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The Conflict

by David Graham Phillips · English · Gutenberg #433 · 553,666 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Conflict

Author: David Graham Phillips


        
Release date: February 1, 1996 [eBook #433]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/433

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONFLICT ***




Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.








THE CONFLICT


by

David Graham Phillips




I

Four years at Wellesley; two years about equally divided among Paris,
Dresden and Florence.  And now Jane Hastings was at home again.  At
home in the unchanged house--spacious, old-fashioned--looking down from
its steeply sloping lawns and terraced gardens upon the sooty, smoky
activities of Remsen City, looking out upon a charming panorama of
hills and valleys in the heart of South Central Indiana.  Six years of
striving in the East and abroad to satisfy the restless energy she
inherited from her father; and here she was, as restless as ever--yet
with everything done that a woman could do in the way of an active
career.  She looked back upon her years of elaborate preparation; she
looked forward upon--nothing.  That is, nothing but marriage--dropping
her name, dropping her personality, disappearing in the personality of
another.  She had never seen a man for whom she would make such a
sacrifice; she did not believe that such a man existed.

She meditated bitterly upon that cruel arrangement of Nature's whereby
the father transmits his vigorous qualities in twofold measure to the
daughter, not in order that she may be a somebody, but solely in order
that she may transmit them to sons.  "I don't believe it," she decided.
"There's something for ME to do."  But what?  She gazed down at Remsen
City, connected by factories and pierced from east, west and south by
railways.  She gazed out over the fields and woods.  Yes, there must be
something for her besides merely marrying and breeding--just as much
for her as for a man.  But what?  If she should marry a man who would
let her rule him, she would despise him.  If she should marry a man she
could respect--a man who was of the master class like her father--how
she would hate him for ignoring her and putting her in her ordained
inferior feminine place.  She glanced down at her skirts with an angry
sense of enforced masquerade. And then she laughed--for she had a keen
sense of humor that always came to her rescue when she was in danger of
taking herself too seriously.

Through the foliage between her and the last of the stretches of
highroad winding up from Remsen City she spied a man climbing in her
direction--a long, slim figure in cap, Norfolk jacket and
knickerbockers.  Instantly--and long before he saw her--there was a
grotesque whisking out of sight of the serious personality upon which
we have been intruding.  In its stead there stood ready to receive the
young man a woman of the type that possesses physical charm and knows
how to use it--and does not scruple to use it. For a woman to conquer
man by physical charm is far and away the easiest, the most fleeting
and the emptiest of victories.  But for woman thus to conquer without
herself yielding anything whatsoever, even so little as an alluring
glance of the eye--that is quite another matter.  It was this sort of
conquest that Jane Hastings delighted in--and sought to gain with any
man who came within range.  If the men had known what she was about,
they would have denounced her conduct as contemptible and herself as
immoral, even brazen.  But in their innocence they accused only their
sophisticated and superbly masculine selves and regarded her as the
soul of innocence.  This was the more absurd in them because she
obviously excelled in the feminine art of inviting display of charm.
To glance at her was to realize at once the beauty of her figure, the
exceeding grace of her long back and waist.  A keen observer would have
seen the mockery lurking in her light-brown eyes, and about the corners
of her full red lips.

She arranged her thick dark hair to make a secret, half-revealed charm
of her fascinating pink ears and to reveal in dazzling unexpectedness
the soft, round whiteness of the nape of her neck.

Because you are thus let into Miss Hastings' naughty secret, so well
veiled behind an air of earnest and almost cold dignity, you must not
do her the injustice of thinking her unusually artful. Such artfulness
is common enough; it secures husbands by the thousand and by the tens
of thousands.  No, only in the skill of artfulness was Miss Hastings
unusual.

As the long strides of the tall, slender man brought him rapidly
nearer, his face came into plain view.  A refined, handsome face, dark
and serious.  He had dark-brown eyes--and Miss Hastings did not like
brown eyes in a man.  She thought that men should have gray or blue or
greenish eyes, and if they were cruel in their love of power she liked
it the better.

"Hello, Dave," she cried in a pleasant, friendly voice.  She was
posed--in the most unconscious of attitudes--upon a rustic bench so
that her extraordinary figure was revealed at its most attractive.

The young man halted before her, his breath coming quickly--not
altogether from the exertion of his steep and rapid climb. "Jen, I'm
mad about you," he said, his brown eyes soft and luminous with passion.
"I've done nothing but think about you in the week you've been back.  I
didn't sleep last night, and I've come up here as early as I dared to
tell you--to ask you to marry me."

He did not see the triumph she felt, the joy in having subdued another
of these insolently superior males.  Her eyes were discreetly veiled;
her delightful mouth was arranged to express sadness.

"I thought I was an ambition incarnate," continued the young man,
unwittingly adding to her delight by detailing how brilliant her
conquest was.  "I've never cared a rap about women--until I saw you.  I
was all for politics--for trying to do something to make my fellow men
the better for my having lived.  Now--it's all gone.  I want you, Jen.
Nothing else matters."

As he paused, gazing at her in speechless longing, she lifted her
eyes--simply a glance.  With a stifled cry he darted forward, dropped
beside her on the bench and tried to enfold her in his arms.  The veins
stood out in his forehead; the expression of his eyes was terrifying.

She shrank, sprang up.  His baffled hands had not even touched her.
"David Hull!" she cried, and the indignation and the repulsion in her
tone and in her manner were not simulated, though her artfulness
hastened to make real use of them.  She loved to rouse men to frenzy.
She knew that the sight of their frenzy would chill her--would fill her
with an emotion that would enable her to remain mistress of the
situation.

At sight of her aversion his eyes sank.  "Forgive me," he muttered.
"You make me--CRAZY."

"I!" she cried, laughing in angry derision.  "What have I ever done to
encourage you to be--impertinent?"

"Nothing," he admitted.  "That is, nothing but just being yourself."

"I can't help that, can I?"

"No," said he, adding doggedly:  "But neither can men help going crazy
about you."

She looked at him sitting there at once penitent and impenitent; and
her mind went back to the thoughts that had engaged it before he came
into view.  Marriage--to marry one of these men, with their coarse
physical ideas of women, with their pitiful weakness before an emotion
that seemed to her to have no charm whatever. And these were the
creatures who ruled the world and compelled women to be their
playthings and mere appendages!  Well--no doubt it was the women's own
fault, for were they not a poor, spiritless lot, trembling with fright
lest they should not find a man to lean on and then, having found the
man, settling down into fat and stupid vacuity or playing the cat at
the silly game of social position?  But not Jane Hastings!  Her bosom
heaved and her eyes blazed scorn as she looked at this person who had
dared think the touch of his coarse hands would be welcome.  Welcome!

"And I have been thinking what a delightful friendship ours was," said
she, disgustedly.  "And all the time, your talk about your
ambition--the speeches you were going to make--the offices you were
going to hold--the good you were going to do in purifying politics--it
was all a blind!"

"All a blind," admitted he.  "From the first night that you came to our
house to dinner--Jen, I'll never forget that dress you wore--or the way
you looked in it."

Miss Jane had thought extremely well of that toilet herself.  She had
heard how impervious this David Hull, the best catch in the town, was
to feminine charm; and she had gone prepared to give battle.  But she
said dejectedly, "You don't know what a shock you've given me."

"Yes, I do," cried he.  "I'm ashamed of myself.  But--I love you, Jen!
Can't you learn to love me?"

"I hadn't even thought of you in that way," said she.  "I haven't
bothered my head about marriage.  Of course, most girls have to think
about it, because they must get some one to support them----"

"I wish to God you were one of that sort," interrupted he. "Then I
could have some hope."

"Hope of what," said she disdainfully.  "You don't mean that you'd
marry a girl who was marrying you because she had to have food,
clothing and shelter?"

"I'd marry the woman I loved.  Then--I'd MAKE her love me.  She simply
couldn't help it."

Jane Hastings shuddered.  "Thank heaven, I don't have to marry!"  Her
eyes flashed.  "But I wouldn't, even if I were poor.  I'd rather go to
work.  Why shouldn't a woman work, anyhow?"

"At what?" inquired Hull.  "Except the men who do manual labor, there
are precious few men who can make a living honestly and
self-respectingly.  It's fortunate the women can hold aloof and remain
pure."

Jane laughed unpleasantly.  "I'm not so sure that the women who live
with men just for shelter are pure," said she.

"Jen," the young man burst out, "you're ambitious--aren't you?"

"Rather," replied she.

"And you like the sort of thing I'm trying to do--like it and approve
of it?"

"I believe a man ought to succeed--get to the top."

"So do I--if he can do it honorably."

Jane hesitated--dared.  "To be quite frank," said she, "I worship
success and I despise failure.  Success means strength. Failure means
weakness--and I abominate weakness."

He looked quietly disapproving.  "You don't mean that.  You don't
understand what you're saying."

"Perfectly," she assured him.  "I'm not a bit good.  Education has
taken all the namby-pamby nonsense out of me."

But he was not really hearing; besides, what had women to do with the
realities of life?  They were made to be the property of men--that was
the truth, though he would never have confessed it to any woman.  They
were made to be possessed.  "And I must possess this woman," he
thought, his blood running hot.  He said:

"Why not help me to make a career?  I can do it, Jen, with you to help."

She had thought of this before--of making a career for herself, of
doing the "something" her intense energy craved, through a man.  The
"something" must be big if it were to satisfy her; and what that was
big could a woman do except through a man? But--this man.  Her eyes
turned thoughtfully upon him--a look that encouraged him to go on:

"Politics interest you, Jen.  I've seen that in the way you listen and
in the questions you ask."

She smiled--but not at the surface.  In fact, his political talk had
bored her.  She knew nothing about the subject, and, so, had been as
one listening to an unknown language.  But, like all women, having only
the narrowest range of interests herself and the things that would
enable her to show off to advantage, she was used to being bored by the
conversational efforts of men and to concealing her boredom.  She had
listened patiently and had led the conversation by slow, imperceptible
stages round to the interesting personal--to the struggle for dominion
over this difficult male.

"Anyhow," he went on, "no intelligent person could fail to be
interested in politics, once he or she appreciated what it meant. And
people of our class owe it to society to take part in politics.  Victor
Dorn is a crank, but he's right about some things--and he's right in
saying that we of the upper class are parasites upon the masses.  They
earn all the wealth, and we take a large part of it away from them.
And it's plain stealing unless we give some service in return.  For
instance, you and I--what have we done, what are we doing that entitles
us to draw so much?  Somebody must earn by hard labor all that is
produced. We are not earning.  So"--he was looking handsome now in his
manly earnestness--"Jen, it's up to us to do our share--to stop
stealing--isn't it?"

She was genuinely interested.  "I hadn't thought of these things," said
she.

"Victor Dorn says we ought to go to work like laborers," pursued David.
"But that's where he's a crank.  The truth is, we ought to give the
service of leadership--especially in politics.  And I'm going to do it,
Jane Hastings!"

For the first time she had an interest in him other than that of
conquest.  "Just what are you going to do?" she asked.

"Not upset everything and tear everything to pieces, as Victor Dorn
wants to do," replied he.  "But reform the abuses and wrongs--make it
so that every one shall have a fair chance--make politics straight and
honest."

This sounded hazy to her.  "And what will you get out of it?" asked she.

He colored and was a little uneasy as he thus faced a direct demand for
his innermost secret--the secret of selfishness he tried to hide even
from himself.  But there was no evading; if he would interest her he
must show her the practical advantages of his proposal.  "If I'm to do
any good," said he, putting the best face, and really not a bad face,
upon a difficult and delicate matter--"if I'm to do any good I must win
a commanding position--must get to be a popular leader--must hold high
offices--and--and--all that."

"I understand," said she.  "That sounds attractive.  Yes, David, you
ought to make a career.  If I were a man that's the career I'd choose."

"You can choose it, though you're a woman," rejoined he. "Marry me, and
we'll go up together.  You've no idea how exciting campaigns and
elections are.  A little while, and you'll be crazy about it all.  The
women are taking part, more and more."

"Who's Victor Dorn?" she suddenly asked.

"You must remember him.  It was his father that was killed by the
railway the day we all went on that excursion to Indianapolis."

"Dorn the carpenter," said Jane.  "Yes--I remember."  Her face grew
dreamy with the effort of memory.  "I see it all again.  And there was
a boy with a very white face who knelt and held his head."

"That was Victor," said Hull.

"Yes--I remember him.  He was a bad boy--always fighting and robbing
orchards and getting kept after school."

"And he's still a bad boy--but in a different way.  He's out against
everything civilized and everybody that's got money."

"What does he do?  Keep a saloon?"

"No, but he spends a lot of time at them.  I must say for him that he
doesn't drink--and professes not to believe in drink. When I pointed
out to him what a bad example he set, loafing round saloons, he laughed
at me and said he was spending his spare time exactly as Jesus Christ
did.  'You'll find, Davy, old man,' he said, 'if you'll take the
trouble to read your Bible, that Jesus traveled with publicans and
sinners--and a publican is in plain English a saloonkeeper.'"

"That was very original--wasn't it?" said Jane.  "I'm interested in
this man.  He's--different.  I like people who are different."

"I don't think you'd like him, Victor Dorn," said David.

"Don't you?"

"Oh, yes--in a way.  I admire him," graciously.  "He's really a
remarkable fellow, considering his opportunities."

"He calls you 'Davy, old man,'" suggested Jane.

Hull flushed.  "That's his way.  He's free and easy with every one.  He
thinks conventionality is a joke."

"And it is," cried Miss Hastings.

"You'd not think so," laughed Hull, "if he called you Jane or Jenny or
my dear Jenny half an hour after he met you."

"He wouldn't," said Miss Hastings in a peculiar tone.

"He would if he felt like it," replied Hull.  "And if you resented it,
he'd laugh at you and walk away.  I suspect him of being a good deal of
a poseur and a fakir.  All those revolutionary chaps are.  But I
honestly think that he really doesn't care a rap for classes--or for
money--or for any of the substantial things."

"He sounds common," said Miss Hastings.  "I've lost interest in him."
Then in the same breath:  "How does he live?  Is he a carpenter?"

"He was--for several years.  You see, he and his mother together
brought up the Dorn family after the father was killed.  They didn't
get a cent of damages from the railroad.  It was an outrage----"

"But my father was the largest owner of the railroad."

Hull colored violently.  "You don't understand about business, Jen.
The railroad is a corporation.  It fought the case--and the Dorns had
no money--and the railway owned the judge and bribed several jurors at
each trial.  Dorn says that was what started him to thinking--to being
a revolutionist--though he doesn't call himself that."

"I should think it would!" cried Miss Hastings.  "If my father had
known----"  She caught her breath.  "But he MUST have known!  He was on
the train that day."

"You don't understand business, Jen.  Your father wouldn't interfere
with the management of the corporation ."

"He makes money out of it--doesn't he?"

"So do we all get money out of corporations that are compelled to do
all sorts of queer things.  But we can't abolish the system--we've got
to reform it.  That's why I'm in politics--and want you----"

"Something must be done about that," interrupted Jane.  "I shall talk
to father----"

"For heaven's sake, Jen," cried David in alarm, "don't tell your father
I'VE been stirring you up.  He's one of the powers in politics in this
State, and----"

"I'll not give you away, Davy," said Miss Hastings a little
contemptuously.  "I want to hear more about this Victor Dorn. I'll get
that money for him and his mother.  Is he very poor?"

"Well--you'd call him poor.  But he says he has plenty.  He runs a
small paper.  I think he makes about twenty-five dollars a week out of
it--and a little more out of lecturing.  Then--every once in a while he
goes back to his trade--to keep his hand in and enjoy the luxury of
earning honest money, as he puts it."

"How queer!" exclaimed Miss Hastings.  "I would like to meet him.  Is
he--very ignorant?"

"Oh, no--no, indeed.  He's worked his way through college--and law
school afterward.  Supported the family all the time."

"He must be tremendously clever."

"I've given you an exaggerated idea of him," Davy hastened to say.
"He's really an ordinary sort of chap."

"I should think he'd get rich," said Miss Hastings.  "Most of the men
that do--so far as I've met them--seem ordinary enough."

"He says he could get rich, but that he wouldn't waste time that way.
But he's fond of boasting."

"You don't think he could make money--after all he did--going to
college and everything?"

"Yes--I guess he could," reluctantly admitted Davy.  Then in a burst of
candor:  "Perhaps I'm a little jealous of him.  If _I_ were thrown on
my own resources, I'm afraid I'd make a pretty wretched showing.
But--don't get an exaggerated idea of him. The things I've told you
sound romantic and unusual.  If you met him--saw him every day--you'd
realize he's not at all--at least, not much--out of the ordinary."

"Perhaps," said Miss Hastings shrewdly, "perhaps I'm getting a better
idea of him than you who see him so often."

"Oh, you'll run across him sometime," said Davy, who was bearing up no
better than would the next man under the strain of a woman's interest
in and excitement about another man.  "When you do, you'll get enough
in about five minutes.  You see, he's not a gentleman ."

"I'm not sure that I'm wildly crazy about gentlemen--AS gentlemen,"
replied the girl.  "Very few of the interesting people I've read about
in history and biography have been gentlemen."

"And very few of them would have been pleasant to associate with,"
rejoined Hull.  "You'll admire Victor as I do.  But you'll feel--as I
do--that there's small excuse for a man who has been educated, who has
associated with upper class people, turning round and inciting the
lower classes against everything that's fine and improving."

It was now apparent to the girl that David Hull was irritatedly jealous
of this queer Victor Dorn--was jealous of her interest in him.  Her
obvious cue was to fan this flame.  In no other way could she get any
amusement out of Davy's society; for his tendency was to be heavily
serious--and she wanted no more of the too strenuous love making, yet
wanted to keep him "on the string."  This jealousy was just the means
for her end.  Said she innocently:  "If it irritates you, Davy, we
won't talk about him."

"Not at all--not at all," cried Hull.  "I simply thought you'd be
getting tired of hearing so much about a man you'd never known."

"But I feel as if I did know him," replied she.  "Your account of him
was so vivid.  I thought of asking you to bring him to call."

Hull laughed heartily.  "Victor Dorn--calling!"

"Why not?"

"He doesn't do that sort of thing.  And if he did, how could I bring
him here?"

"Why not?"

"Well--in the first place, you are a lady--and he is not in your class.
Of course, men can associate with each other in politics and business.
But the social side of life--that's different."

"But a while ago you were talking about my going in for politics," said
Miss Hastings demurely.

"Still, you'd not have to meet SOCIALLY queer and rough characters----"

"Is Victor Dorn very rough?"

The interrupting question was like the bite of a big fly to a sweating
horse.  "I'm getting sick of hearing about him from you," cried Hull
with the pettishness of the spoiled children of the upper class.

"In what way is he rough?" persisted Miss Hastings.  "If you didn't
wish to talk about Victor Dorn, why did you bring the subject up?"

"Oh--all right," cried Hull, restraining himself.  "Victor isn't
exactly rough.  He can act like a gentleman--when he happens to want
to.  But you never can tell what he'll do next."

"You MUST bring him to call!" exclaimed Miss Hastings.

"Impossible," said Hull angrily.

"But he's the only man I've heard about since I've been home that I've
taken the least interest in."

"If he did come, your father would have the servants throw him off the
place."

"Oh, no," said Hiss Hastings haughtily.  "My father wouldn't insult a
guest of mine."

"But you don't know, Jen," cried David.  "Why, Victor Dorn attacks your
father in the most outrageous way in his miserable little anarchist
paper--calls him a thief, a briber, a blood-sucker--a--I'd not venture
to repeat to you the things he says."

"No doubt he got a false impression of father because of that damage
suit," said Miss Hastings mildly.  "That was a frightful thing.  I
can't be so unjust as to blame him, Davy--can you?"

Hull was silent.

"And I guess father does have to do a lot of things in the course of
business----  Don't all the big men--the leaders?"

"Yes--unfortunately they do," said Hull.  "That's what gives
plausibility to the shrieks of demagogues like Victor Dorn--though
Victor is too well educated not to know better than to stir up the
ignorant classes."

"I wonder why he does it," said Miss Hastings, reflectively. "I must
ask him.  I want to hear what he says to excuse himself."  In fact, she
had not the faintest interest in the views of this queer unknown; her
chief reason for saying she had was to enjoy David Hull's jealousy.

"Before you try to meet Victor," said Hull, in a constrained, desperate
way, "please speak to your father about it."

"I certainly shall," replied the girl.  "As soon as he comes home this
afternoon, I'm going to talk to him about that damage suit.  That has
got to be straightened out."  An expression of resolution, of
gentleness and justice abruptly transformed her face.  "You may not
believe it, but I have a conscience." Absently, "A curious sort of a
conscience--one that might become very troublesome, I'm afraid--in some
circumstances."

Instantly the fine side of David Hull's nature was to the fore--the
dominant side, for at the first appeal it always responded.  "So have
I, Jen," said he.  "I think our similarity in that respect is what
draws me so strongly to you. And it's that that makes me hope I can win
you.  Oh, Jen--there's so much to be done in the world--and you and I
could have such a splendid happy life doing our share of it."

She was once more looking at him with an encouraging interest. But she
said, gently:  "Let's not talk about that any more to-day, Davy."

