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The Price She Paid

by David Graham Phillips · English · Gutenberg #457 · 570,024 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Price She Paid

Author: David Graham Phillips


        
Release date: March 1, 1996 [eBook #457]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/457

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


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Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.








THE PRICE SHE PAID


by

David Graham Phillips



I

HENRY GOWER was dead at sixty-one--the end of a lifelong fraud which
never had been suspected, and never would be.  With the world, with his
acquaintances and neighbors, with his wife and son and daughter, he
passed as a generous, warm-hearted, good-natured man, ready at all
times to do anything to help anybody, incapable of envy or hatred or
meanness.  In fact, not once in all his days had he ever thought or
done a single thing except for his own comfort.  Like all intensely
selfish people who are wise, he was cheerful and amiable, because that
was the way to be healthy and happy and to have those around one
agreeable and in the mood to do what one wished them to do.  He told
people, not the truth, not the unpleasant thing that might help them,
but what they wished to hear.  His family lived in luxurious comfort
only because he himself was fond of luxurious comfort. His wife and his
daughter dressed fashionably and went about and entertained in the
fashionable, expensive way only because that was the sort of life that
gratified his vanity.  He lived to get what he wanted; he got it every
day and every hour of a life into which no rain ever fell; he died,
honored, respected, beloved, and lamented.

The clever trick he had played upon his fellow beings came very near to
discovery a few days after his death.  His widow and her son and
daughter-in-law and daughter were in the living-room of the charming
house at Hanging Rock, near New York, alternating between sorrowings
over the dead man and plannings for the future.  Said the widow:

"If Henry had only thought what would become of us if he were taken
away!"

"If he had saved even a small part of what he made every year from the
time he was twenty-six--for he always made a big income," said his son,
Frank.

"But he was so generous, so soft-hearted!" exclaimed the widow.  "He
could deny us nothing."

"He couldn't bear seeing us with the slightest wish ungratified," said
Frank.

"He was the best father that ever lived!" cried the daughter, Mildred.

And Mrs. Gower the elder and Mrs. Gower the younger wept; and Mildred
turned away to hide the emotion distorting her face; and Frank stared
gloomily at the carpet and sighed.  The hideous secret of the life of
duplicity was safe, safe forever.

In fact, Henry Gower had often thought of the fate of his family if he
should die.  In the first year of his married life, at a time when
passion for a beautiful bride was almost sweeping him into generous
thought, he had listened for upward of an hour to the eloquence of a
life insurance agent.  Then the agent, misled by Gower's effusively
generous and unselfish expressions, had taken a false tack.  He had
descanted upon the supreme satisfaction that would be felt by a dying
man as he reflected how his young widow would be left in affluence.  He
made a vivid picture; Gower saw--saw his bride happier after his death
than she had been during his life, and attracting a swarm of admirers
by her beauty, well set off in becoming black, and by her independent
income.  The generous impulse then and there shriveled to its weak and
shallow roots.  With tears in his kind, clear eyes he thanked the agent
and said:

"You have convinced me.  You need say no more. I'll send for you in a
few days."

The agent never got into his presence again. Gower lived up to his
income, secure in the knowledge that his ability as a lawyer made him
certain of plenty of money as long as he should live.  But it would
show an utter lack of comprehension of his peculiar species of
character to imagine that he let himself into the secret of his own
icy-heartedness by ceasing to think of the problem of his wife and two
children without him to take care of them.  On the contrary, he thought
of it every day, and planned what he would do about it--to-morrow.  And
for his delay he had excellent convincing excuses.  Did he not take
care of his naturally robust health?  Would he not certainly outlive
his wife, who was always doctoring more or less? Frank would be able to
take care of himself; anyhow, it was not well to bring a boy up to
expectations, because every man should be self-supporting and
self-reliant.  As for Mildred, why, with her beauty and her cleverness
she could not but make a brilliant marriage. Really, there was for him
no problem of an orphaned family's future; there was no reason why he
should deny himself any comfort or luxury, or his vanity any of the
titillations that come from social display.

That one of his calculations which was the most vital and seemed the
surest proved to be worthless.  It is not the weaklings who die, after
infancy and youth, but the strong, healthy men and women.  The
weaklings have to look out for themselves, receive ample warning in the
disastrous obvious effects of the slightest imprudence.  The robust,
even the wariest of them, even the Henry Gowers, overestimate and
overtax their strength.  Gower's downfall was champagne.  He could not
resist a bottle of it for dinner every night. As so often happens, the
collapse of the kidneys came without any warning that a man of powerful
constitution would deem worthy of notice.  By the time the doctor began
to suspect the gravity of his trouble he was too far gone.

Frank, candidly greedy and selfish--"Such a contrast to his father!"
everyone said--was married to the prettiest girl in Hanging Rock and
had a satisfactory law practice in New York.  His income was about
fifteen thousand a year.  But his wife had tastes as extravagant as his
own; and Hanging Rock is one of those suburbs of New York where gather
well-to-do middle-class people to live luxuriously and to delude each
other and themselves with the notion that they are fashionable, rich
New Yorkers who prefer to live in the country "like the English." Thus,
Henry Gower's widow and daughter could count on little help from
Frank--and they knew it.

"You and Milly will have to move to some less expensive place than
Hanging Rock," said Frank--it was the living-room conference a few days
after the funeral.

Mildred flushed and her eyes flashed.  She opened her lips to
speak--closed them again with the angry retort unuttered.  After all,
Frank was her mother's and her sole dependence.  They could hope for
little from him, but nothing must be said that would give him and his
mean, selfish wife a chance to break with them and refuse to do
anything whatever.

"And Mildred must get married," said Natalie. In Hanging Rock most of
the girls and many of the boys had given names taken from Burke's
Peerage, the Almanac de Gotha, and fashionable novels.

Again Mildred flushed; but her eyes did not flash, neither did she open
her lips to speak.  The little remark of her sister-in-law, apparently
so harmless and sensible, was in fact a poisoned arrow.  For Mildred
was twenty-three, had been "out" five years, and was not even in the
way to become engaged.  She and everyone had assumed from her lovely
babyhood that she would marry splendidly, would marry wealth and social
position.  How could it be otherwise?  Had she not beauty?  Had she not
family and position?  Had she not style and cleverness?  Yet--five
years out and not a "serious" proposal.  An impudent poor fellow with
no prospects had asked her.  An impudent rich man from fashionable New
York had hung after her--and had presently abandoned whatever dark
projects he may have been concealing and had married in his own set,
"as they always do, the miserable snobs," raved Mrs. Gower, who had
been building high upon those lavish outpourings of candy, flowers, and
automobile rides.  Mildred, however, had accepted the defection more
philosophically.  She had had enough vanity to like the attentions of
the rich and fashionable New Yorker, enough good sense to suspect,
perhaps not definitely, what those attentions meant, but certainly what
they did not mean.  Also, in the back of her head had been an intention
to refuse Stanley Baird, if by chance he should ask her.  Was there any
substance to this intention, sprung from her disliking the conceited,
self-assured snob as much as she liked his wealth and station?  Perhaps
not.  Who can say?  At any rate, may we not claim credit for our good
intentions--so long as, even through lack of opportunity, we have not
stultified them?

With every natural advantage apparently, Mildred's failure to catch a
husband seemed to be somehow her own fault.  Other girls, less endowed
than she, were marrying, were marrying fairly well.  Why, then, was
Mildred lagging in the market?

There may have been other reasons, reasons of accident--for, in the
higher class matrimonial market, few are called and fewer chosen. There
was one reason not accidental; Hanging Rock was no place for a girl so
superior as was Mildred Gower to find a fitting husband.  As has been
hinted, Hanging Rock was one of those upper-middle-class colonies where
splurge and social ambition dominate the community life. In such
colonies the young men are of two classes--those beneath such a girl as
Mildred, and those who had the looks, the manners, the intelligence,
and the prospects to justify them in looking higher socially--in
looking among the very rich and really fashionable.  In the Hanging
Rock sort of community, having all the snobbishness of Fifth Avenue,
Back Bay, and Rittenhouse Square, with the added torment of the
snobbishness being perpetually ungratified--in such communities,
beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol, there is a
coarse and brutal materialism, a passion for money, for luxury, for
display, that equals aristocratic societies at their worst.  No one can
live for a winter, much less grow up, in such a place without becoming
saturated with sycophantry.  Thus, only by some impossible combination
of chances could there have been at Hanging Rock a young man who would
have appreciated Mildred and have had the courage of his appreciation.
This combination did not happen. In Mildred's generation and set there
were only the two classes of men noted above.  The men of the one of
them which could not have attracted her accepted their fate of mating
with second-choice females to whom they were themselves second choice.
The men of the other class rarely appeared at Hanging Rock functions,
hung about the rich people in New York, Newport, and on Long Island,
and would as soon have thought of taking a Hanging Rock society girl to
wife as of exchanging hundred-dollar bills for twenty-five-cent pieces.
Having attractions acceptable in the best markets, they took them
there.  Hanging Rock denounced them as snobs, for Hanging Rock was
virtuously eloquent on the subject of snobbishness--we human creatures
being never so effective as when assailing in others the vice or
weakness we know from lifelong, intimate, internal association with it.
But secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that suburban
society were approved, were envied.  And Hanging Rock was most gracious
to them whenever it got the chance.

In her five years of social life Mildred had gone only with the various
classes of fashionable people, had therefore known only the men who are
full of the poison of snobbishness.  She had been born and bred in an
environment as impregnated with that poison as the air of a
kitchen-garden with onions.  She knew nothing else.  The secret
intention to refuse Stanley Baird, should he propose, was therefore the
more astonishing--and the more significant.  From time to time in any
given environment you will find some isolated person, some personality,
with a trait wholly foreign and out of place there.  Now it is a soft
voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a life
of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has known
nothing but sordid slavery for centuries.  Or, in the petty
conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-class community you
come upon one who dreams--perhaps vaguely but still longingly--of an
existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life.  In
spite of her training, in spite of the teaching and example of all
about her from the moment of her opening her eyes upon the world,
Mildred Gower at twenty-three still retained something of these dream
flowers sown in the soil of her naturally good mind by some book or
play or perhaps by some casually read and soon forgotten article in
magazine or newspaper.  We have the habit of thinking only weeds
produce seeds that penetrate and prosper everywhere and anywhere.  The
truth is that fine plants of all kinds, vegetable, fruit, and flower of
rarest color and perfume, have this same hardiness and fecundity.  Pull
away at the weeds in your garden for a while, and see if this is not
so.  Though you may plant nothing, you will be amazed at the results if
you but clear a little space of its weeds--which you have been planting
and cultivating.

Mildred--woman fashion--regarded it as a reproach upon her that she had
not yet succeeded in making the marriage everyone, including herself,
predicted for her and expected of her.  On the contrary, it was the
most savage indictment possible of the marriageable and marrying men
who had met her--of their stupidity, of their short-sighted and
mean-souled calculation, of their lack of courage--the courage to take
what they, as men of flesh and blood wanted, instead of what their
snobbishness ordered.  And if Stanley Baird, the nearest to a
flesh-and-blood man of any who had known her, had not been so
profoundly afraid of his fashionable mother and of his sister, the
Countess of Waring--  But he was profoundly afraid of them; so, it is
idle to speculate about him.

What did men see when they looked at Mildred Gower?  Usually, when men
look at a woman, they have a hazy, either pleasant or unpleasant, sense
of something feminine.  That, and nothing more.  Afterward, through
some whim or some thrust from chance they may see in her, or fancy they
see in her, the thing feminine that their souls--it is always
"soul"--most yearns after.  But just at first glance, so colorless or
conventionally colored is the usual human being, the average
woman--indeed every woman but she who is exceptional--creates upon man
the mere impression of pleasant or unpleasant petticoats.  In the
exceptional woman something obtrudes.  She has astonishing hair, or
extraordinary eyes, or a mouth that seems to draw a man like a magnet;
or it is the allure of a peculiar smile or of a figure whose
sinuosities as she moves seem to cause a corresponding wave-disturbance
in masculine nerves.  Further, the possession of one of these signal
charms usually causes all her charms to have more than ordinary
potency.  The sight of the man is so bewitched by the one potent charm
that he sees the whole woman under a spell.

Mildred Gower, of the medium height and of a slender and well-formed
figure, had a face of the kind that is called lovely; and her smile,
sweet, dreamy, revealing white and even teeth, gave her loveliness
delicate animation.  She had an abundance of hair, neither light nor
dark; she had a fine clear skin.  Her eyes, gray and rather serious and
well set under long straight brows, gave her a look of honesty and
intelligence. But the charm that won men, her charm of charms, was her
mouth--mobile, slightly pouted, not too narrow, of a wonderful, vividly
healthy and vital red.  She had beauty, she had intelligence.  But it
was impossible for a man to think of either, once his glance had been
caught by those expressive, inviting lips of hers, so young, so fresh,
with their ever-changing, ever-fascinating line expressing in a
thousand ways the passion and poetry of the kiss.

Of all the men who had admired her and had edged away because they
feared she would bewitch them into forgetting what the world calls
"good common sense"--of all those men only one had suspected the real
reason for her physical power over men.  All but Stanley Baird had
thought themselves attracted because she was so pretty or so stylish or
so clever and amusing to talk with.  Baird had lived intelligently
enough to learn that feminine charm is never general, is always
specific.  He knew it was Mildred Gower's lips that haunted, that
frightened ambitious men away, that sent men who knew they hadn't a
ghost of a chance with her discontentedly back to the second-choice
women who alone were available for them.  Fortunately for Mildred,
Stanley Baird, too wise to flatter a woman discriminatingly, did not
tell her the secret of her fascination.  If he had told her, she would
no doubt have tried to train and to use it--and so would inevitably
have lost it.

To go on with that important conference in the sitting-room in the
handsome, roomy house of the Gowers at Hanging Rock, Frank Gower
eagerly seized upon his wife's subtly nasty remark.  "I don't see why
in thunder you haven't married, Milly," said he.  "You've had every
chance, these last four or five years."

"And it'll be harder now," moaned her mother. "For it looks as though
we were going to be wretchedly poor.  And poverty is so repulsive."

"Do you think," said Mildred, "that giving me the idea that I must
marry right away will make it easier for me to marry?  Everyone who
knows us knows our circumstances."  She looked significantly at Frank's
wife, who had been wailing through Hanging Rock the woeful plight of
her dead father-in-law's family. The young Mrs. Gower blushed and
glanced away. "And," Mildred went on, "everyone is saying that I must
marry at once--that there's nothing else for me to do."  She smiled
bitterly.  "When I go into the street again I shall see nothing but
flying men.  And no man would come to call unless he brought a chaperon
and a witness with him."

"How can you be so frivolous?" reproached her mother.

Mildred was used to being misunderstood by her mother, who had long
since been made hopelessly dull by the suffocating life she led and by
pain from her feet, which never left her at ease for a moment except
when she had them soaking in cold water.  Mrs. Gower had been born with
ordinary feet, neither ugly nor pretty and entirely fit for the uses
for which nature intended feet.  She had spoiled them by wearing shoes
to make them look smaller and slimmer than they were. In steady weather
she was plaintive; in changeable weather she varied between irritable
and violent.

Said Mildred to her brother:  "How much--JUST how much is there?"

"I can't say exactly," replied her brother, who had not yet solved to
his satisfaction the moral problem of how much of the estate he ought
to allow his mother and sister and how much he ought to claim for
himself--in such a way that the claim could not be disputed.

Mildred looked fixedly at him.  He showed his uneasiness not by
glancing away, but by the appearance of a certain hard defiance in his
eyes.  Said she:

"What is the very most we can hope for?"

A silence.  Her mother broke it.  "Mildred, how CAN you talk of those
things--already?"

"I don't know," replied Mildred.  "Perhaps because it's got to be done."

This seemed to them all--and to herself--a lame excuse for such
apparent hardness of heart.  Her father had always been
SENDER-HEARTED--HAD NEVER SPOKEN OF MONEY, OR ENCOURAGED HIS FAMILY IN
SPEAKING OF IT.

A LONG AND PAINFUL SILENCE.  THEN, THE WIDOW ABRUPTLY:

"YOU'RE SURE, Frank, there's NO insurance?"

"Father always said that you disliked the idea," replied her son; "that
you thought insurance looked like your calculating on his death."

Under her husband's adroit prompting Mrs. Gower had discovered such a
view of insurance in her brain. She now recalled expressing it--and
regretted.  But she was silenced.  She tried to take her mind of the
subject of money.  But, like Mildred, she could not.  The thought of
imminent poverty was nagging at them like toothache.  "There'll be
enough for a year or so?" she said, timidly interrogative.

"I hope so," said Frank.

Mildred was eying him fixedly again.  Said she: "Have you found
anything at all?"

"He had about eight thousand dollars in bank," said Frank.  "But most
of it will go for the pressing debts."

"But how did HE expect to live?" urged Mildred.

"Yes, there must have been SOMETHING," said her mother.

"Of course, there's his share of the unsettled and unfinished business
of the firm," admitted Frank.

"How much will that be?" persisted Mildred.

"I can't tell, offhand," said Frank, with virtuous reproach.  "My
mind's been on--other things."

Henry Gower's widow was not without her share of instinctive
shrewdness.  Neither had she, unobservant though she was, been within
sight of her son's character for twenty-eight years without having
unconfessed, unformed misgivings concerning it. "You mustn't bother
about these things now, Frank dear," said she.  "I'll get my brother to
look into it."

"That won't be necessary," hastily said Frank.  "I don't want any rival
lawyer peeping into our firm's affairs."

"My brother Wharton is the soul of honor," said Mrs. Gower, the elder,
with dignity.  "You are too young to take all the responsibility of
settling the estate.  Yes, I'll send for Wharton to-morrow."

"It'll look as though you didn't trust me," said Frank sourly.

"We mustn't do anything to start the gossips in this town," said his
wife, assisting.

"Then send for him yourself, Frank," said Mildred, "and give him charge
of the whole matter."

Frank eyed her furiously.  "How ashamed father would be!" exclaimed he.

But this solemn invoking of the dead man's spirit was uneffectual.  The
specter of poverty was too insistent, too terrible.  Said the widow:

"I'm sure, in the circumstances, my dear dead husband would want me to
get help from someone older and more experienced."

And Frank, guilty of conscience and an expert in the ways of
conventional and highly moral rascality, ceased to resist.  His wife,
scenting danger to their getting the share that "rightfully belongs to
the son, especially when he has been the brains of the firm for several
years," made angry and indiscreet battle for no outside interference.
The longer she talked the firmer the widow and the daughter became, not
only because she clarified suspicions that had been too hazy to take
form, but also because they disliked her intensely. The following day
Wharton Conover became unofficial administrator.  He had no difficulty
in baffling Frank Gower's half-hearted and clumsy efforts to hide two
large fees due the dead man's estate.  He discovered clear assets
amounting in all to sixty-three thousand dollars, most of it available
within a few months.

"As you have the good-will of the firm and as your mother and sister
have only what can be realized in cash," said he to Frank, "no doubt
you won't insist on your third."

"I've got to consider my wife," said Frank.  "I can't do as I'd like."

"You are going to insist on your third?" said Conover, with an accent
that made Frank quiver.

"I can't do otherwise," said he in a dogged, shamed way.

"Um," said Conover.  "Then, on behalf of my sister and her daughter
I'll have to insist on a more detailed accounting than you have been
willing to give--and on the production of that small book bound in red
leather which disappeared from my brother-in-law's desk the afternoon
of his death."

A wave of rage and fear surged up within Frank Gower and crashed
against the seat of his life.  For days thereafter he was from time to
time seized with violent spasms of trembling; years afterward he was
attributing premature weaknesses of old age to the effects of that
moment of horror.  His uncle's words came as a sudden, high shot climax
to weeks of exasperating peeping and prying and questioning, of sneer
and insinuation.  Conover had been only moderately successful at the
law, had lost clients to Frank's father, had been beaten when they were
on opposite sides.  He hated the father with the secret, hypocritical
hatred of the highly moral and religious man.  He despised the son. It
is not often that a Christian gentleman has such an opportunity to
combine justice and revenge, to feed to bursting an ancient grudge, the
while conscious that he is but doing his duty.

Said Frank, when he was able to speak:  "You have been listening to the
lies of some treacherous clerk here."

"Don't destroy that little book," proceeded Conover tranquilly.  "We
can prove that you took it."

Young Gower rose.  "I must decline to have anything further to say to
you, sir," said he.  "You will leave this office, and you will not be
admitted here again unless you come with proper papers as
administrator."

Conover smiled with cold satisfaction and departed. There followed a
series of quarrels--between Frank and his sister, between Frank and his
mother, between Frank's wife and his mother, between Mildred and her
mother, between the mother and Conover.  Mrs. Gower was suspicious of
her son; but she knew her brother for a pinchpenny, exacting the last
drop of what he regarded as his own.  And she discovered that, if she
authorized him to act as administrator for her, he could--and beyond
question would--take a large share of the estate.  The upshot was that
Frank paid over to his mother and sister forty-seven thousand dollars,
and his mother and her brother stopped speaking to each other.

