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The Grain of Dust: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips · English · Gutenberg #430 · 571,685 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Grain of Dust: A Novel

Author: David Graham Phillips

Illustrator: A. B. Wenzell


        
Release date: December 15, 2004 [eBook #430]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/430

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller and David Garcia


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GRAIN OF DUST: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Charles Keller and David Garcia





[Illustration: "'I will teach you to love me,' he cried."]





THE GRAIN OF DUST


_A NOVEL_


BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS


ILLUSTRATED BY A.B. WENZELL

1911




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"'I will teach you to love he,' he cried"

"'You won't make an out-and-out idiot of yourself, will you Ursula?'"

"'Would you like to think I was marrying you for what you have?--or for
any other reason whatever but for what you are?'"

"'It has killed me,' he groaned."

"She glanced complacently down at her softly glistening shoulders."

"'Father . . . I have asked you not to interfere between Fred and me.'"

"Evidently she had been crying."

"At Josephine's right sat a handsome young foreigner."




THE GRAIN OF DUST




I


Into the offices of Lockyer, Sanders, Benchley, Lockyer & Norman,
corporation lawyers, there drifted on a December afternoon a girl in
search of work at stenography and typewriting. The firm was about the
most important and most famous--radical orators often said infamous--in
New York. The girl seemed, at a glance, about as unimportant and obscure
an atom as the city hid in its vast ferment. She was blonde--tawny hair,
fair skin, blue eyes. Aside from this hardly conclusive mark of identity
there was nothing positive, nothing definite, about her. She was neither
tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither grave nor gay. She gave
the impression of a young person of the feminine gender--that, and
nothing more. She was plainly dressed, like thousands of other girls,
in darkish blue jacket and skirt and white shirt waist. Her boots and
gloves were neat, her hair simply and well arranged. Perhaps in these
respects--in neatness and taste--she did excel the average, which is
depressingly low. But in a city where more or less strikingly pretty
women, bent upon being seen, are as plentiful as the blackberries of
Kentucky's July--in New York no one would have given her a second look,
this quiet young woman screened in an atmosphere of self-effacement.

She applied to the head clerk. It so happened that need for another
typewriter had just arisen. She got a trial, showed enough skill to
warrant the modest wage of ten dollars a week; she became part of the
office force of twenty or twenty-five young men and women similarly
employed. As her lack of skill was compensated by industry and
regularity, she would have a job so long as business did not slacken.
When it did, she would be among the first to be let go. She shrank into
her obscure niche in the great firm, came and went in mouse-like
fashion, said little, obtruded herself never, was all but forgotten.

Nothing could have been more commonplace, more trivial than the whole
incident. The name of the girl was Hallowell--Miss Hallowell. On the
chief clerk's pay roll appeared the additional information that her
first name was Dorothea. The head office boy, in one of his occasional
spells of "freshness," addressed her as Miss Dottie. She looked at him
with a puzzled expression; it presently changed to a slight, sweet
smile, and she went about her business. There was no rebuke in her
manner, she was far too self-effacing for anything so positive as the
mildest rebuke. But the head office boy blushed awkwardly--why he did
not know and could not discover, though he often cogitated upon it. She
remained Miss Hallowell.

Opposites suggest each other. The dimmest personality in those offices
was the girl whose name imaged to everyone little more than a pencil,
notebook, and typewriting machine. The vividest personality was
Frederick Norman. In the list of names upon the outer doors of the
firm's vast labyrinthine suite, on the seventeenth floor of the
Syndicate Building, his name came last--and, in the newest lettering,
suggesting recentness of partnership. In age he was the youngest of the
partners. Lockyer was archaic, Sanders an antique; Benchley, actually
only about fifty-five, had the air of one born in the grandfather class.
Lockyer the son dyed his hair and affected jauntiness, but was in fact
not many years younger than Benchley and had the stiffening jerky legs
of one paying for a lively youth. Norman was thirty-seven--at the age
the Greeks extolled as divine because it means all the best of youth
combined with all the best of manhood. Some people thought Norman
younger, almost boyish. Those knew him uptown only, where he hid the man
of affairs beneath the man of the world-that-amuses-itself. Some people
thought he looked, and was, older than the age with which the
biographical notices credited him. They knew him down town only--where
he dominated by sheer force of intellect and will.

As has been said, the firm ranked among the greatest in New York.
It was a trusted counselor in large affairs--commercial, financial,
political--in all parts of America, in all parts of the globe, for many
of its clients were international traffickers. Yet this young man, this
youngest and most recent of the partners, had within the month forced a
reorganization of the firm--or, rather, of its profits--on a basis that
gave him no less than one half of the whole.

His demand threw his four associates into paroxysms of rage and
fear--the fear serving as a wholesome antidote to the rage.

It certainly was infuriating that a youth, admitted to partnership
barely three years ago, should thus maltreat his associates. Ingrate
was precisely the epithet for him. At least, so they honestly thought,
after the quaint human fashion; for, because they had given him the
partnership, they looked on themselves as his benefactors, and neglected
as unimportant detail the sole and entirely selfish reason for their
graciousness. But enraged though these worthy gentlemen were, and
eagerly though they longed to treat the "conceited and grasping upstart"
as he richly deserved, they accepted his ultimatum. Even the venerable
and venerated Lockyer--than whom a more convinced self-deceiver on the
subject of his own virtues never wore white whiskers, black garments,
and the other badges of eminent respectability--even old Joseph Lockyer
could not twist the acceptance into another manifestation of the
benevolence of himself and his associates. They had to stare the
grimacing truth straight in the face; they were yielding because they
dared not refuse. To refuse would mean the departure of Norman with the
firm's most profitable business. It costs heavily to live in New York;
the families of successful men are extravagant; so conduct unbecoming a
gentleman may not there be resented if to resent is to cut down one's
income. The time was, as the dignified and nicely honorable Sanders
observed, when these and many similar low standards did not prevail in
the legal profession. But such is the frailty of human nature--or so
savage the pressure of the need of the material necessities of civilized
life, let a profession become profitable or develop possibilities of
profit--even the profession of statesman, even that of lawyer--or
doctor--or priest--or wife--and straightway it begins to tumble down
toward the brawl and stew of the market place.

In a last effort to rouse the gentleman in Norman or to shame him into
pretense of gentlemanliness, Lockyer expostulated with him like a
prophet priest in full panoply of saintly virtue. And Lockyer was
passing good at that exalted gesture. He was a Websterian figure,
with the venality of the great Daniel in all its pompous dignity
modernized--and correspondingly expanded. He abounded in those idealist
sonorosities that are the stock-in-trade of all solemn old-fashioned
frauds. The young man listened with his wonted attentive courtesy until
the dolorous appeal disguised as fatherly counsel came to an end. Then
in his blue-gray eyes appeared the gleam that revealed the tenacity and
the penetration of his mind. He said:

"Mr. Lockyer, you have been absent six years--except an occasional two
or three weeks--absent as American Ambassador to France. You have done
nothing for the firm in that time. Yet you have not scorned to take
profits you did not earn. Why should I scorn to take profits I do earn?"

Mr. Lockyer shook his picturesque head in sad remonstrance at this
vulgar, coarse, but latterly frequent retort of insurgent democracy upon
indignant aristocracy. But he answered nothing.

"Also," proceeded the graceless youth in the clear and concise way that
won the instant attention of juries and Judges, "also, our profession
is no longer a profession but a business." His humorous eyes twinkled
merrily. "It divides into two parts--teaching capitalists how to loot
without being caught, and teaching them how to get off if by chance
they have been caught. There are other branches of the profession, but
they're not lucrative, so we do not practice them. Do I make myself
clear?"

Mr. Lockyer again shook his head and sighed.

"I am not an Utopian," continued young Norman. "Law and custom
permit--not to say sanctify--our sort of business. So--I do my best. But
I shall not conceal from you that it's distasteful to me. I wish to get
out of it. I shall get out as soon as I've made enough capital to assure
me the income I have and need. Naturally, I wish to gather in the
necessary amount as speedily as possible."

"Fred, my boy, I regret that you take such low views of our noble
profession."

"Yes--as a profession it is noble. But not as a practice. _My_ regret is
that it invites and compels such low views."

"You will look at these things more--more mellowly when you are older."

"I doubt if I'll ever rise very high in the art of self-deception,"
replied Norman. "If I'd had any bent that way I'd not have got so far so
quickly."

It was a boastful remark--of a kind he, and other similar young men,
have the habit of making. But from him it did not sound boastful--simply
a frank and timely expression of an indisputable truth, which indeed it
was. Once more Mr. Lockyer sighed. "I see you are incorrigible," said
he.

"I have not acted without reflection," said Norman.

And Lockyer knew that to persist was simply to endanger his dignity.
"I am getting old," said he. "Indeed, I am old. I have gotten into the
habit of leaning on you, my boy. I can't consent to your going, hard
though you make it for us to keep you. I shall try to persuade our
colleagues to accept your terms."

Norman showed neither appreciation nor triumph. He merely bowed
slightly. And so the matter was settled. Instead of moving into the
suite of offices in the Mills Building on which he had taken an option,
young Norman remained where he had been toiling for twelve years.

After this specimen of Norman's quality, no one will be surprised to
learn that in figure he was one of those solidly built men of medium
height who look as if they were made to sustain and to deliver shocks,
to bear up easily under heavy burdens; or that his head thickly covered
with fairish hair, was hatchet-shaped with the helve or face suggesting
that while it could and would cleave any obstacle, it would wear a merry
if somewhat sardonic smile the while. No one had ever seen Norman angry,
though a few persevering offenders against what he regarded as his
rights had felt the results of swift and powerful action of the same
sort that is usually accompanied--and weakened--by outward show of
anger. Invariably good-humored, he was soon seen to be more dangerous
than the men of flaring temper. In most instances good humor of
thus unbreakable species issues from weakness, from a desire to
conciliate--usually with a view to plucking the more easily. Norman's
good humor arose from a sense of absolute security which in turn was the
product of confidence in himself and amiable disdain for his fellow men.
The masses he held in derision for permitting the classes to rule and
rob and spit upon them. The classes he scorned for caring to occupy
themselves with so cheap and sordid a game as the ruling, robbing, and
spitting aforesaid. Coming down to the specific, he despised men as
individuals because he had always found in each and everyone of them a
weakness that made it easy for him to use them as he pleased.

Not an altogether pleasant character, this. But not so unpleasant as it
may seem to those unable impartially to analyze human character, even
their own--especially their own. And let anyone who is disposed to
condemn Norman first look within himself--in some less hypocritical and
self-deceiving moment, if he have such moments--and let him note what
are the qualities he relies upon and uses in his own struggle to save
himself from being submerged and sunk. Further, there were in Norman
many agreeable qualities, important, but less fundamental, therefore
less deep-hidden--therefore generally regarded as the real man and as
the cause of his success in which they in fact had almost no part. He
was, for example, of striking physical appearance, was attractively
dressed and mannered, was prodigally generous. Neither as lawyer nor as
man did he practice justice. But while as lawyer he practiced injustice,
as man he practiced mercy. Whenever a weakling appealed to him for
protection, he gave it--at times with splendid recklessness as to the
cost to himself in antagonisms and enmities. Indeed, so great were
the generosities of his character that, had he not been arrogant,
disdainful, self-confident, resolutely and single-heartedly ambitious,
he must inevitably have ruined himself--if he had ever been able to rise
high enough to be worthy the dignity of catastrophe.

Successful men are usually trying persons to know well. Lambs, asses,
and chickens do not associate happily with lions, wolves, and hawks--nor
do birds and beasts of prey get on well with one another. Norman was
regarded as "difficult" by his friends--by those of them who happened to
get into the path of his ambition, in front of instead of behind him,
and by those who fell into the not unnatural error of misunderstanding
his good nature and presuming upon it. His clients regarded him as
insolent. The big businesses, seeking the rich spoils of commerce,
frequent highly perilous waters. They need skillful pilots. Usually
these lawyer-pilots "know their place" and put on no airs upon the
quarter-deck while they are temporarily in command. Not so Norman. He
took the full rank, authority--and emoluments--of commander. And as his
power, fame, and income were swiftly growing, it is fair to assume that
he knew what he was about.

He was admired--extravagantly admired--by young men with not too broad a
vein of envy. He was no woman hater--anything but that. Indeed, those
who wished him ill had from time to time hoped to see him tumble down,
through miscalculation in some of his audacities with women. No--he did
not hate women. But there were several women who hated him--or tried to;
and if wounded vanity and baffled machination be admitted as just causes
for hatred, they had cause. He liked--but he did not wholly trust. When
he went to sleep, it was not where Delilah could wield the shears. A
most irritating prudence--irritating to friends and intimates of all
degrees and kinds, in a race of beings with a mania for being trusted
implicitly but with no balancing mania for deserving trust of the
implicit variety.

And he ate hugely--and whatever he pleased. He could drink beyond
belief, all sorts of things, with no apparent ill effect upon either
body or brain. He had all the appetites developed abnormally, and
abnormal capacity for gratifying them. Where there was one man who
envied him his eminence, there were a dozen who envied him his physical
capacities. We cannot live and act without doing mischief, as well as
that which most of us would rather do, provided that in the doing we are
not ourselves undone. Probably in no direction did Norman do so much
mischief as in unconsciously leading men of his sets down town and up to
imitate his colossal dissipations--which were not dissipation for him
who was abnormal.

Withal, he was a monster for work. There is not much truth in men's
unending talk of how hard they work or are worked. The ravages from
their indulgences in smoking, drinking, gallantry, eating too much and
too fast and too often, have to be explained away creditably, to
themselves and to others--notably to the wives or mothers who nurse them
and suffer from their diminishing incomes. Hence the wailing about work.
But once in a while a real worker appears--a man with enormous ingenuity
at devising difficult tasks for himself and with enormous persistence in
doing them. Frederick Norman was one of these blue-moon prodigies.

Obviously, such a man could not but be observed and talked about.
Endless stories, some of them more or less true, most of them
apocryphal, were told of him--stories of his shrewd, unexpected moves in
big cases, of his witty retorts, of his generosities, of his
peculiarities of dress, of eating and drinking; stories of his
adventures with women. Whatever he did, however trivial, took color and
charm from his personality, so easy yet so difficult, so simple yet so
complex, so baffling. Was he wholly selfish? Was he a friend to almost
anybody or to nobody? Did he ever love? No one knew, not even himself,
for life interested him too intensely and too incessantly to leave him
time for self-analysis. One thing he was certain of; he hated nobody,
envied nobody. He was too successful for that.

He did as he pleased. And, on the whole, he pleased to do far less
inconsiderately than his desires, his abilities, and his opportunities
tempted. Have not men been acclaimed good for less?

In the offices, where he was canvased daily by partners, clerks,
everyone down to the cleaners whose labors he so often delayed, opinion
varied from day to day. They worshiped him; they hated him. They loved
him; they feared him. They regarded him as more than human, as less than
human; but never as just human--though always as endowed with fine human
virtues and even finer human weaknesses. Miss Tillotson, next to the
head clerk in rank and pay--and a pretty and pushing young
person--dreamed of getting acquainted with him--really well acquainted.
It was a vain dream. For him, between up town and down town a great gulf
was fixed. Also, he had no interest in or ammunition for sparrows.

It was in December that Miss Hallowell--Miss Dorothea Hallowell--got her
temporary place at ten dollars a week--that obscure event, somewhat like
a field mouse taking quarters in a horizon-bounded grain field. It was
not until mid-February that she, the palest of personalities, came into
direct contact with Norman, about the most refulgent. This is how it
happened.

Late in that February afternoon, an hour or more after the last of the
office force should have left, Norman threw open the door of his private
office and glanced round at the rows on rows of desks. The lights in the
big room were on, apparently only because he was still within. With an
exclamation of disappointment he turned to re-enter his office. He heard
the click of typewriter keys. Again he looked round, but could see no
one.

"Isn't there some one here?" he cried. "Don't I hear a typewriter?"

The noise stopped. There was a slight rustling from a far corner, beyond
his view, and presently he saw advancing a slim and shrinking slip of a
girl with a face that impressed him only as small and insignificant. In
a quiet little voice she said, "Yes, sir. Do you wish anything?"

"Why, what are you doing here?" he asked. "I don't think I've ever seen
you before."

"Yes. I took dictation from you several times," replied she.

He was instantly afraid he might have hurt her feelings, and he, who in
the days when he was far, far less than now, had often suffered from
that commonplace form of brutality, was most careful not to commit it.
"I never know what's going on round me when I'm thinking," explained he,
though he was saying to himself that the next time he would probably
again be unable to remember one with nothing distinctive to fix
identity. "You are--Miss----?"

"Miss Hallowell."

"How do you happen to be here? I've given particular instructions that
no one is ever to be detained after hours."

A little color appeared in the pale, small face--and now he saw that she
had a singularly fair and smooth skin, singularly beautiful--and he
wondered why he had not noticed it before. Being a close observer, he
had long ago noted and learned to appreciate the wonders of that most
amazing of tissues, the human skin; and he had come to be a connoisseur.
"I'm staying of my own accord," said she.

"They ought not to give you so much work," said he. "I'll speak about
it."

Into the small face came the look of the frightened child--a fascinating
look. And suddenly he saw that she had lovely eyes, clear, expressive,
innocent. "Please don't," she pleaded, in the gentle quiet voice. "It
isn't overwork. I did a brief so badly that I was ashamed to hand it in.
I'm doing it again."

He laughed, and a fine frank laugh he had when he was in the mood.
At once a smile lighted up her face, danced in her eyes, hovered
bewitchingly about her lips--and he wondered why he had not at first
glance noted how sweet and charmingly fresh her mouth was. "Why, she's
beautiful," he said to himself, the manly man's inevitable interest
in feminine charm wide awake. "Really beautiful. If she had a
figure--and were tall--" As he thought thus, he glanced at her figure.
A figure? Tall? She certainly was tall--no, she wasn't--yes, she
was. No, not tall from head to foot, but with the most captivating
long lines--long throat, long bust, long arms, long in body and in
legs--long and slender--yet somehow not tall. He--all this took but an
instant--returned his glance to her face. He was startled. The beauty
had fled, leaving not a trace behind. Before him wavered once more a
small insignificance. Even her skin now seemed commonplace.

She was saying, "Did you wish me to do something?"

"Yes--a letter. Come in," he said abruptly.

Once more the business in hand took possession of his mind. He became
unconscious of her presence. He dictated slowly, carefully choosing his
words, for perhaps a quarter of an hour. Then he stopped and paced up
and down, revolving a new idea, a new phase of the business, that had
flashed upon him. When he had his thoughts once more in form he turned
toward the girl, the mere machine. He gazed at her in amazement. When he
had last looked, he had seen an uninteresting nonentity. But that was
not this person, seated before him in the same garments and with the
same general blondness. That person had been a girl. This time the
transformation was not into the sweet innocence of lovely childhood, but
into something incredibly different. He was gazing now at a woman, a
beautiful world-weary woman, one who had known the joys and then the
sorrows of life and love. Heavy were the lids of the large eyes gazing
mournfully into infinity--gazing upon the graves of a life, the long,
long vista of buried joys. Never had he seen anything so sad or so
lovely as her mouth. The soft, smooth skin was not merely pale; its
pallor was that of wakeful nights, of weeping until there were no more
tears to drain away.

"Miss Hallowell--" he began.

She startled; and like the flight of an interrupted dream, the woman he
had been seeing vanished. There sat the commonplace young person he had
first seen. He said to himself: "I must be a little off my base
to-night," and went on with the dictation. When he finished she withdrew
to transcribe the letter on the typewriter. He seated himself at his
desk and plunged into the masses of documents. He lost the sense of his
surroundings until she stood beside him holding the typewritten pages.
He did not glance up, but seized the sheets to read and sign.

"You may go," said he. "I am very much obliged to you." And he
contrived, as always, to put a suggestion of genuineness into the
customary phrase.

"I'm afraid it's not good work," said she. "I'll wait to see if I am to
do any of it over."

"No, thank you," said he. And he looked up--to find himself gazing at
still another person, wholly different from any he had seen before. The
others had all been women--womanly women, full of the weakness, the
delicateness rather, that distinguishes the feminine. This woman he was
looking at now had a look of strength. He had thought her frail. He was
seeing a strong woman--a splendidly healthy body, with sinews of steel
most gracefully covered by that fair smooth skin of hers. And her
features, too--why, this girl was a person of character, of will.

He glanced through the pages. "All right--thank you," he said hastily.
"Please don't stay any longer. Leave the other thing till to-morrow."

"No--it has to be done to-night."

"But I insist upon your going."

She hesitated, said quietly, "Very well," and turned to go.

"And you mustn't do it at home, either."

