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Infatuation

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Title: Infatuation

Creator: Lloyd Osbourne

Illustrator: Karl Anderson


        
Release date: November 22, 2014 [eBook #47434]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47434

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INFATUATION ***




Produced by Al Haines.





                             *INFATUATION*


                                   BY

                             LLOYD OSBOURNE

                               AUTHOR OF
                 The Motomaniacs, The Adventurer, Etc.



                         With Illustrations by
                             KARL ANDERSON



                              INDIANAPOLIS
                       THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
                               PUBLISHERS




                             COPYRIGHT 1909
                       THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

                                 MARCH



                                PRESS OF
                            BRAUNWORTH & CO.
                        BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
                            BROOKLYN, N. Y.




                             *INFATUATION*


                              *CHAPTER I*


Phyllis Ladd lost her mother at twelve; and this bereavement, especially
terrible to an only child, brought with it two consequences that had a
far-reaching effect on her character. An ardent, high-strung nature,
acquainted so early with a poignant sorrow, gets an outlook on the world
that is so just and true as to constitute a misfortune in itself.  A
child ought not to think; ought not to suffer; ought not to understand.
Individuality, sympathy, sensibility awaken--qualities that go to make a
charming human being--but which have to be paid for in the incessant
balance of our complex existence.  Phyllis' school-fellows were no
longer the same to her; she felt herself a person apart; though she
played as gaily as any of them, and chattered her head off, and tripped
blithely along Chestnut Avenue entwined in the arms of her companions,
she was aware, down in her secret heart, that she was "different."

At twelve, then, her path diverged from the commonplace, in which, as we
all have to admit, however reluctantly, the chances for a happy life are
best.

The second consequence of her mother's death was to bring her into
contact with a scarcely known individual--her father.  This grave,
handsome man, who sat behind a newspaper at breakfast, and who was not
seen again till dinner time; who drove away every morning behind a
liveried coachman and a pair of shining bays to a region called "the
office"; whose smile and voice were always a shy delight to her--this
demigod, admired, unknown, from whom there emanated a delicious sense of
security and strength, now suddenly drew her to his heart, and became
her world, her all.

Robert T. R. Ladd was the president of the K. B. and O. Railway.  Rich
himself, and the son of a rich man, his interests in Carthage were
varied and many, engaging his activities far beyond the great road that
was associated with his name.  Carthage was an old-fashioned city; and
the boys who had grown up together and succeeded their fathers were
clannish to a degree little known in the newer parts of this country.
Joe, who was prominent in electricity and gas, might want to consolidate
a number of scattered plants, and to that end would seek the assistance
of Tom and Harry and Bob.  George, perhaps, in forecasting the growth of
Carthage a little too generously, was in temporary straits with his
land-scheme--well, he would ask Tom and Bob to tide him over, making a
company of himself, and taking them in.  Frank and his brother, in
converting their private bank into the Fifth National--induced as much
as anything by the vanity of seeing their own names on their own
greenbacks--would feel the need of a strong local man on the new
directorate.  Would Bob oblige them?  "Why, with pleasure, though if
somebody else would do as well--"  "Oh, we must have _you_, old fellow."

Such was Carthage--at least the Carthage of Chestnut Avenue, of the long
lines of stately and beautiful mansions on what was called the West
Side, the Carthage that supported the Symphony Orchestra, owned the
parterre boxes at the opera, dined, drove, danced, and did business
together--as compact and jealous a little aristocracy as any in Hungary
or Silesia.  Of course there was another Carthage--several other
Carthages--one a teeming riverside quarter where English was an unknown
tongue, a place black with factory chimneys, full of noise and refuse,
dirt and ugliness, where forty thousand nondescript foreigners pigged
together, and contributed forty thousand pairs of very grimy and
unwilling hands to the material advancement of the city and state.
There was a business Carthage, with banks and sky-scrapers, and vast
webs of wires that darkened the sky.  There was a pleasure Carthage that
awoke only at night, blazing out with a myriad lights, and a myriad
enticements.  There was a middle-class residence Carthage; a
second-class residence Carthage; an immense, poor, semi-disreputable,
altogether dreary Carthage that was popularly alluded to as "South of
the slot," the name dating from the time of the first cable-car line,
now long since discarded.

But to return to Phyllis Ladd.

In losing her mother, it might be said she had discovered her father.
At first perhaps it was pity, loneliness, almost terror that caused Mr.
Ladd to take this little creature in his arms, and hold her as he might
a shield.  He had idolized his wife; he hardly knew how to go on living
without her; one day, in his office, as his old friend Latham was
leaving him, he had pulled open a drawer, and taken a loaded revolver
from it.  "Latham," he said, with a very slight tremor in his voice,
"would you mind putting this damned thing in your pocket--I--I--find it
tempts me."

Yes, his little daughter was a shield; he held her slim body between
himself and despair; he told her this again and again, as he sat with
bowed head and suffusing eyes in the shadow of an irrevocable happiness.
And she in whom there stirred, mysteriously, dimly, the tenderness of
the sublime love that had called her into being--she, even while she
mingled her tears with his, felt within herself the welling of an
exquisite joy.  To love, to solace, to protect, here again instincts
were prematurely awakened; here again her little feet departed from the
commonplace to carry her far afield.

In time, as weeks and months rolled on, the blow, so unendurable at
first, so crushing and terrible, softened, as such things will, and a
busy world again engrossed a busy man.  But the intimacy between father
and daughter remained, and continued unimpaired.  Indeed, it grew even
closer, for now laughter came into it, and gay bubbling little
confidences, and a delightful hour before bedtime, full of eagerness and
zest.  Mr. Ladd, cigar in mouth, and his keen handsome face as
deferential as any courtier's, listened to the interminable doings of
Satty and Nelly and Jessie, with an enjoyment that never seemed to tire.

He, too, had his budget of the day, which, often begun whimsically, not
seldom ended in a serious exposition of his difficulties and problems.
It amused him to state such complexities in simple language; to bring
them down, by some homely metaphor, to the comprehension of this
adorable little coquette, who tried with so many childish arts to dazzle
and ensnare him.  Even at thirteen she was learning the value of drawing
out a man about himself; she was quite willing to understand the
Interstate Commerce Law, and become pink and indignant over a new
classification of "Coal at the pit's mouth"--if it meant her father
would hold her a little tighter, and give her one of those sudden
glances of approval.

Such intercourse with a shrewd, strong, brilliant mind--to a child
naturally precocious and adaptive--could not fail to have far-reaching
consequences on her development.  She caught something of her father's
independence; of his lofty and yet indulgent outlook on a universe made
up so largely of fools and knaves; learned the greatest and rarest of
all imaginative processes--to put oneself in the other fellow's shoes.
When Joe Howard turned traitor at the state legislature, and sold out
the K. B. and O. on the new mileage bill, her wrath at his duplicity
rose to fever.  "Well, there's his side to it," said Mr. Ladd, with
unexpected serenity.  "He hasn't a cent; he's mortgaged up to the ears;
and has a sick daughter dying of consumption.  He's a well-meaning man,
and I suppose would be honest if he could.  But if I were in his place,
and your life was at stake, and the doctor ordered you to some
ten-dollar-a-minute place in Colorado or somewhere, I guess I'd sell out
the K. B. and O. too!"

And for that he got a hug that nearly choked him.

"Money and love, my lamb," he said to her once, "those are the wheels
the old wagon runs on.  Miss Simpkins will fluff you up with a whole lot
of fancy fixings--but I tell you, it boils right down to that."

"Papa," she asked him on another occasion, with round wondering eyes,
"if it's all like that, why are you honorable and noble and splendid?"

"I don't know," he answered, smiling.  "I guess it's pride more than
anything else.  Theoretically the man with the fewest scruples gets
farthest in the race; but thank the Lord, most of us are handicapped
with some good qualities that stick to us like poor relations."

"But Miss Simpkins says that anybody who is bad gets punished for it
sooner or later.  She says that was why her brother-in-law's house
burned down; because he was so uncharitable."

"It may be so with the people Miss Simpkins is acquainted with," said
Mr. Ladd, "but it doesn't hold in the railroad business, nor anywhere
else that I have seen, and I can't help thinking she's a trifle more
hopeful than the traffic can bear!"

This philosophy, so picturesquely expressed, so genial, so amiably
cynical, was not perhaps the best training for an unusually
impressionable mind. Miss Simpkins learned to dread Phyllis' preface:
"But Papa says--"  What Papa said was often a bombshell that blew shams
to pieces; tore down the pretty pink scenery of conventional illusions;
and drove cobble-stones through the gauze that separated Miss Simpkins
and her kind from the real world beyond.  It was a harsh process, and
bad for gauze.

At first, not knowing how else to maintain a fairly large establishment,
Mr. Ladd had sought the services of a "managing housekeeper."  But the
trouble with her--or rather with them, for he had a succession--was that
the "managing" was considerably overdone.  They were discharged, the one
after the other, without having "managed" to achieve their one consuming
ambition, which was to capture the rich widower, and lead him to the
altar. After a while, growing weary of being hunted, and altogether at
his wits' end, he invited his unmarried sister, Henrietta Ladd, to take
the foot of his table, and a place at his hearth.

She was a thin, plain, elderly woman, with a very low voice and a
deceptive appearance of meekness.  The casual guest at Mr. Ladd's board
might have taken her for a silent saint, who, unwillingly sojourning in
this vale of tears, was waiting with ladylike impatience for a heavenly
crown.  In some ways this description would have fitted Aunt Henrietta
well enough, though it took no account of a perverse and interfering
nature that was more than trying to live with.  The silent saint
attempted to rule her brother and her niece with a rod of iron, and so
far succeeded that her two years "tenure of the gubernatorial chair" (as
Mr. Ladd bitterly called it), was fraught with quarrels and unhappiness.
Her tyranny, like all tyrannies, ended in a revolution.  Mr. Ladd
brought his "unmarried misery"--also his own phrase--to a sharp
conclusion, and Henrietta departed with a large check and a still larger
ill-will.

"Phyllis," he said, "I guess we'll just have to rustle along by our poor
little selves.  The people who take charge of us seem to take charge too
hard. They mean well, but why should they stamp on us?--Yes, let's try
it ourselves."

And Phyllis, not quite fifteen years old, became the acknowledged
mistress of the big house.

In her demure head she knew that to fail would be to incur a danger that
was almost too terrible to contemplate.  Her father might be persuaded
into marrying again, and the thought of such a catastrophe sobered and
restrained her.  She was on her mettle, and was determined to succeed.
She had her check-book, her desk, her receipted bills.  She had her
morning interviews with the cook; sent curtains to the cleaners; rang up
various tradespeople on the telephone; gently criticized Mary's
window-cleaning, and George's nails, and busied herself with these, and
innumerable other little cares, while Miss Simpkins waited in the study,
restlessly drumming her long, lean fingers on a French grammar.

Of course, she did several foolish, impulsive things, but no more than
some little bride might have done in the first novelty of controlling a
large household.  She gave a tramp one of her father's best suits of
clothes; she was prevailed upon by the servants to buy many things that
neither they nor anybody else could possibly need--including an
electrically driven knife-cleaner, and a cook's table, so compact and
ingenious, that it would have been priceless on an airship, though in
her own spacious kitchen it was decidedly out of place; and it took her
several months to discover that James was apparently feeding five
elephants instead of five horses.

But she was quick to learn better; and with the innate capacity she
inherited from her father, she soon had everything running on oiled
wheels.  And all this, if you please, at fifteen, with quite a bit of
stocking between her dress and her trimly-shod feet.

It was seldom that her father ever ventured into the realm of criticism;
but once or twice, in his smiling, easy-going way, he gently pulled her
up.

"I don't know much about these things," he remarked once, "but don't
there seem to be a lot of new dresses in this family?"

"One can't go naked, Papa."

"Admitting that, my dear, which with people of our position would
certainly give rise to comment--couldn't we compromise on--well--going
_half_-naked, and perhaps show a more Spartan spirit, besides, in regard
to our hats?"

Phyllis' eyes filled with tears; and flushing with shame, she pressed
her hot cheek against the back of the chair she was sitting in, and felt
herself the most miserable, disgraced, unworthy little creature in the
whole world.

Mr. Ladd's voice deepened, as it always did when he was moved.

"My darling," he said, "don't feel badly about it, because it is only a
trifle.  But it is not kind to your companions to dress better than they
do, and I am sure you do not wish them to feel envious or resentful.  I
just ask you to bear it in mind, that's all, and be somewhat on your
guard."

"I will, Papa."

"Now come and kiss your daddy, and tell him you're not cross with him
for being such an old fuss-cat."

"Y-y-ou are n-not an old fu-u-uss-cat, but the dearest, darlingest,
bestest--"


"Do you think it's right to bite a railroad president's ear?"

"Yes, if you love him!"

"Or muss up the only hair he has, which isn't very much?"

"Yes, if it helps you to think."

"What's that--_thinking_?"

"Yes, Papa."

"It worries me, dearest, to have you doing anything as serious as that."

"Papa, it is serious.  Listen!"

"I'm listening,"

"I've a wonderful idea--I'm going to give a party!"

"Splendid--hope you'll ask me!"

"And I'm going to invite Satty Morrison, and Julia Grant, and Hetty Van
Buren, and Maisie Smith, and the two Patterson girls, and perhaps Alicia
Stewart--and we are going to have ice-cream, and lady's-fingers, and
chocolate-cake, and Christmas crackers, if I can buy them this time of
year--and, Papa, it's going to be a _hat_-party."

"Oh, a hat-party, goodness me, what's that?"

"To give away all the silly, extravagant hats I've bought--though I'll
have to get two new ones to make them go round--but you won't mind that,
will you?"

"No, indeed--not for a hat-party."

And next day the invitations were out.

This scandalous way of bringing up an only daughter caused many people
to shake their heads.