"I see that you have turned over all your money to mother," said Frank
to Mildred a few days after the settlement.

"Of course," said Mildred.  She was in a mood of high scorn for
sordidness--a mood induced by the spectacle of the shameful manners of
Conover, Frank, and his wife.

"Do you think that's wise?" suggested Frank.

"I think it's decent," said Mildred.

"Well, I hope you'll not live to regret it," said her brother.

Neither Mrs. Gower nor her daughter had ever had any experience in the
care of money.  To both forty-seven thousand dollars seemed a
fortune--forty-seven thousand dollars in cash in the bank, ready to
issue forth and do their bidding at the mere writing of a few figures
and a signature on a piece of paper.  In a sense they knew that for
many years the family's annual expenses had ranged between forty and
fifty thousand, but in the sense of actuality they knew nothing about
it--a state of affairs common enough in families where the man is in
absolute control and spends all he makes.  Money always had been
forthcoming; therefore money always would be forthcoming.

The mourning and the loss of the person who had filled and employed
their lives caused the widow and the daughter to live very quietly
during the succeeding year.  They spent only half of their capital. For
reasons of selfish and far-sighted prudence which need no detailing
Frank moved away to New York within six months of his father's death
and reduced communication between himself and wife and his mother and
sister to a frigid and rapidly congealing minimum. He calculated that
by the time their capital was consumed they would have left no feeling
of claim upon him or he feeling of duty toward them.

It was not until eighteen months after her father's death, when the
total capital was sunk to less than fifteen thousand dollars, that
Mildred awakened to the truth of their plight.  A few months at most,
and they would have to give up that beautiful house which had been her
home all her life.  She tried to grasp the meaning of the facts as her
intelligence presented them to her, but she could not.  She had no
practical training whatever.  She had been brought up as a rich man's
child, to be married to a rich man, and never to know anything of the
material details of life beyond what was necessary in managing servants
after the indifferent fashion of the usual American woman of the
comfortable classes.  She had always had a maid; she could not even
dress herself properly without the maid's assistance.  Life without a
maid was inconceivable; life without servants was impossible.

She wandered through the house, through the grounds.  She said to
herself again and again:  "We have got to give up all this, and be
miserably poor--with not a servant, with less than the tenement people
have."  But the words conveyed no meaning to her. She said to herself
again and again:  "I must rouse myself.  I must do something.  I
must--must--must!"  But she did not rouse, because there was nothing to
rouse.  So far as practical life was concerned she was as devoid of
ideas as a new-born baby.

There was but the one hope--marriage, a rich marriage.  It is the habit
of men who can take care of themselves and of women who are securely
well taken care of to scorn the woman or the helpless-bred man who
marries for money or even entertains that idea. How little imagination
these scorners have!  To marry for a mere living, hardly better than
one could make for oneself, assuredly does show a pitiful lack of
self-reliance, a melancholy lack of self-respect.  But for men or women
all their lives used to luxury and with no ability whatever at earning
money--for such persons to marry money in order to save themselves from
the misery and shame that poverty means to them is the most natural,
the most human action conceivable.  The man or the woman who says he or
she would not do it, either is a hypocrite or is talking without
thinking. You may in honesty criticize and condemn a social system that
suffers men and women to be so crudely and criminally miseducated by
being given luxury they did not earn.  But to condemn the victims of
that system for acting as its logic compels is sheer folly or sheer
phariseeism.

Would Mildred Gower have married for money?  As the weeks fled, as the
bank account dwindled, she would have grasped eagerly at any rich man
who might have offered himself--no matter how repellent he might have
been.  She did not want a bare living; she did not want what passes
with the mass of middle-class people for comfort.  She wanted what she
had--the beautiful and spacious house, the costly and fashionable
clothing, the servants, the carriages and motors, the thousand and one
comforts, luxuries, and vanities to which she had always been used.  In
the brain of a young woman of poor or only comfortably off family the
thoughts that seethed in Mildred Gower's brain would have been so many
indications of depravity.  In Mildred Gower's brain they were the
natural, the inevitable, thoughts. They indicated everything as to her
training, nothing as to her character.  So, when she, thinking only of
a rich marriage with no matter whom, and contrasting herself with the
fine women portrayed in the novels and plays, condemned herself as
shameless and degraded, she did herself grave injustice.

But no rich man, whether attractive or repulsive, offered.  Indeed, no
man of any kind offered.  Instead, it was her mother who married.

A widower named James Presbury, elderly, with an income of five to six
thousand a year from inherited wealth, stumbled into Hanging Rock to
live, was impressed by the style the widow Gower maintained, believed
the rumor that her husband had left her better off than was generally
thought, proposed, and was accepted.  And two years and a month after
Henry Gower's death his widow became Mrs. James Presbury--and ceased to
veil from her new husband the truth as to her affairs.

Mildred had thought that, than the family quarrels incident to settling
her father's estate, human nature could no lower descend.  She was now
to be disillusioned. When a young man or a young woman blunders into a
poor marriage in trying to make a rich one, he or she is usually
withheld from immediate and frank expression by the timidity of youth.
Not so the elderly man or woman.  As we grow older, no matter how
timidly conventional we are by nature, we become, through selfishness
or through indifference to the opinion of others or through impatience
of petty restraint, more and more outspoken.  Old Presbury discovered
how he had tricked himself four days after the wedding.  He and his
bride were at the Waldorf in New York, a-honeymooning.

The bride had never professed to be rich.  She had simply continued in
her lifelong way, had simply acted rich.  She well knew the gaudy
delusions her admirer was entertaining, and she saw to it that nothing
was said or done to disturb him.  She inquired into his affairs, made
sure of the substantiality of the comparatively small income he
possessed, decided to accept him as her best available chance to escape
becoming a charge upon her anything but eager and generous relatives.
She awaited the explosion with serenity. She cared not a flip for
Presbury, who was a soft and silly old fool, full of antiquated
compliments and so drearily the inferior of Henry Gower, physically and
mentally, that even she could appreciate the difference, the descent.
She rather enjoyed the prospect of a combat with him, of the end of
dissimulating her contempt.  She had thought out and had put in arsenal
ready for use a variety of sneers, jeers, and insults that suggested
themselves to her as she listened and simpered and responded while he
was courting.

Had the opportunity offered earlier than the fourth day she would have
seized it, but not until that fourth morning was she in just the right
mood.  She had eaten too much dinner the night before, and had followed
it after two hours in a stuffy theater with an indigestible supper.  He
liked the bedroom windows open at night; she liked them closed.  After
she fell into a heavy sleep, he slipped out of bed and opened the
windows wide--to teach her by the night's happy experience that she was
entirely mistaken as to the harmfulness of fresh winter air.  The
result was that she awakened with a frightful cold and a splitting
headache.  And as the weather was about to change she had shooting
pains like toothache through her toes the instant she thrust them into
her shoes. The elderly groom, believing he had a rich bride, was all
solicitude and infuriating attention.  She waited until he had wrought
her to the proper pitch of fury.  Then she said--in reply to some
remark of his:

"Yes, I shall rely upon you entirely.  I want you to take absolute
charge of my affairs."

The tears sprang to his eyes.  His weak old mouth, rapidly falling to
pieces, twisted and twitched with emotion.  "I'll try to deserve your
confidence, darling," said he.  "I've had large business experience--in
the way of investing carefully, I mean.  I don't think your affairs
will suffer in my hands."

"Oh, I'm sure they'll not trouble you," said she in a sweet, sure tone
as the pains shot through her feet and her head.  "You'll hardly notice
my little mite in your property."  She pretended to reflect.  "Let me
see--there's seven thousand left, but of course half of that is
Millie's."

"It must be very well invested," said he.  "Those seven thousand shares
must be of the very best."

"Shares?" said she, with a gentle little laugh.  "I mean dollars."

Presbury was about to lift a cup of cafe au lait to his lips.  Instead,
he turned it over into the platter of eggs and bacon.

"We--Mildred and I," pursued his bride, "were left with only forty-odd
thousand between us.  Of course, we had to live.  So, naturally,
there's very little left."

Presbury was shaking so violently that his head and arms waggled like a
jumping-jack's.  He wrapped his elegant white fingers about the arms of
his chair to steady himself.  In a suffocated voice he said:  "Do you
mean to say that you have only seven thousand dollars in the world?"

"Only half that," corrected she.  "Oh, dear, how my head aches!  Less
than half that, for there are some debts."

She was impatient for the explosion; the agony of her feet and head
needed outlet and relief.  But he disappointed her.  That was one of
the situations in which one appeals in vain to the resources of
language.  He shrank and sank back in his chair, his jaw dropped, and
he vented a strange, imbecile cackling laugh.  It was not an expression
of philosophic mirth, of sense of the grotesqueness of an anti-climax.
It was not an expression of any emotion whatever.  It was simply a
signal from a mind temporarily dethroned.

"What are you laughing at?" she said sharply.

His answer was a repetition of the idiotic sound.

"What's the matter with you?" demanded she. "Please close your mouth."

It was a timely piece of advice; for his upper and false teeth had
become partially dislodged and threatened to drop upon the shirt-bosom
gayly showing between the lapels of his dark-blue silk house-coat.  He
slowly closed his mouth, moving his teeth back into place with his
tongue--a gesture that made her face twitch with rage and disgust.

"Seven thousand dollars," he mumbled dazedly.

"I said less than half that," retorted she sharply.

"And I--thought you were--rich."

A peculiar rolling of the eyes and twisting of the lips gave her the
idea that he was about to vent that repulsive sound again.  "Don't you
laugh!" she cried. "I can't bear your laugh--even at its best."

Suddenly he galvanized into fury.  "This is an outrage!" he cried,
waving his useless-looking white fists. "You have swindled me--SWINDLED
me!"

Her head stopped aching.  The pains in her feet either ceased or she
forgot them.  In a suspiciously calm voice she said:  "What do you
mean?"

"I mean that you are a swindler!" he shouted, banging one fist on the
table and waving the other.

She acted as though his meaning were just dawning upon her.  "Do you
mean," said she tranquilly, "that you married me for money?"

"I mean that I thought you a substantial woman, and that I find you are
an adventuress."

"Did you think," inquired she, "that any woman who had money would
marry YOU?" She laughed very quietly.  "You ARE a fool!"

He sat back to look at her.  This mode of combat in such circumstances
puzzled him.

"I knew that you were rich," she went on, "or you would not have dared
offer yourself to me.  All my friends were amazed at my stooping to
accept you. Your father was an Irish Tammany contractor, wasn't he?--a
sort of criminal?  But I simply had to marry. So I gave you my family
and position and name in exchange for your wealth--a good bargain for
you, but a poor one for me."

These references to HIS wealth were most disconcerting, especially as
they were accompanied by remarks about his origin, of which he was so
ashamed that he had changed the spelling of his name in the effort to
clear himself of it.  However, some retort was imperative. He looked at
her and said:

"Swindler and adventuress!"

"Don't repeat that lie," said she.  "You are the adventurer--despite
the fact that you are very rich."

"Don't say that again," cried he.  "I never said or pretended I was
rich.  I have about five thousand a year--and you'll not get a cent of
it, madam!"

She knew his income, but no one would have suspected it from her
expression of horror.  "What!" she gasped.  "You dared to marry ME when
you were a--beggar!  Me--the widow of Henry Gower!  You impudent old
wreck!  Why, you haven't enough to pay my servants.  What are we to
live on, pray?"

"I don't know what YOU'LL live on," replied he. "_I_ shall live as I
always have."

"A beggar!" she exclaimed.  "I--married to a beggar."  She burst into
tears.  "How men take advantage of a woman alone!  If my son had been
near me!  But there's surely some law to protect me.  Yes, I'm sure
there is.  Oh, I'll punish you for having deceived me."  Her eyes dried
as she looked at him. "How dare you sit there?  How dare you face me,
you miserable fraud!"

Early in her acquaintance with him she had discovered that determining
factors in his character were sensitiveness about his origin and
sensitiveness about his social position.  On this knowledge of his
weaknesses was securely based her confidence that she could act as she
pleased toward him.  To ease her pains she proceeded to pour out her
private opinion of him--all the disagreeable things, all the insults
she had been storing up.

She watched him as only a woman can watch a man. She saw that his rage
was not dangerous, that she was forcing him into a position where fear
of her revenging herself by disgracing him would overcome anger at the
collapse of his fatuous dreams of wealth.  She did not despise him the
more deeply for sitting there, for not flying from the room or trying
to kill her or somehow compelling her to check that flow of insult. She
already despised him utterly; also, she attached small importance to
self-respect, having no knowledge of what that quality really is.

When she grew tired, she became quiet.  They sat there a long time in
silence.  At last he ran up the white flag of abject surrender by
saying:

"What'll we live on--that's what I'd like to know?"

An eavesdropper upon the preceding violence of upward of an hour would
have assumed that at its end this pair must separate, never to see each
other again voluntarily.  But that idea, even as a possibility, had not
entered the mind of either.  They had lived a long time; they were
practical people.  They knew from the outset that somehow they must
arrange to go on together. The alternative meant a mere pittance of
alimony for her; meant for him social ostracism and the small income
cut in half; meant for both scandal and confusion.

Said she fretfully:  "Oh, I suppose we'll get along, somehow.  I don't
know anything about those things. I've always been looked after--kept
from contact with the sordid side of life."

"That house you live in," he went on, "does it belong to you?"

She gave him a contemptuous glance.  "Of course," said she.  "What low
people you must have been used to!"

"I thought perhaps you had rented it for your bunco game," retorted he.
"The furniture, the horses, the motor--all those things--do they belong
to you?"

"I shall leave the room if you insult me," said she.

"Did you include them in the seven thousand dollars?"

"The money is in the bank.  It has nothing to do with our house and our
property."

He reflected, presently said:  "The horses and carriages must be sold
at once--and all those servants dismissed except perhaps two.  We can
live in the house."

She grew purple with rage.  "Sell MY carriages! Discharge MY servants!
I'd like to see you try!"

"Who's to pay for keeping up that establishment?" demanded he.

She was silent.  She saw what he had in mind.

"If you want to keep that house and live comfortably," he went on,
"you've got to cut expenses to the bone.  You see that, don't you?"

"I can't live any way but the way I've been used to all my life,"
wailed she.

He eyed her disgustedly.  Was there anything equal to a woman for folly?

"We've got to make the most of what little we have," said he.

"I tell you I don't know anything about those things," repeated she.
"You'll have to look after them. Mildred and I aren't like the women
you've been used to. We are ladies."

Presbury's rage boiled over again at the mention of Mildred.  "That
daughter of yours!" he cried. "What's to be done about her?  I've got
no money to waste on her."

"You miserable Tammany THING!" exclaimed she. "Don't you dare SPEAK of
my daughter except in the most respectful way."

And once more she opened out upon him, wreaking upon him all her wrath
against fate, all the pent-up fury of two years--fury which had been
denied such fury's usual and natural expression in denunciations of the
dead bread-winner.  The generous and ever-kind Henry Gower could not be
to blame for her wretched plight; and, of course, she herself could not
be to blame for it.  So, until now there had been no scapegoat.
Presbury therefore received the whole burden.  He, alarmed lest a
creature apparently so irrational, should in wild rage drive him away,
ruin him socially, perhaps induce a sympathetic court to award her a
large part of his income as alimony, said not a word in reply.  He bade
his wrath wait.  Later on, when the peril was over, when he had a firm
grip upon the situation--then he would take his revenge.

They gave up the expensive suite at the Waldorf that very day and
returned to Hanging Rock.  They alternated between silence and the
coarsest, crudest quarrelings, for neither had the intelligence to
quarrel wittily or the refinement to quarrel artistically.  As soon as
they arrived at the Gower house, Mildred was dragged into the wrangle.

"I married this terrible man for your sake," was the burden of her
mother's wail.  "And he is a beggar--wants to sell off everything and
dismiss the servants."

"You are a pair of paupers," cried the old man. "You are shameless
tricksters.  Be careful how you goad me!"

Mildred had anticipated an unhappy ending to her mother's marriage, but
she had not knowledge enough of life or of human nature to anticipate
any such horrors as now began.  Every day, all day long the vulgar
fight raged.  Her mother and her stepfather withdrew from each other's
presence only to think up fresh insults to fling at each other.  As
soon as they were armed they hastened to give battle again.  She
avoided Presbury.  Her mother she could not avoid; and when her mother
was not in combat with him, she was weeping or wailing or railing to
Mildred.

It was at Mildred's urging that her mother acquiesced in Presbury's
plans for reducing expenses within income.  At first the girl, even
more ignorant than her mother of practical affairs, did not appreciate
the wisdom, not to say the necessity, of what he wished to do, but soon
she saw that he was right, that the servants must go, that the horses
and carriages and the motors must be sold.  When she was convinced and
had convinced her mother, she still did not realize what the thing
really meant.  Not until she no longer had a maid did she comprehend.
To a woman who has never had a maid, or who has taken on a maid as a
luxury, it will seem an exaggeration to say that Mildred felt as
helpless as a baby lying alone in a crib before it has learned to
crawl.  Yet that is rather an understatement of her plight.  The maid
left in the afternoon. Mildred, not without inconveniences that had in
the novelty their amusing side, contrived to dress that evening for
dinner and to get to bed; but when she awakened in the morning and was
ready to dress, the loss of Therese became a tragedy.  It took the girl
nearly four hours to get herself together presentably--and then, never
had she looked so unkempt.  With her hair, thick and soft, she could do
nothing.

"What a wonderful person Therese was!" thought she.  "And I always
regarded her as rather stupid." Her mother, who had not had a maid
until she was about thirty and had never become completely dependent,
fared somewhat better, though, hearing her moans, you would have
thought she was faring worse.

Mildred's unhappiness increased from day to day, as her wardrobe fell
into confusion and disrepair.  She felt that she must rise to the
situation, must teach herself, must save herself from impending
dowdiness and slovenliness.  But her brain seemed to be paralyzed. She
did not know how or where to begin to learn.  She often in secret gave
way to the futility of tears.

There were now only a cook and one housemaid and a man of all work--all
three newcomers, for Presbury insisted--most wisely--that none of the
servants of the luxurious, wasteful days would be useful in the new
circumstances.  He was one of those small, orderly men who have a
genius for just such situations as the one he now proceeded to grapple
with and solve.  In his pleasure at managing everything about that
house, in distributing the work among the three servants, in marketing,
and, in inspecting purchases and nosing into the garbage-barrel, in
looking for dust on picture-frames and table-tops and for neglected
weeds in the garden walks--in this multitude of engrossing delights he
forgot his anger over the trick that had been played upon him.  He
still fought with his wife and denounced her and met insult with
insult.  But that, too, was one of his pleasures.  Also, he felt that
on the whole he had done well in marrying.  He had been lonely as a
bachelor, had had no one to talk with, or to quarrel with, nothing to
do.  The marriage was not so expensive, as his wife had brought him a
house--and it such a one as he had always regarded as the apogee of
elegance.  Living was not dear in Hanging Rock, if one understood
managing and gave time to it.  And socially he was at last established.

Soon his wife was about as contented as she had ever been in her life.
She hated and despised her husband, but quarreling with him and railing
against him gave her occupation and aim--two valuable assets toward
happiness that she had theretofore lacked.  Her living--shelter, food,
clothing enough--was now secure. But the most important factor of all
in her content was the one apparently too trivial to be worthy of
record. From girlhood she could not recall a single day in which she
had not suffered from her feet.  And she had been ashamed to say
anything about it--had never let anyone, even her maid, see her feet,
which were about the only unsightly part of her.  None had guessed the
cause of her chronic ill-temper until Presbury, that genius for the
little, said within a week of their marriage:

"You talk and act like a woman with chronic corns."

He did not dream of the effect this chance thrust had upon his wife.
For the first time he had really "landed."  She concealed her fright
and her shame as best she could and went on quarreling more viciously
than ever.  But he presently returned to the attack. Said he:

"Your feet hurt you.  I'm sure they do.  Now that I think of it, you
walk that way."

"I suppose I deserve my fate," said she.  "When a woman marries beneath
her she must expect insult and low conversation."

"You must cure your feet," said he.  "I'll not live in the house with a
person who is made fiendish by corns. I think it's only corns.  I see
no signs of bunions."

"You brute!" cried his wife, rushing from the room.

But when they met again, he at once resumed the subject, telling her
just how she could cure herself--and he kept on telling her, she
apparently ignoring but secretly acting on his advice.  He knew what he
was about, and her feet grew better, grew well--and she was happier
than she had been since girlhood when she began ruining her feet with
tight shoes.