She made no reply, but waited respectfully until it was evident he
wished to say no more, then went out. He bundled together his papers,
sealed and stamped and addressed his letter, put on his overcoat and hat
and crossed the outer office on his way to the door. It was empty; she
was gone. He descended in the elevator to the street, remembered that he
had not locked one of his private cases, returned. As he opened the
outer door he heard the sound of typewriter keys. In the corner, the
obscure, sheltered corner, sat the girl, bent with childlike gravity
over her typewriter. It was an amusing and a touching sight--she looked
so young and so solemnly in earnest.

"Didn't I tell you to go home?" he called out, with mock sternness.

Up she sprang, her hand upon her heart. And once more she was beautiful,
but once more it was in a way startlingly, unbelievably different from
any expression he had seen before.

"Now, really. Miss--" He had forgotten her name. "You must not stay on
here. We aren't such slave drivers as all that. Go home, please. I'll
take the responsibility."

She had recovered her equanimity. In her quiet, gentle voice--but it no
longer sounded weak or insignificant--she said, "You are very kind, Mr.
Norman. But I must finish my work."

"Haven't I said I'd take the blame?"

"But you can't," replied she. "I work badly. I seem to learn slowly. If
I fall behind, I shall lose my place--sooner or later. It was that way
with the last place I had. If you interfered, you'd only injure me. I've
had experience. And--I must not lose my place."

One of the scrub women thrust her mussy head and ragged, shapeless body
in at the door. With a start Norman awoke to the absurdity of his
situation--and to the fact that he was placing the girl in a
compromising position. He shrugged his shoulders, went in and locked the
cabinet, departed.

"What a queer little insignificance she is!" thought he, and dismissed
her from mind.




II


Many and fantastic are the illusions the human animal, in its ignorance
and its optimism, devises to change life from a pleasant journey along a
plain road into a fumbling and stumbling and struggling about in a fog.
Of these hallucinations the most grotesque is that the weak can come
together, can pass a law to curb the strong, can set one of their number
to enforce it, may then disperse with no occasion further to trouble
about the strong. Every line of every page of history tells how the
strong--the nimble-witted, the farsighted, the ambitious--have worked
their will upon their feebler and less purposeful fellow men, regardless
of any and all precautions to the contrary. Conditions have improved
only because the number of the strong has increased. With so many lions
at war with each other not a few rabbits contrive to avoid perishing in
the nest.

Norman's genius lay in ability to take away from an adversary the legal
weapons implicitly relied upon and to arm his client with them. No man
understood better than he the abysmal distinction between law and
justice; no man knew better than he how to compel--or to assist--courts
to apply the law, so just in the general, to promoting injustice in the
particular. And whenever he permitted conscience a voice in his internal
debates--it was not often--he heard from it its usual servile
approbation: How can the reign of justice be more speedily brought about
than by making the reign of law--lawyer law--intolerable?

About a fortnight after the trifling incident related in the previous
chapter, Norman had to devise a secret agreement among several of the
most eminent of his clients. They wished to band together, to do a thing
expressly forbidden by the law; they wished to conspire to lower wages
and raise prices in several railway systems under their control. But
none would trust the others; so there must be something in writing, laid
away in a secret safety deposit box along with sundry bundles of
securities put up as forfeit, all in the custody of Norman. When he had
worked out in his mind and in fragmentary notes the details of their
agreement, he was ready for some one to do the clerical work. The some
one must be absolutely trustworthy, as the plain language of the
agreement would make clear to the dullest mind dazzling opportunities
for profit--not only in stock jobbing but also in blackmail. He rang for
Tetlow, the head clerk. Tetlow--smooth and sly and smug, lacking only
courageous initiative to make him a great lawyer, but, lacking that,
lacking all--Tetlow entered and closed the door behind him.

Norman leaned back in his desk chair and laced his fingers behind his
head. "One of your typewriters is a slight blonde girl--sits in the
corner to the far left--if she's still here."

"Miss Hallowell," said Tetlow. "We are letting her go at the end of this
week. She's nice and ladylike, and willing--in fact, most anxious to
please. But the work's too difficult for her. She's rather--rather--well,
not exactly stupid, but slow."

"Um," said Norman reflectively. "There's Miss Bostwick--perhaps she'll
do."

"Miss Bostwick got married last week."

Norman smiled. He remembered the girl because she was the oldest and
homeliest in the office. "There's somebody for everybody--eh, Tetlow?"

"He was a lighthouse keeper," said Tetlow. "There's a story that he
advertised for a wife. But that may be a joke."

"Why not that Miss--Miss Halloway?" mused Norman.

"Miss Hallowell," corrected Tetlow.

"Hallowell--yes. Is she--_very_ incompetent?

"Not exactly that. But business is slackening--and she's been only
temporary--and----"

Norman cut him off with, "Send her in."

"You don't wish her dismissed? I haven't told her yet."

"Oh, I'm not interfering in your department. Do as you like. . . .
No--in this case--let her stay on for the present."

"I can use her," said Tetlow. "And she gets only ten a week."

Norman frowned. He did not like to _hear_ that an establishment in which
he had control paid less than decent living wages--even if the market
price did excuse--yes, compel it. "Send her in," he repeated. Then, as
Tetlow was about to leave, "She is trustworthy?"

"All our force is. I see to that, Mr. Norman."

"Has she a young man--steady company, I think they call it?"

"She has no friends at all. She's extremely shy--at least, reserved.
Lives with her father, an old crank of an analytical chemist over in
Jersey City. She hasn't even a lady friend."

"Well, send her in."

A moment later Norman, looking up from his work, saw the dim slim
nonentity before him. Again he leaned back and, as he talked with her,
studied her face to make sure that his first judgment was correct. "Do
you stay late every night?" asked he smilingly.

She colored a little, but enough to bring out the exquisite fineness of
her white skin. "Oh, I don't mind," said she, and there was no
embarrassment in her manner. "I've got to learn--and doing things over
helps."

"Nothing equal to it," declared Norman. "You've been to school?"

"Only six weeks," confessed she. "I couldn't afford to stay longer."

"I mean the other sort of school--not the typewriting."

"Oh! Yes," said she. And once more he saw that extraordinary
transformation. She became all in an instant delicately, deliciously
lovely, with the moving, in a way pathetic loveliness of sweet children
and sweet flowers. Her look was mystery; but not a mystery of guile. She
evidently did not wish to have her past brought to view; but it was
equally apparent that behind it lay hid nothing shameful, only the sad,
perhaps the painful. Of all the periods of life youth is the best fitted
to bear deep sorrows, for then the spirit has its full measure of
elasticity. Yet a shadow upon youth is always more moving than the
shadows of maturer years--those shadows that do not lie upon the surface
but are heavy and corroding stains. When Norman saw this shadow upon her
youth, so immature-looking, so helpless-looking, he felt the first
impulse of genuine interest in her. Perhaps, had that shadow happened to
fall when he was seeing her as the commonplace and colorless little
struggler for bread, and seeming doomed speedily to be worsted in the
struggle--perhaps, he would have felt no interest, but only the brief
qualm of pity that we dare not encourage in ourselves, on a journey so
beset with hopeless pitiful things as is the journey through life.

But he had no impulse to question her. And with some surprise he noted
that his reason for refraining was not the usual reason--unwillingness
uselessly to add to one's own burdens by inviting the mournful
confidences of another. No, he checked himself because in the manner of
this frail and mouselike creature, dim though she once more was, there
appeared a dignity, a reserve, that made intrusion curiously impossible.
With an apologetic note in his voice--a kind and friendly voice--he
said:

"Please have your typewriter brought in here. I want you to do some work
for me--work that isn't to be spoken of--not even to Mr. Tetlow." He
looked at her with grave penetrating eyes. "You will not speak of it?"

"No," replied she, and nothing more. But she accompanied the simple
negative with a clear and honest sincerity of the eyes that set his mind
completely at rest. He felt that this girl had never in her life told a
real lie.

One of the office boys installed the typewriter, and presently Norman
and the quiet nebulous girl at whom no one would trouble to look a
second time were seated opposite each other with the broad table desk
between, he leaning far back in his desk chair, fingers interlocked
behind his proud, strong-looking head, she holding sharpened pencil
suspended over the stenographic notebook. Long before she seated herself
he had forgotten her except as machine. There followed a troubled hour,
as he dictated, ordered erasure, redictated, ordered re-readings,
skipped back and forth, in the effort to frame the secret agreement in
the fewest and simplest, and least startlingly unlawful, words. At last
he leaned forward with the shine of triumph in his eyes.

"Read straight through," he commanded.

She read, interrupted occasionally by a sharp order from him to correct
some mistake in her notes.

"Again," he commanded, when she translated the last of her notes.

This time she was not interrupted once. When she ended, he exclaimed:
"Good! I don't see how you did it so well."

"Nor do I," said she.

"You say you are only a beginner."

"I couldn't have done it so well for anyone else," said she. "You
are--different."

The remark was worded most flatteringly, but it did not sound so. He saw
that she did not herself understand what she meant by "different." _He_
understood, for he knew the difference between the confused and
confusing ordinary minds and such an intelligence as his own--simple,
luminous, enlightening all minds, however dark, so long as they were in
the light-flooded region around it.

"Have I made the meaning clear?" he asked.

He hoped she would reply that he had not, though this would have
indicated a partial defeat in the object he had--to put the complex
thing so plainly that no one could fail to understand. But she answered,
"Yes."

He congratulated himself that his overestimate of her ignorance of
affairs had not lured him into giving her the names of the parties at
interest to transcribe. But did she really understand? To test her, he
said:

"What do you think of it?"

"That it's wicked," replied she, without hesitation and in her small,
quiet voice.

He laughed. In a way this girl, sitting there--this inconsequential and
negligible atom--typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret
agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their
necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever
stumbling into the traps of the crafty--they, too, would utter an
impotent "Wicked!" if they knew. His voice had the note of gentle
raillery in it as he said:

"No--not wicked. Just business."

She was looking down at her book, her face expressionless. A few moments
before he would have said it was an empty face. Now it seemed to him
sphynxlike.

"Just business," he repeated. "It is going to take money from those who
don't know how to keep or to spend it and give it to those who do know
how. The money will go for building up civilization, instead of for beer
and for bargain-trough finery to make working men's wives and daughters
look cheap and nasty."

She was silent.

"Now, do you understand?"

"I understand what you said." She looked at him as she spoke. He
wondered how he could have fancied those lack-luster eyes beautiful or
capable of expression.

"You don't believe it?" he asked.

"No," said she. And suddenly in those eyes, gazing now into space, there
came the unutterably melancholy look--heavy-lidded from heartache,
weary-wise from long, long and bitter, experiences. Yet she still looked
young--girlishly young--but it was the youthful look the classic Greek
sculptors tried to give their young goddesses--the youth without
beginning or end--younger than a baby's, older than the oldest of the
sons of men. He mocked himself for the fancies this queer creature
inspired in him; but she none the less made him uneasy.

"You don't believe it?" he repeated.

"No," she answered again. "My father has taught me--some things."

He drummed impatiently on the table. He resented her impertinence--for,
like all men of clear and positive mind, he regarded contradiction as in
one aspect impudent, in another aspect evidence of the folly of his
contradictor. Then he gave a short laugh--the confessing laugh of the
clever man who has tried to believe his own sophistries and has failed.
"Well--neither do I believe it," said he. "Now, to get the thing
typewritten."

She seated herself at the machine and set to work. As his mind was full
of the agreement he could not concentrate on anything else. From time to
time he glanced at her. Then he gave up trying to work and sat furtively
observing her. What a quaint little mystery it was! There was in
it--that is, in her--not the least charm for him. But, in all his
experience with women, he could recall no woman with a comparable
development of this curious quality of multiple personalities, showing
and vanishing in swift succession.

There had been a time when woman had interested him as a puzzle to be
worked out, a maze to be explored, a temple to be penetrated--until one
reached the place where the priests manipulated the machinery for the
wonders and miracles to fool the devotees into awe. Some men never get
to this stage, never realize that their own passions, working upon the
universal human love of the mysterious, are wholly responsible for the
cult of woman the sphynx and the sibyl. But Norman, beloved of women,
had been let by them into their ultimate secret--the simple humanness of
woman; the clap-trappery of the oracles, miracles, and wonders. He had
discovered that her "divine intuitions" were mere shrewd guesses, where
they had any meaning at all; that her eloquent silences were screens for
ignorance or boredom--and so on through the list of legends that prop
the feminist cult.

But this girl--this Miss Hallowell--here was a tangible mystery--a
mystery of physics, of chemistry. He sat watching her--watching the
changes as she bent to her work, or relaxed, or puzzled over the meaning
of one of her own hesitating stenographic hieroglyphics--watched her as
the waning light of the afternoon varied its intensity upon her skin.
Why, her very hair partook of this magical quality and altered its tint,
its degree of vitality even, in harmony with the other changes. . . . What
was the explanation? By means of what rare mechanism did her nerve force
ebb and flow from moment to moment, bringing about these fascinating
surface changes in her body? Could anything, even any skin, be better
made than that superb skin of hers--that master work of delicacy and
strength, of smoothness and color? How had it been possible for him to
fail to notice it, when he was always looking for signs of a good skin
down town--and up town, too--in these days of the ravages of pastry and
candy? . . . What long graceful fingers she had--yet what small hands!
Certainly here was a peculiarity that persisted. No--absurd though it
seemed, no! One way he looked at those hands, they were broad and
strong, another way narrow and gracefully weak.

He said to himself: "The man who gets that girl will have Solomon's
wives rolled into one. A harem at the price of a wife--or a--" He left
the thought unfinished. It seemed an insult to this helpless little
creature, the more rather than the less cowardly for being unspoken;
for, no doubt her ideas of propriety were firmly conventional.

"About done?" he asked impatiently.

She glanced up. "In a moment. I'm sorry to be so slow."

"You're not," he assured her truthfully. "It's my impatience. Let me see
the pages you've finished."

With them he was able to concentrate his mind. When she laid the last
page beside his arm he was absorbed, did not look at her, did not think
of her. "Take the machine away," said he abruptly.

He was leaving for the day when he remembered her again. He sent for
her. "I forgot to thank you. It was good work. You will do well. All you
need is practice--and confidence. Especially confidence." He looked at
her. She seemed frail--touchingly frail. "You are not strong?"

She smiled, and in an instant the frailty seemed to have been mere
delicacy of build--the delicacy that goes with the strength of steel
wires, or rather of the spider's weaving thread which sustains weights
and shocks out of all proportion to its appearance. "I've never been ill
in my life," said she. "Not a day."

Again, because she was standing before him in full view, he noted the
peculiar construction of her frame--the beautiful lines of length so
dextrously combined that her figure as a whole was not tall. He said, "A
working woman--or man--needs health above all. Thank you again." And he
nodded a somewhat curt dismissal. When she glided away and he was alone
behind the closed door, he reflected for a moment upon the extraordinary
amount of thinking--and the extraordinary kind of thinking--into which
this poor little typewriter girl had beguiled him. He soon found the
explanation for this vagary into a realm so foreign to a man of his high
tastes and ambitions. "It's because I'm so in love with Josephine," he
decided. "I've fallen into the sentimental state of all lovers. The
whole sex becomes novel and interesting and worth while."

As he left the office, unusually late, he saw her still at work--no
doubt doing over again some bungled piece of copying. She had her normal
and natural look and air--the atomic little typewriter, unattractive and
uninteresting. With another smile for his romantic imaginings, he forgot
her. But when he reached the street he remembered her again. The
threatened blizzard had changed into a heavy rain. The swift and sudden
currents of air, that have made of New York a cave of the winds since
the coming of the skyscrapers, were darting round corners, turning
umbrellas inside out, tossing women's skirts about their heads, reducing
all who were abroad to the same level of drenched and sullen
wretchedness. Norman's limousine was waiting at the curb. He, pausing in
the doorway, glanced up and down the street, had an impulse to return
and take the girl home. Then he smiled satirically at himself. Her lot
condemned her to be out in all weathers. It would not be a kindness but
an exhibition of smug vanity to shelter her this one night; also, there
was the question of her reputation--and the possibility of turning her
head, perhaps just enough to cause her ruin. He sprang across the
wind-swept, rain-swept sidewalk and into the limousine whose door was
being held open by an obsequious attendant. "Home," he said, and the
door slammed.

Usually these journeys between office and home or club in the evening
gave Norman a chance for ten or fifteen minutes of sleep. He had
discovered that this brief dropping of the thread of consciousness gave
him a wonderful fresh grip upon the day, enabled him to work or play
until late into the night without fatigue. But that evening his mind was
wide awake. Nor could he fix it upon business. It would interest itself
only in the hurrying throngs of foot passengers and the ideas they
suggested: Here am I--so ran his thoughts--here am I, tucked away
comfortably while all those poor creatures have to plod along in the
storm. I could afford to be sick. They can't. And what have I done to
deserve this good fortune? Nothing. Worse than nothing. If I had made my
career along the lines of what is honest and right and beneficial to my
fellow men, I'd probably be plugging home under an umbrella--and to a
pretty poor excuse for a home. But I was too wise to do that. I've spent
this day, as I spend all my days, in helping the powerful rich to add to
their wealth and power, to add to the burdens those poor devils out
there in the rain must bear. And I'm rewarded with a limousine, and all
the rest of it.

These thoughts neither came from nor produced a mood of penitence, or of
regret even. Norman was simply indulging in his favorite
pastime--following without prejudice the leading of a chain of pure
logic. He despised self-deceivers. He always kept himself free from
prejudice and all its wiles. He took life as he found it; but he did not
excuse it and himself with the familiar hypocrisies that make the
comfortable classes preen themselves on being the guardians and saviours
of the ignorant, incapable masses. When old Lockyer said one day that
this was the function of the "upper classes," Norman retorted: "Perhaps.
But, if so, how do they perform it? Like the brutal old-fashioned farm
family that takes care of its insane member by keeping him chained in
filth in the cellar." And once at the Federal Club--By the way, Norman
had joined it, had compelled it to receive him just to show his
associates how a strong man could break even such a firmly established
tradition as that no one who amounted to anything could be elected to a
fashionable club in New York. Once at the Federal Club old Galloway
quoted with approval some essayist's remark that every clever human
being was looking after and holding above the waves at least fifteen of
his weaker fellows. Norman smiled satirically round at the complacently
nodding circle of gray heads and white heads. "My observation has been,"
said he, "that every clever chap is shrewd enough to compel at least
fifteen of his fellows to wait on him, to take care of him--do his
chores--and his dirty work." The nodding stopped. Scowls appeared,
except on the face of old Galloway. He grinned. He was one of the few
examples of a very rich man with a sense of humor. Norman always thought
it was this slight incident that led to his getting the extremely
profitable--and shady--Galloway business.

No, Norman's mood, as he watched the miserable crowds afoot and
reflected upon them, was neither remorseful nor triumphant. He simply
noted an interesting fact--a commonplace fact--of the methods of that
sardonic practical joker, Life. Because the scheme of things was unjust
and stupid, because others, most others, were uncomfortable or
worse--why should he make himself uncomfortable? It would be an
absurdity to get out of his limousine and trudge along in the wet and
the wind. It would be equally absurd to sit in his limousine and be
unhappy about the misery of the world. "I didn't create it, and I can't
recreate it. And if I'm helping to make it worse, I'm also hastening the
time when it'll be better. The Great Ass must have brains and spirit
kicked and cudgeled into it."

At his house in Madison Avenue, just at the crest of Murray Hill, there
was an awning from front door to curb and a carpet beneath it. He
passed, dry and comfortable, up the steps. A footman in quiet rich
livery was waiting to receive him. From rising until bedtime, up town
and down town, wherever he went and whatever he was about, every
possible menial detail of his life was done for him. He had nothing to
do but think about his own work and keep himself in health. Rarely did
he have even to open or to close a door. He used a pen only in signing
his name or marking a passage in a law book for some secretary to make a
typewritten copy.

Upon most human beings this sort of luxury, carried beyond the ordinary
and familiar uses of menial service, has a speedily enervating effect.
Thinking being the most onerous of all, they have it done, also. They
sink into silliness and moral and mental sloth. They pass the time at
foolish purposeless games indoors and out; or they wander aimlessly
about the earth chattering with similar mental decrepits, much like
monkeys adrift in the boughs of a tropical forest. But Norman had the
tenacity and strength to concentrate upon achievement all the powers
emancipated by the use of menials wherever menials could be used. He
employed to advantage the time saved in putting in shirt buttons and
lacing shoes and carrying books to and from shelves. In this lay one of
the important secrets of his success. "Never do for yourself what you
can get some one else to do for you as well. Save yourself for the
things only _you_ can do."

