight he was making had
bowed his shoulders and sown the seeds of future furrows upon his face.

At the corner he bought a box of sardines and a pound of crackers for
Mariana, who liked a late supper. Then he crossed to The Gotham and
ascended the stairs.

He found Mariana in a dressing-sack of pink flannel, sitting upon the
bed, and engaged in manufacturing an opera-bonnet out of a bit of black
gauze and a few pink rose-buds. She was trying it on as he entered, and,
catching sight of him, did not remove it as she raised her hand
warningly. "Tell me if it is becoming before you kiss me," she
commanded, pressing her thimble against her lips.

Anthony drew back and surveyed her.

"Of course it is," he replied; "but what is it, anyway?"

Mariana laughed and leaned towards him.

"A bonnet, of course; not a coal-scuttle or a lamp-shade."

Then she took it from her head and held it before her, turning it
critically from side to side.

"Don't you think it might have a few violets against the hair, just
above the left temple? I am sure I could take some out of my last
summer's hat."

She left the bed and stood upon a chair, to place the bonnet in a box
upon the top of the wardrobe. "As a scientific problem it should
interest you," she observed. "I created it out of nothing."

Anthony caught her as she descended from the chair.

"As a possible adornment for your head it interests me still more," he
replied.

"Because you haven't been married long enough to discover what an empty
little head it is?"

"Because it is the dearest head in the world, and the wisest. But what a
thriftless house-keeper, not to have set the table!" A door had been cut
into his study, and he glanced through. "Do you think you are still
below Mason and Dixon's line, where time is not recognized?"

"I forgot it," said Mariana; "but there isn't any bread, so you must go
after it. Oh, you didn't get sardines again, did you? I said potted
ham--and it is really a very small chicken they sent us."

"Well, no matter. It might have been a chop. By the way, I met Mr.
Speares--"

"Father Speares," corrected Mariana.

"Mr. or Father, he's a nice old chap, isn't he?"

"He's a saint," said Mariana. Then she grew serious. "If you could have
gone into the Church--honestly, I mean--how pleased he would have been,
dearest."

"Yes; but I couldn't, you know, and if I had I could not have married
you. He is High Church, you see. Celibacy is his pet institution."

Mariana colored. "Then I am glad you didn't." She flung herself upon
him; then, drawing back, added, wistfully, "But you wouldn't have been
poor."

"Do you find it so hard?"

"I hate it--for you. You work so hard. And I can't help you."

"My beloved!"

"I mind it most for you. But, of course, I feel badly when the
washer-woman comes and there isn't any money--and I should like to have
some gloves--"

"You shall have them, my darling. Why didn't you tell me?"

Mariana leaned upon his breast and swept her loosened hair across his
arm. "It doesn't matter very much," she answered. "If I were starving
and you kissed me I should forget it." And she added, with
characteristic inconsequence: "Only I haven't been out for several days
because I didn't have any."

"You shall have them to-morrow. Is there anything else, dearest?"

"Nothing!" laughed Mariana.

She went to the mirror and began coiling her hair. From the glass her
eyes met Anthony's, and she threw him a smiling glance.

"I have been reading one of your books," she said, pointing with the
brush; "there it is."

Anthony lifted the volume from the bureau and grew serious. "Mill?" he
observed. "It is a good start. Every woman should know political
economy. I am glad it interests you."

"I haven't gone beyond the first page yet," returned Mariana, putting up
both hands to fluff her aureole, and pausing to run her fingers over her
eyebrows in the attempt to narrow them. "There was something in the
first page about 'a web of muslin,' and, somehow, it suggested to me the
idea of making that bonnet. Odd, wasn't it? And I am so glad I read it,
for I am sure I should never have thought of the bonnet otherwise--and
it is becoming."

"But you like Mill?"

"Oh yes," said Mariana; "I find him very suggestive."




CHAPTER XIII


Anthony and Mariana founded their life together upon well-worn
principles. They accepted in its entirety the fallacy that love is a
self-sustaining force, independent of material conditions.

"So long as we love each other," Mariana declared, "nothing matters."