Six months after the marriage, Presbury and his wife were getting on
about as comfortably as it is given to average humanity to get on in
this world of incessant struggle between uncomfortable man and his
uncomfortable environment.  But Mildred had become more and more
unhappy.  Her mother, sometimes angrily, again reproachfully--and that
was far harder to bear--blamed her for "my miserable marriage to this
low, quarrelsome brute."  Presbury let no day pass without telling her
openly that she was a beggar living off him, that she would better
marry soon or he would take drastic steps to release himself of the
burden.  When he attacked her before her mother, there was a violent
quarrel from which Mildred fled to hide in her room or in the remotest
part of the garden.  When he hunted her out to insult her alone, she
sat or stood with eyes down and face ghastly pale, mute, quivering. She
did not interrupt, did not try to escape.  She was like the chained and
spiritless dog that crouches and takes the shower of blows from its
cruel master.

Where could she go?  Nowhere.  What could she do?  Nothing.  In the
days of prosperity she had regarded herself as proud and high spirited.
She now wondered at herself!  What had become of the pride? What of the
spirit?  She avoided looking at her image in the glass--that thin,
pallid face, those circled eyes, the drawn, sick expression about the
mouth and nose. "I'm stunned," she said to herself.  "I've been stunned
ever since father's death.  I've never recovered--nor has mother."  And
she gave way to tears--for her father, she fancied; in fact, from shame
at her weakness and helplessness.  She thought--hoped--that she would
not be thus feeble and cowardly, if she were not living at home, in the
house she loved, the house where she had spent her whole life.  And
such a house!  Comfort and luxury and taste; every room, every corner
of the grounds, full of the tenderest and most beautiful associations.
Also, there was her position in Hanging Rock.  Everywhere else she
would be a stranger and would have either no position at all or one
worse than that of the utter outsider.  There, she was of the few
looked up to by the whole community.  No one knew, or even suspected,
how she was degraded by her step-father.  Before the world he was
courteous and considerate toward her as toward everybody.  Indeed,
Presbury's natural instincts were gentle and kindly.  His hatred of
Mildred and his passion for humiliating her were the result of his
conviction that he had been tricked into the marriage and his inability
to gratify his resentment upon his wife.  He could not make the mother
suffer; but he could make the daughter suffer--and he did.  Besides,
she was of no use to him and would presently be an expense.

"Your money will soon be gone," he said to her. "If you paid your just
share of the expenses it would be gone now.  When it is gone, what will
you do?"

She was silent.

"Your mother has written to your brother about you."

Mildred lifted her head, a gleam of her former spirit in her eyes. Then
she remembered, and bent her gaze upon the ground.

"But he, like the cur that he is, answered through a secretary that he
wished to have nothing to do with either of you."

Mildred guessed that Frank had made the marriage an excuse.

"Surely some of your relatives will do something for you.  I have my
hands full, supporting your mother. I don't propose to have two
strapping, worthless women hanging from my neck."

She bent her head lower, and remained silent.

"I warn you to bestir yourself," he went on.  "I give you four months.
After the first of the year you can't stay here unless you pay your
share--your third."

No answer.

"You hear what I say, miss?" he demanded.

"Yes," replied she.

"If you had any sense you wouldn't wait until your last cent was gone.
You'd go to New York now and get something to do."

"What?" she asked--all she could trust herself to speak.

"How should _I_ know?" retorted he furiously. "You are a stranger to
me.  You've been educated, I assume.  Surely there's something you can
do.  You've been out six years now, and have had no success, for you're
neither married nor engaged.  You can't call it success to be flattered
and sought by people who wanted invitations to this house when it was a
social center."

He paused for response from her.  None came.

"You admit you are a failure?" he said sharply.

"Yes," said she.

"You must have realized it several years ago," he went on.  "Instead of
allowing your mother to keep on wasting money in entertaining lavishly
here to give you a chance to marry, you should have been preparing
yourself to earn a living."  A pause.  "Isn't that true, miss?"

He had a way of pronouncing the word "miss" that made it an epithet, a
sneer at her unmarried and unmarriageable state.  She colored, paled,
murmured:

"Yes."

"Then, better late than never.  You'll do well to follow my advice and
go to New York and look about you."

"I'll--I'll think of it," stammered she.

And she did think of it.  But in all her life she had never considered
the idea of money-making.  That was something for men, and for the
middle and lower classes--while Hanging Rock was regarded as most
noisomely middle class by fashionable people, it did not so regard
itself.  Money-making was not for ladies.  Like all her class, she was
a constant and a severe critic of the women of the lower orders who
worked for her as milliners, dressmakers, shop-attendants, cooks,
maids.  But, as she now realized, it is one thing to pass upon the work
of others; it is another thing to do work oneself. She--  There was
literally nothing that she could do. Any occupation, even the most
menial, was either beyond her skill or beyond her strength, or beyond
both.

Suddenly she recalled that she could sing.  Her prostrate spirit
suddenly leaped erect.  Yes, she could sing! Her voice had been praised
by experts.  Her singing had been in demand at charity entertainments
where amateurs had to compete with professionals.  Then down she
dropped again.  She sang well enough to know how badly she sang--the
long and toilsome and expensive training that lay between her and
operatic or concert or even music-hall stage.  Her voice was fine at
times.  Again--most of the time--it was unreliable. No, she could not
hope to get paying employment even as a church choir-singer.  Miss
Dresser who sang in the choir of the Good Shepherd for ten dollars a
Sunday, had not nearly so good a voice as she, but it was reliable.

"There is nothing I can do--nothing!"

All at once, with no apparent bridge across the vast chasm, her heart
went out, not in pity but in human understanding and sisterly sympathy,
to the women of the pariah class at whom, during her stops in New York,
she had sometimes gazed in wonder and horror.  "Why, we and they are
only a step apart," she said to herself in amazement.  "We and they are
much nearer than my maid or the cook and they!"

And then her heart skipped a beat and her skin grew cold and a fog
swirled over her brain.  If she should be cast out--if she could find
no work and no one to support her--would she--  "O my God!" she moaned.
"I must be crazy, to think such thoughts.  I never could!  I'd die
first--DIE!"  But if anyone had pictured to her the kind of life she
was now leading--the humiliation and degradation she was meekly
enduring with no thought of flight, with an ever stronger desire to
stay on, regardless of pride and self-respect--if anyone had pictured
this to her as what she would endure, what would she have said?  She
could see herself flashing scornful denial, saying that she would
rather kill herself.  Yet she was living--and was not even
contemplating suicide as a way out!

A few days after Presbury gave her warning, her mother took advantage
of his absence for his religiously observed daily constitutional to say
to her:

"I hope you didn't think I was behind him in what he said to you about
going away?"

Mildred had not thought so, but in her mother's guilty tone and
guiltier eyes she now read that her mother wished her to go.

"It'd be awful for me to be left here alone with him," wailed her
mother insincerely.  "Of course we've got no money, and beggars can't
be choosers.  But it'd just about kill me to have you go."

Mildred could not speak.

"I don't know a thing about money," Mrs. Presbury went on.  "Your
father always looked after everything." She had fallen into the way of
speaking of her first husband as part of some vague, remote past,
which, indeed, he had become for her.  "This man"--meaning
Presbury--"has only about five thousand a year, as you know.  I suppose
that's as small as he says it is.  I remember our bills for one month
used to be as much or more than that."  She waved her useless, pretty
hands helplessly.  "I don't see HOW we are to get on, Mildred!"

Her mother wished her to go!  Her mother had fallen under the influence
of Presbury--her mother, woman-like, or rather, ladylike, was of kin to
the helpless, flabby things that float in the sea and attach themselves
to whatever they happen to lodge against.  Her mother wished her to go!

"At the same time," Mrs. Presbury went on, "I can't live without
somebody here to stand between me and him.  I'd kill him or kill
myself."

Mildred muttered some excuse and fled from the room, to lock herself in.

But when she came forth again to descend to dinner, she had resolved
nothing, because there was nothing to resolve.  When she was a child
she leaned from the nursery window one day and saw a stable-boy
drowning a rat that was in a big, oval, wire cage with a wooden bottom.
The boy pressed the cage slowly down in the vat of water.  The rat, in
the very top of the cage, watched the floor sink, watched the water
rise.  And as it watched it uttered a strange, shrill, feeble sound
which she could still remember distinctly and terribly.  It seemed to
her now that if she were to utter any sound at all, it would be that
one.



II

ON the Monday before Thanksgiving, Presbury went up to New York to look
after one of the little speculations in Wall Street at which he was so
clever. Throughout the civilized world nowadays, and especially in and
near the great capitals of finance, there is a class of men and women
of small capital and of a character in which are combined iron
self-restraint, rabbit-like timidity, and great shrewdness, who make
often a not inconsiderable income by gambling in stocks.  They buy only
when the market is advancing strongly; they sell as soon as they have
gained the scantest margin of profit.  They never permit themselves to
be tempted by the most absolute certainty of larger gains.  They will
let weeks, months even, go by without once risking a dollar.  They wait
until they simply cannot lose.  Tens of thousands every year try to
join this class.  All but the few soon succumb to the hourly dazzling
temptations the big gamblers dangle before the eyes of the little
gamblers to lure them within reach of the merciless shears.

Presbury had for many years added from one to ten thousand a year to
his income by this form of gambling, success at which is in itself
sufficient to stamp a man as infinitely little of soul.  On that Monday
he, venturing for the first time in six months, returned to Hanging
Rock on the three-thirty train the richer by two hundred and fifty
dollars--as large a "killing" as he had ever made in any single day,
one large enough to elevate him to the rank of prince among the
"sure-thing snides." He said nothing about his luck to his family, but
let them attribute his unprecedented good humor to the news he brought
and announced at dinner.

"I met an old friend in the street this afternoon," said he.  "He has
invited us to take Thanksgiving dinner with him.  And I think it will
be a dinner worth while--the food, I mean, and the wine.  Not the
guests; for there won't be any guests but us.  General Siddall is a
stranger in New York."

"There are Siddalls in New York," said his wife; "very nice, refined
people--going in the best society."

Presbury showed his false teeth in a genial smile; for the
old-fashioned or plate kind of false teeth they were extraordinarily
good--when exactly in place.  "But not my old friend Bill Siddall,"
said he.  "He's next door to an outlaw.  I'd not have accepted his
invitation if he had been asking us to dine in public.  But this is to
be at his own house--his new house--and a very grand house it is,
judging by the photos he showed me. A regular palace!  He'll not be an
outlaw long, I guess. But we must wait and see how he comes out
socially before we commit ourselves."

"Did you accept for me, too?" asked Mrs. Presbury.

"Certainly," said Presbury.  "And for your daughter, too."

"I can't go," said Mildred.  "I'm dining with the Fassetts."

The family no longer had a servant in constant attendance in the
dining-room.  The maid of many functions also acted as butler and as
fetch-and-carry between kitchen and butler's pantry.  Before speaking,
Presbury waited until this maid had withdrawn to bring the roast and
the vegetables.  Then he said:

"You are going, too, miss."  This with the full infusion of insult into
the "miss."

Mildred was silent.

"Bill Siddall is looking for a wife," proceeded Presbury.  "And he has
Heaven knows how many millions."

"Do you think there's a chance for Milly?" cried Mrs. Presbury, who was
full of alternating hopes and fears, both wholly irrational.

"She can have him--if she wants him," replied Presbury.  "But it's only
fair to warn her that he's a stiff dose."

"Is the money--CERTAIN?" inquired Mildred's mother with that shrewdness
whose rare occasional displays laid her open to the unjust suspicion of
feigning her habitual stupidity.

"Yes," said Presbury amiably.  "It's nothing like yours was.  He's so
rich he doesn't know what to do with his income.  He owns mines
scattered all over the world.  And if they all failed, he's got bundles
of railway stocks and bonds, and gilt-edged trust stocks, too. And he's
a comparatively young man--hardly fifty, I should say.  He pretends to
be forty."

"It's strange I never heard of him," said Mrs. Presbury.

"If you went to South America or South Africa or Alaska, you'd hear of
him," said Presbury.  He laughed. "And I guess you'd hear some pretty
dreadful things. When I knew him twenty-five years ago he had just been
arrested for forging my father's name to a check. But he got out of
that--and it's all past and gone. Probably he hasn't committed any
worse crimes than have most of our big rich men.  Bill's handicap has
been that he hadn't much education or any swell relatives.  But he's a
genius at money-making." Presbury looked at Mildred with a grin.  "And
he's just the husband for Mildred.  She can't afford to be too
particular.  Somebody's got to support her.  _I_ can't and won't, and
she can't support herself."

"You'll go--won't you, Mildred?" said her mother. "He may not be so
bad."

"Yes, I'll go," said Mildred.  Her gaze was upon the untouched food on
her plate.

"Of course she'll go," said Presbury.  "And she'll marry him if she
can.  Won't you, miss?"

He spoke in his amiably insulting way--as distinguished from the way of
savagely sneering insult he usually took with her.  He expected no
reply.  She surprised him.  She lifted her tragic eyes and looked
fixedly at him.  She said:

"Yes, I'll go.  And I'll marry him if I can."

"I told him he could have you," said Presbury.  "I explained to him
that you were a rare specimen of the perfect lady--just what he
wanted--and that you, and all your family, would be grateful to anybody
who would undertake your support."

Mrs. Presbury flushed angrily.  "You've made it perfectly useless for
her to go!" she cried.

"Calm yourself, my love," said her husband.  "I know Bill Siddall
thoroughly.  I said what would help. I want to get rid of her as much
as you do--and that's saying a great deal."

Mrs. Presbury flamed with the wrath of those who are justly accused.
"If Mildred left, I should go, too," cried she.

"Go where?" inquired her husband.  "To the poorhouse?"

By persistent rubbing in Presbury had succeeded in making the truth
about her poverty and dependence clear to his wife.  She continued to
frown and to look unutterable contempt, but he had silenced her. He
noted this with a sort of satisfaction and went on:

"If Bill Siddall takes her, you certainly won't go there.  He wouldn't
have you.  He feels strongly on the subject of mothers-in-law."

"Has he been married before?" asked Mrs. Presbury.

"Twice," replied her husband.  "His first wife died. He divorced the
second for unfaithfulness."

Mildred saw in this painstaking recital of all the disagreeable and
repellent facts about Siddall an effort further to humiliate her by
making it apparent how desperately off she was, how she could not
refuse any offer, revolting though it might be to her pride and to her
womanly instincts.  Doubtless this was in part the explanation of
Presbury's malicious candor.  But an element in that candor was a
prudent preparing of the girl's mind for worse than the reality.  That
he was in earnest in his profession of a desire to bring about the
match showed when he proposed that they should take rooms at a hotel in
New York, to give her a chance to dress properly for the dinner.  True,
he hastened to say that the expense must be met altogether out of the
remnant of Mildred's share of her father's estate, but the idea would
not have occurred to him had he not been really planning a marriage.

Never had Mildred looked more beautiful or more attractive than when
the three were ready to sally forth from the Manhattan Hotel on that
Thanksgiving evening. At twenty-five, a soundly healthy and vigorous
twenty-five, it is impossible for mind and nerves, however wrought
upon, to make serious inroads upon surface charms.  The hope of
emancipation from her hideous slavery had been acting upon the girl
like a powerful tonic.  She had gained several pounds in the three
intervening days; her face had filled out, color had come back in all
its former beauty to her lips.  Perhaps there was some slight aid from
art in the extraordinary brilliancy of her eyes.

Presbury inventoried her with a succession of grunts of satisfaction.
"Yes, he'll want you," he said. "You'll strike him as just the show
piece he needs. And he's too shrewd not to be aware that his choice is
limited."

"You can't frighten me," said Mildred, with a radiant, coquettish
smile--for practice.  "Nothing could frighten me."

"I'm not trying," replied Presbury.  "Nor will Siddall frighten you.  A
woman who's after a bill-payer can stomach anything."

"Or a man," said Mildred.

"Oh, your mother wasn't as bad as all that," said Presbury, who never
lost an opportunity.

Mrs. Presbury, seated beside her daughter in the cab, gave an
exclamation of rage.  "My own daughter insulting me!" she said.

"Such a thought did not enter my head," protested Mildred.  "I wasn't
thinking of anyone in particular."

"Let's not quarrel now," said Presbury, with unprecedented amiability.
"We must give Bill a spectacle of the happy family."

The cab entered the porte-cochere of a huge palace of white stone just
off Fifth Avenue.  The house was even grander than they had
anticipated.  The wrought-iron fence around it had cost a small
fortune; the house itself, without reference to its contents, a large
fortune. The massive outer doors were opened by two lackeys in
cherry-colored silk and velvet livery; a butler, looking like an
English gentleman, was waiting to receive them at the top of a short
flight of marble steps between the outer and the inner entrance doors.
As Mildred ascended, she happened to note the sculpturing over the
inner entrance--a reclining nude figure of a woman, Cupids with
garlands and hymeneal torches hovering about her.

Mildred had been in many pretentious houses in and near New York, but
this far surpassed the grandest of them.  Everything was brand new,
seemed to have been only that moment placed, and was of the
costliest--statuary, carpets, armor, carved seats of stone and wood,
marble staircase rising majestically, tapestries, pictures,
drawing-room furniture.  The hall was vast, but the drawing-room was
vaster.  Empty, one would have said that it could not possibly be
furnished.  Yet it was not only full, but crowded-chairs and sofas,
hassocks and tete-a-tetes, cabinets, tables, pictures, statues, busts,
palms, flowers, a mighty fireplace in which, behind enormous and costly
andirons, crackled enormous and costly logs.  There was danger in
moving about; one could not be sure of not upsetting something, and one
felt that the least damage that could be done there would be an
appallingly expensive matter.

Before that cavernous fireplace posed General Siddall.  He was a tiny
mite of a man with a thin wiry body supporting the head of a
professional barber. His black hair was glossy and most romantically
arranged.  His black mustache and imperial were waxed and
brilliantined.  There was no mistaking the liberal use of dye, also.
From the rather thin, very sharp face looked a pair of small, muddy,
brown-green eyes--dull, crafty, cold, cruel.  But the little man was so
insignificant and so bebarbered and betailored that one could not take
him seriously.  Never had there been so new, so carefully pressed, so
perfectly fitting evening clothes; never a shirt so expensively got
together, or jeweled studs, waistcoat buttons and links so high priced.
From every part of the room, from every part of the little man's
perfumed and groomed person, every individual article seemed to be
shrieking, "The best is not too good for Bill Siddall!"

Mildred was agreeably surprised--she was looking with fierce
determination for agreeable surprises--when the costly little man
spoke, in a quiet, pleasant voice with an elusive, attractive foreign
accent.

"My, but this is grand--grand, General Siddall!" said Presbury in the
voice of the noisy flatterer. "Princely!  Royal!"

Mildred glanced nervously at Siddall.  She feared that Presbury had
taken the wrong tone.  She saw in the unpleasant eyes a glance of
gratified vanity.  Said he:

"Not so bad, not so bad.  I saw the house in Paris, when I was taking a
walk one day.  I went to the American ambassador and asked for the best
architect in Paris.  I went to him, told him about the house--and here
it is."

"Decorations, furniture, and all!" exclaimed Presbury.

"No, just the house.  I picked up the interiors in different parts of
Europe--had everything reproduced where I couldn't buy outright.  I
want to enjoy my money while I'm still young.  I didn't care what it
cost to get the proper surroundings.  As I said to my architect and to
my staff of artists, I expected to be cheated, but I wanted the goods.
And I got the goods.  I'll show you through the house after dinner.
It's on this same scale throughout.  And they're putting me together a
country place--same sort of thing."  He threw back his little shoulders
and protruded his little chest.  "And the joke of it is that the whole
business isn't costing me a cent."

"Not a cent less than half a dozen or a dozen millions," said Presbury.

"Not so much as that--not quite," protested the delightedly sparkling
little general.  "But what I meant was that, as fast as these fellows
spend, I go down-town and make.  Fact is, I'm a little better off than
I was when I started in to build."

"Well, you didn't get any of MY money," laughed Presbury.  "But I
suppose pretty much everybody else in the country must have
contributed."

General Siddall smiled.  Mildred wondered whether the points of his
mustache and imperial would crack and break of, if he should touch
them.  She noted that his hair was roached absurdly high above the
middle of his forehead and that he was wearing the tallest heels she
had ever seen.  She calculated that, with his hair flat and his feet on
the ground, he would hardly come to her shoulder--and she was barely of
woman's medium height.  She caught sight of his hands--the square,
stubby hands of a working man; the fingers permanently slightly curved
as by the handle of shovel and pick; the skin shriveled but white with
a ghastly, sickening bleached white, the nails repulsively manicured
into long white curves.  "If he should touch me, I'd scream," she
thought.  And then she looked at Presbury--and around her at the
evidences of enormous wealth.

The general--she wondered where he had got that title--led her mother
in to dinner, Presbury gave her his arm.  On the way he found
opportunity to mutter:

"Lay it on thick!  Flatter the fool.  You can't offend him.  Tell him
he's divinely handsome--a Louis Fourteen, a Napoleon.  Praise
everything--napkins, tablecloth, dishes, food.  Rave over the wine."