"It'll end in a peck of trouble for Mr. Ladd some day," said the old
cats, with which Carthage was as liberally stocked as any other great
and flourishing American city.  "Mark my words, my dear, no good can
come of bringing up a girl like a wild Indian, and he'll have nobody to
blame but himself if she goes headlong to the bad."




                              *CHAPTER II*


At twenty, Phyllis Ladd was one of the prettiest girls in Carthage.  A
little above medium height, slim, dark, and glowing like a rose, she
moved with that charming consciousness of beauty that is in itself
almost a distinction.  The French and Spanish in her mother's southern
blood showed itself in her slender feet and hands, in her grace, her
voice, her gentle, gracious, and engaging manners.  One could not long
talk to her without realizing that behind those sparkling eyes there was
a fine and highly-sensitive nature, whimsical, original and intrepid;
and to know her well was to perceive that she was one of those women who
would love with rare intensity; and whose future, for good or evil, for
happiness or disaster, was irretrievably dependent on the heart.

In a dim sort of way she had the consciousness of this herself; her
flirtations went no further than to dance with the same partner three or
four times in the course of the same evening; and Carthage, which gave
its young people a great deal of innocent liberty--and which its young
people took with the greediness of children--in time got to consider
her, in spite of deceptive appearances, as being cold, proud, and
"exclusive."  Certainly her exclusiveness drew the line at being kissed
by boisterous young men, and though their company pleased and amused
her, she refused to single out one of them for any special favor.

"They are all such idiots, Papa," she said plaintively.  "Aren't there
any real men anywhere--real men that a girl _could_ love?"

"I'm sure I don't know," returned Mr. Ladd. "I haven't come across one
I'd trust a yellow dog to, let alone my daughter.  But, frankly, I'm
prejudiced on the young-man question--anybody would be who has to run a
railroad with them!"

"Papa," she cried, throwing her arms around his neck, and her mood
changing to one of her gayest phantasies, "let's go away together, you
and I, and see if we can't find him.  The Quest of the Golden Young Man!
There must be one somewhere, and we'll look for him in every hidy-hole
in the world--in street-cars and banks, and ice-cream places, and
cellars, and factories, and mountains, and ships--just you and me, with
a little steamer-trunk--and we'll run across him in the unlikeliest
spot--and he may be a bandit in a cave, or a wild, roystering cow-boy
shooting up one of those awful little western towns--but we'll know
right off that he's our Golden Young Man--and we'll take him, and put
him in a crate, and bring him home in the baggage-car, and poke him with
a long sharp stick till he's willing to marry me!"


The Quest of the Golden Young Man!  It began sooner than Phyllis could
ever have believed possible, and with a companion she would have been
the last to dream of.  Mr. Ladd had a married sister in Washington, the
wife of a highly-placed treasury official.  Mrs. Sam Fensham was a very
fashionable, energetic, pushing woman, wholly absorbed in the task of
pulling competitors off the social ladder, and planting her own
faultless French shoes on the empty rung.  Brother and sister had about
as much in common as you could spread on a dime; but Robert Ladd had all
the American's admiration of ability, no matter in what direction it was
exercised; and Sally Fensham dearly loved her fraternal relationship to
the K. B. and O.

This social strategist had volunteered one of her rare visits to
Carthage under the stress of bad financial weather.  Brother Bob, who
regularly brightened her Christmas with a check in four figures, had
some peculiarities of purse and heart that Mrs. Fensham was well
acquainted with.  You might dash him off a letter, slashed with
underlining, and piteous in the extremity of its _cri de coeur_, and get
nothing in reply but two pages of humorous typewriting, wanting to know
why two people, without children, could not manage to scrape along in
Washington on sixteen thousand dollars a year?

But Brother Bob, face to face, was a very different person.  If you sat
on the arm of his chair, and talked of pa and ma and the old days, and
perhaps cried a little, not altogether insincerely, over faces and
things long since vanished--if, indeed, under the spell of that grave,
kindly brother, you somehow shed your cares into an infinite tenderness,
and forgot everything save that you loved him best of any one on
earth--if--but it always happened--you did not need to give another
thought, to what, after all, was the real object of your visit.

In a day or two, Brother Bob would say; "Sally, just how many dollars
would make you feel eighteen again, and as though you were waiting for
Elmer Boyd to take you out sleighing?"

You could answer thirty-seven hundred, and get it as readily as a
postage stamp; and with it a look of such honest affection, such a
glisten in those fine eyes, that your words of thanks stammered a little
on your tongue.

Well, here was Aunt Sally again--arm-chair--pa and ma--the old
days--check--and in her restless, scheming eyes the birth of a vague
idea that grew ever more and more alluring,--nothing else than to take
this very pretty niece of hers back to Washington, and enhance the
Fensham position by a splendid marriage.  She had a vision of balls and
dinner-parties, all paid for by her millionaire brother; a showy French
limousine; unlimited boxes at the theater and opera; and a powerful
nephew-to-be, with a name to hoist the portcullis of many a proud social
stronghold, and allow the wife of a highly-placed treasury official to
squeeze in.  The Motts, the Glendennings, the Pastors, the Van
Schaicks--the Port Arthurs of Washington society--Sarah Fensham would
assail all of them, holding before her one of their cherished sons, and
defying them to shoot.  A fascinating prospect indeed, and one not
beyond realization, considering the girl's beauty, and her father's
money.

On the subject being broached to Brother Bob, it was met with a
hostility only comparable to a Polar bear being robbed of its cub.  The
whole marriage-market business nauseated him, he declared; his daughter
should never be set up on the counter to be priced and pawed over; not
only would her natural refinement revolt at it, but he inconsistently
and with much warmth announced that Carthage was full of splendid young
men, the sons of his old associates, amongst whom Phyllis should find
her husband when the time came, and a fellow worth fifty of those
Washington dudes and dough-heads.

"It's all very well for you to talk," said Sally coldly, "but I should
say it was more for Phyllis to decide than for you."

"She wouldn't hear of such a thing," protested Mr. Ladd heatedly.  "She
is a quiet, home-loving girl, and wouldn't put herself in a show-window
for anything on earth."

"My house is not a show-window; and what is there immodest or wrong in
her meeting the nicest men in America?"

"Besides, she wouldn't care to leave me."

Angry as she was, there was something in this remark that suddenly
touched Sally Fensham.  She was hard and aggressive, but her heart was
not altogether withered, and under extraordinary circumstances could
even be moved.

"My poor Bob," she said, holding the lapels of his coat, and looking up
at him; "do you not know that Phyllis may meet a man to-day at dinner,
and to-morrow at tea, and the day after drive with him for an hour in
the Park--and then what's father or mother or anything in the world if
she loves him?  Bob, dear, just get it out of your head that you are
going to keep Phyllis.  When the right man comes you will no more count
to her than--than that chair!--Oh, yes, of course, every girl loves her
father in a way--but you have only been keeping her heart warm--and once
it's set on fire--good-by!  And, Bob, dear, listen, is it not common
sense to let her see the right kind of young men; to sift them and weigh
them a bit? Is it a marriage-market to admit none but those who are
presentable and well-bred and come of nice people?  Is that a
show-window?  No, it's giving a girl a chance to choose--the chance I
wish to Heaven I'd had.  We simply try to get the nicest man there is,
and you are more apt to get a prize from a hundred than from six!"

"That applies just as much to Carthage as to Washington."

"Bob, you don't know what you've been risking. Your whole way of living
is utterly crazy.  Why, anybody--_anybody_ could come here, and make
love to her, and carry her off under your nose--some awful commercial
traveler or cheap pianist with frowzy hair--Oh, Bob, girls are such
fools--such crazy, crazy fools!"

"Phyllis isn't."

"Was I?"

"No, I don't think you were."

"But didn't I marry Sam Fensham?"

"I don't see that that--"

Sally laughed; and it was not a pleasant laugh to hear in its
self-revelation.  Sam was notoriously more successful as a treasury
official than as a husband.

"Bob, she has to go to Washington with me, and you must put your hand in
your pocket, and do things handsomely."

"Against her will?"

Again Sally laughed, more harshly and cynically than before.

"Just you ask her," she said.


That night Mr. Ladd did so, and saw with a sinking heart the
electrifying effect it had on her.

Go!  Why, she'd jump out of her shoes to go, and wasn't daddy the
dearest, darlingest, adorablest person in the world to propose it!  And
Aunt Sally's kindness--wasn't it wonderful!  She would meet senators and
ambassadors, and dance in the White House with lovely barons and counts,
and try out her French on a real Frenchman and see if he could
understand it!--A winter in Washington! What could be more exciting,
more delirious!

Mr. Ladd affected to share her delight, and manfully concealed his true
feelings, which were altogether bitter and sad.  But he was a brave old
fellow, and knew how to take his disappointments smilingly.  Besides,
what claim had he to resist the inevitable?  What right?  What
justification? He would have bitten his tongue out before he would have
reproached her, or marred, by the slightest word, her overflowing and
girlish exuberance. It was only as they kissed each other good night
that the pent-up appeal came.

"Don't forget your old dad in the shuffle," he said.  "It's--it's going
to be very hard for him without you, Phyllis."

Her instant contrition was very sweet to him, very comforting and dear.
In fact, he had to struggle pretty desperately to allay the storm of
tenderness he evoked.--No, no, he wanted her to go to Washington.  It
was the right thing to do--the only thing to do.  A girl ought to see
something of the big world before she married and settled down.--Oh,
every girl said that to herself, but you couldn't get away from the fact
that they were made for men, and men for them, and a father just held
the fort till the Golden Young Man arrived.

How they laughed, with tears in their eyes! How infinitely precious was
the love that bound them together!  Dad was never to be lost in the
shuffle--never, never; and he was to write every day, and she was to
write; and if it were a hundred Washingtons she'd come straight back to
him if he were lonely, for to her there was only one real Golden Young
Man, and that was her darling, darling father.

Yet as Mr. Ladd shut the study door, and returned to his seat beside the
lamp, he knew in spite of himself that he had said good-by.  His
guardianship was over; near, now, was that unknown man, that unknown
rival, for whose pleasure he had lavished twenty years of incessant care
and devotion.  Though Ladd was hardly a believer, the wish came out with
the fervency of a prayer: "Oh, my God, let him be worthy of her!"




                             *CHAPTER III*


She did write every day; sometimes the merest snippets, sometimes long,
graphic letters, full of the new life and the new people. Her debut had
been an immense success.  Eddie Phelps, a horrid, tallowy, patronizing
person, but socially a dictator, had put the stamp of his approval on
her, and she had managed to receive it and not burst--which, if Papa
only knew it, was a very remarkable feat.  But, anyway, she had been
hall-marked "sterling," and was enjoying herself furiously.  And the
young men were so different from Carthage, so much more polished and
elegant--and pertinacious.  Washington young men simply didn't know what
"No" meant, and it was like shoveling snow to get rid of them.  But Aunt
Sarah was a regular White Wings, and the poor, the detrimental, and the
fast--every one, in fact, who wasn't a first-class _parti_ with
references from his last place--got carted away before he knew what had
struck him.

And Aunt Sally!  "Why, Papa, we didn't know her at all.  She is as young
as I am, and twice as eager, and dances her stockings through every
other night.  Washington is divided between the people who hate her, and
the people who love her, and they put a tremendous zip into either end
of it. What she really wants is to marry me at the cold end, and
strengthen her position as she calls it; and though I say it, who
shouldn't, the cold-end young men are coming in fast.  When one proposes
to me, she calls it a scalp, and looks, oh, so pleased!  But if I see
any of them working up to that I try to stop him in time, though it's
awfully exciting just the same.  That's why I've only three scalps to
report instead of about eight.  Oh, Papa, what fun it is!"

In time her letters began to change, and there were little signs of
disillusionment.  One was almost a tract on worldliness, in which she
talked about Vanity Fair, and dancing on coffins, and the inner hunger
of the soul.  There were also increasing references to J. Whitlock
Pastor, always coupled with "ideals."  J. Whitlock Pastor was quite a
remarkable young man of thirty, with "a beautiful austerity," and "fine
mind."  His people were immensely wealthy, and immensely
fashionable--even in Carthage there was a sacredness about the name of
Pastor--and Phyllis said there was something splendid in his taking up
forestry as a life work, and devoting himself to it, heart and soul,
when he had been born--not with a silver spoon--but with a bird's-egg
diamond in his mouth.

If there was anything to be said against J. Whitlock Pastor, it was that
he was almost too good to be true.  He wanted to leave the world better
for his having been, and all that--and seemed to have what might be
called an excruciating sense of duty. "A very quiet and rather a sad
man," wrote Phyllis, "whom one might easily mistake for a muff if one
hadn't seen him on horseback.  He rides superbly, and I never saw a
ring-master in a circus who could come anywhere near him."

All this worked up to a telegram that reached Mr. Ladd a few weeks
later: "I accepted him last night, and, Papa, please come on quick and
bless us."

Mr. Ladd hastened to Washington as speedily as his affairs would allow,
which was five days later, and arrived just in time to dress for the
introductory dinner at Mrs. Pastor's--J. Whitlock's mother's.  He tried
to imagine he was delighted, and caught his daughter in his arms with
the enthusiasm of a stage parent.  But Phyllis was so pale, so calm, so
undemonstrative that he hardly knew what to make of her.  He put her
cool indifference down to Washington training, but still it puzzled and
troubled him.  It was so unlike a girl who had met her fate--so unlike
another pair of lovers that had been so much in his head that
day--Genivieve de Levancour, and a certain Bob Ladd. The contrast gave
him a certain sense of foreboding.

In the carriage she was very silent, and nestled against him like a
tired child.  He repeated his congratulations; he strove again to be
delighted; joked, not without effort, about the exalted position of the
Pastors, and what a come-down it was for them to marry such poor white
trash as the Ladds. Then it occurred to him that perhaps this jarred
upon her!  "Forgive me, Phyllis," he said humbly. "I--I hardly know what
I am saying.  I--I guess I'm trying to hide what this recalls to
me--what this means to me."