And Anthony upheld this declaration. To Algarcife those first months of
intimate association were inexpressibly fresh and inspiriting. That
acute sense of nearness to Mariana supplied what had been a void in his
existence, and he looked back upon the time he had spent without her as
a colorless stretch of undifferentiated days.

And yet, with a feminine presence beside him, work was less easy. In the
evenings, when Mariana followed him to his study and seated herself in a
rocking-chair beneath the lamplight, he sometimes experienced a vague
recognition of its inappropriateness. He found the old absorption to
have grown intractable, and the creak of Mariana's rocker, or the low
humming of her voice, was sufficient to surprise in him that repressed
irascibility from which he had never been able to shake himself free.
Even in the midst of his passionate delight in her, a profound
melancholy would seize him at times, and he would find the cravings of
his intellectual nature harassed by the superficial tenor of his daily
employment. Again, as Mariana sat in the lamplight, her swift fingers
busy with some useless bit of millinery, he would regard her with a
sudden tightening of his pulses, and a thrill of fear at the prospect
of a coming separation. The droop of her head, the contour of her face
where the bone of her chin was accentuated by thinness, the soft line of
throat above the full collar, the nimbus of hair shining in the light,
the fall of her skirt, the slender slippered feet, aroused in him a
tumultuous sense of possession. He would turn from his writing to rest
upon her a warm and magnetic glance, before which her lowered lashes
would be lifted, her pensive lips break into a smile.

Then, again, the instinct for solitude, which his years of study had
intensified, would reawaken, and the creaking of the rocker would act as
an irritant upon his nerves.

It was at such a moment that Mariana had looked up and spoken, the
bright inflection of her voice aggravating the interruption.

"Anthony!"

Algarcife turned towards her, his pen raised as if in self-defence.

"When did you begin to love me?"

The pen was lowered, Algarcife smiled. "In the beginning," he answered;
then he frowned, his tone grew captious. "I can't, Mariana," he
protested--"I really can't. I must get this work over."

"You are always working."

"Heaven knows, I am! If I weren't, we would starve."

"It is horrible to be poor."

"We don't improve matters by exclaiming over them. On the contrary, you
will prevent my getting this article off to-night, and we will be a few
dollars the poorer."

"You never talk to me. You are always working."

She spoke pettishly, with an impulse to exasperate.

"Mariana!"

Mariana threw aside her work and clasped her hands. Her face was
upturned, her head supported by the back of the chair. He could see the
violet shadow which rested like a faint suffusion where the heavy hair
swept from behind her ear.

Suddenly her head was lowered, and the mellow lamplight irradiated
across the pallor of her face.

"Of course I know you are working for me," she said, "but I had rather
have less labor and more love."

"I love you as much when I am working for you as when I am shouting it
in your ear."

"But I like to hear it."

"I love you. Now be quiet."

Mariana came and leaned over him. She put her arms about his shoulders
and rested her head upon them. There was a sob in her voice. "Let me
help you," she said. "It is so hard to sit still and do nothing, while
you are killing yourself. Let me help you."

Anthony turned and caught her, and she lay limp and motionless in his
embrace. He kissed her with sudden passion.

"You help me by living," he said, "by breathing, by being near me, by
giving yourself to me unreservedly. Without you I lived but half a
life--without you, now that I have had you, I should go to
pieces--absolutely. I love you as a man loves once in a thousand years.
But we must live, and I must work."

He released her and went back to his writing, while Mariana, in
passionate elation, picked up Mill's _Political Economy_, and fell to
studying.

It was shortly after this that she sought to turn her own talents to
financial results. With this end in view she invested her pocket-money
in a yard or so of white linen and a mass of colored silks, and wove a
garland of nasturtiums around a centre-piece intended to decorate a
dinner-table. When it was finished she was seized with a fit of
sanguineness, and as she rinsed it in a dozen different waters to insure
whiteness, she calculated what the annual products of her labor would
amount to. "If I manage to do one a month," she remarked, pressing the
centre-piece lightly between her moistened hands, "and say I get about
fifteen dollars for each one, I should soon have quite a little income;
twelve times fifteen is--how much, Anthony?"