But Mildred could not adopt this obviously excellent advice.  She sat
silent and cold, while Presbury and her mother raved and drew out the
general to talk of himself--the only subject in the whole world that
seemed to him thoroughly worth while.  As Mildred listened and
furtively observed, it seemed to her that this tiny fool, so obviously
pleased by these coarse and insulting flatteries, could not possibly
have had the brains to amass the vast fortune he apparently possessed.
But presently she noted that behind the personality that was pleased by
this gross fawning and bootlicking there lay--lay in wait and on
guard--another personality, one that despised these guests of his,
estimating them at their true value and using them contemptuously for
the gratification of his coarse appetites.  In the glimpse she caught
of that deeper and real personality, she liked it even less than she
liked the one upon the surface.

It was evidence of superior acumen that she saw even vaguely the real
Bill Siddall, the money-maker, beneath the General William Siddall, raw
and ignorant and vulgar--more vulgar in his refinement than the most
shocking bum at home and at ease in foul-smelling stew. Every man of
achievement hides beneath his surface--personality this second and real
man, who makes the fortune, discovers the secret of chemistry, fights
the battle, carries the election, paints the picture, commits the
frightful murder, evolves the divine sermon or poem or symphony. Thus,
when we meet a man of achievement, we invariably have a sense of
disappointment. "Why, that's not the man!" we exclaim.  "There must be
some mistake."  And it is, indeed, not the man. Him we are incapable of
seeing.  We have only eyes for surfaces; and, not being doers of
extraordinary deeds, but mere plodders in the routines of existence, we
cannot believe that there is any more to another than there is to
ourselves.  The pleasant or unpleasant surface for the conventional
relations of life is about all there is to us; therefore it is all
there is to human nature.  Well, there's no help for it.  In measuring
our fellow beings we can use only the measurements of our own selves;
we have no others, and if others are given to us we are as foozled as
one knowing only feet and inches who has a tape marked off in meters
and centimeters.

It so happened that in her social excursions Mildred had never been in
any of the numerous homes of the suddenly and vastly rich of humble
origin.  She was used to--and regarded as proper and elegant--the
ordinary ostentations and crudities of the rich of conventional
society.  No more than you or I was she moved to ridicule or disdain by
the silliness and the tawdry vulgarity of the life of palace and
liveried lackey and empty ceremonial, by the tedious entertainments, by
the displays of costly and poisonous food. But General Siddall's
establishment presented a new phase to her--and she thought it unique
in dreadfulness and absurdity.

The general had had a home life in his youth--in a coal-miner's cabin
near Wilkes-Barre.  Ever since, he had lived in boarding-houses or
hotels.  As his shrewd and rapacious mind had gathered in more and more
wealth, he had lived more and more luxuriously--but always at hotels.
He had seen little of the private life of the rich.  Thus he had been
compelled to get his ideas of luxury and of ceremonial altogether from
the hotel-keepers and caterers who give the rich what the more
intelligent and informed of the rich are usually shamed by people of
taste from giving themselves at home.

She thought the tablecloth, napkins, and gaudy gold and flowery cut
glass a little overdone, but on the whole not so bad.  She had seen
such almost as grand at a few New York houses.  The lace in the cloth
and in the napkins was merely a little too magnificent.  It made the
table lumpy, it made the napkins unfit for use. But the way the dinner
was served!  You would have said you were in a glorified palace-hotel
restaurant. You looked about for the cashier's desk; you were certain a
bill would be presented after the last course.

The general, tinier and more grotesque than ever in the great
high-backed, richly carved armchair, surveyed the progress of the
banquet with the air of a god performing miracles of creation and
passing them in review and giving them his divine endorsement.  He was
well pleased with the enthusiastic praises Presbury and his wife
lavished upon the food and drink.  He would have been better pleased
had they preceded and followed every mouthful with a eulogy.  He
supplemented their compliments with even more fulsome compliments,
adding details as to the origin and the cost.

"Darcy"--this to the butler--"tell the chef that this fish is the best
yet--really exquisite."  To Presbury:  "I had it brought over from
France--alive, of course.  We have many excellent fish, but I like a
change now and then.  So I have a standing order with Prunier--he's the
big oyster- and fish-man of Paris--to send me over some things every
two weeks by special express.  That way, an oyster costs about fifty
cents and a fish about five or six dollars."

To Mrs. Presbury:  "I'll have Darcy make you and Miss Presbury--excuse
me, Miss Gower--bouquets of the flowers afterward.  Most of them come
from New York--and very high really first-class flowers are. I pay two
dollars apiece for my roses even at this season.  And orchids--well, I
feel really extravagant when I indulge in orchids as I have this
evening.  Ten dollars apiece for those.  But they're worth it."

The dinner was interminably long--upward of twenty kinds of food, no
less than five kinds of wine; enough served and spoiled to have fed and
intoxicated a dozen people at least.  And upon every item of food and
drink the general had some remarks to make.  He impressed it upon his
guests that this dinner was very little better than the one served to
him every night, that the increase in expense and luxury was not in
their honor, but in his own--to show them what he could do when he
wished to make a holiday.  Finally the grand course was reached.  Into
the dining-room, to the amazement of the guests, were rolled two great
restaurant joint wagons.  Instead of being made of silver-plated nickel
or plain nickel they were of silver embossed with gold, and the large
carvers and serving-spoons and forks had gold-mounted silver handles.
When the lackeys turned back the covers there were disclosed several
truly wonderful young turkeys, fattened as if by painstaking and
skillful hand and superbly browned.

Up to that time the rich and costly food had been sadly medium--like
the wines.  But these turkeys were a genuine triumph.  Even Mildred
gave them a look of interest and admiration.  In a voice that made
General Siddall ecstatic Presbury cried:

"GOD bless my soul!  WHERE did you get those beauties, old man!"

"Paris," said Siddall in a voice tremulous with pride and
self-admiration.  You would have thought that he had created not merely
the turkeys, but Paris, also. "Potin sends them over to me.  Potin, you
know, is the finest dealer in groceries, fruit, game, and so on in the
world.  I have a standing order with him for the best of--everything
that comes in.  I'd hate to tell you what my bill with Potin is every
month--he only sends it to me once a year.  Really, I think I ought to
be ashamed of myself, but I reason that, if a man can afford it, he's a
fool to put anything but the best into his stomach."

"You're right there!" mumbled Presbury.  His mouth was full of turkey.
"You HAVE got a chef, General!"

"He ought to cook well.  I pay him more than most bank-presidents get.
What do you think of those joint wagons, Mrs. Presbury?"

"They're very--interesting," replied she, a little nervous because she
suspected they were some sort of vulgar joke.

"I knew you'd like them," said the general.  "My own idea entirely.  I
saw them in several restaurants abroad--only of course those they had
were just ordinary affairs, not fit to be introduced into a gentleman's
dining-room.  But I took the idea and adapted it to my purposes--and
there you are!"

"Very original, old man," said Presbury, who had been drinking too
much.  "I've never seen it before, and I don't think I ever shall
again.  Got the idea patented?"

But Siddall in his soberest moment would have been slow to admit a
suspicion that any of the human race, which he regarded as on its knees
before him, was venturing to poke fun at him.  Drunk as he now was, the
openest sarcasm would have been accepted as a compliment. After a
gorgeous dessert which nobody more than touched--a molded mousse of
whipped and frozen cream and strawberries--"specially sent on to me
from Florida and costing me a dollar apiece, I guess"--after this
costly wonder had disappeared fruit was served. General Siddall had
ready a long oration upon this course.  He delivered it in a
disgustingly thick tone. The pineapple was an English hothouse product,
the grapes were grown by a costly process under glass in Belgium.  As
for the peaches, Potin had sent those delicately blushing marvels, and
the charge for this would be "not less than a louis apiece, sir--a
louis d'or--which, as you no doubt know, is about four dollars of Uncle
Sam's money."

The coffee--"the Queen of Holland may have it on her PRIVATE
table--MAY, I say--but I doubt if anyone else in the world gets a smell
of it except me"--the coffee and the brandy came not a moment too soon.
Presbury was becoming stupefied with indigestion; his wife was nodding
and was wearing that vague, forced, pleasant smile which stands
propriety-guard over a mind asleep; Mildred Gower felt that her nerves
would endure no more; and the general was falling into a besotted
state, spilling his wine, mumbling his words. The coffee and the brandy
revived them all somewhat. Mildred, lifting her eyes, saw by way of a
mirrored section of the enormous sideboard the English butler surveying
master and guests with slowly moving, sneering glance of ineffable
contempt.

In the drawing-room again Mildred, requested by Siddall and ordered by
Presbury, sang a little French song and then--at the urging of
Siddall--"Annie Laurie."  Siddall was wiping his eyes when she turned
around.  He said to Presbury:

"Take your wife into the conservatory to look at my orchids.  I want to
say a word to your stepdaughter."

Mildred started up nervously.  She saw how drunk the general was, saw
the expression of his face that a woman has to be innocent indeed not
to understand. She was afraid to be left alone with him.  Presbury came
up to her, said rapidly, in a low tone:

"It's all right.  He's got a high sense of what's due a respectable
woman of our class.  He isn't as drunk as he looks and acts."

Having said which, he took his wife by the arm and pushed her into the
adjoining conservatory.  Mildred reseated herself upon the inlaid
piano-bench.  The little man, his face now shiny with the sweat of
drink and emotion, drew up a chair in front of her.  He sat--and he was
almost as tall sitting as standing.  He said graciously:

"Don't be afraid, my dear girl.  I'm not that dangerous."

She lifted her eyes and looked at him.  She tried to conceal her
aversion; she feared she was not succeeding. But she need not have
concerned herself about that. General Siddall, after the manner of very
rich men, could not conceive of anyone being less impressed with his
superiority in any way than he himself was.  For years he had heard
only flatteries of himself--his own voice singing his praises, the
fawning voices of those he hired and of those hoping to get some
financial advantage.  He could not have imagined a mere woman not being
overwhelmed by the prospect of his courting her.  Nor would it have
entered his head that his money would be the chief, much less the only,
consideration with her.  He had long since lost all point of view, and
believed that the adulation paid his wealth was evoked by his charms of
person, mind, and manner.  Those who imagine this was evidence of folly
and weak-mindedness and extraordinary vanity show how little they know
human nature.  The strongest head could not remain steady, the most
accurate eyes could not retain their measuring skill, in such an
environment as always completely envelops wealth and power.  And the
much-talked-of difference between those born to wealth and power and
those who rise to it from obscurity resolves itself to little more than
the difference between those born mad and those who go insane.

Looking at the little man with the disagreeable eyes, so dull yet so
shrewd, Mildred saw that within the drunkard who could scarcely sit
straight upon the richly upholstered and carved gilt chair there was
another person, coldly sober, calmly calculating.  And she realized
that it was this person with whom she was about to have the most
serious conversation of her life thus far.

The drunkard smiled with a repulsive wiping and smacking of the thin,
sensual lips.  "I suppose you know why I had you brought here this
evening?" said he.

Mildred looked and waited.

"I didn't intend to say anything to-night.  In fact, I didn't expect to
find in you what I've been looking for.  I thought that old fool of a
stepfather of yours was cracking up his goods beyond their merits.  But
he wasn't.  My dear, you suit me from the ground up.  I've been looking
you over carefully.  You were made for the place I want to fill."

Mildred had lowered her eyes.  Her face had become deathly pale.  "I
feel faint," she murmured.  "It is very warm here."

"You're not sickly?" inquired the general sharply. "You look like a
good solid woman--thin but wiry. Ever been sick?  I must look into your
health.  That's a point on which I must be satisfied."

A wave of anger swept through her, restoring her strength.  She was
about to speak--a rebuke to his colossal impudence that he would not
soon forget. Then she remembered, and bit her lips.

"I don't ask you to decide to-night," pursued he, hastening to explain
this concession by adding:  "I don't intend to decide, myself.  All I
say is that I am willing--if the goods are up to the sample."

Mildred saw her stepfather and her mother watching from just within the
conservatory door.  A movement of the portiere at the door into the
hall let her know that Darcy, the butler, was peeping and listening
there.  She stood up, clenched her hands, struck them together, struck
them against her temples, crossed the room swiftly, flung herself down
upon a sofa, and burst into tears.  Presbury and his wife entered.
Siddall was standing, looking after Mildred with a grin.  He winked at
Presbury and said:

"I guess we gave her too much of that wine.  It's all old and stronger
than you'd think."

"My daughter hardly touched her glasses," cried Mrs. Presbury.

"I know that, ma'am," replied Siddall.  "I watched her.  If she'd done
much drinking, I'd have been done, then and there."

"I suspect she's upset by what you've been saying, General," said
Presbury.  "Wasn't it enough to upset a girl?  You don't realize how
magnificent you are--how magnificent everything is here."

"I'm sorry if I upset her," said the general, swelling and loftily
contrite.  "I don t know why it is that people never seem to be able to
act natural with me."  He hated those who did, regarding them as
sodden, unappreciative fools.

Mrs. Presbury was quieting her daughter.  Presbury and Siddall lighted
cigars and went into the smoking--and billiard-room across the hall.
Said Presbury:

"I didn't deceive you, did I, General?"

"She's entirely satisfactory," replied Siddall.  "I'm going to make
careful inquiries about her character and her health.  If those things
prove to be all right I'm ready to go ahead."

"Then the thing's settled," said Presbury.  "She's all that a lady
should be.  And except a cold now and then she never has anything the
matter with her.  She comes of good healthy stock."

"I can't stand a sickly, ailing woman," said Siddall. "I wouldn't marry
one, and if one I married turned out to be that kind, I'd make short
work of her.  When you get right down to facts, what is a woman?  Why,
a body.  If she ain't pretty and well, she ain't nothing. While I'm
looking up her pedigree, so to speak, I want you to get her mother to
explain to her just what kind of a man I am."

"Certainly, certainly," said Presbury.

"Have her told that I don't put up with foolishness. If she wants to
look at a man, let her look at me."

"You'll have no trouble in that way," said Presbury.

"I DID have trouble in that way," replied the general sourly.  "Women
are fools--ALL women.  But the principal trouble with the second Mrs.
Siddall was that she wasn't a lady born."

"That's why I say you'll have no trouble," said Presbury.

"Well, I want her mother to talk to her plainer than a gentleman can
talk to a young lady.  I want her to understand that I am marrying so
that I can have a WIFE--cheerful, ready, and healthy.  I'll not put up
with foolishness of any kind."

"I understand," said Presbury.  "You'll find that she'll meet all your
conditions."

"Explain to her that, while I'm the easiest, most liberal-spending man
in the world when I'm getting what I want, I am just the opposite when
I'm not getting what I pay for.  If I take her and if she acts right,
she'll have more of everything that women want than any woman in the
world.  I'd take a pride in my wife. There isn't anything I wouldn't
spend in showing her off to advantage.  And I'm willing to be liberal
with her mother, too."

Presbury had been hoping for this.  His eyes sparkled. "You're a
prince, General," he said.  "A genuine prince.  You know how to do
things right."

"I flatter myself I do," said the general.  "I've been up and down the
world, and I tell you most of the kings live cheap beside me.  And when
I get a wife worth showing of, I'll do still better.  I've got
wonderful creative ability.  There isn't anything I can't and won't
buy."

Presbury noted uneasily how cold and straight, how obviously repelled
and repelling the girl was as she yielded her fingers to Siddall at the
leave-taking.  He and her mother covered the silence and ice with hot
and voluble sycophantry.  They might have spared themselves the
exertion.  To Siddall Mildred was at her most fascinating when she was
thus "the lady and the queen."  The final impression she made upon him
was the most favorable of all.

In the cab Mrs. Presbury talked out of the fullness of an overflowing
heart.  "What a remarkable man the general is!" said she.  "You've only
to look at him to realize that you're in the presence of a really
superior person.  And what tact he has!--and how generous he is!--and
how beautifully he entertains! So much dignity--so much simplicity--so
much--"

"Fiddlesticks!" interrupted Presbury.  "Your daughter isn't a damn
fool, Mrs. Presbury."

Mildred gave a short, dry laugh.

Up flared her mother.  "I mean every word I said!" cried she.  "If I
hadn't admired and appreciated him, I'd certainly not have acted as I
did.  _I_ couldn't stoop to such hypocrisy."

"Fiddlesticks!" sneered Presbury.  "Bill Siddall is a horror.  His
house is a horror.  His dinner was a horror.  These loathsome rich
people!  They're ruining the world--as they always have.  They're
making it impossible for anyone to get good service or good food or
good furniture or good clothing or good anything.  They don't know good
things, and they pay exorbitant prices for showy trash, for crude
vulgar luxury.  They corrupt taste.  They make everyone round them or
near them sycophants and cheats.  They substitute money for
intelligence and discrimination. They degrade every fine thing in life.
Civilization is built up by brains and hard work, and along come the
rich and rot and ruin it!"

Mildred and her mother were listening in astonishment. Said the mother:

"I'd be ashamed to confess myself such a hypocrite."

"And I, madam, would be ashamed to be such a hypocrite without taking a
bath of confession afterward," retorted Presbury.

"At least you might have waited until Mildred wasn't in hearing,"
snapped she.

"I shall marry him if I can," said Mildred.

"And blissfully happy you'll be," said Presbury. "Women, ladies--true
ladies, like you and your mother--have no sensibilities.  All you ask
is luxury. If Bill Siddall were a thousand times worse than he is, his
money would buy him almost any refined, delicate lady anywhere in
Christendom."

Mrs. Presbury laughed angrily.  "YOU, talking like this--you of all
men.  Is there anything YOU wouldn't stoop to for money?"

"Do you think I laid myself open to that charge by marrying you?" said
Presbury, made cheerful despite his savage indigestion by the
opportunity for effective insult she had given him and he had promptly
seized. "I am far too gallant to agree with you.  But I'm also too
gallant to contradict a lady.  By the way, you must be careful in
dealing with Siddall.  Rich people like to be fawned on, but not to be
slobbered on. You went entirely too far."

Mrs. Presbury, whom indigestion had rendered stupid, could think of no
reply.  So she burst into tears. "And my own daughter sitting silent
while that man insults her mother!" she sobbed.

Mildred sat stiff and cold.

"It'll be a week before I recover from that dinner," Presbury went on
sourly.  "What a dinner!  What a villainous mess!  These vulgar, showy
rich!  That champagne!  He said it cost him six dollars a bottle, and
no doubt it did.  I doubt if it ever saw France. The dealers rarely
waste genuine wine on such cattle. The wine-cellars of fine houses the
world through are the laughing-stock of connoisseurs--like their
picture-galleries and their other attempts to make money do the work of
taste.  I forgot to put my pills in my bag. I'll have to hunt up an
all-night drug-store.  I'd not dare go to bed without taking an
antidote for that poison."

But Presbury had not been altogether improvident. He had hoped great
things of Bill Siddall's wine-cellar--this despite an almost unbroken
series of bitter disillusionments and disappointments in experience
with those who had the wealth to buy, if they had had the taste to
select, the fine wines he loved.  So, resolving to indulge himself, he
had put into his bag his pair of gout-boots.

This was a device of his own inventing, on which he prided himself.  It
consisted of a pair of roomy doe-skin slippers reenforced with heavy
soles and provided with a set of three thin insoles to be used
according as the state of his toes made advisable.  The cost of the
Presbury gout-boot had been, thanks to patient search for a cheap
cobbler, something under four dollars--this, when men paid shoe
specialists twenty, thirty, and even forty dollars a pair for
gout-boots that gave less comfort.  The morning after the dinner at
which he had drunk to drown his chagrin and to give him courage and
tongue for sycophantry, he put on the boots. Without them it would have
been necessary to carry him from his room to a cab and from cab to
train.  With them he was able to hobble to a street-car.  He tried to
distract his mind from his sufferings by lashing away without ceasing
at his wife and his step-daughter.

When they were once more at home, and the mother and daughter escaped
from him, the mother said:

"I was glad to see that you put up with that wretch, and didn't answer
him back."

"Of course," said Mildred.  "He's mad to be rid of me, but if I
offended him he might snatch away this chance."

"He would," said Mrs. Presbury.  "I'm sure he would.  But--" she
laughed viciously--"once you're married you can revenge yourself--and
me!"

"I wonder," said Mildred thoughtfully.

"Why not?" exclaimed her mother, irritated.

"I can't make Mr. Presbury out," replied the girl. "I understand why
he's helping me to this chance, but I don't understand why he isn't
making friends with me, in the hope of getting something after I'm
married."

Her mother saw the point, and was instantly agitated. "Perhaps he's
simply leading you on, intending to upset it all at the last minute."
She gritted her teeth. "Oh, what a wretch!"

Mildred was not heeding.  "I must have General Siddall looked up
carefully," she went on.  "It may be that he isn't rich, or that he has
another wife somewhere, or that there's some other awful reason why
marrying him would be even worse than it seems."

"Worse than it seems!" cried her mother.  "How CAN you talk so, Milly!
The general seems to be an ideal husband--simply ideal!  I wish _I_ had
your chance.  Any sensible woman could love him."

