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The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel

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Title: The Adventures of a Widow: A Novel

Author: Edgar Fawcett


        
Release date: August 23, 2011 [eBook #37185]
                Most recently updated: May 20, 2016

Language: English

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Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org)


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THE ADVENTURES OF A WIDOW

A Novel

by

EDGAR FAWCETT

Author of "A Gentleman of Leisure," "A Hopeless Case," "An Ambitious
Woman," "Tinkling Cymbals," etc.







Boston
James R. Osgood and Company
1884

Copyright, 1883 and 1884,
By Edgar Fawcett.

All Rights Reserved.




THE ADVENTURES OF A WIDOW.




I.


It is not long ago that the last conservative resident of Bond Street,
proud of his ancient possessorship and no doubt loving the big brick
structure with arched doorway and dormer windows in which he first saw
the light, felt himself relentlessly swept from that interesting quarter
by the stout besom of commerce. Interesting the street really is for all
to whom old things appeal with any charm. It is characteristic of our
brilliant New York, however, that few antiquarian feet tread her
pavements, and that she is too busy with her bustling and thrifty
present to reflect that she has ever reached it through a noteworthy
past. Some day it will perhaps be recorded of her that among all cities
she has been the least preservative of tradition and memorial. The hoary
antiquity of her transatlantic sisters would seem to have made her
unduly conscious of her own youth. She has so long looked over seas for
all her history and romance, that now, when she can safely boast two
solid centuries of age, the habit yet firmly clings, and she cares as
little for the annals of her fine and stately growth as though, like
Troy, she had risen, roof and spire, to the strains of magic melody.

It might be of profit, and surely it would be of pleasure, were she to
care more for the echoes of those harsh and sometimes tragic sounds that
have actually blent their serious music with her rise. As it is, she is
rich in neglected memories; she has tombs that dumbly reproach her
ignoring eye; she has nooks and purlieus that teem with reminiscence and
are silent testimonials of her indifference. Her Battery and her Bowling
Green, each bathed in the tender glamour of Colonial association, lie
frowned upon by the grim scorn of recent warehouses and jeered at by the
sarcastic shriek of the neighboring steam-tug. She can easily guide you
to the modern clamors of her Stock-Exchange; but if you asked her to
show you the graves of Stuyvesant and Montgomery she might find the task
a hard one, though thousands of her citizens daily pass and re-pass
these hallowed spots. Boston, with its gentle ancestral pride, might
well teach her a lesson in retrospective self-esteem. Her own harbor,
like that of Boston, has had its "tea-party," and yet one whose
anniversary now remains a shadow. On Golden Hill, in her own streets,
the first battle of our Revolution was fought, the first blood in the
cause of our freedom was spilled; yet while Boston stanchly commemorates
its later "massacre," what tribute of oratory, essay or song has that
other momentous contest received? This metropolitan disdain of local
souvenir can ill excuse itself on the plea of intolerance toward
provincialism; for if the great cities of Europe are not ashamed to
admit themselves once barbaric, Hudson in fray or traffic with the
swarthy Manhattans, or old Van Twiller scowling at the anathemas of
Bogardus, holds at least a pictorial value and significance.

Bond Street has always been but a brief strip of thoroughfare, running
at right angles between the Bowery and Broadway. Scarcely more than
thirty years ago it possessed the quietude and dignity of a patrician
domain; it was beloved of our Knickerbocker social element; it was the
tranquil stronghold of caste and exclusiveness. Its births, marriages
and deaths were all touched with a modest distinction. Extravagance was
its horror and ostentation its antipathy. The cheer of its
entertainments would often descend to lemonade and sponge-cake, and
rarely rise above the luxury of claret-punch and ice-cream. Its belles
were of demurer type than the brisk-paced ladies of this period, and its
beaux paid as close heed to the straight line in morals as many of their
successors now bestow upon it in the matter of hair-parting. Bond Street
was by no means the sole haunt of the aristocracy, but it was very
representative, very important, very select. There was even a time when
to live there at all conferred a certain patent of respectability. It
was forgiven you that your daughter had married an obscure Smith, or
that your son had linked his lot with an undesirable Jones, if you had
once come permanently to dwell there. The whole short, broad street was
superlatively genteel. Nothing quite describes it like that pregnant
little word. It dined at two o'clock; it had "tea" at six; its parties
were held as dissipated if they broke up after midnight; its young men
"called" on its young women of an evening with ceremonious regularity,
never at such times donning the evening-coat and the white neck-tie
which now so widely obtain, but infallibly wearing these on all
occasions of afternoon festivity with an unconcern of English usage that
would keenly shock many of their descendants.

But by degrees the old order changed. Commerce pushed northward with
relentless energy. Its advance still left Bond Street uninvaded, but
here and there the roomy brick dwellings received distinctly plebeian
inmates. One night, in this street formerly so dedicated to the calm of
refinement, a frightful murder occurred. No one who lived in New York at
that time can fail to remember the Burdell assassination. It was
surrounded by all the most melodramatic luridness of commission. Its
victim was a dentist, slaughtered at midnight with many wounds from an
unknown hand. The mysterious deed shook our whole city with dismay. For
weeks it was a topic that superseded all others. To search through old
newspapers of the excited days that followed is to imagine oneself on
the threshold of a thrilling tale, in which the wrong culprits are
arraigned and the real offender hides himself behind so impregnable an
ambush that nothing but a final chapter can overthrow it. Yet in this
ghastly affair of the stabbed dentist a protracted trial resulted in a
tame acquittal and no more. The story ended abruptly and midway. It lies
to-day as alluring material for the writer of harrowing fiction. It
still retains all the ghastly piquancy of an undiscovered crime.

The vast surrounding populace of New York have long ago learned to
forget it, but there would be truth in the assertion that Bond Street
recalls it still. Its garish publicity scared away the last of her
fine-bred denizens. The retreat was haughty and gradual, but it is now
absolute. Where Ten Eyck and Van Horn had engraved their names in burly
letters on sheeny door-plates, you may see at present the flaunting
signs of a hair-dresser, a beer-seller, a third-rate French
_restaurateur_, a furrier, a flower-maker, and an intercessor between
despairing authors and obdurate publishers. The glory of Bond Street has
departed. Its region has become lamentably "down town." The spoilers
possess it with undisputed rule. It is in one sense a melancholy ruin,
in another a sprightly transformation.

But several years before its decadence turned unargued fact (and now we
near a time that almost verges upon the present), Mr. Hamilton Varick, a
gentleman well past fifty, brought into perhaps the most spacious
mansion of the street a bride scarcely eighteen. Mr. Varick had lived
abroad for many years, chiefly in Paris. He was a tall, spare man, with
a white jaunty mustache and a black eye full of fire. He was extremely
rich, and unless remote relations were considered, heirless. It was
generally held that he had come home to end his days after a life of
foreign folly and gallantry. This may at first have seemed wholly true,
but it also occurred that he had chosen to end them in the society of a
blooming young wife.

His Bond Street house, vacant for years, suddenly felt the embellishing
spell of the upholsterer. Mr. Varick had meanwhile dropped into the
abodes of old friends not seen in twenty years, had shaken hands, with a
characteristic lightsome cordiality, right and left, had beamingly taken
upon his lap the children of mothers and fathers who were once his
youthful comrades in dance and rout, had reminded numerous altered
acquaintances who he was, had been reminded in turn by numerous other
altered acquaintances who they were, had twisted his white mustache, had
talked with airy patriotism about getting back to die in one's native
land, had deplored his long absence from the dear scenes of youth, had
regretted secretly his transpontine Paris, had murmured his bad, witty
French _mots_ to whatever matron would hear them, had got himself
re-made a member of the big, smart Metropolitan Club which he thought a
mere tiresome sort of parochial tavern when he last left it, and had
finally amazed everyone by marrying the young and lovely Miss Pauline
Van Corlear.

Pauline herself had very little to do with the whole arrangement. She
was the only child of a widowed mother who had long ago designed to
marry her notably. Mrs. Van Corlear lived upon a very meagre income, and
had been an invalid since Pauline was eight. But she had educated her
daughter with a good deal of patient care, and had ultimately, at the
proper age, relegated her to the chaperonage of a more prosperous
sister, who had launched her forth into society with due _elan_. Pauline
was not a good match in the mercenary sense; she was perfectly well
aware of the fact; she had been brought up to understand it. But she was
fair to see, and perhaps she understood this a little too well.

New York was then what so many will remember it to have been about
twelve years ago. The civil war had left few traces of disaster; it was
the winter of seventy-one. Wall Street was in a hey-day of hazardous
prosperity; sumptuous balls were given by cliques of the most careful
entertainers; a number of ladies who had long remained unfashionable,
yet who had preserved an inherited right to assert social claim when
they chose, now came to the front. These matrons proved a strong force,
and resisted in sturdy confederacy all efforts of outsiders to break
their dainty ranks. They shielded under maternal wings a delightful bevy
of blooming young maidens, among whom was Pauline Van Corlear.

It was a season of amusing conflict. Journalism had not yet learned to
fling its lime-light of notoriety upon the doings and mis-doings of
private individuals. Young girls did not wake then, as now, on the
morning after a ball, to read (or with jealous heart-burning _not_ to
read) minute descriptions of their toilets on the previous night. The
"society column" of the New York newspaper was still an unborn
abomination. Had this not been the case, a great deal of pungent scandal
might easily have found its way into print. The phalanx of assertive
matrons roundly declared that they had found society in a deplorable
condition. The balls, receptions and dinners were all being given by a
horde of persons without grandfathers. The reigning belles were mostly a
set of loud, rompish girls, with names that rang unfamiliarly. The good
old people had nearly all been drowsing inactive during several winters;
one could hardly discover an Amsterdam, a Spuytenduyvil, a Van
Schuylkill, among this unpleasant rabble. There had been quite too many
of these spurious pretenders. Legitimacy must uplift its debased
standards.

Legitimacy did so, and with a will. Some very fine and spacious mansions
in districts bordering or approximate to Washington Square were
hospitably thrown open, besides others of a smarter but less
time-honored elegance in "up-town" environments. The new set, as it was
called, carried things by storm. They were for the most part very rich
people, and they spent their wealth with a lavish freedom that their
lineage saved from the least charge of vulgarity. No display of money is
ever considered vulgar when lineage is behind it. If you are unblessed
with good descent you must air your silver dishes cautiously and heed
well the multiplicity of your viands; for though your cook possess an
Olympian palate and your butler be the ex-adherent of a king, the
accusation of bad taste hangs like a sword of threat in your banquet
hall.

Among all the winsome _debutantes_ of that season, Pauline Van Corlear
was the most comely. She had a sparkling wit, too, that was at times
mercilessly acute. Most of the young friends with whom she had
simultaneously "come out" were heiresses of no mean consideration; but
Pauline was so poor that an aunt would present her with a few dozens of
gloves, a cousin would donate to her five or six fresh gowns, or perhaps
one still more distant in kinship would supply her with boots and
bonnets. The girl sensitively shrank, at first, from receiving these
gifts; but her plaintive, faded mother, with her cough and querulous
temper, would always eagerly insist upon their acceptance.

"Of course, my dear," Mrs. Van Corlear would say, in her treble pipe of
a voice, while she rocked to and fro the great chair that bore her
wasted, shawl-wrapped body--"of course it is quite right that your
blood-relations should come forward. They all have plenty of money, and
it would be dreadful if they let you go out looking shabby and forlorn.
For my part, I'm only surprised that they don't do more."

"I expect nothing from them, mamma," Pauline would say, a little sadly.

"_Expect_, my dear? Of course you don't. But that doesn't alter the
_obligation_ on their part. Now please do not be obstinate; you know my
neuralgia always gets worse when you're obstinate. You are very
pretty--yes, a good deal prettier than Gertie Van Horn or Sallie
Poughkeepsie, with all their millions--and I haven't a doubt that before
the winter is over you'll have done something really handsome for
yourself. If you haven't, it will be your own fault."

Pauline clearly understood that to do something handsome for herself
meant to marry a rich man. From a tender age she had been brought up to
believe that this achievement was the goal of all hopes, desires and
aims. Everybody expected it of her, as she grew prettier and prettier;
everybody hinted or prophesied it to her long before she "came out." The
little contracted and conventional world in which it was her misfortune
to breathe and move, had forever dinned it into her ears until she had
got to credit it as an article of necessitous faith. There are customs
of the Orient that shock our Western intelligences when we read of women
placidly accepting their tyrannies; but no almond-eyed daughter of pasha
or vizier ever yielded more complaisantly to harem-discipline than
Pauline now yielded to the cold, commercial spirit of the marriage
decreed for her.

She was popular in society, notwithstanding her satiric turn. She always
had a nosegay for the German, and a partner who had pre-engaged her. It
was not seldom that she went to a ball quite laden with the floral boons
of male admirers. Among these latter was her third cousin, then a
gentleman of thirty, named Courtlandt Beekman. Courtlandt had been
Pauline's friend from childhood. She had always been so fond of him that
it had never occurred to her to analyze her fondness now, when they met
under the festal glare of chandeliers instead of in her mother's plain,
dull sitting-room. Nor had it ever occurred to any of her relations to
matrimonially warn her against Courtlandt. He was such a nice, quiet
fellow; naturally he was good to his little cousin; he was good to
everybody, and now that Pauline had grown up and begun to go to places,
his devotion took a brotherly form. Of course he was poor, and, if
sensible, would marry rich. He had been going about for an age in "that
other set." He knew the Briggs girls and the Snowe girls, and all the
_parvenu_ people who had been ruling at assemblies and dancing-classes
during the dark interregnum. Perhaps he would marry a Briggs or a Snowe.
If he did, it would be quite proper. He was Courtlandt Beekman, and his
name would sanctify nearly any sort of Philistine bride. But no one ever
dreamed of suspecting that he might want to marry the cousin, twelve
years his junior, who had sat on his knee as a school-girl, munching the
candies he used to bring her and often pelting him with childish
railleries at the same ungrateful moment.

In person Courtlandt was by no means prepossessing. He had a tall,
brawny figure, and a long, sallow face, whose unclassic irregularities
might have seemed dull and heavy but for the brown eyes, lucid and
variant, that enlivened it. He was a man of few words, but his silences,
though sometimes important, were never awkward. No one accused him of
stupidity, but no one had often connected him with the idea of
cleverness. He produced the impression of being a very close observer,
you scarcely knew why. Possibly it was because you felt confident that
his silences were not mentally vacuous. He had gone among the gay
throngs almost since boyhood; if he had not so persistently mingled with
ladies (and in the main very sweet and cultured ones, notwithstanding
the denunciations hurled against "that other set") it is probable that
he would continuously have merited the title of ungainly and graceless.
But ease and polish had come to him unavoidably; he was like some
rough-shapen vessel that has fallen into the hands of the gilder and
decorator. It would have been hard to pick a flaw in his manners, and
yet his manners were the last thing that he made you think about. He was
in constant social demand; his hosts and hostesses forgot how valuable
to them he really was; he almost stood for that human miracle, a man
without enemies. He made a kind of becoming background for nearly
everybody; he had no axe to grind, no ladder to climb, no prize to win;
he stood neither as debtor nor creditor toward society; he was, in a
way, society itself. There were very few women who did not enjoy a chat
with him _a deux_; and in all general conversation, though his attitude
was chiefly that of listener, the talkers themselves were unaware how
often they sought the response of his peculiar serious smile, or the
intelligent gleam of his look.

Pauline had not been greatly troubled, on her advent among the
merry-makers, with that timidity which is so keen a distress to so many
callow maids. Bashfulness was not one of her weak points; she had borne
the complex stare levelled at her in drawing-rooms with excellent
_aplomb_. Still, she could not help feeling that her kinsman,
Courtlandt, had comfortably smoothed her path toward an individual and
secure foothold. Those early intervals, dire to the soul of every novice
like herself, when male adherence and escort failed through meagreness
of acquaintanceship, Courtlandt had filled with the supporting relief of
his presence and his attentions. There had been no _mauvais quart
d'heure_ in Pauline's evenings; her cousin had loyally saved her from
even the momentary chagrin of being left without a courtier. Later on,
his kindly vigilance had become needless; but he was always to be
trusted, nevertheless, as a safeguard against possible desertion.

The occasion on which Mr. Hamilton Varick first saw Pauline was at a
ball given in the February of her first season, two full months after
she had modestly emerged with her little sisterhood of rosebud damsels.
It was a very beautiful ball, given in a stately and lovely house
adjacent to the Park, and by a lady now old and wrinkled, who had held
her own, forty years ago, as a star in our then limited firmament of
fashion. The dancers, among whom was her fair and smiling granddaughter
of eighteen, chased the jolly hours in a spacious apartment, brilliant
with prismatic candelabra and a lustrous floor of waxed wood. The
rosy-and-white frescoes on the ceiling, the silver-fretted delicacy of
frieze and cornice, the light, pure blues and pinks of tapestries, the
airy and buoyant effects in tint and symmetry, made the whole
quick-moving throng of revellers appear as if the past had let them live
again out of some long-vanished French court-festival.

"These young people only need powdered heads to make it look as if Louis
Quinze were entertaining us in dead earnest," said Mr. Varick, with his
high-keyed, nonchalant voice. He addressed an elderly matron as he
spoke, but he gave a covert glance at Pauline, to whom he had just
received, through request, the honor of a presentation.

"I think it would be in very dead earnest if he did," said Pauline,
speaking up with a gay laugh; and Mr. Varick laughed, too, relishing her
pert joke. He paid her some gallant compliments as he stood at her side,
though she thought them stiff and antique in sound, notwithstanding the
foreign word or phrase that was so apt to tinge them. She found Mr.
Varick pleasantest when he was asking after her sick mother, and telling
her what New York gayeties used to be before the beginning of his long
European absence. He had a tripping, lightsome mode of speech, that
somehow suited the jaunty upward sweep of his white mustache. He would
oscillate both hands in a graceful style as he talked. Elegant
superficiality flowed from him without an effort. It needed no keenness
to tell that he had been floating buoyantly on the top crest of the
wave, and well amid its froth, all his life. He made no pretense to
youth; he would, indeed, poke fun at his own seniority, with a
relentless and breezy sort of melancholy.

"Did you ever hear of a French poet named Francois Villon," he said to
Pauline, dropping into a seat at her side that some departure had just
left vacant. "No, I dare say you've not. He was a dreadful chap--a kind
of _polisson_, as we say, but he wrote the most charming ballads; I
believe he was hanged afterward, or ought to have been--I forget which.
One of his songs had a sad little refrain that ran thus: '_Ou sont les
neiges d'antan?_'--'Where are the snows of last year?' you know. Well,
mademoiselle--no, Miss Pauline, I mean--that line runs in my head
to-night. _Ca me gene_--it bothers me. I want to have the good things of
youth back again. I come home to New York, and find my snow all melted.
Everything is changed. I feel like a ghost--a merry old ghost, however.
_Tenez_--just wait a bit. Do you think those nice young gentlemen will
have anything to say to you after they have seen you a little longer in
my company? I'm sure I have frightened four or five of them away.
They're asking each other, now, who is that old _epouvantail_--what is
the word?--scarecrow. Ah! _voila_--here comes one much bolder than the
rest. I will have mercy on him--and retire. But before my _depart_ I
have a favor to request of you. You will give mamma my compliments? You
will tell her that I shall do myself the honor of calling upon her?
Thanks, very much. We shall be ghosts together, poor mamma and I; you
need not be _chez vous_ when I call, unless you are quite willing--that
is, if you are afraid of ghosts."

"Oh, I'm not," laughed Pauline. "I don't believe in them, Mr. Varick."

"That is delightful for you to say!" her companion exclaimed. "It means
that you will listen for a little while to our spectral conversation and
not find it too _ennuyeuse_. How very kind of you! Ah! we old fellows
are sometimes very grateful for a few crumbs of kindness!"

"You can have a whole loaf from me, if you want," said Pauline, with an
air of girlish diversion.

Not long afterward she declared to her cousin, Courtlandt: "I like the
old gentleman ever so much, Court. He's a refreshing change. You New
York men are all cut after the same pattern."

"I'm afraid he's cut with a rather crooked scissors," said Courtlandt,
who indulged in a sly epigram oftener than he got either credit or
discredit for doing.

"Oh," said Pauline, as if slowly understanding. "You mean he is
_French_, I suppose."

"Quite French, they report."

Mr. Varick made his promised visit upon Pauline and her mother sooner
than either of them expected. Mrs. Van Corlear was rather more ill than
usual, on the day he appeared, and almost the full burden of the ensuing
conversation fell upon her daughter.

The next evening, at the opera, he dropped into a certain box where
Pauline was seated with her aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie. On the following
day Pauline received, anonymously, an immense basket of exquisite
flowers. Twice again Mr. Varick called upon her mother, in the charmless
upstairs sitting-room of their boarding house. As it chanced, Pauline
was not at home either time.

An evening or two afterward she returned at about eleven o'clock from a
theatre party, to find that her mother had not yet retired. Mrs. Van
Corlear's usual bed-time was a very exact ten o'clock.