"But you'll think about it?" urged he.

"Yes," said she.  "Let's be friends--and--and see what happens."

Hull strolled up to the house with her, but refused to stop for lunch.
He pleaded an engagement; but it was one that could--and in other
circumstances would--have been broken by telephone. His real reason for
hurrying away was fear lest Jane should open out on the subject of
Victor Dorn with her father, and, in her ignorance of the truth as to
the situation, should implicate him.

She found her father already at home and having a bowl of crackers and
milk in a shady corner of the west veranda.  He was chewing in the
manner of those whose teeth are few and not too secure.  His brows were
knitted and he looked as if not merely joy but everything except
disagreeable sensation had long since fled his life beyond hope of
return--an air not uncommon among the world's successful men.  However,
at sight of his lovely young daughter his face cleared somewhat and he
shot at her from under his wildly and savagely narrowed eyebrows a
glance of admiration and tenderness--a quaint expression for those
cold, hard features.

Everyone spoke of him behind his back as "Old Morton Hastings."

In fact, he was barely past sixty, was at an age at which city men of
the modern style count themselves young and even entertain--not without
reason--hope of being desired of women for other than purely practical
reasons.  He was born on a farm--was born with an aversion to physical
exertion as profound as was his passion for mental exertion.  We never
shall know how much of its progress the world owes to the physically
lazy, mentally tireless men.  Those are they who, to save themselves
physical exertion, have devised all manner of schemes and machines to
save labor.  And, at bottom, what is progress but man's success in his
effort to free himself from manual labor--to get everything for himself
by the labor of other men and animals and of machines? Naturally his
boyhood of toil on the farm did not lessen Martin Hastings' innate
horror of "real work."  He was not twenty when he dropped tools never
to take them up again.  He was shoeing a horse in the heat of the cool
side of the barn on a frightful August day.  Suddenly he threw down the
hammer and said loudly: "A man that works is a damn fool.  I'll never
work again."  And he never did.

As soon as he could get together the money--and it was not long after
he set about making others work for him--he bought a buggy, a kind of
phaeton, and a safe horse.  Thenceforth he never walked a step that
could be driven.  The result of thirty-five years of this life, so
unnatural to an animal that is designed by Nature for walking and is
punished for not doing so--the result of a lifetime of this folly was a
body shrivelled to a lean brown husk, legs incredibly meagre and so
tottery that they scarcely could bear him about.  His head--large and
finely shaped--seemed so out of proportion that he looked at a glance
senile.  But no one who had business dealings with him suspected him of
senility or any degree of weakness.  He spoke in a thin dry voice,
shrouded in sardonic humor.

"I don't care for lunch," said Jane, dropping to a chair near the side
of the table opposite her father.  "I had breakfast too late.  Besides,
I've got to look out for my figure.  There's a tendency to fat in our
family."

The old man chuckled.  "Me, for instance," said he.

"Martha, for instance," replied Jane.  Martha was her one
sister--married and ten years older than she and spaciously matronly.

"Wasn't that Davy Hull you were talking to, down in the woods?"
inquired her father.

Jane laughed.  "You see everything," said she.

"I didn't see much when I saw him," said her father.

Jane was hugely amused.  Her father watched her laughter--the dazzling
display of fine teeth--with delighted eyes.  "You've got mighty good
teeth, Jenny," observed he.  "Take care of 'em. You'll never know what
misery is till you've got no teeth--or next to none."  He looked
disgustedly into his bowl.  "Crackers and milk!" grunted he.  "No teeth
and no digestion.  The only pleasure a man of my age can have left is
eating, and I'm cheated out of that."

"So, you wouldn't approve of my marrying Davy?" said the girl.

Her father grunted--chuckled.  "I didn't say that.  Does he want to
marry you?"

"I didn't say that," retorted Jane.  "He's an unattached young man--and
I, being merely a woman, have got to look out for a husband."

Martin looked gloomy.  "There's no hurry," said he.  "You've been away
six years.  Seems to me you might stay at home a while."

"Oh, I'd bring him here, popsy I've no intention of leaving you. You
were in an awful state, when I came home.  That mustn't ever happen
again.  And as you won't live with Martha and Hugo--why, I've got to be
the victim."

"Yes--it's up to you, Miss, to take care of me in my declining
years....  You can marry Davy--if you want to.  Davy--or anybody.  I
trust to your good sense."

"If I don't like him, I can get rid of him," said the girl.

Her father smiled indulgently.  "That's A LEETLE too up-to-date for an
old man like me," observed he.  "The world's moving fast nowadays.
It's got a long ways from where it was when your ma and I were young."

"Do you think Davy Hull will make a career?" asked Jane.  She had heard
from time to time as much as she cared to hear about the world of a
generation before--of its bareness and discomfort, its primness, its
repulsive piety, its ignorance of all that made life bright and
attractive--how it quite overlooked this life in its agitation about
the extremely problematic life to come.  "I mean a career in politics,"
she explained.

The old man munched and smacked for full a minute before he said,
"Well, he can make a pretty good speech.  Yes--I reckon he could be
taken in hand and pushed.  He's got a lot of fool college-bred ideas
about reforming things.  But he'd soon drop them, if he got into the
practical swing.  As soon as he had a taste of success, he'd stop being
finicky.  Just now, he's one of those nice, pure chaps who stand off
and tell how things ought to be done.  But he'd get over that."

Jane smiled peculiarly--half to herself.  "Yes--I think he would.  In
fact, I'm sure he would."  She looked at her father. "Do you think he
amounts to as much as Victor Dorn?" she asked, innocently.

The old man dropped a half raised spoonful of milk and crackers into
the bowl with a splash.  "Dorn--he's a scoundrel!" he exclaimed,
shaking with passion.  "I'm going to have that dirty little paper of
his stopped and him put out of town.  Impudent puppy!--foul-mouthed
demagogue!  I'll SHOW him!"

"Why, he doesn't amount to anything, father," remonstrated the girl.
"He's nothing but a common working man--isn't he?"

"That's all he is--the hound!" replied Martin Hastings.   A look of
cruelty, of tenacious cruelty, had come into his face. It would have
startled a stranger.  But his daughter had often seen it; and it did
not disturb her, as it had never appeared for anything that in any way
touched her life.  "I've let him hang on here too long," went on the
old man, to himself rather than to her.  "First thing I know he'll be
dangerous."

"If he's worth while I should think you'd hire him," remarked Jane
shrewdly.

"I wouldn't have such a scoundrel in my employ," cried her father.

"Oh, maybe," pursued the daughter, "maybe you couldn't hire him."

"Of course I could," scoffed Hastings.  "Anybody can be hired."

"I don't believe it," said the girl bluntly.

"One way or another," declared the old man.  "That Dorn boy isn't worth
the price he'd want."

"What price would he want?" asked Jane.

"How should I know?" retorted her father angrily.

"You've tried to hire him--haven't you?" persisted she.

The father concentrated on his crackers and milk.  Presently he said:
"What did that fool Hull boy say about Dorn to you?"

"He doesn't like him," replied Jane.  "He seems to be jealous of
him--and opposed to his political views."

"Dorn's views ain't politics.  They're--theft and murder and
highfalutin nonsense," said Hastings, not unconscious of his feeble
anti-climax.

"All the same, he--or rather, his mother--ought to have got damages
from the railway," said the girl.  And there was a sudden and startling
shift in her expression--to a tenacity as formidable as her father's
own, but a quiet and secret tenacity.

Old Hastings wiped his mouth and began fussing uncomfortably with a
cigar.

"I don't blame him for getting bitter and turning against society,"
continued she.  "I'd have done the same thing--and so would you."

Hastings lit the cigar.  "They wanted ten thousand dollars," he said,
almost apologetically.  "Why, they never saw ten thousand cents they
could call their own."

"But they lost their bread-winner, father," pleaded the girl. "And
there were young children to bring up and educate.  Oh, I hate to think
that--that we had anything to do with such a wrong."

"It wasn't a wrong, Jen--as I used to tell your ma," said the old man,
much agitated and shrill of voice.  "It was just the course of
business.  The law was with our company."

Jane said nothing.  She simply gazed steadily at her father.  He
avoided her glance.

"I don't want to hear no more about it," he burst out with abrupt
violence.  "Not another word!"

"Father, I want it settled--and settled right," said the girl. "I ask
it as a favor.  Don't do it as a matter of business, but as a matter of
sentiment."

He shifted uneasily, debating.  When he spoke he was even more
explosive than before.  "Not a cent!  Not a red!  Give that whelp money
to run his crazy paper on?  Not your father, while he keeps his mind."

"But--mightn't that quiet him?" pleaded she.  "What's the use of having
war when you can have peace?  You've always laughed at people who let
their prejudices stand in the way of their interests.  You've always
laughed at how silly and stupid and costly enmities and revenges are.
Now's your chance to illustrate, popsy."  And she smiled charmingly at
him.

He was greatly softened by her manner--and by the wisdom of what she
said--a wisdom in which, as in a mirror, he recognized with pleasure
her strong resemblance to himself.  "That wouldn't be a bad idea, Jen,"
said he after reflection, "IF I could get a guarantee."

"But why not do it generously?" urged the girl.  "Generosity inspires
generosity.  You'll make him ashamed of himself."

With a cynical smile on his shrivelled face the old man slowly shook
his big head that made him look as top-heavy as a newborn baby.  "That
isn't as smart, child, as what you said before. It's in them things
that the difference between theory and practice shows.  He'd take the
money and laugh at me.  No, I'll try to get a guarantee."  He nodded
and chuckled.  "Yes, that was a good idea of yours, Jen."

"But--isn't it just possible that he is a man with--with principles of
a certain kind?" suggested she.

"Of course, he THINKS so," said Hastings.  "They all do.  But you don't
suppose a man of any sense at all could really care about and respect
working class people?--ignorant, ungrateful fools.  _I_ know 'em.
Didn't I come from among 'em?  Ain't I dealt with 'em all my life?  No,
that there guy Dorn's simply trying to get up, and is using them to
step up on.  I did the same thing, only I did it in a decent,
law-abiding way.  I didn't want to tear down those that was up.  I
wanted to go up and join 'em.  And I did."

And his eyes glistened fondly and proudly as he gazed at his daughter.
She represented the climax of his rising--she, the lady born and bred,
in her beautiful clothes, with her lovely, delicate charms.  Yes, he
had indeed "come up," and there before him was the superb tangible
evidence of it.

Jane had the strongest belief in her father's worldly wisdom.  At the
same time, from what David Hull said she had got an impression of a
something different from the ordinary human being in this queer Victor
Dorn.  "You'd better move slowly," she said to her father.  "There's no
hurry, and you might be mistaken in him."

"Plenty of time," asserted her father.  "There's never any need to
hurry about giving up money."  Then, with one of those uncanny flashes
of intuition for which he, who was never caught napping, was famous, he
said to her sharply:  "You keep your hands off, miss."

She was thrown into confusion--and her embarrassment enraged her
against herself.  "What could _I_ do?" she retorted with a brave
attempt at indifference.

"Well--keep your hands off, miss," said the old man.  "No female
meddling in business.  I'll stand for most anything, but not for that."

Jane was now all eagerness for dropping the subject.  She wished no
further prying of that shrewd mind into her secret thoughts. "It's
hardly likely I'd meddle where I know nothing about the circumstances,"
said she.  "Will you drive me down to Martha's?"

This request was made solely to change the subject, to shift her father
to his favorite topic for family conversation--his daughter Martha,
Mrs. Hugo Galland, her weakness for fashionable pastimes, her incessant
hints and naggings at her father about his dowdy dress, his vulgar
mannerisms of speech and of conduct, especially at table.  Jane had not
the remotest intention of letting her father drive her to Mrs.
Galland's, or anywhere, in the melancholy old phaeton-buggy, behind the
fat old nag whose coat was as shabby as the coat of the master or as
the top and the side curtains of the sorrowful vehicle it drew along at
caterpillar pace.

When her father was ready to depart for his office in the Hastings
Block--the most imposing office building in Remsen City, Jane announced
a change of mind.

"I'll ride, instead," said she.  "I need the exercise, and the day
isn't too warm."

"All right," said Martin Hastings grumpily.  He soon got enough of
anyone's company, even of his favorite daughter's.  Through years of
habit he liked to jog about alone, revolving in his mind his business
affairs--counting in fancy his big bundles of securities, one by one,
calculating their returns past, present and prospective--reviewing the
various enterprises in which he was dominant factor, working out
schemes for getting more profit here, for paying less wages there, for
tightening his grip upon this enterprise, for dumping his associates in
that, for escaping with all the valuable assets from another.  His
appearance, as he and his nag dozed along the highroad, was as
deceptive as that of a hive of bees on a hot day--no signs of life
except a few sleepy workers crawling languidly in and out at the low,
broad crack-door, yet within myriads toiling like mad.

Jane went up to dress.  She had brought an Italian maid with her from
Florence, and a mass of baggage that had given the station loungers at
Remsen City something to talk about, when there was a dearth of new
subjects, for the rest of their lives.  She had transformed her own
suite in the second story of the big old house into an appearance of
the quarters of a twentieth century woman of wealth and leisure.  In
the sitting room were books in four languages; on the walls were
tasteful reproductions of her favorite old masters.  The excellence of
her education was attested not by the books and pictures but by the
absence of those fussy, commonplace draperies and bits of bric-a-brac
where--with people of no taste and no imagination furnish their houses
because they can think of nothing else to fill in the gaps.

Many of Jane's ways made Sister Martha uneasy.  For Martha, while
admitting that Jane through superior opportunity ought to know, could
not believe that the "right sort" of people on the other side had
thrown over all her beloved formalities and were conducting themselves
distressingly like tenement-house people. For instance, Martha could
not approve Jane's habit of smoking cigarettes--a habit which, by one
of those curious freaks of character, enormously pleased her father.
But--except in one matter--Martha entirely approved Jane's style of
dress.  She hastened to pronounce it "just too elegant" and repeated
that phrase until Jane, tried beyond endurance, warned her that the
word elegant was not used seriously by people of the "right sort" and
that its use was regarded as one of those small but subtle signs of the
loathsome "middle class."

The one thing in Jane's dress that Martha disapproved--or, rather,
shied at--was her riding suit.  This was an extremely noisy plaid man's
suit--for Jane rode astride.  Martha could not deny that Jane looked
"simply stunning" when seated on her horse and dressed in that garb
with her long slim feet and graceful calves encased in a pair of riding
boots that looked as if they must have cost "something fierce."  But
was it really "ladylike"?  Hadn't Jane made a mistake and adopted a
costume worn only by the fashionables among the demi-mondaines of whom
Martha had read and had heard such dreadful, delightful stories?

It was the lively plaid that Miss Hastings now clad herself in. She
loved that suit.  Not only did it give her figure a superb opportunity
but also it brought out new beauties in her contour and coloring.  And
her head was so well shaped and her hair grew so thickly about brow and
ears and nape of neck that it looked full as well plaited and done
close as when it was framing her face and half concealing, half
revealing her charming ears in waves of changeable auburn.  After a
lingering--and pardonably pleased--look at herself in a long mirror,
she descended, mounted and rode slowly down toward town.

The old Galland homestead was at the western end of town--in a quarter
that had become almost poor.  But it was so dignified and its grounds
were so extensive that it suggested a manor house with the humble homes
of the lord's dependents clustering about it for shelter.  To reach it
Jane had to ride through two filthy streets lined with factories.  As
she rode she glanced at the windows, where could be seen in dusty air
girls and boys busy at furiously driven machines--machines that
compelled their human slaves to strain every nerve in the monotonous
task of keeping them occupied.  Many of the girls and boys paused long
enough for a glance at the figure of the man-clad girl on the big horse.

Jane, happy in the pleasant sunshine, in her beauty and health and fine
raiment and secure and luxurious position in the world, gave a thought
of pity to these imprisoned young people.  "How lucky I am," she
thought, "not to have been born like that.  Of course, we all have our
falls now and then.  But while they always strike on the hard ground,
I've got a feather bed to fall on."

When she reached Martha's and was ushered into the cool upstairs
sitting room, in somehow ghastly contrast to the hot rooms where the
young working people sweated and strained, the subject persisted in its
hold on her thoughts.  There was Martha, in comfortable, corsetless
expansiveness--an ideal illustration of the worthless idler fattening
in purposelessness.  She was engaged with all her energies in preparing
for the ball Hugo Galland's sister, Mrs. Bertrand, was giving at the
assembly rooms that night.

"I've been hard at it for several days now," said she.  "I think at
last I see daylight.  But I want your opinion."

Jane gazed absently at the dress and accompanying articles that had
been assembled with so much labor.  "All right," said she. "You'll look
fine and dandy."

Martha twitched.  "Jane, dear--don't say that--don't use such an
expression.  I know it's your way of joking.  But lots of people would
think you didn't know any better."

"Let 'em think," said Jane.  "I say and do as I please."

Martha sighed.  Here was one member of her family who could be a
credit, who could make people forget the unquestionably common origin
of the Hastingses and of the Morleys.  Yet this member was always
breaking out into something mortifying, something reminiscent of the
farm and of the livery stable--for the deceased Mrs. Hastings had been
daughter of a livery stable keeper--in fact, had caught Martin Hastings
by the way she rode her father's horses at a sale at a county fair.
Said Martha:

"You haven't really looked at my clothes, Jane.  Why DID you go back to
calling yourself Jane?"

"Because it's my name," replied her sister.

"I know that.  But you hated it and changed it to Jeanne, which is so
much prettier."

"I don't think so any more," replied Miss Hastings.  "My taste has
improved.  Don't be so horribly middle class, Martha--ashamed of
everything simple and natural."

"You think you know it all--don't you?--just because you've lived
abroad," said Martha peevishly.

"On the contrary, I don't know one-tenth as much as I thought I did,
when I came back from Wellesley with a diploma."

"Do you like my costume?" inquired Martha, eying her finery with the
fond yet dubious expression of the woman who likes her own taste but is
not sure about its being good taste.

"What a lazy, worthless pair we are!" exclaimed Jane, hitting her boot
leg a tremendous rap with her little cane.

Martha startled.  "Good God--Jane--what is it?" she cried.

"On the way here I passed a lot of factories," pursued Jane. "Why
should those people have to work like--like the devil, while we sit
about planning ball dresses?"

Martha settled back comfortably.  "I feel so sorry for those poor
people," said she, absently sympathetic.

"But why?" demanded Jane.  "WHY?  Why should we be allowed to idle
while they have to slave?  What have we done--what are we doing--to
entitle us to ease?  What have they done to condemn them to pain and
toil?"

"You know very well, Jane, that we represent the finer side of life."

"Slop!" ejaculated Jane.

"For pity's sake, don't let's talk politics," wailed Martha. "I know
nothing about politics.  I haven't any brains for that sort of thing."

"Is that politics?" inquired Jane.  "I thought politics meant whether
the Democrats or the Republicans or the reformers were to get the
offices and the chance to steal."

"Everything's politics, nowadays," said Martha, comparing the color of
the material of her dress with the color of her fat white arm.  "As
Hugo says, that Victor Dorn is dragging everything into politics--even
our private business of how we make and spend our own money."

Jane sat down abruptly.  "Victor Dorn," she said in a strange voice.
"WHO is Victor Dorn?  WHAT is Victor Dorn?  It seems that I can hear of
nothing but Victor Dorn to-day."

"He's too low to talk about," said Martha, amiable and absent.

"Why?"

"Politics," replied Martha.  "Really, he is horrid, Jane."

"To look at?"

"No--not to look at.  He's handsome in a way.  Not at all common
looking.  You might take him for a gentleman, if you didn't know.
Still--he always dresses peculiarly--always wears soft hats.  I think
soft hats are SO vulgar--don't you?"

"How hopelessly middle-class you are, Martha," mocked Jane.

"Hugo would as soon think of going in the street in a--in a--I don't
know what."

"Hugo is the finest flower of American gentleman.  That is, he's the
quintessence of everything that's nice--and 'nasty.'  I wish I were
married to him for a week.  I love Hugo, but he gives me the creeps."
She rose and tramped restlessly about the room. "You both give me the
creeps.  Everything conventional gives me the creeps.  If I'm not
careful I'll dress myself in a long shirt, let down my hair and run
wild."

"What nonsense you do talk," said Martha composedly.

Jane sat down abruptly.  "So I do!" she said.  "I'm as poor a creature
as you at bottom.  I simply like to beat against the bars of my cage to
make myself think I'm a wild, free bird by nature.  If you opened the
door, I'd not fly out, but would hop meekly back to my perch and fall
to smoothing my feathers.... Tell me some more about Victor Dorn."

"I told you he isn't fit to talk about," said Martha.  "Do you know,
they say now that he is carrying on with that shameless, brazen thing
who writes for his paper, that Selma Gordon?"

"Selma Gordon," echoed Jane.  Her brows came down in a gesture
reminiscent of her father, and there was a disagreeable expression
about her mouth and in her light brown eyes.  "Who's Selma Gordon?"

"She makes speeches--and writes articles against rich people--and--oh,
she's horrid."

"Pretty?"

"No--a scrawny, black thing.  The men--some of them--say she's got a
kind of uncanny fascination.  Some even insist that she's beautiful."
Martha laughed.  "Beautiful!  How could a woman with black hair and a
dark skin and no flesh on her bones be beautiful?"