A strange look came into the girl's face, and her mother could not
withstand her eyes.  "Don't, mother," she said quietly.  "Either you
take me for a fool or you are trying to show me that you have no
self-respect.  I am not deceiving myself about what I'm doing."

Mrs. Presbury opened her lips to remonstrate, changed her mind, drew a
deep sigh.  "It's frightful to be a woman," she said.

"To be a lady, Mr. Presbury would say," suggested Mildred.

After some discussion, they fixed upon Joseph Tilker as the best
available investigator of General Siddall. Tilker had been head clerk
for Henry Gower.  He was now in for himself and had offered to look
after any legal business Mrs. Presbury might have without charging her.
He presently reported that there was not a doubt as to the wealth of
the little general. "There are all sorts of ugly stories about how he
made his money," said Tilker; "but all the great fortunes have a
scandalous history, and I doubt if Siddall's is any worse than the
others.  I don't see how it well could be.  Siddall has the reputation
of being a mean and cruel little tyrant.  He is said to be pompous,
vain, ignorant--"

"Indeed he's not," cried Mrs. Presbury.  "He's a rough diamond, but a
natural gentleman.  I've met him."

"Well, he's rich enough, and that was all you asked me to find out,"
said Tilker.  "But I must warn you, Mrs. Presbury, not to have any
business or intimate personal relations with him."

Mrs. Presbury congratulated herself on her wisdom in having come alone
to hear Tilker's report.  She did not repeat any part of it to Mildred
except what he had said about the wealth.  That she enlarged upon until
Mildred's patience gave out.  She interrupted with a shrewd:

"Anything else, mamma?  Anything about him personally?"

"We've got to judge him in that way for ourselves," replied Mrs.
Presbury.  "You know how wickedly they lie about anyone who has
anything."

"I should like to read a full account of General Siddall," said Mildred
reflectively; "just to satisfy my curiosity."

Mrs. Presbury made no reply.

Presbury had decided that it was best to make no advance, but to wait
until they heard from Siddall.  He let a week, ten days, go by; then
his impatience got the better of his shrewdness.  He sought admittance
to the great man at the offices of the International Metals and
Minerals Company in Cedar Street.  After being subjected to varied
indignities by sundry under-strappers, he received a message from the
general through a secretary:  "The general says he'll let you know when
he's ready to take up that matter.  He says he hasn't got round to it
yet."  Presbury apologized courteously for his intrusion and went away,
cursing under his breath.  You may be sure that he made his wife and
his stepdaughter suffer for what he had been through.  Two weeks more
passed--three--a month. One morning in the mail there arrived this
note--type-written upon business paper:


JAMES PRESBURY, Esqr.:

DEAR SIR:

General Siddall asks me to present his compliments and to say that he
will be pleased if you and your wife and the young lady will dine with
him at his house next Thursday the seventeenth at half-past seven sharp.

ROBERT CHANDLESS, Secretary.


The only words in longhand were the two forming the name of the
secretary.  Presbury laughed and tossed the note across the breakfast
table to his wife. "You see what an ignorant creature he is," said he.
"He imagines he has done the thing up in grand style. He's the sort of
man that can't be taught manners because he thinks manners, the
ordinary civilities, are for the lower orders of people.  Oh, he's a
joke, is Bill Siddall--a horrible joke."

Mrs. Presbury read and passed the letter to Mildred. She simply glanced
at it and returned it to her step-father.

"I'm just about over that last dinner," pursued Presbury.  "I'll eat
little Thursday and drink less. And I'd advise you to do the same, Mrs.
Presbury."

He always addressed her as "Mrs. Presbury" because he had discovered
that when so addressed she always winced, and, if he put a certain tone
into his voice, she quivered.

"That dinner aged you five years," he went on. "Besides, you drank so
much that it went to your head and made you slather him with flatteries
that irritated him.  He thought you were a fool, and no one is stupid
enough to like to be flattered by a fool."

Mrs. Presbury bridled, swallowed hard, said mildly: "We'll have to
spend the night in town again, I suppose."

"You and your daughter may do as you like," said Presbury.  "I shall
return here that night.  I always catch cold in strange beds."

"We might as well all return here," said Mildred. "I shall not wear
evening dress; that is, I'll wear a high-neck dress and a hat."

She had just got a new hat that was peculiarly becoming to her.  She
had shown Siddall herself at the best in evening attire; another sort
of costume would give him a different view of her looks, one which she
flattered herself was not less attractive.  But Presbury interposed an
emphatic veto.

"You'll wear full evening dress," said he.  "Bare neck and arms for men
like Bill Siddall.  They want to see what they're getting."

Mildred flushed scarlet and her lips trembled as though she were about
to cry.  In fact, her emotion was altogether shame--a shame so poignant
that even Presbury was abashed, and mumbled something apologetic.
Nevertheless she wore a low-neck dress on Thursday evening, one as
daring as the extremely daring fashions of that year permitted an
unmarried woman to wear.  It seemed to her that Siddall was still more
costly and elegant-looking than before, though this may have been due
to the fact that he always created an impression that in the retrospect
of memory seemed exaggerated.  It seemed impossible that anyone could
be so clean, so polished and scoured, so groomed and tailored, so
bedecked, so high-heeled and loftily coiffed. His mean little
countenance with its grotesquely waxed mustache and imperial wore an
expression of gracious benignity that assured his guests they need
anticipate no disagreeable news.

"I owe you an apology for keeping you in suspense so long," said he.
"I'm a very busy man, with interests in all parts of the world.  I keep
house--some of 'em bigger than this--open and going in six different
places.  I always like to be at home wherever my business takes me."

Mrs. Presbury rolled her eyes.  "Isn't that WONDERFUL!" she exclaimed.
"What an interesting life you must lead!"

"Oh, so--so," replied the general.  "But I get awful lonesome.  I'm
naturally a domestic man.  I don't care for friends.  They're expensive
and dangerous. A man in my position is like a king.  He can't have
friends.  So, if he hasn't got a family, he hasn't got noth--anything."

"Nothing like home life," said Presbury.

"Yes, indeed," cried Mrs. Presbury.

The little general smiled upon Mildred, sitting pale and silent, with
eyes downcast.  "Well, I don't intend to be alone much longer, if I can
help it," said he. "And I may say that I can make a woman happy if
she's the right sort--if she has sense enough to appreciate a good
husband."  This last he said sternly, with more than a hint of his past
matrimonial misfortunes in his frown and in his voice.  "The trouble
with a great many women is that they're fools--flighty, ungrateful
fools.  If I married a woman like that, I'd make short work of her."

"And she'd deserve it, General," said Mildred's mother earnestly.  "But
you'll have no trouble if you select a lady--a girl who's been well
brought up and has respect for herself."

"That's my opinion, ma'am," said the general. "I'm convinced that while
a man can become a gentleman, a woman's got to be born a lady or she
never is one."

"Very true, General," cried Mrs. Presbury.  "I never thought of it
before, but it's the truest thing I ever heard."

Presbury grinned at his plate.  He stole a glance at Mildred.  Their
eyes met.  She flushed faintly.

"I've had a great deal of experience of women," pursued the general.
"In my boyhood days I was a ladies' man.  And of course since I've had
money they've swarmed round me like bees in a clover-patch."

"Oh, General, you're far too modest," cried Mrs. Presbury.  "A man like
you wouldn't need to be afraid, if he hadn't a cent."

"But not the kind of women I want," replied he, firmly if complacently.
"A lady needs money to keep up her position.  She has to have it.  On
the other hand, a man of wealth and station needs a lady to assist him
in the proper kind of life for men of his sort. So they need each
other.  They've got to have each other.  That's the practical, sensible
way to look at it."

"Exactly," said Presbury.

"And I've made up my mind to marry, and marry right away.  But we'll
come back to this later on. Presbury, you're neglecting that wine."

"I'm drinking it slowly to enjoy it better," said Presbury.

The dinner was the same unending and expensive function that had
wearied them and upset their digestions on Thanksgiving Day.  There was
too much of everything, and it was all just wrong.  The general was not
quite so voluble as he had been before; his gaze was fixed most of the
time on Mildred--roving from her lovely face to her smooth, slender
shoulders and back again.  As he drank and ate his gesture of slightly
smacking his thin lips seemed to include an enjoyment of the girl's
charms.  And a sensitive observer might have suspected that she was not
unconscious of this and was suffering some such pain as if abhorrent
and cruel lips and teeth were actually mouthing and mumbling her.  She
said not a word from sitting down at table until they rose to go into
the library for coffee.

"Do tell me about your early life, General," Mrs. Presbury said.  "Only
the other day Millie was saying she wished she could read a biography
of your romantic career."

"Yes, it has been rather--unusual," conceded the general with swelling
chest and gently waving dollar-and-a-half-apiece cigar.

"I do so ADMIRE a man who carves out his own fortune," Mrs. Presbury
went on--she had not obeyed her husband's injunction as to the
champagne.  "It seems so wonderful to me that a man could with his own
hands just dig a fortune out of the ground."

"He couldn't, ma'am," said the general, with gracious tolerance.  "It
wasn't till I stopped the fool digging and hunting around for gold that
I began to get ahead.  I threw away the pick and shovel and opened a
hotel."  (There were two or three sleeping-rooms of a kind in that
"hotel," but it was rather a saloon of the species known as "doggery.")
"Yes, it was in the hotel that I got my start.  The fellows that make
the money in mining countries ain't the prospectors and diggers, ma'am."

"Really!" cried Mrs. Presbury breathlessly.  "How interesting!"

"They're fools, they are," proceeded the general. "No, the money's made
by the fellows that grub-stake the fools--give 'em supplies and send
'em out to nose around in the mountains.  Then them that find anything
have to give half to the fellow that did the grub-staking.  And he
looks into the claim, and if there's anything in it, why, he buys the
fool out.  In mines, like everywhere else, ma'am, it ain't work, it's
brains that makes the money.  No miner ever made a mining fortune--not
one.  It's the brainy, foxy fellows that stay back in the camps.  I
used to send out fifty and a hundred men a year.  Maybe only two or
three'd turn up anything worth while.  No, ma'am, I never got a dollar
ahead on my digging.  All the gold I ever dug went right off for
grub--or a good time."

"Wonderful!" exclaimed Mrs. Presbury.  "I never heard of such a thing."

"But we're not here to talk about mines," said the general, his eyes
upon Mildred.  "I've been looking into matters--to get down to
business--and I've asked you here to let you know that I'm willing to
go ahead."

Profound silence.  Mildred suddenly drew in her breath with a sound so
sharp that the three others started and glanced hastily at her.  But
she made no further sign.  She sat still and cold and pale.

The general, perfectly at ease, broke the silence. "I think Miss Gower
and I would get on faster alone."

Presbury at once stood up; his wife hesitated, her eyes uneasily upon
her daughter.  Presbury said: "Come on, Alice."  She rose and preceded
him into the adjoining conservatory.  The little general posed himself
before the huge open fire, one hand behind him, the other at the level
of his waistcoat, the big cigar between his first and second fingers.
"Well, my dear?" said he.

Mildred somewhat hesitatingly lifted her eyes; but, once she had them
up, their gaze held steadily enough upon his--too steadily for his
comfort.  He addressed himself to his cigar:

"I'm not quite ready to say I'm willing to go the limit," said he.  "We
don't exactly know each other sufficiently well as yet, do we?"

"No," said Mildred.

"I've been making inquiries," he went on; "that is, I had my chief
secretary make them--and he's a very thorough man, thanks to my
training.  He reports everything entirely all right.  I admire dignity
and reserve in a woman, and you have been very particular. Were you
engaged to Stanley Baird?"

Mildred flushed, veiled her eyes to hide their resentful flash at this
impertinence.  She debated with herself, decided that any rebuke short
of one that would anger him would be wasted upon him.  "No," said she.

"That agrees with Harding's report," said the general.  "It was a mere
girlish flirtation--very dignified and proper," he hastened to add.  "I
don't mean to suggest that you were at all flighty."

"Thank you," said Mildred sweetly.

"Are there any questions you would like to ask about me?" inquired he.

"No," said Mildred.

"As I understand it--from my talk with Presbury--you are willing to go
on?"

"Yes," said Mildred.

The general smiled genially.  "I think I may say without conceit that
you will like me as you know me better.  I have no bad habits--I've too
much regard for my health to over-indulge or run loose.  In my boyhood
days I may have put in rather a heavy sowing of wild oats"--the general
laughed; Mildred conjured up the wintriest and faintest of echoing
smiles--"but that's all past," he went on, "and there's nothing that
could rise up to interfere with our happiness.  You are fond of
children?"

A pause, then Mildred said quite evenly, "Yes."

"Excellent," said the general.  "I'll expect you and your mother and
father to dinner Sunday night.  Is that satisfactory?"

"Yes," said Mildred.

A longish pause.  Then the general:  "You seem to be a little--afraid
of me.  I don't know why it is that people are always that way with
me."  A halt, to give her the opportunity to say the obvious flattering
thing. Mildred said nothing, gave no sign.  He went on:  "It will wear
away as we know each other better.  I am a simple, plain man--kind and
generous in my instincts. Of course I am dignified, and I do not like
familiarity. But I do not mean to inspire fear and awe."

A still longer pause.  "Well, everything is settled," said the general.
"We understand each other clearly?--not an engagement, nothing binding
on either side--simply a--a--an option without forfeit."  And he
laughed--his laugh was a ghoulish sound, not loud but explosive and an
instant check upon demonstration of mirth from anyone else.

"I understand," said Mildred with a glance toward the door through
which Presbury and his wife had disappeared.

"Now, we'll join the others, and I'll show you the house"--again the
laugh--"what may be your future home--one of them."

The four were soon started upon what was for three of them a weariful
journey despite the elevator that spared them the ascents of the
stairways.  The house was an exaggerated reproduction of all the
establishments of the rich who confuse expenditure with luxury and
comfort.  Bill Siddall had bought "the best of everything"; that is,
the things into which the purveyors of costly furnishings have put the
most excuses for charging.  Of taste, of comfort, of discrimination,
there were few traces and these obviously accidental. "I picked out the
men acknowledged to be the best in their different lines," said the
general, "and I gave them carte blanche."

"I see that at a glance," said Presbury.  "You've done the grand thing
on the grandest possible scale."

"I've looked into the finest of the famous places on the other side,"
said the general.  "All I can say is, I've had no regrets."

"I should say not," cried Mrs. Presbury.

With an affectation of modest hesitation--to show that he was a
gentleman with a gentleman's fine appreciation of the due of maiden
modesty--Siddall paused at the outer door of his own apartments.  But
at one sentence of urging from Mrs. Presbury he opened the door and
ushered them in.  And soon he was showing them everything--his Carrara
marble bathroom and bathing-pool, his bed that had been used by several
French kings, his dressing-room with its appliances of gold and
platinum and precious stones, his clothing. They had to inspect a room
full of suits, huge chiffoniers crowded with shirts and ties and
underclothes. He exhibited silk dressing-robes and pajamas, pointed out
the marks of the fashionable London and Paris makers, the monograms,
the linings of ermine and sable. "I'm very particular about everything
that touches me," explained he.  "It seems to me a gentleman can't be
too particular."  With a meaning glance at Mildred, "And I'd feel the
same way about my wife."

"You hear that, Mildred?" said Presbury, with a nasty little laugh.  He
had been relieving the tedium of this sight-seeing tour by
observing--and from time to time aggravating--Mildred's sufferings.

The general released his mirth-strangling goat laugh; Mrs. Presbury
echoed it with a gale of rather wild hysterics.  So well pleased was
the general with the excursion and so far did he feel advanced toward
intimacy that on the way down the majestic marble stairway he ventured
to give Mildred's arm a gentle, playful squeeze.  And at the parting he
kissed her hand.  Presbury had changed his mind about returning to the
country.  On the way to the hotel he girded at Mildred, reviewing all
that the little general had said and done, and sneering, jeering at it.
Mildred made not a single retort until they were upstairs in the hotel.
At the door to her room she said to Presbury--said it in a quiet, cold,
terrible way:

"If you really want me to go through with this thing, you will stop
insulting him and me.  If you do it again, I'll give up--and go on the
streets before I'll marry him."

Presbury shrugged his shoulders and went on to the other room.  But he
did not begin again the next day, and from that time forth avoided
reference to the general.  In fact, there was an astonishing change in
his whole demeanor.  He ceased to bait his wife, became polite, even
affable.  If he had conducted himself thus from the outset, he would
have got far less credit, would have made far less progress toward
winning the liking of his wife, and of her daughter, than he did in a
brief two weeks of change from petty and malignant tyrant to
good-natured, interestingly talkative old gentleman. After the manner
of human nature, Mildred and her mother, in their relief, in their
pleasure through this amazing sudden and wholly unexpected geniality,
not merely forgave but forgot all they had suffered at his hands.
Mildred was not without a suspicion of the truth that this change,
inaugurated in his own good time, was fresh evidence of his contempt
for both of them--of his feeling that he could easily make reparation
with a little kindness and decency and put himself in the way of
getting any possible benefits from the rich alliance.  But though she
practically knew what was going on in his mind, she could not prevent
herself from softening toward him.

Now followed a succession of dinners, of theater- and opera-goings, of
week-ends at the general's new country palace in the fashionable region
of Long Island. All these festivities were of the same formal and
tedious character.  At all the general was the central sun with the
others dim and draggled satellites, hardly more important than the
outer rim of satellite servants.  He did most of the talking; he was
the sole topic of conversation; for when he was not talking about
himself he wished to be hearing about himself.  If Mildred had not been
seeing more and more plainly that other and real personality of his,
her contempt for him and for herself would have grown beyond control.
But, with him or away from him, at every instant there was the sense of
that other real William Siddall--a shadowy menace full of terror.  She
dreamed of it--was startled from sleep by visions of a monstrous and
mighty distortion of the little general's grotesque exterior.  "I shall
marry him if I can," she said to her self.  "But--can I?"  And she
feared and hoped that she could not, that courage would fail her, or
would come to her rescue, whichever it was, and that she would refuse
him.  Aside from the sense of her body that cannot but be with any
woman who is beautiful, she had never theretofore been especially
physical in thought.  That side of life had remained vague, as she had
never indulged in or even been strongly tempted with the things that
rouse it from its virginal sleep. But now she thought only of her body,
because that it was, and that alone, that had drawn this prospective
purchaser, and his eyes never let her forget it.  She fell into the
habit of looking at herself in the glass--at her face, at her
shoulders, at her whole person, not in vanity but in a kind of wonder
or aversion.  And in the visions, both the waking and the sleeping, she
reached the climax of horror when the monster touched her--with clammy,
creepy fingers, with munching lips, with the sharp ends of the mustache
or imperial.

Said Mrs. Presbury to her husband, "I'm afraid the general will be
irritated by Mildred's unresponsiveness."

"Don't worry," replied Presbury.  "He's so crazy about himself that he
imagines the whole world is in the same state."

"Isn't it strange that he doesn't give her presents? Never anything but
candy and flowers."

"And he never will," said Presbury.

"Not until they're married, I suppose."

Presbury was silent.

"I can't help thinking that if Milly were to rouse herself and show
some--some liking--or at least interest, it'd be wiser."

"She's taking the best possible course," said Presbury.  "Unconsciously
to both of them, she's leading him on.  He thinks that's the way a lady
should act--restrained, refined."

Mildred's attitude was simple inertia.  The most positive effort she
made was avoiding saying or doing anything to displease him--no
difficult matter, as she was silent and almost lifeless when he was
near.  Without any encouragement from her he gradually got a deep
respect for her--which meant that he became convinced of her coldness
and exclusiveness, of her absolute trustworthiness.  Presbury was more
profoundly right than he knew.  The girl pursued the only course that
made possible the success she longed for, yet dreaded and loathed.  For
at the outset Siddall had not been nearly so strongly in earnest in his
matrimonial project as he had professed and had believed himself.  He
wished to marry, wished to add to his possessions the admirable
show-piece and exhibition opportunity afforded by the right sort of
wife; but in the bottom of his heart he felt that such a woman as he
dreamed of did not exist in all the foolish, fickle, and shallow female
sex.  This girl--so cold, so proud, beautiful yet not eager to display
her charms or to have them praised--she was the rare bird he sought.

In a month he asked her to marry him; that is, he said:  "My dear, I
find that I am ready to go the limit--if you are."  And she assented.
He put his arm around her and kissed her cheek--and was delighted to
discover that the alluring embrace made no impression upon the ice of
her "purity and ladylike dignity."  Up to the very last moment of the
formal courtship he held himself ready to withdraw should she reveal to
his watchfulness the slightest sign of having any "unladylike"
tendencies or feelings.  She revealed no such sign, but remained
"ladylike"; and certainly, so the general reasoned, a woman who could
thus resist him, even in the license of the formal engagement, would
resist anybody.