The mother and daughter talked for a little while together in low tones.
When Pauline went into her own chamber that night, her face was pale and
her heart was beating.

At a great afternoon reception which took place two days later,
Courtlandt, who made his appearance after five o'clock, coming up town
from the law-office in which he managed by hard work to clear a yearly
two thousand dollars or so, said to his cousin, with a sharpened and
rather inquisitive look:

"What's the matter? You don't seem to be in good spirits."

Pauline looked at him steadily for a moment. It was a great crush, and
people were babbling all about them. "There's something I want to speak
of," the girl presently said, in a lingering way.

A kind of chill stole through Courtlandt's veins at this,--he did not
know why; he always afterward had a lurking credence in the truth of
presentments.

"What is it?" he asked.

Pauline told him what it was. He grew white as he listened, and a
glitter crept into his eyes, and brightened there.

"You're not going to _do_ it?" he said, when she had finished.

She made no answer. She had some flowers knotted in the bosom of her
walking dress, and she now looked down at them. They were not the
flowers Mr. Varick had sent; they were a bunch bestowed by Courtlandt
himself at a little informal dance of the previous evening, where the
cotillon had had one pretty floral figure. She regarded their petals
through a mist of unshed tears, now, though her cousin did not know it.

He repeated his question, bending nearer. It seemed to him as if the sun
in heaven must have stopped moving until she made her answer.

"You know what mamma is, Court," she faltered.

"Yes, I do. She has very false views of many things. But you have not.
You can't be sold without your own consent."

"Let us go away from here together," she murmured. "These rooms are so
hot and crowded that I can hardly breathe in them."

He gave her his arm, and they pushed their way forth into a neighboring
hall through one of the broad yet choked doorways.

Outside, in Fifth Avenue, the February twilight had just begun to
deepen. The air was mild though damp; a sudden spell of clemency had
enthralled the weather, and the snow, banked in crisp pallor along the
edge of either sidewalk, would soon shrink and turn sodden. At the far
terminus of every western street burned a haze of dreamy gold light
where the sun had just dropped from view, but overhead the sky had that
treacherous tint of vernal amethyst which is so often a delusive snare
to the imprudent truster of our mutable winters. Against this vapory
mildness of color the house-tops loomed sharp and dark; a humid wind
blew straight from the south; big and small sleighs were darting along,
with the high, sweet carillons of their bells now loud and now low;
through the pavements that Courtlandt and Pauline were treading, great
black spots of dampness had slipped their cold ooze, to tell of the thaw
that lay beneath. Yesterday the sky had been a livid and frosty azure,
and the sweep of the arctic blast had had the cut of a blade in it;
to-day the city was steeped in a languor of so abrupt a coming that you
felt its peril while you owned its charm. Courtlandt broke the silence
that had followed their exit. He spoke as if the words forced themselves
between his shut teeth.

"I can't believe that you really mean to do it," he said, watching
Pauline's face as she moved onward, looking neither to right nor left.
"It would be horrible of you! He is over sixty if he's a day, besides
having been mixed up in more than one scandal with women over there in
Paris. I think it must be all a joke on your part. If it is, I wish for
God's sake that you'd tell me so, Pauline!"

"It isn't," she said. She turned her face to his, then, letting him see
how pale and sad it was. "I must do it, Court," she went on. "It's like
a sort of fate, forcing and dragging me. I had no business to mention
mamma in the matter, I suppose. She couldn't _make_ me consent, of
course, although, if I did not, her lamentations would take a most
distracting form for the next year or two. No; it's not she; it's
myself. I don't live in a world where people hold very high views of
matrimony. And I hate the life I'm living now. The other would be
independence, even if bought at a dear price. And how many girls would
envy me my chance? What am I at present but a mere pensioner on my
wealthy relatives? I can't stay in; I've started with the whirl, and I
can't stop. Everybody whom I know is dancing along at the same pace. If
I declined invitations; if I didn't do as all the other girls are doing;
if I said 'No, I'm poor and can't afford it,'--then mamma would begin
tuning her harp and sending up her wail. And I should be bored to death,
besides." Here Pauline gave a hollow laugh, and slightly threw back her
head. "Good Heavens!" she continued, "there's nothing strange in it.
I've been brought up to expect it; I knew it would probably come, and I
was taught, prepared, warned, to regard it when it did come in only one
way. If he hadn't been old he might have been shocking. What a piercing
pertinence there is to my case in that little proverb, 'Beggars mustn't
be choosers!' I'm a beggar, you know: ask Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie if
she doesn't think I am. And _he's_ quite the reverse of shocking, truly.
His hair may be rather white, but his teeth are extremely so, and I
think they're indigenous, aboriginal; I hope if they're not he will
never tell me, anyway."

She gave another laugh, as mirthless as if the spectre of herself had
framed it. She had turned her face away from him again, and slightly
quickened her walk.

"You mean, then, that your mind is really made up!" said Courtlandt,
with an ire, a fierceness, that she had never seen in him before. "You
mean that for a little riches, a little power, you'll turn marriage,
that should be a holy usage, into this wicked mockery?"

Pauline bit her lip. Such a speech as this from her equanimous cousin
was literally without precedent. She felt stung and guilty as she said,
with cool defiance,--

"Who holds marriage as a holy usage? I've never seen anyone who did."

"I do!" he asseverated, with clouding face. "You do, too, Pauline in
your heart."

"I haven't any heart. They're not worn nowadays. They're out of
fashion. We carry purses instead--when we can."

"I think I will tell Mr. Varick you said that," he answered, measuring
each word grimly.

"Oh, do!" Pauline exclaimed. A weary and mournful bravado filled her
tones. "How he would laugh! Do you fancy he thinks I care a button for
him? Why, nearly the first sentence he spoke to mamma on this weighty
subject concerned the number of yearly thousands he was willing to
settle upon me."

"So, it is all arranged?"

"It only awaits your approval."

"It can only get my contempt!"

"That is too bad. I thought you would anticipate some of the charming
little dinners I intend to give. He has dreadful attacks of the gout, I
have learned, and sometimes I'll ask you to preside with me in his
vacant chair. That is, if you"--

But he would hear no more. He turned on his heel and left her. He
bitterly told himself that her heart was ice, and not worth wasting a
thought upon. But he wasted a good many that night, and days afterward.

Whether ice or not, it was a very heavy heart as Pauline went homeward.
Just in proportion as the excuses for her conduct were ready on her
lips, so they were futile to appease her conscience.

And yet she exulted in one justifying circumstance, as she herself named
it. "If I _loved_ anybody--Court, or anybody else," she reflected, "I
never _could_ do it! But I don't. It's going to make a great personage
of me. I want to find out how it feels to be a great personage. I want
to try the new sensation of not wearing charity gloves...." She had
almost a paroxysm of nervous tears, alone in her own room, a little
later. That evening Mr. Varick once more presented himself....

At about eleven o'clock he jumped into a cab which he had kept waiting
an interminable time, and lighted a very fragrant cigar as he was being
driven off.

"_Elle est belle a faire peur_," he muttered aloud. And the next moment
a thought passed through his mind which would resemble this, if put into
English, though he always thought in French:--

"I will write to Madeleine to-morrow, and send her ten thousand francs.
That will end everything--and if the gout spares me five years longer I
shan't see Paris while it does."

He had not by any means come home to die. He had said so because it had
a neat sound, throwing a perfume of sentiment about his return. And he
was always fond of the perfume of sentiment. In reality he had come home
to look after his affairs, which had grown burdensomely prosperous, and
then sail back with all the decorous haste allowable.

Perhaps he had come home with a few other trifling motives. But of every
conceivable motive, he had _not_ come with one. That one was--to marry.
And yet he had to-night arranged his alliance (satisfactorily on both
sides, it was to be hoped) with Miss Pauline Van Corlear.

He leaned back in the dimness of the speeding cab, and reflected upon
it. His reflections made him laugh, and as he laughed his lip curled up
below his white mustache and showed his white teeth, with the good, dark
cigar between them--the teeth of which Pauline had said that if they
were false she did not wish to know it.




II.


The marriage was a quiet one, and took place in the early following
spring. Pauline made a very lovely bride, but as this comment is
delivered upon a most ample percentage of all the brides in Christendom,
it is scarcely worth being recorded. The whole important constituency of
her kindred were graciously pleased at the match, with a single
exception. This was Courtlandt Beekman, who managed to be absent in
Washington at the time of the wedding. Pauline's presents were superb;
the Poughkeepsies, Amsterdams, and all the rest, came forth in expensive
sanction of the nuptials. After a brief Southern tour the wedded pair
took up their abode in the newly appointed Bond Street mansion. Mrs. Van
Corlear, already ensconced there, welcomed them with as beaming a smile
as her invalid state would permit. Pauline, as she kissed her, wondered
if those same bloodless lips would ever have any further excuse for
querulous complaint. It was pathetic to note the old lady's gratified
quiver while her thin hand was gallantly imprinted, as well, by the
kiss of her new son-in-law. She had surely reached the goal of all her
earthly hopes. She had a silken chair to rock in, and a maid as her
special attendant, and a doctor to be as devoted and exorbitant as he
chose. Her neuralgia, her asthma, her rheumatism, her thousand and one
ailments, were henceforth to wreak their dolorous inflictions among the
most comfortable and sumptuous surroundings. And yet, as if in mockery
of her new facilities for being the truly aristocratic invalid, this
poor lady, after a few weeks of the most encouraging opportunity,
forsook all its commodious temptations and quietly died in her bed of a
sudden heart-seizure.

On the occasion of her death Pauline's husband, who had thus far been
scrupulously polite, made a remark which struck his wife as brutal, and
roused her resentment. He was a good deal more brutal, in a glacial,
exasperating way, as Pauline's anger manifested itself. But shortly
after the funeral he was prostrated by a sharp attack of his gout,
during which Pauline nursed him with forgiving assiduity.

The young wife was now in deep mourning. Her husband's attack had been
almost fatal. His recovery was slow, and a voyage to Europe was urgently
recommended by his physicians. They sailed in latter June. Courtlandt
was among those who saw Pauline off in the steamer. He looked, while
taking her hand in farewell, as if he felt very sorry for her. Pauline
seemed in excellent spirits; her black dress became her; she was so
blonde that you saw the gold hair before you marked the funereal garb;
and then she had her smile very ready, which had always won nearly
everybody. Perhaps only Courtlandt, in his wise, grave taciturnity, saw
just how factitious the smile was.

Mr. Varick quite recovered from this attack. Pauline's letters said so.
They had soon left London, near which the Cunarder had brought them, and
gone to Paris; Mr. Varick was feeling so much better from the voyage,
and had always felt so at home in Paris. For several months afterward
Pauline's letters were sent over-sea in the most desultory and irregular
fashion. And what they contained by no means pleased their recipients.
She appeared to tell nothing about herself; she was always writing of
the city. As if one couldn't read of the Tuileries and Notre Dame in a
thousand books! As if one hadn't been there oneself! Why did she not
write _how they were getting on together_? That was the one imperative
stimulus for curiosity among all Pauline's friends and kindred--how
they were getting on together. All, we should add, except Courtlandt,
who seemed to manifest no curiosity of whatever sort. Of course one
could not write and ask her, point blank! What was one to do? Did
rambling essays upon the pleasures of a trip to Versailles, or the
recreation of a glimpse of Fontainebleau, mean that Mr. Varick had or
had not broken loose in a mettlesome manner from his latter-day
matrimonial traces?

"We are prepared for anything, you know," Mrs. Poughkeepsie, Pauline's
aunt and former patron, had once rather effusively said to Courtlandt.
"Now that Hamilton Varick is well, he might be larking over there to any
dreadful extent. And Pauline, from sheer pride, mightn't be willing to
tell us."

"Very cruel of her, certainly," Courtlandt had responded, laconic and
not a little sarcastic as well.

But as months went by, Pauline's correspondents forgot, in the
absorption engendered by more national incentives for gossip, the
unsatisfactory tone of her letters. Once, however, Pauline wrote that
she wished very much to return, but that her husband preferred remaining
in Paris.

"He won't come back!" immediately rose the cry on this side of the
water. "He's keeping her over there against her will! How perfectly
horrible! Well, she deserves it for marrying a _vieux galant_ like that!
Poor Pauline! With her looks she might have married somebody of
respectable age. But she wouldn't wait. She was so crazy to make her
market, poor girl! It's to be hoped that he doesn't beat her, or
anything of that frightful sort!"

One auditor of these friendly allusions would smile at them with furtive
but pardonable scorn. This auditor was Courtlandt; and he remembered how
the same compassionate declaimers had been the first to applaud
Pauline's astounding betrothal.

After two years of absence on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Varick, certain
rumors drifted to America. This or that person had seen them in Paris.
Pauline was still pretty as ever, but living quite retired. It was said
she had taken to books and general mental improvement. No one ever saw
her with her husband. She never alluded to him in any way. There were
queer stories about his goings on. It was hard to verify them; Paris was
so big, and so many men were always doing such funny things there.

The conclave on these shores heard and sympathetically shuddered. The
"new set" had now healed all its old feuds. New York society was in a
condition of amicably cemented factions. The Briggs girls and the Snowe
girls had married more or less loftily, and had proved to the Amsterdams
and others that they were worthy of peaceable affiliation. "Poor Pauline
Varick" began to be a phrase, though a somewhat rare one, for without
anybody actually wakening to the fact, she had been living abroad four
whole years. And then, without the least warning, came the news that she
was a widow.

She was universally expected home, then, after the tidings that her
husband was positively dead had been confirmed beyond the slightest
doubt. But perhaps for this reason Pauline chose to remain abroad
another year. When she did return her widowhood was an established fact.
Her New York _clientele_ had grown used to it. Mr. Varick had left her
all his fortune; she was a very wealthy young widow. Aggressive queries
respecting his death, or his deportment during the foreign sojourn that
preceded his death, were now quite out of order. She had buried him, as
she had married him, decently and legally. He slept in Pere la Chaise,
by his own _ante mortem_ request. No matter what sort of a life he had
led her; it was nobody's business. She returned home, two years later,
to take a high place and hold a high head. Those merciful intervening
years shielded her from a multitude of stealthy interrogatories. She did
not care to be questioned much regarding her European past as the wife
of Mr. Varick, and she soon contrived to make it plain that she did not.
There was no dissentient voice in the verdict that she had greatly
changed. And in a physical sense no one could deny that she had changed
for the better.

Her figure, which had before been quite too thin despite its pliant
grace, was now rounded into soft and charming curves. Her gray eyes
sparkled less often, but they glowed with a steadier light for perhaps
this reason; they looked as if more of life's earnest actualities had
been reflected in them. Her face, with its chiselled features all
blending to produce so high-bred and refined an expression, rarely broke
into a smile now, but some unexplained fascination lay in its acquired
seriousness, that made the smile of brighter quality and deeper import
when it really came. She wore her copious and shining hair in a heavy
knot behind, and let it ripple naturally toward either pure temple,
instead of having it bush low down over her forehead in a misty turmoil,
as previously. Her movements, her walk, her gestures, all retained the
volatile briskness and freedom they had possessed of old; there was not
even the first matronly hint about her air, and yet it was more
self-poised, more emphatic, more womanly.

"I really must move out of this dreadful Bond Street," she said to
Courtlandt, rather early in the conversation which took place between
them on the day of their first meeting. "I think I could endure it for
some time longer if that immense tailor-shop had not gone up there at
the Broadway corner, where such a lovely, drowsy old mansion used to
stand. Yes, I must let myself be compliantly swept further up town.
There is a kind of Franco-German tavern just across the way that
advertises a 'regular dinner'--whatever that is--from twelve o'clock
till three, every day, at twenty-five cents."

"I see you haven't forgotten our national currency," said Courtlandt,
with one of his inscrutable dispositions of countenance.

Pauline tossed her head in a somewhat French way. "I have forgotten very
little about my own country," she said.

"You are glad to get back to it, then?"

"Yes, very. I want to take a new view of it with my new eyes."

"You got a new pair of eyes in Europe?"

"I got an older pair." She looked at him earnestly for a moment. "Tell
me, Court," she went on, "how is it that I find you still unmarried?"

He shifted in his chair, crossing his legs. "Oh," he said, "no nice girl
has made me an offer."

Pauline laughed. "As if she'd be nice if she had! Do you remember how
they used to say you would marry in the other set? Is there another set
now?"

"There is a number of fresh ones. New York is getting bigger every day,
you know. Young men are being graduated from college, young girls from
seminaries. I forget just what special set you mean that you expected me
to marry into."

"No, you don't!" cried Pauline, with soft positiveness. She somehow felt
herself getting quietly back into the old easy terms with Courtlandt.
His sobriety, that never echoed her gay moods, yet always seemed to
follow and enjoy them, had re-addressed her like a familiar though
alienated friend. "You recollect perfectly how Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie
used to lift that Roman nose of hers and declare that she would never
allow her Sallie to know those fast Briggs and Snowe girls, who had got
out because society had been neglected by all the real gentry in town
for a space of at least five years?"

Courtlandt gave one of his slow nods. "Oh, yes, I recollect. Aunt
Cynthia was quite wrong. She's pulled in her horns since then. The
Briggses and the Snowes were much too clever for her. They were always
awfully well-mannered girls, too, besides being so jolly. They needed
her, and they coolly made use of her, and of a good many revived leaders
like her, besides. Most of the good men like them; that was their strong
point. It was all very well to say they hadn't had ancestors who knew
Canal Street when it was a canal, and shot deer on Twenty-Third Street;
but that wouldn't do at all. No matter how their parents had made their
money, they knew how to spend it like swells, and they had pushed
themselves into power and were not to be elbowed out. The whole fight
soon died a natural death. They and their supporters are nearly all
married now and married pretty well."

"And you didn't marry one of them, Court?"

Courtlandt gave a slight, dry cough. "I'm under the impression,
Pauline," he said, "that I did not."

"How long ago it all seems!" she murmured, drooping her blond head and
fingering with one hand at a button on the front of her black dress.
"It's only four years, and yet I fancy it to be a century." She raised
her head. "Then the Knickerbockers, as we used to call them, no longer
rule?"

Courtlandt laughed gravely. "I don't know that they ever did," he
answered.

"Well, they used to give those dancing-classes, you know, where nobody
was ever admitted unless he or she had some sort of patrician claim.
Don't you recollect how Mrs. Schenectady, when she gave Lily a Delmonico
Blue-Room party (do they have Delmonico Blue-Room parties, now?),
instructed old Grace Church Brown to challenge at the Fourteenth Street
entrance (where he would always wait as a stern horror for the coachmen
of the arriving and departing carriages) anybody who did not present a
certain mysterious little card at the sacred threshold?"

"Oh, yes," returned Courtlandt ruminatively.

"And how," continued Pauline, "that democratic Mrs. Vanderhoff happened
to bring, on this same evening, some foreign gentleman who had dined
with her, and whom she meant to present with an apologetic flourish to
the Schenectadys, when suddenly the corpulent sentinel, Brown, desired
from her escort the mysterious card, and finding it not to be
forthcoming sent a messenger upstairs? And how Mr. Schenectady presently
appeared and informed Mrs. Vanderhoff, with a cool snobbery which had
something sublime about it, that he was exceedingly sorry, but the rule
had been passed regarding the admission of any non-invited guest to his
entertainment?"

"Oh, yes; I remember it all," said Courtlandt. "Schenectady behaved like
a cad. Nobody is half so strict, nowadays, nor half so grossly uncivil.
You'll find society very much changed, if you go out. You'll see people
whose names you never heard before. I sometimes think there's nothing
required to make one's self a great swell nowadays except three
possessions, all metallic--gold, silver, and brass."

"How amusing!" said Pauline. "And yet," she suddenly added, with a swift
shake of the head, "I'm sure it will never amuse _me_! No, Court, I have
grown a very different person from the ignorant girl you once saw me!"
She lowered her voice here, and regarded him with a tender yet
impressive fixity. "When I look back upon it all now, and think how I
used to hold the code of living which those people adopt as something
that I must respect and even reverence, I can scarcely believe that the
whole absurd comedy did not happen in some other planet. You don't know
how much I've been through since you met me last. I'm not referring to
my husband. It isn't pleasant for me to talk about _that_ part of the
past. I wouldn't say even this much to any one except you; but now that
I have said it, I'll say more, and tell you that I endured a good deal
of solid trial, solid humiliation, solid heart-burning.... There, let us
turn that page over, you and myself, and never exchange another word on
the subject. You were perfectly right; the thing I did _was_ horrible,
and I've bought my yards of sackcloth, my bushels of ashes. If it were
to do over again, I'd rather beg, starve, die in the very gutter.
There's no exaggeration, here; I have grown to look on this human
destiny of ours with such utterly changed vision--I've so broadened in a
mental and moral sense, that my very identity of the past seems as if it
were something I'd moulted, like the old feathers of a bird. Feathers
make a happy simile; I was lighter than a feather, then--as light as
thistledown. I had no principles; I merely had caprices. I had no
opinions of my own; other people's were handed to me and I blindly
accepted them. My chief vice, which was vanity, I mistook for the virtue
of self-respect, and kept it carefully polished, like a little
pocket-mirror to look at one's face in. I was goaded by an actually
sordid avarice, and I flattered myself that it was a healthy matrimonial
ambition. I swung round in a petty orbit no larger than a saucer's rim,
and imagined it to have the scope of a star's. I chattered gossip with
fops of both sexes, and called it conversation. I bounced and panted
through the German for two hours of a night, and declared it to be
enjoyment. I climbed up to the summit of a glaring yellow-wheeled drag
and sat beside some man whose limited wit was entirely engrossed by the
feat of driving four horses at once; and because poor people stopped to
sigh, and silly ones to envy, and sensible ones to pity, as we rumbled
up the Avenue in brazen ostentation, I considered myself an elect and
exceptional being. Of course I must have had some kind of a better
nature lying comatose behind all this placid tolerance of frivolity.
Otherwise the change never would have come; for the finest seed will
fail if the soil is entirely barren."