She pressed his hand, and snuggled it against her cheek, but still
shrouded herself in reserve.

"Papa," she said suddenly, "you'd stick to me through thick and thin,
wouldn't you?  Whatever I did--however foolish or silly I might be,
you'd always love me, wouldn't you?"

"By God, yes," he answered, "though why on earth you should ask--"

"Only to make sure," she exclaimed, brightening. "Just to be certain
that my old-dog father hadn't changed.  Now say bow-wow, just to show
that you haven't!"

Mr. Ladd, very much mystified, and not at all comfortable in his mind,
obediently bow-wowed. It set Phyllis off in a peal of laughter, and it
was with apparent hilarity that both descended at the Pastor's front
door.

Whitlock's mother received them in the drawing-room.  She was a stately,
gray-haired woman, with a subdued voice, and a graciousness that was
almost oppressive.  Her guests had hardly been seated, when J. Whitlock
himself appeared, and excused himself, with faultless and somewhat
unnecessary courtesy, for not having been found awaiting their arrival.
Mr. Ladd saw before him a tall, thin young man, of a polished and
somewhat cold exterior, with a dryness of expression that was positively
parching.  Like one of those priceless enamels of the Orient, one felt
that J. Whitlock Pastor had been roasted and glazed, roasted and glazed,
roasted and glazed until the substance beneath had become but a matter
of conjecture.  The enamel was magnificent--but where was the man? Mr.
Ladd, with a choking sense of disappointment, began to suspect there was
none.

J. Whitlock opened the proceedings much as the czar might have opened a
Duma.  He recited a neat, dry, commonplace little address of welcome,
and sounded a key-note of constraint and formality that was rigorously
maintained throughout the evening.  The address was seconded by the
empress-dowager, and then it was Mr. Ladd's turn to swear loyalty to the
throne, and burst into cheers.  He did so as well as he could, but it
was a poor, lame attempt; and when, almost in despair, he went up to J.
Whitlock, and impulsively wrung the Imperial hand, the very atmosphere
seemed to shiver at the sacrilege.

A frigid dinner followed in a dining-room of overpowering magnificence.
There was a high-class conversation to match, interrupted from time to
time by a small British army--small in number--but prodigal of inches,
and calves, and chest-measure--who stealthily pounced on plates,
obtruded thumbs, and stopped breathing when they served you.  Mr. Ladd,
smarting with an inexplicable resentment, compounded of jealousy, scorn
and chagrin, writhed in his chair, and tugged at his mustache, and gazed
from his daughter to his prospective son-in-law with melancholy wonder.

Yet Phyllis seemed to be perfectly contented, sitting there so demure,
elegant and self-possessed at the terrible board of the Romanoffs.  Mr.
Ladd could have wished that she had shown a little more assertion, a
little more--well, he hardly knew what but something to offset the
unconscious arrogance of these people, and to show them that a Ladd was
as good as they were, if not a darned sight better! But Phyllis, if
anything, was too much the other way.  There was a humility in her
sweetness, her deference, her touching desire to please.  To her father
she seemed to have accepted too readily, too gratefully, her beggar-maid
position at that kingly table.

But as he watched her some doubts assailed him. He remembered how
singular she had been in the carriage, how over-wrought, and unlike her
usual self.  Her eyes, fixed so constantly on her intended's, had in
them more pleading than love; more a curious, studying, seeking look, as
though she, too, was trying to penetrate the enamel, and see beneath.
But her voice softened as she spoke to him; she smiled and colored at
his allusions to "us" and "our"; she shyly referred to their projected
honeymoon in the western forests, and spoke rapturously of galloping
through the glades at the head of twenty rangers, all sunburned and
jingling and armed to the teeth.

What was an old fellow to make of it, anyway? One could bring up a girl
from a baby, and still not know her.  Mr. Ladd was very much perplexed.

After dinner, the ladies left the two men at their coffee, and retired.
The British Army set out liqueurs, cigars, a spirit-lighter, and then
noiselessly vanished.  Now that they were alone together, Mr. Ladd hoped
that J. Whitlock would unbend; hoped that the long-deferred process of
making his acquaintance would begin.  He might not be an ideal
son-in-law, but it was horse-sense to make the best of him.  You had to
take the son-in-law God gave you.  Besides, the man that Phyllis loved
was bound to have a fine nature; and if he could unveil it to her, he
surely could unveil it to her father. So, between sips of Benedictine,
and through the haze of a good cigar, Mr. Ladd essayed the task.

He commenced by describing his own early manhood; his courtship of
Phyllis' mother; his marriage in face of a thousand difficulties.  Again
and again he faltered; it was all so sacred; his eyes were often
moist--but he persevered; he had to win this young man, and how better
than by appealing to the sentiment that unites all true lovers?  The
elderly railroad president could not bear utterly to be left out of
these two young lives.  His daughter was lost to him; at best a husband
leaves little for a father; this stranger had it now in his power to
make that little almost nothing.  Small wonder, then, that Mr. Ladd
struggled for his shred of happiness; put pride on one side; exerted
every faculty he possessed to attract the friendship of Phyllis' master.
For a husband is a master; a woman is the slave of the man she loves;
forty centuries have changed nothing but the words, and the size and
metal of the ring.

It used to be of iron, and was worn on the neck.

Mr. Ladd's gaze, that had been fixed in vacancy, of a sudden fell full
on J. Whitlock's face.  What he saw was an expression so cold, so
delicately supercilious, so patiently polite, that he stopped as
suddenly as though he had been struck by lightning. Was it for this,
then, that he had opened this holy of holies, into which no human being
before had ever looked,--this inmost recess of his soul, now profaned,
it seemed to him, for ever?  For a second his shame transcended even his
disappointment.  He had dishonored the dead, besides dishonoring
himself. He had allowed this tall, thin, bored creature to hear things
too dear, too intimate, to be spoken even to Phyllis.  My God, what an
old fool he had been, what an ass!

"Had we not better join the ladies?" inquired J. Whitlock, after the
pause had lasted long enough to redeem the proposal from any appearance
of rudeness.

"I suppose we had," returned Mr. Ladd, in a tone as dry as his host's;
and together they both sought the drawing-room.

A long, long hour followed before, in decency, a very flustered,
embittered, and upset middle-aged gentleman could dare to say his
adieux.  From the frescoed ceiling the painted angels must certainly
have wept at the sight beneath; or, if they did not weep, they surely
yawned.  The labored conversation, the make-believe cordiality, the
awful gap when a topic fell to rise no more, certainly made it an
evening that never could be forgotten.  Blessed Briton who said: "Mr.
Ladd's kerridge!"  Twice blessed Briton who handed them into it, and
uttered the magic word "'Ome!"


"Did you like him, Papa?"

"A delightful young man, Phyllis, perfectly delightful."

"And his mother?"

"Charming, charming!"

"I never saw either one of them unbend as they did to you."

"It was a great compliment.  I appreciate it."

"You don't think I could have done better?"

"No, indeed.  Not if you love him."

"Papa?"

"Yes, dearest?"

"Papa, I've done something awful.  Shut your eyes, and I'll try to tell
you."

"Phyllis, what do you--?"

"Are they shut--tight--_tight_?"

"Yes, but I don't--"

"Now, don't talk, Papa, but listen like a good little railroad
president, and I'll tell you what I think of J. Whitlock Pastor, and
that is he's _unbearable_!  No, no, I'm not joking--I mean it, I mean
it!  He's unbearable, and his mother's unbearable, and the forty yards
around them is unbearable, and I wouldn't marry him for anything under
the sun, no, not if he was the only man in the world except the
clergyman who would do it; and Papa, I'm so mortified and ashamed and
miserable that I don't know what to do.  Didn't you notice me to-night,
and how shy and crushed I was, sitting there like a little Judas, and
feeling, oh, horribly wicked and treacherous?  It was _all_ I could do
not to scream out that I hated him, just as loud as I could: I hate you!
I hate you!  I hate you!--I was trying to tell you that when we started,
but I didn't have the courage.  I wanted you to see him for yourself; to
realize how unendurable he is; I--I--wanted you not to blame me too
much, Papa."

To Mr. Ladd it was like a reprieve at the gallows' foot.  Blame her?
Why, elation ran to his head like wine; he caught her in his arms and
hugged her; had he saved her from drowning he could not have been more
passionately thankful.  His opinion of the young man came out in a
torrent of unvarnished Anglo-Saxon.  To every epithet he applied to him,
Phyllis added a worse.  In their wild humor, and bubbling over with a
laughter that verged on the hysterical, they vied with each other in
tearing J. Whitlock to pieces.

"But, Phyllis, Phyllis, how did you ever come to do it?"

"I don't know, Papa."

"But you must have liked him?"

"I thought I did."

"Was it the attraction of his position--his name--and all that kind of
thing?"

"No, I thought I loved him."

"How _could_ you have thought such a thing?"

"It's incredible, but I did, Papa.  I loved him right up to the moment
when he kissed me.  And how could I stop him after having looked down at
my toes, and said 'Yes.'  He's been kissing me for five days--and, Papa,
I hate him."

The fierceness she put into these three words was vitriolic.  Disgust,
revulsion, outraged pride flooded her cheek with carmine.

"Papa, I can't make any excuses for myself. It's not prudery; it's not
that; but somehow the real _me_ didn't like the real _him_, and that's
all I can say about it!"

"You'll have to write to him, and break it off."

"But what am I to tell him, Papa?  It's so awful and humiliating for
him.  I guess I'll just put it down to insanity in my family."

"But, good Lord, we haven't any--we've a very decent record."

"Oh, Papa, I simply must have been insane to have got engaged to
him.--I'll write him a beautiful letter of regret, and inclose a
doctor's certificate!"

Her incorrigible humor was again asserting itself. She outlined the
letter, her eyes dancing with merriment.  Mr. Ladd, in no mood to
criticize these swift transitions, joined in whole-heartedly.  They
laughed and laughed till the tears came, and arrived home like noisy
children from a party.

Mrs. Fensham, in a very decollete gown, and looking like a sylph of
twenty-five, was waiting for the carriage to take her to a ball.  She
swam up in front of Bob, and raised her two little hands to his
shoulders--a graceful gesture, and one she was very fond of.

"And you found him a perfect dear, didn't you?" she murmured
ecstatically.

"Well, I don't know that I did," faltered Brother Bob, placing a kiss on
the top of her head.  "The fact is, Sally, we've decided to call it
off!"

"Bob, you haven't broken the engagement!"

Her lisping voice turned suddenly metallic.  She stared from her brother
to her niece, a sylph no longer, but a woman of forty-five, pale with
apprehension and anger.

"Phyllis has made a mistake, that's all," he said. "He looked very nice
in the show-window, but now we are going to take him back, and get a
credit-slip for something we want more."

"A new automobile coat for Papa," put in Phyllis mischievously.

"And you can both laugh about it!" exclaimed Aunt Sarah in appalled
accents.  "Laugh at throwing over J. Whitlock Pastor!  Oh, you little
Carthage nobodies--haven't you any sense at all--don't you know what you
are doing--isn't he as much a duke with us as any Marlborough or
Newcastle in England?  He was too good; he was too nice; he wasn't
enough of a snob to blow and brag--and that's what he gets for it, the
'No' of a silly girl, who'd prefer a barber's block clerk to the
greatest gentleman in America!"

She tottered to the mantelpiece and burst into tears--the first tears
she had shed in twenty worldly and scheming years--and the only tears
that did attend the rupture of the Pastor-Ladd engagement.




                              *CHAPTER IV*


There was the usual chatter, the usual slanders, the usual innuendoes
that follow such an event.  Charming little assassins, in Paquin gowns
and picture hats flew about sticking pins into Phyllis' reputation.
Those worse gossips, the clubs, were not behindhand either; and old
gentlemen, who ought to have known better, unctuously laid their heads
together and passed the lies along.  It is so much the custom to dwell
on the good side of human nature that we are apt to forget the existence
of another--that cruel malignancy, which, in embryo, may be seen any
time at the monkey-house in the Zoo.  In its more developed human form
it jostles at our elbows every day.

The American duke himself behaved with a beautiful propriety.  Publicly
he took all the blame on his own shoulders, and hied him to the western
wilds to scourge the campers and cigarette-smokers who infested his
beloved forests.  Thus congenially employed, he was quite willing to
wait for Time's healing hand to do the rest.  In a year he was
completely reenameled, and took a finer polish than ever.

Mr. Ladd hoped that Phyllis would return to Carthage to hide her head
from the storm.  But she insisted on staying in Washington, and "seeing
it through," which she did with the prettiest defiance imaginable,
returning pin for pin with gay insouciance, and dancing the night out in
all manner of lions' dens.  In her veins there ran the blood of that old
aristocratic South--of those fighting-cock Frenchmen, dark, lithe and
graceful, who had loved, gambled and gone the pace with headlong
recklessness and folly; of those fiery Spaniards, more grave and still
more dissolute, to whom pride was the very breath of life, and who could
call out a man and shoot him with the stateliest of courtesy.--What a
race it had been in the heyday of its wildness and youth, the torment of
women, the terror of men, alluring even now through the haze of by-gone
pistol-smoke!  And though it has been dead and gone these hundred and
fifty years, the strain yet persists in some Phyllis here, some
stripling there, attenuated perhaps, but far, far from lost.

Even to-day such intrepidity casts its spell.  The eyes that are
unafraid, the mouth that can smile in peril, do we not still admire
their possessor--and that most of all in a young, high-bred and
exceedingly attractive woman?  Washington certainly did in Phyllis
Ladd--young-man Washington, that is,--and they trooped after her in
cohorts, and would have drunk champagne from her little slipper had she
let them.