As soon as the engagement was formally concluded, the general hurried
on the preparations for the wedding. He opened accounts at half a dozen
shops in New York--dressmakers, milliners, dealers in fine and
fashionable clothing of every kind--and gave them orders to execute
whatever commands Miss Gower or her mother--for HER--might give them.
When he told her of this munificence and magnificence and paused for
the outburst of gratitude, he listened in vain. Mildred colored to the
roots of her hair and was silent, was seeking the courage to refuse.

"I know that you and your people can't afford to do the thing as things
related to me must be done," he went on to say.  "So I decided to just
start in a little early at what I've got to do anyhow.  Not that I
blame you for your not having money, my dear.  On the contrary, that's
one of your merits with me.  I wouldn't marry a woman with money.  It
puts the family life on a wrong basis."

"I had planned a quiet wedding," said Mildred. "I'd much prefer it."

"Now you can be frank with me, my dear," said the general.  "I know you
ladies--how cheated you feel if you aren't married with all the frills
and fixings. So that's the way it shall be done."

"Really," protested Mildred, "I'm absolutely frank. I wish it to be
quite quiet--in our drawing-room, with no guests."

Siddall smiled, genial and tolerant.  "Don't argue with me, my dear.  I
know what you want, and I'll see that you get it.  Go ahead with these
shop-people I've put at your disposal--and go as far as you like. There
isn't anything--ANYTHING--in the way of clothes that you can't
have--that you mustn't have. Mrs. General Siddall is going to be the
best-dressed woman in the world--as she is the prettiest.  I haven't
opened an account for you with Tiffany's or any of those people.  I'll
look out for that part of the business, myself."

"I don't care for jewelry," said Mildred.

"Naturally not for the kind that's been within your means heretofore,"
replied he; "but you'll open your eyes when you see MY jewelry for MY
wife.  All in good time, my dear.  You and your mother must start right
in with the shopping; and, a week or so before the wedding, I'll send
my people down to transform the house.  I may be wrong, but I rather
think that the Siddall wedding will cause some talk."

He was not wrong.  Through his confidential secretary, Harding the
thorough, the newspaper press was induced to take an interest in the
incredible extravagance Siddall was perpetrating in arranging for a
fitting wedding for General William Siddall.  For many days before the
ceremony there were daily columns about him and his romantic career and
his romantic wooing of the New Jersey girl of excellent family and
social position but of comparatively modest means. The shopkeepers gave
interviews on the trousseau.  The decorators and caterers detailed the
splendors and the costliness of the preparations of which they had
charge. From morning until dark a crowd hung round the house at Hanging
Rock, and on the wedding day the streets leading to it were
blocked--chiefly with people come from a distance, many of them from
New York.

At the outset all this noise was deeply distasteful to Mildred, but
after a few days she recovered her normal point of view, forgot the
kind of man she was marrying in the excitement and exultation over her
sudden splendor and fame.  So strongly did the delusion presently
become, that she was looking at the little general with anything but
unfavorable eyes.  He seemed to her a quaint, fascinating, benevolent
necromancer, having miraculous powers which he was exercising in her
behalf. She even reproached herself with ingratitude in not being
wildly in love with him.  Would not any other girl, in her place, have
fallen over ears in love with this marvelous man?

However, while she could not quite convince herself that she loved, she
became convinced without effort that she was happy, that she was going
to be still happier. The excitement wrought her into a state of
exaltation and swept her through the wedding ceremony and the going
away as radiant a bride as a man would care to have.

There is much to be said against the noisy, showy wedding.  Certainly
love has rarely been known to degrade himself to the point of attending
any such.  But there is something to be said for that sort of married
start--for instance, where love is neither invited nor desired, an
effort must be made to cover the painful vacancy his absence always
causes.

The little general's insistence on a "real wedding" was most happy for
him.  It probably got him his bride.



III

THE intoxication of that wedding held on long enough and strongly
enough to soften and blunt the disillusionments of the first few days
of the honeymoon.  In the prospect that period had seemed, even to
Mildred's rather unsophisticated imagination, appalling beyond her
power to endure.  In the fact--thanks in large part to that
intoxication--it was certainly not unendurable.  A human being, even an
innocent young girl, can usually bear up under any experience to which
a human being can be subjected.  The general in pajamas--of the finest
silk and of pigeon's-egg blue with a vast gorgeous monogram on the
pocket--was more grotesque, rather than more repellent, than the
general in morning or evening attire.  Also he--that is, his expert
staff of providers of luxury--had arranged for the bride a series of
the most ravishing sensations in whisking her, like the heroine of an
Arabian Night's tale, from straitened circumstances to the very
paradise of luxury.

The general's ideas on the subject of woman were old fashioned, of the
hard-shell variety.  Woman was made for luxury, and luxury was made for
woman.  His woman must be the most divinely easeful of the luxurious.
At all times she must be fit and ready for any and every sybaritic idea
that might enter her husband's head--and other purpose she had none.
When she was not directly engaged in ministering to his joy she must be
busy preparing herself for his next call upon her.  A woman was a
luxury, was the luxury of luxuries, must have and must use to their
uttermost all capacities for gratifying his senses and his vanity.
Alone with him, she must make him constantly feel how rich and rare and
expensive a prize he had captured. When others were about, she must be
constantly making them envy and admire him for having exclusive rights
in such wonderful preserves.  All this with an inflexible devotion to
the loftiest ideals of chastity.

But the first realizations of her husband's notions as to women were
altogether pleasant.  As she entered the automobile in which they went
to the private car in the special train that took them to New York and
the steamer--as she entered that new and prodigally luxurious
automobile, she had a first, keen sense of her changed position.  Then
there was the superb private car--her car, since she was his wife--and
there was the beautiful suite in the magnificent steamer.  And at every
instant menials thrusting attentions upon her, addressing her as if she
were a queen, revealing in their nervous tones and anxious eyes their
eagerness to please, their fear of displeasing.  And on the steamer,
from New York to Cherbourg, she was never permitted to lose sight of
the material splendors that were now hers. All the servants, all the
passengers, reminded her by their looks, their tones.  At Paris, in the
hotel, in the restaurants, in the shops--especially in the shops--those
snobbish instincts that are latent in the sanest and the wisest of us
were fed and fattened and pampered until her head was quite turned.
And the general began to buy jewels for her.  Such jewels--ropes of
diamonds and pearls and emeralds, rings such as she had never dreamed
existed!  Those shopping excursions of theirs in the Rue de la Paix
would make such a tale as your ordinary simple citizen, ignorant of the
world's resources in luxury and therefore incredulous about them, would
read with a laugh at the extravagance of the teller.

Before the intoxication of the wedding had worn away it was re-enforced
by the intoxication of the honeymoon--not an intoxication of love's
providing, but one exceeding potent in its influence upon our weak
human brains and hearts, one from which the strongest of us, instead of
sneering at poor Mildred, would better be praying to be delivered.

At her marriage she had a few hundred dollars left of her
patrimony--three hundred and fifty and odd, to be more exact.  She
spent a little money of her own here and there--in tips, in buying
presents for her mother, in picking up trifles for her own toilet.  The
day came when she looked in her purse and found two one-franc pieces, a
fifty-franc note, and a few coppers. And suddenly she sat back and
stared, her mouth open like her almost empty gold bag, which the
general had bought her on their first day in the Rue de la Paix. About
ten dollars in all the world, and the general had forgotten to
speak--or to make any arrangement, at least any arrangement of which
she was aware--about a further supply of money.

They had been married nearly a month.  He knew that she was poor.  Why
hadn't he said something or, better still, DONE something?  Doubtless
he had simply forgotten.  But since he had forgotten for a month, might
he not continue to forget?  True, he had himself been poor at one time
in his life, very poor, and that for a long time.  But it had been so
many years ago that he had probably lost all sense of the meaning of
poverty.  She frowned at this evidence of his lack of the finer
sensibilities--by no means the first time that lack had been
disagreeably thrust upon her.  Soon she would be without money--and she
must have money--not much, as all the serious expenses were looked
after by the general, but still a little money.  How could she get it?
How could she remind him of his neglect without seeming to be
indelicate?  It was a difficult problem.  She worked at it more and
more continuously, and irritably, and nervously, as the days went by
and her fifty-two francs dwindled to five.

She lay awake, planning long and elaborate conversations that would
imperceptibly lead him up to where he must see what she needed without
seeing that he had been led.  She carried out these ingenious
conversations. She led him along, he docilely and unsuspectingly
following.  She brought him up to where it seemed to her impossible for
any human being endowed with the ordinary faculties to fail to see what
was so plainly in view.  All in vain.  General William Siddall gazed
placidly--and saw nothing.

Several days of these failures, and with her funds reduced to a
fifty-centime piece and a two-sous copper she made a frontal attack.
When they went forth for the day's shopping she left her gold bag
behind.  After an hour or so she said:

"I've got to go to the Galleries Lafayette for some little things.  I
shan't ask you to sacrifice yourself.  I know you hate those stuffy,
smelly big shops."

"Very well," said he.  "I'll use the time in a call on my bankers."

As they were about to separate, she taking the motor and he walking,
she made a face of charming dismay and said:  "How provoking!  I've
left my bag at the hotel."

Instead of the expected prompt offer of money he said, "It'll only take
you a minute or so to drive there."

"But it's out of the way," she replied.  "I'll need only a hundred
francs or so."

Said he:  "I've an account at the Bon Marche.  Go there and have the
things charged.  It's much the best big shop in Paris."

"Very well," was all she could trust herself to say. She concealed her
anger beneath a careless smile and drove away.  How dense he was! Could
anything be more exasperating--or more disagreeable?  What SHOULD she
do?  The situation was intolerable; yet how could it be ended, except
by a humiliating direct request for money?  She wondered how young
wives habitually dealt with this problem, when they happened to marry
husbands so negligent, not to say underbred, as to cause them the
awkwardness and the shame.  There followed several days during which
the money idea was an obsession, nagging and grinning at her every
instant.  The sight of money gave her a peculiar itching sensation.
When the little general paid for anything--always drawing out a great
sheaf of bank notes in doing it--she flushed hot and cold, her glance
fell guiltily and sought the money furtively.  At last her desperation
gave birth to an inspiration.

About her and the general, or, rather, about the general, revolved the
usual rich man's small army of satellites of various
degrees--secretaries, butlers, footmen, valets, other servants male and
female, some of them supposed to be devoted entirely to her service,
but all in fact looking ever to the little general.  The members of
this company, regardless of differences of rank and pay, were banded
together in a sort of democratic fellowship, talking freely with one
another, on terms of perfect equality.  She herself had, curiously,
gotten on excellent terms with this motley fraternity and found no
small relief from the strain of the general's formal dignity in talking
with them with a freedom and ease she had never before felt in the
society of underlings. The most conspicuous and most agreeable figure
in this company was Harding, the general's factotum.  Why not lay the
case before Harding?  He was notably sensible, and sympathetic--and
discreet.

The following day she did so.  Said she, blushing furiously:  "Mr.
Harding, I find myself in a very embarrassing position.  I wonder if
you can help me?"

Harding, a young man and of one of the best blond types, said:  "No
doubt I can--and I'll be glad to."

"The fact is"--  Her voice was trembling with nervousness.  She opened
the gold bag, took out the little silver pieces and the big copper
piece, extended her pink palm with them upon it--"there's all I've got
left of the money I brought with me."

Harding gazed at the exhibit tranquilly.  He was chiefly remarkable for
his perfect self-possession.  Said he:  "Do you wish me to cash a check
for you?"

The stupidity of men!  Tears of vexation gathered in her eyes.  When
she could speak she faltered:

"No."

He was looking at her now--a grave, kind glance.

She somehow felt encouraged and heartened.  She went on:  "I was
hoping--that--that the gen--that my husband had said something to you
and that you perhaps had not thought to say anything to me."

Their glances met, his movingly sympathetic and understanding, hers
piteously forlorn--the look of a lovely girl, stranded and friendless
in a far strange land.  Presently he said gently:

"Yes, he told me to say something to you--if you should speak to me
about this matter."  His tone caused in her heart a horrible stillness
of suspense.  He went on:  "He said--I give you his exact words: 'If my
wife should ask you for money, tell her my ideas on the subject.'"

A pause.  She started up, crimson, her glance darting nervously this
way and that to avoid his.  "Never mind.  Really, it's of no
importance.  Thank you--I'll get on very well--I'm sorry to have
troubled you--"

"Pardon me, Mrs. Siddall," he interposed, "but I think you'd best let
me finish."

She started to protest, she tried to move toward the door.  Her
strength failed her, she sat down, waited, nervously clasping and
unclasping the costly, jewel-embroidered bag.

"He has explained to me, many times," continued Harding, "that he
believes women do not understand the value of money and ought not to be
trusted with it. He proposes to provide everything for you, every
comfort and luxury--I am using his own language, Mrs. Siddall--and he
has open accounts at the principal shops in every city where you will
go--New York, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Paris, London, Rome. He says
you are at liberty to get practically anything you please at these
shops, and he will pay the bills. He thus entirely spares you the
necessity of ever spending any money.  Should you see anything you wish
at some shop where he has no account, you can have it sent collect, and
I or my assistant, Mr. Drawl, will settle for it.  All he asks is that
you use discretion in this freedom.  He says it would be extremely
painful to him to have to withdraw it."

Harding had pronounced this long speech in a dry monotonous voice, like
one reading mechanically from a dull book.  As Mildred listened, her
thoughts began to whirl about the central idea until she fell into a
kind of stupor.  When he finished she was staring vacantly at the bag
in her lap--the bag she was holding open wide.

Harding continued:  "He also instructed me to say something about his
former--his experiences.  The first Mrs. Siddall he married when he was
very young and poor.  As he grew rich, she became madly extravagant.
And as they had started on a basis on which she had free access to his
money he could not check her. The result, finally, was a succession of
bitter quarrels, and they were about to divorce when she died.  He made
the second Mrs. Siddall an allowance, a liberal allowance.  Her follies
compelled him to withdraw it. She resorted to underhanded means to get
money from him without his knowing it.  He detected the fraud. After a
series of disagreeable incidents she committed the indiscretion which
caused him to divorce her.  He says that these experiences have
convinced him that--"

"The second Mrs. Siddall," interrupted Mildred, "is she still alive?"

Harding hesitated.  "Yes," he said reluctantly.

"Is she--poor?" asked Mildred.

"I should prefer not to--"

"Did the general forbid you to tell me?"

"On the contrary, he instructed me--  But I'd rather not talk about it,
Mrs. Siddall."

"Is she poor?" repeated Mildred.

"Yes."

"What became of her?"

A long pause.  Then Harding said:  "She was a poor girl when the
general married her.  After the divorce she lived for a while with the
man.  But he had nothing.  They separated.  She tried various kinds of
work--and other things.  Since she lost her looks--  She writes from
time to time, asking for money."

"Which she never gets?" said Mildred.

"Which she never gets," said Harding.  "Lately she was cashier or head
waitress in a cheap restaurant in St. Louis."

After a long silence Mildred said:  "I understand. I understand."  She
drew a long breath.  "I shall understand better as time goes on, but I
understand fairly well now."

"I need not tell you, Mrs. Siddall," said Harding in his gentle,
tranquil way, "that the general is the kindest and most generous of
men, but he has his own methods--as who has not?"

Mildred had forgotten that he was there--not a difficult matter, when
he had in its perfection the secretarial manner of complete
self-effacement.  Said she reflectively, like one puzzling out a
difficult problem:

"He buys a woman, as he buys a dog or a horse. He does not give his
dog, his horse, pocket-money. Why should he give his woman
pocket-money?"

"Will it help matters, Mrs. Siddall, to go to the other extreme and do
him a grave injustice?"

She did not hear.  At the picture presented to her mind by her own
thoughts she gave a short satirical laugh.  "How stupid of me not to
have understood from the outset," said she.  "Why, I've often heard of
this very thing."

"It is more and more the custom among men of large property, I
believe," said Harding.  "Perhaps, Mrs. Siddall, you would not blame
them if you were in their position.  The rich men who are
careless--they ruin everybody about them, I assure you.  I've seen it
again and again."

But the young wife was absorbed in her own thoughts.  Harding, feeling
her mood, did not interrupt. After a while she said:

"I must ask you some questions.  These jewels the general has been
buying--"

Harding made a movement of embarrassment and protest.  She smiled
ironically and went on:

"One moment, please.  Every time I wish to wear any of them I have to
go to him to get them.  He asks me to return them when I am undressing.
He says it is safer to keep everything in his strong box.  I have been
assuming that that was the only reason.  I begin to suspect--  Am I
right, Mr. Harding?"

"Really I can't say, Mrs. Siddall," said Harding. "These are not
matters to discuss with me, if you will permit me to say so."

"Oh, yes, they are," replied she laughingly. "Aren't we all in the same
boat?--all employes of the general?"

Harding made no reply.

Mildred was beside herself with a kind of rage that, because outlet was
necessary and because raving against the little general would be
absolutely futile, found outlet in self-mockery and reckless sarcasm.

"I understand about the jewels, too," she went on. "They are not mine.
Nothing is mine.  Everything, including myself, belongs to him.  If I
give satisfaction in the position for which I've been hired for my
board and clothes, I may continue to eat the general's food and sleep
in the general's house and wear the general's jewels and dresses and
ride in the general's traps and be waited on by the general's servants.
If I don't like my place or he doesn't like my way of filling it"--she
laughed merrily, mockingly--"out I go--into the streets--after the
second Mrs. Siddall.  And the general will hire a new--"  She paused,
cast about for a word in vain, appealed to the secretary, "What would
you call it, Mr. Harding?"

Harding rose, looking at her with a very soothing tranquillity.  "If I
were you, Mrs. Siddall," said he, "I should get into the auto and go
for a long drive--out to the Bois--out to Versailles--a long, long
drive.  I should be gone four or five hours at least, and I should look
at the thing from all sides.  Especially, I'd look at it from HIS
standpoint."

Mildred, somewhat quieter, but still mocking, said: "If I should decide
to quit, would my expenses be paid back to where I was engaged?  I
fancy not."

Harding looked grave.  "If you had had money enough to pay your own
expenses about, would you have married him?" said he.  "Isn't he
paying--paying liberally, Mrs. Siddall--for ALL he gets?"

Mildred, stung, drew herself up haughtily, gave him a look that
reminded him who she was and who he was. But Harding was not impressed.

"You said a moment ago--truly--that we are all in the same boat,"
observed he.  "I put those questions to you because I honestly wish to
help you--because I wish you not to act foolishly, hastily."

"Thank you, Mr. Harding," said Mildred coldly. And with a slight nod
she went, angry and ashamed that she had so unaccountably opened up her
secret soul, bared its ugly wounds, before a man she knew so slightly,
a man in a position but one remove from menial.  However, she took his
advice--not as to trying to view the matter from all sides, for she was
convinced that there was only the one side, but as to calming herself
by a long drive alone in the woods and along quiet roads.  When she
returned she was under control once more.

She found the general impatiently awaiting her. Many packages had
come--from the jewelers, from the furriers, from a shop whose specialty
was the thinnest and most delicate of hand-made underwear.  The general
loved to open and inspect finery for her--loved it more than he loved
inspecting finery for himself, because feminine finery was far more
attractive than masculine.  To whet his pleasure to the keenest she
must be there to admire with him, to try on, to exhibit.  As she
entered the salon where the little man was fussing about among the
packages, their glances met.  She saw that Harding had told him--at
least in discreet outline--of their conversation.  She also saw that if
she reopened the subject she would find herself straightway whirled out
upon a stormy sea of danger that might easily overwhelm her flimsy
boat.  She silently and sullenly dropped into her place; she ministered
to the general's pleasure in packages of finery. But she did not
exclaim, or admire, or respond in any way.  The honeymoon was over. Her
dream of wifehood was dissipated.

She understood now the look she so often had seen on the faces of rich
men's poor wives driving in state in Fifth Avenue.  That night, as she
inspected herself in the glass while the general's maid for her brushed
her long thick hair, she saw the beginnings of that look in her own
face.  "I don't know just what I am," she said to herself.  "But I do
know what I am not.  I am not a wife."

She sent away the maid, and sat there in the dressing-room before the
mirror, waiting, her glance traveling about and noting the profuse and
prodigal luxury.  In the corner stood a circular rack loaded with
dressing-gowns--more than a score of exquisite combinations of silk and
lace or silk and chiffon.  It so happened that there was nowhere in
sight a single article of her apparel or for her toilet that was not
bought with the general's money.  No, there were some hairpins that she
had paid for herself, and a comb with widely separated teeth that she
had chanced to see in a window when she was alone one day.  Anything
else? Yes, a two-franc box of pins.  And that was all. Everything else
belonged to the general.  In the closets, in the trunks--all the
general's, part of the trousseau he had paid for.  Not an undergarment;
not an outer garment; not a hat or a pair of shoes, not a wrap, not a
pair of gloves.  All, the general's.