"More than I am going to let you work for," replied Algarcife. "Your
eyes have been red ever since you started that confounded table-cover.
It is the very last."

Mariana placed one finger to her lips, and then applied it lightly to
the iron she held in her hand. "I do hope I won't scorch it," she
observed. "Oh, do give me that blanket! It must be ironed on a blanket
to make the flowers stand out. Aren't they natural?"

She lifted her heated face and glanced at him for approbation.

"I feel like plucking them," returned Algarcife. "Don't tire yourself.
Good-bye." And he passed into the next room and closed the door.

Mariana ironed the centre-piece, wrapped it in yellow tissue-paper, and
carried it to an exchange for women's work around the corner. It was
placed in a glass-case amid a confusion of similar articles, where it
languished for the space of several months. At the end of that time she
redeemed it.

The failure of the enterprise precipitated an attack of hysteria, which
spent itself in Anthony's arms and left her resigned and exhausted.

"I can't do anything to help you," she observed, hopelessly. "I hoped to
clear at least fifteen dollars from that centre-piece, and, instead, I
lost five. I shall always be an encumbrance."

"You are my beloved counsellor."

"My love isn't of much use, and you never take my advice."

"But I like to listen to it."

Mariana rested her head upon his shoulder and closed her eyes.

"I am only a luxury," she said, "like wine or cigars, but it wouldn't be
pleasant to dispense with me, would it?"

"It would be death."

She sighed contentedly, her hand wandered across his brow. There was a
faint, magnetic force in her finger-tips which left a burning sensation
like that caused by a slightly charged electric current.

"I made you marry me, you know," she remarked, complacently, "so I am
glad you don't regret it."

"Nonsense," remonstrated Algarcife, his lips upon her hair, the warm
contact of her body inducing a sense of nearness. "I married you by
force. I quite took your breath away. If you had resisted, I should have
had you whether or no."

"Oh, but I did make you," returned Mariana. "But there was nothing else
to do. I couldn't possibly have gone home, and I did love you so
distractedly."

"As you do now."

"As I do now. Of course I must have known that rushing to you that night
with the letter was just like a proposal of marriage."

"It was, rather," concluded Algarcife.

"But you needn't have married me unless you wanted to," urged Mariana.
"There was Mr. Paul--"

Anthony laughed. "I was a vicarious sacrifice," he declared, "to insure
the peace of Mr. Paul."

The next day Algarcife received an unexpected sum of money, and they
agreed to celebrate their rising fortunes by a night at the opera. It
was "Tannhauser," and Mariana craved music.

"I am afraid it is improvident," Anthony, whom the opera bored,
remarked, dubiously; then looking into Mariana's wistful face, he
recanted. "It doesn't matter," he added. "A little extravagance won't
affect the probability of future starvation. We will go."

And they went. Mariana wore her freshest gown and the little bonnet with
the knot of violets above the left temple. She was in her gayest mood,
which was only dampened in a slight degree by the odor of the benzine
clinging to her newly cleaned gloves.

As she leaned against the railing in the fifth gallery, gazing
plaintively down into the pit, she looked subtle and seductive--like a
creation in half-tones, swept by fugitive lights and shadows. The pallor
of her face was intensified, her radiant lips compressed, and the green
flame in her glance scintillated beneath luxurious lashes. Anthony,
fastening upon her contented eyes, wondered at the singular charm which
she radiated. Small, slight, insignificant, and charged with
imperfections as she was, her very imperfections possessed the
fascination of elusiveness. Her radiance was intensified in the memory
by the plainness succeeding it; the sensitive curve of her nostrils was
heightened in effect by the irregularity of feature, and the angular
distinctness of the bones of her chin emphasized the faint violet
shadows suffusing the hollows. Had her charm been less impalpable it
would have lost its power. The desire of beauty might have satiated
itself in a dozen women, or of amativeness in a dozen others, but
Mariana fascinated instinctively, and her spell was without beginning in
a single attribute and without end in possession.