Months rolled by.  The tide of Phyllis' letters rose in Mr. Ladd's
drawer--countless pages in that fine girlish hand, full of zest, full of
the joy of living, revealing, intimate, and silent only in regard to the
most important matter of all--J. Whitlock's successor.

Mr. Ladd knew what value to set on her assertion that she was "tired of
men."  He waited, not without jealousy, for preference to show itself;
reading and re-reading every allusion that might afford a clue.  If she
wrote that "the ambassador was a very kind old man, with aristocratic
legs, and a profile like a horse, who singled me out for much more than
my share of attention"--Mr. Ladd would forthwith look up that
ambassador; get his diplomatic rating; and worry about his being
sixty-six, and twice a widower.

One day, quite out of the sky, a card was brought him inscribed,
"Captain Baron Sempft von Piller, First Attache, Imperial German
Embassy, Washington."  As a rule, applicants to see Mr. Ladd had first
to state their business, and undergo a certain amount of sifting before
they were admitted.  In this manner inventors were weeded out, cranks,
people with a grievance against the claims' department, book-agents,
labor-leaders, charity-mongers, bogus clergymen who had been refused
half-rates--all that host who buzzed like mosquitoes outside Mr. Ladd's
net.  But the First Attache of the Imperial German Embassy was given an
open track, which he took with a military stride, and the clank of an
invisible sword.

Mr. Ladd turned in his chair, and beheld a florid, tall, fine-looking
young man of twenty-eight or so, with the stiff carriage of a Prussian
officer, and unshrinking blue eyes that had been trained not to droop in
the face of anything.

The captain wasted no time in preliminaries. In a carefully-rehearsed
sentence, innocent of all punctuation, and delivered in a breath, he
said: "It is not my intention to trespass overlong on the time of I know
a much-engrossed gentleman but if you will kindly grant me three minutes
I shall be happy to convince you of the integrity of my character and
the honor of my intentions Mr. Ladd Sir."

Taking another breath that swelled out his magnificent chest at least
four inches, he resumed: "This I now lay before you is my
birth-certificate these are the reports on my gymnasium courses at
Pootledam respectively marked good very good indifferent good very good
till inspired by the thought of a military career I entered on probation
subsequently made permanent by the vote of my fellow-officers the tenth
regiment of Uhlans which after six years of honorable commendation I
left regretted by every one to place myself in the diplomatic service
Mr. Ladd Sir."

Taking a third breath, he went on:

"By kindly glancing at this letter which I have the honor to bear from
my esteemed chief whom I am proud also to call my friend you will see to
your complete satisfaction that I am no needy adventurer trading on an
historic and greatly-renowned name but a man of substance promise and
ability with the assurance of reaching if I live the highest place it is
in the power of my country and my emperor to grant Mr. Ladd Sir."

He was inhaling his fourth breath when Mr. Ladd managed to interpose a
speech of his own.

"I am delighted to see you, captain," he said, "and I shall be happy to
oblige you in any way I can.  Perhaps you desire to inspect what is
really one of the most perfect double-track railroad systems in this
country, operated at the minimum of expense, and with an efficiency that
makes the K. B. and O. very favorably regarded by our public.  If it
falls below the high standard of your own government-owned lines, you
must credit us with a traffic at least sixteen-fold larger per mile than
that of yours.  I will ask you to bear this in mind before making too
critical a comparison."

A boyish and most engaging smile overspread the captain's features, and
for the moment he almost forgot how to go on with the set speech he had
learned so carefully.  But he stiffened his shoulders, threw back his
head, and continued, like a student up for a difficult and trying
examination: "Before paying my addresses to one whose youth beauty and
charm has taken captive a heart hitherto untouched by the sentiment of
love I judged it only right as a gentleman and a former German officer
before seeking to compromise the lady's inclination in any way whatever
to provide myself with the necessary proofs of my unassailable position
and honor and lay them with profound respect in the hands of her
highly-considered and greatly-esteemed father Mr. Ladd Sir."

Mr. Ladd nearly fell off his chair at this announcement; but controlling
himself, he bent hastily over the papers, and managed to hide his
stupefaction. He was very much bewildered, and though favorably
impressed by Von Piller, had the American's distrust of all foreigners,
particularly if titled. The word "baron" conjured up horrible stories of
imposture and mortification; hungry fortune-hunters; shameless
masqueraders preying on credulity and snobbishness, always with debts at
home and often wives; old-world wolves ravening for the trusting lambs
of the new.

But the ambassador's letter was most explicit, and its authenticity
could be tested in an hour.  The craftiest of wolves would not dare to
take such a risk.  Wonder of wonders, it seemed, too, that the baron was
rich--one of the Westphalian iron kings--with great landed estates
besides.  Yes, he was certainly a very eligible young man.  No harm
could be done by rising and shaking hands with him.  Mr. Ladd did so,
impressively.

"You are very punctilious," he said.  "I wish we had more of that
ourselves.  Your conduct is manly and straightforward, and I esteem it
highly. Frankly, I should prefer my daughter to marry an American--but
if a foreigner is to win her, I should be very happy to have that
foreigner you."

The baron, who was now quite out of set-speeches, and had to flounder in
English of his own making, murmured: "I lofe her--oh, how I lofe her!
My friends they say, 'crazy, crazy,' but I say, 'no, this tells me I am
wise.'"

And with that he pressed his hand to his heart, with an air of such
simplicity and devotion that Mr. Ladd was touched.

"You're a fine young man," he said, "and I wish you luck."

"You will speak well of me to her?--Manly, straightforward--you will say
those words?"

"With pleasure, Baron."

The florid face beamed; the blue eyes were shining; Mr. Ladd remembered
the tendency of foreigners to embrace, and hastened to put the desk
between them.

"I will go now," exclaimed Von Piller.  "I will what you call, get busy.
I will lay at her little feet the heart of a man that adores her!"

"Don't be in too big a hurry," said the railroad president kindly.
"Take an old fellow's advice; begin by trying to make a good
impression."

Von Piller smiled complacently.

"Already have I done it," he remarked.  "She likes me very mooch.  The
battle is half-won, and all I need is General Papa to reinforce."

It suddenly shot through General Papa's mind that the baron was not so
simple as he appeared. Mr. Ladd's first feeling of compassion for a
hopeless suit changed to a grinding jealousy.  It was intolerable to him
that anybody should carry off his precious daughter, and this amiable
young man at once took on the hue of an enemy.  Their farewell was stiff
and formal; and when, two hours later, the confirming telegram arrived
from the German embassy, Mr. Ladd hotly consigned Captain Baron Sempft
von Piller to the devil.




                              *CHAPTER V*


Von Piller had not under-estimated the "good impression."  It was
certainly good enough for him to become, two days later, the successful
suitor for Phyllis' hand.  The engagement was in the papers, and
everybody was happy--save Mr. Ladd.  On top of his natural resentment at
any poor human biped in trousers daring to aspire to his daughter, there
were two letters from Washington that embittered him beyond measure.
The one was from Phyllis; the other from Sarah Fensham; and though very
different in expression their gist was the same.  He was besought _not_
to come to Washington.

"Dear, darling old daddy," wrote Phyllis, "The whole thing is such
gossamer, so faint and delicate and eider-downish, that one belittling
look of yours, one unguarded and critical word--would utterly destroy
it.  Of course, Sempft is not the Golden Young Man, and I know it very
well, but I really do like him lots, and if you will give it six weeks
to 'set,' as masons say, I believe that it will turn very nicely into
love.  But just now--!  Oh, Papa, the poor little building would topple
so easily--and you know how hard I have found it already to stay too
close to those big, greedy, grasping creatures who want to race off with
one as a poodle does with a stick.  Not that Sempft isn't awfully nice
and considerate, but I know there will be times when--!  Oh, Papa, be
patient, and give me a chance, for if you should hurry over and catch me
in the right humor, I would send him away so fast that he would think he
was fired out of a Zalinski cannon!"

Sarah's letter was in a more wounding strain: "For Heaven's sake, stay
away, my dearest brother, or you will ruin everything.  That girl of
yours is too fastidious and wilful for belief, and from the bottom of my
heart I am sorry for the poor dear baron, who is making such a goddess
out of an icicle.  She is possessed of the same insane pride that you
have, and is quite of your own opinion that nobody is good enough for
her.  After bringing her up all wrong, don't add to your folly by
breaking off a second splendid match.  Stay in Carthage, and try to
acquiesce in the fact that sooner or later she is bound to marry
somebody; and thank your stars that it is somebody to be proud of.  I
know she is too good for any one but an archangel, but still, steel
yourself to accept a young, wealthy, handsome, brilliant, accomplished,
high-born and distinguished son-in-law, who has the world at his feet.
Naturally to you it is an intolerable prospect. I don't ask you to say
that it is not.  But for Heaven's sake, remain in Carthage, and keep
your sulks at a distance."

After his first anger had passed, Mr. Ladd took himself seriously to
task, and forced that other self of his to admit the undeniable justice
of both these letters.  He was a cantankerous, cross-grained old
curmudgeon, and the right place for a cantankerous, cross-grained old
curmudgeon was unquestionably--Carthage. If he were so utterly unable to
make allowances for youth and immaturity--and he had to assent to the
fact that he was unable--he ought, at any rate, to have the grace to
keep his fault-finding face turned to the wall.  Phyllis was right.
Sarah was right.  Everybody was right, except a hot-headed old fellow,
with a sick and jealous heart, who, if he did not restrain himself,
would end by marring his daughter's future beyond recall.--Yes, he would
hold himself in; he would do nothing to incur reproach; he would let
things take their course, and pretend to be a sort of Sunny Jim,
smilingly regarding events from Carthage.

It was none too easy an undertaking, but he was sustained in some degree
by the hurried little scrawls that reached him, day by day, from
Phyllis.--It was all going splendidly.  She was so proud of Sempft.  He
was everywhere such a favorite. He was so high-spirited, and manly--and
so crazily in love with her.  It was nice to have him so crazily in love
with her.  It was nice to lead such a big, swaggering soldier by a pink
ribbon--to pin him with a little, girlish ticket marked "reserved"--to
see him jump at the mere raising of an eyebrow when some embezzling
young debutante had sneaked him away into a corner.--Then there was the
engagement ring she could not pull her glove over, with diamonds so
large and flashing that they'd light the gas; there was the gorgeous
pearl-necklace, which Aunt Sarah would not allow her to accept yet;
there was the emperor's wonderful cablegram of congratulation, all about
Germany and America, as though the two countries were engaged, instead
of merely she and Sempft.  It made her feel so important, so
international--and horrid, shabby men snap-shotted her on the street
like a celebrity, walking backwards with cameras in their hands while
everybody fell over everybody to see what was going on!--Oh, yes, Papa,
she was saving it up to brag about to her grandchildren--when she was a
tiresome old lady in a castle corner, with nothing to do but bore chubby
little German aristocrats.

Her gaiety and sprightliness never wavered. Her content, her happiness
were transparent.  If her ardor for Baron von Piller seemed never to
pass the big-brother limits, it might be assumed she concealed her
feelings, and was either too shy or too modest to betray them.  Mr.
Ladd, who read her letters with a microscope, noticed the omission,
and--wondered.  His misgivings were not untinged with pleasure.  Did she
really love this man, he asked himself again and again?  It was
impossible to be certain.  Had it not been for the J. Whitlock Pastor
episode he would have been in less doubt.  But with this in mind, he
could not help wondering--wondering a great deal.

The answer to these conjectures came with a startling unexpectedness.
One afternoon, on his return home, he found the front door open, and an
expressman staggering up to it with a trunk. In the hall were five more
trunks, and Henry and Edwards, both in shirt-sleeves, were departing for
the upper regions with another.  Before Mr. Ladd could ask a question
there was a swift rush of skirts, an inroad of barking dogs, and a
radiant young person was hanging to his neck with round, bare arms.  It
was Phyllis, her eyes dancing, her face flushed with the romp she had
been having with the dogs, her hair in wild disorder, and half down her
back.

"I'm home, Papa," she cried, "home for good, and in such awful disgrace
you oughtn't to take me in!  Yes, your wayward girl has crept back to
the dear old farm, and though the snow was deep, and all she had was a
crust from a crippled child--she's here, Papa, at last, and, oh, oh, oh,
so glad!--Down, Watch, down!  Teddy, you'll get one in the nose if you
don't stop!--Oh, the little wretch has got my slipper off!"

Teddy scampered away with it, and there was a lively tussle before it
was recovered, with all manner of laughter and slaps and growls.

"But Captain von Piller?" demanded Mr. Ladd. "Is he coming?  Is he here,
too?"

"No, Papa," she returned, "he isn't here, and he never will be here, and
I left him screaming till you could hear it all over Washington.  Just
howling, Papa, and calling for warships!  And Aunt Sarah was hollering,
too, till the only dignified thing left was to tie my sheets together
and let myself out, which I did before there was a riot!"

"Phyllis, you don't mean that your engagement--"

"Hush, Papa, we can't talk here.--Come upstairs to your den."

There she heaped up a dozen pillows on the divan; settled herself with
Watch's head on her lap, and Wally and Teddy beside her; asked if there
were any chocolate creams, and resigned herself to there being none; and
then, pushing back the soft, thick hair from her eyes, told her father
to sit at her feet, and not to crowd a valuable dog.

"Yes, all that's finished," she said.  "It was splendid and
international, and all that, but I could not stand it any more.  He was
just like poor Whitlock, only worse.  I don't know how to describe it,
Papa, for he was awfully correct and all that--I wouldn't for worlds
have you think he wasn't--only he expected all the conventional things
that go with being engaged, and wanted me to nestle against his
waistcoat, and, and--pant with joy I suppose--and whisper what a
beautiful, wonderful, irresistible, bubble-bubble-bubble person he
was--and shyly kiss his hand, probably--Oh, well, Papa, I tried to, and
I didn't like it, and in spite of myself it seemed wrong and
humiliating--and he was so large, and pink, and German, and so much of
him rolled over his collar, and everybody seemed in such a conspiracy to
poke us into dark corners and leave us there, and so finally I just
said, 'No, I've made a mistake, and here's your ring, and here's the
cablegram from the Kaiser, and here's the photograph of your dead
mother--and would you mind getting out of my life, please?--and friends
are requested to accept this the only intimation.'"