"You have taken a new departure, with a vengeance," said Courtlandt. He
spoke in his usual tranquil style. He considered the sketch Pauline had
just drawn of her former self very exaggerated and prejudiced. He had
his own idea of what she used to be. He was observing her with an
excessive keenness of scrutiny, now, underneath his reposeful demeanor.
But he aired none of his contradictory beliefs. It is possible that he
had never had a downright argument with any fellow-creature in his life.
Somehow the brief sentence which he had just spoken produced the
impression of his having said a great deal more than this. It was always
thus with the man; by reason of some unique value in his silence any
terse variation of it took a reflected worth.

Pauline's hands were folded in her lap; she was looking down at them
with a musing air. She continued to speak without lifting her gaze.
"Yes," she went on, "the reformatory impulse must have been latent all
that time. I can't tell just what quickened it into its present
activity. But I am sure, now, that it will last as long as I do."

"What are the wonders it is going to accomplish?"

"Don't satirize it," she exclaimed, looking up at him with a start. "It
is a power for good."

"I hope so," he said.

"_I_ know so! Courtlandt, I've come back home to live after my own
fashion. I've come back with an idea, a theory. Of course a good many
people will laugh at me. I expect a certain amount of ridicule. But I
shall despise it so heartily that it will not make me swerve a single
inch. I intend to be very social--yes, enormously so. My drawing-rooms
shall be the resort of as many friends as I can bring together--but all
of a certain kind."

"Pray, of what kind?"

"You shall soon see. They are to be men and women of intellectual
calibre; they are to be workers and not drones; they are to be thinkers,
writers, artists, poets, scholars. They can come, if they please, in
abnormal coats and unconventional gowns; I sha'n't care for that. They
can be as poor as church mice, as unsuccessful as talent nearly always
is, as quaint in manner as genius incessantly shows itself." Here
Pauline rose, and made a few eloquent little gestures with both hands,
while she moved about the room in a way that suggested the hostess
receiving imaginary guests. "I mean to organize a _salon_," she
continued--"a veritable _salon_. I mean to wage a vigorous crusade
against the aimless flippancy of modern society. I've an enthusiasm for
my new undertaking. Wait till you see how valiantly I shall carry it
out."

"Am I to understand," said Courtlandt, without the vestige of a smile,
"that you mean to begin by cutting all your former friends?"

She glanced at him as if with a suspicion of further satire. But his
sedate mien appeared to reassure her. "Cutting them?" she repeated. "No;
of course not."

"But you will not invite them to your _salon_?"

She tossed her head again. "They would be quite out of place there. They
are not in earnest about anything. Everybody whom I shall have must be
in earnest. I intend to lay great stress upon that one requirement. It
is to be a passport of admission. My apartments are to be at once easy
and difficult of entrance. I shall not object to the so-called
aristocratic class, although if any applicant shall solicit my notice
who is undoubtedly a member of this class, I shall in a certain way hold
the fact as disqualifying; it shall be remembered against him; if I
admit him at all I shall do so in spite of it and not because of it.--Is
my meaning quite clear on this point?"

"Oh, excessively," said Courtlandt; "you could not have made it more so.
All ladies and gentlemen are to be received under protest."

He let one of his odd, rare laughs go with the last sentence, and for
this reason Pauline merely gave him a magnificent frown instead of
visiting upon him more wrathful reprimand. At the same time she said:
"It's a subject, Court, on which I am unprepared for trivial levity. If
you can't treat it with respect I prefer that you should warn me in
time, and I will reserve all further explanations of my project."

He gave a slight, ambiguous cough. "If I seem disrespectful you must lay
it to my ignorance."

"I should be inclined to do that without your previous instructions."
Here she regarded him with a commiseration that he thought delicious; it
was so palpably genuine; she so grandly overlooked the solemn roguery
that ambuscaded itself behind his humility.

"You see," he went on, "I haven't learned the vocabulary of radicalism,
so to speak. I think I know the fellows you propose to have; they wear
long hair, quite often, and big cloaks instead of top-coats, and collars
low enough in the neck to show a good deal of wind-pipe. As for the
women, they"--

"It is perfectly immaterial to me how any of them may dress!" she
interrupted, with majestic disapproval. "I ought to be very sorry for
you, Courtlandt, and I am. You're clever enough not to let yourself
rust, like this, all your days. I don't believe you've ever read one of
the works of the great modern English thinkers. You're sluggishly
satisfied to go jogging along in the same old ruts that humanity has
worn deep for centuries. Of course you never had, and never will have,
the least spark of enthusiasm. You're naturally lethargic; if a person
stuck a pin into you I don't believe you would jump. But all this is no
reason why you shouldn't try and live up to the splendid advancements of
your age. When my constituents are gathered about me--when I have fairly
begun my good work of centralizing and inspiriting my little band of
sympathizers--when I have defined in a practical way my intended
opposition to the vanities and falsities of existing creeds and tenets,
why, then, I will let you mingle with my assemblages and learn for
yourself how you've been wasting both time and opportunity."

"That is extremely good of you," murmured Courtlandt imperturbably. "I
supposed your doors were to be closed upon me for good and all."

"Oh, no. I shall insist, indeed, that you drop in upon us very often. I
shall need your presence. You are to be my connecting link, as it were."

"How very pleasant! You have just told me that I was benighted. Now I
find myself a connecting link."

"Between culture and the absence of it. I have no objection to your
letting the giddy and whimsical folk perceive what a vast deal they are
deprived of. Besides, I should like you to be my first conversion--a
sort of bridge by which other converts may cross over into the happy
land."

"You are still most kind. I believe that bridges are usually wooden. No
doubt you feel that you have made a wise selection of your material. May
I be allowed to venture another question?"

"Yes--if it is not too impudent."

She was watching him with her head a little on one side, now, and a
smile struggling forth from her would-be serious lips. She was
recollecting how much she had always liked him, and considering how much
she would surely like him hereafter, in this renewal of their old
half-cousinly and half-flirtatious intimacy. She was thinking what deeps
of characteristic drollery slept in him--with what a quiet, funny sort
of martyrdom he had borne her little girlish despotisms, before that
sudden marriage had wrought so sharp a rupture of their relations, and
how often he had forced her into unwilling laughter by the slow and
almost sleepy humor with which he had successfully parried some of her
most vigorous attacks.

"I merely wanted to ask you," he now said, "where all these
extraordinary individuals are to be found."

"Ah, that is an important question, certainly," she said, with a solemn
inclination--or at least the semblance of one. "I intend to collect
them."

"Good gracious! You speak of them as if they were minerals or mummies
that you were going to get together for a museum. I have no doubt that
they will be curiosities, by the bye."

"I am afraid _you_ will find them so."

"Are they to be imported?"

"Oh, no. That will not be necessary."

"I see; they're domestic products."

"Quite so. In this great city--filled with so much energy, so much
re-action against the narrow feudalisms of Europe--I am very certain of
finding them." She paused for a moment, and seemed to employ a tacit
interval for the accumulation of what she next said. "I shall not be
entirely unassisted in my search, either."

A cunning twinkle became manifest in the brown eyes of her listener. He
drew a long breath. "Ah! now we get at the root of the matter. There's a
confederate--an accomplice, so to speak."

"I prefer that you should not allude to my assistant in so rude a style.
Especially as, in the first place, you have never met him, and, in the
second, he is a person of the most remarkable gifts."

"Is there any objection to my asking his name? Or is it still a dark
mystery?"

She laughed at this, as if she thought it highly diverting. "My dear
cousin," she exclaimed, "how absurd you can be at a pinch! What on earth
should make the name of Mr. Kindelon a dark mystery?"

"Um-m-m. Somebody you met abroad, then?"

"Somebody I met on the steamer, while returning."

"I see. An Englishman?"

"A gentleman of Irish birth. He has lived in New York for a number of
years. He knows a great many of the intellectual people here. He has
promised to help me in my efforts. He will be of great value."

Courtlandt rose. "So are your spoons, Pauline," he said rather gruffly,
not at all liking the present drift of the information. "Take my advice,
and lock them up when you give your first _salon_."




III.


Pauline had not been long in her native city again before she made the
discovery that a great deal was now socially expected of her. The news
of her return spread abroad with a rapidity more suggestive of bad than
of good tidings; her old acquaintances, male and female, flocked to the
Bond Street house with a most loyal promptitude. The ladies came in
glossy _coupes_ and dignified coaches, not seldom looking about them
with _dilletante_ surprise at the mercantile glare and tarnish of this
once neat and seemly crossway, as they mounted Mrs. Varick's antiquated
stoop. Most of them were now married; they had made their market, as
Pauline's deceased mother would have said, and it is written of them
with no wanton harshness that they had in very few cases permitted
sentiment to enact the part of salesman. There is something about the
fineness of our republican ideals (however practice may have
determinedly lowered and soiled them) that makes the mere worldly view
of marriage a special provocation to the moralist. Regarded as a
convenient mutual barter in Europe, there it somehow shocks far less;
the wrong of the grizzled bridegroom winning the young, loveless, but
acquiescent bride bears a historic stamp; we recall, perhaps, that they
have always believed in that kind of savagery over there; it is as old
as their weird turrets and their grim torture-chambers. But with
ourselves, who broke loose, in theory at least, from a good many tough
bigotries, the sacredness of the marriage state presents a much more
meagre excuse for violation. It was not that the husbands of Pauline's
wedded friends were in any remembered instance grizzled, however; they
were indeed, with few exceptions, by many years the juniors of her own
dead veteran spouse; but the influences attendant upon their unions with
this or that maiden had first concerned the question of money as a
primary and sovereign force, and next that of name, prestige, or
prospective elevation. These young brides had for the most part sworn a
much more sincere fidelity to the carriages in which they now rode, and
the pretty or imposing houses in which they dwelt, than to the
important, though not indispensable, human attachments of such prized
commodities.

Pauline found them all strongly monotonous; she could ill realize that
their educated simpers and their regimental sort of commonplace had ever
been potent to interest her. One had to pay out such a small bit of line
in order to sound them; one's plummet so soon struck bottom, as it were.
She found herself silently marvelling at the serenity of their
contentment; no matter how gilded were the cages in which they made
their decorous little trills, what elegance of filigree could atone for
the absence of space and the paucity of perches?

The men whom she had once known and now re-met pleased her better. They
had, in this respect, the advantage of their sex. Even when she
condemned them most heartily as shallow and fatuous, their detected
admiration of her beauty or of their pleasure in her company won for
them the grace of a pardoning afterthought. They were still bachelors,
and some of them more maturely handsome bachelors than when she had last
looked upon them. They had niceties and felicities of attitude, of
intonation, of tailoring, of boot or glove, to which, without confessing
it, she was still in a degree susceptible.

But she did not encourage them. They were not of her new world; she had
got quite beyond them. She flattered herself that she always affected
them as being gazed down upon from rather chilly heights. She insisted
on telling herself that they were much more difficult to talk with than
she really found them. This was one of the necessities of her
conversion; they must not prove agreeable any longer; it was
inconsequent, untenable, that they should receive from her anything but
a merely hypocritic courtesy. She wanted her contempt for the class of
which they were members to be in every way logical, and so manufactured
premises to suit its desired integrity. Meanwhile she was much more
entertaining than she knew, and treated Courtlandt, one day, with quite
a shocked sternness for having informed her that these male visitors had
passed upon her some very admiring criticisms.

"I have done my best to behave civilly," she declared. "I was in my own
house, you know, when they called. But I cannot understand how they can
possibly _like_ me as they no doubt used to do! I would much rather have
you bring me quite a contrary opinion, in fact."

"If you say so," returned Courtlandt, with his inimitable repose, "I
will assure them of their mistake and request that they correct it."

Pauline employed no self-deception whatever in the acknowledgment of
her real feelings toward Courtlandt. She cherished for him what she
liked to tell herself was an inimical friendliness. In the old days he
had never asked her to marry him, and yet it had been plain to her that
under favoring conditions he might have made her this proposal. She was
nearly certain that he no longer regarded her with a trace of the former
tenderness. On her own side she liked him so heartily, notwithstanding
frequent antagonisms, that the purely amicable nature of this fondness
blurred any conception of him in the potential light of a lover.

But, indeed, Pauline had resolutely closed her eyes against the
possibility of ever again receiving amorous declaration or devotion. She
had had quite enough of marriage. Her days of sentiment were past. True,
they had never actually been, but the phantasmal equivalent for them had
been, and she now determined upon not replacing this by a more
accentuated experience. Her path toward middle life was very clearly
mapped out in her imagination; it was to be strewn with nicely sifted
gravel and bordered by formally clipped foliage. And it was to be very
straight, very direct; there should be no bend in it that came upon a
grove with sculptured Cupid and rustic lounge. The "marble muses,
looking peace" might gleam now and then through its enskirting boskage,
but that should be all. Pauline had read and studied with a good deal of
fidelity, both during her marriage and after her widowhood. She had gone
into the acquisition of knowledge and the development of thought as some
women go into the intoxication of a nervine. Her methods had been
amateurish and desultory; she had not been taught, she had learned, and
hence learned ill. "The modern thinkers," as she called them, delighted
her with their liberality, their iconoclasm. She was in just that
receptive mood to be made an extremist by their doctrines, the best of
which so sensibly warn us against extremes. Her husband's memory, for
the sake of decency if for no other reason, deserved the reticence which
she had shown concerning it. He had revealed to her a hollow nature
whose void was choked with vice, like some of those declivities in
neglected fields, where the weed and the brier run riot. The pathos of
her position, in a foreign land, with a lord whose daily routine of
misconduct left her solitary for hours, while inviting her, had she so
chosen, to imitate a course of almost parallel license, was finally a
cogent incentive toward that change which ensued. The whole falsity of
the educational system which had resulted in her detested marriage was
slowly laid bare to her eyes by this shocking and salient example of it.

There was something piteous, and yet humorous as well, in her present
intellectual state. She was a young leader in the cause of culture,
without a following. She believed firmly in herself, and yet deceived
herself. Much in the world that it was now her fixed principle to shun
and reprobate, she liked and clung to. These points of attraction were
mostly superficialities, it is true, like the fashion of clothes or the
conventionalism of accepted social customs. But even these she had more
than half persuaded herself that she despised, and when she observed
them in others they too often blinded her to attractions of a less
flimsy sort. She had verged upon a sanguine and florid fanaticism, and
was wholly unconscious of her peril. Some of Courtlandt's sober comments
might effectually have warned her, if it had not been for a marked
contrary influence. This was represented by the gentleman whom we have
already heard her name as Mr. Kindelon.

She had been presented to him on the steamer during her recent homeward
voyage, by an acquaintance who knew little enough regarding his
antecedents. But Ralph Kindelon had been at once very frank with her.
This was the most prominent trait that usually disclosed itself in him
on a first acquaintance; he always managed to impress you by his
frankness. He had a large head set on a large frame of splendid, virile
proportions. His muscular limbs were moulded superbly; his big hands and
feet had the same harmony of contour, despite their size; his grace of
movement was extraordinary, considering his height and weight; the noble
girth and solidity of chest struck you as you stood close to him--men
found it so substantially, women so protectively, human. A kind of
warmth seemed to diffuse itself from his bodily nearness, as if the
pulse of his blood must be on some exceptionally liberal scale. But for
those whom he really fascinated his real fascinations lay elsewhere. You
met them in the pair of facile dimples that gave genial emphasis to his
sunny smile; in the crisp, coarse curl of his blue-black hair, which
receded at either temple, and drooped centrally over a broad, full brow;
in the sensuous, ample, ruddy mouth, which so often showed teeth of
perfect shape and unflawed purity, and was shaded by a mustache tending
to chestnut in shade, with each strong crinkled hair of it rippling away
to the smooth-sloping cheeks; and lastly in the violet-tinted Irish
eyes, whose deep-black lashes had a beautiful length and gloss.

Kindelon spoke with a decided brogue. It was no mere Celtic accent; it
was the pure and original parlance of his native island, though shorn of
those ungrammatical horrors with which we are prone by habit to
associate it. His English was Irish, as one of his own countrymen might
have said, but it was very choice and true English, nevertheless. Well
as he spoke it, he spoke it immoderately, even exorbitantly, when the
mood was upon him, and the mood was upon him, in a loquacious sense,
with considerable pertinacity. He was the sort of man concerning whom
you might have said, after hearing him talk three minutes or so, that he
talked too much; but if you had listened to him five minutes longer,
your modified opinion would probably have been that he scarcely talked
too much for so good a talker.

It has been chronicled of him that he was extremely frank. Before he had
enlivened during more than an hour, for Pauline, the awful tedium of an
Atlantic voyage in winter, she discovered herself to be in a measure
posted concerning his personal biography. His parents had been farmers
in his native Ireland, and he was the fourth of a family of eleven
children. At the age of twelve years a certain benevolent baronet, whose
tenant his father was, had sent him to school in Dublin with a view
toward training and encouraging a natural and already renowned
precocity. At school he had done well until seventeen, and at seventeen
he had suddenly found himself thrown on the world, through the death of
his patron. After that he had revisited his somewhat distant home for a
brief term, and soon afterward had taken passage for America, aided by
the funds of an admiring kinsman. He had even then developed evidence of
what we call a knack for writing. After severe hardships on these
shores, he had drifted into an editorial office in the capacity of
printer. This had been a godsend to him, and it had fallen from the
skies of Chicago, not New York. But New York had ultimately proved the
theatre of those triumphs which were brilliant indeed compared with the
humdrum humility of his more Western pursuits. Here he had written
articles on many different subjects for the local journals; he had
served in almost every drudging department of reportorial work; he had
risen, fallen, risen, and at last risen once and for all, durably and
honorably, as an associate-editor in a popular and prominent New York
journal. He told Pauline the name of his journal--the New York
"Asteroid"--and she remembered having heard of it. He laughed his
affluent, mellow laugh at this statement, as though it were the most
amusing thing in the world to find an American who had only "heard of"
the New York "Asteroid."

In a political sense, and moreover in all senses, he was a zealous
liberal. How he had managed to scrape together so remarkable an amount
of knowledge was a mystery to himself. Everything that he knew had been
literally "scraped together;" the phrase could not be apter than when
applied to his mental store of facts. He read with an almost phenomenal
swiftness, and his exquisite memory retained whatever touched it with a
perfection like that of some marvellously sensitive photographic agent.
He never forgot a face, a book, a conversation. He hardly forgot a
single one of his newspaper articles, and their name was legion. His
powers just stopped short of genius, but they distinctly stopped there.
He did many things well--many things, in truth, which for a man so
hazardously educated it was surprising that he did at all. But he did
nothing superlatively well. It was the old story of that fatal facility
possessed by numbers of his own countrymen who have migrated to these
shores. Perhaps the one quality that he lacked was a reflective
patience--and this is declared of his brains alone, having no reference
to his moral parts. He leaped upon subjects, and devoured them, so to
speak. It never occurred to him that there is a cerebral digestion,
which, if we neglect its demands, inevitably entails upon us a sort of
dyspeptic vengeance. In crushing the fruit with too greedy a speed we
get to have a blunted taste for its finer flavor.

Within certain very decided limits he had thus far made an easy conquest
of Pauline. She had never before met any one whom he remotely resembled.
In the old days she would have shrank from him as being unpatrician;
now, his fleet speech, his entire lack of repose, his careless,
unmodish, though scrupulously clean dress, all had for her an appealing
and individual charm. After parting on the arrival in New York, she and
Kindelon had soon re-met. He bore the change from oceanic surroundings
admirably in Pauline's eyes. With characteristic candor he told her that
he had come back from the recent visit to his old parents in Ireland
(Pauline knowing all about this visit, of course) to find himself
wofully poor. She was wondering whether he would resent the offer of a
loan if she made him one, when he suddenly surprised her by a statement
with regard to "present funds," that certainly bore no suggestion of
poverty. The truth was, he lacked all proper appreciation of the value
of money. Economy was an unknown virtue with him; to have was to spend;
he was incapable of saving; no financial to-morrow existed for him, and
by his careless and often profuse charities he showed the same absence
of caution as that which marked all other daily expenditures.