"It has been known to happen," said Jane curtly.  "Is she one of THE
Gordons?"

"Mercy, no!" cried Martha Galland.  "She simply took the name of
Gordon--that is, her father did.  He was a Russian peasant--a Jew.  And
he fell in love with a girl who was of noble family--a princess, I
think."

"Princess doesn't mean much in Russia," said Jane sourly.

"Anyhow, they ran away to this country.  And he worked in the rolling
mill here--and they both died--and Selma became a factory girl--and
then took to writing for the New Day--that's Victor Dorn's paper, you
know."

"How romantic," said Jane sarcastically.  "And now Victor Dorn's in
love with her?"

"I didn't say that," replied Martha, with a scandal-smile.

Jane Hastings went to the window and gazed out into the garden. Martha
resumed her habitual warm day existence--sat rocking gently and fanning
herself and looking leisurely about the room. Presently she said:

"Jane, why don't you marry Davy Hull?"

No answer.

"He's got an independent income--so there's no question of his marrying
for money.  And there isn't any family anywhere that's better than
his--mighty few as good.  And he's DEAD in love with you, Jen."

With her back still turned Jane snapped, "I'd rather marry Victor Dorn."

"What OUTRAGEOUS things you do say!" cried Martha.

"I envy that black Jewess--that--what's her name?--that Selma Gordon."

"You don't even know them," said Martha.

Jane wheeled round with a strange laugh.  "Don't I?" cried she.

"I don't know anyone else."

She strode to her sister and tapped her lightly on the shoulder with
the riding stick.

"Be careful," cautioned Martha.  "You know how easily my flesh
mars--and I'm going to wear my low neck to-night."

Jane did not heed.  "David Hull is a bore--and a fraud," she said.  "I
tell you I'd rather marry Victor Dorn."

"Do be careful about my skin, dear," pleaded Martha.  "Hugo'll be SO
put out if there's a mark on it.  He's very proud of my skin."

Jane looked at her quizzically.  "What a dear, fat old rotter of a
respectability it is, to be sure," said she--and strode from the room,
and from the house.

Her mood of perversity and defiance did not yield to a ten mile gallop
over the gentle hills of that lovely part of Indiana, but held on
through the afternoon and controlled her toilet for the ball.  She knew
that every girl in town would appear at that most fashionable party of
the summer season in the best clothing she could get together.  As she
had several dresses from Paris which she not without reason regarded as
notable works of art, the opportunity to outshine was hers--the sort of
opportunity she took pleasure in using to the uttermost, as a rule.
But to be the best dressed woman at Mrs. Bertram's party was too easy
and too commonplace.  To be the worst dressed would call for
courage--of just the sort she prided herself on having.  Also, it would
look original, would cause talk--would give her the coveted sense of
achievement.

When she descended to show herself to her father and say good night to
him, she was certainly dressed by the same pattern that caused him to
be talked about throughout that region.  Her gown was mussed, had been
mended obviously in several places, had not been in its best day
becoming.  But this was not all.  Her hair looked stringy and
dishevelled.  She was delighted with herself. Except during an illness
two years before never had she come so near to being downright homely.
"Martha will die of shame," said she to herself.  "And Mrs. Bertram
will spend the evening explaining me to everybody."  She did not
definitely formulate the thought, "And I shall be the most talked about
person of the evening"; but it was in her mind none the less.

Her father always smoked his after-dinner cigar in a little room just
off the library.  It was filled up with the plain cheap furniture and
the chromos and mottoes which he and his wife had bought when they
first went to housekeeping--in their early days of poverty and
struggle.  On the south wall was a crude and cheap, but startlingly
large enlargement of an old daguerreotype of Letitia Hastings at
twenty-four--the year after her marriage and the year before the birth
of the oldest child, Robert, called Dock, now piling up a fortune as an
insider in the Chicago "brave" game of wheat and pork, which it is
absurd to call gambling because gambling involves chance.  To smoke the
one cigar the doctor allowed him, old Martin Hastings always seated
himself before this picture.  He found it and his thoughts the best
company in the world, just as he had found her silent self and her
thoughts the best company in their twenty-one years of married life.
As he sat there, sometimes he thought of her--of what they had been
through together, of the various advances in his fortune--how this one
had been made near such and such anniversary, and that one between two
other anniversaries--and what he had said to her and what she had said
to him. Again--perhaps oftener--he did not think of her directly, any
more than he had thought of her when they sat together evening after
evening, year in and year out, through those twenty-one years of
contented and prosperous life.

As Jane entered he, seated back to the door, said:

"About that there Dorn damage suit----"

Jane started, caught her breath.  Really, it was uncanny, this
continual thrusting of Victor Dorn at her.

"It wasn't so bad as it looked," continued her father.  He was speaking
in the quiet voice--quiet and old and sad--he always used when seated
before the picture.

"You see, Jenny, in them days"--also, in presence of the picture he
lapsed completely into the dialect of his youth--"in them days the
railroad was teetering and I couldn't tell which way things'd jump.
Every cent counted."

"I understand perfectly, father," said Jane, her hands on his shoulders
from behind.  She felt immensely relieved.  She did not realize that
every doer of a mean act always has an excellent excuse for it.

"Then afterwards," the old man went on, "the family was getting along
so well--the boy was working steady and making good money and pushing
ahead--and I was afeared I'd do harm instead of good.  It's mighty
dangerous, Jen, to give money sudden to folks that ain't used to it.
I've seen many a smash-up come that way. And your ma--she thought so,
too--kind of."

The "kind of" was advanced hesitatingly, with an apologetic side glance
at the big crayon portrait.  But Jane was entirely convinced.  She was
average human; therefore, she believed what she wished to believe.

"You were quite right, father," said she.  "I knew you couldn't do a
bad thing--wouldn't deliberately strike at weak, helpless people.  And
now, it can be straightened out and the Dorns will be all the better
for not having been tempted in the days when it might have ruined them."

She had walked round where her father could see her, as she delivered
herself of this speech so redolent of the fumes of collegiate smugness.
He proceeded to examine her--with an expression of growing
dissatisfaction.  Said he fretfully:

"You don't calculate to go out, looking like that?"

"Out to the swellest blow-out of the year, popsy," said she.

The big heavy looking head wobbled about uneasily.  "You look too much
like your old pappy's daughter," said he.

"I can afford to," replied she.

The head shook positively.  "You ma wouldn't 'a liked it.  She was
mighty partic'lar how she dressed."

Jane laughed gayly.  "Why, when did you become a critic of women's
dress?" cried she.

"I always used to buy yer ma dresses and hats when I went to the city,"
said he.  "And she looked as good as the best--not for these days, but
for them times."  He looked critically at the portrait.  "I bought them
clothes and awful dear they seemed to me."  His glance returned to his
daughter.  "Go get yourself up proper," said he, between request and
command.  "SHE wouldn't 'a liked it."

Jane gazed at the common old crayon, suddenly flung her arms round the
old man's neck.  "Yes--father," she murmured.  "To please HER."

She fled; the old man wiped his eyes, blew his nose and resumed the
careful smoking of the cheap, smelly cigar.  He said he preferred that
brand of his days of poverty; and it was probably true, as he would
refuse better cigars offered him by fastidious men who hoped to save
themselves from the horrors of his.  He waited restlessly, though it
was long past his bedtime; he yawned and pretended to listen while Davy
Hull, who had called for Jane in the Hull brougham, tried to make a
favorable impression upon him.  At last Jane reappeared--and certainly
Letitia Hastings would have been more than satisfied.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," said she to Hull, who was speechless and
tremulous before her voluptuous radiance.  "But father didn't like the
way I was rigged out.  Maybe I'll have to change again."

"Take her along, Davy," said Hastings, his big head wagging with
delight.  "She's a caution--SHE is!"

Hull could not control himself to speak.  As they sat in the carriage,
she finishing the pulling on of her gloves, he stared out into the
heavy rain that was deluging the earth and bending low the boughs.
Said she, half way down the hill:

"Well--can't you talk about anything but Victor Dorn?"

"I saw him this afternoon," said Hull, glad that the tension of the
silence was broken.

"Then you've got something to talk about."

"The big street car strike is on."

"So father said at dinner.  I suppose Victor Dorn caused it."

"No--he's opposed to it.  He's queer.  I don't exactly understand his
ideas.  He says strikes are ridiculous--that it's like trying to cure
smallpox by healing up one single sore."

Jane gave a shiver of lady-like disgust.  "How--nasty," said she.

"I'm telling you what he said.  But he says that the only way human
beings learn how to do things right is by doing them wrong--so while
he's opposed to strikes he's also in favor of them."

"Even _I_ understand that," said Jane.  "I don't think it's difficult."

"Doesn't it strike you as--as inconsistent?"

"Oh--bother consistency!" scoffed the girl.  "That's another middle
class virtue that sensible people loathe as a vice. Anyhow, he's
helping the strikers all he can--and fighting US. You know, your father
and my father's estate are the two biggest owners of the street
railways."

"I must get his paper," said Jane.  "I'll have a lot of fun reading the
truth about us."

But David wasn't listening.  He was deep in thought.  After a while he
said:  "It's amazing--and splendid--and terrible, what power he's
getting in our town.  Victor Dorn, I mean."

"Always Victor Dorn," mocked Jane.

"When he started--twelve years ago as a boy of twenty, just out of
college and working as a carpenter--when he started, he was alone and
poor, and without friends or anything.  He built up little by little,
winning one man at a time--the fellow working next him on his right,
then the chap working on his left--in the shop--and so on, one man
after another.  And whenever he got a man he held him--made him as
devoted--as--as fanatical as he is himself.  Now he's got a band of
nearly a thousand.  There are ten thousand voters in this town.  So,
he's got only one in ten. But what a thousand!"

Jane was gazing out into the rain, her eyes bright, her lips parted.

"Are you listening?" asked Hull.  "Or, am I boring you?"

"Go on," said she.

"They're a thousand missionaries--apostles--yes, apostle is the name
for them.  They live and breathe and think and talk only the ideas
Victor Dorn believes and fights for.  And whenever he wants anything
done--anything for the cause--why, there are a thousand men ready to do
it."

"Why?" said Jane.

"Victor Dorn," said Hull.  "Do you wonder that he interests me?  For
instance, to-night: you see how it's raining.  Well, Victor Dorn had
them print to-day fifty thousand leaflets about this strike--what it
means to his cause.  And he has asked five hundred of his men to stand
on the corners and patrol the streets and distribute those dodgers.
I'll bet not a man will be missing."

"But why?" repeated Jane.  "What for?"

"He wants to conquer this town.  He says the world has to be
conquered--and that the way to begin is to begin--and that he has
begun."

"Conquer it for what?"

"For himself, I guess," said Hull.  "Of course, he professes that it's
for the public good.  They all do.  But what's the truth?"

"If I saw him I could tell you," said Jane in the full pride of her
belief in her woman's power of divination in character.

"However, he can't succeed," observed Hull.

"Oh, yes, he can," replied Jane.  "And will.  Even if every idea he had
were foolish and wrong.  And it isn't--is it?"

David laughed peculiarly.  "He's infernally uncomfortably right in most
of the things he charges and proposes.  I don't like to think about
it."  He shut his teeth together.  "I WON'T think about it," he
muttered.

"No--you'd better stick to your own road, Davy," said Jane with
irritating mockery.  "You were born to be thoroughly conventional and
respectable.  As a reformer you're ideal.  As a--an imitator of Victor
Dorn, you'd be a joke."

"There's one of his men now," exclaimed Hull, leaning forward excitedly.

Jane looked.  A working man, a commonplace enough object, was standing
under the corner street lamp, the water running off his hat, his
shoulders, his coat tail.  His package of dodgers was carefully
shielded by an oilcloth from the wet which had full swing at the man.
To every passer-by he presented a dodger, accompanying the polite
gesture with some phrase which seemed to move the man or woman to take
what was offered and to put it away instead of dropping it.

Jane sank back in the carriage, disappointed.  "Is that all?" said she
disdainfully.

"ALL?" cried Hull.  "Use your imagination, Jen.  But I forgot--you're a
woman.  They see only surfaces."

"And are snared into marrying by complexions and pretty features and
dresses and silly flirting tricks," retorted the girl sarcastically.

Hull laughed.  "I spoke too quick that time," said he.  "I suppose you
expected to see something out of a fifteenth century Italian old
master!  Well--it was there, all right."

Jane shrugged her shoulders.  "And your Victor Dorn," said she, "no
doubt he's seated in some dry, comfortable place enjoying the thought
of his men making fools of themselves for him."

They were drawing up to the curb before the Opera House where were the
assembly rooms.  "There he is now," cried Hull.

Jane, startled, leaned eagerly forward.  In the rain beyond the edge of
the awning stood a dripping figure not unlike that other which had so
disappointed her.  Underneath the brim of the hat she could see a
smooth-shaven youngish face--almost boyish.  But the rain streaming
from the brim made satisfactory scrutiny impossible.

Jane again sank back.  "How many carriages before us?" she said.

"You're disappointed in him, too, I suppose," said Hull.  "I knew you
would be."

"I thought he was tall," said Jane.

"Only middling," replied Hull, curiously delighted.

"I thought he was serious," said Jane.

"On the contrary, he's always laughing.  He's the best natured man I
know."

As they descended and started along the carpet under the middle of the
awning, Jane halted.  She glanced toward the dripping figure whom the
police would not permit under the shelter.  Said she:  "I want one of
those papers."

Davy moved toward the drenched distributor of strike literature. "Give
me one, Dorn," he said in his most elegant manner.

"Sure, Davy," said Dorn in a tone that was a subtle commentary on
Hull's aristocratic tone and manner.  As he spoke he glanced at Jane;
she was looking at him.  Both smiled--at Davy's expense.

Davy and Jane passed on in, Jane folding the dodger to tuck it away for
future reading.  She said to him:  "But you didn't tell me about his
eyes."

"What's the matter with them?"

"Everything," replied she--and said no more.



II

The dance was even more tiresome than Jane had anticipated. There had
been little pleasure in outshining the easily outshone belles of Remsen
City.  She had felt humiliated by having to divide the honors with a
brilliantly beautiful and scandalously audacious Chicago girl, a Yvonne
Hereford--whose style, in looks, in dress and in wit, was more
comfortable to the standard of the best young men of Remsen City--a
standard which Miss Hastings, cultivated by foreign travel and social
adventure, regarded as distinctly poor, not to say low.  Miss
Hereford's audacities were especially offensive to Jane.  Jane was
audacious herself, but she flattered herself that she had a delicate
sense of that baffling distinction between the audacity that is the
hall mark of the lady and the audacity that proclaims the not-lady.
For example, in such apparently trifling matters as the way of smoking
a cigarette, the way of crossing the legs or putting the elbows on the
table or using slang, Jane found a difference, abysmal though narrow,
between herself and Yvonne Hereford. "But then, her very name gives her
away," reflected Jane. "There'd surely be a frightfully cheap streak in
a mother who in this country would name her daughter Yvonne--or in a
girl who would name herself that."

However, Jane Hastings was not deeply annoyed either by the
shortcomings of Remsen City young men or by the rivalry of Miss
Hereford.  Her dissatisfaction was personal--the feeling of futility,
of cheapness, in having dressed herself in her best and spent a whole
evening at such unworthy business.  "Whatever I am or am not fit for,"
said she to herself, "I'm not for society--any kind of society.  At
least I'm too much grown-up mentally for that."  Her disdainful
thoughts about others were, on this occasion as almost always, merely a
mode of expressing her self-scorn.

As she was undressing she found in her party bag the dodger Hull had
got for her from Victor Dorn.  She, sitting at her dressing table,
started to read it at once.  But her attention soon wandered.  "I'm not
in the mood," she said.  "To-morrow." And she tossed it into the top
drawer.  The fact was, the subject of politics interested her only when
some man in whom she was interested was talking it to her.  In a
general way she understood things political, but like almost all women
and all but a few men she could fasten her attention only on things
directly and clearly and nearly related to her own interests. Politics
seemed to her to be not at all related to her--or, indeed, to anybody
but the men running for office.  This dodger was politics, pure and
simple.  A plea to workingmen to awaken to the fact that their STRIKES
were stupid and wasteful, that the way to get better pay and decent
hours of labor was by uniting, taking possession of the power that was
rightfully theirs and regulating their own affairs.

She resumed fixing her hair for the night.  Her glance bent steadily
downward at one stage of this performance, rested unseeingly upon the
handbill folded printed side out and on top of the contents of the open
drawer.  She happened to see two capital letters--S.G.--in a line by
themselves at the end of the print.  She repeated them mechanically
several times--"S.G.--S.G.--S.G."--then her hands fell from her hair
upon the handbill.  She settled herself to read in earnest.

"Selma Gordon," she said.  "That's different."

She would have had some difficulty in explaining to herself why it was
"different."  She read closely, concentratedly now.  She tried to read
in an attitude of unfriendly criticism, but she could not.  A dozen
lines, and the clear, earnest, honest sentences had taken hold of her.
How sensible the statements were, and how obviously true.  Why, it
wasn't the writing of an "anarchistic crank" at all--on the contrary,
the writer was if anything more excusing toward the men who were giving
the drivers and motormen a dollar and ten cents a day for fourteen
hours' work--"fourteen hours!" cried Jane, her cheeks burning--yes,
Selma Gordon was more tolerant of the owners of the street car line
than Jane herself would have been.

When Jane had read, she gazed at the print with sad envy in her eyes.
"Selma Gordon can think--and she can write, too," said she half aloud.
"I want to know her--too."

That "too" was the first admission to herself of a curiously intense
desire to meet Victor Dorn.

"Oh, to be in earnest about something!  To have a real interest! To
find something to do besides the nursery games disguised under new
forms for the grown-up yet never to be grown-up infants of the world.
And THAT kind of politics doesn't sound shallow and dull.  There's
heart in it--and brains--real brains--not merely nasty little
self-seeking cunning."  She took up the handbill again and read a
paragraph set in bolder type:

"The reason we of the working class are slaves is because we haven't
intelligence enough to be our own masters, let alone masters of anybody
else.  The talk of equality, workingmen, is nonsense to flatter your
silly, ignorant vanity.  We are not the equals of our masters.  They
know more than we do, and naturally they use that knowledge to make us
work for them.  So, even if you win in this strike or in all your
strikes, you will not much better yourselves.  Because you are ignorant
and foolish, your masters will scheme around and take from you in some
other way what you have wrenched from them in the strike.

"Organize!  Think!  Learn!  Then you will rise out of the dirt where
you wallow with your wives and your children.  Don't blame your
masters; they don't enslave you.  They don't keep you in slavery.  Your
chains  are of your own forging and only you can strike them off!"

Certainly no tenement house woman could be lazier, emptier of head,
more inane of life than her sister Martha.  "She wouldn't even keep
clean if it wasn't the easiest thing in the world for her to do, and a
help at filling in her long idle day." Yet--Martha Galland had every
comfort and most of the luxuries, was as sheltered from all the
hardships as a hot-house flower. Then there was Hugo--to go no further
afield than the family. Had he ever done an honest hour's work in his
life?  Could anyone have less brains than he?  Yet Hugo was rich and
respected, was a director in big corporations, was a member of a
first-class law firm.  "It isn't fair," thought the girl.  "I've always
felt it.  I see now why.  It's a bad system of taking from the many for
the benefit of us few.  And it's kept going by a few clever, strong men
like father.  They work for themselves and their families and relatives
and for their class--and the rest of the people have to suffer."

She did not fall asleep for several hours, such was the tumult in her
aroused brain.  The first thing the next morning she went down town,
bought copies of the New Day--for that week and for a few preceding
weeks--and retreated to her favorite nook in her father's grounds to
read and to think--and to plan.  She searched the New Day in vain for
any of the wild, wandering things Davy and her father had told her
Victor Dorn was putting forth.  The four pages of each number were
given over either to philosophical articles no more "anarchistic" than
Emerson's essays, not so much so as Carlyle's, or to plain accounts of
the current stealing by the politicians of Remsen City, of the squalor
and disease--danger in the tenements, of the outrages by the gas and
water and street car companies.  There was much that was terrible, much
that was sad, much that was calculated to make an honest heart burn
with indignation against those who were cheerily sacrificing the whole
community to their desire for profits and dividends and graft, public
and private.  But there was also a great deal of humor--of rather a
sardonic kind, but still seeing the fantastic side of this grand game
of swindle.

Two paragraphs made an especial impression on her:

"Remsen City is no worse--and no better--than other American cities.
It's typical.  But we who live here needn't worry about the rest of the
country.  The thing for us to do is to CLEAN UP AT HOME."

"We are more careful than any paper in this town about verifying every
statement we make, before we make it.  If we should publish a single
statement about anyone that was false even in part we would be
suppressed.  The judges, the bosses, the owners of the big
blood-sucking public service corporations, the whole ruling class, are
eager to put us out of existence.  Don't forget this fact when you hear
the New Day called a lying, demagogical sheet."