"And how did he take it?"

"He wouldn't take it--that was the trouble. He made a frightful fuss.
He couldn't have made more if we had been really married, and I had
announced my intention of running away with the elevator-boy!  He
scrunched my hands till I thought the bones would break, and might have
thrown me out of the window if tea hadn't come in the nick of time.
Then he went off to Aunt Sarah, with the German idea of stinging up the
family--as though twenty aunts could make me love a man I didn't--and
succeeded so well that she practically drove me out.  Oh, her position!
I never heard the end of it--and of course she said I had ruined it, and
that she never could hold up her head again.  The only thing to do was
to run.  So I ran and ran and ran--to my old dad!"

She slipped her hand down, and held her father's collar as though he,
too, were a dog, and gave it an affectionate little tug.

"My darling old dad," she murmured.

"It's not so bad to have one, is it?" he said. "To know where there is a
snug harbor, and an old fellow who thinks you are perfect, and
everything you do is right.  You will get a lot of criticism for this,
and I suppose Washington will boil over--but to my thinking, you
couldn't have done better, and I am thankful for your courage.  If you
don't love a man, for God's sake, don't marry him, even if you're both
walking up the aisle, and he's twiddling the ring!--To tell the truth, I
wasn't a bit partial to Von Piller, and found it pretty hard to sit
tight, and be told he was forty different kinds of a paragon."

"My darling Papa," she observed sweetly, "you're never going to like
anybody who wants to marry me, and it's sure to cost me some worry when
the right person does come.--Do you suppose he ever will?"

"Oh, I guess so."

"In spite of the awful record I have made? Aunt Sarah says I am branded
as a coquette, and no decent man will ever have anything more to do with
me."

"Rubbish."

Phyllis fondled Watch's ears, which were long and silky, and tried the
effect on dog-beauty of overlapping them on his head.

"Papa, what's the matter with me?  Why haven't I any sense?  Why am I
not like other girls?"

"You are very fastidious."

"Yes, that's true."

"And very proud."

"Yes, inherited."

"And demand a great deal."

"Yes--everything."

"You are in love with love--and are rather in a hurry."

"Oh, Papa--shut your eyes--I am love-hungry. I want to love--I'm crazy
to love.  Only--only--"

"The right man hasn't arrived?"

"I hope it's that.  If it isn't, I'm going to have a bad time of it.  It
seems so useless; this getting engaged and then hating the poor
wretch.--It's such a terrible waste of energy and heart-beats all
round."

"Dad included."

"What a nuisance I am, to be sure!  I've exhausted everybody's patience
except yours, and that's getting thin.  It will end in my living alone
in a shanty with nothing but dogs, and the faded photographs of the men
I've thrown over.  Aunt Sarah called me an awful name; called me an
engagement-buster; said that the habit would grow and grow till I was a
horrid old maid with nothing to tease but a parrot.--Though I'd love to
have a parrot--two of them--and raise little parrots! Little fluffy baby
parrots must be adorable.  Papa, let's buy a pair to-morrow, and you'll
teach the he-one to swear, and I'll teach the she-one to be gentle and
submissive and always have her own way.  And Papa--?"

"Yes, dearest?"

"You aren't cross with me, are you?"

"Not a bit."

"And I may live with you, and add up your bills, and bring you your
slippers, and dream all day of that Golden Young Man who doesn't exist?"

"Oh, don't say that--He does, Phyllis."

"Papa, he doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't!"




                              *CHAPTER VI*


Socially speaking Carthage was as distant from Washington as is
Timbuctoo.  While the Von Piller hurricane was raging in the nation's
capital, the Carthage barometer showed "fair and rising."  To a
storm-tossed little mariner, it was like gaining the lee of some palmy
isle, and casting anchor in still water.  The islanders, too, if a
trifle homespun and provincial, were the most delightful people, and
unspoiled by any intrusion of a higher civilization.  Phyllis had not
realized how entirely her outlook had changed until she returned to her
own home.  She saw her former school fellows with new eyes, and while
she could not forbear smiling at some of their ways, she liked them
better than ever before.--They, on their side, regarded with awe this
fashionable young beauty, who had jilted a Pastor, and given the mitten
to a real, live, guaranteed baron, and who had descended in their midst,
like a racer in a paddock of donkeys.

Some of them felt very donkeyfied indeed.  Tom Fergus, a gelatinous
young man, somewhat forward and familiar, who was alluded to in the
local papers as "one of the leaders of the younger set" said she was
"raving pretty, but, my stars, what was a fellow to talk to her about?"
Billy Phillpots, who worked in his father's store (many of the young
fellows "worked in his father's store") vetoed her as "insufferably
stuck up," he having escorted her home one night, and failed to extort
the usual toll at the garden-gate.--The good night kiss at the
garden-gate was quite a Carthage institution, and as innocent as the
kiss of an early Christian.

Life in Carthage was altogether Early Christian--for the young people of
the better families. They met every night, and moved in flocks, like
sparrows, alighting first in one house and then another--taking up the
carpets for dancing, improvising suppers, crowding round the fireplaces
to sing, and tell stories.  Presumably there was some social line drawn
somewhere; but money at least counted for little, and anybody that was
"nice" was allowed in.  And it must be said, on the whole, that they
were remarkably "nice," and very much a credit to high-class democracy.
The boys were well-mannered, brotherly and respectful; the girls
charming in their blitheness and gaiety.  Occasionally there was a
match, and a couple disappeared as completely as though they had fallen
into the river and been swept away.  You couldn't marry, and still be a
sparrow.  No, indeed!  You passed into another world, and six months
after the sparrows would hardly know you on the street.  One would not
venture to say this was cruel--though it always came as a shock to the
newly-wedded pair--it was just the sparrow way, that's all.

Phyllis was soon flying with the rest of them, and her ready
adaptability caused her to be accepted in their midst without more than
a passing hesitation.  Hiding her riper and more womanly nature, and
absorbing herself in this animated triviality, she pretended to be as
much a sparrow as any of the flock, and no less lively and empty-headed.
She was lonely, heart-tired, and very much adrift on the sea of life;
and in the engaging childishness of these girls and boys, who, though of
her own age, were mentally only up to her elbow, she found a sort of
solace, a sort of peace.  They kept her from thinking; their chatter and
good spirits were exhilarating; the naive admiration of the young men
warmed, and yet did not disturb her.--Before her long flight to other
skies, the little bird might well be thankful for the sparrows.

Spring came--summer.  Her twenty-first birthday passed in the
Adirondacks, where her father had a cottage in that wilderness of woods
and lakes. She was in her twenty-second year now, and knew what it was
to feel old--oh, so old!  That she was able, by the laws of the land, to
buy and hold real-estate seemed but a poor set-off to this encroachment
of time--though her father repeatedly pointed out this new privilege the
years had brought. She could marry, too, without his consent--another
empty concession to maturity, considering there was no one to marry with
or without it.  Of course, there were a few silly babies running after
her as though she were a woolly sheep--but no one that the wildest
stretch of imagination could consider a man.  Some of their fathers ran,
too--stout widowers panting with the unaccustomed exertion,--but that
was grotesque and disgusting.  Far or wide, high or low, there wasn't a
pin feather of the Golden Young Man.  His noble race was extinct.  He
lived in books, but you never met him. Never, never.  He had died out a
million years ago, leaving nothing save a tradition for poets and
novelists to paw over.

Quite convinced that it was a wretched world, Phyllis danced and rode,
picnicked and camped out after deer in a bewitching Wild West costume,
and was always the first to a party, and the last to leave it--all very
much like one who found it tolerable enough.  Some would have called her
an insatiable little pleasure-seeker, and been wholly misled. "What are
any of us doing except waiting for a man?" she once announced with
shocking candor. "It's the fashion to talk of 'other interests' and we
girls are all graduating, and slumming, and teaching little foreign Jews
to sing '_My Country 'Tis of Thee_, and _Columbia_, _Gem of the Ocean_,
and learning to be trained nurses and bacteriologists--just in the
effort to save our poor little self-respect.  We ruin our complexions,
dim our eyes, and spoil our nice hands--all the property of some future
lord and master, whom we really are pilfering--and who's deceived?  Who
takes it seriously? We don't, who do it.  Poof, what a pretense it
is!--If you have to wait, why not two-step through it as I do, and be as
happy as you can, like people snowed up in a train.  That's what a young
girl is--snowed up--and I only wish some one would come with a spade and
dig me out!"

These racy confidences entertained and delighted her father, but on
other people they often had a contrary effect.  The truth from the lips
of babes and sucklings, however phenomenal, is also disconcerting.  Old
women, who in private taught their daughters a revolting cynicism, and
called it "putting them on their guard," were much overcome by Phyllis'
frankness.  It was "bold"; it was "unladylike"; it was "dreadful."  They
tore Phyllis to pieces, and prophesied the most awful things. It may be
that they were right.  Selfishness is a fine ballast, and an anxious
regard for number one keeps many a little ship on an undeviating course.
Phyllis was made to smart for her unconventional sayings, and they often
came back to her, so distorted and coarsened by their travels, that her
cheeks flushed with anger.

"There's one thing I am learning fast," she said, "and that is, all my
friends seem to be men, and all my enemies, women--and I may as well get
used to it now.  I know there are a few exceptions either way, but it's
substantially that, anyhow, and one might as well face up to it, and
save trouble."

"I'm afraid you are what they call a man's woman, my dear," said Mr.
Ladd.

"I'm glad of it," exclaimed Phyllis saucily.  "I don't want to be any
other kind of a woman, least of all one of those sneaking, cowardly,
backbiting, hypocritical things.  I don't wonder they used to whip them
in the good old days.  If men hadn't degenerated so terribly, they'd be
whipping them now!"


Autumn saw her back in Carthage again.  Aunt Sarah was begging to have
her for another Washington winter, and was in a beautifully forgiving
humor.  The breaches in her social position had been repaired, and the
Demon Want, confound him, was knocking loudly at the door of her elegant
establishment--so that the hope of another visit, with its accompanying
shower of Brother Bob's gold, loomed very attractively before these
cold, blue eyes.  But Phyllis could not be beguiled; she had no wish to
repeat that mad winter; her mood was all the other way--for her big
tranquil house, her books, her dogs, her horses, and long dreaming hours
to herself, undisturbed.  She had loved Washington, and had exhausted
it.  The strain of its business-like gaiety was not to be endured again.
It was a factory of pleasure, and the hours over-long, the tasks
over-hard.  Aunt Sarah might ring the bell all she wished, but the
factory that winter would be one toiler short.  When a person has
entered her twenty-second year, that advanced age brings with it a
certain serenity unknown to wilder twenty.  You are glad to lie back
with a dog's head in your lap, and lazily watch the procession. Silly
young men, choking in immense collars, no longer can keep you out of bed
till three A.M. Let the new debutantes have that doubtful joy.
Twenty-two preferred her book, and her silent rooms.--Not that Carthage
was without its simple relaxations, but they were well spaced out, with
long intervals between.


"Miss Daisy wants you on the 'phone, Miss."

"Oh, all right--I'm coming.--Hello, hello, hello--What a dear you are to
ask me--A--matinee Wednesday?  Love to!--What's it to be?"

"Oh, Phyllis, you won't be offended, will you, but I'm so poor, and
their boxes are only five dollars, and will hold six, and they've
promised to squeeze in three more chairs--and so I've invited nine--and
it's in that cheap, horrid Thalia Theater, but nobody can hurt us in a
box, and everybody says the play's wonderful, and you can eat peanuts,
which you can't do in a real theater; and it's _Moths_, by Ouida, and
Cyril Adair is the star, and he is so wonderfully handsome--oh, you must
have seen his pictures in the barber-shop windows--and anyway, even if
he isn't, the play is delightfully wicked--because I had such a fight
with mama about it, and then Howard has been twice, which he wouldn't
have done if it wasn't; and even if it isn't, how am I to give a
theater-party on no more than five dollars?  The Columbia boxes are
fifteen, and so are the Lyceum's, and when they say six, it's six, and
you simply couldn't dare to ask nine girls because they wouldn't let
them in. But the Thalia man was so pleased and impressed that I believe
he would have included ice-cream if I had asked him--and Phyllis?"

"Yes, darling."

"It would give such a lot of ginger to it, if you would lend me your
carriage and the dog-cart--!  Oh, I knew you would!  What a comfort you
are, Phyllis.  I don't know how I'd get along without you, you are
always so generous and obliging.  Nettie Havens has volunteered tea at
her house--just insisted on it when I told her. I guess that poor little
five never went so far in all its little history!  I can't think it ever
ran a whole theater-party before, with carriages and teas. It's an awful
tacky way of doing things, I admit, but what does it matter if we have a
good time?--Yes, that's the only way to look at it, and you're a
darling.  Do you know I think Harry Thayre is sweet on--!  Oh, bother,
she says I've to ring off, or pay another nickel.  If it was a man she'd
let him have fifteen cents' worth!  Well, good-by, good-by--!"


It was a pretty sight they presented in their box, a veritable
flower-bed of young American womanhood. The bright, girlish faces, the
laughter, the animation, the sparkling eyes, the ripples of merriment,
the air of innocent bravado--all were in such contrast to the usual
patrons of the Thalia that the house could not take its eyes off them.
It was essentially a shop-girl-and-best-young-man theater, with a
hoodlum gallery, and a general appearance of extreme youth.  Those who
did not chew gum were almost conspicuous, and a formidable young man
with a voice of brass, perambulated the aisles with a large tray, and
terrorized nickels and dimes from the pockets of swains.  He had a
humorous directness that made the price of immunity seem cheap at the
money.  It was worth a dime any time to escape him.