In her immediate purchase of a new residence she consulted with him, and
allowed herself to be guided by his counsels. This event brought them
more closely together for many days than they would otherwise have been.
His artistic feeling and his excellent taste were soon a fresh surprise
to her. "I begin to think," she said to him one day, "that there is
nothing you do not know."

He laughed his blithe, bass laugh. "Oh," he said, "I know a lot of
things in a loose, haphazard way. We newspaper men can't escape general
information, Mrs. Varick. We breathe it in, naturally, and in spite of
ourselves."

"But tell me," Pauline now asked, "are these other people to whom I
shall soon be presented as clever as you are?"

He looked at her with merriment twinkling in his light-tinted eyes.
"They're a good deal cleverer--some of them," he replied. "They could
give me points and beat me, as we say in billiards."

"You make me very anxious to know them."

"When you talk like that I feel as if I might be tempted to postpone all
introductions indefinitely," he responded. He spoke with sudden
seriousness, and she felt that mere gallantry had not lain at the root
of this answer.

As a matter of course, Kindelon and Courtlandt soon met each other in
Pauline's drawing-room. Courtlandt was quite as quiet as usual, and the
Irishman perhaps rather unwontedly voluble. Pauline thought she had
never heard her new friend talk better. He made his departure before her
cousin, and when he had gone Pauline said, with candid enthusiasm:

"Isn't he a wonderful man?"

"Wonderful?" repeated Courtlandt, a trifle drowsily.

She gave him a keen look, and bristled visibly while she did so.
"Certainly!" she declared. "No other word just expresses him. I didn't
observe you very closely, Court," she went on, "but I took it for
granted that you were being highly interested. I can't imagine your
_not_ being."

"He gave me a kind of singing in the ears," said Courtlandt. "I've got
it yet. He makes me think of one of those factories where there's a
violent hubbub all the time, so that you have to speak loud if you want
to be heard."

Pauline was up in arms, then. "I never listened to a more scandalously
unjust criticism!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to tell me, unblushingly,
that you do not think him a _very_ extraordinary person?"

"Oh, very," said her cousin.

Pauline gave an exasperated sigh. "I am so used to you," she said, "that
I should never even be surprised by you. But you need not pretend that
you can have any except one _truthful_ opinion about Mr. Kindelon."

"I haven't," was the reply. "He's what they call a smart newspaper man.
A Bohemian chap, you know. They're nearly all of them just like that.
They can talk you deaf, dumb, and blind, if you only give them a
chance."

"I don't think the dumbness required any great effort, as far as _you_
were concerned!" declared Pauline, with sarcastic belligerence.

She never really quarrelled with Courtlandt, because his impregnable
stolidity made such a result next to impossible. But she was now so
annoyed by her cousin's slighting comments upon Kindelon that her
treatment was touched with a decided coolness for days afterward.

Meanwhile her aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, had undergone considerable
discomforting surprise. Mrs. Poughkeepsie had been prepared to find
Pauline changed, but by no means changed in her present way. On hearing
her niece express certain very downright opinions with regard to the
life which she was bent upon hereafter living, this lady at first
revealed amazement and afterward positive alarm.

"But my dear Pauline," she said, "you cannot possibly mean that you
intend to get yourself talked about?"

"Talked about, Aunt Cynthia? I don't quite catch your drift, really."

"Let me be plainer, then. If you remain out of society, that is one
thing. I scarcely went anywhere, as you know, for ten years after my
husband's death--not, indeed, until Sallie had grown up and was ready to
come out. There is no objection, surely, against closing one's doors
upon the world, provided one desires to do so--although I should say
that such a step, Pauline, at your age, and after two full years of
widowhood, was decidedly a mistake. Still"--

"Pardon me, Aunt Cynthia," Pauline here broke in. "Nothing is further
from my wish than to close my doors upon the world. On the contrary, I
want to open them very wide indeed."

Mrs. Poughkeepsie lifted in shocked manner both her fair, plump, dimpled
hands. She was a stout lady, with that imposing, dowager-like effect of
_embonpoint_ which accompanies a naturally tall and majestic stature.
Her type had never in girlhood been a very feminine one, and it now
bordered upon masculinity. Her eyes were hard, calm and dark; her
arching nose expressed the most serene self-reliance. She was indeed a
person with no doubts; she had, in her way, settled the universe. All
her creeds were crystallized, and each, metaphorically, was kept in
cotton, as though it were a sort of family diamond. She had been a Miss
Schenectady, of the elder, wealthy and more conspicuous branch; it was a
most notable thing to have been such a Miss Schenectady. She had married
a millionaire, and also a Poughkeepsie; this, moreover, was something
very important and fine. She had so distinct a "position" that her
remaining out of active participation in social pursuits made no
difference whatever as regarded her right to appear and rule whenever
she so chose; it had only been necessary for her to lift her spear,
when Miss Sallie required her chaperonage, and the Snowes and Briggses
had perforce to tremble. And this fact, too, she held as a precious,
delectable prerogative.

In not a few other respects she was satisfied regarding herself. There
was nothing, for that matter, which concerned herself in any real way,
about which she did not feel wholly satisfied. Her environment in her
own opinion was of the best, and doubtless in the opinion of a good many
of her adherents also. From the necklace of ancestral brilliants which
she now wore, sparkling at ball or dinner, on her generous and creamy
neck, to the comfortably-cushioned pew in Grace Church, where two good
generations of Poughkeepsies had devoutly sat through many years of
Sundays, she silently valued and eulogized the gifts which fate had
bestowed upon her.

Pauline's present attitude seemed to her something monstrous. It had not
seemed monstrous that her niece should give the bloom and vital purity
of a sweet maidenhood to a man weighted with years and almost decrepid
from past excesses. But that she should seek any other circle of
acquaintance except one sanctioned by the immitigable laws of caste,
struck her as a bewildering misdemeanor.

"My dear Pauline," she now exclaimed, "you fill me with a positive fear!
Of course, if you shut your doors to the right people you open them to
the wrong ones. You have got some strange idea abroad, which you are now
determined to carry out--to _exploiter_, my dear! With your very large
income there is hardly any dreadful imprudence which you may not commit.
There is no use in telling me that the people whom one knows are not
worth knowing. If you have got into that curious vein of thought you
have no remedy for it except to refrain from all entertaining and all
acceptance of courtesies. But I beg, Pauline, that you will hesitate
before you store up for yourself the material of ugly future repentance.
Sallie and I have accepted the Effinghams' box at the opera to-night.
Those poor Effinghams have been stricken by the death of their father;
it was so sudden--he was sitting in his library and literally fell
dead--he must certainly have left two millions, but of course that has
nothing to do with their bereavement, and it was so kind of them to
remember us. They know that I have always wanted a proscenium, and that
there are no prosceniums, now, to be had for love or money. I have sent
our box in the horse-shoe to cousin Kate Ten Eyck; she is so wretchedly
cramped in her purse, you know, and still has Lulu on her hands, and
will be so grateful--as indeed she wrote me quite gushingly that she
_was_, this very afternoon. Now, Pauline, won't you go with us, my
dear?"

Pauline went. A noted _prima donna_ sang, lured by an immense nightly
reward to disclose her vocal splendors before American audiences. But
her encompassment, as is so apt to be the case here, was pitiably
mediocre. She sang with a presentable contralto, a passable baritone, an
effete basso, and an almost despicable tenor. The chorus was
anachronistic in costume, sorry in voice, and mournfully undrilled. But
the _diva_ was so comprehensively talented that she carried the whole
performance. At the same time there were those among her hearers who
lamented that her transcendent ability should be burlesqued by so shabby
and impotent a surrounding. The engagement of this famous lady was
meanwhile one of those sad operatic facts for which the American people
have found, during years past, no remedy and no preventive. The fault,
of course, lies with themselves. When they are sufficiently numerous as
true lovers of music they will refuse their countenance to even a great
singer except with creditable artistic and scenic support.

Pauline sat in the Effinghams' spacious proscenium-box, between Mrs.
Poughkeepsie and her daughter. Sallie Poughkeepsie was a large girl,
with her mother's nose, her mother's serenity, her mother's promise of
corpulent matronhood. She had immense prospects; it was reported that
she had refused at least twenty eligible matrimonial offers while
waiting for the parental nod of approval, which had not yet come.

During the first _entr'acte_ a little throng of admirers entered the
box. Some of these Pauline knew; others had appeared, as it were, after
her time. One was an Englishman, and she presently became presented to
him as the Earl of Glenartney. The title struck her as beautiful,
appealing to her sense of the romantic and picturesque; but she wondered
that it had done so when she subsequently bent a closer gaze upon the
receding forehead, flaccid mouth and lank frame of the Earl himself. He
had certainly as much hard prose about his appearance as poetry in his
name. Mrs. Poughkeepsie beamed upon him in a sort of sidelong way all
the time that he conversed with Sallie. A magnate of bountiful
shirt-bosom and haughty profile claimed her full heed, but she failed to
bestow it entirely; the presence of this unmarried Scotch peer at her
child's elbow was too stirring an incident; her usual equanimity was in
a delightful flutter; ambition had already begun its insidious whispers,
for the Earl was known to be still a bachelor.

Pauline, who read her aunt so thoroughly, felt the mockery of this
maternal deference. She told herself that there was something dreary and
horrible about a state of human worldliness which could thus idolize
mere rank and place. She knew well enough that so long as Lord
Glenartney were not a complete idiot, and so long as his moral character
escaped the worst depravity, he would be esteemed a magnificent match
for her cousin.

The Earl remained at Sallie's side all through the succeeding act. When
the curtain again fell he still remained, while other gentlemen took the
places of those now departing. And among these, to her surprise and
pleasure, was Ralph Kindelon.

She almost rose as she extended her hand to her friend. A defiant
satisfaction had suddenly thrilled her. She pronounced Kindelon's name
quite loudly as she presented him to her aunt. Instead of merely bowing
to Mrs. Poughkeepsie, Kindelon, with effusive cordiality, put forth his
hand. Pauline saw a startled look creep across her aunt's face. The
handsome massive-framed Irishman was not clad in evening dress. He
towered above all the other gentlemen; he seemed, as indeed he almost
was, like a creature of another species. His advent made an instant
sensation; a universal stare was levelled upon him by these sleek
devotees of fashion, among whom he had the air of pushing his way with a
presumptuous geniality. He carried a soft "wide-awake" hat in one hand;
his clothes were of some dark gray stuff; his neatly but heavily booted
feet made dull sounds upon the floor as he now moved backward in search
of a chair. There was no possible doubt regarding his perfect
self-possession; he had evidently come to remain and to assert himself.

"Who on earth is he?" Mrs. Poughkeepsie found a chance to swiftly
whisper in the ear of her niece. There was an absolutely dramatic touch
in the agitation which went with her questioning sentence.

Pauline looked steadily at her aunt as she responded: "A very valued
friend of mine."

"But, my dear!" faltered Mrs. Poughkeepsie. The fragmentary little
vocative conveyed a volume of patrician dismay.

By this time Kindelon had found a chair. He placed it close to Pauline.

"I am so very glad that you discovered me," said Pauline. She spoke in
quite loud tones, while everybody listened. Her words had the effect of
a distinct challenge, and as such she intended them.

"I am flinging down a gauntlet," she thought, "to snobbery and
conservatism. This slight event marks a positive era in my life."

"I saw you from the orchestra," now said Kindelon, in his heartiest
tones. "The distance revealed you to me, though I cannot say it lent the
least enchantment, for that would surely be impossible." He now looked
towards Mrs. Poughkeepsie, without a trace of awe in his mirthful
expression. "You must pardon my gallantry, madam," he proceeded. "Your
niece and I, though recent friends, are yet old ones. We have crossed
the Atlantic together, and that, in the winter season, is a wondrous
promoter of intimacy, as you perhaps know. Perhaps Mrs. Varick has
already done me the honor of mentioning our acquaintance."

"Not until now," said Mrs. Poughkeepsie, with a smile that had the
glitter of ice in it.




IV.


The orchestra had not yet recommenced, and the curtain would not
reascend for at least ten good minutes. A vigorous babble of many voices
rose from the many upstairs boxes. In some of these Kindelon's
appearance might not have created the least comment. Here it was a
veritable bombshell.

The "Poughkeepsie set" was famed for its rigid exclusiveness. Wherever
Miss Sallie and her mother went, a little train of courtiers invariably
followed them. They always represented an ultra-select circle inside of
the larger and still decidedly aristocratic one. Only certain young men
ever presumed to approach Sallie at all, and these were truly the
darlings of fortune and fashion--young gentlemen of admitted ascendency,
whose attentions would have made an obscure girl rapidly prominent, and
who, while often distinguished for admirable manners, always contrived
to hover near those who were the sovereign reverse of obscure. They
would carry only her bouquets, or those of other girls who belonged to
the same special and envied clique; they would "take out in the German"
only Sallie and her particular intimates. Bitter jealousies among the
contemplating dowagers were often a result of this determined
eclecticism. "Why _is_ it that my Kate has to put up with so many
second-rate men?" would pass with tormenting persistence through the
mind of this matron. "Why can't my Caroline get any of the great swells
to notice her?" would drearily haunt another. And between these two
distressed ladies there might meanwhile be seated a third, whose
daughter, for reasons of overwhelming wealth or particular
attractiveness, always moved clad in a nimbus of sanctity.

Pauline was perfectly well aware that the coming of her friend had
seemed an audacity, and that his unconventionally garrulous tongue was
now regarded as a greater one. Courtlandt may have told her that the
rival factions had cemented their differences and that all society
in New York was more democratic than formerly. Still, it was
unimaginable that her aunt Cynthia could ever really change her spots.
Where she trod, there, too, must float the aroma of an individual
self-glorification. Pauline was as much delighted by Kindelon's easy
daring as by the almost glacial answer of her stately kinswoman; and she
at once hastened to say, while looking with a smile at the unembarrassed
Kindelon himself,--

"I have scarcely had a chance to tell either my aunt or my cousin how
good you were to me on the 'Bothnia.'" Then she lifted her fan, and
waved it prettily toward Sallie. "This _is_ my cousin, Miss
Poughkeepsie," she went on; she did not wait for the slow accomplishment
of Sallie's forced and freezing bow, but at once added: "and here is
Lord Glenartney, here Mr. Fyshkille, here Mr. Van Arsdale, here Mr.
Hackensack. Now, I think you know us all, Mr. Kindelon."

As she ended her little speech she met Mrs. Poughkeepsie's eyes fixed
upon her in placid consternation. Of course this wholesale introduction,
among the chance occupants of an opera box, was a most unprecedented
violation of usage. But that was precisely Pauline's wish--to violate
usage, if she could do it without recourse to any merely vulgar rupture.
They had all stared at Ralph Kindelon, had treated him as if he were
some curious animal instead of a fellow-creature greatly their own
superior, and they should have a chance now of discovering just how well
he could hold his own in their little self-satisfied assemblage.

Kindelon bowed and smiled in every direction. He appeared unconscious
that everybody did not bow and smile with just the same reciprocal
warmth.

"This is the most luxurious way of enjoying the opera," he exclaimed,
with an upward gesture of both hands to indicate the walls of the
commodious box. "But, ah! I am afraid that it possesses its drawbacks as
well! One would be tempted to talk too much here--to discountenance the
performance. Now, I am an irreclaimable talker, as Mrs. Varick can
testify; she has hardly done anything but listen since the beginning of
our acquaintance. And yet I should like to feel that I had my tribute of
silence always ready for the great musical masters. Among these I rank
the Italian composers, whom it has now become fashionable to despise.
Pray, Mrs. Poughkeepsie, are you--or is your daughter?--a convert to
what they term the new school?"

There was no ignoring the felicitous, rhythmic voice that pronounced
these hurried and yet clearly enunciated sentences, unless by means of
an insolence so direct and cruel that it would transgress all bounds of
civil decency. Mrs. Poughkeepsie was capable of not a little insolence
at a pinch; her ramparts were spiked, and could deal no gentle hurts to
those who sought anything like the scaling of them. But here the
overtures made were alike too suave and too bold. She felt herself in
the presence of a novel civility--one that assumed her rebuff to be
impossible.

"I have always preferred the Italian music," she now said. "But then my
knowledge of the German is limited."

"Oh, German music is the most dreadful baw!" here struck in Lord
Glenartney. He had taken an immediate fancy to Kindelon; he liked people
who were in a different sphere from himself; he usually went with
jockeys and prize-fighters, whenever the demands of his great position
permitted such association, in his native country. Here in America he
knew only the Poughkeepsie set, which had seized upon him and kept close
watch over him ever since he had landed in New York.

"No, I don't at all agree with you there," said Kindelon. "Undoubtedly
German music is based upon a grand idea. I should be sorry not to
believe so."

"Bless my soul!" laughed his lordship; "I don't know anything about
grand ideahs. The small ones are quite as much as I can manage
comfortably."

"Mr. Kindelon will be shocked by such a confession, I'm sure," said the
gentleman named Fyshkille, who was strikingly slim, who gazed at people
condescendingly over a pale parapet of very stiff shirt-collar, and who
considered himself to have a natural turn for satire. "He appears to be
a person of such grand ideas himself."

This airy bit of impudence caused Mr. Van Arsdale to twirl one end of a
dim, downy mustache and perpetrate a rather ambiguous giggle. But Mr.
Hackensack, who was stout, with a pair of large black eyes set in a fat,
colorless, mindless face, whipped forth a silk pocket-handkerchief and
gave an explosive burst of merriment within its soft folds.

"You seem to be very much amused at something," drawled Sallie, while
she looked in her languid way toward her trio of admirers.

"We are," said the satirical Mr. Fyshkille, who prided himself on always
keeping his countenance. His two friends, who thought him a devilish
clever fellow, both produced another laugh, this time suppressed on the
part of each.

Pauline felt keenly annoyed. She glanced at Kindelon, telling herself
that he must surely see the pitiable ridicule of which he was being
made the butt.

She had, however, quite miscalculated. The self-esteem of Kindelon as
utterly failed to realize that he was an object of the slightest banter,
whether overt or covert, as though he had been both near-sighted and
deaf. He knew nothing of the idle autocracy with which accident had now
brought him into contact. He was opposed to it on principle, but he had
had no experience of its trivial methods of arrogance. He had come into
the box to see Pauline, and he took it broadly for granted that he would
be treated with politeness by her surrounders, and listened to (provided
he assumed that office of general spokesman which he nearly always
assumed wherever chance placed him) with admiring attention.

A few minutes later he had stripped his would-be foes of all sting by
effectively and solidly manifesting unconsciousness that they had
intended to be hostile. He talked of Wagner and his followers with a
brilliant force that did not solicit heed and yet compelled it. He
discoursed upon the patent absurdities of Italian opera with a nimble
wit and an incisive severity. Then he justified his preference for
Donizetti and Rossini with a readiness that made his past sarcasm on
their modes quickly forgotten. And finally he delivered a eulogy upon
the German motive and ideal in music which showed the fine liberality of
a mind that recognizes the shortcomings in its own predilection, and
foresees the inevitable popularity of a more advanced and complicated
system.

He had silenced everybody before he finished, but with the silence of
respect. He had forced even these petty triflers who dwelt on the mere
skirts of all actual life, to recognize him as not simply the comer from
a world which they did not care to know about, but from a world greater
and higher than any which they were capable of knowing about. And
finally, in the flush of this handsome little triumph, he made his exit,
just as the curtain was again rising, after a few murmured words to
Pauline regarding certain night-work on the New York "Asteroid," which
must prevent him from seeing the remainder of the performance.

Nobody heeded the opera for at least five minutes after his departure.
He had left his spell behind him. Pauline at first marked its cogency,
and then observed this gradually dissolve. The flimsiness of their
thinking and living returned to them again in all its paltry reality.

"Of course," murmured Mrs. Poughkeepsie to Pauline, "he is a person who
writes books, of one sort or another."

"If they're novels," said Lord Glenartney, "I'd like awfully to know
abaout 'em. I'm fond of readin' a good novel. It's so jolly if one's
lyin' daown and carn't sleep, but feels a bit seedy, ye know."

"I fancy they must be rather long novels," said Sallie, with a drowsy
scorn that suited her big, placid anatomy.

"I wish he'd not run off so; I wanted the address of his hatter,"
declared the envenomed Mr. Fyshkille.

"Or his tailor," amended Mr. Van Arsdale, with the auxiliary giggle.

"I guess you'd find both somewhere in the Bowery," pursued the fleshy
Mr. Hackensack, who always said "I guess," for "I fancy," and had a
nasal voice, and an incorrigible American soul inside his correct
foreign garments.

Pauline now swept a haughty look at Mr. Fyshkille and his two allies,
and said, with open displeasure,--

"I suppose you think it an unpardonable sin for any gentleman to suit
his own taste in dress, and not copy that of some English model. But
your uncivil comments on Mr. Kindelon before myself, his admitted
friend, show me that he might easily teach you a lesson in good
manners."