In his household there were three persons, and sixteen servants to wait
upon them. His sister--she and her husband, Clayton Fitzhugh, were the
other two persons--his sister was always complaining that there were not
enough servants, and Frederick, the most indulgent of brothers, was
always letting her add to the number. It seemed to him that the more
help there was, the less smoothly the household ran. But that did not
concern him; his mind was saved for more important matters. There was no
reason why it should concern him; could he not compel the dollars to
flood in faster than she could bail them out?

This brother and sister had come to New York fifteen years before, when
he was twenty-two and she nineteen. They were from Albany, where their
family had possessed some wealth and much social position for many
generations. There was the usual "queer streak" in the Norman family--an
intermittent but fixed habit of some one of them making a "low
marriage." One view of this aberration might have been that there was in
the Norman blood a tenacious instinct of sturdy and self-respecting
independence that caused a Norman occasionally to do as he pleased
instead of as he conventionally ought. Each time the thing occurred
there was a mighty and horrified hubbub throughout the connection. But
in the broad, as the custom is, the Normans were complacent about the
"queer streak." They thought it kept the family from rotting out and
running to seed. "Nothing like an occasional infusion of common blood,"
Aunt Ursula Van Bruyten (born Norman) used to say. For her Norman's
sister was named.

Norman's father had developed the "queer streak." Their mother was the
daughter of a small farmer and, when she met their father, was
chambermaid in a Troy hotel, Troy then being a largish village. As soon
as she found herself married and in a position with whose duties she was
unfamiliar, she set about fitting herself for them with the same
diligence and thoroughness which she had shown in learning chamber work
in a village hotel. She educated herself, selected not without
shrewdness and carefully put on an assortment of genteel airs, finally
contrived to make a most creditable appearance--was more aristocratic in
tastes and in talk than the high mightiest of her relatives by marriage.
But her son Fred was a Pinkey in character. In boyhood he was noted for
his rough and low associates. His bosom friends were the son of a Jewish
junk dealer, the son of a colored wash-woman, and the son of an Irish
day laborer. Also, the commonness persisted as he grew up. Instead of
seeking aristocratic ease, he aspired to a career. He had choice of
several rich and well-born girls; but he developed a strong distaste for
marriage of any sort and especially for a rich marriage. A fortune he
was resolved to have, but it should be one that belonged to him. When he
was about ready to enter a law office, his father and mother died
leaving less than ten thousand dollars in all for his sister and
himself. His sister hesitated, half inclined to marry a stupid second
cousin who had thirty thousand a year.

"Don't do it, Ursula," Fred advised. "If you must sell out, sell for
something worth while." He laughed in his frank, ironical way. "Fact is,
we've both made up our minds to sell. Let's go to the best market--New
York. If you don't like it, you can come back and marry that fat-wit any
time you please."

Ursula inspected herself in the glass, saw a face and form exceeding
fair to look upon; she decided to take her brother's advice. At twenty
she threw over a multi-millionaire and married Clayton Fitzhugh for
love--Clayton with only seventeen thousand a year. Of course, from the
standpoint of fashionable ambition, seventeen thousand a year in New
York is but one remove from tenement house poverty. As Clayton had no
more ability at making money than had Ursula herself, there was nothing
to do but live with Norman and "take care of him." But for this
self-sacrifice of sisterly affection Norman would have been rich at
thirty-seven. As he had to make her rich as well as himself, progress
toward luxurious independence was slower--and there was the house,
costing nearly fifty thousand a year to keep up.

There had been a time in Norman's career--a brief and very early
time--when, with the maternal peasant blood hot in his veins, he had
entertained the quixotic idea of going into politics on the poor or
people's side and fighting for glory only. The pressure of expensive
living had soon driven this notion clean off. Norman had almost
forgotten that he ever had it, was no longer aware how strong it had
been in the last year at law school. Young men of high intelligence and
ardent temperament always pass through this period. With some--a
few--its glory lingers long after the fire has flickered out before the
cool, steady breath of worldliness.

All this time Norman has been dressing for dinner. He now leaves the
third floor and descends toward the library, as it still lacks twenty
minutes of the dinner hour.

As he walked along the hall of the second floor a woman's voice called
to him, "That you, Fred?"

He turned in at his sister's sitting room. She was standing at a table
smoking a cigarette. Her tall, slim figure looked even taller and
slimmer in the tight-fitting black satin evening dress. Her features
faintly suggested her relationship to Norman. She was a handsome woman,
with a voluptuous discontented mouth.

"What are you worried about, sis?" inquired he.

"How did you know I was worried?" returned she.

"You always are."

"Oh!"

"But you're unusually worried to-night."

"How did you know that?"

"You never smoke just before dinner unless your nerves are ragged. . . .
What is it?"

"Money."

"Of course. No one in New York worries about anything else."

"But _this_ is serious," protested she. "I've been thinking--about your
marriage--and what'll become of Clayton and me?" She halted, red with
embarrassment.

Norman lit a cigarette himself. "I ought to have explained," said he.
"But I assumed you'd understand."

"Fred, you know Clayton can't make anything. And when you
marry--why--what _will_ become of us!"

"I've been taking care of Clayton's money--and of yours. I'll continue
to do it. I think you'll find you're not so badly of. You see, my
position enables me to compel a lot of the financiers to let me in on
the ground floor--and to warn me in good time before the house falls.
You'll not miss me, Ursula."

She showed her gratitude in her eyes, in a slight quiver of the lips, in
an unsteadiness of tone as she said, "You're the real thing, Freddie."

"You can go right on as you are now. Only--" He was looking at her with
meaning directness.

She moved uneasily, refused to meet his gaze. "Well?" she said, with a
suggestion of defiance.

"It's all very natural to get tired of Clayton," said her brother. "I
knew you would when you married him. But--Sis, I mind my own business.
Still--Why make a fool of yourself?"

"You don't understand," she exclaimed passionately. And the light in her
eyes, the color in her cheeks, restored to her for the moment the beauty
of her youth that was almost gone.

"Understand what?" inquired he in a tone of gentle mockery.

"Love. You are all ambition--all self control. You can be
affectionate--God knows, you have been to me, Fred. But love you know
nothing about--nothing."

His was the smile a man gives when in earnest and wishing to be thought
jesting--or when in jest and wishing to be thought in earnest.

"You mean Josephine? Oh, yes, I suppose you do care for her in a way--in
a nice, conventional way. She is a fine handsome piece--just the sort to
fill the position of wife to a man like you. She's sweet and charming,
she appreciates, she flatters you. I'm sure she loves you as much as a
_girl_ knows how to love. But it's all so conventional, so proper. Your
position--her money. You two are of the regulation type even in that
you're suited to each other in height and figure. Everybody'll say,
'What a fine couple--so well matched!'"

"Maybe _you_ don't understand," said Norman.

"If Josephine were poor and low-born--weren't one of us--and all
that--would you have her?"

"I'm sure I don't know," was his prompt and amused answer. "I can only
say that I know what I want, she being what she is."

Ursula shook her head. "I have only to see you and her together to know
that you at least don't understand love."

"It might be well if _you_ didn't," said Norman dryly. "You might be less
unhappy--and Clayton less uneasy."

"Ah, but I can't help myself. Don't you see it in me, Fred? I'm not a
fool. Yet see what a fool I act."

"Spoiled child--that's all. No self-control."

"You despise everyone who isn't as strong as you." She looked at him
intently. "I wonder if you _are_ as self-controlled as you imagine.
Sometimes I wish you'd get a lesson. Then you'd be more sympathetic. But
it isn't likely you will--not through a woman. Oh, they're such
pitifully easy game for a man like you. But then men are the same way
with you--quite as easy. You get anything you want. . . . You're really
going to stick to Josephine?"

He nodded. "It's time for me to settle down."

"Yes--I think it is," she went on thoughtfully. "I can hardly believe
you're to marry. Of course, she's the grand prize. Still--I never
imagined you'd come in and surrender. I guess you _do_ care for her."

"Why else should I marry?" argued he. "She's got nothing I need--except
herself, Ursula."

"What _is_ it you see in her?"

"What you see--what everyone sees," replied Fred, with quiet, convincing
enthusiasm. "What no one could help seeing. As you say, she's the grand
prize."

"Yes, she is sweet and handsome--and intelligent--very superior,
without making others feel that they're outclassed. Still--there's
something lacking--not in her perhaps, but in you. You have it for
her--she's crazy about you. But she hasn't it for you."

"What?"

"I can't tell you. It isn't a thing that can be put into words."

"Then it doesn't exist."

"Oh, yes it does," cried Ursula. "If the engagement were to be
broken--or if anything were to happen to her--why, you'd get over
it--would go on as if nothing had happened. If she didn't fit in with
your plans and ambitions, she'd be sacrificed so quick she'd not know
what had taken off her head. But if you felt what I mean--then you'd
give up everything--do the wildest, craziest things."

"What nonsense!" scoffed Norman. "I can imagine myself making a fool
of myself about a woman as easily as about anything else. But I can't
imagine myself playing the fool for anything whatsoever."

There was mysterious fire in Ursula's absent eyes. "You remember me as a
girl--how mercenary I was--how near I came to marrying Cousin Jake?"

"I saved you from that."

"Yes--and for what? I fell in love."

"And out again."

"I was deceived in Clayton--deceived myself--naturally. How is a woman
to know, without experience?"

"Oh, I'm not criticising," said the brother.

"Besides, a love marriage that fails is different from a mercenary
marriage that fails."

"Very--very," agreed he. "Just the difference between an honorable and a
dishonorable bankruptcy."

"Anyhow--it's bankrupt--my marriage. But I've learned what love is--that
there is such a thing--and that it's valuable. Yes, Fred, I've got the
taste for that wine--the habit of it. Could I go back to water or milk?"

"Spoiled baby--that's the whole story. If you had a nursery full of
children--or did the heavy housework--you'd never think of these
foolish moonshiny things."

"Yet you say you love!"

"Clayton is as good as any you're likely to run across--is better than
_some_ I've seen about."

"How can _you_ say?" cried she. "It's for me to judge."

"If you would only _judge_!"

Ursula sighed. "It's useless to talk to you. Let's go down."

Norman, following her from the room, stopped her in the doorway to give
her a brotherly hug and kiss. "You won't make an out-and-out idiot of
yourself, will you, Ursula?" he said, in his winning manner.

The expression of her eyes as she looked at him showed how strong was
his influence over her. "You know I'll come to you for advice before I
do anything final," said she. "Oh, I don't know what I want! I only know
what I don't want. I wish I were well balanced--as you are, Fred."

[Illustration: "'You won't make an out-and-out idiot of yourself, will
you Ursula?'"]




III


The brother and sister dined alone. Clayton was, finding his club a more
comfortable place than his home, in those days of his wife's
disillusionment and hesitation about the future. Many weak creatures are
curiously armed for the unequal conflict of existence--some with
fleetness of foot, some with a pole-cat weapon of malignance, some with
porcupine quills, some with a 'possumlike instinct for "playing dead."
Of these last was Fitzhugh. He knew when to be silent, when to keep out
of the way, when to "sit tight" and wait. His wife had discovered that
he was a fool--that he perhaps owed more to his tailor than to any other
single factor for the success of his splendid pose of the thorough
gentleman. Yet she did not realize what an utter fool he was, so clever
had he been in the use of the art of discreet silence. Norman suspected
him, but could not believe a human being capable of such fathomless
vacuity as he found whenever he tried to explore his brother-in-law's
brain.

After dinner Norman took Ursula to the opera, to join the Seldins, and
after the first act went to Josephine, who had come with only a deaf old
aunt. Josephine loved music, and to hear an opera from a box one must be
alone. Norman entered as the lights went up. It always gave him a
feeling of dilation, this spectacle of material splendor--the women,
whose part it is throughout civilization to-day to wear for public
admiration and envy the evidences of the prowess of the males to whom
they belong. A truer version of Dr. Holmes's aphorism would be that it
takes several generations in oil to make a deep-dyed snob--wholly to
destroy a man's or a woman's point of view, sense of the kinship of all
flesh, and to make him or her over into the genuine believer in caste
and worshiper of it. For all his keenness of mind, of humor, Norman had
the fast-dyed snobbishness of his family and friends. He knew that caste
was silly, that such displays as this vulgar flaunting of jewels and
costly dresses were in atrocious bad taste. But it is one thing to know,
another thing to feel; and his feeling was delight in the spectacle,
pride in his own high rank in the aristocracy.

His eyes rested with radiant pleasure on the girl he was to marry. And
she was indeed a person to appeal to the passion of pride. Simply and
most expensively dressed in pearl satin, with only a little jewelry, she
sat in the front of her parterre box, a queen by right of her father's
wealth, her family's position, her own beauty. She was a large
woman--tall, a big frame but not ungainly. She had brilliant dark eyes,
a small proud head set upon shoulders that were slenderly young now and,
even when they should became matronly, would still be beautiful. She had
good teeth, an exquisite smile, the gentle good humor of those who,
comfortable themselves, would not have the slightest objection to all
others being equally so. Because she laughed appreciatively and repeated
amusingly she had great reputation for wit. Because she industriously
picked up from men a plausible smatter of small talk about politics,
religion, art and the like, she was renowned as clever verging on
profound. And she believed herself both witty and wise--as do thousands,
male and female, with far less excuse.

She had selected Norman for the same reason that he had selected her;
each recognized the other as the "grand prize." Pity is not nearly so
close kin to love as is the feeling that the other person satisfies to
the uttermost all one's pet vanities. It would have been next door to
impossible for two people so well matched not to find themselves drawn
to each other and filled with sympathy and the sense of comradeship, so
far as there can be comradeship where two are driving luxuriously along
the way of life, with not a serious cause for worry. People without half
the general fitness of these two for each other have gone through to the
end, regarding themselves and regarded as the most devoted of lovers.
Indeed, they were lovers. Only one of those savage tests, to which in
all probability they would never be exposed, would or could reveal just
how much, or how little, that vague, variable word lovers meant when
applied to them.

As their eyes met, into each pair leaped the fine, exalted light of
pride in possession. "This wonderful woman is mine!" his eyes said. And
her eyes answered, "And you--you most wonderful of men--you are mine!"
It always gave each of them a thrill like intoxication to meet, after a
day's separation. All the joy of their dazzling good fortune burst upon
them afresh.

"I'll venture you haven't thought of me the whole day," said she as he
dropped to the chair behind her.

It was a remark she often made--to give him the opportunity to say,
"I've thought of little else, I'm sorry to say--I, who have a career to
look after." He made the usual answer, and they smiled happily at each
other. "And you?" he said.

"Oh, I? What else has a woman to think about?"

Her statement was as true as his was false. He was indeed all she had to
think about--all worth wasting the effort of thought upon. But
he--though he did not realize it--had thought of her only in the
incidental way in which an ambition-possessed man must force himself to
think of a woman. The best of his mind was commandeered to his career.
An amiable but shakily founded theory that it was "our" career enabled
him to say without sense of lying that his chief thought had been she.

"How those men down town would poke fun at you," said she, "if they knew
you had me with you all the time, right beside you."

This amused him. "Still, I suspect there are lots of men who'd be
exposed in the same way if there were a general and complete show-down."

"Sometimes I wish I really were with you--working with you--helping you.
You have girls--a girl--to be your secretary--or whatever you call
it--don't you?"

"You should have seen the one I had to-day. But there's always something
pathetic about every girl who has to make her own living."

"Pathetic!" protested Miss Burroughs. "Not at all. I think it's fine."

"You wouldn't say that if you had tried it."

"Indeed, I should," she declared with spirit. "You men are entirely too
soft about women. You don't realize how strong they are. And, of course,
women don't resist the temptation to use their sex when they see how
easy it is to fool men that way. The sad thing about it is that the
woman who gets along by using her sex and by appealing to the
soft-heartedness of men never learns to rely on herself. She's likely to
come to grief sooner or later."

"There's truth in all that," said Norman. "Enough to make it dangerously
unjust. There's so much lying done about getting on that it's no wonder
those who've never tried to do for themselves get a wholly false notion
of the situation. It is hard--bitterly hard--for a man to get on. Most
men don't. Most men? All but a mere handful. And if those who do get on
were to tell the truth--the _whole_ truth--about how they
succeeded--well, it'd not make a pleasant story."

"But _you've_ got on," retorted the girl.

"So I have. And how?" Norman smiled with humorous cynicism. "I'll never
tell--not all--only the parts that sound well. And those parts are the
least important. However, let's not talk about that. What I set out to
say was that, while it's hard for a man to make a decent living--unless
he has luck--and harder still--much harder--for him to rise to
independence----"

"It wasn't so dreadfully hard for _you_," interrupted Josephine, looking
at him with proud admiration. "But then, you had a wonderful brain."

"That wasn't what did it," replied he. "And, in spite of all my
advantages--friendships, education, enough money to tide me over the
beginnings--in spite of all that, I had a frightful time. Not the work.
Of course, I had to work, but I like that. No, it was the--the
maneuvering, let's call it--the hardening process."

"You!" she exclaimed.

"Everyone who succeeds--in active life. You don't understand the system,
dear. It's a cutthroat game. It isn't at all what the successful
hypocrites describe in their talks to young men!" He laughed. "If I had
followed the 'guides to success,' I'd not be here. Oh, yes, I've made
terrible sacrifices, but--" his look at her made her thrill with
exaltation--"it was worth doing. . . . I understand and sympathize with
those who scorn to succeed. But I'm glad I happened not to be born with
their temperament, at least not with enough of it to keep me down."

"You're too hard on yourself, too generous to the failures."

"Oh, I don't mean the men who were too lazy to do the work or too
cowardly to dare the--the unpleasant things. And I'm not hard with
myself--only frank. But we were talking of the women. Poor things, what
chance have they got? You scorn them for using their sex. Wait till
you're drowning, dear, before you criticise another for what he does to
save himself when he's sinking for the last time. I used everything I
had in making my fight. If I could have got on better or quicker by the
aid of my sex, I'd have used that."

"Don't say those things, Fred," cried Josephine, smiling but half in
earnest.

"Why not? Aren't you glad I'm here?"

She gave him a long look of passionate love and lowered her eyes.

"At whatever cost?"

"Yes," she said in a low voice. "But I'm _sure_ you exaggerate."

"I've done nothing _you_ wouldn't approve of--or find excuses for. But
that's because you--I--all of us in this class--and in most other
classes--have been trained to false ideas--no, to perverted ideas--to a
system of morality that's twisted to suit the demands of practical life.
On Sundays we go to a magnificent church to hear an expensive preacher
and choir, go in expensive dress and in carriages, and we never laugh at
ourselves. Yet we are going in the name of One who was born in a stable
and who said that we must give everything to the poor, and so on."

"But I don't see what we could do about it--" she said hesitatingly.

"We couldn't do anything. Only--don't you see my point?--the difference
between theory and practice? Personally, I've no objection--no strong
objection--to the practice. All I object to is the lying and faking
about it, to make it seem to fit the theory. But we were talking of
women--women who work."

"I've no doubt you're right," admitted she. "I suppose they aren't to
blame for using their sex. I ought to be ashamed of myself, to sneer at
them."

"As a matter of fact, their sex does few of them any good. The reverse.
You see, an attractive woman--one who's attractive _as_ a woman--can
skirmish round and find some one to support her. But most of the working
women--those who keep on at it--don't find the man. They're not
attractive, not even at the start. After they've been at it a few years
and lose the little bloom they ever had--why, they've got to take their
chances at the game, precisely like a man. Only, they're handicapped by
always hoping that they'll be able to quit and become married women. I'd
like to see how men would behave if they could find or could imagine any
alternative to 'root hog or die.'"

"What's the matter with you this evening, Fred? I never saw you in such
a bitter mood."

"We never happened to get on this subject before."

"Oh, yes, we have. And you always have scoffed at the men who fail."

"And I still scoff at them--most of them. A lot of lazy cowards. Or
else, so bent on self-indulgence--petty self-indulgence--that they
refuse to make the small sacrifice to-day for the sake of the large
advantage day after to-morrow. Or else so stuffed with vanity that they
never see their own mistakes. However, why blame them? They were born
that way, and can't change. A man who has the equipment of success and
succeeds has no more right to sneer at one less lucky than you would
have to laugh at a poor girl because she wasn't dressed as well as you."

"What a mood! _Something_ must have happened."

"Perhaps," said he reflectively. "Possibly that girl set me off."

"What girl?"

"The one I told you about. The unfortunate little creature who was
typewriting for me this afternoon. Not so very little, either. A curious
figure she had. She was tall yet she wasn't. She seemed thin, and when
you looked again, you saw that she was really only slender, and
beautifully shaped throughout."

Miss Burroughs laughed. "She must have been attractive."