With the paper beside her on the rustic bench, she fell to
dreaming--not of a brighter and better world, of a wiser and freer
race, but of Victor Dorn, the personality that had unaided become such
a power in Remsen City, the personality that sparkled and glowed in the
interesting pages of the New Day, that made its sentences read as if
they were spoken into your very ears by an earnest, honest voice
issuing from a fascinating, humor-loving, intensely human and natural
person before your very eyes.  But it was not round Victor Dorn's brain
that her imagination played.

"After all," thought she, "Napoleon wasn't much over five feet.  Most
of the big men have been little men.  Of course, there were
Alexander--and Washington--and Lincoln, but--how silly to bother about
a few inches of height, more or less!  And he wasn't really SHORT.  Let
me see--how high did he come on Davy when Davy was standing near him?
Above his shoulder--and Davy's six feet two or three.  He's at least as
tall as I am--anyhow, in my ordinary heels."

She was attracted by both the personalities she discovered in the
little journal.  She believed she could tell them apart.  About some of
the articles, the shorter ones, she was doubtful.  But in those of any
length she could feel that difference which enables one to distinguish
the piano touch of a player in another room--whether it is male or
female.  Presently she was searching for an excuse for scraping
acquaintance with this pair of pariahs--pariahs so far as her world was
concerned.  And soon she found it.  The New Day was taking
subscriptions for a fund to send sick children and their mothers to the
country for a vacation from the dirt and heat of the tenements--for
Remsen City, proud though it was and boastful of its prosperity, housed
most of its inhabitants in slums--though of course that low sort of
people oughtn't really to be counted--except for purposes of swelling
census figures--and to do all the rough and dirty work necessary to
keep civilization going.

She would subscribe to this worthy charity--and would take her
subscription, herself.  Settled--easily and well settled.  She did not
involve herself, or commit herself in any way.  Besides, those who
might find out and might think she had overstepped the bounds would
excuse her on the ground that she had not been back at home long and
did not realize what she was doing.

What should she wear?

Her instinct was for an elaborate toilet--a descent in state--or such
state as the extremely limited resources of Martin Hastings' stables
would permit.  The traps he had ordered for her had not yet come; she
had been glad to accept David Hull's offer of a lift the night before.
Still, without a carriage or a motor she could make quite an impression
with a Paris walking dress and hat, properly supported by fashionable
accessories of the toilet.

Good sense and good taste forbade these promptings of nature. No, she
would dress most simply--in her very plainest things--taking care to
maintain all her advantages of face and figure.  If she overwhelmed
Dorn and Miss Gordon, she would defeat her own purpose--would not
become acquainted with them.

In the end she rejected both courses and decided for the riding
costume.  The reason she gave for this decision--the reason she gave
herself--was that the riding costume would invest the call with an air
of accident, of impulse.  The real reason.

It may be that some feminine reader can guess why she chose the most
startling, the most gracefully becoming, the most artlessly physical
apparel in her wardrobe.

She said nothing to her father at lunch about her plans.  Why should
she speak of them?  He might oppose; also, she might change her mind.
After lunch she set out on her usual ride, galloping away into the
hills--but she had put twenty-five dollars in bills in her trousers
pocket.  She rode until she felt that her color was at its best, and
then she made for town--a swift, direct ride, her heart beating high as
if she were upon a most daring and fateful adventure.  And, as a matter
of fact, never in her life had she done anything that so intensely
interested her.  She felt that she was for the first time slackening
rein upon those unconventional instincts, of unknown strength and
purpose, which had been making her restless with their vague stirrings.

"How silly of me!" she thought.  "I'm doing a commonplace, rather
common thing--and I'm trying to make it seem a daring, romantic
adventure.  I MUST be hard up for excitement!"

Toward the middle of the afternoon she dropped from her horse before
the office of the New Day and gave a boy the bridle. "I'll be back in a
minute," she explained.  It was a two-story frame building, dingy and
in disrepair.  On the street floor was a grocery.  Access to the New
Day was by a rickety stairway.  As she ascended this, making a great
noise on its unsteady boards with her boots, she began to feel cheap
and foolish.  She recalled what Hull had said in the carriage.  "No
doubt," replied she, "I'd feel much the same way if I were going to see
Jesus Christ--a carpenter's son, sitting in some hovel, talking with
his friends the fishermen and camel drivers--not to speak of the women."

The New Day occupied two small rooms--an editorial work room, and a
printing work room behind it.  Jane Hastings, in the doorway at the
head of the stairs, was seeing all there was to see.  In the editorial
room were two tables--kitchen tables, littered with papers and
journals, as was the floor, also.  At the table directly opposite the
door no one was sitting--"Victor Dorn's desk," Jane decided.  At the
table by the open window sat a girl, bent over her writing.  Jane saw
that the figure was below, probably much below, the medium height for
woman, that it was slight and strong, that it was clad in a simple,
clean gray linen dress.  The girl's black hair, drawn into a plain but
distinctly graceful knot, was of that dense and wavy thickness which is
a characteristic and a beauty of the Hebrew race.  The skin at the nape
of her neck, on her hands, on her arms bare to the elbows was of a
beautiful dead-white--the skin that so admirably compliments dead-black
hair.

Before disturbing this busy writer Jane glanced round.  There was
nothing to detain her in the view of the busy printing plant in the
room beyond.  But on the walls of the room before her were four
pictures--lithographs, cheap, not framed, held in place by a tack at
each corner.  There was Washington--then Lincoln--then a copy of
Leonardo's Jesus in the Last Supper fresco--and a fourth face, bearded,
powerful, imperious, yet wonderfully kind and good humored--a face she
did not know.  Pointing her riding stick at it she said:

"And who is that?"

With a quick but not in the least a startled movement the girl at the
table straightened her form, turned in her chair, saying, as she did
so, without having seen the pointing stick:

"That is Marx--Karl Marx."

Jane was so astonished by the face she was now seeing--the face of the
girl--that she did not hear the reply.  The girl's hair and skin had
reminded her of what Martha had told her about the Jewish, or
half-Jewish, origin of Selma Gordon.  Thus, she assumed that she would
see a frankly Jewish face.  Instead, the face looking at her from
beneath the wealth of thick black hair, carelessly parted near the
centre, was Russian--was Cossack--strange and primeval, intense, dark,
as superbly alive as one of those exuberant tropical flowers that seem
to cry out the mad joy of life.  Only, those flowers suggest the
evanescent, the flame burning so fiercely that it must soon burn out,
while this Russian girl declared that life was eternal.  You could not
think of her as sick, as old, as anything but young and vigorous and
vivid, as full of energy as a healthy baby that kicks its dresses into
rags and wears out the strength of its strapping nurse.  Her nose was
as straight as Jane's own particularly fine example of nose.  Her dark
gray eyes, beneath long, slender, coal black lines of brow, were
brimming with life and with fun.  She had a wide, frank, scarlet mouth;
her teeth were small and sharp and regular, and of the strong and
healthy shade of white.  She had a very small, but a very resolute
chin.  With another quick, free movement she stood up.  She was indeed
small, but formed in proportion.  She seemed out of harmony with her
linen dress.  She looked as if she ought to be careening on the steppes
in some romantic, half-savage costume.  Jane's first and instant
thought was, "There's not another like her in the whole world.  She's
the only living specimen of her kind."

"Gracious!" exclaimed Jane.  "But you ARE healthy."

The smile took full advantage of the opportunity to broaden into a
laugh.  A most flattering expression of frank, childlike admiration
came into the dark gray eyes.  "You're not sickly, yourself," replied
Selma.  Jane was disappointed that the voice was not untamed Cossack,
but was musically civilized.

"Yes, but I don't flaunt it as you do," rejoined Jane.  "You'd make
anyone who was the least bit off, furious."

Selma, still with the child-like expression, but now one of curiosity,
was examining Jane's masculine riding dress.  "What a sensible suit!"
she cried, delightedly.  "I'd wear something like that all the time, if
I dared."

"Dared?" said Jane.  "You don't look like the frightened sort."

"Not on account of myself," explained Selma.  "On account of the cause.
You see, we are fighting for a new idea.  So, we have to be careful not
to offend people's prejudices about ideas not so important.  If we went
in for everything that's sensible, we'd be regarded as cranks.  One
thing at a time."

Jane's glance shifted to the fourth picture.  "Didn't you say that
was--Karl Marx?"

"Yes."

"He wrote a book on political economy.  I tried to read it at college.
But I couldn't.  It was too heavy for me.  He was a Socialist--wasn't
he?--the founder of Socialism?"

"A great deal more than that," replied Selma.  "He was the most
important man for human liberty that ever lived--except perhaps one."
And she looked at Leonardo's "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief."

"Marx was a--a Hebrew--wasn't he?"

Selma's eyes danced, and Jane felt that she was laughing at her
hesitation and choice of the softer word.  Selma said:

"Yes--he was a Jew.  Both were Jews."

"Both?" inquired Jane, puzzled.

"Marx and Jesus," explained Selma.

Jane was startled.  "So HE was a Jew--wasn't He?"

"And they were both labor leaders--labor agitators.  The first one
proclaimed the brotherhood of man.  But he regarded this world as
hopeless and called on the weary and heavy laden masses to look to the
next world for the righting of their wrongs. Then--eighteen centuries
after--came that second Jew"--Selma looked passionate, reverent
admiration at the powerful, bearded face, so masterful, yet so
kind--"and he said:  'No! not in the hereafter, but in the here.  Here
and now, my brothers.  Let us make this world a heaven.  Let us redeem
ourselves and destroy the devil of ignorance who is holding us in this
hell.'  It was three hundred years before that first Jew began to
triumph.  It won't be so long before there are monuments to Marx in
clean and beautiful and free cities all over the earth."

Jane listened intensely.  There was admiring envy in her eyes as she
cried:  "How splendid!--to believe in something--and work for it and
live for it--as you do!"

Selma laughed, with a charming little gesture of the shoulders and the
hands that reminded Jane of her foreign parentage. "Nothing else seems
worth while," said she.  "Nothing else is worth while.  There are only
two entirely great careers--to be a teacher of the right kind and work
to ease men's minds--as those four did--or to be a doctor of the right
kind and work to make mankind healthy.  All the suffering, all the
crime, all the wickedness, comes from ignorance or bad health--or both.
Usually it's simply bad health."

Jane felt as if she were devoured of thirst and drinking at a fresh,
sparkling spring.  "I never thought of that before," said she.

"If you find out all about any criminal, big or little, you'll discover
that he had bad health--poisons in his blood that goaded him on."

Jane nodded.  "Whenever I'm difficult to get on with, I'm always not
quite well."

"I can see that your disposition is perfect, when you are well," said
Selma.

"And yours," said Jane.

"Oh, I'm never out of humor," said Selma.  "You see, I'm never
sick--not the least bit."

"You are Miss Gordon, aren't you?"

"Yes--I'm Selma Gordon."

"My name is Jane Hastings."  Then as this seemed to convey nothing to
Selma, Jane added:  "I'm not like you.  I haven't an individuality of
my own--that anybody knows about.  So, I'll have to identify myself by
saying that I'm Martin Hastings' daughter."

Jane confidently expected that this announcement would cause some sort
of emotion--perhaps of awe, perhaps of horror, certainly of interest.
She was disappointed.  If Selma felt anything she did not show it--and
Jane was of the opinion that it would be well nigh impossible for so
direct and natural a person to conceal. Jane went on:

"I read in your paper about your fund for sick children.  I was riding
past your office--saw the sign--and I've come in to give what I happen
to have about me."  She drew out the small roll of bills and handed it
to Selma.

The Russian girl--if it is fair thus to characterize one so intensely
American in manner, in accent and in speech--took the money and said:

"We'll acknowledge it in the paper next week."

Jane flushed and a thrill of alarm ran through her. "Oh--please--no,"
she urged.  "I'd not like to have my name mentioned.  That would look
as if I had done it to seem charitable.  Besides, it's such a trifle."

Selma was calm and apparently unsuspicious.  "Very well," said she.
"We'll write, telling what we did with the money, so that you can
investigate."

"But I trust you entirely," cried Jane.

Selma shook her head.  "But we don't wish to be trusted," said she.
"Only dishonest people wish to be trusted when it's possible to avoid
trusting.  And we all need watching.  It helps us to keep straight."

"Oh, I don't agree with you," protested Miss Hastings.  "Lots of the
time I'd hate to be watched.  I don't want everybody to know all I do."

Selma's eyes opened.  "Why not?" she said.

Jane cast about for a way to explain what seemed to her a self-evident
truth.  "I mean--privacy," she said.  "For instance, if you were in
love, you'd not want everybody to know about it?"

"Yes, indeed," declared Selma.  "I'd be tremendously proud of it.  It
must be wonderful to be in love."

In one of those curious twists of feminine nature, Miss Hastings
suddenly felt the glow of a strong, unreserved liking for this strange,
candid girl.

Selma went on:  "But I'm afraid I never shall be.  I get no time to
think about myself.  From rising till bed time my work pushes at me."
She glanced uneasily at her desk, apologetically at Miss Hastings.  "I
ought to be writing this minute.  The strike is occupying Victor, and
I'm helping out with his work."

"I'm interrupting," said Jane.  "I'll go."  She put out her hand with
her best, her sweetest smile.  "We're going to be friends--aren't we?"

Selma clasped her hand heartily and said:  "We ARE friends.  I like
everybody.  There's always something to like in everyone--and the bad
part isn't their fault.  But it isn't often that I like anyone so much
as I do you.  You are so direct and honest--quite different from the
other women of your class that I've met."

Jane felt unaccountably grateful and humble.  "I'm afraid you're too
generous.  I guess you're not a very good judge of people," she said.

"So Victor--Victor Dorn--says," laughed Selma.  "He says I'm too
confiding.  Well--why not?  And really, he trusts everybody,
too--except with the cause.  Then he's--he's"--she glanced from face to
face of the four pictures--"he's like those men."

Jane's glance followed Selma's.  She said:  "Yes--I should imagine
so--from what I've heard."  She startled, flushed, hid behind a
somewhat constrained manner.  "Will you come up to my house to lunch?"

"If I can find time," said Selma.  "But I'd rather come and take you
for a walk.  I have to walk two hours every day.  It's the only thing
that'll keep my head clear."

"When will you come?--to-morrow?"

"Is nine o'clock too early?"

Jane reflected that her father left for business at half-past eight.
"Nine to-morrow," she said.  "Good-by again."

As she was mounting her horse, she saw "the Cossack girl," as she was
calling her, writing away at the window hardly three feet above the
level of Jane's head when she was mounted, so low was the first story
of the battered old frame house.  But Selma did not see her; she was
all intent upon the writing.  "She's forgotten me already," thought
Jane with a pang of jealous vanity.  She added:  "But SHE has SOMETHING
to think about--she and Victor Dorn."

She was so preoccupied that she rode away with only an absent thank you
for the small boy, in an older and much larger and wider brother's
cast-off shirt, suspenders and trousers.  At the corner of the avenue
she remembered and turned her horse.  There stood the boy gazing after
her with a hypnotic intensity that made her smile.  She rode back
fumbling in her pockets.  "I beg your pardon," said she to the boy.
Then she called up to Selma Gordon:

"Miss Gordon--please--will you lend me a quarter until to-morrow?"

Selma looked up, stared dazedly at her, smiled absently at Miss
Hastings--and Miss Hastings had the strongest confirmation of her
suspicion that Selma had forgotten her and her visit the instant she
vanished from the threshold of the office.  Said Selma:  "A
quarter?--oh, yes--certainly."  She seemed to be searching a drawer or
a purse out of sight.  "I haven't anything but a five dollar bill.  I'm
so sorry"--this in an absent manner, with most of her thoughts
evidently still upon her work.  She rose, leaned from the window,
glanced up the street, then down.  She went on:

"There comes Victor Dorn.  He'll lend it to you."

Along the ragged brick walk at a quick pace the man who had in such
abrupt fashion stormed Jane Hasting's fancy and taken possession of her
curiosity was advancing with a basket on his arm.  He was indeed a man
of small stature--about the medium height for a woman--about the height
of Jane Hastings.  But his figure was so well put together and his walk
so easy and free from self-consciousness that the question of stature
no sooner arose than it was dismissed.  His head commanded all the
attention--its poise and the remarkable face that fronted it. The
features were bold, the skin was clear and healthy and rather fair.
His eyes--gray or green blue and set neither prominently nor
retreatedly--seemed to be seeing and understanding all that was going
on about him.  He had a strong, rather relentless mouth--the mouth of
men who make and compel sacrifices for their ambitions.

"Victor," cried Selma as soon as he was within easy range of her voice,
"please lend Miss Hastings a quarter."  And she immediately sat down
and went to work again, with the incident dismissed from mind.

The young man--for he was plainly not far beyond thirty--halted and
regarded the young woman on the horse.

"I wish to give this young gentleman here a quarter," said Jane.  "He
was very good about holding my horse."

The words were not spoken before the young gentleman darted across the
narrow street and into a yard hidden by masses of clematis, morning
glory and sweet peas.  And Jane realized that she had wholly mistaken
the meaning of that hypnotic stare.

Victor laughed--the small figure, the vast clothes, the bare feet with
voluminous trousers about them made a ludicrous sight.  "He doesn't
want it," said Victor.  "Thank you just the same."

"But I want him to have it," said Jane.

With a significant unconscious glance at her costume Dorn said: "Those
costumes haven't reached our town yet."

"He did some work for me.  I owe it to him."

"He's my sister's little boy," said Dorn, with his amiable, friendly
smile.  "We mustn't start him in the bad way of expecting pay for
politeness."

Jane colored as if she had been rebuked, when in fact his tone forbade
the suggestion of rebuke.  There was an unpleasant sparkle in her eyes
as she regarded the young man in the baggy suit, with the basket on his
arm.  "I beg your pardon," said she coldly.  "I naturally didn't know
your peculiar point of view."

"That's all right," said Dorn carelessly.  "Thank you, and good day."
And with a polite raising of the hat and a manner of good humored
friendliness that showed how utterly unconscious he was of her being
offended at him, he hastened across the street and went in at the gate
where the boy had vanished.  And Jane had the sense that he had
forgotten her.  She glanced nervously up at the window to see whether
Selma Gordon was witnessing her humiliation--for so she regarded it.
But Selma was evidently lost in a world of her own.  "She doesn't love
him," Jane decided.  "For, even though she is a strange kind of person,
she's a woman--and if she had loved him she couldn't have helped
watching while he talked with another woman--especially with one of my
appearance and class."

Jane rode slowly away.  At the corner--it was a long block--she glanced
toward the scene she had just quitted.  Involuntarily she drew rein.
Victor and the boy had come out into the street and were playing
catches.  The game did not last long.  Dorn let the boy corner him and
seize him, then gave him a great toss into the air, catching him as he
came down and giving him a hug and a kiss.  The boy ran shouting
merrily into the yard; Victor disappeared in the entrance to the
offices of the New Day.

That evening, as she pretended to listen to Hull on national politics,
and while dressing the following morning Jane reflected upon her
adventure.  She decided that Dorn and the "wild girl" were a low,
ill-mannered pair with whom she had nothing in common, that her
fantastic, impulsive interest in them had been killed, that for the
future she would avoid "all that sort of cattle."  She would receive
Selma Gordon politely, of course--would plead headache as an excuse for
not walking, would get rid of her as soon as possible.  "No doubt,"
thought Jane, with the familiar, though indignantly denied, complacence
of her class, "as soon as she gets in here she'll want to hang on.  She
played it very well, but she must have been crazy with delight at my
noticing her and offering to take her up."

The postman came as Jane was finishing breakfast.  He brought a note
from Selma--a hasty pencil scrawl on a sheet of printer's copy paper:


"Dear Miss Hastings:  For the present I'm too busy to take my walks.
So, I'll not be there to-morrow.  With best regards, S.G."


Such a fury rose up in Jane that the undigested breakfast went wrong
and put her in condition to give such exhibition as chance might tempt
of that ugliness of disposition which appears from time to time in all
of us not of the meek and worm-like class, and which we usually
attribute to any cause under the sun but the vulgar right one.  "The
impertinence!" muttered Jane, with a second glance at the note which
conveyed; among other humiliating things, an impression of her own
absolute lack of importance to Selma Gordon.  "Serves me right for
lowering myself to such people.  If I wanted to try to do anything for
the working class I'd have to keep away from them.  They're so
unattractive to look at and to associate with--not like those shrewd,
respectful, interesting peasants one finds on the other side.  They're
better in the East.  They know their place in a way.  But out here
they're insufferable."

And she spent the morning quarrelling with her maid and the other
servants, issuing orders right and left, working herself into a
horrible mood dominated by a headache that was anything but a pretense.
As she wandered about the house and gardens, she trailed a beautiful
negligee with that carelessness which in a woman of clean and orderly
habits invariably indicates the possession of many clothes and of a
maid who can be counted on to freshen things up before they shall be
used again.  Her father came home to lunch in high good humor.

"I'll not go down town again for a few days," said he.  "I reckon I'd
best keep out of the way.  That scoundrelly Victor Dorn has done so
much lying and inciting these last four or five years that it ain't
safe for a man like me to go about when there's trouble with the hands."

"Isn't it outrageous!" exclaimed Jane.  "He ought to be stopped."

Hastings chuckled and nodded.  "And he will be," said he. "Wait till
this strike's over."

"When will that be?" asked Jane.