All three of the offenders were now forced to utter words of apology,
while Lord Glenartney looked as if he thought Mrs. Varick's wrath great
fun, and Sallie exchanged a look of ironical distress with her mother,
that seemed to inquire: "What uncomfortable absurdity will Pauline next
be guilty of?"

But Mrs. Poughkeepsie and Sallie left their kinswoman at her Bond Street
residence that night with very agreeable adieus. True, Lord Glenartney
occupied a seat in their carriage, but even if this had not been the
case, neither mother nor daughter would have vented upon Pauline any of
the disapproval she had provoked in them. She was now a power in the
world, and besides being near to them in blood, even her follies merited
the leniency of a Poughkeepsie.

But after Sallie and her mother had said good-night to his lordship and
were alone at home together, the young lady spoke with querulous disgust
of her cousin's behavior.

"She will lose caste horribly, mamma, if she goes on in this way. It's
perfectly preposterous! If there is one thing on earth that is really
_low_, it's for a woman to become strong-minded!"

Mrs. Poughkeepsie nodded. "You are quite right. But she's her own
mistress, and there is no restraining her."

"People _ought_ to be restrained," grumbled Sallie, loosening her opera
cloak, "when they want to throw away their positions like that."

"Oh, Pauline can't throw hers away so easily," affirmed Mrs.
Poughkeepsie with sapient composure. "No, not with her name and her big
income. She will merely get herself laughed at, you know--_encanailler_
herself most ludicrously; that is all. We must let her have her head, as
one says of a horse. Her father was always full of caprices; he wouldn't
have died a poor man if he had not been. She merely has a caprice now.
Of course she will come to terms again with society sooner or later, and
repent having made such a goose of herself. That is, unless"--And here
Mrs. Poughkeepsie paused, while a slight but distinct shudder ended her
sentence.

Sallie gave a faint, harsh laugh. "Oh, I understand you thoroughly,
mamma," she exclaimed. "You mean unless some common man like that Mr.
Kindelon should induce her to marry him. How awful such a thing would
be! I declare, the very thought of it is sickening! With that superb
fortune, too! I shouldn't be surprised if he had proposed already!
Perhaps she has only been preparing us gradually for the frightful news
that she has accepted him!"

But no such frightful news reached the Poughkeepsies, as day succeeded
day. Pauline went little into the fashionable throngs, which were at the
height of their winter gayeties. She soon quitted her Bond Street
residence for good, and secured a small basement-house on a side street
near Fifth Avenue, furnishing it with that speed in the way of luxurious
appointment which a plethoric purse so readily commands.

"I am quite prepared now," she said to Kindelon one morning, after
having received him in her new and lovely sitting-room, where everything
was unique and choice, from the charming chandelier of twisted silver to
the silken Japanese screen, rich with bird and flower in gold and
crimson. "Of course you understand what I mean."

He affected not to do so. "Prepared?" he repeated, with the gay gleam
slipping into his eyes. "For what?"

"My _salon_, of course."

"Oh," he said. "I confess that I suspected what you meant, though I was
not quite sure. I almost feared lest your resolution might have
undergone a change of late."

"And pray, why?" asked Pauline, raising her brows, with a little
imperious smile.

"You have not mentioned the project for surely a good fortnight," he
returned. "I had wondered whether or no it had weakened with you."

"It is stronger than ever," Pauline asseverated. She folded her hands in
her lap and tried to look excessively firm and resolute. She was always
particularly handsome when she tried to look thus; she was just slender
and feminine enough in type to make the assumption of strength, of
determination, especially becoming.

"Ah, very well," replied Kindelon, with one of his richly expressive
smiles. "Then I have a proposition to make you. It concerns an immediate
course of action on your part. Have you ever heard of Mrs. Hagar
Williamson Dares?"

Pauline burst into a laugh. "No. It sounds more like an affirmation than
a name--'Mrs. Hagar Williamson Dares.' One feels like saying, 'Does
she?' Don't think me irredeemably trifling, and please continue. Please
tell me, I mean, what remarkable things has this remarkably-named lady
done?"

"Nothing."

Pauline's face, full of a pleased anticipation, fell. "Nothing! How
tiresome!"

"I mean nothing remarkable," Kindelon went on, "in the luminously
intellectual sense. And yet she is a very extraordinary woman. At
twenty-five she was divorced from her husband."

Pauline shook her head troubledly. "That does not sound at all
promising."

"He was a dissolute wretch. The courts easily granted her a release from
him. At this time she was almost penniless. The question, as she had two
little children, naturally arose: 'How are we three to live?' She had
been reared in a New England home; her dead father had been a man of
extensive learning, and at one time the principal of a successful
school. Hagar had always had 'a taste for writing,' as we call it. She
began by doing criticisms for a New York journal of rather scholarly
tendency, whose editor had combined pity for her almost starving
condition with appreciation of her undoubted talents. But the prices
that the poor struggling young mother received were necessarily very
meagre. She became practical. She asked herself if there was no other
way of earning money by her pen. She soon discovered a way; it did not
require her to know about Diderot and Strauss and Spinoza, with all of
whose writings (and with many classics more of equal fame) she was
finely familiar; it simply required that she should lay aside every
vestige of literary pride and write _practically_. Good Heavens! what a
word that word 'practical' is in literature! You must tell the people
how to bake a pie, to cure a headache, to bleach a shirt, to speak the
truth, to clean silverware, to make a proposal of marriage. Mrs. Dares
did it in country letters, in city letters, in newspaper editorials, in
anonymous fine-print columns, in the back parts of fashion and household
magazines--and she does it still. For a number of years past she has
superintended a periodical of the popular sort, which I dare say you
have never heard of. The amount of work that she accomplishes is
enormous. A strong man would stagger under it, but this frail woman
(you'll think her frail when you see her) bears it with wondrous
endurance. Her life has been a terrible failure, looked at from one
point of view--for it is scarcely exaggeration to say that had she not
been handicapped by poverty in the beginning she might have swayed and
charmed her generation with great books. But from another point of view
her life has been a sublime success; she has trampled all aspiration
under foot, forsworn every impulse of honorable egotism, and toiled for
the maintenance of a home, for the education of her two daughters. They
are both grown up, now--girls who are themselves bread-winners like
their mother, and bearing their yoke of labor as cheerfully, though not
with the same splendid strength, as she. One is a school-teacher in a
well-known _kindergarten_ here, and one has become an artist of no
contemptible ability. Meanwhile Mrs. Dares has not merely established a
pleasant and refined household; she has caused to be diffused from it,
as a social centre, the warm radiations of a sweet, wholesome
hospitality. Like some of the high-born Fifth Avenue leaders of fashion,
she has her 'evenings.' But they are of a totally different character.
They are not 'select;' I don't claim that grace for them. And yet they
are very interesting, very typical. Some shabby people meet
there--shabby, I mean, in mental ways no less than in character and
costume. But the prevailing element is of a higher order than they.
Anyone whom Mrs. Dares believes to be an earnest worker in the field of
letters will have no difficulty about gaining her favor. I think she
would rather greet in her rooms some threadbare young poet who had
published at his own expense a slim little volume of poems possessing
distinct merit and having received the snubs of both critics and public,
than welcome some rich and successful writer whose real claim upon
recognition she honestly doubted. And for this reason she makes
mistakes. I have no doubt she is aware of making them. When we search
the highways and hedges for cases of deserving charity, we cannot but
light upon at least an occasional impostor--to put the matter as
optimistically as possible. And now let me tell you that if my mighty
explanatory outburst has roused your desire to meet Mrs. Dares, the
opportunity to do so lies well within your reach."

"How?" said Pauline. And then, as if abashed by the brusque abruptness
of her own question, she added, with a little penitent nod: "Oh, yes;
you mean that she has kindly consented to let you bring her here."

"Not at all," said Kindelon. "It is true that she goes about a good
deal. Her position as a journalist gives her, of course, the _entree_ to
many theatres, and as she is passionately fond of the drama, her face is
seldom missed on a _premiere_ at any reputable house--Daly's, the Union
Square, the Madison Square, or Wallack's. She takes delight, too, in
appearing at the entertainments of her various friends, and she always
does so clad elegantly, richly, but without a shadow of ostentatious
display. On these occasions her society is eagerly sought. I have
sometimes wondered why; for her conversation, though invariably full of
sound sense and pithy acumen, lacks the cheerful play of humor which is
so widely demanded to generate anything like popularity wherever men and
women are socially met. But she is very popular, and I suppose it is her
striking simplicity, her gift of always being sincerely and unaffectedly
_herself_, which has made her so. Still, for all this gregarious
impulse, if I may thus name it, I do not believe she would take the
first step, where you are concerned, to establish an acquaintance."

"And for what reason?" asked Pauline. Her tones, while she put this
query, were full of a hurt bewilderment. Kindelon seemed to muse for a
brief space; and any such unconversational mood was rare, as we know,
with his mercurial lightsomeness of manner. "She would be sensitive," he
presently said, "about making an advance of this sort."

"Of this sort?" repeated Pauline, with a somewhat irritated inflection.
"Of what sort?"

Her companion watched her with fixity for a moment. Then he raised his
large forefinger, and slowly shook it, with admonitory comedy of
gesture. "You must not tell me that you don't understand," he said.
"Put yourself in this lady's place. Suppose that you, in spite of fine
brains and noble character, lacked the social standing"--

Pauline broke in quite hotly at this. Her eyes had taken a quick
sparkle, and the color was flying rosy and pure into her fair face.
"Pshaw!" she exclaimed. "It is not any question of social standing. I
want to know these people"--She suddenly paused, as though her tongue
had betrayed her into some regrettable and unseemly phrase. "I want to
pass," she continued more slowly, "from an aimless world into one of
thought and sense. Mrs. Dares is prominent in this other world. From
what you say I should judge that she is a very representative and
influential spirit there. Why should she not be benign and gracious
enough to seek me here? Why should she require that I shall emphatically
pay her my court? Your description makes me glad and happy to know her.
If she learned this, would she hold aloof from any absurd scruples about
a disparity in social standing?--Well, if she did," declared Pauline,
who by this time was quite excitedly flushed and fluttered, "then I
should say that you had over-painted her virtues and too flatteringly
concealed her faults!"

Kindelon threw back his head, as she finished, and laughed with such
heartiness that more of his strong white teeth were transiently visible
than would have pleased a strict judge of decorum.

"Oh, how amusing you are!" he cried. "You are really superb and don't
perceive it!--Well," he proceeded, growing graver, "I suppose you would
be far less so if you had the vaguest inkling of it. Now, pray listen.
Does it enter your conscience at all that you are disguising a kind of
royal patronage and condescension behind a gentle and saint-like
humility? No--of course it doesn't. But, my dear lady, this is
unequivocally true. You scoff at social standing, and yet you
complacently base yourself upon it. You want to desert all your old
tenets, and yet you keep a kind of surreptitious clasp about them. You
would not for the world be considered a person who cared for the
aristocratic purple, and yet you wrap it round you in the most illogical
fashion. Mrs. Dares has her evenings; to-night is one of them. You, as
yet, have no evenings; your _salon_ is still in embryo. You want to
affiliate with her, to be one of her set, her surroundings, her _monde_.
And yet you quietly bid her to your house, as though she were proposing
your co-operation, your support, your intimacy, and not you hers!"

Pauline, with perhaps a deepened tinge of color in her cheeks, was
staring at the floor when Kindelon ended. And from beneath her gown came
the impatient little tap of a nervous foot. After an interval of
silence, during which her friend's gaze watched her with a merry
vivacity of expression, she slowly lifted her shapely blond head, and
answered in grave, even saddened tones,--

"Then my _salon_ is to be a failure?--an unrealizable castle in Spain?"

"Oh, no," promptly said Kindelon, with one of those sympathetic laughs
which belonged among his elusive fascinations. "By no means--unless you
so will it."

"But I don't will it," said Pauline.

"Very well. Then it will be a castle in--in New York. That sounds
tangible enough, surely. It is the first step that counts, and you have
only to take your first step. It will certainly look much better to know
some of your courtiers before you ascend your throne. And meanwhile it
would be far more discreet to cultivate an acquaintance with your
probable prime minister."

"All of which means--?" she said.

"That you had best let me accompany you to Mrs. Dares's house this
evening."

"But I am not invited!" exclaimed Pauline.

"Oh yes, you are," said Kindelon, with easy security in the jocund
contradiction. "Miss Cora, the youngest daughter of Mrs. Dares, told me
last night that she and her mother would both be very glad to have you
come."

There was a momentary intonation in Kindelon's voice that struck his
listener as oddly unexpected. "So you have already spoken of me?" she
said lingeringly, and looking at him with more intentness than she
herself knew of.

"Yes," he replied, with a certain speed, and with tones that were not
just set in an unembarrassed key. "I go there now and then."

"And you have mentioned me to Mrs. Dares?"

"Yes--more than once, I think. She knows that you may be induced to come
this evening."

His glance, usually so direct, had managed to avoid Pauline's, which was
then very direct indeed.

"Tell me," Pauline said, after another silence had somehow made itself
felt between them. "Are you a very good friend of this girl--Miss Cora?"

He returned her look then, but with an unwonted vacillation of his
own--or so she chose to think.

"Yes," he responded, fluently frank, as it seemed. "We are very good
friends--excellent friends, I may say. You will find her quite as
charming, in a different way, as her mother. I mean, of course, if you
will go with me this evening--or any future evening."

Pauline put forth her hand, and laid it for an instant on his
full-moulded arm.

"I will go with you this evening," she said.




V.


Kindelon found Pauline in a very lightsome and animated state of mind
when he called at her house that evening. She had a touch of positive
excitement in her way of referring to the proposed visit. He thought he
had never seen her look more attractive than when she received him,
already wrapped in a fleecy white over-garment and drawing on her
gloves, while a piquant smile played at the corners of her mouth and a
vivacious glitter filled her gray eyes.

"You are here before the carriage," she said to him, "though we shan't
have to wait long for that.--Hark--there is the bell, now; my men would
not presume to be a minute late this evening. The footman must have
detected in my manner a great seriousness when I gave him my order; I
felt very serious, I can assure you, as I did so. It meant the first
step in a totally new career."

"Upon my word, you look fluttered," said Kindelon, in his mellow, jocose
voice.

"Naturally I do!" exclaimed Pauline, as she nodded to the servant who
now announced that the carriage was in readiness. "I am going to have a
fresh, genuine sensation. I am going to emancipate myself--to break my
tether, as it were. I've been a prisoner for life; I don't know how the
sunshine looks, or how it feels to take a gulp of good, free air."

He watched her puzzledly until the outer darkness obscured her face, and
they entered the carriage together. She mystified him while she talked
on, buoyant enough, yet always in the same key. He was not sure whether
or no her sparkling manner had a certain sincere trepidation behind it.
Now and then it seemed to him as if her voluble professions of anxiety
rang false--as if she were making sport of herself, of him, or of the
projected diversion.

"Do you really take the whole matter so much to heart," he presently
said, while the vehicle rolled them along the wintry, lamplit streets,
"or is this only some bit of dainty and graceful masquerading?"

"Masquerading?" she echoed, with a shocked accent.

"Oh, well, you are accustomed to meeting all sorts of people. You can't
think that any human classes are so sharply divided that to cross a new
threshold means to enter a new world."

She was silent, and he could see her face only vaguely for some little
time; but when a passing light cast an evanescent gleam upon it he
thought that he detected something like a look of delicate mischief
there. Her next words, rather promptly spoken, bore with them an
explanatory bluntness.

"I am convinced that if everybody else disappoints me Miss Dares will
not."

"Miss Dares?" he almost faltered, in the tone of one thrown off his
guard.

"Miss Cora Dares," Pauline continued, with a self-correcting precision.
"The younger of the two daughters, the one who paints. Oh, you see," she
continued, after a little laugh that was merry, though faint, "I have
forgotten nothing. I've a great curiosity to see this young artist. You
had not half so much to tell me about her as about her mother, and yet
you have somehow contrived to make her quite as interesting."

"Why?" Kindelon asked, with a soft abruptness to which the fact of his
almost invisible face lent a greater force. "Is it because you think
that I like Cora Dares? I should like to think that was your reason for
being interested in her."

Another brief silence on Pauline's part followed his words, and then she
suddenly responded, with the most non-committal innocence of tone:

"Why, what other reason could I possibly have? Of course I suppose that
you like her. And of course that is why I am anxious to meet her."

There was a repelling pleasantry in these three short sentences. If
Kindelon had been inclined to slip any further into the realm of
sentiment, the very reverse of encouragement had now met him. Pauline's
matter-of-course complacency had a distinct chill under its superficial
warmth. "Don't misunderstand me, please," she went on, with so altered a
voice that her listener felt as if she had indeed been masquerading
through some caprice best known to herself, and now chose once and for
all to drop masque and cloak. "I really expect a most novel and
entertaining experience to-night. You say that I have met all sorts of
people. I have by no means done so. It strikes me that our acquaintance
is not so young that I should tell you this. It is true that I made a
few pleasant and even valuable friendships in Europe; but these have
been exceptional in my life, and I now return to my native city to
disapprove everybody whom I once approved."

"And you expect to approve all the people whom you shall meet to-night?"

"You ask that in a tone of positive alarm."

"I can't help betraying some nervous fear. Your expectations are so
exorbitant."

Pauline tossed her head in the dimness. "Oh, you will find me more
easily suited than you suppose."

Kindelon gave a kind of dubious laugh. "I'm not so sure that you will be
easily suited," he said. "You are very pessimistic in your judgments of
the fashionable throng. It strikes me that you are a rigid critic of
nearly everybody. How can I tell that you will not denounce me, in an
hour or so, as the worst of impostors, for having presumed to introduce
you among a lot of objectionable bores?"

"I think you will admit," said Pauline, in offended reply, "that most of
Mrs. Dares's friends have brains."

"Brains? Oh, yes, all sorts of brains."

"That is just what I want to meet," she rapidly exclaimed--"all sorts of
brains. I am accustomed, at present, to only two or three sorts.--Oh,
you need not be afraid that I shall become bored. No, indeed! On the
contrary, I expect to be exhilarated. I shall fraternize with most of
them--I shall be one of them almost immediately. Wait until you see!"

"I shan't see that," said Kindelon, with an amused _brusquerie_.

"What do you mean?" she questioned, once more offendedly.

He began to speak, with his old glib fleetness. "Why, my dear lady,
because you are _not_ one of them, and never can be. You are a
patrician, reared differently, and you will carry your stamp with you
wherever you go. Your very voice will betray you in ten seconds. You may
show them that you want to be their good friend, but you can't convince
them that you and they are of the same stock. Some of them will envy
you, others may secretly presume to despise you, and still others may
very cordially like you. I don't think it has ever dawned upon me until
lately how different you are from these persons whom you wish to make
your allies and supporters. That night, when I went into your aunt's
opera-box, I had a very slight understanding of the matter. I've always
scoffed at the idea of a New York aristocracy. It seemed so absurd, so
self-contradictory. And if it existed at all, I've always told myself,
it must be the merest nonsensical sham. But now I begin to recognize it
as an undeniable fact. There's a sort of irony, too, in my finding it
out so late--after I have knocked about as a journalist in a city which
I believed to be democratic if it was anything. However, you've made the
whole matter plain to me. You didn't intend to open my plebeian eyes,
but you have done so. It is really wonderful how you have set me
thinking. I've often told myself that America was a political failure as
a republic, but I never realized that it was a social one."

Just then the carriage stopped. "I am sorry," said Pauline, "to have
unconsciously made you think ill of the literary society of New York."
She paused for a moment, and there was a rebuking solemnity in her voice
as she added: "I believe--I insist upon believing till I see
otherwise--that it does not deserve to be condemned."




VI.


The footman was now heard, as he sprang from the box. "Good gracious!"
exclaimed Kindelon; "I haven't condemned it! It condemns itself."

Pauline gave a laugh full of accusative satire. "Oh!" she burst forth.
"I should like to hear you speak against it before Mrs. Dares--and your
friend Miss Cora, too--as you have just done before me!"

The footman had by this time opened the carriage door. He kept one
white-gloved hand on the knob, standing, with his cockaded hat and his
long-skirted coat, motionless and respectful in the outer gloom.

Kindelon threw up both hands, and waved them in a burlesque of despair.
"There is _no_ literary society in New York," he murmured, as if the
admission had been wrung from him. "Don't go inside there with any idea
of meeting it, for it is not to be found! Mrs. Dares herself will tell
you so!"

Pauline shook her head vigorously. "I'm sure you can't mean that," she
exclaimed, in grieved reproach.

Kindelon gave one of his laughs, and jumped out of the carriage. Pauline
took the hand which he offered her, while the displaced footman
decorously receded.

"I do mean it," he said, as they went up a high, narrow stoop together,
and saw two slim, lit windows loom before them.

"I hope I am not responsible for this last change of faith in you," she
answered, while Kindelon was ringing the bell.