"Not in the least. Absolutely without charm--and so homely--no, not
homely--commonplace. No, that's not right, either. She had a startling
way of fading and blazing out. One moment she seemed a blank--pale,
lifeless, colorless, a nobody. The next minute she became--amazingly
different. Not the same thing every time, but different things."

Frederick Norman was too experienced a dealer with women deliberately to
make the mistake--rather, to commit the breach of tact and
courtesy--involved in praising one woman to another. But in this case it
never occurred to him that he was talking to a woman of a woman.
Josephine Burroughs was a lady; the other was a piece of office
machinery--and a very trivial piece at that. But he saw and instantly
understood the look in her eyes--the strained effort to keep the
telltale upper lip from giving its prompt and irrepressible signal of
inward agitation.

"I'm very much interested," said she.

"Yes, she was a curiosity," said he carelessly.

"Has she been there--long?" inquired Josephine, with a feigned
indifference that did not deceive him.

"Several months, I believe. I never noticed her until a few days ago.
And until to-day I had forgotten her. She's one of the kind it's
difficult to remember."

He fell to glancing round the house, pretending to be unconscious of the
furtive suspicion with which she was observing him. She said:

"She's your secretary now?"

"Merely a general office typewriter."

The curtain went up for the second act. Josephine fixed her attention on
the stage--apparently undivided attention. But Norman felt rather than
saw that she was still worrying about the "curiosity." He marveled at
this outcropping of jealousy. It seemed ridiculous--it _was_ ridiculous.
He laughed to himself. If she could see the girl--the obscure,
uninteresting cause of her agitation--how she would mock at herself!
Then, too, there was the absurdity of thinking him capable of such a
stoop. A woman of their own class--or a woman of its corresponding
class, on the other side of the line--yes. No doubt she had heard
things that made her uneasy, or, at least, ready to be uneasy. But this
poorly dressed obscurity, with not a charm that could attract even a man
of her own lowly class--It was such a good joke that he would have
teased Josephine about it but for his knowledge of the world--a
knowledge in whose primer it was taught that teasing is both bad taste
and bad judgment. Also, it was beneath his dignity, it was offense to
his vanity, to couple his name with the name of one so beneath him that
even the matter of sex did not make the coupling less intolerable.

When the curtain fell several people came into the box, and he went to
make a few calls round the parterre. He returned after the second act.
They were again alone--the deaf old aunt did not count. At once
Josephine began upon the same subject. With studied indifference--how
amusing for a woman of her inexperience to try to fool a man of his
experience!--she said:

"Tell me some more about that typewriter girl. Women who work always
interest me."

"She wouldn't," said Norman. The subject had been driven clean out of
his mind, and he didn't wish to return to it. "Some day they will
venture to make judicious long cuts in Wagner's operas, and then they'll
be interesting. It always amuses me, this reverence of little people for
the great ones--as if a great man were always great. No--he _is_ always
great. But often it's in a dull way. And the dull parts ought to be
skipped."

"I don't like the opera this evening," said she. "What you said a while
ago has set me to thinking. Is that girl a lady?"

"She works," laughed he.

"But she might have been a lady."

"I'm sure I don't know."

"Don't you know _anything_ about her?"

"Except that she's trustworthy--and insignificant and not too good at
her business."

"I shouldn't think you could afford to keep incompetent people," said
the girl shrewdly.

"Perhaps they won't keep her," parried Norman gracefully. "The head
clerk looks after those things."

"He probably likes her."

"No," said Norman, too indifferent to be cautious. "She has no
'gentlemen friends.'"

"How do you know that?" said the girl, and she could not keep a certain
sharpness out of her voice.

"Tetlow, the head clerk, told me. I asked him a few questions about her.
I had some confidential work to do and didn't want to trust her without
being sure."

He saw that she was now prey to her jealous suspicion. He was uncertain
whether to be amused or irritated. She had to pause long and with
visible effort collect herself before venturing:

"Oh, she does confidential work for you? I thought you said she was
incompetent."

He, the expert cross-examiner, had to admire her skill at that high
science and art. "I felt sorry for her," he said. "She seemed such a
forlorn little creature."

She laughed with a constrained attempt at raillery. "I never should have
suspected you of such weakness. To give confidential things to a forlorn
little incompetent, out of pity."

He was irritated, distinctly. The whole thing was preposterous. It
reminded him of feats of his own before a jury. By clever questioning,
Josephine had made about as trifling an incident as could be imagined
take on really quite imposing proportions. There was annoyance in his
smile as he said:

"Shall I send her up to see you? You might find it amusing, and maybe
you could do something for her."

Josephine debated. "Yes," she finally said. "I wish you would send
her--" with a little sarcasm--"if you can spare her for an hour or so."

"Don't make it longer than that," laughed he. "Everything will stop
while she's gone."

It pleased him, in a way, this discovery that Josephine had such a
common, commonplace weakness as jealousy. But it also took away
something from his high esteem for her--an esteem born of the lover's
idealizings; for, while he was not of the kind of men who are on their
knees before women, he did have a deep respect for Josephine,
incarnation of all the material things that dazzled him--a respect with
something of the reverential in it, and something of awe--more than he
would have admitted to himself. To-day, as of old, the image-makers are
as sincere worshipers as visit the shrines. In our prostrations and
genuflections in the temple we do not discriminate against the idols we
ourselves have manufactured; on the contrary, them we worship with
peculiar gusto. Norman knew his gods were frauds, that their divine
qualities were of the earth earthy. But he served them, and what most
appealed to him in Josephine was that she incorporated about all their
divine qualities.

He and his sister went home together. Her first remark in the auto was:
"What were you and Josie quarreling about?"

"Quarreling?" inquired he in honest surprise.

"I looked at her through my glasses and saw that the was all upset--and
you, too."

"This is too ridiculous," cried he.

"She looked--jealous."

"Nonsense! What an imagination you have!"

"I saw what I saw," Ursula maintained. "Well, I suppose she has heard
something--something recent. I thought you had sworn off, Fred. But I
might have known."

Norman was angry. He wondered at his own exasperation, out of all
proportion to any apparent provoking cause. And it was most unusual for
him to feel temper, all but unprecedented for him to show it, no matter
how strong the temptation.

"It's a good idea, to make her jealous," pursued his sister. "Nothing
like jealousy to stimulate interest."

"Josephine is not that sort of woman."

"You know better. All women are that sort. All men, too. Of course, some
men and women grow angry and go away when they get jealous while others
stick closer. So one has to be judicious."

"Josephine and I understand each other far too well for such pettiness."

"Try her. No, you needn't. You have."

"Didn't I tell you----"

"Then what was she questioning you about?"

"Just to show you how wrong you were, I'll tell you. She was asking me
about a poor little girl down at the office--one she wants to help."

Ursula laughed. "To help out of your office, I guess. I thought you'd
lived long enough, Fred, to learn that no woman trusts _any_ man about
_any_ woman. Who is this 'poor little girl'?"

"I don't even know her name. One of the typewriters."

"What made Josephine jealous of her?"

"Haven't I told you Josephine was not----"

"But I saw. Who is this girl?--pretty?"

Norman pretended to stifle a yawn. "Josephine bored me half to death
talking about her. Now it's you. I never heard so much about so little."

"Is there something up between you and the girl?" teased Ursula.

"Now, that's an outrage!" cried Norman. "She's got nothing but her
reputation, poor child. Do leave her that."

"Is she very young?"

"How should I know?"

"Youth is a charm in itself."

"What sort of rot is this!" exclaimed he. "Do you think I'd drop down to
anything of that kind--in _any_ circumstances? A little working girl--and
in my own office?"

"Why do you heat so, Fred?" teased the sister. "Really, I don't wonder
Josephine was torn up."

An auto almost ran into them--one of those innumerable hairbreadth
escapes that make the streets of New York as exciting as a battle--and
as dangerous. For a few minutes Ursula's mind was deflected. But a
fatality seemed to pursue the subject of the pale obscurity whose very
name he was uncertain whether he remembered aright.

Said Ursula, as they entered the house, "A girl working in the office
with a man has a magnificent chance at him. It's lucky for the men that
women don't know their business, but are amateurs and too stuck on
themselves to set and bait their traps properly. Is that girl trying to
get round you?"

"What possesses everybody to-night!" cried Norman. "I tell you the
girl's as uninteresting a specimen as you could find."

"Then why are _you_ so interested in her?" teased the sister.

Norman shrugged his shoulders, laughed with his normal easy good humor
and went to his own floor.

On top of the pile of letters beside his plate, next morning, lay a note
from Josephine:

  "Don't forget your promise about that girl, dear. I've an hour before
  lunch, and could see her then. I was out of humor last night. I'm very
  penitent this morning. Please forgive me. Maybe I can do something for
  her. JOSEPHINE."


Norman read with amused eyes. "Well!" soliloquized he, "I'm not likely
to forget that poor little creature again. What a fuss about nothing!"




IV


Many men, possibly a majority, have sufficient equipment for at least a
fair measure of success. Yet all but a few are downright failures,
passing their lives in helpless dependence, glad to sell themselves for
a small part of the value they create. For this there are two main
reasons. The first is, as Norman said, that only a few men have the
self-restraint to resist the temptings of a small pleasure to-day in
order to gain a larger to-morrow or next day. The second is that few men
possess the power of continuous concentration. Most of us cannot
concentrate at all; any slight distraction suffices to disrupt and
destroy the whole train of thought. A good many can concentrate for a
few hours, for a week or so, for two or three months. But there comes a
small achievement and it satisfies, or a small discouragement and it
disheartens. Only to the rare few is given the power to concentrate
steadily, year in and year out, through good and evil event or report.

As Norman stepped into his auto to go to the office--he had ridden a
horse in the park before breakfast until its hide was streaked with
lather--the instant he entered his auto, he discharged his mind of
everything but the business before him down town--or, rather, business
filled his mind so completely that everything else poured out and away.
A really fine mind--a perfect or approximately perfect instrument to the
purposes of its possessor--is a marvelous spectacle of order. It is like
a vast public library constantly used by large numbers. There are
alcoves, rows on rows, shelves on shelves, with the exactest system
everywhere prevailing, with the attendants moving about in list-bottomed
shoes, fulfilling without the least hesitation or mistake the multitude
of directions from the central desk. It is like an admirably drilled
army, where there is the nice balance of freedom and discipline that
gives mobility without confusion; the divisions, down to files and even
units, can be disposed along the line of battle wherever needed, or can
be marshaled in reserve for use at the proper moment. Such a mind may be
used for good purpose or bad--or for mixed purposes, after the usual
fashion in human action. But whatever the service to which it is put, it
acts with equal energy and precision. Character--that is a thing apart.
The character determines the morality of action; but only the intellect
determines the skill of action.

In the offices of that great law firm one of the keenest pleasures of
the more intelligent of the staff was watching the workings of Frederick
Norman's mind--its ease of movement, its quickness and accuracy, its
obedience to the code of mental habits he had fixed for himself. In
large part all this was born with the man; but it had been brought to a
state of perfection by the most painful labor, by the severest
discipline, by years of practice of the sacrifice of small
temptations--temptations to waste time and strength on the little
pleasant things which result in such heavy bills--bills that bankrupt a
man in middle life and send him in old age into the deserts of poverty
and contempt.

Such an unique and trivial request as that of Josephine Burroughs being
wholly out of his mental habit for down town, he forgot it along with
everything else having to do with uptown only--along with Josephine
herself, to tell a truth which may pique the woman reader and may be
wholly misunderstood by the sentimentalists. By merest accident he was
reminded.

As the door of his private office opened to admit an important client he
happened to glance up. And between the edge of the door frame and his
client's automobile-fattened and carefully dressed body, he caught a
glimpse of the "poor little forlornness" who chanced to be crossing the
outer office. A glint of sunlight on her hair changed it from
lifelessness to golden vital vividness; the same chance sunbeam touched
her pale skin with a soft yellow radiation--and her profile was
delicately fine and regular. Thus Norman, who observed everything, saw
a head of finely wrought gold--a startling cameo against the dead white
of office wall. It was only with the second thought that he recognized
her. The episode of the night before came back and Josephine's penitent
yet persistent note.

He glanced at the clock. Said the client in the amusing tone of one who
would like to take offense if he only dared, "I'll not detain you long,
Mr. Norman. And really the matter is extremely important."

There are not many lawyers, even of the first rank, with whom their big
clients reverse the attitude of servant and master. Norman might well
have been flattered. In that restrained tone from one used to servility
and fond of it and easily miffed by lack of it was the whole story of
Norman's long battle and splendid victory. But he was not in the mood to
be flattered; he was thinking of other things. And it presently annoyed
him that his usually docile mind refused to obey his will's order to
concentrate on the client and the business--said business being one of
those huge schemes through which a big monster of a corporation is
constructed by lawyers out of materials supplied by great capitalists
and controllers of capital, is set to eating in enormous meals the
substance of the people; at some obscure point in all the principal
veins small but leechlike parasite corporations are attached,
industriously to suck away the surplus blood so that the owners of the
beast may say, "It is eating almost nothing. See how lean it is, poor
thing! Why, the bones fairly poke through its meager hide."

An interesting and highly complicated enterprise is such a construction.
It was of the kind in which Norman's mind especially delighted; Hercules
is himself only in presence of an herculean labor. But on that day he
could not concentrate, and because of a trifle! He felt like a giant
disabled by a grain of dust in the eye--yes, a mere grain of dust! "I
must love Josephine even more than I realize, to be fretted by such a
paltry thing," thought he. And after patiently enduring the client for
half an hour without being able to grasp the outlines of the project, he
rose abruptly and said: "I must get into my mind the points you've given
me before we can go further. So I'll not waste your time."

This sounded very like "Clear out--you've bored me to my limit of
endurance." But the motions of a mind such as he knew Norman had were
beyond and high above the client's mere cunning at dollar-trapping. He
felt that it was the part of wisdom--also soothing to vanity--to assume
that Norman meant only what his words conveyed. When Norman was alone he
rang for an office boy and said:

"Please ask Miss Halliday to come here."

The boy hesitated. "Miss Hallowell?" he suggested.

"Hallowell--thanks--Hallowell," said Norman.

And it somehow pleased him that he had not remembered her name. How
significant it was of her insignificance that so accurate a memory as
his should make the slip. When she, impassive, colorless, nebulous,
stood before him the feeling of pleasure was, queerly enough, mingled
with a sense of humiliation. What absurd vagaries his imagination had
indulged in! For it must have been sheer hallucination, his seeing those
wonders in her. How he would be laughed at if those pictures he had made
of her could be seen by any other eyes! "They must be right when they
say a man in love is touched in the head. Only, why the devil should I
have happened to get these crazy notions about a person I've no interest
in?" However, the main point--and most satisfactory--was that Josephine
would be at a glance convinced--convicted--made ashamed of her absurd
attack. A mere grain of dust.

"Just a moment, please," he said to Miss Hallowell. "I want to give you
a note of introduction."

He wrote the note to Josephine Burroughs: "Here she is. I've told her
you wish to talk with her about doing some work for you." When he
finished he looked up. She was standing at the window, gazing out upon
the tremendous panorama of skyscrapers that makes New York the most
astounding of the cities of men. He was about to speak. The words fell
back unuttered. For once more the hallucination--or whatever it
was--laid hold of him. That figure by the window--that beautiful girl,
with the great dreamy eyes and the soft and languorous nuances of golden
haze over her hair, over the skin of perfectly rounded cheek and
perfectly moulded chin curving with ideal grace into the whitest and
firmest of throats----

"Am I mad? or do I really see what I see?" he muttered.

He turned away to clear his eyes for a second view, for an attempt to
settle it whether he saw or imagined. When he looked again, she was
observing him--and once more she was the obscure, the cipherlike Miss
Hallowell, ten-dollar-a-week typewriter and not worth it. Evidently she
noted his confusion and was vaguely alarmed by it. He recovered himself
as best he could and debated whether it was wise to send her to
Josephine. Surely those transformations were not altogether his own
hallucinations; and Josephine might see, might humiliate him by
suspecting more strongly--... Ridiculous! He held out the letter.

"The lady to whom this is addressed wishes to see you. Will you go
there, right away, please? It may be that you'll get the chance to make
some extra money. You've no objection, I suppose?"

She took the letter hesitatingly.

"You will find her agreeable, I think," continued he. "At any rate, the
trip can do no harm."

She hesitated a moment longer, as if weighing what he had said. "No, it
will do no harm," she finally said. Then, with a delightful color and a
quick transformation into a vision of young shyness, "Thank you, Mr.
Norman. Thank you so much."

"Not at all--not in the least," he stammered, the impulse strong to take
the note back and ask her to return to her desk.

When the door closed behind her he rose and paced about the room
uneasily. He was filled with disquiet, with hazy apprehension. His
nerves were unsteady, as if he were going through an exhausting strain.
He sat and tried to force himself to work. Impossible. "What sort of
damn fool attack is this?" he exclaimed, pacing about again. He searched
his mind in vain for any cause adequate to explain his unprecedented
state. "If I did not know that I was well--absolutely well--I'd think I
was about to have an illness--something in the brain."

He appealed to that friend in any trying hour, his sense of humor. He
laughed at himself; but his nerves refused to return to the normal. He
rushed from his private office on various pretexts, each time lingered
in the general room, talking aimlessly with Tetlow--and watching the
door. When she at last appeared, he guiltily withdrew, feeling that
everyone was observing his perturbation and was wondering at it and
jesting about it. "And what the devil am I excited about?" he demanded
of himself. What indeed? He seated himself, rang the bell.

"If Miss Hallowell has got back," he said to the office boy, "please ask
her to come in."

"I think she's gone out to lunch," said the boy. "I know she came in a
while ago. She passed along as you was talking to Mr. Tetlow."

Norman felt himself flushing. "Any time will do," he said, bending over
the papers spread out before him--the papers in the case of the General
Traction Company resisting the payment of its taxes. A noisome odor
seemed to be rising from the typewritten sheets. He made a wry face and
flung the papers aside with a gesture of disgust. "They never do
anything honest," he said to himself. "From the stock-jobbing owners
down to the nickel-filching conductors they steal--steal--steal!" And
then he wondered at, laughed at, his heat. What did it matter? An ant
pilfering from another ant and a sparrow stealing the crumb found by
another sparrow--a man robbing another man--all part of the universal
scheme. Only a narrow-minded ignoramus would get himself wrought up over
it; a philosopher would laugh--and take what he needed or happened to
fancy.

The door opened. Miss Hallowell entered, a small and demure hat upon her
masses of thick fair hair arranged by anything but unskillful fingers.
"You wished to see me?" came in the quiet little voice, sweet and frank
and shy.

He roused himself from pretended abstraction.

"Oh--it's you?" he said pleasantly. "They said you were out."

"I was going to lunch. But if you've anything for me to do, I'll be glad
to stay."

"No--no. I simply wished to say that if Miss Burroughs wished to make an
arrangement with you, we'd help you about carrying out your part of it."

She was pale--so pale that it brought out strongly the smooth dead-white
purity of her skin. Her small features wore an expression of pride, of
haughtiness even. And in the eyes that regarded him steadily there shone
a cold light--the light of a proud and lonely soul that repels intrusion
even as the Polar fastnesses push back without effort assault upon their
solitudes. "We made no arrangement," said she.

"You are not more than eighteen, are you?" inquired he abruptly.

The irrelevant question startled her. She looked as if she thought she
had not heard aright. "I am twenty," she said.

"You have a most--most unusual way of shifting to various ages and
personalities," explained he, with some embarrassment.

She simply looked at him and waited.

His embarrassment increased. It was a novel sensation to him, this
feeling ill at ease with a woman--he who was at ease with everyone and
put others at their ease or not as he pleased. "I'm sorry you and Miss
Burroughs didn't arrange something. I suppose she found the hours
difficult."

"She made me an offer," replied the girl. "I refused it."

"But, as I told you, we can let you off--anything within reason."

"Thank you, but I do not care to do that kind of work. No doubt any kind
of work for wages classes one as a servant. But those people up
there--they make one _feel_ it--feel menial."

"Not Miss Burroughs, I assure you."

A satirical smile hovered round the girl's lips. Her face was altogether
lovely now, and no lily ever rose more gracefully from its stem than did
her small head from her slender form. "She meant to be kind, but she was
insulting. Those people up there don't understand. They're vain and
narrow. Oh, I don't blame them. Only, I don't care to be brought into
contact with them."

He looked at her in wonder. She talked of Josephine as if she were
Josephine's superior, and her expression and accent were such that they
contrived to convey an impression that she had the right to do it. He
grew suddenly angry at her, at himself for listening to her. "I am
sorry," he said stiffly, and took up a pen to indicate that he wished
her to go.