"Mighty soon," replied her father.  "I was ready for 'em this
time--good and ready.  I've sent word to the governor that I want the
militia down here tomorrow----"

"Has there been a riot?" cried Jane anxiously.

"Not yet," said Hastings.  He was laughing to himself.  "But there will
be to-night.  Then the governor'll send the troops in to-morrow
afternoon."

"But maybe the men'll be quiet, and then----" began Jane, sick inside
and trembling.

"When I say a thing'll happen, it'll happen," interrupted her father.
"We've made up our minds it's time to give these fellows a lesson.
It's got to be done.  A milder lesson'll serve now, where later on it'd
have to be hard.  I tell you these things because I want you to
remember 'em.  They'll come in handy--when you'll have to look after
your own property."

She knew how her father hated the thought of his own death; this was
the nearest he had ever come to speaking of it.  "Of course, there's
your brother William," he went on.  "William's a good boy--and a mighty
good business man--though he does take risks I'd never 'a took--not
even when I was young and had nothing to lose.  Yes--and Billy's
honest.  BUT"--the big head shook impressively--"William's human,
Jenny--don't ever forget that. The love of money's an awful thing."  A
lustful glitter like the shine of an inextinguishable fire made his
eyes fascinating and terrible.  "It takes hold of a man and never lets
go.  To see the money pile up--and up--and up."

The girl turned away her gaze.  She did not wish to see so far into her
father's soul.  It seemed a hideous indecency.

"So, Jenny--don't trust William, but look after your own property."

"Oh, I don't care anything about it, popsy," she cried, fighting to
think of him and to speak to him as simply the living father she had
always insisted on seeing.

"Yes--you do care," said Hastings sharply.  "You've got to have your
money, because that's your foundation--what you're built on.  And I'm
going to train you.  This here strike's a good time to begin."

After a long silence she said:  "Yes, money's what I'm built on. I
might as well recognize the truth and act accordingly.  I want you to
teach me, father."

"I've got to educate you so as, when you get control, you won't go and
do fool sentimental things like some women--and some men that warn't
trained practically--men like that Davy Hull you think so well of.
Things that'd do no good and 'd make you smaller and weaker."

"I understand," said the girl.  "About this strike--WHY won't you give
the men shorter hours and better pay?"

"Because the company can't afford it.  As things are now, there's only
enough left for a three per cent dividend after the interest on the
bonds is paid."

She had read in the New Day that by a series of tricks the "traction
ring" had quadrupled the bonded indebtedness of the roads and
multiplied the stock by six, and had pocketed the proceeds of the
steal; that three per cent on the enormously inflated capital was in
fact eighteen per cent on the actual stock value; that seven per cent
on the bonds was in fact twenty-eight per cent on the actual bonded
indebtedness; that this traction steal was a fair illustration of how
in a score of ways in Remsen City, in a thousand and one ways in all
parts of the country, the upper class was draining away the substance
of the masses, was swindling them out of their just wages, was forcing
them to pay many times the just prices for every article of civilized
use.  She had read these things--she had thought about them--she had
realized that they were true.

She did not put to her father the question that was on her lips--the
next logical question after his answer that the company could not
afford to cut the hours lower than fourteen or to raise wages to what
was necessary for a man to have if he and his family were to live, not
in decency and comfort, but in something less than squalor.  She did
not put the question because she wished to spare her father--to spare
herself the shame of hearing his tricky answer--to spare herself the
discomfort of squarely facing a nasty truth.

Instead she said:  "I understand.  And you have got to look out for the
rights of the people who have invested their money."

"If I didn't I'd be cheating them," said Hastings.  "And if the men
don't like their jobs, why, they can quit and get jobs they do like."
He added, in absolute unconsciousness of his inconsistency, in absolute
belief in his own honesty and goodness, "The truth is our company pays
as high wages as can be got anywhere.  As for them hours--when _I_ was
working my way up, _I_ used to put in sixteen and eighteen hours a day,
and was mighty glad to do it.  This lazy talk of cutting down hours
makes me sick.  And these fellows that're always kicking on their jobs,
I'd like to know what'd become of them and their families if I and men
like me didn't provide work for 'em."

"Yes, indeed!" cried Jane, eagerly seizing upon this attractive view of
the situation--and resolutely accepting it without question.

In came one of the maids, saying:  "There's a man wants to see you, Mr.
Hastings."

"What's his name?  What does he want?" inquired Hastings, while Jane
made a mental note that she must try to inject at least a little order
and form into the manners of announcing visitors.

"He didn't give a name.  He just said, 'Tell the old man I want to see
him.'  I ain't sure, but I think it's Dick Kelly."

As Lizzie was an ardent Democrat, she spoke the name
contemptuously--for Dick Kelly was the Republican boss.  If it had been
House, the Democratic boss and Kelly's secret dependent and henchman,
she would have said "Mr. Joseph House" in a tone of deep respect.

"Kelly," said Hastings.  "Must be something important or he'd 'a
telephoned or asked me to see him at my office or at the Lincoln Club.
He never came out here before.  Bring him in, Lizzie."

A moment and there appeared in the doorway a man of perhaps forty years
who looked like a prosperous contractor who had risen from the ranks.
His figure was notable for its solidity and for the power of the
shoulders; but already there were indications that the solidity, come
of hard manual labor in early life, was soon to soften into fat under
the melting influence of prosperity and the dissipation it put within
too easy reach.  The striking features of his face were a pair of keen,
hard, greenish eyes and a jaw that protruded uglily--the jaw of
aggressiveness, not the too prominent jaw of weakness.  At sight of
Jane he halted awkwardly.

"How're you, Mr. Hastings?" said he.

"Hello, Dick," said the old man.  "This is my daughter Jane."

Jane smiled a pleasant recognition of the introduction.  Kelly said
stiffly, "How're you, ma'am?"

"Want to see me alone, I suppose?" Hastings went on.  "You go out on
the porch, Jenny."

As soon as Jane disappeared Kelly's stiffness and clumsiness vanished.
To head off Hastings' coming offer of a cigar, he drew one from his
pocket and lighted it.  "There's hell to pay, Mr. Hastings," he began,
seating himself near the old man, tilting back in his chair and
crossing his legs.

"Well, I reckon you can take care of it," said Hastings calmly.

"Oh, yes, we kin take care of it, all right.  Only, I don't want to do
nothing without consulting you."

In these two statements Mr. Kelly summed up the whole of politics in
Remsen City, in any city anywhere, in the country at large.

Kelly had started life as a blacksmith.  But he soon tired of the
dullness and toil and started forth to find some path up to where men
live by making others work for them instead of plodding along at the
hand-to-mouth existence that is the lot of those who live by their own
labors alone.  He was a safe blower for a while, but wisely soon
abandoned that fascinating but precarious and unremunerative career.
From card sharp following the circus and sheet-writer to a bookmaker he
graduated into bartender, into proprietor of a doggery.  As every
saloon is a political club, every saloon-keeper is of necessity a
politician.  Kelly's woodbox happened to be a convenient place for
directing the floaters and the repeaters.  Kelly's political importance
grew apace.  His respectability grew more slowly.  But it had grown and
was growing.

If you had asked Lizzie, the maid, why she was a Democrat, she would
have given no such foolish reason as the average man gives.

She would not have twaddled about principles--when everyone with
eyeteeth cut ought to know that principles have departed from politics,
now that both parties have been harmonized and organized into agencies
of the plutocracy.  She would not have said she was a Democrat because
her father was, or because all her friends and associates were.  She
would have replied--in pleasantly Americanized Irish:

"I'm a Democrat because when my father got too old to work, Mr. House,
the Democrat leader, gave him a job on the elevator at the Court
House--though that dirty thief and scoundrel, Kelly, the Republican
boss, owned all the judges and county officers.  And when my brother
lost his place as porter because he took a drink too many, Mr. House
gave him a card to the foreman of the gas company, and he went to work
at eight a week and is there yet."

Mr. Kelly and Mr. House belong to a maligned and much misunderstood
class.  Whenever you find anywhere in nature an activity of any kind,
however pestiferous its activity may seem to you--or however good--you
may be sure that if you look deep enough you will find that that
activity has a use, arises from a need.  The "robber trusts" and the
political bosses are interesting examples of this basic truth.  They
have arisen because science, revolutionizing human society, has
compelled it to organize.  The organization is crude and clumsy and
stupid, as yet, because men are ignorant, are experimenting, are
working in the dark.  So, the organizing forces are necessarily crude
and clumsy and stupid.

Mr. Hastings was--all unconsciously--organizing society industrially.
Mr. Kelly--equally unconscious of the true nature of his
activities--was organizing society politically.  And as industry and
politics are--and ever have been--at bottom two names for identically
the same thing, Mr. Hastings and Mr. Kelly were bound sooner or later
to get together.

Remsen City was organized like every other large or largish community.
There were two clubs--the Lincoln and the Jefferson--which well enough
represented the "respectable elements"--that is, those citizens who
were of the upper class. There were two other clubs--the Blaine and the
Tilden--which were similarly representative of the "rank and file" and,
rather, of the petty officers who managed the rank and file and voted
it and told it what to think and what not to think, in exchange taking
care of the needy sick, of the aged, of those out of work and so on.
Martin Hastings--the leading Republican citizen of Remsen City, though
for obvious reasons his political activities were wholly secret and
stealthy--was the leading spirit in the Lincoln Club.  Jared
Olds--Remsen City's richest and most influential Democrat, the head of
the gas company and the water company--was foremost in the Jefferson
Club.  At the Lincoln and the Jefferson you rarely saw any but
"gentlemen"--men of established position and fortune, deacons and
vestrymen, judges, corporation lawyers and the like.  The Blaine and
the Tilden housed a livelier and a far less select class--the
"boys"--the active politicians, the big saloon keepers, the criminal
lawyers, the gamblers, the chaps who knew how to round up floaters and
to handle gangs of repeaters, the active young sports working for
political position, by pitching and carrying for the political leaders,
by doing their errands of charity or crookedness or what not.  Joe
House was the "big shout" at the Tilden; Dick Kelly could be found
every evening on the third--or "wine," or plotting--floor of the
Blaine--found holding court.  And very respectful indeed were even the
most eminent of Lincoln, or Jefferson, respectabilities who sought him
out there to ask favors of him.

The bosses tend more and more to become mere flunkeys of the
plutocrats.  Kelly belonged to the old school of boss, dating from the
days when social organization was in the early stages, when the
political organizer was feared and even served by the industrial
organizer, the embryo plutocrats.  He realized how necessary he was to
his plutocratic master, and he made that master treat him almost as an
equal.  He was exacting ever larger pay for taking care of the voters
and keeping them fooled; he was getting rich, and had as yet vague
aspirations to respectability and fashion.  He had stopped drinking,
had "cut out the women," had made a beginning toward a less inelegant
way of speaking the language.  His view of life was what is called
cynical.  That is, he regarded himself as morally the equal of the
respectable rulers of society--or of the preachers who attended to the
religious part of the grand industry of "keeping the cow quiet while it
was being milked."

But Mr. Kelly was explaining to Martin Hastings what he meant when he
said that there was "hell to pay":

"That infernal little cuss, Victor Dorn," said he "made a speech in the
Court House Square to-day.  Of course, none of the decent papers--and
they're all decent except his'n--will publish any of it.  Still, there
was about a thousand people there before he got through--and the
thing'll spread."

"Speech?--what about?" said Hastings.  "He's always shooting off his
mouth.  He'd better stop talking and go to work at some honest
business."

"He's got on to the fact that this strike is a put-up job--that the
company hired labor detectives in Chicago last winter to come down here
and get hold of the union.  He gave names--amounts paid--the whole damn
thing."

"Um," said Hastings, rubbing his skinny hands along the shiny
pantaloons over his meagre legs.  "Um."

"But that ain't all," pursued Kelly.  "He read out a list of the men
told off to pretend to set fire to the car barns and start the
riot--those Chicago chaps, you know."

"I don't know anything about it," said Hastings sharply.

Kelly smiled slightly--amused scorn.  It seemed absurd to him for the
old man to keep up the pretense of ignorance.  In fact, Hastings was
ignorant--of the details.  He was not quite the aloof plutocrat of the
modern school, who permits himself to know nothing of details beyond
the dividend rate and similar innocent looking results of causes at
which sometimes hell itself would shudder.  But, while he was more
active than the conscience-easing devices now working smoothly made
necessary, he never permitted himself to know any unnecessary criminal
or wicked fact about his enterprises.

"I don't know," he repeated.  "And I don't want to know."

"Anyhow, Dorn gave away the whole thing.  He even read a copy of your
letter of introduction to the governor--the one you--according to
Dorn--gave Fillmore when you sent him up to the Capitol to arrange for
the invitation to come after the riot."

Hastings knew that the boss was deliberately "rubbing it in" because
Hastings--that is, Hastings' agents had not invited Kelly to assist in
the project for "teaching the labor element a much needed lesson."  But
knowledge of Kelly's motive did not make the truth he was telling any
less true--the absurd mismanagement of the whole affair, with the
result that Dorn seemed in the way to change it from a lesson to labor
on the folly of revolt against their kind and generous but firm
employers into a provoker of fresh and fiercer revolt--effective
revolt--political revolt.  So, as Kelly "rubbed," Hastings visibly
winced and writhed.

Kelly ended his recital with:  "The speech created a hell of a
sensation, Mr. Hastings.  That young chap can talk."

"Yes," snapped Hastings.  "But he can't do anything else."

"I'm not so sure of that," replied Kelly, who was wise enough to
realize the value of a bogey like Dorn--its usefulness for purposes of
"throwing a scare into the silk-stocking crowd." "Dorn's getting mighty
strong with the people."

"Stuff and nonsense!" retorted Hastings.  "They'll listen to any slick
tongued rascal that roasts those that are more prosperous than they
are.  But when it comes to doing anything, they know better.  They envy
and hate those that give them jobs, but they need the jobs."

"There's a good deal of truth in that, Mr. Hastings," said Kelly, who
was nothing if not judicial.  "But Dorn's mighty plausible.  I hear
sensible men saying there's something more'n hot air in his facts and
figgures."  Kelly paused, and made the pause significant.

"About that last block of traction stock, Mr. Hastings.  I thought you
were going to let me in on the ground floor.  But I ain't heard
nothing."

"You ARE in," said Hastings, who knew when to yield.  "Hasn't Barker
been to see you?  I'll attend to it, myself."

"Thank you, Mr. Hastings," said Kelly--dry and brief as always when
receipting with a polite phrase for pay for services rendered.  "I've
been a good friend to your people."

"Yes, you have, Dick," said the old man heartily.  "And I want you to
jump in and take charge."

Hastings more than suspected that Kelly, to bring him to terms and to
force him to employ directly the high-priced Kelly or
Republico-Democratic machine as well as the State Republico-Democratic
machine, which was cheaper, had got together the inside information and
had ordered one of his henchmen to convey it to Dorn.  But of what use
to quarrel with Kelly?  Of course, he could depose him; but that would
simply mean putting another boss in his place--perhaps one more
expensive and less efficient.  The time had been when he--and the
plutocracy generally--were compelled to come to the political bosses
almost hat in hand.  That time was past, never to return.  But still a
competent political agent was even harder to find than a competent
business manager--and was far more necessary; for, while a big business
might stagger along under poor financial or organizing management
within, it could not live at all without political favors, immunities,
and licenses.  A band of pickpockets might as well try to work a town
without having first "squared" the police.  Not that Mr. Hastings and
his friends THEMSELVES compared themselves to a band of pickpockets.
No, indeed.  It was simply legitimate business to blackjack your
competitors, corner a supply, create a monopoly and fix prices and
wages to suit your own notions of what was your due for taking the
"hazardous risks of business enterprise."

"Leave everything to me," said Kelly briskly.  "I can put the thing
through.  Just tell your lawyer to apply late this afternoon to Judge
Lansing for an injunction forbidding the strikers to assemble anywhere
within the county.  We don't want no more of this speechifying.  This
is a peaceable community, and it won't stand for no agitators."

"Hadn't the lawyers better go to Judge Freilig?" said Hastings.

"He's shown himself to be a man of sound ideas."

"No--Lansing," said Kelly.  "He don't come up for re-election for five
years.  Freilig comes up next fall, and we'll have hard work to pull
him through, though House is going to put him on the ticket, too.
Dorn's going to make a hot campaign--concentrate on judges."

"There's nothing in that Dorn talk," said Hastings.  "You can't scare
me again, Dick, as you did with that Populist mare's nest ten years
ago."

That had been Kelly's first "big killing" by working on the fears of
the plutocracy.  Its success had put him in a position to buy a
carriage and a diamond necklace for Mrs. Kelly and to make first
payments on a large block of real estate.  "It was no mare's nest, Mr.
Hastings," gravely declared the boss.  "If I hadn't 'a knowed just how
to use the money we collected, there'd 'a been a crowd in office for
four years that wouldn't 'a been easy to manage, I can tell you.  But
they was nothing to this here Dorn crowd. Dorn is----"

"We must get rid of him, Dick," interrupted Hastings.

The two men looked at each other--a curious glance--telegraphy. No
method was suggested, no price was offered or accepted.  But in the
circumstances those matters became details that would settle
themselves; the bargain was struck.

"He certainly ought to be stopped," said Kelly carelessly. "He's the
worst enemy the labor element has had in my time." He rose.  "Well, Mr.
Hastings, I must be going."  He extended his heavy, strong hand, which
Hastings rose to grasp.  "I'm glad we're working together again without
any hitches.  You won't forget about that there stock?"

"I'll telephone about it right away, Dick--and about Judge Lansing.
You're sure Lansing's all right?  I didn't like those decisions of his
last year--the railway cases, I mean."

"That was all right, Mr. Hastings," said Kelly with a wave of the hand.
"I had to have 'em in the interests of the party.  I knowed the upper
court'd reverse.  No, Lansing's a good party man--a good, sound man in
every way."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Hastings.

Before going into his private room to think and plan and telephone, he
looked out on the west veranda.  There sat his daughter; and a few feet
away was David Hull, his long form stretched in a hammock while he
discoursed of his projects for a career as a political reformer.  The
sight immensely pleased the old man.  When he was a boy David Hull's
grandfather, Brainerd Hull, had been the great man of that region; and
Martin Hastings, a farm hand and the son of a farm hand, had looked up
at him as the embodiment of all that was grand and aristocratic.  As
Hastings had never travelled, his notions of rank and position all
centred about Remsen City.  Had he realized the extent of the world, he
would have regarded his ambition for a match between the daughter and
granddaughter of a farm hand and the son and grandson of a Remsen City
aristocrat as small and ridiculous. But he did not realize.

Davy saw him and sprang to his feet.

"No--no--don't disturb yourselves," cried the old man.  "I've got some
things to 'tend to.  You and Jenny go right ahead."

And he was off to his own little room where he conducted his own
business in his own primitive but highly efficacious way.  A corps of
expert accountants could not have disentangled those crabbed,
criss-crossed figures; no solver of puzzles could have unravelled the
mystery of those strange hieroglyphics.  But to the old man there
wasn't a difficult--or a dull--mark in that entire set of dirty,
dog-eared little account books.  He spent hours in poring over them.
Just to turn the pages gave him keen pleasure; to read, and to
reconstruct from those hints the whole story of some agitating and
profitable operation, made in comparison the delight of an imaginative
boy in Monte Cristo or Crusoe seem a cold and tame emotion.

David talked on and on, fancying that Jane was listening and admiring,
when in fact she was busy with her own entirely different train of
thought.  She kept the young man going because she did not wish to be
bored with her own solitude, because a man about always made life at
least a little more interesting than if she were alone or with a woman,
and because Davy was good to look at and had an agreeable voice.

"Why, who's that?" she suddenly exclaimed, gazing off to the right.

Davy turned and looked.  "I don't know her," he said.  "Isn't she queer
looking--yet I don't know just why."

"It's Selma Gordon," said Jane, who had recognized Selma the instant
her eyes caught a figure moving across the lawn.

"The girl that helps Victor Dorn?" said Davy, astonished. "What's SHE
coming HERE for?  You don't know her--do you?"

"Don't you?" evaded Jane.  "I thought you and Mr. Dorn were such pals."

"Pals?" laughed Hull.  "Hardly that.  We meet now and then at a
workingman's club I'm interested in--and at a cafe' where I go to get
in touch with the people occasionally--and in the street.  But I never
go to his office.  I couldn't afford to do that.  And I've never seen
Miss Gordon."

"Well, she's worth seeing," said Jane.  "You'll never see another like
her."

They rose and watched her advancing.  To the usual person, acutely
conscious of self, walking is not easy in such circumstances.  But
Selma, who never bothered about herself, came on with that matchless
steady grace which peasant girls often get through carrying burdens on
the head.  Jane called out:

"So, you've come, after all."

Selma smiled gravely.  Not until she was within a few feet of the steps
did she answer:  "Yes--but on business."  She was wearing the same
linen dress.  On her head was a sailor hat, beneath the brim of which
her amazingly thick hair stood out in a kind of defiance.  This hat,
this further article of Western civilization's dress, added to the
suggestion of the absurdity of such a person in such clothing.  But in
her strange Cossack way she certainly was beautiful--and as healthy and
hardy as if she had never before been away from the high, wind-swept
plateaus where disease is unknown and where nothing is thought of
living to be a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five.  Both before and
after the introduction Davy Hull gazed at her with fascinated curiosity
too plainly written upon his long, sallow, serious face.  She, intent
upon her mission, ignored him as the arrow ignores the other birds of
the flock in its flight to the one at which it is aimed.