And the play?

It was a rousing love-story, crude, stilted, old-fashioned, but
developed with a force and earnestness that Ouida has always possessed.
The brutal Prince, the ill-used Princess, Correze, the idol of the
public, the tenor whose voice has taken the world by storm, heart-broken
and noble in his hopeless love--here were full-blooded situations to
make the heart beat.  And how nine of them _did_ beat in that crowded
box.  And what scalding tears rolled down those youthful cheeks!  And
what little fists clenched as the Prince, passing all bounds, and
incensed to frenzy, struck--positively struck--the adorable being who
was clinging so desperately to honor and duty!  Who could blame Correze
for what was to follow?  Assuredly not our nine rosebuds, who, if
anything, found the splendid creature almost too backward, too
self-sacrificing.  But--!

And Cyril Adair, who played Correze with a fervid pathos that tore the
heart out of your breast! Of course, you knew he had taken the world by
storm.  Of course you knew the public idolized him.  Wasn't he the
handsomest, manliest, most chivalrous fellow alive?  Hadn't he a voice
to melt a stone, or drive, as cutting as a rapier, through even a
Prince?  His firm chin, his faultless teeth, his strange, smoldering,
compelling eyes, his vigorous yet graceful frame--small wonder that the
Princess threw everything to the winds for such a man.  Under the
circumstances none of the nine would have waited half so long.  The
Princess' devotion to honor and duty seemed hardly less than morbid.
Her patience under insults was positively exasperating.  She clung to
respectability with both hands--screamed, raged, but stuck to it as
tight as a limpet--until a blow in the face, and the vilest of epithets
from her brutal husband, toppled her finally to perdition--that is, if
it were perdition to link the remainder of her life with that glorious
being, and abandon everything for love.


The box applauded wildly, and led off the whole house.  The curtain was
made to rise again and again.  Correze, advancing to the footlights, was
left in no doubt as to where he had scored his heaviest hit, and
rewarded those eager, girlish faces with a glance of his fine eyes, and
a bow intended for them alone.  Phyllis was the least enthusiastic of
the party, and her silence during the first intermission was noisily
commented on.  She ate caramels slowly, and added nothing but
monosyllables and an enigmatic smile to the rapturous demonstrations of
her companions.  But had they noticed her during the further course of
the performance, they might have had something else to wonder at.  With
parted lips, and breath so faint that she seemed not to breathe at
all--with a face paling to marble, and poignant with a curious and
unreasoning distress, her eyes never quitted those of Cyril Adair, and
fixed themselves on his in a stare so troubled, so fascinated, that her
soul seemed to leave her body and to pass the footlights.




                             *CHAPTER VII*


The tea that followed was but a blurred memory, a confused recollection
of noise and chatter, with a stab at the heart every time the actor's
name was mentioned.  She was thankful to get home, and lock herself in
her room. She was in a tumult of shame, agitation, and an exquisite
guilty joy.  She partly undressed, and threw herself on her bed,
shutting her eyes to win back the face and voice that had moved her to
the depths.  What had he done to her?  A few hours before she had never
known of his existence. The merest accident had revealed it to her, and
now he was causing the blood to surge through her veins, and mantle her
cheeks with dishonor.  For it was dishonor.  Everything in her revolted
at such a position.  His preposterous name struck fiercely on her pride
and her sense of the ridiculous--Cyril Adair!  How could any one,
masquerading under such an egregious alias, dare to give her a moment's
concern.  She burst out laughing at herself, a contemptuous and bitter
laugh.  Cyril Adair!  No dazzled little housemaid could have been
sillier than she.

Yet his face haunted her, the tones of his voice, that strange,
smoldering look in his eyes.  How greedily that dreadful woman had
kissed him! Those were no stage kisses.  Before a thousand people she
had abandoned herself to his arms, and fastened that painted mouth to
his in an ecstasy. The audience thought it was acting.  Phyllis, with a
keener perception, saw the truth, and it made her savage with jealousy.
That dreadful woman was shameless, crazy, beside herself.  She had wooed
him with every fiber of her body, pressing his head to her bosom, using
every artifice to inflame him, and what had brought down the thunders of
the house had not been a delineation of passion, but the naked thing
itself.

It was horrible.  Actors and actresses were horrible.  No wonder they
were despised even while they were run after.  No wonder their lives
were notorious.  How could it be otherwise when--? But she envied that
woman.  Yes, she envied that woman, terrible as it was to admit it.
Hated her, and envied her.--No, she pitied her as one of her own silly,
headlong sex, cursed with this need to love.  She was no longer young;
she was thirty years old if a day; she was probably poor, disreputable,
with nothing in the world but a trunk full of trashy finery, and no home
but a cheap hotel. Love was the only thing she had, poor wretch, the
only thing.

And Cyril Adair?  It was hard to imagine him in private life except as
Correze.  But, of course, he wasn't Correze--that was absurd.  Perhaps
he would be so changed that one would scarcely know him on the street.
She had heard of such disillusions--of tottering old men playing
boys--and wasn't Bernhardt sixty?  But a woman can tell, a woman
who--who--cares.  That vigorous manhood was no made-up pretense; such
freshness, such warmth, such grace, could not be affected; he was
certainly not much more than thirty, on the border line of youth and
early-maturity when men, to her, possessed their greatest charm.

Lying there, in a swoon of shy delight, she allowed her fancy to fly
away in dreams.  Hand in hand, they trod a fairy-land of love and
rapture. She stole sentences from his part, and made him repeat them to
her alone--avowals, passionate and tender, in all the mellow sweetness
of the voice that still reechoed in her heart.  He was Correze, and she,
in the madness of her infatuation, had forced her way to him and thrown
herself humbly at his feet.  His love was not for her; she aspired to no
such heights; but she had come to be his little slave; to follow him in
his wanderings; to sleep across his door, and guard him while he slept.
To be near him was all she asked.  His little slave, who, when he was
dejected and weary, would nestle beside him, and cover his hand with the
softest kisses.  She wanted no reward; she would try not to be jealous
of those great ladies, though there would be times when she could not
hold back her feelings, and his hand, as she drew it across her eyes,
would be all wet with tears.

With her maid's knock at the door there came a sudden revulsion.
Phyllis called to her to go away, unwilling to be seen in her
defenselessness, and fearful of she knew not what.  But the spell was
broken.  The bubble of that pretty fantasy vanished at one touch of
fact.  Harsh reality obtruded itself, and with it a pitiless
self-arraignment.  She had been swept off her feet by a third-class
actor, in a third-class play, full of mawkish sentiment and unreality,
in a third-class theater where they chewed gum, and ate apples while
they wept over the hero's woes!  A wave of self-disgust rose within her.
She felt soiled, humiliated.  How dared this cheap, showy creature reach
out to take such liberties with a woman a thousand times above him?  A
creature, who in all probability ate with his knife, carried on low love
affairs with admiring shop-girls, and practised his fascinations before
a mirror, like a trick-monkey!  Pah, the thought of her amorous
imaginings reddened her cheeks, and consumed her with bitterness and
shame.  Where was her self-respect, her modesty?  If wishes could have
killed, there would have been no performance of _Moths_ that night at
the Thalia Theater.

At dinner she convulsed her father with an account of the play, in which
neither Adair nor the audience were in any way spared.  In her zest and
mockery, it all took on a richly humorous aspect, and at times she was
interrupted by her own silvery peals of laughter.  To hear her, how
could any one have guessed that she had been stirred as she had never
been stirred before, and that the screaming farce she described had been
in reality the one drama that had ever touched her? Was it in revenge
for what she had suffered?  Was it perversity?  Or was it the attempt to
conquer a physical attraction so irresistible that it tormented and
terrified her even while she fought it with the best of all
weapons--derision?

She passed a wretched night, tossing and turning on her bed in a whirl
of emotions.  She was haunted by that face which appeared to regard her
with such reproach.  Why had she betrayed him, it seemed to ask?  The
smoldering eyes, compelling always, were questioning and melancholy.
That look, of such singular intensity, and with its strange and
mysterious appeal to some other self of hers, again asserted its
resistless power.  She felt herself slipping back, in a langour of
tenderness, to the mood that had shocked her so much before.  In vain
she repeated the saving words--threw out those little life-buoys to a
swimmer drowning in unworthy love--"third-class actor"--"matinee
hero"--"shop-girls' idol."--The drowning swimmer continued to drown,
unhelped.  The life-buoys floated away, and disappeared.  Engulfing
love, worthy or unworthy, drew down her spent body to the blue and
coraled depths, and held her there, fainting with delight.

In our secret hearts, who has not, at some time or other, felt an
unreasoning desire for one all unknown.  Is love, indeed--true love,
anything else? Glamour and idealization--we would not go far without
either, and many, hand in hand, have trod the long path to the grave,
and died happy with their illusions.  Nature, to screen her coarser
intent, fools us, little children that we are, with these pretty and
poetic artifices.  May it always be so, for God knows, it is an ugly
world, and it does not do to peer too curiously behind the scenes.


There was a Mrs. Beekman that Phyllis knew, the widow of a distinguished
lawyer, left with nothing, who had bravely set herself to earn her
living as a milliner.  It was to the credit of Carthage that Mrs.
Beekman's altered fortunes had not impaired its regard for her.  She
kept her friends in spite of the "Hortense" over her shop, and a window
full of home-made hats, which, of themselves, would have amply justified
ostracism.  It was no new thing for Mrs. Beekman to act as chaperon, and
repay, in this small measure, many kindnesses that verged on charity.
So she was not surprised, though much pleased and excited, when Phyllis
telephoned, and asked her to go with her to the theater. "I liked the
play so much I want to see it again," trickled that tiny voice into her
ear, "and though it's at that awful Thalia Theater, we can sit in a box,
and be quite safe and comfortable.--May I call for you a little after
eight, dear?"

Mrs. Beekman, who was an indefatigable pleasure-seeker, consented with
effusiveness.  Phyllis was a darling to have thought of her.  One of her
girls had told her the play was splendid, and that the star--oh, what
didn't she say about the star! Was Phyllis crazy about him, too?  Hee,
hee, all alike under their skins, as Kipling said!  Not that she liked
Kipling--he was so unrefined--but Miss Britt (you know Miss Britt, the
silly one, with poodle eyes, and a poodle-fool if ever there was one)
Miss Britt raved for hours about his "somber beauty."  Wasn't it
killing!  If Adair wanted to, he could leave town with two box-cars of
conquests!  My, the milliners wouldn't have a girl left, and the
ice-cream parlors would all have to shut.--At eight, dear?--And dress
quietly so as not to attract attention?  Hee, hee, it was quite a lark,
wasn't it?


Sitting in the same box, on the same chair, but with a feeling as though
years had elapsed since she had last been there, Phyllis again saw the
curtain rise on _Moths_.  The impulse that had brought her, the mad
desire to see the man who had tortured her so cruelly, had changed to a
cold critical mood, to a disdain so comprehensive that it included
herself no less than Adair.  Dispassionate and contemptuous, it cost her
no effort to steel herself against his first appearance.  His mouth was
undeniably rather coarse; she detected a self-complacency beneath his
Correze that his acting failed to hide; she saw his glance seek the
back-benches with a satisfaction at finding them filled, that struck her
as somehow greedy and tradesmanlike.  What a disgusting business it was
to posture and rant, and choke back sham tears, and mimic the sacredest
things in life--and watch back-benches with an eye to the evening's
profits!  The wretchedest laborer, with his pick and shovel, was more of
a man. At any rate he did something that was dignified, that was useful
and wanted.  He was not framed in cardboard; there was no row of lights
at his honest, muddy feet; his loving was a private matter, and when he
kissed he meant it.--How fortunate it was that she had come!  How
unerring the instinct that had brought her back to be cured!

But as the play proceeded such reflections were forgotten in the
intensity of her absorption.  Again she was leaning forward with parted
lips; rapt, over-borne, lost to everything, and pale with an
indescribable tumult of emotion.  She was conscious of no audience; of
naught save the man who held her captive with a power so absolute and
irresistible that birth, training, pride, weighed as nothing in the
balance.  His voice pierced her heart; his eyes seemed to draw the soul
from her body; she trembled at her own helplessness, though the
realization of it was also a strange and intoxicating pleasure.

But intermingled with that pleasure, darting through it like a tongue of
flame, was a jealousy of Miss de Vere that not even the bitterest of
contempt could allay.  Phyllis felt to the full the degradation of being
jealous of any one bearing so preposterous a name.  Lydia de Vere!  Her
lips curled at herself.  Oh, that shoddy affectation of aristocracy!
Lydia de Vere!  And that in a ten-twenty-thirty cent theater, and hardly
clothed above the waist; and yet, in spite of her painted face, her dyed
hair, and all of her thirty years, with shoulders and breast that a
duchess might have envied, she was handsome in her common, flamboyant,
chorus-girl way, with the meaningless good looks that one associates
with tights and gilt spears. Her acting was stilted and false; her fine
ladyism an impossible assumption; she railed at the Prince in the
accents of a cook giving notice.  But her love for Correze taxed no
histrionic powers.  It was vehement and real, as were the kisses she
bestowed so freely, and the caresses she lingered over with voluptuous
satisfaction.  Beneath the drama of fictitious personages was another of
flesh and blood, like a splash of scarlet on a printed page.

What fury and anguish lay pent up in one girlish bosom!  What a
suffocating sense of defeat, bitterness and shame!--  To burn with
jealousy of such a woman was more lowering than to--  No, she would not
admit that word to herself.  It was folly, infatuation, madness--but not
love.  It would pass with the swiftness it had come, leaving her in
wonder at herself, though the scar would remain for many a long day.
This man was robbing her of something that never perhaps could be
altogether replaced.  How wicked it was, how unjust--she who had done
nothing to tempt the lightning! She hated him for it; she clenched her
teeth and defied him; she understood now what she had read in books that
there are men the mind scorns even while the body surrenders.  But she
was made of stronger stuff; she had pride and courage; her pearls were
not for swine to trample on.  She would put him out of her head for
ever.