He rather expected that she would be alarmed. But if she was, she wholly
concealed it. She smiled slightly and moved toward the door. Looking
after her, he relented. She seemed so young--was so young--and was
evidently poor. He said:

"It's all right to be proud, Miss Hallowell. But there is such a thing
as supersensitiveness. You are earning your living. If you'll pardon me
for thrusting advice upon you, I think you've made a mistake. I'm sure
Miss Burroughs meant well. If you had been less sensitive you'd soon
have realized it."

"She patronized me," replied the girl, not angrily, but with amusement.
"It was all I could do not to laugh in her face. The idea of a woman who
probably couldn't make five dollars a week fancying she was the superior
of any girl who makes her own living, no matter how poor a living it
is."

Norman laughed. It had often appealed to his own sense of humor, the
delusion that the tower one happened to be standing upon was part of
one's own stature. But he said: "You're a very foolish young person.
You'll not get far in the world if you keep to that road. It winds
through Poverty Swamps to the Poor House."

"Oh, no," replied she. "One can always die."

Again he laughed. "But why die? Why not be sensible and live?"

"I don't know," replied she. She was looking away dreamily, and her eyes
were wonderful to see. "There are many things I feel and do--and I don't
at all understand why. But--" An expression of startling resolution
flashed across her face. "But I do them, just the same."

A brief silence; then, as she again moved toward the door, he said, "You
have been working for some time?"

"Four years."

"You support yourself?"

"I work to help out father's income. He makes almost enough, but not
quite."

Almost enough! The phrase struck upon Norman's fancy as both amusing and
sad. Almost enough for what? For keeping body and soul together; for
keeping body barely decently clad. Yet she was content. He said:

"You like to work?"

"Not yet. But I think I shall when I learn this business. One feels
secure when one has a trade."

"It doesn't impress me as an interesting life for a girl of your age,"
he suggested.

"Oh, I'm not unhappy. And at home, of evenings and Sundays, I'm happy."

"Doing what?"

"Reading and talking with father and--doing the housework--and all the
rest of it."

What a monotonous narrow little life! He wanted to pity her, but somehow
he could not. There was no suggestion in her manner that she was an
object of pity. "What did Miss Burroughs say to you--if I may ask?"

"Certainly. You sent me, and I'm much obliged to you. I realize it was
an opportunity--for another sort of girl. I half tried to accept because
I knew refusing was only my--queerness." She smiled charmingly. "You are
not offended because I couldn't make myself take it?"

"Not in the least." And all at once he felt that it was true. This girl
would have been out of place in service. "What was the offer?"

Suddenly before him there appeared a clever, willful child, full of the
childish passion for imitation and mockery. And she proceeded to "take
off" the grand Miss Burroughs--enough like Josephine to give the satire
point and barb. He could see Josephine resolved to be affable and equal,
to make this doubtless bedazzled stray from the "lower classes" feel
comfortable in those palatial surroundings. She imitated Josephine's
walk, her way of looking, her voice for the menials--gracious and
condescending. The exhibition was clever, free from malice, redolent of
humor. Norman laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks.

"You ought to go on the stage," said he. "How Josephine--Miss Burroughs
would appreciate it! For she's got a keen sense of humor."

"Not for the real jokes--like herself," replied Miss Hallowell.

"You're prejudiced."

"No. I see her as she is. Probably everyone else--those around her--see
her money and her clothes and all that. But I saw--just her."

He nodded thoughtfully. Then he looked penetratingly at her. "How did
you happen to learn to do that?" he asked. "To see people as they are?"

"Father taught me." Her eyes lighted up, her whole expression changed.
She became beautiful with the beauty of an intense and adoring love.
"Father is a wonderful man--one of the most wonderful that ever lived.
He----"

There was a knock at the door. She startled, he looked confused. Both
awakened to a sense of their forgotten surroundings, of who and what
they were. She went and Mr. Sanders entered. But even in his confusion
Norman marveled at the vanishing of the fascinating personality who had
been captivating him into forgetting everything else, at the
reappearance of the blank, the pale and insignificant personality
attached to a typewriting machine at ten dollars a week. No, not
insignificant, not blank--never again that, for him. He saw now the full
reality--and also why he, everyone, was so misled. She made him think of
the surface of the sea when the sky is gray and the air calm. It lies
smooth and flat and expressionless--inert, monotonous. But let sunbeam
strike or breeze ever so faint start up, and what a commotion of
unending variety! He could never look at her again without being
reminded of those infinite latent possibilities, without wondering what
new and perhaps more charming, more surprising varieties of look and
tone and manner could be evoked.

And while Sanders was talking--prosing on and on about things Norman
either already knew or did not wish to know--he was thinking of her. "If
she happens to meet a man with enough discernment to fall in love with
her," he said to himself, "he certainly will never weary. What a pity
that such a girl shouldn't have had a chance, should be wasted on some
unappreciative chucklehead of her class! What a pity she hasn't
ambition--or the quality, whatever it is--that makes those who have it
get on, whether they wish or no."

During the rest of the day he revolved from time to time indistinct
ideas of somehow giving this girl a chance. He wished Josephine would
and could help, or perhaps his sister Ursula. It was not a matter that
could be settled, or even taken up, in haste. No man of his mentality
and experience fails to learn how perilous it is in the least to
interfere in the destiny of anyone. And his notion involved not slight
interference with advice or suggestion or momentarily extended helping
hand, but radical change of the whole current of destiny. Also, he
appreciated how difficult it is for a man to do anything for a young
woman--anything that would not harm more than it would help. Only one
thing seemed clear to him--the "clever child" ought to have a chance.

He went to see Josephine after dinner that night His own house, while
richly and showily furnished, as became his means and station,
seemed--and indeed was--merely an example of simple, old-fashioned
"solid comfort" in comparison with the Burroughs palace. He had never
liked, but, being a true New Yorker, had greatly admired the splendor of
that palace, its costly art junk, its rotten old tapestries, its
unlovely genuine antiques, its room after room of tasteless
magnificence, suggesting a museum, or rather the combination home and
salesroom of an art dealer. This evening he found himself curious,
critical, disposed to license a long-suppressed sense of humor. While
he was waiting for Josephine to come down to the small salon into which
he had been shown, her older sister drifted in, on the way to a late
dinner and ball. She eyed him admiringly from head to foot.

"You've _such_ an air, Fred," said she. "You should hear the butler on the
subject of you. He says that of all the men who come to the house you
are most the man of the world. He says he could tell it by the way you
walk in and take off your hat and coat and throw them at him."

Norman laughed and said, "I didn't know. I must stop that."

"Don't!" cried Mrs. Bellowes. "You'll break his heart. He adores it. You
know, servants dearly love to be treated as servants. Anyone who thinks
the world loves equality knows very little about human nature. Most
people love to look up, just as most women love to be ruled. No, you
must continue to be the master, the man of the world, Fred."

She was busy with her gorgeous and trailing wraps and with her cigarette
or she would have seen his confusion. He was recalling his scene with
the typewriter girl. Not much of the man of the world, then and there,
certainly. What a grotesque performance for a man of his position, for a
serious man of any kind! And how came he to permit such a person to
mimic Josephine Burroughs, a lady, the woman to whom he was engaged? In
these proud and pretentious surroundings he felt contemptibly
guilty--and dazed wonder at his own inexplicable folly and weakness.

Mrs. Bellowes departed before Josephine came down. So there was no
relief for his embarrassment. He saw that she too felt constrained.
Instead of meeting him half way in embrace and kiss, as she usually did,
she threw him a kiss and pretended to be busy lighting a cigarette and
arranging the shades of the table lamp. "Well, I saw your 'poor little
creature,'" she began. She was splendidly direct in all her dealings,
after the manner of people who have never had to make their own way--to
cajole or conciliate or dread the consequences of frankness.

"I told you you'd not find her interesting."

"Oh, she was a nice little girl," replied Josephine with elaborate
graciousness--and Norman, the "take off" fresh in his mind, was acutely
critical of her manner, of her mannerisms. "Of course," she went on,
"one does not expect much of people of that class. But I thought her
unusually well-mannered--and quite clean."

"Tetlow makes 'em clean up," said Norman, a gleam of sarcasm in his
careless glance and tone. And into his nostrils stole an odor of
freshness and health and youth, the pure, sweet odor that is the base of
all the natural perfumes. It startled him, his vivid memory of a feature
of her which he had not been until now aware that he had ever noted.

"I offered her some work," continued Josephine, "but I guess you keep
her too busy down there for her to do anything else."

"Probably," said Norman. "Why do you sit on the other side of the room?"

"Oh, I don't know," laughed Josephine. "I feel queer to-night. And it
seems to me you're queer, too."

"I? Perhaps rather tired, dear--that's all."

"Did you and Miss Hallowell work hard to-day?"

"Oh, bother Miss Hallowell. Let's talk about ourselves." And he drew her
to the sofa at one end of the big fireplace. "I wish we hadn't set the
wedding so far off." And suddenly he found himself wondering whether
that remark had been prompted by eagerness--a lover's eagerness--or by
impatience to have the business over and settled.

"You don't act a bit natural to-night, Fred. You touch me as if I were a
stranger."

"I like that!" mocked he. "A stranger hold your hand like
this?--and--kiss you--like this?"

She drew away, suddenly laid her hands on his shoulders, kissed him upon
the lips passionately, then looked into his eyes. "_Do_ you love me,
Fred?--_really_?"

"Why so earnest?"

"You've had a great deal of experience?"

"More or less."

"Have you ever loved any woman as you love me?"

"I've never loved any woman but you. I never before wanted to marry a
woman."

"But you may be doing it because--well, you might be tired and want to
settle down."

"Do you believe that?"

"No, I don't. But I want to hear you say it isn't so."

"Well--it isn't so. Are you satisfied?"

"I'm frightfully jealous of you, Fred."

"What a waste of time!"

"I've got something to confess--something I'm ashamed of."

"Don't confess," cried he, laughing but showing that he meant it.
"Just--don't be wicked again That's much better than confession."

"But I must confess," insisted she. "I had evil thoughts evil suspicions
about you. I've had them all day--until you came. As soon as I saw you I
felt bowed into the dust. A man like you, doing anything so vulgar as I
suspected you of--oh, dearest, I'm _so_ ashamed!"

He put his arms round her and drew her to his shoulder. And the scene of
mimicry in his office flashed into his mind, and the blood burned in his
cheeks. But he had no such access of insanity as to entertain the idea
of confession.

"It was that typewriter girl," continued Josephine. She drew away again
and once more searched his face. "You told me she was homely."

"Not exactly that."

"Insignificant then."

"Isn't she?"

"Yes--in a way," said Josephine, the condescending note in her voice
again--and in his mind Miss Hallowell's clever burlesque of that note.
"But, in another way--Men are different from women. Now I--a woman of
my sort--couldn't stoop to a man of her class. But men seem not to feel
that way."

"No," said he, irritated. "They've the courage to take what they want
wherever they find it. A man will take gold out of the dirt, because
gold is always gold. But a woman waits until she can get it at a
fashionable jeweler's, and makes sure it's made up in a fashionable way.
I don't like to hear _you_ say those things."

Her eyes flashed. "Then you _do_ like that Hallowell girl!" she cried--and
never before had her voice jarred upon him.

"That Hallowell girl has nothing to do with this," he rejoined. "I like
to feel that you really love me--that you'd have taken me wherever you
happened to find me--and that you'd stick to me no matter how far I
might drop."

"I would! I would!" she cried, tears in her eyes. "Oh, I didn't mean
that, Fred. You know I didn't--don't you?"

She tried to put her arms round his neck, but he took her hands and held
them. "Would you like to think I was marrying you for what you have?--or
for any other reason whatever but for what you are?"

It being once more a question of her own sex, the obstinate line
appeared round her mouth. "But, Fred, I'd not be _me_, if I were--a
working girl," she replied.

"You might be something even better if you were," retorted he coldly.
"The only qualities I don't like about you are the surface qualities
that have been plated on in these surroundings. And if I thought it was
anything but just you that I was marrying, I'd lose no time about
leaving you. I'd not let myself degrade myself."

"Fred--that tone--and don't--please don't look at me like that!" she
begged.

[Illustration: "'Would you like to think I was marrying you for what you
have?--or for any other reason whatever but for what you are?'"]

But his powerful glance searched on. He said, "Is it possible that you
and I are deceiving ourselves--and that we'll marry and wake up--and be
bored and dissatisfied--like so many of our friends?"

"No--no," she cried, wildly agitated. "Fred, dear we love each other.
You know we do. I don't use words as well as you do--and my mind works
in a queer way--Perhaps I didn't mean what I said. No matter. If my
love were put to the test--Fred, I don't ask anything more than that
your love for me would stand the tests my love for you would stand."

He caught her in his arms and kissed her with more passion than he had
ever felt for her before. "I believe you, Jo," he said. "I believe you."

"I love you so--that I could be jealous even of her--of that little girl
in your office. Fred, I didn't confess all the truth. It isn't true that
I thought her--a nobody. When she first came in here--it was in this
very room--I thought she was as near nothing as any girl I'd ever seen.
Then she began to change--as you said. And--oh, dearest, I can't help
hating her! And when I tried to get her away from you, and she wouldn't
come----"

"Away from me!" he cried, laughing.

"I felt as if it were like that," she pleaded. "And she wouldn't
come--and treated me as if she were queen and I servant--only politely,
I must say, for Heaven knows I don't want to injure her----"

"Shall I have her discharged?"

"Fred!" exclaimed she indignantly. "Do you think I could do such a
thing?"

"She'd easily get another job as good. Tetlow can find her one. Does
that satisfy you?"

"No," she confessed. "It makes me feel meaner than ever."

"Now, Jo, let's drop this foolish seriousness about nothing at all.
Let's drop it for good."

"Nothing at all--that's exactly it. I can't understand, Fred. What is
there about her that makes her haunt me? That makes me afraid she'll
haunt you?"

Norman felt a sudden thrill. He tightened his hold upon her hands
because his impulse had been to release them. "How absurd!" he said,
rather noisily.

"Isn't it, though?" echoed she. "Think of you and me almost quarreling
about such a trivial person." Her laugh died away. She shivered, cried,
"Fred, I'm superstitious about her. I'm--I'm--_afraid_!" And she flung
herself wildly into his arms.

"She _is_ somewhat uncanny," said he, with a lightness he was far from
feeling. "But, dear--it isn't complimentary to me, is it?"

"Forgive me, dearest--I don't mean that. I couldn't mean that. But--I
_love_ you so. Ever since I began to love you I've been looking round for
something to be afraid of. And this is the first chance you've given
me."

"_I've_ given you!" mocked he.

She laughed hysterically. "I mean the first chance I've had. And I'm
doing the best I can with it."

They were in good spirits now, and for the rest of the evening were as
loverlike as always, the nearer together for the bit of rough sea they
had weathered so nicely. Neither spoke of Miss Hallowell. Each had
privately resolved never to speak of her to the other again. Josephine
was already regretting the frankness that had led her to expose a not
too attractive part of herself--and to exaggerate in his eyes the
importance of a really insignificant chit of a typewriter. When he went
to bed that night he was resolved to have Tetlow find Miss Hallowell a
job in another office.

"She certainly _is_ uncanny," he said to himself. "I wonder why--I wonder
what the secret of her is. She's the first woman I ever ran across who
had a real secret. _Is_ it real? I wonder."




V


Toward noon the following day Norman, suddenly in need of a
stenographer, sent out for Miss Purdy, one of the three experts at
eighteen dollars a week who did most of the important and very
confidential work for the heads of the firm. When his door opened again
he saw not Miss Purdy but Miss Hallowell.

"Miss Purdy is sick to-day," said she. "Mr. Tetlow wishes to know if I
would do."

Norman shifted uneasily in his chair. "Just as
well--perfectly--certainly," he stammered. He was not looking at
her--seemed wholly occupied with the business he was preparing to
dispatch.

She seated herself in the usual place, at the opposite side of the broad
table. With pencil poised she fixed her gaze upon the unmarred page of
her open notebook. Instead of abating, his confusion increased. He could
not think of the subject about which he wished to dictate. First, he
noted how long her lashes were--and darker than her hair, as were her
well-drawn eyebrows also. Never had he seen so white a skin or one so
smooth. She happened to be wearing a blouse with a Dutch neck that day.
What a superb throat! What a line of beauty its gently swelling curve
made. Then his glance fell upon her lips, rosy-red, slightly pouted. And
what masses of dead gold hair--no, not gold, but of the white-gray of
wood ashes, and tinted with gold! No wonder it was difficult to tell
just what color her hair was. Hair like that was ready to be of any
color. And there were her arms, so symmetrical in her rather tight
sleeves, and emerging into view in the most delicate wrists. What a
marvelous skin!

"Have you ever posed?"

She startled and the color flamed in her cheeks. Her eyes shot a glance
of terror at him. "I--I," she stammered. Then almost defiantly, "Yes, I
did--for a while. But I didn't suppose anyone knew. At the time we
needed the money badly."

Norman felt deep disgust with himself for bursting out with such a
question, and for having surprised her secret. "There's nothing to be
ashamed of," he said gently.

"Oh, I'm not ashamed," she returned. Her agitation had subsided. "The
only reason I quit was because the work was terribly hard and the pay
small and uncertain. I was confused because they discharged me at the
last place I had, when they found out I had been a model. It was a
church paper office."

Again she poised her pencil and lowered her eyes. But he did not take
the hint. "Is there anything you would rather do than this sort of
work?" he asked.

"Nothing I could afford," replied she.

"If you had been kind to Miss Burroughs yesterday she would have helped
you."

"I couldn't afford to do that," said the girl in her quiet, reticent
way.

"To do what?"

"To be nice to anyone for what I could get out of it."

Norman smiled somewhat cynically. Probably the girl fancied she was
truthful; but human beings rarely knew anything about their real selves.
"What would you like to do?"

She did not answer his question until she had shrunk completely within
herself and was again thickly veiled with the expression which made
everyone think her insignificant. "Nothing I could afford to do," said
she. It was plain that she did not wish to be questioned further along
that line.

"The stage?" he persisted.

"I hadn't thought of it," was her answer.

"What then?"

"I don't think about things I can't have. I never made any definite
plans."

"But isn't it a good idea always to look ahead? As long as one has to be
moving, one might as well move in a definite direction."

She was waiting with pencil poised.

"There isn't much of a future at this business."

She shrank slightly. He felt that she regarded his remark as preparation
for a kindly hint that she was not giving satisfaction. . . . Well, why not
leave it that way? Perhaps she would quit of her own accord--would spare
him the trouble--and embarrassment--of arranging with Tetlow for another
place for her. He began to dictate--gave her a few sentences mockingly
different from his usual terse and clear statements--interrupted himself
with:

"You misunderstood me a while ago. I didn't mean you weren't doing your
work well. On the contrary, I think you'll soon be expert. But I thought
perhaps I might be able to help you to something you'd like better."

He listened to his own words in astonishment. What new freak of madness
was this? Instead of clearing himself of this uncanny girl, he was
proposing things to her that would mean closer relations. And what
reason had he to think she was fitted for anything but just what she was
now doing--doing indifferently well?

"Thank you," she said, so quietly that it seemed coldly, "but I'm
satisfied as I am."

Her manner seemed to say with polite and restrained plainness that she
was not in the least appreciative of his interest or of himself. But
this could not be. No girl in her position could fail to be grateful for
his interest. No woman, in all his life, had ever failed to respond to
his slightest advance. No, it simply could not be. She was merely shy,
and had a peculiar way of showing it. He said:

"You have no ambition?"

"That's not for a woman."

She was making her replies as brief as civility permitted. He observed
her narrowly. She was not shy, not embarrassed. What kind of game was
this? It could not be in sincere nature for a person in her position
thus to treat overtures, friendly and courteous overtures, from one in
his position. And never before--never--had a woman been thus
unresponsive. Instead of feeling relief that she had disentangled him
from the plight into which his impulsive offer had flung him, he was
piqued--angered--and his curiosity was inflamed as never before about
any woman.

The relations of the sexes are for the most part governed by traditions
of sex allurements and sex tricks so ancient that they have ceased to be
conscious and have become instinctive. One of these venerable first
principles is that mystery is the arch provoker. Norman, an old and
expert student of the great game--the only game for which the staidest
and most serious will abandon all else to follow its merry call--Norman
knew this trick of mystery. The woman veils herself and makes believe to
fly--an excellent trick, as good to-day as ever after five thousand
years of service. And he knew that in it lay the explanation for the
sudden and high upflaming of his interest in this girl. "What an ass I'm
making of myself!" reflected he. "When I care nothing about the girl,
why should I care about the mystery of her? Of course, it's some poor
little affair, a puzzle not worth puzzling out."

All true and clear enough. Yet seeing it did not abate his interest a
particle. She had veiled herself; she was pretending--perhaps
honestly--to fly. He rose and went to the window, stood with his back to
her, resumed dictating. But the sentences would not come. He whirled
abruptly. "I'm not ready to do the thing yet," he said. "I'll send for
you later."