As she sat there in the fifth gallery, drinking with insatiable thirst
the swelling harmony, her emotional nature, which association with
Algarcife had somewhat subdued, was revivified, and she pressed
Anthony's responsive hand in exaltation. The music reverberating round
her brought in its train all those lurid dreams which she had half
forgotten, and the dramatic passion awoke and burned her pulses. She
felt herself invigorated, swept from the moorings of the commonplace,
and subverted by the scenic intensity before her. She felt taller,
stronger, fuller of unimpregnated germs of power, and, like an infusion
of splendid barbaric blood, there surged through her veins a flame of
color. With a triumphant crash of harmonious discord, she felt that the
artistic instinct was stimulated from its supineness, and the desire to
achieve was aglow within her. The electric lights beneath the brilliant
ceiling, the odor of hot-house flowers, the music sweeping upward and
bearing her on its swelling tide, acted upon her overwrought
sensibilities like an intoxicant. She drew near to Anthony; her lips
quivered.

"Oh, if it would last," she said--"if it would last!"

But it did not last, and when it was over Mariana pressed her hand to
her brow like one in pain. The return to reality jarred upon her vibrant
nerves, and she became aware of shooting throbs in her temples, and of
the depressing moisture in the atmosphere.

"I am faint," she complained. "I must have something--anything."

"It is all that clashing and banging," responded Anthony. "What a relief
silence is!"

They bought ale and cheese and crackers from a grocery at the corner,
and carried the parcels to their room. Mariana let down her hair, put on
her dressing-gown, and threw herself upon the hearth-rug. She felt weak
and hungry. "If there were only a fire," she lamented regretfully,
stretching her hands towards the register; after which she opened the
paper-bags and ate ravenously.

In the night she awoke with a start and a sob. She reached out moaningly
in the darkness. Her hands were trembling and the neck of her gown was
damp and chill. "I believe I shall go mad," she said, desperately.

Anthony struck a match, lighted the candle, and looked at her. He laid a
cool hand upon her forehead.

"What is it?" he asked. "Are you nervous? Have you been dreaming?"

"No, no," cried Mariana, rolling her head upon the pillow, "but I want
music. I want art. There is so much that is beautiful, and I want
something."

She wept hysterically. Anthony got up and made her a cup of tea, which
she could not drink because it was smoked.

But on the morrow she was herself again. As she was arranging her hair
she laughed and chattered gayly, and the effect of the previous evening
was shown only in a tendency to break into song. Before drinking her
coffee she turned to the piano and trilled an Italian aria, the fingers
of one hand wandering over the key-board in a careless accompaniment.

During the day her buoyancy was unfailing. She took up her studies
zealously, and the morning devoted to Mill was rich in results. Her
acuteness of apprehension was a continual marvel to Algarcife's steadier
perception, and he regarded with deference the quickness with which she
grasped the general drift of unstudied social problems. An exaggerated
example of feminine intuition he ascribed unhesitatingly to a profundity
of intellectual ability. That Mariana was adapting herself to his
theories of life, he recognized and accepted. There was relief in the
thought that his influence over her was weightier than the appeal of her
art. With adolescent egotism, he convinced himself that he was shaping
and perfecting a mental energy into channels other than the predestined
ones; and while Mariana was matured into a palpitant reflection of his
own image, he believed that he was liberating an intellect enthralled by
superficialities. But, in truth, the stronger force was assimilating to
itself the weaker, and the comradeship existing in their love was
perfect in smoothness and finish. The opinions which Anthony radiated
Mariana reflected, and they presented to the world proof of a domestic
unity complete in its harmony.




CHAPTER XIV


One evening in March, Mr. Nevins gave a supper in his studio.

Anthony had come in that morning looking somewhat perplexed. "Nevins
wants us to-night," he said to Mariana, "and I couldn't get out of it."

Mariana looked up eagerly from her practising. "Oh, it is the
'Andromeda,'" she replied. "He said he would celebrate it. So it has
been accepted."

"But it hasn't been. It is the rejection he is celebrating. He told me
so. I feel sorry for the fellow, so I said we would go."