He was in the door of the dressing-room--the small wiry figure in
rose-silk pajamas.  The mustache and imperial were carefully waxed as
always, day and night. On the little feet were high-heeled slippers. On
the head was a rose-silk Neapolitan nightcap with gay tassel. The
nightcap hid the bald spot from which the lofty toupee had been
removed.  A grotesque little figure, but not grotesque to her.  Through
the mask of the vain, boastful little face she saw the general watching
her, as she had seen him that afternoon when she came in--the
mysterious and terrible personality that had made the vast fortune,
that had ridden ruthlessly over friend and foe, over man and woman and
child--to the goal of its desires.

"It's late, my dear?" said the little man.  "Come to bed."

She rose to obey--she in the general's purchases of filmy nightgown
under a pale-pink silk dressing-gown.

He smiled with that curious noiseless mumbling and smacking of the thin
lips.  She sat down again.

"Don't keep me waiting.  It's chilly," he said, advancing toward her.

"I shall sleep in here to-night--on the couch," said she.  She was
trembling with fright at her own audacity. She could see a
fifty-centime piece and a copper dancing before her eyes.  She felt
horribly alone and weak, but she had no desire to retract the words
with which she had thrown down the gauntlet.

The little general halted.  The mask dropped; the man, the monster,
looked at her.  "What's the matter?" said he in an ominously quiet
voice.

"Mr. Harding delivered your message to-day," said she, and her steady
voice astonished her.  "So I am going back home."

He waited, looking steadily at her.

"After he told me and I thought about it, I decided to submit, but just
now I saw that I couldn't.  I don't know what possesses me.  I don't
know what I'm going to do, or how I'm going to do it.  But it's all
over between us."  She said this rapidly, fluently, in a decisive way,
quite foreign to her character as she had thought it.

"You are coming to bed, where you belong," said he quietly.

"No," replied she, pressing herself against her chair as if force were
being used to drag her from it.  She cast about for something that
would make yielding impossible.  "You are--repulsive to me."

He looked at her without change of countenance. Said he:  "Come to bed.
I ask you for the last time."

There was no anger in his voice, no menace either open or covert;
simply finality--the last word of the man who had made himself feared
and secure in the mining-camps where the equation of personal courage
is straightway applied to every situation.  Mildred shivered.  She
longed to yield, to stammer out some excuse and obey him.  But she
could not; nor was she able to rise from her chair.  She saw in his
hard eyes a look of astonishment, of curiosity as to this unaccountable
defiance in one who had seemed docile, who had apparently no
alternative but obedience.  He was not so astonished at her as she was
at herself.  "What is to become of me?" her terror-stricken soul was
crying. "I must do as he says--I must--yet I cannot!" And she looked at
him and sat motionless.

He turned away, moved slowly toward the door, halted at the threshold
to give her time, was gone.  A fit of trembling seized her; she leaned
forward and rested her arms upon the dressing-table or she would have
fallen from the chair to the floor.  Yet, even as her fear made her
sick and weak, she knew that she would not yield.

The cold drove her to the couch, to lie under half a dozen of the
dressing-gowns and presently to fall into a sleep of exhaustion.  When
she awoke after what she thought was a few minutes of unconsciousness,
the clamor of traffic in the Rue de Rivoli startled her.  She started
up, glanced at the clock on the chimneypiece. It was ten minutes past
nine!  When, by all the rules governing the action of the nerves, she
ought to have passed a wakeful night she had overslept more than an
hour.  Indeed, she had had the first sound and prolonged sleep that had
come to her since the honeymoon began; for until then she had slept
alone all her life and the new order had almost given her chronic
insomnia. She rang for her maid and began to dress.  The maid did not
come.  She rang again and again; apparently the bell was broken.  She
finished dressing and went out into the huge, grandly and gaudily
furnished salon.  Harding was at a carved old-gold and lacquer desk,
writing.  As she entered he rose and bowed.

"Won't you please call one of the servants?" said she.  "I want my
coffee.  I guess the bell in my room is broken.  My maid doesn't
answer."

"No, the bell is not broken," said Harding.

She looked at him questioningly.

"The general has issued an order that nothing is to be done in this
apartment, and nothing served, unless he personally authorizes it."

Mildred paled, drew herself up in what seemed a gesture of haughtiness
but was an effort to muster her strength.  To save herself from the
humiliation of a breakdown before him, she hastily retreated by the way
she had come.  After perhaps a quarter of an hour she reappeared in the
salon; she was now dressed for the street.  Harding looked up from his
writing, rose and bowed gravely.  Said she:

"I am going out for a walk.  I'll be back in an hour or so."

"One moment," said Harding, halting her as she was opening the door
into the public hall.  "The general has issued an order that if you go
out, you are not to be allowed to return."

Her hand fell from the knob.  With flashing eyes she cried, "But that
is impossible!"

"It is his orders," said Harding, in his usual quiet manner.  "And as
he pays the bills he will be obeyed."

She debated.  Against her will, her trembling hand sought the knob
again.  Against her will, her weak arm began to draw the door open.
Harding came toward her, stood before her and looked directly into her
eyes. His eyes had dread and entreaty in them, but his voice was as
always when he said:

"You know him, Mrs. Siddall."

"Yes," she said.

"The reason he has got ALL he wanted--whatever he wanted--is that he
will go to any length.  Every other human being, almost, has a limit,
beyond which they will not go--a physical fear or a moral fear or a
fear of public opinion.  But the general--he has no limit."

"Yes," she said.  And deathly pale and almost staggering she drew open
the door and went out into the public hall.

"For God's sake, Mrs. Siddall!" cried Harding, in great agitation.
"Come in quickly.  They are watching--they will tell him!  Are you mad?"

"I think I must be," said she.  "I am sick with fear. I can hardly keep
from dropping down here in a faint. Yet--" a strange look, a mingling
of abject terror and passionate defiance, gave her an aspect quite
insane--"I am going.  Perhaps I, too, have no limit."

And she went along the corridor, past a group of gaping and frightened
servants, down the stairway and out by the private entrance for the
grand apartments of the hotel in the Rue Raymond de l'Isle.  She
crossed the Rue de Rivoli and entered the Tuileries Gardens. It was
only bracingly cool in the sunshine of that winter day.  She seated
herself on a chair on the terrace to regain her ebbed strength.  Hardly
had she sat down when the woman collector came and stood waiting for
the two sous for the chair.  Mildred opened her bag, found two coins.
She gave the coppers to the woman.  The other--all the money she
had--was the fifty-centime piece.

"But the bag--I can get a good deal for that," she said aloud.

"I beg your pardon--I didn't catch that."

She came back to a sense of her surroundings.  Stanley Baird was
standing a few feet away, smiling down at her.  He was, if possible,
even more attractively dressed than in the days when he hovered about
her, hoping vague things of which he was ashamed and trying to get the
courage to put down his snobbishness and marry her because she so
exactly suited him.  He was wearing a new kind of collar and tie,
striking yet in excellent quiet taste.  Also, his face and figure had
filled out just enough--he had been too thin in the former days.  But
he was now entered upon that period of the fearsome forties when,
unless a man amounts to something, he begins to look insignificant.  He
did not amount to anything; he was therefore paling and waning as a
personality.

"Was I thinking aloud?" said Mildred, as she gave him her hand.

"You said something about 'getting a good deal.'" He inspected her with
the freedom of an old friend and with the thoroughness of a
connoisseur.  Women who took pains with themselves and were satisfied
with the results liked Stanley Baird's knowing and appreciative way of
noting the best points in their toilets.  "You're looking fine,"
declared he.  "It must be a pleasure to them up in the Rue de la Paix
to dress you.  That's more than can be said for nine out of ten of the
women who go there.  Yes, you're looking fine--and in grand health,
too.  Why, you look younger than I ever saw you.  Nothing like marriage
to freshen a girl up. Well, I suppose waiting round for a husband who
may or may not turn up does wear a woman down."

"It almost killed me," laughed Mildred.  "And you were largely
responsible."

"I?" said Baird.  "You didn't want me.  I was too old for you."

"No, I didn't want you," said Mildred.  "But you spoiled me.  I
couldn't endure the boys of my own age."

Stanley was remembering that Mildred had married a man much older than
he.  With some notion of a careless sort of tact in mind he said, "I
was betwixt and between--neither young enough nor old enough."

"You've married, too, since we met.  By the way, thank you again for
that charming remembrance. You always did have such good taste.  But
why didn't you come to the wedding--you and your wife?"

He laughed.  "We were busy busting up," said he. "You hadn't heard?
It's been in the papers.  She's gone back to her people.  Oh, nothing
disgraceful on either side.  Simply that we bored each other to death.
She was crazy about horses and dogs, and that set.  I think the
stable's the place for horses--don't care to have 'em parading through
the house all the time, every room, every meal, sleeping and waking.
And dogs--the infernal brutes always have fleas.  Fleas only tickled
her, but they bite me--raise welts and hills.  There's your husband
now, isn't it?"

Baird was looking up at the windows of the Continental, across the
street.  Mildred's glance slowly and carelessly followed his.  At one
window stood the little general, gazing abstractedly out over the
gardens.  At another window Mildred saw Harding; at a third, her maid;
at a fourth, Harding's assistant, Drawl; at a fifth, three servants of
the retinue.  Except the general, all were looking at her.

"You've married a very extraordinary man," said Baird, in a correct
tone of admiration.  "One of the ablest and most interesting men we've
got, _I_ think."

"So you are free again?" said Mildred, looking at him with a queer,
cold smile.

"Yes, and no," replied Stanley.  "I hope to be entirely free.  It's her
move next.  I'm expecting it every day.  But I'm thoroughly
respectable.  Won't you and the general dine with me?"

"Thanks, but I'm sailing for home to-morrow or next day."

"That's interesting," said Baird, with enthusiasm. "So am I.  What ship
do you go on?"

"I don't know yet.  I'm to decide this afternoon, after lunch."  She
laughed.  "I'm sitting here waiting for someone to ask me to lunch.
I've not had even coffee yet."

"Lunch with me!" cried Baird.  "I'll go get the general--I know him
slightly."

"I didn't say anything about the general," said Mildred.

Stanley smiled apologetically.  "It wouldn't do for you to go about
with me--not when my missus is looking for grounds for divorce."

"Why not?" said Mildred.  "So's my husband."

"You busted up, too?  Now, that's what _I_ call jolly."  And he cast a
puzzled glance up at the abstracted general.  "I say, Mildred, this is
no place for either of us, is it?"

"I'd rather be where there's food," confessed she.

"You think it's a joke, but I assure you--  Oh, you WERE joking--about
YOUR bust-up?"

"No, indeed," she assured him.  "I walked out a while ago, and I
couldn't go back if I would--and I don't think I would if I could."

"That's foolish.  Better go back," advised he.  He was preparing
hastily to decamp from so perilous a neighborhood.  "One marriage is
about like another, once you get through the surface.  I'm sure you'll
be better off than--back with your stepfather."

"I've no intention of going to his house," she declared. "Oh, there's
your brother.  I forgot."

"So had I forgotten him.  I'll not go there, either. In fact, I've not
thought where I'll go."

"You seem to have done mighty little thinking before you took a very
serious step for a woman."  He was uneasily eying the rigid, abstracted
little figure a story up across the way.

"Those things aren't a question of thinking," said she absently.  "I
never thought in my life--don't think I could if I tried.  But when the
time came I--I walked out."  She came back to herself, laughed. "I
don't understand why I'm telling you all this, especially as you're mad
with fright and wild to get away. Well, good-by, Stanley."

He lifted his hat.  "Good-by.  We'll meet when we can do so without my
getting a scandal on you."  He walked a few paces, turned, and came
back.  "By the way, I'm sailing on the Deutschland.  I thought you'd
like to know--so that you and I wouldn't by any chance cross on the
same boat."

"Thanks," said she dryly.

"What's the matter?" asked he, arrested, despite his anxiety to be
gone, by the sad, scornful look in her eyes.

"Nothing.  Why?"

"You had such a--such a queer look."

"Really?  Good-by."

In fact, she had thought--had hoped for the sake of her liking for
him--that he had come back to make the glaringly omitted offer of help
that should have come from any human being learning that a fellow being
was in the precarious position in which she had told him she was.  Not
that she would have accepted any such offer.  Still, she would have
liked to have heard the kindly words.  She sat watching his handsome,
graceful figure, draped in the most artistically cut of long dark
overcoats, until he disappeared in the crowd in the Rue de Castiglione.
Then, without a glance up at the interested, not to say excited windows
of the general's splendid and spreading apartments, she strolled down
the gardens toward the Place Concorde. In Paris the beautiful, on a
bright and brisk day it is all but impossible to despair when one still
has left youth and health.  Mildred was not happy--far from it.  The
future, the immediate future, pressed its terrors upon her.  But in
mitigation there was, perhaps born of youth and inexperience, a giddy
sense of relief. She had not realized how abhorrent the general
was--married life with the general.  She had been resigning herself to
it, accepting it as the only thing possible, keeping it heavily draped
with her vanities of wealth and luxury--until she discovered that the
wealth and the luxury were in reality no more hers than they were her
maid's. And now she was free!

That word free did not have its full meaning for her. She had never
known what real freedom was; women of the comfortable class--and men,
too, for that matter--usually are born into the petty slavery of
conventions at least, and know nothing else their whole lives
through--never know the joy of the thought and the act of a free mind
and a free heart.  Still, she was released from a bondage that seemed
slavish even to her, and the release gave her a sensation akin to the
joy of freedom.  A heavy hand that was crushing her very soul had been
lifted off--no, FLUNG off, and by herself. That thought, terrifying
though it was, also gave her a certain new and exalting self-respect.
After all, she was not a worm.  She must have somewhere in her the
germs of something less contemptible than the essential character of so
many of the eminently respectable women she knew.  She could picture
them in the situation in which she had found herself.  What would they
have done?  Why, what every instinct of her education impelled her to
do; what some latent love of freedom, some unsuspected courage of
self-respect had forbidden her to do, had withheld her from doing.

Her thoughts and the gorgeous sunshine and her youth and health put her
in a steadily less cheerless mood as by a roundabout way she sought the
shop of the jeweler who sold the general the gold bag she had selected.
The proprietor himself was in the front part of the shop and received
"Madame la Generale" with all the honors of her husband's wealth.  She
brought no experience and no natural trading talent to the enterprise
she was about to undertake; so she went directly to the main point.

"This bag," said she, laying it upon the glass between them, "I bought
it here a short time ago."

"I remember perfectly, madame.  It is the handsomest, the most
artistic, we have sold this year."

"I wish to sell it back to you," said she.

"You wish to get something else and include it as part payment, madame?"

"No, I wish to get the money for it."

"Ah, but that is difficult.  We do not often make those arrangements.
Second-hand articles--"

"But the bag is quite new.  Anyhow, it must have some value.  Of course
I'd not expect the full price."

The jeweler smiled.  "The full price?  Ah, madame, we should not think
of offering it again as it is. We should--"

"No matter," interrupted Mildred.  The man's expression--the normally
pleasant and agreeable countenance turned to repulsive by craft and
lying--made her eager to be gone.  "What is the most you will give me?"

"I shall have to consider--"

"I've only a few minutes.  Please do not irritate me."

The man was studying her countenance with a desperate look.  Why was
she, the bride of the monstrously rich American, why was she trying to
sell the bag?  Did it mean the end of her resources?  Or, were there
still huge orders to be got from her?  His shrewdness, trained by
thirty years of dealing with all kinds of luxurious human beings, went
exploring in vain.  He was alarmed by her frown.  He began hesitatingly:

"The jewels and the gold are only a small part of the value.  The chief
value is the unique design, so elegant yet so simple.  For the jewels
and the gold, perhaps two thousand francs--"

"The purse was twelve thousand francs," interrupted she.

"Perfectly, madame.  But--" "I am in great haste.  How much will you
give me?"

"The most would be four thousand, I fear.  I shall count up more
carefully, if madame will--"

"No, four thousand will do."

"I will send the money to madame at her hotel.  The Continental, is it
not?"

"No, I must have it at once."

The jeweler hesitated.  Mildred, flushing scarlet with shame--but he
luckily thought it anger--took up the bag and moved toward the door.

"Pardon, madame, but certainly.  Do you wish some gold or all notes?"

"Notes," answered she.  "Fifty and hundred-franc notes."

A moment later she was in the street with the notes in a small bundle
in the bosom of her wrap.  She went hurriedly up the street.  As she
was about to turn the corner into the boulevard she on impulse glanced
back. An automobile had just drawn up at the jeweler's door and General
Siddall--top-hat, sable-lined overcoat, waxed mustache and imperial,
high-heeled boots, gold-mounted cane--was descending.  And she knew
that he had awakened to his one oversight, and was on his way to repair
it.  But she did not know that the jeweler--old and wise in human
ways--would hastily vanish with the bag and that an assistant would
come forward with assurances that madame had not been in the shop and
that, if she should come in, no business would be negotiated without
the general's express consent.  She all but fainted at the narrowness
of her escape and fled round into the boulevard.  She entered a taxi
and told the man to drive to Foyot's restaurant on the left bank--where
the general would never think of looking for her.

When she had breakfasted she strolled in the Luxembourg Gardens, in
even better humor with herself and with the world.  There was still
that horrid-faced future, but it was not leering into her very face. It
was nearly four thousand francs away--"and if I hadn't been so stupid,
I'd have got eight thousand, I'm sure," she said.  But she was rather
proud of a stupidity about money matters.  And four thousand francs,
eight hundred dollars--that was quite a good sum.

She had an instinct that the general would do something disagreeable
about the French and English ports of departure for America.  But
perhaps he would not think of the Italian ports.  That night she set
out for Genoa, and three days later, in a different dress and with her
hair done as she never wore it, sailed as Miss Mary Stevens for America
on a German Mediterranean boat.

She had taken the whole of a cabin on the quieter deck below the
promenade, paying for it nearly half of what was left of the four
thousand francs.  The first three days she kept to her cabin except at
the dinner-hour, when she ventured to the deck just outside and walked
up and down for exercise.  Then followed four days of nasty weather
during which she did not leave her bed.  As the sea calmed, she,
wretched and reckless, had a chair put for herself under her window and
sat there, veiled and swathed and turning her face away whenever a rare
wandering passenger happened to pass along.  Toward noon a man paused
before her to light a cigarette.  She, forgetting for the moment her
precautions, looked at him.  It chanced that he looked at her at
exactly the same instant.  Their glances met.  He started nervously,
moved on a few steps, returned.  Said she mockingly:

"You know you needn't speak if you don't want to, Stanley."

"There isn't a soul on board that anybody ever knew or that ever knew
anybody," said he.  "So why not?"

"And you look horribly bored."

"Unspeakably," replied Baird.  "I've spoken to no one since I left
Paris."

"What are you doing on this ship?" inquired she.

"To be perfectly honest," said he, "I came this way to avoid you.  I
was afraid you'd take passage on my steamer just to amuse yourself with
my nervousness. And--here you are!"

"Amusing myself with your nervousness."

"But I'm not nervous.  There's no danger.  Will you let me have a chair
put beside yours?"

"It will be a charity on your part," said she.

When he was comfortably settled, he explained his uneasiness.  "I see
I've got to tell you," said he, "for I don't want you to think me a
shouting ass.  The fact is my wife wants to get a divorce from me and
to soak me for big alimony.  She's a woman who'll do anything to gain
her end, and--well, for some reason she's always been jealous of you. I
didn't care to get into trouble, or to get you into trouble."

"I'm traveling as Mary Stevens," said Mildred. "No one knows I'm
aboard."

"Oh, I'm sure we're quite safe.  We can enjoy the rest of this voyage."

A sea voyage not merely induces but compels a feeling of absolute
detachment from the world.  To both Stanley and Mildred their
affairs--the difficulties in which they were involved on terra
firma--ceased for the time to have any reality.  The universe was
nothing but a vast stretch of water under a vast stretch of sky; the
earth and the things thereof were a retrospect and a foreboding.
Without analyzing it, both he and she felt that they were free--free
from cares, from responsibilities--free to amuse themselves.  And they
proceeded to enjoy themselves in the necessarily quiet and limited way
imposed by the littleness of their present world and the meagerness of
the resources.

As neither had the kind of mind that expands in abstractions, they were
soon talking in the most intimate and personal way about
themselves--were confessing things which neither would have breathed to
anyone on land.  It was the man who set the example of breaking through
the barriers of conventional restraint--perhaps of delicacy, though it
must be said that human beings are rarely so fine in their reticences
as the theory of refinement would have us believe.  Said Stanley, after
the preliminaries of partial confidence and halting avowal that could
not be omitted, even at sea, by a man of "gentlemanly instinct":

"I don't know why I shouldn't own up.  I know you'll never tell
anybody.  Fact is, I and my wife were never in love with each other for
a second.  We married because we were in the same set and because our
incomes together gave us enough to do the thing rather well." After a
solemn pause.  "I was in love with another woman--one I couldn't marry.
But I'll not go into that.  As for my wife, I don't think she was in
love with anyone.  She's as cold as a stone."

Mildred smiled ironically.