Without a word or a glance she stood, took her book and went toward the
door. He gazed after her. He could not refrain from speaking again. "I'm
afraid you misunderstood my offer a while ago," said he, neither curt
nor friendly. "I forgot how such things from a man to a young woman
might be misinterpreted."

"I never thought of that," replied she unembarrassed. "It was simply
that I can't put myself under obligation to anyone."

As she stood there, her full beauty flashed upon him--the exquisite
form, the subtly graceful poise of her body, of her head--the loveliness
of that golden-hued white skin--the charm of her small rosy mouth--the
delicate, sensitive, slightly tilted nose--and her eyes--above all, her
eyes!--so clear, so sweet. Her voice had seemed thin and faint to him;
its fineness now seemed the rarest delicacy--the exactly fitting kind
for so evasive and delicate a beauty as hers. He made a slight bow of
dismissal, turned abruptly away. Never in all his life, strewn with
gallant experiences--never had a woman thus treated him, and never had a
woman thus affected him. "I am mad--stark mad!" he muttered. "A
ten-dollar-a-week typewriter, whom nobody on earth but myself would look
at a second time!" But something within him hurled back this scornful
fling. Though no one else on earth saw or appreciated--what of it? She
affected _him_ thus--and that was enough. "_I_ want her! . . . I _want_
her! I have never wanted a woman before."

He rushed into the dressing room attached to his office, plunged his
face into ice-cold water. This somewhat eased the burning sensation that
was becoming intolerable. Many were the unaccountable incidents in his
acquaintance with this strange creature; the most preposterous was this
sudden seizure. He realized now that his feeling for her had been like
the quiet, steady, imperceptible filling of a reservoir that suddenly
announces itself by the thunder and roar of a mighty cascade over the
dam. "This is madness--sheer madness! I am still master within myself. I
will make short work of this rebellion." And with an air of calmness so
convincing that he believed in it he addressed himself to the task of
sanity and wisdom lying plain before him. "A man of my position caught
by a girl like that! A man such as I am, caught by _any_ woman whatever!"
It was grotesque. He opened his door to summon Tetlow.

The gate in the outside railing was directly opposite, and about thirty
feet away. Tetlow and Miss Hallowell were going out--evidently to lunch
together. She was looking up at the chief clerk with laughing eyes--they
seemed coquettish to the infuriated Norman. And Tetlow--the serious and
squab young ass was gazing at her with the expression men of the stupid
squab sort put on when they wish to impress a woman. At this spectacle,
at the vision of that slim young loveliness, that perfect form and
deliciously smooth soft skin, white beyond belief beneath its faintly
golden tint--the hot blood steamed up into Norman's brain, blinded his
sight, reddened it with desire and jealousy. He drew back, closed his
door with a bang.

"This is not I," he muttered. "What has happened? Am I insane?"

       *       *       *       *       *

When Tetlow returned from lunch the office boy on duty at the gate told
him that Mr. Norman wished to see him at once. Like all men trying to
advance along ways where their fellow men can help or hinder, the head
clerk was full of more or less clever little tricks thought out with a
view to making a good impression. One of them was to stamp upon all
minds his virtue of promptness--of what use to be prompt unless you
forced every one to feel how prompt you were? He went in to see Norman,
with hat in hand and overcoat on his back and one glove off, the other
still on. Norman was standing at a window, smoking a cigarette. His
appearance--dress quite as much as manner--was the envy of his
subordinate--as, indeed, it was of hundreds of the young men struggling
to rise down town. It was so exactly what the appearance of a man of
vigor and power and high position should be. Tetlow practiced it by the
quarter hour before his glass at home--not without progress in the
direction of a not unimpressive manner of his own.

As Tetlow stood at attention, Norman turned and advanced toward him.
"Mr. Tetlow," he began, in his good-humored voice with the never wholly
submerged under-note of sharpness, "is it your habit to go out to lunch
with the young ladies employed here? If so, I wish to suggest--simply to
suggest--that it may be bad for discipline."

Tetlow's jaw dropped a little. He looked at Norman, was astonished to
discover beneath a thin veneer of calm signs of greater agitation than
he had ever seen in him. "To-day was the first time, sir," he said. "And
I can't quite account for my doing it. Miss Hallowell has been here
several months. I never specially noticed her until the last few
days--when the question of discharging her came up. You may remember it
was settled by you." Norman flung his cigarette away and stalked to the
window.

"Mr. Norman," pursued Tetlow, "you and I have been together many years.
I esteem it my greatest honor that I am able--that you permit me--to
class you as my friend. So I'm going to give you a confidence--one that
really startles me. I called on Miss Hallowell last night."

Norman's back stiffened.

"She is even more charming in her own home. And--" Tetlow blushed and
trembled--"I am going to make her my wife if I can."

Norman turned, a mocking satirical smile unpleasantly sparkling in his
eyes and curling his mouth "Old man," he said, "I think you've gone
crazy."

Tetlow made a helpless gesture. "I think so myself. I didn't intend to
marry for ten years--and then--I had quite a different match in mind."

"What's the matter with you, Billy?" inquired Norman, inspecting him
with smiling, cruelly unfriendly eyes.

"I'm damned if I know, Norman," said the head clerk, assuming that his
friend was sympathetic and dropping into the informality of the old days
when they were clerks together in a small firm. "I'd have proposed to
her last night if I hadn't been afraid I'd lose her by being in such a
hurry. . . . You're in love yourself."

Norman startled violently.

"You're going to get married. Probably you can sympathize. You know how
it is to meet the woman you want and must have."

Norman turned away.

"I've had--or thought I had--rather advanced ideas on the subject of
women. I've always had a horror of being married for a living or for a
home or as an experiment or a springboard. My notion's been that I
wouldn't trust a woman who wasn't independent. And theoretically I still
think that's sound. But it doesn't work out in practice. A man has to
have been in love to be able to speak the last word on the sex
question."

Norman dropped heavily into his desk chair and rumpled his hair into
disorder. He muttered something--the head clerk thought it was an oath.

"I'd marry her," Tetlow went on, "if I knew she was simply using me in
the coldest, most calculating way. My only fear is that I shan't be able
to get her--that she won't marry me."

Norman sneered. "That's not likely," he said.

"No, it isn't," admitted Tetlow. "They--the Hallowells--are nice
people--of as good family as there is. But they're poor--very poor.
There's only her father and herself. The old man is a scientist--spends
most of his time at things that won't pay a cent--utterly impractical. A
gentleman--an able man, if a little cracked--at least he seemed so to me
who don't know much about scientific matters. But getting poorer
steadily. So I think she will accept me."

A gloomy, angry frown, like a black shadow, passed across Norman's face
and disappeared. "You'd marry her--on those terms?" he sneered.

"Of course I _hope_ for better terms----"

Norman sprang up, strode to the window and turned his back.

"But I'm prepared for the worst. The fact is, she treats me as if she
didn't care a rap for the honor of my showing her attention."

"A trick, Billy. An old trick."

"Maybe so. But--I really believe she doesn't realize. She's queer--has
been queerly brought up. Yes, I think she doesn't appreciate. Then, too,
she's young and light--almost childish in some ways. . . . I don't blame
you for being disgusted with me, Fred. But--damn it, what's a man to
do?"

"Cure himself!" exploded Norman, wheeling violently on his friend. "You
must act like a man. Billy, such a marriage is ruin for you. How can we
take you into partnership next year? When you marry, you must marry in
the class you're moving toward, not in any of those you're leaving
behind."

"Do you suppose I haven't thought of all that?" rejoined Tetlow
bitterly. "But I can't help myself. It's useless for me to say I'll try.
I shan't try."

"Don't you want to get over this?" demanded Norman fiercely.

"Of course--No--I don't. Fred, you'd think better of me if you knew
her. You've never especially noticed her. She's beautiful."

Norman dropped to his chair again.

"Really--beautiful," protested Tetlow, assuming that the gesture was one
of disgusted denial. "Take a good look at her, Norman, before you
condemn her. I never was so astonished as when I discovered how
good-looking she is. I don't quite know how it is, but I suppose nobody
ever happened to see how--how lovely she is until I just chanced to see
it." At a rudely abrupt gesture from Norman he hurried on, eagerly
apologetic, "And if you talk with her--She's very reserved. But she's
the lady through and through--and has a good mind. . . . At least, I
think she has. I'll admit a man in love is a poor judge of a woman's
mind. But, anyhow, I _know_ she's lovely to look at. You'll see it
yourself, now that I've called your attention to it. You can't fail to
see it."

Norman threw himself back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his
head. "_Why_ do you want to marry her?" he inquired, in a tone his
sensitive ear approved as judicial.

"How can I tell?" replied the head clerk irritably. "Does a man ever
know?"

"Always--when he's sensibly in love."

"But when he's just in love? That's what ails me," retorted Tetlow, with
a sheepish look and laugh.

"Billy, you've got to get over this. I can't let you make a fool of
yourself."

Tetlow's fat, smooth, pasty face of the overfed, underexercised
professional man became a curious exhibit of alarm and obstinacy.

"You've got to promise me you'll keep away from her--except at the
office--for say, a week. Then--we'll see."

Tetlow debated.

"It's highly improbable that anyone else will discover these
irresistible charms. There's no one else hanging round?"

"No one, as I told you the other day, when you questioned me about her."

Norman shifted, looked embarrassed.

"I hope I didn't give you the impression I was ashamed of loving her or
would ever be ashamed of her anywhere?" continued Tetlow, a very
loverlike light in his usually unromantic eyes. "If I did, it wasn't
what I meant--far from it. You'll see, when I marry her, Norman. You'll
be congratulating me."

Norman sprang up again. "This is plain lunacy, Tetlow. I am amazed at
you--amazed!"

"Get acquainted with her, Mr. Norman," pleaded the subordinate. "Do it,
to oblige me. Don't condemn us----"

"I wish to hear nothing more!" cried Norman violently. "Another thing.
You must find her a place in some other office--at once."

"You're right, sir," assented Tetlow. "I can readily do that."

Norman scowled at him, made an imperious gesture of dismissal. Tetlow,
chopfallen but obdurate, got himself speedily out of sight.

Norman, with hands deep in his pockets, stared out among the skyscrapers
and gave way to a fit of remorse. It was foreign to his nature to do
petty underhanded tricks. Grand strategy--yes. At that he was an adept,
and not the shiftiest, craftiest schemes he had ever devised had given
him a moment's uneasiness. But to be driving a ten-dollar-a-week
typewriter out of her job--to be maneuvering to deprive her of a for
her brilliant marriage--to be lying to an old and loyal retainer who had
helped Norman full as much and as often as Norman had helped him--these
sneaking bits of skullduggery made him feel that he had sunk indeed. But
he ground his teeth together and his eyes gleamed wickedly. "He shan't
have her, damn him!" he muttered. "She's not for him."

He summoned Tetlow, who was obviously low in mind as the result of
revolving the things that had been said to him. "Billy," he began in a
tone so amiable that he was ashamed for himself, "you'll not forget I
have your promise?"

"What did I promise?" cried Tetlow, his voice shrill with alarm.

"Not to see her, except at the office, for a week."

"But I've promised her father I'd call this evening. He's going to show
me some experiments."

"You can easily make an excuse--business."

"But I don't want to," protested the head clerk. "What's the use? I've
got my mind made up. Norman, I'd hang on after her if you fired me out
of this office for it. And I can't rest--I'm fit for nothing--until
this matter's settled. I came very near taking her aside and proposing
to her, just after I went out of here a while ago."

"You _damn_ fool!" cried Norman, losing all control of himself. "Take the
afternoon express for Albany instead of Harcott and attend to those
registrations and arrange for those hearings. I'll do my best to save
you. I'll bring the girl in here and keep her at work until you get out
of the way."

Tetlow glanced at his friend; then the tears came into his eyes. "You're
a hell of a friend!" he ejaculated. "And I thought you'd sympathize
because you were in love."

"I do sympathize, Billy," Norman replied with an abrupt change to
shamefaced apology. "I sympathize more than you know. I feel like a dog,
doing this. But it can't result in any harm, and I want you to get a
little fresh air in that hot brain of yours before you commit yourself.
Be reasonable, old man. Suppose you rushed ahead and proposed--and she
accepted--and then, after a few days, you came to. What about her? You
must act on the level, Tetlow. Do the fair thing by yourself and by
her."

Norman had often had occasion to feel proud of the ingenuity and
resourcefulness of his brain. He had never been quite so proud as he was
when he finished that speech. It pacified Tetlow; it lightened his own
sense of guilt; it gave him a respite.

Tetlow rewarded Norman with the look that in New York is the equivalent
of the handclasp friend seeks from friend in times of stress. "You're
right, Fred. I'm much obliged to you. I haven't been considering _her_
side of it enough. A man ought always to think of that. The women--poor
things--have a hard enough time to get on, at best."

Norman's smile was characteristically cynical. Sentimentality amused
him. "I doubt if there are more female wrecks than male wrecks scattered
about the earth," rejoined he. "And I suspect the fact isn't due to the
gentleness of man with woman, either. Don't fret for the ladies, Tetlow.
They know how to take care of themselves. They know how to milk with a
sure and a steady hand. You may find it out by depressing experience
some day."

Tetlow saw the aim. His obstinate, wretched expression came back. "I
don't care. I've got----"

"You went over that ground," interrupted Norman impatiently. "You'd
better be catching the train."

As Tetlow withdrew, he rang for an office boy and sent him to summon
Miss Hallowell.

Norman had been reasoning with himself--with the aid of the self that
was both better and more worldly wise. He felt that his wrestlings had
not been wholly futile. He believed he had got the strength to face the
girl with a respectful mind, with a mind resolute in duty--if not
love--toward Josephine Burroughs. "I _love_ Josephine," he said to
himself. "My feeling for this girl is some sort of physical attraction.
I certainly shall be able to control it enough to keep it within myself.
And soon it will die out. No doubt I've felt much the same thing as
strongly before. But it didn't take hold because I was never bound
before--never had the sense of the necessity for restraint. That sense
is always highly dangerous for my sort of man."

This sounded well. He eyed the entering girl coldly, said in a voice
that struck him as excellent indifference, "Bring your machine in here,
Miss Hallowell, and recopy these papers. I've made some changes. If you
spoil any sheets, don't throw them away, but return everything to me."

"I'm always careful about the waste-paper baskets," said she, "since
they warned me that there are men who make a living searching the waste
thrown out of offices."

He made no reply. He could not have spoken if he had tried. Once more
the spell had seized him--the spell of her weird fascination for him. As
she sat typewriting, with her back almost toward him, he sat watching
her and analyzing his own folly. He knew that diagnosing a disease does
not cure it; but he found an acute pleasure in lingering upon all the
details of the effect she had upon his nerves. He did not dare move from
his desk, from the position that put a huge table and a revolving case
of reference books between them. He believed that if he went nearer he
would be unable to resist seizing her in his arms and pouring out the
passion that was playing along his nerves as the delicate, intense flame
flits back and forth along the surface of burning alcohol.

A knock at the door. He plunged into his papers. "Come!" he called.

Tetlow thrust in his head. Miss Hallowell did not look up. "I'm off,"
the head clerk said. His gaze was upon the unconscious girl--a gaze that
filled Norman with longing to strangle him.

"Telegraph me from Albany as soon as you get there," said Norman.
"Telegraph me at my club."

Tetlow was gone. The machine tapped monotonously on. The barette which
held the girl's hair at the back was so high that the full beauty of the
nape of her neck was revealed. That wonderful white skin with the golden
tint! How soft--yet how firm--her flesh looked! How slender yet how
strong was her build----

"How do you like Tetlow?" he asked, because speak to her he must.

She glanced up, turned in her chair. He quivered before the gaze from
those enchanting eyes of hers. "I beg pardon," she said. "I didn't
hear."

"Tetlow--how do you like him?"

"He is very kind to me--to everyone."

"How did your father like him?"

He confidently expected some sign of confusion, but there was no sign.
"Father was delighted with him," she said merrily. "He took an interest
in the work father's doing--and that was enough."

She was about to turn back to her task. He hastened to ask another
question. "Couldn't I meet your father some time? What Tetlow told me
interested me greatly."

"Father would be awfully pleased," replied she. "But--unless you really
care about--biology, I don't think you'd like coming."

"I'm interested in everything interesting," replied Norman dizzily. What
was he saying? What was he doing? What folly was his madness plunging
him into?

"You can come with Mr. Tetlow when he gets back."

"I'd prefer to talk with him alone," said Norman. "Perhaps I might see
some way to be of service to him."

Her expression was vividly different from what it had been when he
offered to help _her_. She became radiant with happiness. "I do hope
you'll come," she said--her voice very low and sweet, in the effort she
was making to restrain yet express her feelings.

"When? This evening?"

"He's always at home."

"You'll be there?"

"I'm always there, too. We have no friends. It's not easy to make
acquaintances in the East--congenial acquaintances."

"I'd want you to be there," he explained with great care, "because you
could help him and me in getting acquainted."

"Oh, he'll talk freely--to anyone. He talks only the one subject. He
never thinks of anything else."

She was resting her crossed arms on the back of her chair and, with her
chin upon them, was looking at him--a childlike pose and a childlike
expression. He said: "You are _sure_ you are twenty?"

She smiled gayly. "Nearly twenty-one."

"Old enough to be in love."

She lifted her head and laughed. She had charming white teeth--small and
sharp and with enough irregularity to carry out her general suggestion
of variability. "Yes, I shall like that, when it comes," she said; "But
the chances are against it just now."

"There's Tetlow."

She was much amused. "Oh, he's far too old and serious."

Norman felt depressed. "Why, he's only thirty-five."

"But I'm not twenty-one," she reminded him. "I'd want some one of my own
age. I'm tired of being so solemn. If I had love, I'd expect it to
change all that."

Evidently a forlorn and foolish person--and doubtless thinking of him,
two years the senior of Tetlow and far more serious, as an elderly
person, in the same class with her father. "But you like biology?" he
said. The way to a cure was to make her talk on.

"I don't know anything about it," said she, looking as frivolous as a
butterfly or a breeze-bobbed blossom. "I listen to father, but it's all
beyond me."

Yes--a light-weight. They could have nothing in common. She was a mere
surface--a thrillingly beautiful surface, but not a full-fledged woman.
So little did conversation with him interest her, she had taken
advantage of the short pause to resume her work. No, she had not the
faintest interest in him. It wasn't a trick of coquetry; it was genuine.
He whom women had always bowed before was unable to arouse in her a
spark of interest. She cared neither for what he had nor for what he
was, in himself. This offended and wounded him. He struggled sulkily
with his papers for half an hour. Then he fell to watching her again
and----

"You must not neglect to give me your address," he said. "Write it on a
slip of paper after you finish. I might forget it."

"Very well," she replied, but did not turn round.

"Why, do you think, did Tetlow come to see you?" he asked. He felt
cheapened in his own eyes--he, the great man, the arrived man, the
fiance of Josephine Burroughs, engaged in this halting and sneaking
flirtation! But he could not restrain himself.

She turned to answer. "Mr. Tetlow works very hard and has few friends.
He had heard of my father and wanted to meet him--just like you."

"Naturally," murmured Norman, in confusion. "I thought--perhaps--he was
interested in _you_."

She laughed outright--and he had an entrancing view of the clean rosy
interior of her mouth. "In _me_?--Mr. Tetlow? Why, he's too serious and
important for a girl like me."

"Then he bored you?"

"Oh, no. I like him. He is a good man--thoroughly good."

This pleased Norman immensely. It may be fine to be good, but to be
called good--that is somehow a different matter. It removes a man at
once from the jealousy-provoking class. "Good exactly describes him,"
said Norman. "He wouldn't harm a fly. In love he'd be ridiculous."

"Not with a woman of his own age and kind," protested she. "But I'm
neglecting my work."

And she returned to it with a resolute manner that made him ashamed to
interrupt again--especially after the unconscious savage rebukes she had
administered. He sat there fighting against the impulse to watch
her--denouncing himself--appealing to pride, to shame, to prudence--to
his love for Josephine--to the sense of decency that restrains a hunter
from aiming at a harmless tame song bird. But all in vain. He
concentrated upon her at last, stared miserably at her, filled with
longing and dread and shame--and longing, and yet more longing.

When she finished and stood at the other side of the desk, waiting for
him to pass upon her work, she must have thought he was in a profound
abstraction. He did not speak, made a slight motion with his hand to
indicate that she was to go. Shut in alone, he buried his face in his
arms. "What madness!" he groaned. "If I loved her, there'd be some
excuse for me. But I don't. I couldn't. Yet I seem ready to ruin
everything, merely to gratify a selfish whim--an insane whim."