"Of course we will!" exclaimed Mariana. "But I'm afraid he'll be
gloomy."

"On the contrary, he has just come off a spree, and has a patch over his
left eye. His hilarity is positively annoying. He and Ardly are smashing
everything in their rooms. The pitcher went as I passed."

"Oh, it is his way of expressing feeling," returned Mariana,
sympathetically. "Listen to this new air. It goes tra la la, tra--"

Anthony cut her short.

"My dear girl, I'm in an awful hurry. Would you mind being quiet
awhile?" And he entered his study, closing the door after him. Mariana
left the piano and sat with folded hands looking down into the street
below. A fine rain was falling, and the streets were sloppy with a
whitish slime. The women that passed held their skirts well above their
ankles, revealing all shapes and varieties of feet. She noticed that
they carried their skirts awkwardly, with a curious hitch upon the right
hip. They were working-women for the most part, and their gowns were
neither well made nor well cut, but they walked aggressively, with an
uneven, almost masculine, swagger.

Mariana yawned and sighed. She would have liked to go back to the piano
and bang a march or some stirring strain of martial music, but she
recalled Anthony's injunction and yawned again. She remembered suddenly
that her practising had become uncertain of late, and that Anthony's
objection seemed to lie like a drawn sword between her and her art. An
involuntary smile crossed her lips, that she who had pledged herself to
the pursuit of music had also given herself to a man to whom Wagner was
as Rossini. She dwelt upon her changed conditions almost unconsciously.
It was not that her devotion to art had cooled since her marriage, but
that something was forever preventing the expression of it. That Anthony
regarded it as one of the trivialities of life, she saw clearly, and
there was an aggrieved note in her regret. To her, in whom the artistic
instinct was bone of her bone and blood of her blood, the sacrifice of a
professional career was less slight than Algarcife believed, and in the
depths of her heart there still lurked the hope that in time Anthony's
impassioned opposition to a stage life would wear itself out. When the
moment came, she dreamed of a final reinspiration of the slumbering
fires of her ambition. Now, as she sat beside the window, she became
aware of the awakening. Once again she allowed her mind to hover above
the distant future and to illuminate its neutral canvas with garish
colors. In the future anything and everything was possible. Some weeks
ago Signor Morani had sent for her and offered her tuition, and she had
accepted. "If you achieve success you can repay me," he had said,
adding, with philosophic intention, "If not, I shall have lost nothing
that was my own."

Mariana, in a burst of gratitude, had wept upon his shoulder, and he had
smiled as he patted her prostrate head.

"Remember," he said, "that you are an artist first, and a wife and
mother afterwards, and you will succeed."

Sitting beside the window and staring at the expressionless tenements
across the way, she laughed with soft insistence at the professor's
warning. What a consuming force was love, that it had destroyed her old
mad longing for the stage! Was it all love, or was it only the love of
Anthony?

Then before her, in the train of her thoughts, the sentiments of her
life were limned vividly, and she remembered the young highwayman whose
picture she had seen. She saw the bold, Byronic countenance, with the
shadow of evil upon the lips and the uncultured eyes. She recalled the
blur by which the printer had obscured the chin, and she felt again the
tremor with which she had awaited the sentence of the court. She thought
of Edgardo, the romantic tenor, of his impassioned arias, and then of
his fat and immobile face, of his red-cheeked German wife, to whom he
was a faithful husband, and of his red-cheeked German children, to whom
he was a devoted father. She laughed again as she remembered the tears
with which she had bedewed her pillow, and the spasm of jealousy in
which she had mentally attacked the prima donna. Last of all she thought
of Jerome Ardly, as she had seen him upon the night of her arrival,
sitting in indolent discussion of his dinner, the _Evening Post_ spread
out upon his knee. She experienced in memory the thrill which had seized
her at his voice. She remembered how strong and masterful he had looked
with the glow of heart disease, which she had thought the glow of
health, upon his face. Then her thoughts returned to Anthony and
settled to rest. To dwell upon him was as if she had laid her head upon
his arm and felt his hand above her heart; as if she had anchored
herself in deep waters, far beyond the breakers and shallows of life.