"Well," he at once said, "I believe you are. There is no kind of real
society here except one. Mind you, I don't say this in any but the most
dispassionate and critical way. And I'm not glad to say it, either; I'm
sorry, in fact. But it is true"--And then, after a second of silence, he
repeated--"no kind of society except one."

Pauline smiled as she watched him, but there was both exasperation and
challenge in the smile.

"What kind is that?" she queried.

"Ask your aunt, Mrs. Poughkeepsie," he replied.

Pauline gave an irritated sigh. As she did so the door of Mrs. Dares's
house was opened by a spruce-looking young negress, and they both
passed into the little limited hall beyond. Tapestries of tasteful
design were looped back from the small doors which gave upon the hall.
Their blended stuffs of different colors produced a novel effect, wholly
disproportioned to the real worth of the fabrics themselves. The deft
skill of Mrs. Dares's younger daughter was responsible, not alone for
these, but for other equally happy embellishments throughout this
delightful miniature dwelling. In every chamber there was to be found
some pretty decorative stratagem whereby a maximum of graceful and even
brilliant ornamentation had been won from a minimum of pecuniary
expense. Pauline's eye had swept too many costly objects of upholstery
not to recognize that a slender purse had here gone with a keen artistic
sense. The true instinct of beauty seemed never to err, and its constant
accompaniment of simplicity in the way of actual material lent it a new
charm. Screen, rug, panelling, mantel-cover, tidy, and chair-cushion
took for her a quick value because of their being wrought through no
luxurious means. It was so easy to buy all these things in velvet, in
silk, in choice woods; it was so hard, so rare, to be able to plan them
all from less pretentious resources. Before she had been five minutes
in Mrs. Dares's abode, Pauline found herself affected by the mingled
attractiveness and modesty of its details, as we are allured by the
tints, contours, and even perfumes of certain wildflowers which glow
only the more sweetly because of their contrast with cultured blooms.

Mrs. Dares herself had a look not unlike that of some timid little
wildflower. She was short of stature and very fragile; Kindelon's past
accounts of her incessant accomplishments took the hue of fable as
Pauline gazed upon her. She was extremely pale, with large, warm, dark
eyes set in a face of cameo-like delicacy. Her dress hung in folds about
her slight person, as if there had been some pitying motive in the
looseness of its fit. But she wore it with an air of her own. It was a
timid air, and yet it was one of ease and repose. The intelligence and
earnestness of her clear-cut face gave her an undeniable dignity; you
soon became sure that she was wholly unassuming, but you as soon
realized that this trait of diffidence had no weakness in mind or
character for its cause. It seemed, in truth, to correspond with her
bodily frailty, and to make her individualism more complete while none
the less emphatic. The personality that pushes itself upon our heed
does not always make us notice it the quickest. Mrs. Dares never pushed
herself upon anybody's heed, yet she was seldom unnoticed. Her voice
rarely passed beyond a musical semitone, and yet you rarely failed to
catch each word it uttered. Pauline not only caught each word, as her
new hostess now stood and addressed her, leaving for the time all other
guests who were crowding the rather meagre apartments, but she tacitly
decided, as well, that there was an elegance and purity in the
expressions used by this notable little lady which some of the
grander-mannered dames whom she had intimately known might have copied
with profit. One peculiarity about Mrs. Dares, however, was not slow to
strike her: the pale, delicate face never smiled. Not that it was
melancholy or even uncheerful, but simply serious. Mrs. Dares had no
sense of humor. She could sometimes say a witty thing that bit hard and
sharp, but she was without any power to wear that lazier mental
fatigue-dress from which some of the most vigorous minds have been
unable, before hers, to win the least relaxation. This was probably the
true reason why her small drawing-room often contained guests whose
eccentricity of garb or deportment would otherwise have excluded them
from her civilities. She could not enjoy the foibles of her
fellow-creatures; she was too perpetually busy in taking a grave view of
their sterner and more rational traits. She found something in nearly
everybody that interested her, and it always interested her because it
was human, solemn, important--a part, so to speak, of the great
struggle, the great development, the great problem. This may, after all,
be no real explanation of why she never smiled; for a smile, as we know,
can hold the sadness of tears in its gleam, just as a drop of morning
dew will hold the moisture of the autumn rainfall. But the absence of
all mirthful trace on her gentle lips accorded, nevertheless, with the
inherent sobriety of her nature, and they who got to know her well would
unconsciously assign for both a common origin.

"My dear Mrs. Varick," she said to Pauline, "I am very glad that you
chose to seek my poor hospitality this evening. Mr. Kindelon has already
prophesied that we shall be good friends, and as I look at you I find
myself beginning to form a most presumptuous certainty that he will not
prove a false prophet. He tells me that you are weary of the fashionable
world; I have seen nothing of that, myself, though I fancy I know what
it is like.--A great Castle of Indolence, I mean, where there are many
beautiful chambers, but where the carpets yield too luxuriously under
foot, and the couches have too inviting a breadth. Now, in this little
drawing-room of mine you will meet few people who have not some daily
task to perform--however ill many of us may accomplish it. In that way
the change will have an accent for you--the air will be fresher and more
tonic, though shifting from warm to chilly in the most irregular manner.
I want to warn you, my dear lady, that you will miss that evenness of
temperature which makes such easy breathing elsewhere. Be prepared for a
decided atmospheric shock, now and then: but you will find it rather
stimulating when it arrives, and by no means unwholesome."

Pauline could scarcely repress her astonishment at this very original
speech of welcome. She and Mrs. Dares were separated from all other
occupants of the room while it was being delivered; Kindelon had moved
away after making his two friends known to each other, and doubtless
with the intention of letting his hostess stand or fall on her own
conversational merits, as far as concerned the first impression which
Pauline should receive from her. But this impression was one in which
admiration and approval played quite as strong a part as surprise.
Pauline had wanted just such a spur and impetus as her faculties were
now receiving; she kept silent for a few brief seconds, in silent
enjoyment of the complex emotions which Mrs. Dares had wakened. Then she
said, with a low laugh that had not the least suspicion of frivolity,--

"If it is a social temperature with those barometric tricks and freaks,
Mrs. Dares, I promise you that I shan't catch cold in it. But I fear Mr.
Kindelon has wasted too many premonitory words upon me. He should have
politely allowed me to betray myself, as a specimen of harmless and
humble commonplace. I am sure to do it sooner or later."

"Oh, he has told me of your aim, your purpose," said Mrs. Dares.

Pauline colored, and laid one hand on the lady's slender arm. "Then we
are rivals, I suppose?" she murmured, with an arch smile.

Mrs. Dares turned and looked at her guest before answering; there was a
mild, dreamy comprehensiveness in the way she seemed to survey their
many shapes, letting her large, soft, dusky eyes dwell upon no special
one of them. A little later she regarded Pauline again. She now shook
her head negatively before replying.

"Oh, no, no," she said. "What you see here is not in any sense a
representative assemblage. I have often wished that some one would
establish a stricter and more definite standard than mine. We need it
sadly. There are no entertainments given in New York where the mentally
alert people--those who read, and think, and write--can meet with an
assurance that their company has been desired for reasons of an
exceptional personal valuation. The guest without the wedding-garment is
always certain to be there. I fear that I have paid too little heed to
the wedding-garment; my daughters--and especially my eldest daughter,
Martha--are always telling me that, in various ways.--Oh, no, Mrs.
Varick, we shall not be rivals. You will have the leisure to sift, to
weigh, to admit or exclude, to label, to indorse, to classify--to make
order, in short, out of chaos. This _I_ have never had the leisure to
do." She looked at Pauline with an almost pensive gravity. Then she
slowly repeated the word, "Never."

"I fancy you have never had the cruelty," said Pauline.

"There would be considerable solid mercy in it," was the firm answer.

"Yes. To those who were both called and chosen. But how about the
repulsed candidates for admission?"

"They would deserve their defeat," said Mrs. Dares, with thoughtful
deliberation. "Morals and manners properly combined would be their sole
passport."

"And ability," amended Pauline.

"Ability? Oh, they all have ability who care to mingle night after night
where that qualification is the dominating necessity for mutual
enjoyment. Remember, an organized literary and intellectual society
would not demand what that other society, of which you have seen so
much, imperatively demands. I mean wealth, position, modishness, _ton_.
All these would go for nothing with an aristocracy of talent, of high
and true culture, of progress, of fine and wise achievement in all
domains where human thought held rule. There, gross egotism,
priggishness, raw eccentricity, false assumption of leadership, facile
jealousy, dogmatic intolerance--these, and a hundred other faults, would
justly exert a debarring influence."

Pauline did not know how her cheeks were glowing and her eyes were
sparkling as she now quickly said, after having swept her gaze along the
groups of guests not far away.

"And this is what you call making order out of chaos? Ah, yes, I
understand. It is very delightful to contemplate. It quite stirs one
with ambition. It is like having the merciless and senseless snobbery of
mere fashionable life given a reasonable, animating motive. I should
like to take upon myself such a task." Here she suddenly frowned in a
moderate but rather distressed way. "Not long ago," she went on, "Mr.
Kindelon told me that I would find no literary society in New York. But
I contested this point. I'm inclined to contest it still, though you
have shaken my faith, I admit."

"The word 'literary' is very specializing," said Mrs. Dares. She had
drooped her large, musing eyes.

"Do you mean that for an evasion?" asked Pauline with a tart pungency
that she at once regretted as almost discourteous. "Allow," she went on,
promptly softening her tone, "that the word does cover a multitude of
definitions as I use it--that it is used _faute de mieux_, and that no
society has ever existed anywhere which one could call strictly
literary. Come, then, my dear Mrs. Dares, allowing all this, do you
consider that Mr. Kindelon was right? Is it all chaos to-day in New
York? Is there no gleam of order?" And here Pauline broke into a furtive
tremor of laughter. "Must I begin my good work at the very earliest
possible beginning if I am to commence at all?"

Mrs. Dares's dark eyes seemed to smile now, if her lips did not. "Yes,"
she said. "Mr. Kindelon was right. You are to begin at the very
beginning.--In London it is so different," she went on, lapsing into the
meditative seriousness from which nothing could permanently distract
her. "I spent a happy and memorable month there not many years ago. It
was a delicious holiday, taken because of overwork here at home, and a
blessed medicine I found it. I had brought with me a few lucky letters.
They opened doors to me, and beyond those doors I met faces and voices
full of a precious welcome. You would know the names of not a few of
those who were gracious to me; they are names that are household words.
And there, in London, I saw, strongly established, a dignified,
important and influential society. Rarely, once in a while, I met some
man or woman with a title, but he or she had always either done
something to win the title, or something--if it was inherited--to
outshine it. I did not stay long enough to pick flaws, to cavil; I
enjoyed and appreciated--and I have never forgotten!"

Just at this point, and somewhat to Pauline's secret annoyance, Kindelon
returned with a lady at his side. Pauline was soon told the lady's
name, and as she heard it her annoyance was swiftly dissipated by a new
curiosity. She at once concluded that Miss Cora Dares bore very slight
resemblance to her mother. She was taller, and her figure was of a full
if not generous moulding. Her rippled chestnut hair grew low over the
forehead; almost too low for beauty, though her calm, straight-featured
face, lit by a pair of singularly luminous blue eyes, and ending in a
deep-dimpled chin of exquisite symmetry, needed but a glance to make
good its attractive claim. Miss Cora Dares was quite profuse in her
smiles; she gave Pauline, while taking the latter's hand, a very bright
and charming one, which made her look still less like her mother.

"We saw you and mamma talking very earnestly together, Mrs. Varick," she
said, with a brief side-glance toward Kindelon, "and so we concluded
that it would be safe to leave you undisturbed for at least a little
while. But mamma is curiously unsafe as an entertainer." This was said
with an extremely sweet and amiable look in Mrs. Dares's direction. "She
sometimes loses herself in gentle rhapsodies. My sister Martha and I
have to keep watch upon her by turns, out of pity for the unliberated
victims."

"I need not tell you how I scorn the injustice of that charge, my dear
Mrs. Dares!" here cried Kindelon. "It would be late in the day to inform
you of my devoted admiration!"

"I fear it is early in the day for me to speak of mine," said Pauline;
but the laugh that went with her words (or was it the words themselves?)
rang sincerely, and took from what she said the levity of mere idle
compliment.

"But you will surely care to meet some of our friends, Mrs. Varick," now
said Cora Dares.

"Oh, by all means, yes!" exclaimed Pauline. The girl's limpid, steadfast
eyes fascinated her, and she gazed into their lucent depths longer than
she was perhaps aware. It was almost like an abrupt awakening to find
that she and Mrs. Dares's youngest daughter were standing alone
together, Kindelon and the elder lady having gone. "I want very much to
meet many of your friends," Pauline proceeded. She put her head a little
on one side, while her lips broke into a smile that her companion
appeared to understand perfectly and to answer with mute, gay
intelligence. "I suppose you have heard all about me and my grand
project, just as your charming mother has heard, Miss Dares?"

"Oh, yes," returned Cora.

"And you think it practicable?"

"I think it praiseworthy."

"Which means that I shall fail."

Cora looked humorously troubled. "If you do, it will not be your fault.
I am not doubtful on that point."

"Your mother has by no means encouraged me. She says that I must be
careful in my selections, but she gives me very little hope of finding
many worthy subjects to select. She seems to think that when the wheat
has been taken from the tares, as it were, there will be very little
wheat left."

"Yes, I know mamma's opinions. I don't quite share them. My sister
Martha does, however, thoroughly.--Ah, here is Martha now. Let me make
you acquainted."

Martha Dares proved to be still more unlike her mother than Cora, save
as regarded her stature, which was very short. She had a plump person,
and a face which was prepossessing solely from its expression of honest
good-nature. It was a face whose fat cheeks, merry little black eyes and
shapeless nose were all a stout defiance of the classic type. Pauline at
once decided that Martha was shrewd, energetic and cheerful, and that
she might reveal, under due provocation, a temper of hot flash and acute
sting.

"And now you know the whole family, Mrs. Varick," said Cora, when her
sister had been presented.

"Yes, I complete the group," said Miss Dares, with a jocund trip of the
tongue about her speech, that suggested a person who did all her
thinking in the same fleet and impetuous way. "I hope you find it an
interesting group, Mrs. Varick?"

"Very," said Pauline. "Its members have so much individuality. They are
all three so different."

"True enough," hurried Martha. "We react upon each other, for this
reason, in a very salutary way. You've no idea what a corrective agent
my practical turn is for this poetic sister of mine, who would be up in
the clouds nearly all the time, trying to paint the unpaintable, but for
an occasional downward jerk from me, you know, such as a boy will give
to a refractory kite. But I'll grant you that Cora has more than
partially convinced me that life isn't entirely made up of spelling,
arithmetic, geography and the use of the globes--for I'm a
school-teacher, please understand, though in a rather humble way. And
there's poor dear mamma. Goodness knows what would become of _her_ if it
were not for both of us. She hasn't an idea how to economize her
wonderful powers of work. Cora and I have established a kind of military
despotism; we have to say 'halt' and 'shoulder your pen,' just as if she
were a sort of soldier. But it will never do for me to rattle on like
this. I'm as bad, after my own fashion, as our mutual friend, Mr.
Kindelon, when I once really get started. By the way, you know Mr.
Kindelon very well indeed, don't you?"

"Very well, though I have not known him very long," answered Pauline.

She somehow felt that Martha's question concealed more interest than its
framer wished to betray. The little black eyes had taken a new keenness,
but the genial face had sobered as well. And for some reason just at
this point both Martha and Pauline turned their looks upon Cora.

She had slightly flushed; the change, however, was scarcely noticeable.
She at once spoke, as though being thus observed had made her speak.

"He always has something pleasant to say of you," softly declared Cora.
Here she turned to her sister. "Will you bring up some people to Mrs.
Varick," she asked, "or shall I?"

"Oh, just as you choose," answered Martha. She had fixed her eyes on
Pauline again. The next moment Cora had glided off.

"What my sister says is quite true," affirmed Martha.

"You mean--?" Pauline questioned, with a faint start which she could
scarcely have explained.

"That Mr. Kindelon admires you very much."

"I am glad to hear it," returned Pauline, thinking how commonplace the
sentence sounded, and at the same time feeling her color rise and deepen
under the persistent scrutiny of those sharp dark eyes.

"Don't you think him intensely able?" said Martha, much more slowly than
usual. "We do."

Pauline bowed assent. "Brilliantly able," she answered. "Tell me, Miss
Dares, with which of you is he the more intimate, your sister or
yourself?"

Martha gave a laugh that was crisp and curt. She looked away from
Pauline as she answered. "Oh, he's more intimate with me than with
Cora," she said. "We are stanch friends. He tells me nearly everything.
I think he would tell me if he were to fall in love."

"Really?" laughed Pauline. Her face was wreathed in smiles of apparent
amusement. She looked, just then, as she had often looked in the
fashionable world, when everything around her seemed so artificial that
she took the tints of her environment and became as artificial herself.

But it pleased her swiftly to change the subject. "I am quite excited
this evening," she went on. "I am beginning a new career; you
understand, of course. Tell me, Miss Dares, how do _you_ think I shall
succeed in it?"

Martha was watching her fixedly. And Martha's reply had a short, odd
sound. "I think you are almost clever enough not to fail," she said.




VII.


Before Pauline had been an hour longer in the Dares's drawing-room she
had become acquainted with many new people. She could not count them all
when she afterward tried to do so; the introductions had been very rapid
for some little time; one, so to speak, had trodden upon the heel of
another. Her meditated project had transpired, and not a few of her
recent acquaintances eyed her with a critical estimate of her capability
to become their future leader.

She soon found herself an object of such general scrutiny that she was
in danger of growing embarrassed to the verge of actual bewilderment.
She was now the centre of a little group, and every member of it
regarded her with more or less marked attentiveness.

"I've a tragic soul in a comic body, Mrs. Varick," said a fat little
spinster, with a round moon of a face and a high color, whose name was
Miss Upton. "That is the way I announce myself to all strangers. I
should have gone on the stage and played _Juliet_ if it hadn't been for
my unpoetic person. But imagine a bouncing, obese Juliet! No; I realized
that it would never do. I shall have to die with all my music in me, as
it were."

"A great many poets have done that," said a pale young gentleman with
very black hair and eyes, and an expression of ironical fatigue which
seldom varied. He was Mr. Leander Prawle, and he was known to have
written verses for which he himself had unbounded admiration. "Indeed,"
the young poet continued, lifting one thin, white hand to where his
moustache was not yet, "it is hard to sing a pure and noble song with
the discords of daily life about one."

"Not if you can make the world stop its discords and listen to you, Mr.
Prawle," said Pauline.

"Oh, Prawle can never do that," said a broad-shouldered young blond,
with a face full of drowsy reverie and hair rolled back from it in a
sort of yellow mane. "He's always writing transcendental verses about
Man with a capital M and the grand amelioration of Humanity with a
capital H. Prawle has no color. He hates an adjective as if it were a
viper. He should have lived with me in the _Quartier Latin_; he should
have read, studied and loved the divine Theophile Gautier--most perfect
of all French poets!"

The speaker fixed his sleepy blue eyes upon Leander Prawle while he thus
spoke. A slight smile touched his lips, leaving a faint dimple in either
smooth oval cheek. He was certainly very handsome, in an unconventional,
audacious way. His collar gave a lower glimpse of his firm yet soft
throat than usage ordinarily sanctions; the backward wave of his hair
was certainly against any conceded form. He had been made known to
Pauline as Mr. Arthur Trevor, and she had felt surprised at his name
being so English; she had expected to find it French; Mr. Trevor had
appeared to her extremely French.

"When you speak of Paris and of Gautier," she now said to him, "you
really relieve me, Mr. Trevor. I was so prepared, on first meeting you,
to find that you were not an American."

"Oh, Trevor is very French," said Leander Prawle coldly.

Trevor laughed, lifting one hand, on the middle finger of which was the
tawny tell-tale mark of the confirmed cigarette-smoker.

"And my friend, Prawle," he said, "is enormously English."

"Not English--American," slowly corrected Leander Prawle.

"It is the same thing!" cried Arthur Trevor. "He is cold-blooded, Mrs.
Varick," the young gentleman continued, with emphasis and a certain
excitement. "We are always fighting, Prawle and I. I tell Prawle that in
his own beloved literature, he should have but one model outside of
Shakespeare. That is Keats--the sweet, sensuous, adorable Keats."

"I loathe Keats," said Leander Prawle, as if he were repeating some
fragment of a litany. "I think him a word-monger."

"Aha," laughed Arthur Trevor, showing his white, sound teeth, "Keats was
an immense genius. He knew the art of expression."

"And he expressed nothing," said Leander Prawle.

"He expressed beauty," declared Trevor. "Poetry is that. There is
nothing else. Even the great master, Hugo, would tell you so."

"Hugo is a mere rhapsodist," said Leander Prawle.

Trevor laughed again. He gave a comic, exaggerated shudder while he did
so. He now exclusively addressed Pauline. "My dear Mrs. Varick," he
said, "are you not horrified?"