On top of the papers she had left he saw a separate slip. He drew it
toward him, spread it out before him. Her address. An unknown street in
Jersey City!

"I'll not go," he said aloud, pushing the slip away. Go? Certainly not.
He had never really meant to go. He would, of course, keep his
engagement with Josephine. "And I'll not come down town until she has
taken another job and has caught Tetlow. I'll stop this idiocy of trying
to make an impression on a person not worth impressing. What weak
vanity--to be piqued by this girl's lack of interest!"

Nevertheless--he at six o'clock telephoned to the Burroughs' house that
he was detained down town. He sent away his motor, dined alone in the
station restaurant in Jersey City. And at half past seven he set out in
a cab in search of--what? He did not dare answer that interrogation.




VI


Like many another chance explorer from New York, Norman was surprised to
discover that, within a few minutes of leaving the railway station, his
cab was moving through a not unattractive city. He expected to find the
Hallowells in a tenement in some more or less squalid street overhung
with railway smoke and bedaubed with railway grime. He was delighted
when the driver assured him that there was no mistake, that the
comfortable little cottage across the width of the sidewalk and a small
front yard was the sought-for destination.

"Wait, please," he said to the cabman. "Or, if you like, you can go to
that corner saloon down there. I'll know where to find you." And he gave
him half a dollar.

The cabman hesitated between two theories of this conduct--whether it
was the generosity it seemed or was a ruse to "side step" payment.
He--or his thirst--decided for the decency of human nature; he drove
confidingly away. Norman went up the tiny stoop and rang. The sound of a
piano, in the room on the ground floor where there was light, abruptly
ceased. The door opened and Miss Hallowell stood before him. She was
throughout a different person from the girl of the office. She had
changed to a tight-fitting pale-blue linen dress made all in one piece.
Norman could now have not an instant's doubt about the genuineness, the
bewitching actuality, of her beauty. The wonder was how she could
contrive to conceal so much of it for the purposes of business. It was a
peculiar kind of beauty--not the radiant kind, but that which shines
with a soft glow and gives him who sees it the delightful sense of being
its original and sole discoverer. An artistic eye--or an eye that
discriminates in and responds to feminine loveliness--would have been
captivated, as it searched in vain for flaw.

If Norman anticipated that she would be nervous before the task of
receiving in her humbleness so distinguished a visitor, he must have
been straightway disappointed. Whether from a natural lack of that sense
of social differences which is developed to the most pitiful
snobbishness in New York or from her youth and inexperience, she
received him as if he had been one of the neighbors dropping in after
supper. And it was Norman who was ill at ease. Nothing is more
disconcerting to a man accustomed to be received with due respect to his
importance than to find himself put upon the common human level and
compelled to "make good" all over again from the beginning. He felt--he
knew--that he was an humble candidate for her favor--a candidate with
the chances perhaps against him.

The tiny parlor had little in it beside the upright piano because there
was no space. But the paper, the carpet and curtains, the few pieces of
furniture, showed no evidence of bad taste, of painful failure at the
effort to "make a front." He was in the home of poor people, but they
were obviously people who made a highly satisfactory best of their
poverty. And in the midst of it all the girl shone like the one evening
star in the mystic opalescence of twilight.

"We weren't sure you were coming," said she. "I'll call father. . . .
No, I'll take you back to his workshop. He's easier to get acquainted
with there."

"Won't you play something for me first? Or--perhaps you sing?"

"A very little," she admitted. "Not worth hearing."

"I'm sure I'd like it. I want to get used to my surroundings before I
tackle the--the biology."

Without either hesitation or shyness, she seated herself at the piano.
"I'll sing the song I've just learned." And she began. Norman moved to
the chair that gave him a view of her in profile. For the next five
minutes he was witness to one of those rare, altogether charming visions
that linger in the memory in freshness and fragrance until memory itself
fades away. She sat very straight at the piano, and the position brought
out all the long lines of her figure--the long, round white neck and
throat, the long back and bosom, the long arms and legs--a series of
lovely curves. It has been scientifically demonstrated that pale blue is
pre-eminently the sex color. It certainly was pre-eminently _her_ color,
setting off each and every one of her charms and suggesting the
roundness and softness and whiteness her drapery concealed. She was one
of those rare beings whose every pose is instinct with grace. And her
voice--It was small, rather high, at times almost shrill. But in every
note of its register there sounded a mysterious, melancholy-sweet call
to the responding nerves of man.

Before she got halfway through the song Norman was fighting against the
same mad impulse that had all but overwhelmed him as he watched her in
the afternoon. And when her last note rose, swelled, slowly faded into
silence, it seemed to him that had she kept on for one note more he
would have disclosed to her amazed eyes the insanity raging within him.

She turned on the piano stool, her hands dropped listlessly in her lap.
"Aren't those words beautiful?" she said in a dreamy voice. She was not
looking at him. Evidently she was hardly aware of his presence.

He had not heard a word. He was in no mood for mere words. "I've never
liked anything so well," he said. And he lowered his eyes that she might
not see what they must be revealing.

She rose. He made a gesture of protest. "Won't you sing another?" he
asked.

"Not after that," she said. "It's the best I know. It has put me out of
the mood for the ordinary songs."

"You are a dreamer--aren't you?"

"That's my real life," replied she. "I go through the other part just to
get to the dreams."

"What do you dream?"

She laughed carelessly. "Oh, you'd not be interested. It would seem
foolish to you."

"You're mistaken there," cried he. "The only thing that ever has
interested me in life is dreams--and making them come true."

"But not _my_ kind of dreams. The only kind I like are the ones that
couldn't possibly come true."

"There isn't any dream that can't be made to come true."

She looked at him eagerly. "You think so?"

"The wildest ones are often the easiest." He had a moving voice himself,
and it had been known to affect listening ears hypnotically when he was
deeply in earnest, was possessed by one of those desires that conquer
men of will and then make them irresistible instruments. "What is your
dream?--happiness? . . . love?"

She gazed past him with swimming eyes, with a glance that seemed like a
brave bright bird exploring infinity. "Yes," she said under her breath.
"But it could never--never come true. It's too perfect."

"Don't doubt," he said, in a tone that fitted her mood as the rhythm of
the cradle fits the gentle breathing of the sleeping child. "Don't ever
doubt. And the dream will come true."

"You have been in love?" she said, under the spell of his look and tone.

He nodded slowly. "I am," he replied, and he was under the spell of her
beauty.

"Is it--wonderful?"

"Like nothing else on earth. Everything else seems--poor and
cheap--beside it."

He drew a step nearer. "But you couldn't love--not yet," he said. "You
haven't had the experience. You will have to learn."

"You don't know me," she cried. "I have been teaching myself ever since
I was a little girl. I've thought of nothing else most of the time.
Oh--" she clasped her white hands against her small bosom--"if I ever
have the chance, how much I shall give!"

"I know it! I know it!" he replied. "You will make some man happier than
ever man was before." His infatuation did not blind him to the fact that
she cared nothing about him, looked on him in the most unpersonal way.
But that knowledge seemed only to inflame him the more, to lash him on
to the folly of an ill-timed declaration. "I have felt how much you will
give--how much you will love--I've felt it from the second time I saw
you--perhaps from the first. I've never seen any woman who interested me
as you do--who drew me as you do--against my ambition--against my will.
I--I----"

He had been fighting against the words that would come in spite of him.
He halted now because the food of emotion suffocated speech. He stood
before her, ghastly pale and trembling. She did not draw back. She
seemed compelled by his will, by the force of his passion, to stay where
she was. But in her eyes was a fascinated terror--a fear of him--of the
passion that dominated him, a passion like the devils that made men gash
themselves and leap from precipices into the sea. To unaccustomed eyes
the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually
repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing,
towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild rapture of
infinite longing realized.

"I have frightened you?" he said.

"Yes," was her whispered reply.

"But it is your dream come true."

She shrank back--not in aversion, but gently. "No--it isn't my dream,"
she replied.

"You don't realize it yet, but you will."

She shook her head positively. "I couldn't ever think of you in that
way."

He did not need to ask why. She had already explained when they were
talking of Tetlow. There was a finality in her tone that filled him with
despair. It was his turn to look at her in terror. What power this slim
delicate girl had over him! What a price she could exact if she but
knew! Knew? Why, he had told her--was telling her in look and tone and
gesture--was giving himself frankly into captivity--was prostrate,
inviting her to trample. His only hope of escape lay in her
inexperience--that she would not realize. In the insanities of passion,
as in some other forms of dementia, there is always left a streak of
reason--of that craft which leads us to try to get what we want as
cheaply as possible. Men, all but beside themselves with love, will
bargain over the terms, if they be of the bargaining kind by nature.
Norman was not a haggler. But common prudence was telling him how unwise
his conduct was, how he was inviting the defeat of his own purposes.

He waved his hand impatiently. "We'll see, my dear," he said with a
light good-humored laugh. "I mustn't forget that I came to see your
father."

She looked at him doubtfully. She did not understand--did not quite
like--this abrupt change of mood. It suggested to her simplicity a lack
of seriousness, of sincerity. "Do you really wish to see my father?" she
inquired.

"Why else should I come away over to Jersey City? Couldn't I have talked
with you at the office?"

This seemed convincing. She continued to study his face for light upon
the real character of this strange new sort of man. He regarded her with
a friendly humorous twinkle in his eyes. "Then I'll take you to him,"
she said at length. She was by no means satisfied, but she could not
discover why she was dissatisfied.

"I can't possibly do you any harm," he urged, with raillery.

"No, I think not," replied she gravely. "But you mustn't say those
things!"

"Why not?" Into his eyes came their strongest, most penetrating look. "I
want you. And I don't intend to give you up. It isn't my habit to give
up. So, sooner or later I get what I go after."

"You make me--afraid," she said nervously.

"Of what?" laughed he. "Not of me, certainly. Then it must be of
yourself. You are afraid you will end by wanting me to want you."

"No--not that," declared she, confused by his quick cleverness of
speech. "I don't know what I'm afraid of."

"Then let's go to your father. . . . You'll not tell Tetlow what I've
said?"

"No." And once more her simple negation gave him a sense of her absolute
truthfulness.

"Or that I've been here?"

She looked astonished. "Why not?"

"Oh--office reasons. It wouldn't do for the others to know."

She reflected on this. "I don't understand," was the result of her
thinking. "But I'll do as you ask. Only, you must not come again."

"Why not? If they knew at the office, they'd simply talk--unpleasantly."

"Yes," she admitted hesitatingly after reflecting. "So you mustn't come
again. I don't like some kinds of secrets."

"But your father will know," he urged. "Isn't that enough for--for
propriety?"

"I can't explain. I don't understand, myself. I do a lot of things by
instinct." She, standing with her hands behind her back and with clear,
childlike eyes gravely upon him, looked puzzled but resolved. "And my
instinct tells me not to do anything secret about you."

This answer made him wonder whether after all he might not be too
positive in his derisive disbelief in women's instincts. He laughed.
"Well--now for your father."

The workshop proved to be an annex to the rear, reached by a passage
leading past a cosy little dining room and a kitchen where the order and
the shine of cleanness were notable even to masculine eyes. "You are
well taken care of," he said to her--she was preceding him to show the
way.

"We take care of ourselves," replied she. "I get breakfast before I
leave and supper after I come home. Father has a cold lunch in the
middle of the day, when he eats at all--which isn't often. And on
Saturday afternoons and Sundays I do the heavy work."

"You _are_ a busy lady!"

"Oh, not so very busy. Father is a crank about system and order. He has
taught me to plan everything and work by the plans."

For the first time Norman had a glimmer of real interest in meeting her
father. For in those remarks of hers he recognized at once the rare
superior man--the man who works by plan, where the masses of mankind
either drift helplessly or are propelled by some superior force behind
them without which they would be, not the civilized beings they seem,
but even as the savage in the dugout or as the beast of the field. The
girl opened a door; a bright light streamed into the dim hallway.

"Father!" she called. "Here's Mr. Norman."

Norman saw, beyond the exquisite profile of the girl's head and figure,
a lean tallish old man, dark and gray, whose expression proclaimed him
at first glance no more in touch with the affairs of active life in the
world than had he been an inhabitant of Mars.

Mr. Hallowell gave his caller a polite glance and handshake--evidence of
merest surface interest in him, of amiable patience with an intruder.
Norman saw in the neatness of his clothing and linen further proof of
the girl's loving care. For no such abstracted personality as this would
ever bother about such things for himself. These details, however,
detained Norman only for a moment. In the presence of Hallowell it was
impossible not to concentrate upon him.

As we grow older what we are inside, the kind of thoughts we admit as
our intimates, appears ever more strongly in the countenance. This had
often struck Norman, observing the men of importance about him, noting
how as they aged the look of respectability, of intellectual
distinction, became a thinner and ever thinner veneer over the
selfishness and greediness, the vanity and sensuality and falsehood. But
never before had he been so deeply impressed by its truth. Evidently
Hallowell during most of his fifty-five or sixty years had lived the
purely intellectual life. The result was a look of spiritual beauty, the
look of the soul living in the high mountain, with serenity and vast
views constantly before it. Such a face fills with awe the ordinary
follower of the petty life of the world if he have the brains to know or
to suspect the ultimate truth about existence. It filled Norman with
awe. He hastily turned his eyes upon the girl--and once more into his
face came the resolute, intense, white-hot expression of a man doggedly
set upon an earthy purpose.

There was an embarrassed silence. Then the girl said, "Show him the
worms, father."

Mr. Hallowell smiled. "My little girl thinks no one has seen that sort
of thing," said he. "I can't make her believe it is one of the
commonplaces."

"You've never had anyone here more ignorant than I, sir," said Norman.
"The only claim on your courtesy I can make is that I'm interested and
that I perhaps know enough in a general way to appreciate."

Hallowell waved his hand toward a row of large glass bottles on one of
the many shelves built against the rough walls of the room. "Here they
are," said he. "It's the familiar illustration of how life may be
controlled."

"I don't understand," said Norman, eying the bottled worms curiously.

"Oh, it's simply the demonstration that life is a mere chemical
process----"

Norman had ceased to listen. The girl was moving toward the door by
which they had entered--was in the doorway--was gone! He stood in an
attitude of attention; Hallowell talked on and on, passing from one
thing to another, forgetting his caller and himself, thinking only of
the subject, the beloved science, that has brought into the modern world
a type of men like those who haunted the deserts and mountain caves in
the days when Rome was falling to pieces. With those saintly hermits of
the Dark Ages religion was the all-absorbing subject. And seeking their
own salvation was the goal upon which their ardent eyes were necessarily
bent. With these modern devotees, science--the search for the truth
about the world in which they live--is their religion; and their goal
is the redemption of the world. They are resolved--step by step, each
worker contributing his mite of discovery--to transform the world from a
hell of discomfort and pain and death to a heaven where men and women,
free and enlightened and perhaps immortal, shall live in happiness. They
even dream that perhaps this race of gods shall learn to construct the
means to take them to another and younger planet, when this Earth has
become too old and too cold and too nakedly clad in atmosphere properly
to sustain life.

From time to time Norman caught a few words of what Hallowell
said--words that made him respect the intelligence that had uttered
them. But he neither cared nor dared to listen. He refused to be
deflected from his one purpose. When he was as old as Hallowell, it
would be time to think of these matters. When he had snatched the things
he needed, it would be time to take the generous, wide, philosopher view
of life. But not yet. He was still young; he could--and he would!--drink
of the sparkling heady life of the senses, typefied now for him in this
girl. How her loveliness flamed in his blood--flamed as fiercely when he
could not see the actual, tangible charms as when they were radiating
their fire into his eyes and through his skin! First he must live that
glorious life of youth, of nerves aquiver with ecstasy. Also, he must
shut out the things of the intellect--must live in brain as well as in
body the animal life--in brain the life of cunning and strategy. For the
intellectual life would make it impossible to pursue such ignoble
things. First, material success and material happiness. Then, in its own
time, this intellectual life to which such men as Hallowell ever beckon,
from their heights, such men as Norman, deep in the wallow that seems to
them unworthy of them, even as they roll in it.

As soon as there came a convenient pause in Hallowell's talk, Norman
said, "And you devote your whole life to these things?"

Hallowell's countenance lost its fine glow of enthusiasm. "I have to
make a living. I do chemical analyses for doctors and druggists. That
takes most of my time."

"But you can dispatch those things quickly."

Hallowell shook his head. "There's only one way to do things. My clients
trust me. I can't shirk."

Norman smiled. He admired this simplicity. But it amused him, too; in a
world of shirking and shuffling, not to speak of downright dishonesty,
it struck the humorous note of the incongruous. He said:

"But if you could give all your time you would get on faster."

"Yes--if I had the time--_and_ the money. To make the search exhaustive
would take money--five or six thousand a year, at the least. A great
deal more than I shall ever have."

"Have you tried to interest capitalists?"

Hallowell smiled ironically. "There is much talk about capitalists and
capital opening up things. But I have yet to learn of an instance of
their touching anything until they were absolutely sure of large
profits. Their failed enterprises are not miscarriage of noble purpose
but mistaken judgment, judgment blinded by hope and greed."

"I see that a philosopher can know life without living it," said Norman.
"But couldn't you put your scheme in such a way that some capitalist
would be led to hope?"

"I'd have to tell them the truth. Possibly I might discover something
with commercial value, but I couldn't promise. I don't think it is
likely."

Norman's eyes were on the door. His thoughts were reaching out to the
distant and faint sound of a piano. "Just what do you propose to search
for?" inquired he.

He tried to listen, because it was necessary that he have some knowledge
of Hallowell's plans. But he could not fix his attention. After a few
moments he glanced at his watch, interrupted with, "I think I understand
enough for the present. I've stayed longer than I intended. I must go
now. When I come again I may perhaps have some plan to propose."

"Plan?" exclaimed Hallowell, his eyes lighting up.

"I'm not sure--not at all sure," hastily added Norman. "I don't wish to
give you false hopes. The matter is extremely difficult. But I'll try.
I've small hope of success, but I'll try."

"My daughter didn't explain to me," said the scientist. "She simply said
one of the gentlemen for whom she worked was coming to look at my place.
I thought it was mere curiosity."

"So it was, Mr. Hallowell," said Norman. "But I have been interested. I
don't as yet see what can be done. I'm only saying that I'll think it
over."

"I understand," said Hallowell. He was trying to seem calm and
indifferent. But his voice had the tremulous note of excitement in it
and his hands fumbled nervously, touching evidence of the agitated
gropings of his mind in the faint, perhaps illusory, light of a
new-sprung hope. "Yes, I understand perfectly. Still--it is pleasant to
think about such a thing, even if there's no chance of it. I am very
fond of dreaming. That has been my life, you know."

Norman colored, moved uneasily. The fineness of this man's character
made him uncomfortable. He could pity Hallowell as a misguided failure.
He could dilate himself as prosperous, successful, much the more
imposing and important figure in the contrast. Yet there was somehow a
point of view at which, if one looked carefully, his own sort of man
shriveled and the Hallowell sort towered.

"I _must_ be going," Norman said. "No--don't come with me. I know the way.
I've interrupted you long enough." And he put out his hand and, by those
little clevernesses of manner which he understood so well, made it
impossible for Hallowell to go with him to Dorothy.

He was glad when he shut the door between him and her father. He paused
in the hall to dispel the vague, self-debasing discomfort--and listening
to _her_ voice as she sang helped wonderfully. There is no more trying
test of a personality than to be estimated by the voice alone. That test
produces many strange and startling results. Again and again it
completely reverses our judgment of the personality, either destroys or
enhances its charm. The voice of this girl, floating out upon the quiet
of the cottage--the voice, soft and sweet, full of the virginal passion
of dreams unmarred by experience--It was while listening to her voice,
as he stood there in the dimly lighted hall, that Frederick Norman
passed under the spell in all its potency. In taking an anaesthetic
there is the stage when we reach out for its soothing effects; then
comes the stage when we half desire, half fear; then a stage in which
fear is dominant, and we struggle to retain our control of the senses.
Last comes the stage when we feel the full power of the drug and relax
and yield or are beaten down into quiet. Her voice drew him into the
final stage, was the blow of the overwhelming wave's crest that crushed
him into submission.

She glanced toward the door. He was leaning there, an ominous calm in
his pale, resolute face. She gazed at him with widening eyes. And her
look was the look of helplessness before a force that may, indeed must,
be struggled against, but with the foregone certainty of defeat.

A gleam of triumph shone in his eyes. Then his expression changed to one
more conventional. "I stopped a moment to listen, on my way out," said
he.

Her expression changed also. The instinctive, probably unconscious
response to his look faded into the sweet smile, serious rather than
merry, that was her habitual greeting. "Mr. Tetlow didn't get away from
father so soon."