In the next room she knew that Anthony was at work, that he had
probably, for the time being, forgotten her existence. The knowledge
caused her a twinge of pain, and she went to the door, opened it, and
looked in.

Algarcife glanced up absently.

"You don't wish anything, do you?" he inquired, and she saw that an
irritable mood was upon him, "I can't be interrupted."

"It is nothing," answered Mariana as she closed the door, but she felt a
sudden tightening of the heart, and, as she gathered up several loose
sheets of music lying upon the floor, she thought, with a spasm of
regretful pain, of the practising she had given up. "He does not know,"
she said, and a few tears fell upon the key-board.

That night, when she was dressing for Nevins's supper, she noticed that
there was a faint flush in her cheeks and her hands were hot.

"We lead such a quiet life," she said, laughing, "that a very little
thing excites me."

Algarcife, who was shaving, put down his razor and came towards her. He
was in his shirt-sleeves, and she noticed that he looked paler and more
haggard than usual.

"Look here, Mariana," he began, "don't talk too much to Nevins; I don't
like it."

Mariana confronted him smilingly.

"You are positively the green-eyed monster himself," she said. "But why
don't you say Ardly, and come nearer the truth? I was in love with him
once, you know."

"Hush!" said Anthony, savagely; "you oughtn't to joke about such things;
it isn't decent."

"Oh, it didn't go as far as that!" returned Mariana, with audacity.

"How dare you!" exclaimed Algarcife, and they flung themselves into each
other's arms.

"How absurd you are!" said Mariana, looking up. "You haven't one little
atom of common-sense--not one."

Then they finished dressing, lowered the lights, and went down-stairs.

Mr. Nevins greeted them effusively. He was standing in the centre of a
small group composed of Miss Freighley, Mr. Sellars, and Mr. Paul, and
the patch above his left eye, as well as his general unsteadiness, bore
evidence to his need of the moral suasion to which Mr. Paul was giving
utterance. In a corner of the room the "Andromeda" was revealed naked to
her friends as well as to her enemies, and at the moment of Anthony's
and Mariana's entrance Mr. Ardly was engaged in crowning her with a
majestic wreath of willow.

He looked up from his task to bestow a morose greeting.

"We have invited you to weep with us," he remarked. "The gentle pronoun
'us,' which you may have observed, is due, not to my sympathetic nature,
but to the fact that I have lost a wager upon the rejected one to Mr.
Paul--"

"Who is also among the prophets," broke in Mr. Nevins, with a
declamatory wave of his hand. "For behold, he prophesied, and his
prophecy it came to pass! For he spake, saying, 'The "Andromeda," she
shall be barren of honor, and lo! in one hour shall she be made
desolate, and her creator shall put dust upon his head and rend his
clothes, yet shall it avail not--'"

"Shut up, Nevins!" roared Ardly, seating himself at the table beside
Mariana. "As if everybody didn't know that Mr. Paul's prophecy was
obliged to come to pass! Did you ever see a pessimist who wasn't
infallible as a soothsayer? It beats a special revelation all hollow."

"Please don't be irreverent," remonstrated Mariana. "I am sure I am
awfully sorry about the 'Andromeda,' and I believe that if Mr. Nevins
had taken my advice and lightened those shadows--"

"Or mine, and lengthened that thigh," broke in Ardly.

"Or mine, and shortened the fingers," added Miss Freighley.

"Or mine, and never painted it," in a savage whisper from Algarcife.

Mr. Nevins silenced the quartet with promptness. "Hang it all!" he
exclaimed, crossly; "between most of your suggestions for art's sake,
and Mr. Paul's suggestions for decency's sake, there wouldn't be a
blamed rag of her left."

"On the contrary," commented Mr. Paul, "an additional rag or two would
be decidedly advantageous."

Mariana raised her finger, with an admonishing shake of the head.

"Out upon you for a Philistine!" she said. "I haven't heard such
profanity since I showed my colored mammy a 'Venus de Milo,' and her
criticism was, 'Lor', child! nakedness ain't no treat to me!'"

Mr. Nevins laughed 

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