Before Pauline could answer, the fat little Miss Upton spoke. "Oh, Mr.
Trevor," she said, "you know that though you and Mr. Prawle are always
quarrelling about poetry, and belong to two different schools, still,
each of you, in his way, is admirable. You are the North and South
poles."

"No," said Arthur Trevor, "for the North and South poles never come
together, while Prawle and I are continually clashing."

"It looks very much as if chaos were the result," said Pauline.

Arthur Trevor gazed at her reproachfully. "I hope you don't mean that,"
he said. He put his arm while he spoke, about the neck of a short and
fleshy man, with a bald, pink scalp and a pair of dull, uneasy eyes.
"Here is our friend, Rufus Corson," he continued. "Rufus has not spoken
a word to you since he was presented, Mrs. Varick. But he's a
tremendously important fellow. He doesn't look it, but he is the poet of
death, decay, and horror."

"Good Heavens!" murmured Pauline playfully.

"It is true," pursued Arthur Trevor. "Rufus, here, is a wonderful
fellow, and he has written some verses that will one day make him famous
as the American Baudelaire."

"I have not read Baudelaire," said Pauline.

Mr. Corson at once answered her. He spoke in a forced, loitering way. He
wore the dress of a man who scorns all edicts of mode, and yet he was
very commonplace in appearance.

"The literature of the present age is in a state of decadence," he said.
Mr. Corson, himself, looked to be in a state of plump prosperity; even
his rosy baldness had a vivid suggestion of youth and of the enjoyments
which youth bestows. "I write hopelessly," he continued, "because I live
in a hopeless time. My 'Sonnet to a Skull' has been praised, because"--

"It has _not_ been praised," said Leander Prawle firmly and severely.

Mr. Corson regarded Prawle with an amused pity. "It has been praised by
people whom you don't know," he said, "and who don't want to know you."

"It is horrible," enunciated Leander Prawle, while he appealingly rolled
toward Pauline his dark eyes, which the confirmed pallor of his face
made still darker. "Mrs. Varick," he went on, "I am sure that you will
agree with me in asserting that skulls and skeletons and disease are not
fit subjects for poetical treatment."

"Yes," answered Pauline, "I think that they are not beautiful--and for
this reason I should condemn them."

"Then you will make a great mistake, Mrs. Varick," now quickly
interposed Arthur Trevor. He passed one hand backward along the yellow
mane of his hair while he thus spoke. But he still kept an arm about the
neck of his friend, Corson. "I maintain," he continued, "that Corson has
a perfect right to sing of autumnal things. A corpse is as legitimate a
subject as a sunset. They are both morbid; they both mean what is
moribund."

"Oh, but they are so different!" exclaimed the fat Miss Upton. "One is
the work of Gawd, to delight man, and the other is--oh, dear! the other
is--well, it's only a mere dead body! None of the great poets have ever
written in that dreadful style, Mr. Trevor. Of course, I know that Mr.
Corson has done some _powerful_ work, but is it right to give people the
shudders and horrors, as he does? Why not have sunshine in poetry,
instead of gloom and misery?"

"Sunshine is commonplace," said Arthur Trevor.

"Very," said Mr. Corson.

"Sunshine means hope," declared Leander Prawle. "It means evolution,
development, progress."

"Art is art!" cried Trevor. "Sing of what you please, so long as your
_technique_ is good, so long as you have the right _chic_, the right
_facon_, the right way of putting things!"

"True," said Corson. "I write of skulls and corpses because you can get
new effects out of them. They haven't been done to death, like faith,
and philanthropy, and freedom. Optimism is so tiresome, nowadays. All
the Greeks are dead. Notre Dame stands intact, but the Parthenon is a
ruin."

Leander Prawle shivered. "You can make clever rhymes about
charnel-houses," he said, "but that is not poetry. You can deplore the
allurements of women with green eyes and stony hearts, but you degrade
womanhood while you do so. You"--

"Are you not bored?" whispered Kindelon, in his mellow Irish brogue to
Pauline, as he just then stole to her side. "If so, let us walk away
together."

Pauline slipped her hand into his proffered arm. "I was not bored," she
said, as they moved off, "but I was just beginning to be. Are there
nothing but belligerent poets here to-night?"

"Oh, you will find other sorts of people."

"But, who are these three wranglers, Mr. Trevor, Mr. Prawle, and Mr.
Corson?"

Kindelon laughed. "They are fanatics," he said. "Each one believes
himself a Milton in ability."

"Are they successful?"

"They send poems (with stamps inclosed) to the magazines, and have them
rejected. They make believe to despise the magazines, but secretly they
would give worlds to see their names in print. Heaven knows, the
magazines print rubbish enough. But they are sensible in rejecting
Arthur Trevor's poems, which are something in this style--I quote from
memory:--

    "'The hot, fierce tiger-lily madly yearns
    To kill with passionate poison the wild moth
    That reels in drunken ecstasy above
    Its gorgeous bosom....'

"Or in rejecting that bald-pated posing Corson's trash, which runs like
this:--

    "'Death is far better than the loathsome lot
    Of kissing lips that soon must pale and rot,
    Of clasping forms that soon must cease their breath
    Within the black embrace of haughty death!'

"Or in declining to publish Mr. Leander Prawle's buncombe, which sounds
somewhat after this fashion:

    "'Man shall one day develop to a god,
    Though now he walks unwinged, unaureoled....
    To-day we moil and mope--to-morrow's dawn
    Shall bring us pinions to outsoar the stars.'

"That's the sort of the thing this brave trio does. All poets are
partially mad, of course. But then _they_ are mad without being poets;
it's this that makes their lunacy so tiresome."

"And are they always quarrelling when they meet?"

"Oh, they do it for effect. They are privately very good friends. They
are all equally obscure; they've no cause, yet, to hate one another. If
one of them should get a book published before either of the other two,
they would probably both abominate him in good earnest."

Just then a tall, sallow gentleman, with small, gray eyes and a nose
like the beak of a carnivorous bird, laid his hand on Kindelon's sleeve.

"Powers has just asked me to write the Fenimore Cooper article for his
new American Cyclopaedia," declared this gentleman, whose name was
Barrowe, and whom Pauline had already met.

"Well, you're precisely the man," replied Kindelon. "Nobody can do it
better."

"Precisely the man!" exclaimed Mr. Barrowe. "Perhaps I would be if I
were not so overwhelmed with other duties--so unmercifully handicapped."
He turned to Pauline. "I am devoted to literature, madam," he went on,
"but I am forced into commerce for the purpose of keeping starvation
away from my family and myself. There is the plain, unvarnished truth.
And now, as it is, I return home after hours of hard, uncongenial work,
to snatch a short interval between dinner-time and bed-time for whatever
I can accomplish with my poor tired pen. My case is a peculiar and
pathetic one--and this Powers ought to understand it. But, no; he comes
to me in the coolest manner, and makes my doing that article for him a
question of actual good-nature and friendly support. So, of course, I
consent. But it shows a great want of delicacy in Powers. He knows well
enough that I am obliged to neglect many social duties--that I should
not even be here at this moment--that besides my daily business I am
besieged with countless applications from literary people for all sorts
of favors. Why, this very week, I have received no less than fourteen
requests for my autograph. How are my wife and little ones to live if I
am perpetually to oblige inconsiderate and thoughtless friends?"

"Your complaints would indicate," said Kindelon, rather dryly, "that
Powers has not offered you the requisite cheque for proposed services."

Mr. Barrowe gave an irritated groan. "Kindelon!" he exclaimed, "do you
know you can be a very rude man when you want?"

"You've told me that several times before, Barrowe," said Kindelon,
quite jovially, moving on with Pauline.

He did this briskly enough to prevent the indignant Mr. Barrowe from
making any further reply.

"I'm afraid you'll have trouble with that man," he said to Pauline,
presently, "if you admit him into your _salon_."

"I have read some of his essays," she answered. "They are published
abroad, you know. I thought them very clever."

"So they are--amazingly. But Barrowe himself is a sort of monomaniac. He
believes that he is the most maltreated of authors. He is forever boring
his friends with these egotistic lamentations. Now, the truth of the
matter is that he has more to solidly congratulate himself upon than
almost any author whom I know. He was sensible enough, years ago, to
embark in commercial affairs. I forget just what he does; I think he is
a wholesale druggist, or grocer. He writes brilliantly and with
extraordinary speed. His neglect of social duties, as he calls them, is
the purest nonsense. He goes wherever he is asked, and finds plenty of
time for work besides. This request from Powers secretly pleases him.
The new Cyclopaedia is going to be a splendid series of volumes. But
Barrowe must have his little elegiac moan over his blighted life."

"And the applications from fellow-authors?" asked Pauline. "The requests
for autographs?"

"Pshaw! those are a figment of his fancy, I suspect. He imagines that he
is of vast importance in the literary world. His sensitiveness is
something ridiculous. He's a far worse monologuist than I am, which is
surely saying a great deal; but if you answer him he considers it an
interruption, and if you disagree with him he ranks it as impertinence.
I think he rather likes me because I persistently, fearlessly, and
relentlessly do both. But with all his faults, Barrowe has a large, warm
heart. Still, it's astonishing how a fine and true character can often
enshroud itself with repellent mannerisms, just as a firm breadth of
sea-rock will become overcrusted with brittle barnacles.... Ah,
Whitcomb, good evening."

A corpulent man, with silver-gray hair and a somewhat pensive
expression, was the recipient of Kindelon's last cordial sentence of
salutation. After he had made the needful introduction, Kindelon said,
addressing Pauline while he regarded Mr. Whitcomb,--

"This is the author of no less than five standard histories."

"Kindelon is very good to call them standard, Mrs. Varick," said Mr.
Whitcomb, in a voice quite as pensive as his face. "I wish that a few
thousands more would only share his opinion."

"Oh, but they are gradually getting to do it, my dear Whitcomb!"
declared Kindelon. "Don't make any mistake on that point. A few days ago
I chanced to meet your publisher, Sours. Now, an author must stand
pretty sure of success when his publisher pays him a round compliment."

"What did Sours say?" asked Mr. Whitcomb, with an almost boyish
eagerness.

"He said," exclaimed Kindelon, "that Whitcomb was our coming American
historian. There, my dear sir, what do you think of that?"

Mr. Whitcomb sadly shook his silver-gray head. "I've been coming," he
murmured, "ever since I was twenty-eight, and I shall be fifty-seven
next May. I can't say that I think Sours's compliment meant much. It's
got to be a sort of set phrase about me, that I'm coming. It never
occurs to anybody to say that I've come, and I suppose it will not if I
live to be eighty and totter round with white hair. No, I shall always
be coming, coming...."

As the gentleman repeated this final word he smiled with a kind of weary
amiability, still shaking his gray head; and a moment later he had
passed from sight.

"Mrs. Varick," now said a cold, rasping voice to Pauline, "have you
managed to enjoy yourself, thus far? If you recollect, we were
introduced a little while ago ... Miss Cragge, you know."

"Oh, yes, I remember, Miss Cragge," said Pauline. "And I find it very
pleasant here, I assure you."

Miss Cragge had given Kindelon a short nod, which he returned somewhat
faintly. She was a lady of masculine height, with a square-jawed face, a
rather mottled complexion, and a pair of slaty-blue eyes that looked at
you very directly indeed from beneath a broad, flat forehead. She was
dressed in a habit of some shabby gray stuff, and wore at her throat a
large antique cameo pin, which might have been unearthed from an
ancestral chest near the lavendered laces and faded love-letters of a
long-dead grandmother. She was by no means an agreeable-looking lady;
she was so ungentle in her quick, snapping speech and so unfeminine in
her gaunt, bony, and almost towering figure, that she promptly impressed
you with an idea of Nature having maliciously blended the harsher traits
of both sexes in one austere personality, and at the same time leaving
the result sarcastically feminine. She seldom addressed you without
appearing to be bent on something which she thought you might have to
tell her, or which she would like you very much to reveal. Her
affirmations often had the sound of interrogatories. She had none of the
tact, the grace, the _finesse_ of the ordinary "interviewer;" she went
to her task rough-handed and undexterous.

"I'm glad you like it," she at once said to Pauline. "I know you've
moved a good deal in fashionable society, and I should be gratified to
learn how this change affects you."

"Quite refreshingly," returned Pauline.

"You don't feel like a fish out of water, then?" said Miss Cragge, with
a sombre little laugh. "Or like a cat in a strange garret?... I saw you
at the opera the other evening. You were with Mrs. Poughkeepsie and her
daughter; I was down stairs in the orchestra. I go a good deal to places
of amusement--in a professional way, you know; I'm a dead-head, as the
managers call it--I help to paper the house."

"You are rather too idiomatic, I fear," now said Kindelon, with a chilly
ring in his tones, "for Mrs. Varick to understand you."

"Idiomatic is very good--excellent, in fact," replied Miss Cragge, with
a pleasantry that barely missed being morose. "I suppose you mean that I
am slangy. You're always trying to snub me, Kindelon, but I don't mind
you. You can't snub me--nobody can. I'm too thick-skinned." Here the
strangely self-poised lady laughed again, if the grim little sound that
left her mirthless lips could really be called a laugh. "I know the
Poughkeepsies by sight," she continued, re-addressing Pauline, "because
it's my business as a newspaper correspondent to get all the fashionable
items that I can collect, and whenever I'm at any public place of
amusement where there's a chance of meeting those upper-ten people, I
always keep my eyes and ears open as wide as possible. I'm correspondent
for eight weekly papers outside of New York, besides doing work for two
of the city dailies. I never saw anything like the craze for society
gossip nowadays. One good story from high life, with a moderate spice of
scandal in it, will pay me six times as well as anything else. They say
I'm always hunting about for material, and no wonder that I am. The
thing is bread and butter to me--and not much butter, either. You see,
the rich classes here are getting to represent so large a body; so many
people are trying to push themselves into society. And when they can't
elbow their way into the swell balls and parties, why, the next best
thing is to read about who were there, and what they had on, and who led
the German, and what they ate and drank, and how the house was
decorated. It seemed a queer enough business for me, at first; I started
with grand ideas, but I've had to come down a good many pegs; I've had
to pull in my horns. And now I don't mind it a bit; I suppose Kindelon
would say that I enjoyed it ... eh, Kindelon? Why, Mrs. Varick, I used
to write book-reviews for the New York 'Daily Criterion,' and my pay
kept growing less and less. One day I wrote a very careful review of a
book that I admired greatly--it was George Eliot's 'Middlemarch,' in
fact. The editor-in-chief sent for me. He named the article, and then
said, 'I hear that you wrote it. It's a very fine piece of work.'
'Thank you, sir,' I replied, with a tingle of gratification. 'Yes, a
very fine piece of work, indeed,' continued the editor; 'I read it with
much pleasure. But don't do that sort of thing again, Miss Cragge--we've
no use for it on the 'Criterion.' After that I became less ambitious and
more mercenary. There's no use pounding against stone walls. The reading
public will have what it wants, and if I don't give it to them, somebody
else will be only too glad to take my place.... By the way, Mrs. Varick,
do you think that Miss Poughkeepsie is going to marry that Scotch
earl--Lord Glenartney?"

"I can't tell you, really," said Pauline. She had made up her mind to
dislike Miss Cragge very much indeed. At the same time she felt a
certain pity for her.

Kindelon began to press quietly forward, and Pauline, who still had his
arm, by no means resisted this measure.

"I've been very candid," called Miss Cragge, while the two were slipping
away from her. She spoke with even more than her usual blunt, curt
manner. "It was because I knew Kindelon would be apt to say hard things
of me, and I wanted to spike a few of his guns. But I hope I haven't
shocked you, Mrs. Varick."

"Oh, not at all," said Pauline, as blandly as her feelings would
permit....

"You were a good deal disgusted, no doubt," said Kindelon, when they
were beyond Miss Cragge's hearing.

"She isn't the most charming person I have ever met," replied Pauline.
"I will grant you that."

"How amiably you denounce her! But I forget," he added. "Such a little
time ago you were prepared to be exhilarated and ... what was the other
word?... to fraternize with most of the company here."

She chose not to heed the last stroke of light irony.

"Are you and Miss Cragge enemies?" she asked.

"Well, I abominate her, and she knows it. I rarely abominate anybody,
and I think she knows that also. To my mind she is a conscienceless,
hybrid creature. She is a result of a terrible modern license--the
license of the Press. There is a frank confession, for a newspaper man
like myself. But, between ourselves, I don't know where modern
journalism, in some of its ferocious phases, is going to stop, unless it
stops at a legislative veto. Miss Cragge would sacrifice her best
friend (if she had any friends--which she hasn't) to the requirements
of what she calls 'an item.' She thinks no more of assailing a
reputation, in her quest for so-termed 'material,' than a rat would
think of carrying off a lump of cheese. She knows very well that I will
never forgive her for having printed a lot of libellous folly about a
certain friend of mine. He had written a rather harmless and weak novel
of New York society, New York manners. Miss Cragge had some old grudge
against him; I think it was on account of an adverse criticism which she
believed him to have written regarding some dreary, amateurish poems for
whose author she had conceived a liking. This was quite enough for Miss
Cragge. She filled a column of the Rochester "Rocket," or the Topeka
"Trumpet," or some such sheet, with irate fictions about poor Charley
Erskine. He had no redress, poor fellow; she declared that he had
slandered a pure, high-minded lady in society here by caricaturing her
in his novel. She parodied some of poor Charley's rather fragile verses;
she accused him of habitually talking fatuous stuff at a certain
Bohemian sort of beer-garden which he had visited scarcely five times
within that same year. Oh, well, the whole thing was so atrocious that I
offered my friend the New York "Asteroid" in which to hurl back any
epistolary thunderbolt he should care to manufacture. But Charley
wouldn't; he might have written a bad novel and worse poems, but he had
sense enough to know that his best scorn lay in severe silence. Still,
apart from all this, I have excellent reasons for shunning Miss Cragge,
and I have told you some of them. She is the most aggravated form of the
American newspaper correspondent, prowling about and seeking whom she
may devour. I consider her a dangerous person, and I advise you not to
allow her within your _salon_."

"Oh, I shan't," quickly answered Pauline. "You need not have counselled
me on that point. It was quite unnecessary. I intend to pick and
choose." She gave a long, worried sigh, now, which Kindelon just heard
above the conversational hum surrounding them. "I am afraid it all comes
to picking and choosing, everywhere," she went on. "Aunt Cynthia
Poughkeepsie is perpetually doing it in _her_ world, and I begin to
think that there is none other where it must not be done."

Kindelon leaned his handsome crisp-curled head nearer to her own; he
fixed his light-blue eyes, in which lay so warm and liquid a sparkle,
intently upon the lifted gaze of Pauline.

"You are right," he said. "You will learn that, among other lessons,
before you are much older. There is no such thing as not picking and
choosing. Whatever the grade of life, it is always done by those who
have any sort of social impulse. I believe it is done in Eighth Avenue
and Avenue A, when they give parties in little rooms of tenement houses
and hire a fiddler to speed the dance. There is always some Michael or
Fritz who has been ostracized. The O'Haras and the Schneiders follow the
universal law. Wherever three are gathered together, the third is pretty
sure to be of questionable welcome. This isn't an ideal planet, my dear
lady, and 'liberty' and 'fraternity' are good enough watchwords, but
'equality' never yet was one;--if I didn't remember my Buckle, my
Spencer, my Huxley, and my dear old Whig Macaulay, I should add that it
never _would_ be one."

Just at this point Kindelon and Pauline found themselves face to face
with two gentlemen who were both in a seemingly excited frame of mind.
Pauline remembered that they had both been presented to her not long
ago. She recollected their names, too; her memory had been nerved to
meet all retentive exigencies. The large, florid man, with the bush of
sorrel beard, was Mr. Bedlowe, and the smaller, smooth-shaven man, with
the consumptive stoop and the professorial blue spectacles, was Mr.
Howe.

Mr. Howe and Mr. Bedlowe were two novelists of very opposite repute.
Kindelon had already caught a few words from the latter, querulously
spoken.

"Ah, so you think modern novel-writing a sham, my dear Howe?" he said,
pausing with his companion, while either gentleman bowed recognition to
Pauline. "Isn't that rank heresy from the author of a book that has just
been storming the town?"

"My book didn't storm the town, Kindelon," retorted Mr. Howe, lifting a
hand of scholarly slimness and pallor toward his opaque goggles. "I wish
it had," he proceeded, somewhat wearily. "No; Bedlowe and I were having
one of our old quarrels. I say that we novelists of the Anglo-Saxon
tongue are altogether too limited. That is what I mean by declaring that
modern novel-writing is a sham."

"He means a great deal more, I'm sorry to say," here cried Mr. Bedlowe,
who had a habit of grasping his sorrel beard in one hand and thrusting
its end toward his hirsute lips as though they were about to be allured
by some edible mouthful.

"He means, Kindelon, that because we haven't the shocking immoral
latitude of the French race, we can't properly express ourselves in
fiction. And he goes still further--Howe is always going still further
every fresh time that I meet him. He says that if the modern novelist
dared to express himself on religious subjects, he would be an
agnostic."