"You'll give me a minute or two alone?" she said to Jane.  "We can walk
on the lawn here."

Hull caught up his hat.  "I was just going," said he.  Then he
hesitated, looked at Selma, stammered:  "I'll go to the edge of the
lawn and inspect the view."

Neither girl noted this abrupt and absurd change of plan.  He departed.
As soon as he had gone half a dozen steps, Selma said in her quick,
direct fashion:

"I've come to see you about the strike."

Jane tried to look cool and reserved.  But that sort of expression
seemed foolish in face of the simplicity and candor of Selma Gordon.
Also, Jane was not now so well pleased with her father's ideas and
those of her own interest as she had been while she was talking with
him.  The most exasperating thing about the truth is that, once one has
begun to see it--has begun to see what is for him the truth--the honest
truth--he can not hide from it ever again.  So, instead of looking cold
and repellant, Jane looked uneasy and guilty.  "Oh, yes--the strike,"
she murmured.

"It is over," said Selma.  "The union met a half hour ago and revoked
its action--on Victor Dorn's advice.  He showed the men that they had
been trapped into striking by the company--that a riot was to be
started and blamed upon them--that the militia was to be called in and
they were to be shot down."

"Oh, no--not that!" cried Jane eagerly.  "It wouldn't have gone as far
as that."

"Yes--as far as that," said Selma calmly.  "That sort of thing is an
old story.  It's been done so often--and worse.  You see, the
respectable gentlemen who run things hire disreputable creatures.  They
don't tell them what to do.  They don't need to. The poor wretches
understand what's expected of them--and they do it.  So, the
respectable gentlemen can hold up white hands and say quite truthfully,
'No blood-no filth on these--see!"' Selma was laughing drearily.  Her
superb, primitive eyes, set ever so little aslant, were flashing with
an intensity of emotion that gave Jane Hastings a sensation of
terror-much as if a man who has always lived where there were no
storms, but such gentle little rains with restrained and refined
thunder as usually visit the British Isles, were to find himself in the
midst of one of those awful convulsions that come crashing down the
gorges of the Rockies.  She marveled that one so small of body could
contain such big emotions.

"You mustn't be unjust," she pleaded.  "WE aren't THAT wicked, my dear."

Selma looked at her.  "No matter," she said.  "I am not trying to
convert you--or to denounce your friends to you.  I'll explain what
I've come for.  In his speech to-day and in inducing the union to
change, Victor has shown how much power he has.  The men whose plans he
has upset will be hating him as men hate only those whom they fear."

"Yes--I believe that," said Jane.  "So, you see, I'm not blindly
prejudiced."

"For a long time there have been rumors that they might kill him----"

"Absurd!" cried Jane angrily.  "Miss Gordon, no matter how prejudiced
you may be--and I'll admit there are many things to justify you in
feeling strongly--but no matter how you may feel, your good sense must
tell you that men like my father don't commit murder."

"I understand perfectly," replied Selma.  "They don't commit murder,
and they don't order murder.  I'll even say that I don't think they
would tolerate murder, even for their benefit.  But you don't know how
things are done in business nowadays.  The men like your father have to
use men of the Kelly and the House sort--you know who they are?"

"Yes," said Jane.

"The Kellys and the Houses give general orders to their lieutenants.
The lieutenants pass the orders along--and down. And so on, until all
sorts of men are engaged in doing all sorts of work.  Dirty, clean,
criminal--all sorts.  Some of these men, baffled in what they are
trying to do to earn their pay--baffled by Victor Dorn--plot against
him."  Again that sad, bitter laugh.  "My dear Miss Hastings, to kill a
cat there are a thousand ways besides skinning it alive."

"You are prejudiced," said Jane, in the manner of one who could not be
convinced.

Selma made an impatient gesture.  "Again I say, no matter. Victor
laughs at our fears----"

"I knew it," said Jane triumphantly.  "He is less foolish than his
followers."

"He simply does not think about himself," replied Selma.  "And he is
right.  But it is our business to think about him, because we need him.
Where could we find another like him?"

"Yes, I suppose your movement WOULD die out, if  he were not behind it."

Selma smiled peculiarly.  "I think you don't quite understand what we
are about," said she.  "You've accepted the ignorant notion of your
class that we are a lot of silly roosters trying to crow one sun out of
the heavens and another into it.  The facts are somewhat different.
Your class is saying, 'To-day will last forever,' while we are saying,
'No, to-day will run its course--will be succeeded by to-morrow.  Let
us not live like the fool who thinks only of the day.  Let us be
sensible, intelligent, let us realize that there will be to-morrow and
that it, too, must be lived.  Let us get ready to live it sensibly. Let
us build our social system so that it will stand the wear and tear of
another day and will not fall in ruins about our heads.'"

"I am terribly ignorant about all these things," said Jane. "What a
ridiculous thing my education has been!"

"But it hasn't spoiled your heart," cried Selma.  And all at once her
eyes were wonderfully soft and tender, and into her voice came a tone
so sweet that Jane's eyes filled with tears. "It was to your heart that
I came to appeal," she went on. "Oh, Miss Hastings--we will do all we
can to protect Victor Dorn--and we guard him day and night without his
knowing it.  But I am afraid--afraid!  And I want you to help.  Will
you?"

"I'll do anything I can," said Jane--a Jane very different from the
various Janes Miss Hastings knew--a Jane who seemed to be conjuring of
Selma Gordon's enchantments.

"I want you to ask your father to give him a fair show.  We don't ask
any favors--for ourselves--for him.  But we don't want to see him--"
Selma shuddered and covered her eyes with her hands "--lying dead in
some alley, shot or stabbed by some unknown thug!"

Selma made it so vivid that Jane saw the whole tragedy before her very
eyes.

"The real reason why they hate him," Selma went on, "is because he
preaches up education and preaches down violence--and is building his
party on intelligence instead of on force.  The masters want the
workingman who burns and kills and riots.  They can shoot him down.
They can make people accept any tyranny in preference to the danger of
fire and murder let loose.  But Victor is teaching the workingmen to
stop playing the masters' game for them.  No wonder they hate him!  He
makes them afraid of the day when the united workingmen will have their
way by organizing and voting.  And they know that if Victor Dorn lives,
that day will come in this city very, very soon."  Selma saw Davy Hull,
impatient at his long wait, advancing toward them. She said:  "You will
talk to your father?"

"Yes," said Jane.  "And I assure you he will do what he can. You don't
know him, Miss Gordon."

"I know he loves you--I know he MUST love you," said Selma. "Now, I
must go.  Good-by.  I knew you would be glad of the chance to do
something worth while."

Jane had been rather expecting to be thanked for her generosity and
goodness.  Selma's remark seemed at first blush an irritating attempt
to shift a favor asked into a favor given.  But it was impossible for
her to fail to see Selma's sensible statement of the actual truth.  So,
she said honestly:

"Thank you for coming, Miss Gordon.  I am glad of the chance."

They shook hands.  Selma, holding her hand, looked up at her, suddenly
kissed her.  Jane returned the kiss.  David Hull, advancing with his
gaze upon them, stopped short.  Selma, without a glance--because
without a thought--in his direction, hastened away.

When David rejoined Jane, she was gazing tenderly after the small,
graceful figure moving toward the distant entrance gates. Said David:

"I think that girl has got you hypnotized."

Jane laughed and sent him home.  "I'm busy," she said.  "I've got
something to do, at last."



III

Jane knocked at the door of her father's little office.  "Are you
there, father?" said she.

"Yes--come in, Jinny."  As she entered, he went on, "But you must go
right away again.  I've got to 'tend to this strike." He took on an
injured, melancholy tone.  "Those fool workingmen! They're certain to
lose.  And what'll come of it all?  Why, they'll be out their wages and
their jobs, and the company lose so much money that it can't put on the
new cars the public's clamorin' for.  The old cars'll have to do for
another year, anyhow--maybe two."

Jane had heard that lugubrious tone from time to time, and she knew
what it meant--an air of sorrow concealing secret joy.  So, here was
another benefit the company--she preferred to think of it as the
company rather than as her father--expected to gain from the strike.
It could put off replacing the miserable old cars in which it was
compelling people to ride.  Instead of losing money by the strike, it
would make money by it.  This was Jane's first glimpse of one of the
most interesting and important truths of modern life--how it is often
to the advantage of business men to have their own business crippled,
hampered, stopped altogether.

"You needn't worry, father," said she cheerfully.  "The strike's been
declared off."

"What's that?" cried her father.

"A girl from down town just called.  She says the union has called the
strike off and the men have accepted the company's terms."

"But them terms is withdrawn!" cried Hastings, as if his daughter were
the union.  He seized the telephone.  "I'll call up the office and
order 'em withdrawn."

"It's too late," said she.

Just then the telephone bell rang, and Hastings was soon hearing
confirmation of the news his daughter had brought him.  She could not
bear watching his face as he listened.  She turned her back, stood
gazing out at the window.  Her father, beside himself, was shrieking
into the telephone curses, denunciations, impossible orders.  The one
emergency against which he had not provided was the union's ending the
strike.  When you have struck the line of battle of a general, however
able and self-controlled, in the one spot where he has not arranged a
defense, you have thrown him--and his army--into a panic.  Some of the
greatest tactitians in history have given way in those circumstances;
so, Martin Hastings' utter loss of self-control and of control of the
situation only proves that he had his share of human nature.  He had
provided against the unexpected; he had not provided against the
impossible.

Jane let her father rave on into the telephone until his voice grew
hoarse and squeaky.  Then she turned and said:  "Now, father--what's
the use of making yourself sick?  You can't do any good--can you?"  She
laid one hand on his arm, with the other hand caressed his head.  "Hang
up the receiver and think of your health."

"I don't care to live, with such goings-on," declared he.  But he hung
up the receiver and sank back in his chair, exhausted.

"Come out on the porch," she went on, tugging gently at him. "The air's
stuffy in here."

He rose obediently.  She led him to the veranda and seated him
comfortably, with a cushion in his back at the exact spot at which it
was most comfortable.  She patted his shrunken cheeks, stood off and
looked at him.

"Where's your sense of humor?" she cried.  "You used to be able to
laugh when things went against you.  You're getting to be as solemn and
to take yourself as seriously as Davy Hull."

The old man made a not unsuccessful attempt to smile.  "That there
Victor Dorn!" said he.  "He'll be the death of me, yet."

"What has he done now?" said Jane, innocently.

Hastings rubbed his big bald forehead with his scrawny hand. "He's
tryin' to run this town--to run it to the devil," replied he, by way of
evasion.

"Something's got to be done about him--eh?" observed she, in a fine
imitation of a business-like voice.

"Something WILL be done," retorted he.

Jane winced--hid her distress--returned to the course she had mapped
out for herself.  "I hope it won't be something stupid," said she.
Then she seated herself and went on.  "Father--did you ever stop to
wonder whether it is Victor Dorn or the changed times?"

The old man looked up abruptly and sharply--the expression of a shrewd
man when he catches a hint of a new idea that sounds as if it might
have something in it.

"You blame Victor Dorn," she went on to explain.  "But if there were no
Victor Dorn, wouldn't you be having just the same trouble?  Aren't men
of affairs having them everywhere--in Europe as well as on this
side--nowadays?"

The old man rubbed his brow--his nose--his chin--pulled at the tufts of
hair in his ears--fumbled with his cuffs.  All of these gestures
indicated interest and attention.

"Isn't the real truth not Victor Dorn or Victor Dorns but a changed and
changing world?" pursued the girl.  "And if that's so, haven't you
either got to adopt new methods or fall back? That's the way it looks
to me--and we women have got intuitions if we haven't got sense."

"_I_ never said women hadn't got sense," replied the old man. "I've
sometimes said MEN ain't got no sense, but not women.  Not to go no
further, the women make the men work for 'em--don't they?  THAT'S a
pretty good quality of sense, _I_ guess."

But she knew he was busily thinking all the time about what she had
said.  So she did not hesitate to go on:  "Instead of helping Victor
Dorn by giving him things to talk about, it seems to me I'd USE him,
father."

"Can't do anything with him.  He's crazy," declared Hastings.

"I don't believe it," replied Jane.  "I don't believe he's crazy.  And
I don't believe you can't manage him.  A man like that--a man as clever
as he is--doesn't belong with a lot of ignorant tenement-house people.
He's out of place.  And when anything or anybody is out of place, they
can be put in their right place.  Isn't that sense?"

The old man shook his head--not in negation, but in uncertainty.

"These men are always edging you on against Victor Dorn--what's the
matter with them?" pursued Jane.  "_I_ saw, when Davy Hull talked about
him.  They're envious and jealous of him, father. They're afraid he'll
distance them.  And they don't want you to realize what a useful man he
could be--how he could help you if you helped him--made friends with
him--roused the right kind of ambition in him."

"When a man's ambitious," observed Hastings, out of the fullness of his
own personal experience, "it means he's got something inside him,
teasing and nagging  at him--something that won't let him rest, but
keeps pushing and pulling--and he's got to keep fighting, trying to
satisfy it--and he can't wait to pick his ground or his weapons."

"And Victor Dorn," said Jane, to make it clearer to her father by
putting his implied thought into words, "Victor Dorn is doing the best
he can--fighting on the only ground that offers and with the only
weapons he can lay hands on."

The old man nodded.  "I never have blamed him--not really," declared
he.  "A practical man--a man that's been through things--he understands
how these things are," in the tone of a philosopher.  "Yes, I reckon
Victor's doing the best he can--getting up by the only ladder he's got
a chance at."

"The way to get him off that ladder is to give him another," said Jane.

A long silence, the girl letting her father thresh the matter out in
his slow, thorough way.  Finally her young impatience conquered her
restraint.  "Well--what do you think, popsy?" inquired she.

"That I've got about as smart a gel as there is in Remsen City,"
replied he.

"Don't lay it on too thick," laughed she.

He understood why she was laughing, though he did not show it. He knew
what his much-traveled daughter thought of Remsen City, but he held to
his own provincial opinion, nevertheless.  Nor, perhaps, was he so far
wrong as she believed.  A cross section of human society, taken almost
anywhere, will reveal about the same quantity of brain, and the quality
of the mill is the thing, not of the material it may happen to be
grinding.

She understood that his remark was his way of letting her know that he
had taken her suggestion under advisement.  This meant that she had
said enough.  And Jane Hastings had made herself an adept in the art of
handling her father--an accomplishment she could by no means have
achieved had she not loved him; it is only when a woman deeply and
strongly loves a man that she can learn to influence him, for only love
can put the necessary sensitiveness into the nerves with which moods
and prejudices and whims and such subtle uncertainties can be felt out.

The next day but one, coming out on the front veranda a few minutes
before lunch time she was startled rather than surprised to see Victor
Dorn seated on a wicker sofa, hat off and gaze wandering delightedly
over the extensive view of the beautiful farming country round Remsen
City.  She paused in the doorway to take advantage of the chance to
look at him when he was off his guard.  Certainly that profile view of
the young man was impressive.  It is only in the profile that we get a
chance to measure the will or propelling force behind a character.  In
each of the two main curves of Dorn's head--that from the top of the
brow downward over the nose, the lips, the chin and under, and that
from the back of the head round under the ear and forward along the
lower jaw--in each of these curves Dorn excelled.

She was about to draw back and make a formal entry, when he said,
without looking toward her:

"Well--don't you think it would be safe to draw near?"

The tone was so easy and natural and so sympathetic--the tone of Selma
Gordon--the tone of all natural persons not disturbed about themselves
or about others--that Jane felt no embarrassment whatever.  "I've heard
you were very clever," said she, advancing.  "So, I wanted to have the
advantage of knowing you a little better at the outset than you would
know me."

"But Selma Gordon has told me all about you," said he--he had risen as
she advanced and was shaking hands with her as if they were old
friends.  "Besides, I saw you the other day--in spite of your effort to
prevent yourself from being seen."

"What do you mean?" she asked, completely mystified.

"I mean your clothes," explained he.  "They were unusual for this part
of the world.  And when anyone wears unusual clothes, they act as a
disguise.  Everyone neglects the person to center on the clothes."

"I wore them to be comfortable," protested Jane, wondering why she was
not angry at this young man whose manner ought to be regarded as
presuming and whose speech ought to be rebuked as impertinent.

"Altogether?" said Dorn, his intensely blue eyes dancing.

In spite of herself she smiled.  "No--not altogether," she admitted.

"Well, it may please you to learn that you scored tremendously as far
as one person is concerned.  My small nephew talks of you all the
time--the 'lady in the lovely pants.'"

Jane colored deeply and angrily.  She bent upon Victor a glance that
ought to have put him in his place--well down in his place.

But he continued to look at her with unchanged, laughing, friendly blue
eyes, and went on:  "By the way, his mother asked me to apologize for
HIS extraordinary appearance.  I suppose neither of you would recognize
the other in any dress but the one each had on that day.  He doesn't
always dress that way.  His mother has been ill.  He wore out his
play-clothes.  If you've had experience of children you'll know how
suddenly they demolish clothes.  She wasn't well enough to do any
tailoring, so there was nothing to do but send Leonard forth in his big
brother's unchanged cast-offs."

Jane's anger had quite passed away before Dorn finished this simple,
ingenuous recital of poverty unashamed, this somehow fine laying open
of the inmost family secrets.  "What a splendid person your sister must
be!" exclaimed she.

She more than liked the look that now came into his face.  He said:
"Indeed she is!--more so than anyone except us of the family can
realize.  Mother's getting old and almost helpless. My brother-in-law
was paralyzed by an accident at the rolling mill where he worked.  My
sister takes care of both of them--and her two boys--and of me--keeps
the house in band-box order, manages a big garden that gives us most of
what we eat--and has time to listen to the woes of all the neighbors
and to give them the best advice I ever heard."

"How CAN she?" cried Jane.  "Why, the day isn't long enough."

Dorn laughed.  "You'll never realize how much time there is in a day,
Miss Jane Hastings, until you try to make use of it all. It's very
interesting--how much there is in a minute and in a dollar if you're
intelligent about them."

Jane looked at him in undisguised wonder and admiration.  "You don't
know what a pleasure it is," she said, "to meet anyone whose sentences
you couldn't finish for him before he's a quarter the way through them."

Victor threw back his head and laughed--a boyish outburst that would
have seemed boorish in another, but came as naturally from him as song
from a bird.  "You mean Davy Hull," said he.

Jane felt herself coloring even more.  "I didn't mean him especially,"
replied she.  "But he's a good example."

"The best I know," declared Victor.  "You see, the trouble with Davy is
that he is one kind of a person, wants to be another kind, thinks he
ought to be a third kind, and believes he fools people into thinking he
is still a fourth kind."

Jane reflected on this, smiled understandingly.  "That sounds like a
description of ME," said she.

"Probably," said Victor.  "It's a very usual type in the second
generation in your class."

"My class?" said Jane, somewhat affectedly.  "What do you mean?"

"The upper class," explained Victor.

Jane felt that this was an opportunity for a fine exhibition of her
democracy.  "I don't like that," said she.  "I'm a good American, and I
don't believe in classes.  I don't feel--at least I try not to
feel--any sense of inequality between myself and those--those
less--less--fortunately off.  I'm not expressing myself well, but you
know what I mean."

"Yes, I know what you mean," rejoined Victor.  "But that wasn't what I
meant, at all.  You are talking about social classes in the narrow
sense.  That sort of thing isn't important. One associates with the
kind of people that pleases one--and one has a perfect right to do so.
If I choose to have my leisure time with people who dress a certain
way, or with those who have more than a certain amount of money, or
more than a certain number of servants or what not--why, that's my own
lookout."

"I'm SO glad to hear you say that," cried Jane.  "That's SO sensible."

"Snobbishness may be amusing," continued Dorn, "or it may be
repulsive--or pitiful.  But it isn't either interesting or important.
The classes I had in mind were the economic classes--upper, middle,
lower.  The upper class includes all those who live without
work--aristocrats, gamblers, thieves, preachers, women living off men
in or out of marriage, grown children living off their parents or off
inheritances.  All the idlers."

Jane looked almost as uncomfortable as she felt.  She had long taken a
secret delight in being regarded and spoken of as an "upper class"
person.  Henceforth this delight would be at least alloyed.

"The middle class," pursued Victor, "is those who are in part parasites
and in part workers.  The lower class is those who live by what they
earn only.  For example, you are upper class, your father is middle
class and I am lower class."

"Thank you," said Jane demurely, "for an interesting lesson in
political economy."

"You invited it," laughed Victor.  "And I guess it wasn't much more
tiresome to you than talk about the weather would have been. The
weather's probably about the only other subject you and I have in
common."

"That's rude," said Jane.

"Not as I meant it," said he.  "I wasn't exalting my subjects or
sneering at yours.  It's obvious that you and I lead wholly different
lives."

"I'd much rather lead your life than my own," said Jane. "But--you are
impatient to see father.  You came to see him?"