It was terrible how he always got back again. There were tones in his
voice that melted every resolution.  If ever laughter was music, it was
his, and the contagion of it swept the house; and his face, though not
handsome in the accepted sense, was striking in the effect it gave of an
untamed, extraordinary and powerful nature, only half revealed.  What
was pride or courage or anything? What availed the hatred of that
hotly-beating little heart?  Had he not but to look her way to make it
his own?  Had he crushed it in his hand, would it not have died of joy?
Hatred, resentment, outraged self-respect--words, nothing but words.

As the house streamed out she waited in dread for Mrs. Beekman's
criticism.  However desperately she might belittle Adair to herself,
Phyllis shrank from hearing condemnation on other lips. The pride that
had failed so utterly to defend her, had taken sides with the enemy,
devotedly, passionately.  Judge of her surprise, then, her pleasure and
relief, when Mrs. Beekman said to her solemnly: "Phyllis, that man's a
genius!  He's perfectly splendid!"  Misunderstanding her companion's
silence, and thinking it implied dissent, she went on with a note of
argument in her voice. "Of course one can feel somehow that he has had
no advantages--that he has probably never been within ten miles of the
people he is trying to represent--(do you remember his shaking hands
with his gloves on?)--but just the same he has a wonderful and
magnificent talent, and we'll hear of him as surely as the world heard
of Henry Irving, or Booth, or Bernhardt.  Truly, Phyllis, I believe the
day will come when we'll be bragging of having admired Adair before he
was famous; that is, if you feel like me about it," she added
doubtfully.

"I do, I do!" cried Phyllis.  "I've never seen anybody on the stage I've
liked as much."

"Well, I have," said Mrs. Beekman candidly. "He certainly suffered from
being with all those idiots, and I don't like that fling-ding walk of
his.--I guess he's about five years short of the winning-post, but we'll
see him romp in as sure as my name's Emma Beekman."

"Romping in" jarred somewhat on Phyllis' ear, but all the same Mrs.
Beekman's admiration was very sweet to her, and in a queer sort of way
was comforting and reassuring.  There was dignity in idolizing a genius;
it raised her in her own good opinion.

She forgot the apples and the chewing-gum; she forgot even Miss de Vere;
a mantle of unreasoning happiness enveloped her, and with it came a gush
of affection for Mrs. Beekman that quite astonished the latter.  She
held her hand in the dark, and tried, with many unseen blushes, to keep
the one subject uppermost.  To lie back in the carriage and hear Adair
praised, thrilled her with delicious sensations.  She was insatiable,
and kept the milliner repeating "genius, genius, genius," like a parrot.
It cost her an order for a twenty dollar hat, but what did she care?
She would have given the clothes off her back in the extravagance of her
desire.  Fortunately Mrs. Beekman was nothing loath, and would have
chattered for ever on this entrancing topic.  "I guess we're as bad as
my girls," she said, with her good-natured laugh, "and he could put us
both in the box-car, too, if he had the mind."

"I shouldn't care if I was the only one," returned Phyllis gaily, "and
anyway, I've always loved traveling!"

"It would be to the devil," said Mrs. Beekman half-seriously.  "That's
where such men come from, and that's where they go back--and if you
could follow round the circle, I guess you'd find it mile-stoned with
silly girls."

"Oh, if I went, I would stay to the end," cried Phyllis.  "No putting me
off at a way-station. I'd take a through ticket."

"And get there alone," put in Mrs. Beekman. "Men like that don't go far
with any girl.  They are a power for mischief, and they weren't much
wrong in the old days to run them out of town--vagabonds and strolling
players, you know.  I guess in those times they used to take chickens,
too, and anything portable.  A bad lot, my dear, and they aren't any
better to-day."

This was a poor return for a twenty-dollar hat, and without knowing
exactly why, it made Phyllis exceedingly miserable.  She felt a
diminishing affection for Mrs. Beekman; and the world altogether
suddenly took on a cold and dismal aspect.  Her spirits were not revived
by finding her father sitting up for her.

"What was the play?" he asked, taking her wraps.

"_Moths_, Papa."

"What?  Twice?"

"Oh, I thought it would amuse me to see it again, and besides, Mrs.
Beekman preferred it to anything else in town, and I really went for her
sake, you know.  It's a charity to take her out sometimes; her life is
so monotonous, and one feels so sorry for her."

Mr. Ladd waited, smiling in advance, for another humorous take-off of
the piece.  But there was no fun in Phyllis that night.  She drank a
glass of water, kissed him good night, and went silently up to bed.

"She doesn't seem very well," he thought, with a shade of concern, and
remembered that she had been pale and tired for some days past.  "If she
doesn't pick up in a day or two, I believe I'll get the doctor."

Had he seen her an hour later, his misgivings would have increased.
Kneeling beside her bed, her face crushed in the coverlet, she was
weeping softly and heart-brokenly to herself.




                             *CHAPTER VIII*


Friday, the day that followed, was memorable to her for its decisiveness
and remorse. She took a long ride, and between canters, busied her head
with plans of escape.  Washington, Florida, Europe--it mattered little
where--so long as she got away at once.  She looked at herself
dispassionately, and the more she looked the more utterly despicable did
she seem.  She was undoubtedly in love with this cheap, showy
actor--(somehow in the sunshine his genius had withered, and he seemed
to share the general tawdriness of gum and apples and shop-boy
sentiment)--crazily in love, infatuated; and to refuse to admit it was
but to hide her head in the sand, like an ostrich.

The comparison was not a pretty one, but then she was not looking for
pretty comparisons.  In fact, as far as her feelings for Adair were
concerned, she was eager to find words that could make her wince.  She
said them out loud, exulting in their brutality; gross words, picked up
she hardly knew where, and put out of mind as unclean and horrible. To
use them now was a form of self-flagellation, and she laid on the whip
with a will.  It was good for a little fool, she said viciously.  Lash!
lash! It would keep her out of mischief.  Lash! lash! Let her understand
once for all what it really meant, even if the skin curled off her back.

On her return home she stopped at the telegraph-office to carry out her
intention of volunteering a visit to Aunt Sarah's.  Night or day, in
season or out, there she always had a refuge.  If blood in Aunt Sarah's
case, was not thicker than water, there was the more robust bond of hard
cash always to be relied upon.  A niece who descended in a shower of
gold could count with confidence on the bread and salt of hospitality,
and the sincerest of welcoming kisses.  There is something to be said
for people you can count on with confidence.  An affectionate,
love-you-like-a-daughter aunt might have made excuses.  A money-loving,
pleasure-loving, wholly selfish aunt, living very much above her income,
was one of the certainties of life.

But as she reined in her horse, and the groom ran to give her his hand
to dismount, she wondered, after all, whether she would telegraph.  The
flagellation had been very successful; the September sunshine had killed
the pitiful glimmer of the footlights; the crisp invigorating air had
brought sanity with every breath.  No, indeed, she would not telegraph,
she was not half the fool she had thought herself; it was a girlish
weakness to exaggerate everything--infatuation included.  She would
telephone to that nice New Yorker instead and invite him to tea.  That
oldish man with the charming distinction and courtesy, who had shown
symptoms of infatuation, too.--Yes, a good whipping to be followed by
two hours of an excessively devoted Mr. Van Suydam, and perhaps a
boy-and-girl-evening later with the carpet up--and why should anybody be
scared of anything?

So the telegram was not sent; and a young lady, very much restored, and
looking adorably fresh and pretty on her Kentucky mare, came galloping
up Chestnut Avenue in excellent spirits and appetite.

As for Mr. Van Suydam--he threw over a big reception to come, and was so
agreeable and eager, in such a sweet, restrained, smiling way, that he
was allowed to hold a little hand a long, long while, and murmur a whole
heartful of tender things that amounted virtually to a
declaration--which was cruel of Phyllis, not to say unladylike and
shocking; for with half-shut eyes she tried to imagine it was quite
another man who was wooing her, and abandoned herself to the fiction
with a waywardness that was inexcusable.  But however unjust it was
towards Mr. Van Suydam, who was an honorable man, and meant what he
said, and was naturally much elated--his suit did Phyllis good, and even
as dummy for another, an inevitable comparison would insist upon
obtruding itself.  Caste is very strong; it is difficult to associate
good-breeding, honor and distinction with a ten-twenty-thirty cent star;
and though Mr. Van Suydam, was nothing to Phyllis personally she could
not help realizing the high value she set on the qualities he
exemplified--so high, indeed, that it began to seem impossible for her
to care seriously for any man without them.

An evening with the sparrows rounded out that day of good resolves and
healthy common sense. She danced with a zest that no
genuinely-infatuated person could have felt, and told ghost stories
afterwards before the fire, and listened to others being told, with
shudders of unaffected enjoyment. "And my dear, when she looked at that
man again, _she saw that his throat was cut from ear to ear!_"--It was a
jolly evening, innocently hilarious, and as wholesome as an ocean
breeze.  Morbidity and introspection could not persist in an atmosphere
so genially youthful.  Phyllis never thought once of Cyril Adair, and
flirted outrageously with Sam Hargreaves, convulsing the sparrows by
sharing his ice-cream spoon.  Ordinarily quiet and backward, and even a
little disdainful, she showed herself in wild spirits that night, and
her audacity, humor and gaiety were irresistible.


It was very discouraging, after a night's sleep, as untroubled as a
babe's, to awaken again with a dull ache within her, and to discover,
with hopeless despondency, that she was not cured at all. Alas for the
girlish armor she had striven so hard to put about her--Mr. Van Suydam,
Sam Hargreaves, the bitter, ugly things she had said to herself, the
defiant resolutions.  Where was that pride she had stung to fury?  Where
was that sense of caste which yesterday had seemed so peremptory?

The morning found her bereft of everything, wretched, defenseless, with
no longer even the will to fly.  She was under the spell once more, and
powerless to throw it off.  Her whole prepossession was to see Adair
again, cost what it might. Nothing else mattered.  She was mad,
infatuated, contemptible to herself--but she could only be appeased by
the sight of him.  Yet how was it possible?  How could she contrive it?
She could not well ask Mrs. Beekman a second time.  That any one should
suspect her secret was intolerable--she would rather have died.  The
circle of her girl friends was too small to arrange another
theater-party without submitting herself to unbearable innuendoes and
home-thrusts.  Those young women had a preternatural instinct for
detecting the dawn of love.  In other things they might be stupid and
blind, but for this they were as watchful as hawks, and as merciless as
only twenty can be.  What of her admirers then--Mr. Van Suydam, say, or
good-natured, fat Sam?  But they could be very sharp, too--and besides,
she could not be so forward as to seek an invitation.  Young girls in
Carthage had a great deal of liberty--but it had its limits.  Perhaps
she could take one of the house-maids with her to the matinee--it was
Saturday and the piece was given twice.  But this would appear queer,
especially if it reached her father.

There seemed nothing for it but to dress very plainly and go by herself.
It was something to remember that matinees practically existed for women
only--though attending one alone was unheard of in Phyllis' set.  It was
less a social law than a sort of fact.  Girls went to matinees in pairs
apparently--always had--and apparently always would.  "Who did you go
with, my dear?" was an inevitable question.  Well, if necessary, one
could meet that with a fib; and if one were found out, it was no great
crime after all--but rather a mild escapade that a blush could condone.
Of course a box was out of the question.  She could not sit solitary in
a box for the whole house to gape at.  But there was nothing to prevent
her buying two orchestra seats, so that any one recognizing her might
draw a natural deduction.  An adjoining empty seat was almost a
chaperon, besides permitting her to widen her distance from an
unpleasant neighbor.  If there should be two unpleasant neighbors, she
could always rise and walk out.

At two she was passing the Thalia Theater with an air of well-feigned
unconcern, though her steps grew slower, and she stole quick frightened
glances at the bustling entrance.  She felt the need of such a
preliminary survey before she could screw her courage up to the point of
joining the in-going throng, who by daylight looked so depressingly
dingy and common that she was fairly daunted by the sight of them.  Even
in the plainest clothes she possessed, she felt that she would be
noticeable among people like that, and this was brought home to her the
more by the impudent stare of several young men, who parted, none too
politely, for her to pass.  They knew she had no business there alone;
that she belonged to another world; and there was speculation, as well
as forward admiration, in the looks they cast at her. She felt they had
somehow divined her hesitating purpose, and were grinning at her
humiliation. She quickened her pace, and got by with fiercely flaming
cheeks, and a desolating sense of failure.

But the desire was so overmastering that after a few minutes she turned,
and again coerced her reluctant feet.  Impudent young men could do her
no harm.  What a coward she had been to let them disconcert her.  She
would put down her sixty cents, and enter boldly, telling herself she
was a factory girl, whose young man happened to be late. She might even
leave the second ticket at the box-office with the phantom's name on
it--though no, that would mean too much talking, and she distrusted her
voice.  But, anyhow, nothing was going to keep her out of the theater.
Didn't soldiers walk tip to breastworks, bristling with guns and
cannons--whole rows of them, with probably a very similar shakiness in
their legs?  She would advance on that box-office in the same
spirit--right, left, right, left--rubadub, rubadub--with sixty cents in
her hot little hand.

She had scarcely reached the outskirts of the crowd when she suddenly
heard her name called aloud.  It went through her like a knife, and she
hardly dared turn her guilty head.  There, beside the curb, in a big
automobile, was Mr. Van Suydam, with a party of women in veils and furs,
all signaling to her.  There ensued an animated conversation.  Where was
she going?  Why shouldn't she jump in with them?  Mr. Van Suydam would
sit on the floor of the tonneau, and give her his place.  They were so
insistent that it was not easy to refuse.  She fibbed manfully, and
invented pressing engagements....  At last they rolled off, waving their
hands....