Baird saw and flushed.  "At least, she was to me. I was ready to make a
sort of bluff.  You see, a man feels guilty in those circumstances and
doesn't want to humiliate a woman.  But she--" he laughed
unpleasantly--"she wasn't bothering about MY feelings. That's a nice,
selfish little way you ladies have."

"She probably saw through you and hated you for playing the hypocrite
to her," said Mildred.

"You may be right, I never thought of that," confessed he.  "She
certainly had a vicious way of hammering the other woman indirectly.
Not that she ever admitted being jealous.  I guess she knew.  Everybody
usually knows everything."

"And there was a great deal of talk about you and me," said Mildred
placidly.

"I didn't say it was you," protested Stanley, reddening.

"No matter," said Mildred.  "Don't bother about that.  It's all past
and gone."

"Well, at any rate, my marriage was the mistake of my life.  I'm
determined that she shan't trip me up and trim me for any alimony.  And
as matters stand, she can't.  She left me of her own accord."

"Then," said Mildred thoughtfully, "if the wife leaves of her own
accord, she can't get alimony?"

"Certainly not--not a cent."

"I supposed so," said she.  "I'm not sure I'd take it if I could get
it.  Still, I suppose I would."  She laughed.  "What's the use of being
a hypocrite with oneself?  I know I would.  All I could get."

"Then you had no LEGAL excuse for leaving?"

"No," said she.  "I--just bolted.  I don't know what's to become of me.
I seem not to care, at present, but no doubt I shall as soon as we see
land again."

"You'll go back to him," said Stanley.

"No," replied she, without emphasis or any accent whatever.

"Sure you will," rejoined he.  "It's your living. What else can you do?"

"That's what I must find out.  Surely there's something else for a
woman besides such a married life as mine.  I can't and won't go back
to my husband.  And I can't and won't go to the house at Hanging Rock.
Those two things are settled."

"You mean that?"

"Absolutely.  And I've got--less than three hundred and fifty dollars
in the whole world."

Baird was silent.  He was roused from his abstraction by gradual
consciousness of an ironical smile on the face of the girl, for she did
not look like a married woman.  "You are laughing at me.  Why?"
inquired he.

"I was reading your thoughts."

"You think you've frightened me?"

"Naturally.  Isn't a confession such as I made enough to frighten a
man?  It sounded as though I were getting ready to ask alms."

"So it did," said he.  "But I wasn't thinking of it in that way.  You
WILL be in a frightful fix pretty soon, won't you?"

"It looks that way.  But you need not be uneasy."

"Oh, I want to help you.  I'll do everything I can. I was trying to
think of something you could make money at.  I was thinking of the
stage, but I suppose you'd balk at that.  I'll admit it isn't the life
for a lady.  But the same thing's true of whatever money can be made
at.  If I were you, I'd go back."

"If I were myself, I'd go back," said Mildred. "But I'm not myself."

"You will be again, as soon as you face the situation."

"No," said she slowly, "no, I shall never be myself again."

"But you could have everything a woman wants. Except, of
course--perhaps--  But you never struck me as being especially
sentimental."

"Sentiment has nothing to do with it," rejoined she. "Do you think I
could get a place on the stage?"

"Oh, you'd have to study a while, I suppose."

"But I can't afford that.  If I could afford to study, I'd have my
voice trained."

Baird's face lighted up with enthusiasm.  "The very thing!" he cried.
"You've got a voice, a grand-opera voice.  I've heard lots of people
say so, and it sounded that way to me.  You must cultivate your voice."

Mildred laughed.  "Don't talk nonsense.  Even I know that's nonsense.
The lessons alone would cost thousands of dollars.  And how could I
live for the four or five years?"

"You didn't let me finish," said Baird.  "I was going to say that when
you get to New York you must go and have your voice passed on--by some
impartial person.  If that person says it's worth cultivating, why, I'm
willing to back you--as a business proposition. I can afford to take
the risk.  So, you see, it's all perfectly simple."

He had spoken rapidly, with a covert suggestion of fear lest she would
rebuke him sharply for what she might regard as an impertinent offer.
She surprised him by looking at him calmly, reflectively, and saying:

"Yes, you could afford it, couldn't you?"

"I'm sure I could.  And it's the sort of thing that's done every day.
Of course, no one'd know that we had made this little business
arrangement.  But that's easily managed.  I'd be glad if you'd let me
do it, Mildred. I'd like to feel that I was of some use in the world.
And I'd like to do something for YOU."

By way of exceedingly cautious experiment he ventured to put ever so
slight an accent of tenderness upon the "you."  He observed her
furtively but nervously. He could not get a hint of what was in her
mind.  She gazed out toward the rising and falling horizon line.
Presently she said:

"I'll think about it."

"You must let me do it, Mildred.  It's the sensible thing--and you know
me well enough to know that my friendship can be counted on."

"I'll think about it," was all she would concede.

They discussed the singing career all that and the succeeding days--the
possibilities, the hopes, the dangers--but the hopes a great deal more
than the dangers. He became more and more interested in her and in the
project, as her beauty shone out with the tranquillizing sea and as her
old charm of cleverness at saying things that amused him reasserted
itself.  She, dubious and lukewarm at first, soon was trying to curb
her own excited optimism; but long before they sighted Sandy Hook she
was merely pretending to hang back. He felt discouraged by her parting!
"If I decide to go on, I'll write you in a few days."  But he need not
have felt so.  She had made up her mind to accept his offer.  As for
the complications involved in such curiously intimate relations with a
man of his temperament, habits, and inclinations, she saw them very
vaguely indeed--refused to permit herself to see them any less vaguely.
Time enough to deal with complications when and as they arose; why
needlessly and foolishly annoy herself and hamper herself? Said she to
herself, "I must begin to be practical."



IV

AT the pier Mildred sent her mother a telegram, giving the train by
which she would arrive--that and nothing more.  As she descended from
the parlor-car there stood Mrs. Presbury upon the platform, face
wreathed in the most joyous of welcoming smiles, not a surface trace of
the curiosity and alarm storming within.  After they had kissed and
embraced with a genuine emotion which they did not try to hide, because
both suddenly became unconscious of that world whereof ordinarily they
were constantly mindful--after caresses and tears Mrs. Presbury said:

"It's all very well to dress plain, when everyone knows you can afford
the best.  But don't you think you're overdoing it a little?"

Mildred laughed somewhat nervously.  "Wait till we're safe at home,"
said she.

On the way up from the station in the carriage they chattered away in
the liveliest fashion, to make the proper impression upon any observing
Hanging-Rockers.  "Luckily, Presbury's gone to town to-day," said his
wife.  "But really he's quite livable--hasn't gone back to his old
ways.  He doesn't know it, but he's rapidly growing deaf.  He imagines
that everyone is speaking more and more indistinctly, and he has lost
interest in conversation.  Then, too, he has done well in Wall Street,
and that has put him in a good humor."

"He'll not be surprised to see me--alone," said Mildred.

"Wait till we're home," said her mother nervously.

At the house Mrs. Presbury carried on a foolish, false-sounding
conversation for the benefit of the servants, and finally conducted
Mildred to her bedroom and shut doors and drew portieres and glanced
into closets before saying:  "Now, what IS the matter, Millie? WHERE is
your husband?"

"In Paris, I suppose," replied Mildred.  "I have left him, and I shall
never go back."

"Presbury said you would!" cried her mother. "But I didn't believe it.
I don't believe it.  I brought you up to do your duty, and I know you
will."

This was Mildred's first opportunity for frank and plain speaking; and
that is highly conducive to frank and plain thinking.  She now began to
see clearly why she had quit the general.  Said she:  "Mamma, to be
honest and not mince words, I've left him because there's nothing in
it."

"Isn't he rich?" inquired her mother.  "I've always had a kind of
present--"

"Oh, he's rich, all right," interrupted the girl. "But he saw to it
that I got no benefit from that."

"But you wrote me how he was buying you everything!"

"So I thought.  In fact he was buying ME nothing." And she went on to
explain the general's system.

Her mother listened impatiently.  She would have interrupted the long
and angry recital many times had not Mildred insisted on a full hearing
of her grievances, of the outrages that had been heaped upon her.
"And," she ended, "I suppose he's got it so arranged that he could have
me arrested as a thief for taking the gold bag."

"Yes, it's terrible and all that," said her mother. "But I should have
thought living with me here when Presbury was carrying on so dreadfully
would have taught you something.  Your case isn't an exception, any
more than mine is.  That's the sort of thing we women have to put up
with from men, when we're in their power."

"Not I," said Mildred loftily.

"Yes, you," retorted her mother.  "ANY woman. EVERY woman.  Unless we
have money of our own, we all have trouble with the men about money,
sooner or later, in one way or another.  And rich men!--why, it's
notorious that they're always more or less mean about money. A wife has
got to use tact.  Why, I even had to use some tact with your father,
and he was as generous a man as ever lived.  Tact--that's a woman's
whole life. You ought to have used tact.  You'll go back to him and use
tact."

"You don't know him, mamma!" cried Mildred. "He's a monster.  He isn't
human."

Mrs. Presbury drew a long face and said in a sad, soothing voice: "Yes,
I know, dear.  Men are very, very awful, in some ways, to a nice
woman--with refined, ladylike instincts.  It's a great shock to a
pure--"

"Oh, gammon!" interrupted Mildred.  "Don't be silly, mother.  It isn't
worth while for one woman to talk that kind of thing to another.  I
didn't fully know what I was doing when I married a man I didn't
love--a man who was almost repulsive to me.  But I knew enough.  And I
was getting along well enough, as any woman does, no matter what she
may say--yes, you needn't look shocked, for that's hypocrisy, and I
know it now--  But, as I was saying, I didn't begin to HATE him until
he tried to make a slave of me.  A slave!" she shuddered.  "He's a
monster!"

"A little tact, and you can get everything you want," insisted her
mother.

"I tell you, you don't know the man," cried Mildred. "By tact I suppose
you mean I could have sold things behind his back--and all that."  She
laughed.  "He hasn't got any back.  He had it so arranged that those
cold, wicked eyes of his were always watching me.  His second wife
tried 'tact.'  He caught her and drove her into the streets.  I'd have
had no chance to get a cent, and if I had gotten it I'd not have dared
spend it.  Do you imagine I ran away from him without having THOUGHT?
If there'd been any way of staying on, any way of making things even
endurable, I'd have stayed."

"But you've got to go back, Milly," cried her mother, in tears.

"You mean that you can't support me?"

"And your brother Frank--" Mrs. Presbury's eyes flashed and her rather
stout cheeks quivered.  "I never thought I'd tell anybody, but I'll
tell you.  I never liked your brother Frank, and he never liked me.
That sounds dreadful, doesn't it?"

"No, mother dear," said Mildred gently.  "I've learned that life isn't
at all as--as everybody pretends."

"Indeed it isn't," said her mother.  "Mothers always have favorites
among their children, and very often a mother dislikes one of her
children.  Of course she hides her feeling and does her duty.  But all
the same she can't help the feeling that is down in her heart.  I had a
presentiment before he was born that I wouldn't like him, and sure
enough, I didn't.  And he didn't like me, or his father, or any of us."

"It would never occur to me to turn to him," said Mildred.

"Then you see that you've got to go back to the general.  You can't get
a divorce and alimony, for it was you that left him--and for no cause.
He was within his rights."

Mildred hesitated, confessed:  "I had thought of going back to him and
acting in such a way that he'd be glad to give me a divorce and an
allowance."

"Yes, you might do that," said her mother.  "A great many women do.
And, after all, haven't they a right to?  A lady has got to have proper
support, and is it just to ask her to live with a man she loathes?"

"I haven't thought of the right or wrong of it," said Mildred.  "It
looks to me as though right and wrong have very little to do with life
as it's lived.  They're for hypocrites--and fools."

"Mildred!" exclaimed her mother, deeply shocked.

Mildred was not a little shocked at her own thoughts as she inspected
them in the full light into which speech had dragged them.  "Anyhow,"
she went on, "I soon saw that such a plan was hopeless.  He's not the
man to be trifled with.  Long before I could drive him to give me a
living and let me go he would have driven me to flight or suicide."

Her mother had now had time to reflect upon Mildred's revelations.
Aided by the impressions she herself had gotten of the little general,
she began to understand why her daughter had fled and why she would not
return. She felt that the situation was one which time alone could
solve.  Said she:  "Well, the best thing is for you to stay on here and
wait until he makes some move."

"He'll have me watched--that's all he'll do," said Mildred.  "When he
gets ready he'll divorce me for deserting him."

Mrs. Presbury felt that she was right.  But, concealing her
despondency, she said:  "All we can do is to wait and see.  You must
send for your luggage."

"I've nothing but a large bag," said Mildred.  "I checked it in the
parcel-room of the New York station."

Mrs. Presbury was overwhelmed.  How account to Hanging Rock for the
reappearance of a baggageless and husbandless bride?  But she held up
bravely. With a cheerfulness that did credit to her heart and showed
how well she loved her daughter she said:  "We must do the best we can.
We'll get up some story."

"No," said Mildred.  "I'm going back to New York.  You can tell people
here what you please--that I've gone to rejoin him or to wait for
him--any old thing."

"At least you'll wait and talk with Presbury," pleaded her mother.  "He
is VERY sensible."

"If he has anything to suggest," said Mildred, "he can write it.  I'll
send you my address."

"Milly," cried her mother, agitated to the depths, "where ARE you
going?  WHAT are you going to do? You look so strange--not at all like
yourself."

"I'm going to a hotel to-night--probably to a boarding-house
to-morrow," said Mildred.  "In a few days I shall begin to--" she
hesitated, decided against confidence--"begin to support myself at
something or other."

"You must be crazy!" cried her mother.  "You wouldn't do anything--and
you couldn't."

"Let's not discuss it, mamma," said the girl tranquilly.

The mother looked at her with eyes full of the suspicion one lady
cannot but have as to the projects of another lady in such
circumstances.

"Mildred," she said pleadingly, "you must be careful.  You'll find
yourself involved in a dreadful scandal. I know you wouldn't DO
anything WRONG no matter how you were driven.  But--"

"I'll not do anything FOOLISH, mamma," interrupted the girl.  "You are
thinking about men, aren't you?"

"Men are always ready to destroy a woman," said her mother.  "You must
be careful--"

Mildred was laughing.  "Oh, mamma," she cried, "do be sensible and do
give me credit for a little sense.  I've got a very clear idea of what
a woman ought to do about men, and I assure you I'm not going to be
FOOLISH. And you know a woman who isn't foolish can be trusted where a
woman who's only protected by her principles would yield to the first
temptation--or hunt round for a temptation."

"But you simply can't go to New York and live there all alone--and with
nothing!"

"Can I stay here--for more than a few days?"

"But maybe, after a few days--" stammered her mother.

"You see, I've got to begin," said Mildred.  "So why delay?  I'd gain
nothing.  I'd simply start Hanging Rock to gossiping--and start Mr.
Presbury to acting like a fiend again."

Her mother refused to be convinced--was the firmer, perhaps, because
she saw that Mildred was unshakable in her resolve to leave
forthwith--the obviously sensible and less troublesome course.  They
employed the rest of Mildred's three hours' stop in arguing--when
Mildred was not raging against the little general.  Her mother was more
than willing to assist her in this denunciation, but Mildred preferred
to do it all herself. She had--perhaps by unconsciously absorbed
training from her lawyer father--an unusual degree of ability to see
both sides of a question.  When she assailed her husband, she saw only
her own side; but somehow when her mother railed and raved, she began
to see another side--and the sight was not agreeable.  She wished to
feel that her husband was altogether in the wrong; she did not wish to
have intruded upon her such facts as that she had sold herself to
him--quite in the customary way of ladies, but nevertheless quite
shamelessly--or that in strict justice she had done nothing for him to
entitle her to a liberal money allowance or any allowance at all.

On the train, going back to New York, she admitted to herself that the
repulsive little general had held strictly to the terms of the
bargain--"but only a devil and one with not a single gentlemanly
instinct would insist on such a bargain."  It took away much of the
shame, and all of the sting, of despising herself to feel that she was
looking still lower when she turned to despising him.

To edge out the little general she began to think of her mother, but as
she passed in review what her mother had said and how she had said it
she saw that for all the protests and arguings her mother was more than
resigned to her departure.  Mildred felt no bitterness; ever since she
could remember her mother had been a shifter of responsibility.  Still,
to stare into the face of so disagreeable a fact as that one had no
place on earth to go to, no one on earth to turn to, not even one's own
mother--to stare on at that grimacing ugliness did not tend to
cheerfulness.  Mildred tried to think of the future--but how could she
think of something that was nothing?  She knew that she would go on,
somehow, in some direction, but by no effort of her imagination could
she picture it.  She was so impressed by the necessity of considering
the future that, to rouse herself, she tried to frighten herself with
pictures of poverty and misery, of herself a derelict in the vast and
cold desert of New York--perhaps in rags, hungry, ill, but all in vain.
She did not believe it. Always she had had plenty to wear and to eat,
and comfortable surroundings.  She could no more think of herself as
without those things than a living person can imagine himself dead.

"I'm a fool," she said to herself.  "I'm certain to get into all sorts
of trouble.  How can it be otherwise, when I've no money, no friends,
no experience, no way of making a living--no honest way--perhaps no way
of the other kind, either?"  There are many women who ecstasize their
easily tickled vanities by fancying that if they were so disposed they
need only flutter an eyelid to have men by the legion striving for
their favors, each man with a bag of gold.  Mildred, inexperienced as
she was, had no such delusions.  Her mind happened not to be of that
chastely licentious caste which continually revolves and fantastically
exaggerates the things of the body.

She could not understand her own indifference about the future.  She
did not realize that it was wholly due to Stanley Baird's offer.  She
was imagining she was regarding that offer as something she might
possibly consider, but probably would not.  She did not know that her
soul had seized upon it, had enfolded it and would on no account let it
go.  It is the habit of our secret selves thus to make decisions and
await their own good time for making us acquainted with them.

With her bag on the seat beside her she set out to find a temporary
lodging.  Not until several hotels had refused her admittance on the
pretext that they were "full up" did she realize that a young woman
alone is an object of suspicion in New York.  When a fourth room-clerk
expressed his polite regrets she looked him straight in the eye and
said:

"I understand.  But I can't sleep in the street.  You must tell me
where I can go."

"Well, there's the Ripon over in Seventh Avenue," said he.

"Is it respectable?" said she.

"Oh, it's very clean and comfortable there," said he. "They'll treat
you right."

"Is it respectable?" said she.

"Well, now, it doesn't LOOK queer, if that's what you mean," replied
he.  "You'll do very nicely there.  You can be just as quiet as you
want."

She saw that hotel New York would not believe her respectable.  So to
the Ripon she went, and was admitted without discussion.  As the last
respectable clerk had said, it did not LOOK queer.  But it FELT queer;
she resolved that she would go into a boarding-house the very next day.

Here again what seemed simple proved difficult.  No respectable
boarding-house would have Miss Mary Stevens.  She was confident that
nothing in her dress or manner hinted mystery.  Yet those sharp-eyed
landladies seemed to know at once that there was something peculiar
about her.  Most of them became rude the instant they set eyes upon
her.  A few--of the obviously less prosperous class--talked with her,
seemed to be listening for something which her failing to say decided
them upon all but ordering her out of the house.  She, hindered by her
innocence, was slow in realizing that she could not hope for admission
to any select respectable circle, even of high-class salesladies and
clerks, unless she gave a free and clear account of herself--whence she
had come, what she was doing, how she got her money.

Toward the end of the second day's wearisome and humiliating search she
found a house that would admit her.  It was a pretentious,
well-furnished big house in Madison Avenue.  The price--thirty-five
dollars a week for board, a bedroom with a folding bed in an alcove,
and a bath, was more than double what she had counted on paying, but
she discovered that decent and clean lodgings and food fit to eat were
not to be had for less.  "And I simply can't live pig-fashion," said
she.  "I'd be so depressed that I could do nothing.  I can't live like
a wild animal, and I won't."  She had some vague
notion--foreboding--that this was not the proper spirit with which to
face life.  "I suppose I'm horribly foolish," reflected she, "but if I
must go down, I'll go down with my colors flying."  She did not know
precisely what that phrase meant, but it sounded fine and brave and
heartened her to take the expensive lodgings.

The landlady was a Mrs. Belloc.  Mildred had not talked with her twenty
minutes before she had a feeling that this name was assumed.  The
evening of her first day in the house she learned that her guess was
correct--learned it from the landlady herself.  After dinner Mrs.
Belloc came into her room to cheer her up, to find out about her and to
tell her about herself.

"Now that you've come," said she, "the house is full up--except some
little rooms at the top that I'd as lief not fill.  The probabilities
are that any ladies who would take them wouldn't be refined enough to
suit those I have.  There are six, not counting me, every one with a
bath and two with private parlors.  And as they're all handsome,
sensible women, ladylike and steady, I think the prospects are that
they'll pay promptly and that I won't have any trouble."

Mildred reflected upon this curious statement.  It sounded innocent
enough, yet what a peculiar way 

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