"He telephoned asking me to come to dinner--that is, lunch.  I believe
it's called lunch when it's second in this sort of house."

"Father calls it dinner, and I call it lunch, and the servants call it
IT.  They simply say, 'It's ready.'"

Jane went in search of her father, found him asleep in his chair in the
little office, one of his dirty little account books clasped in his
long, thin fingers with their rheumatic side curve.  The maid had seen
him there and had held back dinner until he should awaken.  Perhaps
Jane's entrance roused him; or, perhaps it was the odor of the sachet
powder wherewith her garments were liberally scented, for he had a
singularly delicate sense of smell.  He lifted his head and, after the
manner of aged and confirmed cat-nappers, was instantly wide awake.

"Why didn't you tell me Victor Dorn was coming for dinner?" said she.

"Oh--he's here, is he?" said Hastings, chuckling.  "You see I took your
advice.  Tell Lizzie to lay an extra plate."

Hastings regarded this invitation as evidence of his breadth of mind,
his freedom from prejudice, his disposition to do the generous and the
helpful thing.  In fact, it was evidence of little more than his
dominant and most valuable trait--his shrewdness.  After one careful
glance over the ruins of his plan, he appreciated that Victor Dorn was
at last a force to be reckoned with.  He had been growing,
growing--somewhat above the surface, a great deal more beneath the
surface.  His astonishing victory demonstrated his power over Remsen
City labor--in a single afternoon he had persuaded the street car union
to give up without hesitation a strike it had been planning--at least,
it thought it had been doing the planning--for months.  The Remsen City
plutocracy was by no means dependent upon the city government of Remsen
City.  It had the county courts--the district courts--the State courts
even, except where favoring the plutocracy would be too obviously
outrageous for judges who still considered themselves men of honest and
just mind to decide that way.  The plutocracy, further, controlled all
the legislative and executive machinery.  To dislodge it from these
fortresses would mean a campaign of years upon years, conducted by men
of the highest ability, and enlisting a majority of the voters of the
State.  Still, possession of the Remsen City government was a most
valuable asset.  A hostile government could "upset business," could
"hamper the profitable investment of capital," in other words could
establish justice to a highly uncomfortable degree.  This victory of
Dorn's made it clear to Hastings that at last Dorn was about to unite
the labor vote under his banner--which meant that he was about to
conquer the city government.  It was high time to stop him and, if
possible, to give his talents better employment.

However, Hastings, after the familiar human fashion, honestly thought
he was showing generosity, was going out of his way to "give a likely
young fellow a chance."  When he came out on the veranda he stretched
forth a graciously friendly hand and, looking shrewdly into Victor's
boyishly candid eyes, said:

"Glad to see you, young man.  I want to thank you for ending that
strike.  I was born a working man, and I've been one all my life and,
when I can't work any more, I want to quit the earth. So, being a
working man, I hate to see working men make fools of themselves."

Jane was watching the young man anxiously.  She instinctively knew that
this speech must be rousing his passion for plain and direct speaking.
Before he had time to answer she said: "Dinner's waiting.  Let's go in."

And on the way she made an opportunity to say to him in an undertone:
"I do hope you'll be careful not to say anything that'll upset father.
I have to warn every one who comes here. His digestion's bad, and the
least thing makes him ill, and--" she smiled charmingly at him--"I HATE
nursing.  It's too much like work to suit an upper-class person."

There was no resisting such an appeal as that.  Victor sat silent and
ate, and let the old man talk on and on.  Jane saw that it was a severe
trial to him to seem to be assenting to her father's views.  Whenever
he showed signs of casting off his restraint, she gave him a pleading
glance.  And the old man, so weazened, so bent and shaky, with his bowl
of crackers and milk, was--or seemed to be--proof that the girl was
asking of him only what was humane.  Jane relieved the situation by
talking volubly about herself--her college experiences, what she had
seen and done in Europe.

After dinner Hastings said:

"I'll drive you back to town, young man.  I'm going in to work, as
usual.  I never took a vacation in my life.  Can you beat that record?"

"Oh, I knock off every once in a while for a month or so," said Dorn.

"The young fellows growing up nowadays ain't equal to us of the old
stock," said Martin.  "They can't stand the strain.  Well, if you're
ready, we'll pull out."

"Mr. Dorn's going to stop a while with me, father," interposed Jane
with a significant glance at Victor.  "I want to show him the grounds
and the views."

"All right--all right," said her father.  He never liked company in his
drives; company interfered with his thinking out what he was going to
do at the office.  "I'm mighty glad to know you, young man.  I hope
we'll know each other better.  I think you'll find out that for a devil
I'm not half bad--eh?"

Victor bowed, murmured something inarticulate, shook his host's hand,
and when the ceremony of parting was over drew a stealthy breath of
relief--which Jane observed.  She excused herself to accompany her
father to his trap.  As he was climbing in she said:

"Didn't you rather like him, father?"

Old Hastings gathered the reins in his lean, distorted hands. "So so,"
said he.

"He's got brains, hasn't he?"

"Yes; he's smart; mighty smart."  The old man's face relaxed in a
shrewd grin.  "Too damn smart.  Giddap, Bet."

And he was gone.  Jane stood looking after the ancient phaeton with an
expression half of amusement, half of discomfiture.  "I might have
known," reflected she, "that popsy would see through it all."

When she reappeared in the front doorway Victor Dorn was at the edge of
the veranda, ready to depart.  As soon as he saw her he said gravely:
"I must be off, Miss Hastings.  Thank you for the very interesting
dinner."  He extended his hand.  "Good day."

She put her hands behind her back, and stood smiling gently at him.
"You mustn't go--not just yet.  I'm about to show you the trees and the
grass, the bees, the chickens and the cows.  Also, I've something
important to say to you."

He shook his head.  "I'm sorry, but I must go."

She stiffened slightly; her smile changed from friendly to cold.
"Oh--pardon me," she said.  "Good-by."

He bowed, and was on the walk, and running rapidly toward the entrance
gates.

"Mr. Dorn!" she called.

He turned.

She was afraid to risk asking him to come back for a moment.  He might
refuse.  Standing there, looking so resolute, so completely master of
himself, so devoid of all suggestion of need for any one or anything,
he seemed just the man to turn on his heel and depart.  She descended
to the walk and went to him.  She said:

"Why are you acting so peculiarly?  Why did you come?"

"Because I understood that your father wished to propose some changes
in the way of better hours and better wages for the men," replied he.
"I find that the purpose was--not that."

"What was it?"

"I do not care to go into that."

He was about to go on--on out of her life forever, she felt. "Wait,"
she cried.  "The men will get better hours and wages. You don't
understand father's ways.  He was really discussing that very thing--in
his own mind.  You'll see.  He has a great admiration for you.  You can
do a lot with him.  You owe it to the men to make use of his liking."

He looked at her in silence for a moment.  Then he said:  "I'll have to
be at least partly frank with you.  In all his life no one has ever
gotten anything out of your father.  He uses men. They do not use him."

"Believe me, that is unjust," cried Jane.  "I'll tell you another thing
that was on his mind.  He wants to--to make reparation for--that
accident to your father.  He wants to pay your mother and you the money
the road didn't pay you when it ought."

Dorn's candid face showed how much he was impressed.  This beautiful,
earnest girl, sweet and frank, seemed herself to be another view of
Martin Hastings' character--one more in accord with her strong belief
in the essential goodness of human nature.

Said he:  "Your father owes us nothing.  As for the road--its debt
never existed legally--only morally.  And it has been outlawed long
ago--for there's a moral statute of limitations, too.  The best thing
that ever happened to us was our not getting that money.  It put us on
our mettle.  It might have crushed us. It happened to be just the thing
that was needed to make us."

Jane marveled at this view of his family, at the verge of poverty, as
successful.  But she could not doubt his sincerity. Said she sadly,
"But it's not to the credit of the road--or of father.  He must
pay--and he knows he must."

"We can't accept," said Dorn--a finality.

"But you could use it to build up the paper," urged Jane, to detain him.

"The paper was started without money.  It lives without money--and it
will go on living without money, or it ought to die."

"I don't understand," said Jane.  "But I want to understand. I want to
help.  Won't you let me?"

He shook his head laughingly.  "Help what?" inquired he. "Help raise
the sun?  It doesn't need help."

Jane began to see.  "I mean, I want to be helped," she cried.

"Oh, that's another matter," said he.  "And very simple."

"Will YOU help me?"

"I can't.  No one can.  You've got to help yourself.  Each one of us is
working for himself--working not to be rich or to be famous or to be
envied, but to be free."

"Working for himself--that sounds selfish, doesn't it?"

"If you are wise, Jane Hastings," said Dorn, "you will
distrust--disbelieve in--anything that is not selfish."

Jane reflected.  "Yes--I see," she cried.  "I never thought of that!"

"A friend of mine, Wentworth," Victor went on, "has put it wonderfully
clearly.  He said, 'Some day we shall realize that no man can be free
until all men are free.'"

"You HAVE helped me--in spite of your fierce refusal," laughed Jane.
"You are very impatient to go, aren't you?  Well, since you won't stay
I'll walk with you--as far as the end of the shade."

She was slightly uneasy lest her overtures should be misunderstood.  By
the time they reached the first long, sunny stretch of the road down to
town she was so afraid that those overtures would not be
"misunderstood" that she marched on beside him in the hot sun.  She did
not leave him until they reached the corner of Pike avenue--and then it
was he that left her, for she could cudgel out no excuse for going
further in his direction.  The only hold she had got upon him for a
future attempt was slight indeed--he had vaguely agreed to lend her
some books.

People who have nothing to do get rid of a great deal of time in trying
to make impressions and in speculating as to what impressions they have
made.  Jane--hastening toward Martha's to get out of the sun which
could not but injure a complexion so delicately fine as hers--gave
herself up to this form of occupation.  What did he think of her?  Did
he really have as little sense of her physical charm as he seemed?  No
woman could hope to be attractive to every man.  Still--this man surely
must be at least not altogether insensible.  "If he sends me those
books to-day--or tomorrow--or even next day," thought Jane, "it will be
a pretty sure sign that he was impressed--whether he knows it or not."

She had now definitely passed beyond the stage where she wondered at
herself--and reproached herself--for wishing to win a man of such
common origin and surroundings.  She could not doubt Victor Dorn's
superiority.  Such a man as that didn't need birth or wealth or even
fame.  He simply WAS the man worth while--worth any woman's while.  How
could Selma be associated so intimately with him without trying to get
him in love with her?  Perhaps she had tried and had given up?
No--Selma was as strange in her way as he was in his way.  What a
strange--original--INDIVIDUAL pair they were!

"But," concluded Jane, "he belongs with US.  I must take him away from
all that.  It will be interesting to do it--so interesting that I'll be
sorry when it's done, and I'll be looking about for something else to
do."

She was not without hope that the books would come that same evening.
But they did not.  The next day passed, and the next, and still no
books.  Apparently he had meant nothing by his remark, "I've some books
you'd be interested to read."  Was his silence indifference, or was it
shyness?  Probably she could only faintly appreciate the effect her
position, her surroundings produced in this man whose physical
surroundings had always been as poor as her mental surroundings--those
created by that marvelous mind of his--had been splendid.

She tried to draw out her father on the subject of the young man, with
a view to getting a hint as to whether he purposed doing anything
further.  But old Hastings would not talk about it; he was still
debating, was looking at the matter from a standpoint where his
daughter's purely theoretical acumen could not help him to a decision.
Jane rather feared that where her father was evidently so doubtful he
would follow his invariable rule in doubtful cases.

On the fourth day, being still unable to think of anything but her
project for showing her prowess by conquering this man with no time for
women, she donned a severely plain walking costume and went to his
office.

At the threshold of the "Sanctum" she stopped short.  Selma, pencil
poised over her block of copy paper and every indication of impatience,
albeit polite impatience, in her fascinating Cossack face, was talking
to--or, rather, listening to--David Hull.  Like not a few young
men--and young women--brought up in circumstances that surround them
with people deferential for the sake of what there is, or may possibly
be, in it--Davy Hull had the habit of assuming that all the world was
as fond of listening to him as he was of listening to himself.  So it
did not often occur to him to observe his audience for signs of a
willingness to end the conversation.

Selma, turning a little further in her nervousness, saw Jane and sprang
up with a radiant smile of welcome.

"I'm SO glad!" she cried, rushing toward her and kissing her. "I've
thought about you often, and wished I could find time to come to see
you."

Jane was suddenly as delighted as Selma.  For Selma's burst of
friendliness, so genuine, so unaffected, in this life of blackness and
cold always had the effect of sun suddenly making summer out of a chill
autumnal day.  Nor, curiously enough, was her delight lessened by Davy
Hull's blundering betrayal of himself.  His color, his eccentric
twitchings of the lips and the hands would have let a far less astute
young woman than Jane Hastings into the secret of the reason for his
presence in that office when he had said he couldn't "afford" to go.
So guilty did he feel that he stammered out:

"I dropped in to see Dorn."

"You wished to see Victor?" exclaimed the guileless Selma. "Why didn't
you say so?  I'd have told you at once that he was in Indianapolis and
wouldn't be back for two or three days."

Jane straightway felt still better.  The disgusting mystery of the
books that did not come was now cleared up.  Secure in the certainty of
Selma's indifference to Davy she proceeded to punish him.  "What a
stupid you are, Davy!" she cried mockingly. "The instant I saw your
face I knew you were here to flirt with Miss Gordon."

"Oh, no, Miss Hastings," protested Selma with quaint intensity of
seriousness, "I assure you he was not flirting.  He was telling me
about the reform movement he and his friends are organizing."

"That is his way of flirting," said Jane.  "Every animal has its own
way--and an elephant's way is different from a mosquito's."

Selma was eyeing Hull dubiously.  It was bad enough for him to have
taken her time in a well-meaning attempt to enlighten her as to a new
phase of local politics; to take her time, to waste it, in
flirting--that was too exasperating!

"Miss Hastings has a sense of humor that runs riot at times," said Hull.

"You can't save yourself, Davy," mocked Jane.  "Come along. Miss Gordon
has no time for either of us."

"I do want YOU to stay," she said to Jane.  "But, unfortunately, with
Victor away----"  She looked disconsolately at the half-finished page
of copy.

"I came only to snatch Davy away," said Jane.

"Next thing we know, he'll be one of Mr. Dorn's lieutenants."

Thus Jane escaped without having to betray why she had come.  In the
street she kept up her raillery.  "And a WORKING girl, Davy! What would
our friends say!  And you who are always boasting of your
fastidiousness!  Flirting with a girl who--I've seen her three times,
and each time she has had on exactly the same plain, cheap little
dress."

There was a nastiness, a vulgarity in this that was as unworthy of Jane
as are all the unlovely emotions of us who are always sweet and refined
when we are our true selves--but have a bad habit of only too often not
being what we flatter ourselves is our true selves.  Jane was growing
angry as she, away from Selma, resumed her normal place in the world
and her normal point of view.  Davy Hull belonged to her; he had no
right to be hanging about another, anyway--especially an attractive
woman.  Her anger was not lessened by Davy's retort.  Said he:

"Her dress may have been the same.  But her face wasn't--and her mind
wasn't.  Those things are more difficult to change than a dress."

She was so angry that she did not take warning from this reminder that
Davy was by no means merely a tedious retailer of stale commonplaces.
She said with fine irony--and with no show of anger:  "It is always a
shock to a lady to realize how coarse men are--how they don't
discriminate."

Davy laughed.  "Women get their rank from men," said he coolly.

"In themselves they have none.  That's the philosophy of the
peculiarity you've noted."

This truth, so galling to a lady, silenced Jane, made her bite her lips
with rage.  "I beg your pardon," she finally said. "I didn't realize
that you were in love with Selma."

"Yes, I am in love with her," was Davy's astounding reply. "She's the
noblest and simplest creature I've ever met."

"You don't mean you want to marry her!" exclaimed Jane, so amazed that
she for the moment lost sight of her own personal interest in this
affair.

Davy looked at her sadly, and a little contemptuously.

"What a poor opinion at bottom you women--your sort of women--have of
woman," said he.

"What a poor opinion of men you mean," retorted she.  "After a little
experience of them a girl--even a girl--learns that they are incapable
of any emotion that isn't gross."

"Don't be so ladylike, Jane," said Hull.

Miss Hastings was recovering control of herself.  She took a new tack.
"You haven't asked her yet?"

"Hardly.  This is the second time I've seen her.  I suspected that she
was the woman for me the moment I saw her.  To-day I confirmed my idea.
She is all that I thought--and more.  And, Jane, I know that you
appreciate her, too."

Jane now saw that Davy was being thus abruptly and speedily confiding
because he had decided it was the best way out of his entanglement with
her.  Behind his coolness she could see an uneasy watchfulness--the
fear that she might try to hold him.  Up boiled her rage--the higher
because she knew that if there were any possible way of holding Davy,
she would take it--not because she wished to, or would, marry him, but
because she had put her mark upon him.  But this new rage was of the
kind a clever woman has small difficulty in dissembling.

"Indeed I do appreciate her, Davy," said she sweetly.  "And I hope you
will be happy with her."

"You think I can get her?" said he, fatuously eager.  "You think she
likes me?  I've been rather hoping that because it seized me so
suddenly and so powerfully it must have seized her, too.  I think often
things occur that way."

"In novels," said Jane, pleasantly judicial.  "But in real life about
the hardest thing to do is for a man to make a woman care for
him--really care for him."

"Well, no matter how hard I have to try----"

"Of course," pursued Miss Hastings, ignoring his interruption, "when a
man who has wealth and position asks a woman who hasn't to marry him,
she usually accepts--unless he happens to be downright repulsive, or
she happens to be deeply and hopefully in love with another man."

Davy winced satisfactorily.  "Do you suspect," he presently asked,
"that she's in love with Victor Dorn?"

"Perhaps," said Jane reflectively.  "Probably.  But I'd not feel
discouraged by that if I were you."

"Dorn's a rather attractive chap in some ways."

Davy's manner was so superior that Jane almost laughed in his face.
What fools men were.  If Victor Dorn had position, weren't surrounded
by his unquestionably, hopelessly common family, weren't deliberately
keeping himself common--was there a woman in the world who wouldn't
choose him without a second thought being necessary, in preference to a
Davy Hull?  How few men there were who could reasonably hope to hold
their women against all comers.

Victor Dorn might possibly be of those few.  But Davy Hull--the idea
was ridiculous.  All his advantages--height, looks, money,
position--were excellent qualities in a show piece; but they weren't
the qualities that make a woman want to live her life with a man, that
make her hope he will be able to give her the emotions woman-nature
craves beyond anything.

"He is very attractive," said Jane, "and I've small doubt that Selma
Gordon is infatuated with him.  But--I shouldn't let that worry me if I
were you."  She paused to enjoy his anxiety, then proceeded:  "She is a
level-headed girl.  The girls of the working class--the intelligent
ones--have had the silly sentimentalities knocked out of them by
experience.  So, when you ask her to marry you, she will accept."

"What a low opinion you have of her!" exclaimed Davy.  "What a low view
you take of life!"--most inconsistent of him, since he was himself more
than half convinced that Jane's observations were not far from the
truth.

"Women are sensible," said Jane tranquilly.  "They appreciate that
they've got to get a man to support them.  Don't forget, my dear Davy,
that marriage is a woman's career."

"You lived abroad too long," said Hull bitterly.

"I've lived at home and abroad long enough and intelligently enough not
to think stupid hypocrisies, even if I do sometimes imitate other
people and SAY them."

"I am sure that Selma Gordon would no more think of marrying me for any
other reason but love--would no more think of it than--than YOU would!"

"No more," was Jane's unruffled reply.  "But just as much.  I didn't
absolutely refuse you, when you asked me the other day, partly because
I saw no other way of stopping your tiresome talk--and your
unattractive way of trying to lay hands on me.  I DETEST being handled."

Davy was looking so uncomfortable that he attracted the attention of
the people they were passing in wide, shady Lincoln Avenue.

"But my principal reason," continued Jane, mercilessly amiable and
candid, "was that I didn't know but that you might prove to be about
the best I could get, as a means to realizing my ambition."  She looked
laughingly at the unhappy young man. "You didn't think I was in love
with you, did you, Davy dear?" Then, while the confusion following this
blow was at its height, she added:  "You'll remember one of your chief
arguments for my accepting you was ambition.  You didn't think it low
then--did you?"

Hull was one of the dry-skinned people.  But if he had been sweating
profusely he would have looked and would have been less wretched than
burning up in the smothered heat of his misery.

They were nearing Martha's gates.  Jane said:  "Yes, Davy, you've got a
good chance.  And as soon as she gets used to our way of living, she'll
make you a good wife."  She laughed gayly.

"She'll not be quite so pretty when she settles down and takes on
flesh.  I wonder how she'll look in fine clothes and jewels."

She measured Hull's stature with a critical eye.  "She's only about
half as tall as you.  How funny you'll look together!" With sudden
soberness and sweetness, "But, seriously, David, I'm proud of your
courage in taking a girl for herself regardless of her surroundings.
So few men would be willing to face the ridicule and the criticism, and
all the social difficulties." She nodded encouragingly.  "Go in and
win!  You can count on my friendship--for I'm in love with her myself."