"I stayed longer than I intended. I found it even more interesting than
I had expected. . . . Would you be glad if your father could be free to
do as he likes and not be worried about anything?"

"That is one of my dreams."

"Well, it's certainly one that might come true. . . . And you--It's a
shame that you should have to do so much drudgery--both here and in New
York."

"Oh, I don't mind about myself. It's all I'm fit for. I haven't any
talent--except for dreaming."

"And for making--_some_ man's dreams come true."

Her gaze dropped. And as she hid herself she looked once more almost as
insignificant and colorless as he had once believed her to be.

"What are you thinking about?"

She shook her head slowly without raising her eyes or emerging from the
deep recess of her reserve.

"You are a mystery to me. I can't decide whether you are very innocent
or very--concealing."

She glanced inquiringly at him. "I don't understand," she said.

He smiled. "No more do I. I've seen so much of faking--in women as well
as in men--that it's hard for me to believe anyone is genuine."

"Do you think I am trying to deceive you? About what?"

He made an impatient gesture--impatience with his credulity where she
was concerned. "No matter. I want to make you happy--because I want you
to make me happy."

Her eyes became as grave as a wondering child's. "You are laughing at
me," she said.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I could not make you happy."

"Why not?"

"What could a serious man like you find in me?"

His intense, burning gaze held hers. "Some time I will tell you."

She shut herself within herself like a flower folding away its beauty
and leaving exposed only the underside of its petals. It was impossible
to say whether she understood or was merely obeying an instinct.

He watched her a moment in silence. Then he said:

"I am mad about you--mad. You _must_ understand. I can think only of you.
I am insane with jealousy of you. I want you--I must have you."

He would have seized her in his arms, but the look of sheer amazement
she gave him protected her where no protest or struggle would. "You?"
she said. "Did you really mean it? I thought you were just talking."

"Can't you see that I mean it?"

"Yes--you look as if you did. But I can't believe it. I could never
think of you in that way."

Once more that frank statement of indifference infuriated him. He _must_
compel her to feel--he must give that indifference the lie--and at once!
He caught her in his arms. He rained kisses upon her pale face. She made
not the least resistance, but seemed dazed. "I will teach you to love
me," he cried, drunk now with the wine of her lips, with the perfume of
her exquisite youth. "I will make you happy. We shall be mad with
happiness."

She gently freed herself. "I don't believe I could ever think of you in
that way."

"Yes, darling--you will. You can't help loving where you are loved so
utterly."

She gazed at him wonderingly--the puzzled wonder of a child.
"You--love--me?" she said slowly.

"Call it what you like. I am mad about you. I have forgotten
everything--pride--position--things you can't imagine--and I care for
nothing but you."

And again he was kissing her with the soft fury of fire; and again she
was submitting with the passive, dazed expression that seemed to add to
his passion. To make her feel! To make her respond! He, whom so many
women had loved--women of position, of fame for beauty, of social
distinction or distinction as singers, players--women of society and
women of talent all kinds of worth-while women--they had cared, had run
after him, had given freely all he had asked and more. And this
girl--nobody at all--she had nothing for him.

He held her away from him, cried angrily: "What is the matter with you?
What is the matter with me?"

"I don't understand," she said. "I wish you wouldn't kiss me so much."

He released her, laughed satirically. "Oh--you are playing a game. I
might have known."

"I don't understand," said she. "A while ago you said you loved me. Now
you act as if you didn't like me at all." And she smiled gayly at him,
pouting her lips a little. Once more her beauty was shining. It made his
nerves quiver to see the color in her pure white skin where he had
kissed her.

"I don't care whether it is a game or not," he cried. And he was about
to seize her again, when she repulsed him. He crushed her resistance,
held her tight in his arms.

"You frighten me," she murmured. "You--hurt me."

He released her. "What do you want?" he cried. "Don't you care at all?"

"Oh, yes. I like you--very much. I have from the first time I saw you.
But you seem older--and more serious."

"Never mind about that. We are going to love each other--and I am going
to make you and your father happy."

"If you make father happy I will do anything for you. I don't want
anything myself--but he is getting old and sometimes his despair is
terrible." There were tears in her voice--tears and the most touching
tenderness. "He has some great secret that he wants to discover, and he
is afraid he will die without having had the chance."

"You will love me if I make your father happy?"

He knew it was the question of a fool, but he so longed to hear from her
lips some word to give him hope that he could not help asking it. She
said:

"Love you as--as you seem to love me? Not that same way. I don't feel
that way toward you. But I will love you in my own way."

He observed her with penetrating eyes. Was this speech of hers innocence
or calculation? He could get no clue to the truth. He saw nothing but
innocence; the teaching of experience warned him to believe in nothing
but guile. He hid his doubt and chagrin behind a mocking smile. "As you
please," said he. "I will do my part. Then--we'll see. . . . Do you care
about anyone else--in _my_ way of loving, I mean?"

It was again the question of an infatuated fool, and put in an
infatuated fool's way. For, if she were a "deep one," how could he hope
to get the truth? But her answer reassured him. "No," she said--her
simple, direct negation that had a convincing power he had never seen
equaled.

"If I ever knew of another man's touching you," he said, "I'd feel like
strangling him." He laughed at himself. "Not that I should strangle him.
That sort of thing isn't done any more. But I'd do something devilish."

"But I haven't promised not to kiss anyone else," she said. "Why should
I? I don't love you."

He looked at her strangely. "But you're going to love me," he said.

She shrank within herself again. She looked at him with uneasy eyes.
"You won't kiss me any more until I tell you that I do love you?" she
asked with the gravity and pathos and helplessness of a child.

"Don't you want to learn to love me?--to learn to love?"

She was silent--a silence that maddened him.

"Don't be afraid to speak," he said irritably. "What are you thinking?"

"That I don't want you to kiss me--and that I do want father to be
happy."

Was this guile? Was it innocence? He put his arms round her. "Look at
me," he said.

She gazed at him frankly.

"You like me?"

"Yes."

"Why don't you want me to kiss you?"

"I don't know. It makes me--dislike you."

He released her. She laid her hand on his arm eagerly. "Please--" she
implored. "I don't mean to hurt you. I wouldn't offend you for anything.
Only--when you ask me a question--mustn't I tell you the truth?"

"Always," he said, believing in her, in spite of the warnings of cynical
worldliness. "I don't know whether you are sincere or not--as yet. So
for the present I'll give you the benefit of the doubt." He stood back
and looked at her from head to foot. "You are beautiful!--perfect," he
said in a low voice. He laughed. "I'll resist the temptation to kiss you
again. I must go now. About your father--I'll see what can be done."

She stood with her hands behind her back, looking up at him with an
expression he could not fathom. Suddenly she advanced, put up her lips
and said gravely,

"Won't you kiss me?"

He eyed her quizzically. "Oh--you've changed your mind?"

She shook her head.

"Then why do you ask me to kiss you?"

"Because of what you said about father."

He laughed and kissed her. And then she, too, laughed. He said, "Not for
my own sake--not a little bit?"

"Oh, yes," she cried, "when you kiss me that way. I like to be kissed. I
am very affectionate."

He laughed again. "You _are_ a queer one. If it's a game, it's a good one.
Is it a game?"

"I don't know," said she gayly. "Good night. This is dreadfully late for
me."

"Good night," he said, and they shook hands. "Do you like me better--or
less?"

"Better," was her prompt, apparently honest reply.

"Curiously enough, I'm beginning to _like_ you," said he. "Now don't ask
me what I mean by that. If you don't know already, you'll not find out
from me."

"Oh, but I do know," cried she. "The way you kissed me--that was one
thing. The way you feel toward me now--that's a different thing. Isn't
it so?"

"Exactly. I see we are going to get on."

"Yes, indeed."

They shook hands again in friendliest fashion, and she opened the front
door for him. And her farewell smile was bright and happy.




VII


In the cold clear open he proceeded to take the usual account of
stock--with dismal results. She had wound him round her fingers, had
made him say only the things he should not have said, and leave unsaid
the things that might have furthered his purposes. He had conducted the
affair ridiculously--"just what is to be expected of an infatuated
fool." However, there was no consolation in the discovery that he was
reduced, after all these years of experience, to the common level--man
weak and credulous in his dealings with woman. He hoped that his disgust
with himself would lead on to disgust, or, rather, distaste for her. It
is the primal instinct of vanity to dislike and to shun those who have
witnessed its humiliation.

"I believe I am coming to my senses," he said. And he ventured to call
her up before him for examination and criticism. This as he stood upon
the forward deck of the ferry with the magnificent panorama of New York
before him. New York! And he, of its strong men, of the few in all that
multitude who had rank and power--he who had won as his promised wife
the daughter of one of the dozen mighty ones of the nation! What an
ill-timed, what an absurd, what a crazy step down this excursion of
his! And for what? There he summoned her before him. And at the first
glance of his fancy at her fair sweet face and lovely figure, he
quailed. He was hearing her voice again. He was feeling the yield of her
smooth, round form to his embrace, the yield of her smooth white cheek
to his caress. In his nostrils was the fragrance of her youth, the
matchless perfume of nature, beyond any of the distillations of art in
its appeal to his normal and healthy nerves. And he burned with the fire
only she could quench. "I must--I must.--My God, I _must_!" he muttered.

When he reached home, he asked whether his sister was in. The butler
said that Mrs. Fitzhugh had just come from the theater. In search of
her, he went to the library, found her seated there with a book and a
cigarette, her wrap thrown back upon her chair. "Come out to supper with
me, Ursula," he said. "I'm starved and bored."

"Why, you're not dressed!" exclaimed his sister. "I thought you were at
the Cameron dance with Josephine."

"Had to cut it out," replied he curtly. "Will you come?"

"I can't eat, but I'll drink. Yes, let's have a spree. It's been years
since we had one--not since we were poor. Let's not go to a _deadly_
respectable place. Let's go where there are some of the other kind,
too."

"But I must have food. Why not the Martin?"

"That'll do--though I'd prefer something a little farther up Broadway."

"The Martin is gay enough. The truth is, there's nothing really gay any
more. There's too much money. Money suffocates gayety."

To the Martin they went, and he ordered an enormous supper--one of those
incredible meals for which he was famous. They dispatched a quart of
champagne before the supper began to come, he drinking at least two
thirds of it. He drank as much while he was eating--and called for a
third bottle when the coffee was served. He had eaten half a dozen big
oysters, a whole guinea hen, a whole portion of salad, another of
Boniface cheese, with innumerable crackers.

"If I could eat as you do!" sighed Ursula enviously. "Yet it's only one
of your accomplishments."

"I'm not eating much nowadays," said he gloomily. "I'm losing my
appetite." And he lit a long black cigar and swallowed half a large
glass of the champagne. "Nothing tastes good--not even champagne."

"There _is_ something wrong with you," said Ursula. "Did you ask me out
for confidences, or for advice--or for both?"

"None of them," replied he. "Only for company. I knew I'd not be able to
sleep for hours, and I wanted to put off the time when I'd be alone."

"I wish I had as much influence with you as you have with me," said
Ursula, by way of preparation for confidences.

"Influence? Don't I do whatever you say?"

She laughed. "Nobody has influence over you," she said.

"Not even myself," replied he morosely.

"Well--that talking-to you gave me has had its effect," proceeded Mrs.
Fitzhugh. "It set me to thinking. There are other things besides
love--man and woman love. I've decided to--to behave myself and give
poor Clayton a chance to rest." She smiled, a little maliciously. "He's
had a horrible fright. But it's over now. What a fine thing it is for a
woman to have a sensible brother!"

Norman grunted, took another liberal draught of the champagne.

"If I had a mind like yours!" pursued Ursula. "Now, you simply couldn't
make a fool of yourself."

He looked at her sharply. He felt as if she had somehow got wind of his
eccentric doings.

"I've always resented your rather contemptuous attitude toward women,"
she went on. "But you are right--really you are. We're none of us worth
the excitement men make about us."

"It isn't the woman who makes a fool of the man," said Norman. "It's the
man who makes a fool of himself. A match can cause a terrific explosion
if it's in the right place--but not if it isn't."

She nodded. "That's it. We're simply matches--and most of us of the
poor sputtering kind that burns with a bad odor and goes out right away.
A very inferior quality of matches."

"Yes," repeated Norman, "it's the man who does the whole business."

A mocking smile curled her lips. "I knew you weren't in love with
Josephine."

He stared gloomily at his cigar.

"But you're going to marry her?"

"I'm in love with her," he said angrily. "And I'm going to marry her."

She eyed him shrewdly. "Fred--are you in love with some one else?"

He did not answer immediately. When he did it was with a "No" that
seemed the more emphatic for the delay.

"Oh, just one of your little affairs." And she began to poke fun at him.
"I thought you had dropped that sort of thing for good and all. I hope
Josie won't hear of it. She'd not understand. Women never do--unless
they don't care a rap about the man. . . . Is she on the stage? I know
you'll not tell me, but I like to ask."

Her brother looked at her rather wildly. "Let's go home," he said. He
was astounded and alarmed by the discovery that his infatuation had
whirled him to the lunacy of longing to confide--and he feared lest, if
he should stay on, he would blurt out his disgraceful secret. "Waiter,
the bill."

"Don't let's go yet," urged his sister. "The most interesting people are
beginning to come. Besides, I want more champagne."

He yielded. While she gazed round with the air of a visitor to a Zoo
that is affected by fashionable people, and commented on the faces,
figures, and clothes of the women, he stared at his plate and smoked and
drank. Finally she said, "I'd give anything to see you make a fool of
yourself, just once."

He grinned. "Things are in the way to having your wish gratified," he
said. "It looks to me as if my time had come."

She tried to conceal her anxiety. "Are you serious?" she asked. Then
added: "Of course not. You simply couldn't. Especially now--when
Josephine might hear. I suppose you've noticed how Joe Culver is hanging
round her?"

He nodded.

"There's no danger--unless----"

"I shall marry Josephine."

"Not if she hears."

"She's not going to hear."

"Don't be too sure. Women love to boast. It tickles their vanity to have
a man. Yes, they pretend to be madly in love simply to give themselves
the excuse for tattling."

"She'll not hear."

"You can't be sure."

"I want you to help me out. I'm going to tell her I'm tremendously busy
these few next days--or weeks."

"Weeks!" Ursula Fitzhugh laughed. "My, it must be serious!"

"Weeks," repeated her brother. "And I want you to say things that'll
help out--and to see a good deal of her." He flung down his cigar. "You
women don't understand how it is with a man."

"Don't we though! Why, it's a very ordinary occurrence for a woman to be
really in love with several men at once."

His eyes gleamed jealously. "I don't believe it," he cried.

"Not Josephine," she said reassuringly. "She's one of those
single-hearted, untemperamental women. They concentrate. They have no
imagination."

"I wasn't thinking of Josephine," said he sullenly. "To go back to what
I was saying, I am in love with Josephine and with no one else. I can't
explain to you how or why I'm entangled. But I'll get myself untangled
all right--and very shortly."

"I know that, Fred. You aren't the permanent damn-fool sort."

"I should say not!" exclaimed he. "It's a hopeful sign that I know
exactly how big a fool I am."

She shook her head in strong dissent. "On the contrary," said she,
"it's a bad sign. I didn't realize I was making a fool of myself until
you pointed it out to me. That stopped me. If I had been doing it with
my eyes open, your jacking me up would only have made me go ahead."

"A woman's different. It doesn't take much to stop a woman. She's about
half stopped when she begins."

Ursula was thoroughly alarmed. "Fred," she said earnestly, "you're
running bang into danger. The time to stop is right now."

"Can't do it," he said. "Let's not talk about it."

"Can't? That word from _you_?"

"From me," replied he. "Don't forget helping out with Josephine. Let's
go."

And he refused to be persuaded to stay on--or to be cajoled or baited
into talking further of this secret his sister saw was weighing heavily.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was down town half an hour earlier than usual the next morning. But
no one noted it because his habit had always been to arrive among the
first--not to set an example but to give his prodigious industry the
fullest swing. There was in Turkey a great poet of whom it is said that
he must have written twenty-five hours a day. Norman's accomplishment
bulked in that same way before his associates. He had not slept the
whole night. But, thanks to his enormous vitality, no trace of this
serious dissipation showed. The huge supper he had eaten--and drunk--the
sleepless night and the giant breakfast of fruit and cereal and chops
and wheat cakes and coffee he had laid in to stay him until lunch time,
would together have given pause to any but such a physical organization
as his. The only evidence of it was a certain slight irritability--but
this may have been due to his state of intense self-dissatisfaction.

As he entered the main room his glance sought the corner where Miss
Hallowell was ensconced. She happened to look up at that instant. With a
radiant smile she bowed to him in friendliest fashion. He colored
deeply, frowned with annoyance, bowed coldly and strode into his room.
He fussed and fretted about with his papers for a few minutes, then rang
the bell.

"Send in Miss Pritchard--no, Mr. Gowdy--no, Miss Hallowell," he said to
the office boy. And then he looked sharply at the pert young face for
possible signs of secret cynical amusement. He saw none such, but was
not convinced. He knew too well how by a sort of occult process the
servants, all the subordinates, round a person like himself discover the
most intimate secrets, almost get the news before anything has really
occurred.

Miss Hallowell appeared, and very cold and reserved she looked as she
stood waiting.

"I sent for you because--" he began. He glanced at the door to make sure
that it was closed--"because I wanted to hear your voice." And he
laughed boyishly. He was in high good humor now.

"Why did you speak to me as you did when you came in?" said she.

There was certainly novelty in this direct attack, this equal to equal
criticism of his manners. He was not pleased with the novelty; but at
the same time he felt a lack of the courage to answer her as she
deserved, even if she was playing a clever game. "It isn't necessary
that the whole office should know our private business," said he.

She seemed astonished. "What private business?"

"Last night," said he, uncertain whether she was trifling with him or
was really the innocent she pretended to be. "If I were you, I'd not
speak as friendlily as you did this morning--not before people."

"Why?" inquired she, her sweet young face still more perplexed.

"This isn't a small town out West," explained he. "It's New York. People
misunderstand--or rather--" He gave her a laughing, mischievous
glance--"or rather--they don't."

"I can't see anything to make a mystery about," declared the girl. "Why,
you act as if there were something to be ashamed of in coming to see
me."

He was observing her sharply. How could a girl live in the New York
atmosphere several years without getting a sensible point of view? Yet,
so far as he could judge, this girl was perfectly honest in her
ignorance. "Don't be foolish," said he. "Please accept the fact as I
give it to you. You mustn't let people see everything."

She made no attempt to conceal her dislike for this. "I won't be mixed
up in anything like that," said she, quite gently and without a
suggestion of pique or anger. "It makes me feel low--and it's horribly
common. Either we are going to be friends or we aren't. And if we are,
why, we're friends whenever we meet. I'm not ashamed of you. And if you
are ashamed of me, you can cut me out altogether."

His color deepened until his face was crimson. His eyes avoided hers. "I
was thinking chiefly of you," he said--and he honestly thought he was
speaking the whole truth.

"Then please don't do so any more," said she, turning to go. "I
understand about New York snobbishness. I want nothing to do with it."

He disregarded the danger of the door being opened at any moment. He
rushed to her and took her reluctant hand. "You mustn't blame me for the
ways of the world. I can't change them. Do be sensible, dearest. You're
only going to be here a few days longer. I've got that plan for you and
your father all thought out. I'll put it through at once. I don't want
the office talking scandal about us--do you?"

She looked at him pityingly. His eyes fell before hers. "I know it's a
weakness," he said, giving up trying to deceive her and himself. "But I
can't help it. I was brought up that way."

"Well--I wasn't. I see we can never be friends."

What a mess he had made of this affair! This girl must be playing upon
him. In his folly he had let her see how completely he was in her power,
and she was using that power to establish relations between them that
were the very opposite of what he desired--and must have. He must
control himself. "As you please," he said coldly, dropping her hand.
"I'm sorry, but unless you are reasonable I can do nothing for you." And
he went to his desk.

She hesitated a moment; as her back was toward him, he could not see her
expression. Without looking round she went out of his office. It took
all his strength to let her go. "She's bluffing," he muttered. "And
yet--perhaps she isn't. There may be people like that left in New York."
Whatever the truth, he simply must make a stand. He knew women; no woman
had the least respect for a man who let her rule--and this woman,
relying upon his weakness for her, was bent upon ruling. If he did not
make a stand, she was lost to him. If he did make a stand, he could no
more than lose her. Lose her! That thought made him sick at heart. "What
a fool I am about her!" he cried. "I must hurry things up. I must get
enough of her--must get through it and back to my sober senses."

That was a time of heavy pressure of important affairs. He furiously
attacked one task after another, only to abandon each in t

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