"Precisely!" cried Mr. Howe, with the pale hand wavering downward from
the eerie glasses. "But he doesn't dare! If he did, his publisher
wouldn't publish him!"

"My publisher publishes _me_!" frowned Mr. Bedlowe.

"Oh, you're a pietist," was the excited answer. "At least, you go in for
that when you write your novels. It pays, and you do it. I don't say
that you do it _because_ it pays, but ..."

"You infer it," grumbled Mr. Bedlowe, "and that's almost the same as
saying it." He visibly bristled here. "I've got a wholesome faith," he
proceeded, with hostility. "That's why I wrote 'The Christian Knight in
Armor' and 'The Doubtful Soul Satisfied.' Each of them sold seventy
thousand copies apiece. There's a proof that the public wanted
them--that they filled a need."

"So does the 'Weekly Wake-Me-Up,'" said Mr. Howe, with mild disdain. "My
dear Bedlowe, you have two qualities as a modern novel-writer which are
simply atrocious--I mean, plot and piety. The natural result of these is
popularity. But your popularity means nothing. You utterly neglect
analysis"--

"I despise analysis!"

"You entirely ignore style"--

"I express my thoughts without affectation."

"Your characters are wholly devoid of subtlety"--

"I abhor subtlety!"

"You preach sermons"--

"Which thousands listen to!"

"You fail completely to represent your time"--

"My readers, who represent my time, don't agree with you."

"You end your books with marriages and christenings in the most absurdly
old-fashioned way"--

"I end a story as every story _should_ end. Sensible people have a
sensible curiosity to know what becomes of hero and heroine."

"Curiosity is the vice of the vulgar novel-reader. Psychological
interest is the one sole interest that should concern the more cultured
mind. And though you may sell your seventy thousand copies, I beg to
assure you that ..."

"Had we not heard quite enough of that hot squabble?" said Kindelon to
Pauline, after he had pressed with her into other conversational
regions, beyond the assault and defence of these two inimical novelists.

"I rather enjoyed it," said Pauline.

"They would have presently dragged us into their argument," returned
Kindelon. "It was just as well that we retired without committing
ourselves by an opinion. I should have sided with Howe, though I think
him an extremist."

"I know some of Mr. Bedlowe's novels," said Pauline. "They are very
popular in England. I thought them simply dire."

"And Howe is a real artist. He has a sort of cult here, though not a
large one. What he says is true enough, in the main. The modern novelist
dares not express his religious views, unless they be of the most
conventional and tame sort. And how few fine minds are there to-day
which are not rationalistic, unorthodox? A man like Bedlowe coins money
from his milk-and-water platitudes, while Howe must content himself with
the recognition of a small though devout circle.... Did you meet the
great American dramatist, by the way? I mean Mr. Osgood Paiseley. He is
standing over yonder near the mantel ... that slender little man with
the abnormally massive head."

"Yes, I met him," returned Pauline. "He is coming this way."

"Have you any new dramatic work in preparation, Paiseley?" asked
Kindelon, as the gentleman who had just been mentioned now drew near
himself and Pauline.

"Yes," was Mr. Paiseley's reply. He spoke with a nasal tone and without
much grammatical punctilio. "I've got a piece on hand that I'm doing for
Mattie Molloy. Do you know her at all? She does the song-and-dance
business with comedy variations. I think the piece'll be a go; it'll
just suit her, I guess."

"Your last melodrama, 'The Brand of Cain,' was very successful, was it
not?" pursued Kindelon.

"Well," said Mr. Paiseley, as he threw back an errant lock or two from
his great width of swollen-looking forehead, "I'm afraid it isn't going
to catch on so very well, after all. The piece is all right, but the
company can't play it. Cooke guys his part because he don't like it, and
doesn't get a hand on some of the strongest lines that have been put
into any actor's mouth for the past twenty years--fact! as sure as
you're born! Moore makes up horribly, and Kitty Vane is so over-weighted
that Miss Cowes, in a straight little part of only a few lengths, gets
away with her for two scenes; and Sanders is awfully preachy. If I could
have had my own say about casting the piece, we'd have turned away money
for six weeks and made it a sure thing for the road. I mean for the big
towns, not the one-night places; it's got too many utility-people to
make it pay there. But I shan't offer anything more to the
stock-theatres; after this, I'm going to fit stars."

Pauline turned a covertly puzzled look upon her companion. She seemed to
be hearing a new language. And yet, although the words were all familiar
enough, their collocation mystified her.

"You think there is more profit, then, in fitting stars," said Kindelon,
"if there is less fame?"

Mr. Paiseley laughed, with not a little bitterness. "Oh, fame," he said,
"is the infirmity of the young American dramatist. I've outgrown it. I
used to have it. But what's the use of fighting against France and
England in the stock-theatres? Give me a fair show there, and I can draw
bigger money than Dennery or Sardou--don't you make any mistake! But
those foreign fellows are always crowding us natives out of New York.
The managers hem and smirk over our pieces, and say they're good enough,
but they've got something that's running well at the Porte Sang Martang
or the Odeun in Paris. The best we can do is to have our plays done by a
scratch company at some second-rate house, or, if it's a first-class
house, they give us bad time. No, I fit travelling stars at so much cash
down, and so much royalty afterward--that is, when I can't get a
percentage on the gross. I don't work any more for fame; I want my
dinner...."

"Your friend takes a rather commercial view of the American stage," said
Pauline to Kindelon, after they had again moved onward.

"I am sorry to say that it is almost the only view taken by any of our
dramatists. Paiseley is thoroughly representative of his class. They
would all like to write a fine play, but they nearly all make the
getting of money their primary object. Now, I do not believe that the
lust of gain has ever been a foremost incentive in the production of any
great mental achievement. Our novels and poems are to-day better than
our plays, I think, because they are written with a more artistic and a
less monetary stimulus. The rewards of the successful playwright may
mean a fortune to him; he always remembers that when he begins, and he
usually begins for the reason that he does remember it...."

Pauline had glimpses of not a few more individualities, that evening,
before she at length took her leave.

"Well, how have you enjoyed it?" asked Kindelon, as they were being
driven home together.

"I have not entirely enjoyed it," was the slow answer.

"You have been disappointed?"

"Yes."

"But your purpose of the _salon_ still remains good?"

"Indeed it does!" she exclaimed with eagerness. "I shall begin my
work--I shall issue my invitations in a few days. Mrs. Dares will no
doubt supply me with a full list of names and addresses."

"And you will invite everybody?"

"Oh, by no means. I shall pick and choose."

"Beware of calamity!" said Kindelon. And his voice was so odd a blending
of the jocose and serious that she could ill guess whether he were in
earnest or not.




VIII.


Pauline now began in excellent earnest the preparations for embarking
upon her somewhat quaint enterprise. During the next three or four days
she saw a good deal of Kindelon. They visited together the little
editorial sanctum in Spruce Street, where Mrs. Dares sat dictating some
of her inexhaustible "copy" to a pale and rather jaded-looking female
amanuensis. The lady received her visitors with a most courteous
hospitality. Pauline had a sense of shocking idleness as she looked at
the great cumbrous writing-desk covered with ink-stains, files or
clippings of newspapers, and long ribbon-like rolls of "proof." Her own
fine garments seemed to crackle ostentatiously beside the noiseless
folds of Mrs. Dares's work-day cashmere.

"We shall not take up much of your valuable time," she said to the
large-eyed, serious little lady. "We have called principally to ask a
favor of you, and I hope you will not think it a presumptuous request."

"I hope it is presumptuous," said Mrs. Dares, "for that, provided I can
grant it at all, will make it so much pleasanter to grant."

"You may be sure," cried Kindelon gayly to Pauline, "that you have made
a complete conquest of Mrs. Dares. She is usually quite miserly with her
compliments. She puts me on the wretched allowance of one a year."

"Perhaps you don't deserve a more liberal income," said Pauline. Then
she re-addressed Mrs. Dares. "I want to ask you," she proceeded, with a
shy kind of venture in her tone, "if you will kindly loan me your
visiting-book for a little while."

"My visiting-book?" murmured Mrs. Dares. Then she slowly shook her head,
while the pale girl at the desk knitted her brows perplexedly, as though
she had encountered some tantalizing foreign word. "I would gladly lend
it if I had one," Mrs. Dares went on; "but I possess no such article."

"Good gracious!" exclaimed Pauline, with an involuntary surprise that
instantly afterward she regretted as uncivil. "You _have_ none!"

But Mrs. Dares did not seem to detect the least incivility in Pauline's
amazement.

"No, my dear Mrs. Varick, I have no need of a visiting-book, for I have
no time to visit."

"But you surely have some sort of list, have you not?" now inquired
Kindelon.

Mrs. Dares lightly touched her forehead. "Only here in my memory," she
said, "and that is decidedly an imperfect list. My guests understand
that to be invited to one of my evenings is to be invited to all. I
suppose that in the fashionable world," she proceeded, fixing her great
dark eyes on Pauline, "it is wholly different. There, matters of this
sort are managed with much ceremony, no doubt."

"With much trivial ceremony," said Pauline. "A little scrap of
pasteboard there represents an individuality--and in just as efficient
manner as if it were truly the person represented. To be in society, as
it is called, is to receive a perpetual shower of cards. I strongly
doubt if many people ever care to meet in a truly social way those whose
company they pretend to solicit. There are few more perfect mockeries in
that most false and mocking life, than the ordinary visit of etiquette."
Pauline here gave a little meaning smile as she briefly paused. "But I
suppose you will understand, Mrs. Dares," she continued, "that I regret
your having no regular list. I wanted to borrow it--and with what
purpose I am sure you can readily imagine."

"Yes," was the reply. "My daughter Cora shall prepare you one, however.
She has an admirable memory. If she fails in the matter of addresses,
there is the directory as a help, you know. And so your idea about the
_salon_ is unchanged?"

"It is unalterable," said Pauline, with a laugh. "But I hate so to
trouble your daughter."

"She will not think it any trouble," said Kindelon quickly.

Pauline looked at him with a slight elevation of the brows. "You speak
confidently for Miss Cora," she said.

Kindelon lifted one hand, and waved it a trifle embarrassedly. "Oh, I
have always found her so accommodating," he answered.

"Yes, Cora is always glad to please those whom she likes," said Mrs.
Dares....

A little later Pauline and Kindelon took leave of their hostess. They
had been driven to Spruce Street in the carriage of the former, and as
they quitted the huge building in which Mrs. Dares's tiny sanctum was
situated, Kindelon said to his companion: "You shall return home at
once?"

Pauline gave a careless laugh. She looked about her at all the
commercial hurry and bustle of the placarded, vehicle-thronged street.
"I have nowhere else to go just at present," she said. "Not that I
should not like to stay down town, as you call it, a little longer. The
noise and activity please me.... Oh, by the way," she added, "did you
not say that you must repair to your office?"

"The 'Asteroid' imperatively claims me," said Kindelon, taking out his
watch. "Only twelve o'clock," he proceeded; "I thought it later. Well, I
have at least an hour at your service still. Have you any commands?"

"Where on earth could we pass your hour of leisure?" said Pauline. "It
would probably not be proper if I accompanied you into the office of the
'Asteroid.'"

"It would be sadly dull."

"Then I will drive up town after I have left you there."

"Why not remain _down_ town, since the change pleases you?"

"Driving aimlessly about for a whole hour?"

"By no means. I have an idea of what we might do. I think you might not
find the idea at all disagreeable. If you will permit, I will give your
footman an order, and plan for you a little surprise."

"Do so, by all means," said Pauline lightsomely, entering the carriage.
"I throw myself upon your mercy and your protection."

Kindelon soon afterward seated himself at her side, and the carriage was
immediately borne into the clamorous region of what we term lower
Broadway.

"I hope I shall like your surprise," said Pauline, as she leaned back
against the cushions, not knowing how pretty she looked in her patrician
elegance of garb and person. "But we will not talk of it; I might guess
what it is if we did, and that would spoil all. My faith in you shall be
blind and unquestioning, and I shall expect a proportionately rich
reward.... What gulfs of difference lie between that interesting little
Mrs. Dares and most of the women whom I have met! People tell us that we
must travel to see life. I begin to think that one great city like New
York can give us the most majestic experience, if only we know how to
receive it. Take my Aunt Cynthia Poughkeepsie, for example, and compare
her with Mrs. Dares! A whole continent seems to lie between them, and
yet they are continually living at scarcely a stone's-throw apart."

Kindelon gave a brisk, acquiescent nod.

"True enough," he said. "Travel shows us only the outsides of men and
women. We go abroad to discover better what profits of observation lie
at home...."

The carriage at length stopped.

"Is my surprise all ready to burst upon me?" asked Pauline, at this
point.

"Yes. Its explosion is now imminent," said Kindelon, with dry solemnity
of accent.

Pauline, after she had alighted, surveyed her surroundings for a moment,
and then said,--

"I knew we were approaching the Battery, but I did not suppose you meant
to stop there. And why _have_ you stopped, pray?"

Kindelon pointed toward a distant flash of water glimpsed between the
nude black boughs of many high trees. "You can't think what a delightful
stroll we could take over yonder," he said, "along the esplanade. The
carriage could wait here for us, you know."

"Certainly," acceded Pauline.

They soon entered the noble park lying on their right. It was a day of
unusual warmth for that wintry season, but the air freshened and
sharpened as they drew further seaward. There are many New Yorkers to
whom our beautiful Battery is but a name, and Pauline was one of them.
As she neared the rotund wooden building of Castle Garden, a wholly
novel and unexpected sight awaited her. Not long ago one of the great
ocean-steamers had discharged here many German immigrants, and some of
these had come forth from the big sea-fronting structure beyond, to meet
the stares of that dingy, unkempt rabble which always collects, on such
occasions, about its doorways. Pauline and Kindelon paused to watch the
poor dazed-looking creatures, with their pinched, vacuous faces, their
timid miens, their coarse, dirty bundles. The women mostly had blond
braids of hair matted in close coils against the backs of their heads;
they wore no bonnets, and one or two of them led a bewildered, dull-eyed
child by the hand, while one or two more clasped infants to their
breasts, wrapped in soiled shawls. The men had a spare, haggard, slavish
demeanor; the liberal air and sun, the very amplitude and brilliancy of
sky and water, seemed to cow and depress them; they slunk instead of
walking; there was something in their visages of an animal suggestion;
they did not appear entirely human, and made you recall the mythic
combinations of man and beast.

"They are Germans, I suppose," said Kindelon to Pauline; "or perhaps
they hail from some of the Austrian provinces. Many of my own country
people, the Irish, are not much less shocking to behold when they first
land here."

"These do not shock me," said Pauline; "they sadden me. They look as if
they had not wit enough to understand whither they had come, but quite
enough to feel alarmed and distrustful of their present environment."

"This drama of immigration is constantly unfolding itself here, day
after day," answered Kindelon. "It surely has its mournful side, but
you, as an American, ought by all means to discern its bright one. These
poor souls are the social refuse of Europe; they are the pathetic
fugitives from vile and time-honored abuses; they are the dreary
consequences of kingdoms and empires. Their state is almost brutish, as
you see; they don't think themselves half as far above the brute as you
think them, depend upon it. They have had manhood and womanhood crushed
into the dust for generations. It is as much their hereditary instinct
to fawn and crawl as it is for a dog to bark or a cat to lap milk. They
represent the enlightened and thrifty peasantry over-sea. Bah! how it
sickens a man to consider that because a few insolent kings must have
their hands kissed and their pride of rule glutted, millions of their
people are degraded into such doltish satires upon humanity! But I
mentioned the bright side of this question, from the American
standpoint."

"Yes," said Pauline quickly, lifting her face to his. "I hope it is
really a bright side."

"It is--very. America receives these pitiful wretches, and after a few
short months they are regenerated, transformed. There has never, in the
history of the world, been a nation of the same magnificent hospitality
as this. Before such droves of deplorable beings any other nation would
shut her ports or arm her barriers, in strong affright. But America
(which I have always thought a much more terse and expressive name than
the United States) does nothing of the sort. With a superb kindness,
which has behind it a sense of unexampled power, she bids them all
welcome. And in a little while they breathe her vitalizing air with a
new and splendid result. They forget the soldiers who kicked them, the
tyrants who made them shoulder muskets in defence of thrones, the taxes
wrung from their scant wages that princes might dance and feast. They
forget all this gross despotism; they begin to live; their very frames
and features change; their miserable past is like a broken fetter flung
gladly away. And America does all this for them--this, which no other
country has done or can do!"

He spoke with a fine heat, an impressive enthusiasm. Pauline, standing
beside him, had earnestly fixed her look upon his handsome, virile face,
noting the spark that pierced his light-blue eyes, between the black
gloss of their lashes, and the little sensitive tremor that disturbed
his nostril. She had never felt more swayed by his force of personality
than now. She had never felt more keenly than now that his manful
countenance and shape were both fit accompaniments of an important and
robust nature.

"And what does America really do with these poor, maltreated creatures,
after having greeted and domesticated them?" came her next words, filled
with an appealing sincerity of utterance.

Something appeared suddenly to have changed Kindelon's mood. He laughed
shortly and half turned away.

"Oh," he said, in wholly altered voice, "if they are Irish she sometimes
makes Tammany politicians of them, and if they are Germans she sometimes
turns them into howling socialists."

"Do you mean what you say?" exclaimed Pauline almost indignantly.

He bent his head and looked at her intently, for a moment, with a covert
play of mirth under the crisp, dark flow of his mustache.

"I am afraid that I do," he replied, with another laugh.

"Then you think this grand American hospitality of which you have just
spoken to be a failure--a sham?"

"No, no--far from that," he said rapidly, and with recurring
seriousness. "I was only going back to the dark side of the
question--that is all. You know, I told you it had both its dark and its
bright side.... Come, let us leave this rabble. You have not really seen
the Battery yet. Its true splendors lie just beyond...."

They were presently strolling along the stone-paved esplanade, with its
granite posts connected by loops of one continuous iron chainwork. To
the south they had a partial view of Brooklyn, that city which is a sort
of reflective and imitative New York, with masts bristling from her
distant wharves and more than a single remote church-spire telling of
the large religious impulse which has given her a quaint ecclesiastical
fame. But westward your eye could traverse the spacious bay until it met
the dull-red semicircle of Fort Columbus, planted low and stout upon the
shore of Governor's Island, and the soft, swelling, purplish hills of
Staten Island, where they loomed still further beyond. Boats of all
shapes and kinds were passing over the luminous waters, from the squat,
ugly tug, with its hoarse whistle, to the huge black bulk of an Atlantic
steamer, bound for transpontine shores and soon to move majestically
oceanward through the fair sea-gate of the Narrows. A few loiterers
leaned against the stone posts, and a few more lounged upon the seats
ranged further inland along this salubrious marine promenade. Back among
the turfy levels that stretched broadly between the flagged pathways,
you saw the timorous green of hardy grass, where an occasional pale
wreath of unmelted snow yet lingered. People were passing to and fro,
with steps that rang hollow on the hard pavement. If you listened
intently you could catch a kind of dreamy hum from the vast city, which
might almost be said to begin its busy, tumultuous life here in this
very spot, thence pushing through many a life-crowded street and avenue,
sheer on to the rocky fields and goat-haunted gutters of dreary Harlem.

"What a glorious bay it is!" exclaimed Kindelon, while he and Pauline
stood on the breezy esplanade. "There never was a city with more royal
approaches than New York."

"That fort yonder," said Pauline, "will perhaps thunder broadsides, one
day, at the fleet of an invading enemy. This is still such a young city
compared with those of other lands.... I suppose these waters, centuries
later, will see grand sights, as civilization augments."

"Perhaps they may see very mournful ones," objected Kindelon.

"But you are an evolutionist," declared Pauline, with a priggish little
pursing of the lips that he found secretly very amusing. "You believe
that everything is working toward nobler conditions, though you laughed
at Leander Prawle, the optimistic poet, the other evening, for his
roseate prophecies about the human race."

"Oh, I'm an evolutionist," answered Kindelon. "I believe it will all
come right by-and-by, like the gigantic unravelling of a gigantic
skein.... But such views don't prevent me from feeling the probability of
New York being reduced to ashes more than once in the coming centuries."

"Oh, yes, I remember," said Pauline. "There are often the apparent
retrogressions--rhythmic variations of movement which temporarily retard
all progress in societies."

Kindelon burst into one of his mellowest and heartiest laughs. "You are
delicious," he said, "when you try to recollect your Herbert Spencer.
You make me think of a flower that has been dropped among the leaves of
an Algebra."

"I am not at all sure that I like your simile," said Pauline, tossing
her head somewhat. "It is pleasant to be likened to a flower, but in
this case it is rather belittling. And if it comes to recollecting my
Herbert Spencer, perhaps the process is not one of very violent
_effort_, either."

"Oh," said Kindelon ruefully, "I have offended you."

A sunny smile broke from her lips the next moment. "I can't be
offended," she replied, "when I think how you rebuked my ab

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