She left him standing dazedly, looking up and down the street as if it
were some strange and pine-beset highway in a foreign land.

After taking a few steps she returned to the gates and called him:  "I
forgot to ask do you want me to regard what you've told me as
confidential?  I was thinking of telling Martha and Hugo, and it
occurred to me that you might not like it."

"Please don't say anything about it," said he with panicky eagerness.
"You see--nothing's settled yet."

"Oh, she'll accept you."

"But I haven't even asked her," pleaded Hull.

"Oh--all right--as you please."

When she was safely within doors she dropped to a chair and burst out
laughing.  It was part of Jane's passion for the sense of triumph over
the male sex to felt that she had made a "perfect jumping jack of a
fool" of David Hull.  "And I rather think," said she to herself, "that
he'll soon be back where he belongs."  This with a glance at the tall
heels of the slippers on the good-looking feet she was thrusting out
for her own inspection.  "How absurd for him to imagine he could do
anything unconventional.  Is there any coward anywhere so cowardly as
an American conventional man?  No wonder I hate to think of marrying
one of them.  But--I suppose I'll have to do it some day.  What's a
woman to do?  She's GOT to marry."

So pleased with herself was she that she behaved with unusual
forbearance toward Martha whose conduct of late had been most trying.
Not Martha's sometimes peevish, sometimes plaintive criticisms of her;
these she did not mind.  But Martha's way of ordering her own life.
Jane, moving about in the world with a good mind eager to improve, had
got a horror of a woman's going to pieces--and that was what Martha was
doing.

"I'm losing my looks rapidly," was her constant complaint.  As she had
just passed thirty there was, in Jane's opinion, not the smallest
excuse for this.  The remedy, the preventive, was obvious--diet and
exercise.  But Martha, being lazy and self-indulgent and not
imaginative enough to foresee to what a pass a few years more of
lounging and stuffing would bring her, regarded exercise as unladylike
and dieting as unhealthful.  She would not weaken her system by taking
less than was demanded by "nature's infallible guide, the healthy
appetite."  She would not give up the venerable and aristocratic
tradition that a lady should ever be reposeful.

"Another year or so," warned Jane, "and you'll be as steatopygous as
the bride of a Hottentot chief."

"What does steat--that word mean?" said Martha suspiciously.

"Look in the dictionary," said Jane.  "Its synonyms aren't used by
refined people."

"I knew it was something insulting," said Martha with an injured sniff.

The only concessions Martha would make to the latter-day craze of women
for youthfulness were buying a foolish chin-strap of a beauty quack and
consulting him as to whether, if her hair continued to gray, she would
better take to peroxide or to henna.

Jane had come down that day with a severe lecture on fat and wrinkles
laid out in her mind for energetic delivery to the fast-seeding Martha.
She put off the lecture and allowed the time to be used by Martha in
telling Jane what were her (Jane's) strongest and less strong--not
weaker but less strong, points of physical charm.

It was cool and beautiful in the shade of the big gardens behind the
old Galland house.  Jane, listening to Martha's honest and just
compliments and to the faint murmurs of the city's dusty, sweaty toil,
had a delicious sense of the superiority of her lot--a feeling that
somehow there must be something in the theory of rightfully superior
and inferior classes--that in taking what she had not earned she was
not robbing those who had earned it, as her reason so often asserted,
but was being supported by the toil of others for high purposes of
aesthetic beauty.  Anyhow, why heat one's self wrestling with these
problems?

When she was sure that Victor Dorn must have returned she called him on
the telephone.  "Can't you come out to see me to-night?" said she.
"I've something important--something YOU'LL think important--to consult
you about."  She felt a refusal forming at the other end of the wire
and hastened to add:  "You must know I'd not ask this if I weren't
certain you would be glad you came."

"Why not drop in here when you're down town?" suggested Victor.

She wondered why she did not hang up the receiver and forget him.

But she did not.  She murmured, "In due time I'll punish you for this,
sir," and said to him:  "There are reasons why it's impossible for me
to go there just now.  And you know I can't meet you in a saloon or on
a street corner."

"I'm not so sure of that," laughed he.  "Let me see.  I'm very busy.
But I could come for half an hour this afternoon."

She had planned an evening session, being well aware of the favorable
qualities of air and light after the matter-of-fact sun has withdrawn
his last rays.  But she promptly decided to accept what offered.  "At
three?"

"At four," replied he.

"You haven't forgotten those books?"

"Books?  Oh, yes--yes, I remember.  I'll bring them."

"Thank you so much," said she sweetly.  "Good-by."

And at four she was waiting for him on the front veranda in a house
dress that was--well, it was not quite the proper costume for such an
occasion, but no one else was to see, and he didn't know about that
sort of thing--and the gown gave her charms their best possible
exposure except evening dress, which was out of the question.  She had
not long to wait.  One of the clocks within hearing had struck and
another was just beginning to strike when she saw him coming toward the
house.  She furtively watched him, admiring his walk without quite
knowing why.  You may perhaps know the walk that was Victor's--a steady
forward advance of the whole body held firmly, almost rigidly--the walk
of a man leading another to the scaffold, or of a man being led there
in conscious innocence, or of a man ready to go wherever his purposes
may order--ready to go without any heroics or fuss of any kind, but
simply in the course of the day's business.  When a man walks like
that, he is worth observing--and it is well to think twice before
obstructing his way.

That steady, inevitable advance gave Jane Hastings an absurd feeling of
nervousness.  She had an impulse to fly, as from some oncoming danger.
Yet what was coming, in fact?  A clever young man of the working class,
dressed in garments of the kind his class dressed in on Sunday, and
plebeianly carrying a bundle under his arm.

"Our clock says you are three seconds late," cried she, laughing and
extending her hand in a friendly, equal way that would have immensely
flattered almost any man of her own class. "But another protests that
you are one second early."

"I'm one of those fools who waste their time and their nerves by being
punctual," said he.

He laid the books on the wicker sofa.  But instead of sitting Jane
said:  "We might be interrupted here.  Come to the west veranda."

There she had him in a leafy solitude--he facing her as she posed in
fascinating grace in a big chair.  He looked at her--not the look of a
man at a woman, but the look of a busy person at one who is about to
show cause for having asked for a portion of his valuable time.  She
laughed--and laughter was her best gesture. "I can never talk to you if
you pose like that," said she. "Honestly now, is your time so
pricelessly precious?"

He echoed her laugh and settled himself more at his ease.  "What did
you want of me?" he asked.

"I intend to try to get better hours and better wages for the street
car men," said she.  "To do it, I must know just what is right--what I
can hope to get.  General talk is foolish.  If I go at father I must
have definite proposals to make, with reasons for them.  I don't want
him to evade.  I would have gotten my information  elsewhere, but I
could think of no one but you who might not mislead me."

She had confidently expected that this carefully thought out scheme
would do the trick.  He would admire her, would be interested, would be
drawn into a position where she could enlist him as a constant adviser.
He moved toward the edge of his chair as if about to rise.  He said,
pleasantly enough but without a spark of enthusiasm:

"That's very nice of you, Miss Hastings.  But I can't advise
you--beyond saying that if I were you, I shouldn't meddle."

She--that is, her vanity--was cut to the quick.  "Oh!" said she with
irony, "I fancied you wished the laboring men to have a better sort of
life."

"Yes," said he.  "But I'm not in favor of running hysterically about
with a foolish little atomizer in the great stable.  You are talking
charity.  I am working for justice.  It will not really benefit the
working man for the company, at the urging of a sweet and lovely young
Lady Bountiful, to deign graciously to grant a little less slavery to
them.  In fact, a well fed, well cared for slave is worse off than one
who's badly treated--worse off because farther from his freedom.  The
only things that do our class any good, Miss Hastings, are the things
they COMPEL--compel by their increased intelligence and increased unity
and power.  They get what they deserve.  They won't deserve more until
they compel more.  Gifts won't help--not even gifts from--"  His
intensely blue eyes danced--"from such charming white hands so
beautifully manicured."

She rose with an angry toss of the head.  "I didn't ask you here to
annoy me with impertinences about my finger nails."

He rose, at his ease, good-humored, ready to go.  "Then you should have
worn gloves," said he carelessly, "for I've been able to think only of
your finger nails--and to wonder WHAT can be done with hands like that.
Thank you for a pleasant talk." He bowed and smiled.  "Good-by.
Oh--Miss Gordon sent you her love."

"What IS the matter, Mr. Dorn?" cried the girl desperately. "I want
your friendship--your respect.  CAN'T I get it?  Am I utterly hopeless
in your eyes?"

A curious kind of color rose in his cheeks.  His eyes regarded her with
a mysterious steadiness.  "You want neither my respect nor my
friendship," said he.  "You want to amuse yourself." He pointed at her
hands.  "Those nails betray you."  He shrugged his shoulders, laughed,
said as if to a child:  "You are a nice girl, Jane Hastings.  It's a
pity you weren't brought up to be of some use.  But you weren't--and
it's too late."

Her eyes flashed, her bosom heaved.  "WHY do I take these things from
you?  WHY do I invite them?"

"Because you inherit your father's magnificent persistence--and you've
set your heart on the whim of making a fool of me--and you hate to give
up."

"You wrong me--indeed you do," cried she.  "I want to learn--I want to
be of use in the world.  I want to have some kind of a real life."

"Really?" mocked he good-humoredly.

"Really," said she with all her power of sweet earnestness.

"Then--cut your nails and go to work.  And when you have become a
genuine laborer, you'll begin to try to improve not the condition of
others, but your own.  The way to help workers is to abolish the idlers
who hang like a millstone about their necks. You can help only by
abolishing the one idler under your control."

She stood nearer him, very near him.  She threw out her lovely arms in
a gesture of humility.  "I will do whatever you say," she said.

They looked each into the other's eyes.  The color fled from her face,
the blood poured into his--wave upon wave, until he was like a man who
has been set on fire by the furious heat of long years of equatorial
sun.  He muttered, wheeled about and strode away--in resolute and
relentless flight.  She dropped down where he had been sitting and hid
her face in her perfumed hands.

"I care for him," she moaned, "and he saw and he despises me! How COULD
I--how COULD I!"

Nevertheless, within a quarter of an hour she was in her dressing room,
standing at the table, eyes carefully avoiding her mirrored eyes--as
she cut her finger nails.



IV

Jane was mistaken in her guess at the cause of Victor Dorn's agitation
and abrupt flight.  If he had any sense whatever of the secret she had
betrayed to him and to herself at the same instant it was wholly
unconscious.  He had become panic-stricken and had fled because he,
faced with her exuberance and tempting wealth of physical charm, had
become suddenly conscious of her and of himself in a way as new to him
as if he had been fresh from a monkery where no woman had ever been
seen.  Thus far the world had been peopled for him with human beings
without any reference to sex.  The phenomena of sex had not interested
him because his mind had been entirely taken up with the other aspects
of life; and he had not yet reached the stage of development where a
thinker grasps the truth that all questions are at bottom questions of
the sex relation, and that, therefore, no question can be settled right
until the sex relations are settled right.

Jane Hastings was the first girl he had met in his whole life who was
in a position to awaken that side of his nature.  And when his brain
suddenly filled with a torrent of mad longings and of sensuous
appreciations of her laces and silk, of her perfume and smoothness and
roundness, of the ecstasy that would come from contact with those warm,
rosy lips--when Victor Dorn found himself all in a flash eager
impetuosity to seize this woman whom he did not approve of, whom he did
not even like, he felt bowed with shame.  He would not have believed
himself capable of such a thing.  He fled.

He fled, but she pursued.  And when he sat down in the garden behind
his mother's cottage, to work at a table where bees and butterflies had
been his only disturbers, there was this SHE before him--her soft,
shining gaze fascinating his gaze, her useless but lovely white hands
extended tantalizingly toward him.

As he continued to look at her, his disapproval and dislike melted.  "I
was brutally harsh to her," he thought repentantly.

"She was honestly trying to do the decent thing.  How was she to know?
And wasn't I as much wrong as right in advising her not to help the
men?"

Beyond question, it was theoretically best for the two opposing forces,
capital and labor, to fight their battle to its inevitable end without
interference, without truce, with quarter neither given nor taken on
either side.  But practically--wasn't there something to be said for
such humane proposals of that of Jane Hastings?  They would put off the
day of right conditions rightly and therefore permanently
founded--conditions in which master and slave or serf or wage-taker
would be no more; but, on the other hand, slaves with shorter hours of
toil and better surroundings could be enlightened  more easily.
Perhaps.  He was by no means sure; he could not but fear that anything
that tended to make the slave comfortable in his degradation must of
necessity weaken his aversion to degradation.  Just as the worst kings
were the best kings because they hastened the fall of monarchy, so the
worst capitalists, the most rapacious, the most rigid enforcers of the
economic laws of a capitalistic society were the best capitalists, were
helping to hasten the day when men would work for what they earned and
would earn what they worked for--when every man's pay envelope would
contain his wages, his full wages, and nothing but his wages.

Still, where judgment was uncertain, he certainly had been unjust to
that well meaning girl.  And was she really so worthless as he had on
first sight adjudged her?  There might be exceptions to the rule that a
parasite born and bred can have no other instructor or idea but those
of parasitism.  She was honest and earnest, was eager to learn the
truth.  She might be put to some use.  At any rate he had been unworthy
of his own ideals when he, assuming without question that she was the
usual capitalistic snob with the itch for gratifying vanity by
patronizing the "poor dear lower classes," had been almost insultingly
curt and mocking.

"What was the matter with me?" he asked himself.  "I never acted in
that way before."  And then he saw that his brusqueness had been the
cover for fear of of her--fear of the allure of her luxury and her
beauty.  In love with her?  He knew that he was not.  No, his feeling
toward her was merely the crudest form of the tribute of man to
woman--though apparently woman as a rule preferred this form to any
other.

"I owe her an apology," he said to himself.  And so it came to pass
that at three the following afternoon he was once more facing her in
that creeper-walled seclusion whose soft lights were almost equal to
light of gloaming or moon or stars in romantic charm.

Said he--always direct and simple, whether dealing with man or woman,
with devious person or straight:

"I've come to beg your pardon for what I said yesterday."

"You certainly were wild and strange," laughed she.

"I was supercilious," said he.  "And worse than that there is not.
However, as I have apologized, and you have accepted my apology, we
need waste no more time about that.  You wished to persuade your father
to----"

"Just a moment!" interrupted she.  "I've a question to ask. WHY did you
treat me--why have you been treating me so--so harshly?"

"Because I was afraid of you," replied he.  "I did not realize it, but
that was the reason."

"Afraid of ME," said she.  "That's very flattering."

"No," said he, coloring.  "In some mysterious way I had been betrayed
into thinking of you as no man ought to think of a woman unless he is
in love with her and she with him.  I am ashamed of myself.  But I
shall conquer that feeling--or keep away from you.... Do you understand
what the street car situation is?"

But she was not to be deflected from the main question, now that it had
been brought to the front so unexpectedly and in exactly the way most
favorable to her purposes.  "You've made me uneasy," said she.  "I
don't in the least understand what you mean.  I have wanted, and I
still want, to be friends with you--good friends--just as you and Selma
Gordon are--though of course I couldn't hope to be as close a friend as
she is.  I'm too ignorant--too useless."

He shook his head--with him, a gesture that conveyed the full strength
of negation.  "We are on opposite sides of a line across which
friendship is impossible.  I could not be your friend without being
false to myself.  You couldn't be mine unless you were by some accident
flung into the working class and forced to adopt it as your own.  Even
then you'd probably remain what you are.  Only a small part of the
working class as yet is at heart of the working class.  Most of us
secretly--almost openly--despise the life of work, and dream and hope a
time of fortune that will put us up among the masters and the idlers."
His expressive eyes became eloquent.  "The false and shallow ideas that
have been educated into us for ages can't be uprooted in a few brief
years."

She felt the admiration she did not try to conceal.  She saw the proud
and splendid conception of the dignity of labor--of labor as a
blessing, not a curse, as a badge of aristocracy and not of slavery and
shame.  "You really believe that, don't you?" she said.  "I know it's
true.  I say I believe it--who doesn't SAY so?  But I don't FEEL it."

"That's honest," said he heartily.  "That's some thing to build on."

"And I'm going to build!" cried she.  "You'll help me--won't you?  I
know, it's a great deal to ask.  Why should you take the time and the
trouble to bother with one single unimportant person."

"That's the way I spend my life--in adding one man or one woman to our
party--one at a time.  It's slow building, but it's the only kind that
endures.  There are twelve hundred of us now--twelve hundred voters, I
mean.  Ten years ago there were only three hundred.  We'd expand much
more rapidly if it weren't for the constant shifts of population.  Our
men are forced to go elsewhere as the pressure of capitalism gets too
strong.  And in place of them come raw emigrants, ignorant, full of
dreams of becoming capitalists and exploiters of their fellow men and
idlers.  Ambition they call it.  Ambition!"  He laughed.  "What a
vulgar, what a cruel notion of rising in the world!  To cease to be
useful, to become a burden to others!  ...  Did you ever think how many
poor creatures have to toil longer hours, how many children have to go
to the factory instead of to school, in order that there may be two
hundred and seven automobiles privately kept in this town and
seventy-four chauffeurs doing nothing but wait upon their masters?
Money doesn't grow on bushes, you know. Every cent of it has to be
earned by somebody--and earned by MANUAL labor."

"I must think about that," she said--for the first time as much
interested in what he was saying as in the man himself.  No small
triumph for Victor over the mind of a woman dominated, as was Jane
Hastings, by the sex instinct that determines the thoughts and actions
of practically the entire female sex.

"Yes--think about it," he urged.  "You will never see it--or
anything--until you see it for yourself."

"That's the way your party is built--isn't it?" inquired she. "Of those
who see it for themselves."

"Only those," replied he.  "We want no others."

"Not even their votes?" said she shrewdly.

"Not even their votes," he answered.  "We've no desire to get the
offices until we get them to keep.  And when we shall have conquered
the city, we'll move on to the conquest of the county--then of the
district--then of the state.  Our kind of movement is building in every
city now, and in most of the towns and many of the villages.  The old
parties are falling to pieces because they stand for the old politics
of the two factions of the upper class quarreling over which of them
should superintend the exploiting of the people.  Very few of us
realize what is going on before our very eyes--that we're seeing the
death agonies of one form of civilization and the birth-throes of a
newer form."

"And what will it be?" asked the girl.

She had been waiting for some sign of the "crank," the impractical
dreamer.  She was confident that this question would reveal the man she
had been warned against--that in answering it he would betray his true
self.  But he disappointed and surprised her.

"How can I tell what it will be?" said he.  "I'm not a prophet.  All I
can say is I am sure it will be human, full of imperfections, full of
opportunities for improvements--and that I hope it will be better than
what we have now.  Probably not much better, but a little--and that
little, however small it may be, will be a gain.  Doesn't history show
a slow but steady advance of the idea that the world is for the people
who live in it, a slow retreat of the idea that the world and the
people and all its and their resources are for a favored few of some
kind of an upper class?  Yes--I think it is reasonable to hope that out
of the throes will come a freer and a happier and a more intelligent
race."

Suddenly she burst out, apparently irrelevantly:  "But I can't--I
really can't agree with you that everyone ought to do physical labor.
That would drag the world down--yes, I'm sure it would."

"I guess you haven't thought about that," said he.  "Painters do
physical labor--and sculptors--and writers--and all the scientific
men--and the inventors--and--"  He laughed at her--"Who doesn't do
physical labor that does anything really useful?  Why, you yourself--at
tennis and riding and such things--do heavy physical labor.  I've only
to look at your body to see that.  But it's of a foolish kind--foolish
and narrowly selfish."

"I see I'd better not try to argue with you," said she.

"No--don't argue--with me or with anybody," rejoined he.  "Sit down
quietly and think about life--about your life.  Think how it is best to
live so that you may get the most out of life--the most substantial
happiness.  Don't go on doing the silly customary things simply because
a silly customary world says they are amusing and worth while.
Think--and do--for yourself, Jane Hastings."

She nodded slowly and thoughtfully.  "I'll try to," she said. She
looked at him with the expression of the mind aroused.  It was an
expression that often rewarded him after a long straight talk with a
fellow being.  She went on:  "I probably shan't do what you'd approve.
You see, I've got to be myself--got to live to a certain extent the
kind of a life fate has made for me."

"You couldn't successfully live any other," said he.

"But, while it won't be at all what you'd regard as a model life--or
even perhaps useful--it'll be very different--very much better--than it
would have been, if I hadn't met you--Victor Dorn."

"Oh, I've done nothing," said he.  "All I try to do is to encourage my
fellow beings to be themselves.  So--live your own life--the life you
can live best--just as you wear the clothes that fit and become you....
And now--about the street car question.  What do you want of me?"

"Tell me what to say to father."

He shook his head.  "Can't do it," said he.  "There's a good place for
you to make a beginning.  Put on an old dress and go down town and get
acquainted with the family life of the street-car men.  Talk to their
wives and their children.  Look into the whole business yourself."

"But I'm not--not competent to judge," objected she.

"Well, make yourself competent," advised he.

"I might get Miss Gordon to go with me," suggested she.

"You'll learn more thoroughly if you go al

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