But this chance meeting cost her all the poor courage she possessed.
Why, she could not explain to herself--but it was gone, and there was
nothing for it but to hasten away.  She felt she had escaped detection
by a hair; the precious matinee was lost; her eyes smarted with
disappointment and chagrin. She rankled with the injustice of it,
too--the unmerited and unsought disaster that this infatuation really
was.  She was so wholly innocent of any blame.  She had done
nothing--absolutely nothing--to incur it.  If you caught measles or
smallpox every one was sorry for you; it was admittedly a misfortune for
which you were in no way responsible.  But if you caught love (she
smiled at her own phrase), it was an unspeakable disgrace! Yet what was
the difference?  Did it not lie outside one's self?  How unjust it was,
then, to make a criminal of a woman for what was beyond her power to
control; and the exasperating part was that she felt a criminal to
herself!

Her heart was heavy with shame.  One instinct made her love
unreasonably; another instinct arrogated the right to criticize with
unsparing venom.  What a contradiction!  What a cruel heritage from all
those thousands of dead people who had gone to make her body and her
mind with odds and ends of themselves!  She had done no harm, yet some
blind, unknown, malignant force was grinding her under its heel.  She
understood now why old-fashioned people believed so implicitly in the
devil.  It was their crude explanation of the unexplainable.

She locked herself in her room, and impelled by a thought that had been
dancing dizzily in her head, opened her desk, and drew out a sheet of
note-paper.  She managed to write: "Dear Mr. Adair"; and then, blushing
crimson, covered her face with her hands, and began to tremble with an
uncontrollable emotion.  To continue that letter--to send it--was to
outrage every feeling of modesty within her.  Under the circumstances
any letter, however cold or conventional, was an avowal. She might
almost as well write "_je t'adore_" under her photograph, and leave it
at the stage-door. But that blind, unknown, malignant force, after a
moment of respite, again drove her on.  She might shiver and blush, but
the compulsion of it was like iron, and she had to obey.

"Dear Mr. Adair," she wrote, "I have seen _Moths_ twice, and may I, a
mere member of the public, and altogether unknown to you, take the great
liberty of expressing my admiration of your wonderful performance?"  She
stopped at the last word, and debated it over with herself--quite
coolly, considering the throes she had been in a minute before.  No,
"performance" would not do. Bears performed; so did acrobats; it was not
the right word at all.--She took another sheet of paper, and began
again: "Dear Mr. Adair: I have seen _Moths_ twice, and may I, a mere
member of the public, and altogether unknown to you, take the great
liberty of expressing my admiration of your powerful portrayal of a
noble nature struggling against an illicit passion?  Nothing I have ever
seen on the stage has moved me so deeply, and though praise from an
absolute stranger may seem little in your eyes, I can not resist the
impulse that makes me write.  Trusting you will receive this in the
spirit that prompts it, believe me, in sincere homage, Phyllis Ladd."

She read it, and re-read it till the words lost all meaning.  What would
he think of it?  What sort of person would it conjure up to him?  The
hand, and the paper, and the engraved address all denoted refinement and
good taste.  It would be quite evident to him that she was a lady, with
a social position of the best--that is, if he knew what Chestnut Avenue
meant in Carthage, and especially such a number as 214.  But there was
nothing to show that she was young, or unmarried--or--or--good-looking.
The letter might just as well have been written by a matron of fifty.
If only she could have added "aged twenty-one, and generally considered
a very pretty woman."  She would have liked him to know that, even if
she were never to see him again; would have liked to tantalize his
curiosity in regard to the unknown Phyllis Ladd whose name was signed at
the end.--Though he probably received bushels of notes.  All actors were
said to.  And being a man he would probably like some of the warmer ones
better--those from frankly adoring shop-girls, hampered neither by
social position nor backwardness.  Hers would be pushed to one side, and
never thought of again.  Oh, the little fool she was to send it! What
could come of it but shame, and good Heavens, hadn't she had enough of
that already?

But undeterred, and wilful in spite of everything, she addressed an
envelope, folded her letter inside it, and went out to drop it herself
into the box.  As it slipped from her fingers she felt an intense
pleasure in her daring.  It was only a coward who took no risks.  There
was her letter in the box gone beyond retaking.  For better or worse,
for good or evil, it had started on its road, and let come what might.




                              *CHAPTER IX*


The next morning, towards noon, Cyril Adair was lounging over the bar of
the Good Fellows' Grotto, with one well-shod foot perched on the metal
rest below.  Before him was a Martini cocktail, and the admiring,
deferential face of Larry, the bar-keeper.  Adair stood the scrutiny of
daylight better than most actors.  Late hours, dissipation and
grease-paint had not impaired a fine and ruddy skin that the morning
razor left as fresh as a boy's.  His brown eyes were clear, and there
was about him an air of unassailable health that was enhanced by broad
shoulders, a neck as firm as any ever cut from Greek marble, and a
finely-swelling chest--the physique, in fact, of what he had some
pretensions to be--a good, welter-weight boxer.  His skill in this
direction was well known, and his readiness when tipsy to exercise it on
any one unfortunate enough to offend him, was one of the scandals of his
stormy and scandalous life.  His engagements, nine times out of ten, had
the knack of ending in the police court, with raw beefsteak for the
plaintiff's eye, and the option of "seven day's hard" for the uncontrite
defendant.  Even when stark sober--and to do him justice he drank only
in fits and starts, with long intermissions between--there was something
subtly formidable in the man, and people instinctively made way for him,
and treated him with a respect verging on fear.

He was over-dressed in what was the last accentuation of the prevailing
fashion--with far too much braided cuff, with far too startling a
waistcoat, with far too extravagant a tie and pin--and worse than
anything, wore them all with assertiveness and self-complacency.  Though
his manners were good (when he liked,) and his address agreeable, and
even ingratiating, he was too showy, too self-satisfied, too elaborately
at ease, and his assurance seemed to rest, not on the conventional
groundwork of birth and breeding, but rather on his power and will to
knock you through the door if he cared to take the trouble.

Of course, he was profoundly ignorant, knowing nothing, reading little,
his life bounded by the footlights on one side, and the stage-door on
the other--and like all such men perpetually nervous lest he should be
found out.  His inherent ability was enormous--as enormous as his
vanity.  He had fought his way up from nothing--from the muddy streets
in which he had sold papers, and begged, and starved, his whole boyhood
long.  He was full of instincts that had never had the chance of
becoming anything more--instincts, which, if cultivated, might have made
him a very different man.  He was passionately fond of bad music;
delighted in the only pictures he knew, those in hotels and saloons; he
had, stored away in a memory that never forgot anything, half the plays
of Shakespeare, and thousands of lines of trashy verse. A savage, in
fact, in the midst of our civilization, which, after trying to grind him
into powder, and denying him everything, was unjust enough to despise
him heartily for what he had made of himself unaided.  Could he have
refrained from taking offense at trifles, and from punching people's
heads, he could easily have retained the high place he had once held on
the New York stage.  He had no one to thank but himself if he were now
touring the country in a fifty-class company, with an enemy in every
manager who had ever employed him.  He had a strong, unusual talent.  In
the delineation of somber and misunderstood natures, contradictory,
pent-up, heroic--the out and out bad man with a spark of good--he was
admitted by metropolitan critics to have no equal in America.  Others
copied him slavishly and made successes, while he, their inspiration and
their model, remained comparatively unknown.  There were times when he
felt very badly about it, but a pretty face and a provocative petticoat
could always divert his attention. Needless to say he had not to look
far to find either.

"Larry," he asked nonchalantly, "do you know any people in Carthage here
named Ladd?"

"I don't believe I do, Mr. Adair," returned Larry, scratching his head.
"Leastways, none except Robert T. R. Ladd, the railroad president."
Larry was unable to conceive that this mighty name could possibly have
any bearing on Adair's question.  "No, I don't believe I do."

"Oh, the railroad president?  Any family?"

"Just one daughter."

"Well, go on--tell me about her."

"Why, there isn't much to say, except people call her the prettiest girl
in Carthage--but then they always say that of a millionaire's
daughter--Emma Satterlee would turn the milk sour, and yet in the
society notes--"

"Did you ever see her?--No, no, I don't mean that one--the railroad
man's--the Ladd girl?"

"Yes, I saw her onst in a church fair.  She hit _me_ all right.  Slender
brunette, very aristocracy, with the kind of eyes that if you're _fond_
of brunettes--seem like--"

"How old is she?"

"Hell, how do I know!  Twenty--twenty-one--something around there.  Just
a girl."

"And the prettiest one in Carthage?" repeated Adair, sipping his
cocktail as though the description pleased him.

"Well, I would leave _my_ happy home for her," said Larry, with a grin.
"Pretty--I'd say she was pretty--pretty enough to eat."

"Lives out Chestnut Avenue way, doesn't she?"

"Yes, in the stone house that's set back in a kind of park, with a big
gate in front and a driveway.  The Ladds' are at the top of the top, you
know.  My, I felt I was breaking into the swell bunch myself when she
told my fortune for a dollar. If I had had the nerve and the money I
guess she would be telling it yet!  And she smiled so sweet when she
took it, like I was as good as anybody.  God forgive me if I seem to
talk disrespectful of her, for she's a lady through and through, and I
knew it even if I was only a bar-keeper."

"Toss you for the drinks," said Adair, draining his glass.  "Hand over
the box, Larry."

"Sure Mike," said the bar-keeper rattling the dice.


Adair encountered an acquaintance, a commercial traveler named Hellman,
on the sidewalk outside.

"Just the fellow I wanted to see," he cried. "Hellman, there is such a
word as temerity, isn't there?"

"Bet your life," said Hellman.  "The temerity of my playing _Hamlet_,
you know--the temerity of you thinking yourself a better-looking man
than I am--the temerity of--"

"And you spell it t-e-m-e-r-i-t-y?" interrupted Adair.

"Yes, why?"

"Oh, I used it in a letter I was writing to a girl, and I didn't want to
mail it till I was sure."  He showed the envelope in his hand, with his
thumb hiding the name.

"Always at it," said Hellman, with an unpleasant laugh.  "Who are you
throwing the handkerchief at now?"

"The prettiest girl in Carthage," returned Adair genially.  "There's a
box over there--let's drop it in."

And together they crossed the street, and sent the letter on its way.

It was to Phyllis, begging in warm but respectful language for the
privilege of calling on her.




                              *CHAPTER X*


"Dear Mr. Adair: I hardly expected you to reply to my note, nor could I
have thought it would please you so much as you say.  Indeed, I hope you
will not misjudge it--or me--for it was written on the same impulse that
makes one applaud in the theater itself, and with no ulterior idea.
Frankly, I do not think I ought to ask you to call--the circumstances
are so peculiar--and it is all so against the conventionalities.  In
Washington or New York it would be different, but this little
place--like all little places--is strait-laced beyond belief.  It will
be my loss more than yours, which perhaps will be some consolation to
you.  Yet it seems too stupid to say no--that is, if you really _do_
want to come--and I am going to ask you after all.  Surely a little talk
over a cup of tea to-morrow at five ought not to arrest the stars in
their courses, or bring down the pillars of the universe on our
unfortunate heads?  And if any one should come in, we might say that we
had met before in Washington? That would place our acquaintance on a
more correct footing, and save me, at least, the possibility of
embarrassment.  Is this asking too much of you?  Sincerely yours,
Phyllis Ladd."




                              *CHAPTER XI*


There are men who pursue women with a skill, zest and pertinacity that
others do bears or tigers, and with very much the same hardihood and
delight.  In the rich preserves of the world, so well stocked with youth
and beauty, they find an unending enjoyment, and an unending occupation.
No sooner have they brought down one, and beheld her bleeding and
stricken at their feet, than they are up and off, with another notch on
their gun, and fresh ardor in their hearts.  They are debarred from
taking the tangible trophies of skin and head; a slipper, a glove, a
bundle of letters are often all they have to show; but within them wells
the satisfaction of the hunter who has made a "kill."

Amongst this race of sportsmen there were few hardier or more daring
than Cyril Adair.  That the game was cruel or cowardly had never
occurred to him.  The women he knew--all of the lower class--frequently
played their side of it with eyes wide open, and ran--not to escape--but
with the full intention of being caught.  This is not urged in his
extenuation.  Often he was not aware of the subterfuge.  Women to him
were but prey, and in more venerable times he would have waylaid any
lady he favored, with a club.

Behold him in immaculate afternoon costume, striding along Chestnut
Avenue--boutonniere, silk-hat, cane, new suede gloves, etc.--a devil of
a fellow in his own estimation, with an air and a swagger that reflected
his profound contentment with himself.  He had never gone a-hunting
before in such a splendid wood.  The thought that he was actually going
to invade one of those imposing mansions made his pulses leap.  How big
they were, how aristocratic!  What incomes they represented!  What
mysteries of ease and luxury lay hidden behind those stately windows!
He was tremendously stirred; tremendously excited.  He swelled with
self-complacency.  He was hardly over thirty, he was handsome, he was a
genius--and the women loved him!

A man-servant admitted him.  Yes, Miss Ladd was expecting him.  His hat
and cane were taken, while he gazed, somewhat daunted, at the immense
hall in which he found himself.  He had a confused sense of tapestries;
of stone bas-reliefs very worn and old; of oriental rugs; of
strange-looking, moldy chairs, straight-backed and carved, with massive
arms, on which there was still the fading gilt of the fifteenth
century.--He was led through another room of a similar cold and spacious
magnificence, and then up-stairs to the drawing-room. Here he was left,
while the man departed to inform his mistress of the visitor's arrival.

The elegance and beauty with which Adair found himself surrounded fairly
took his breath away. His only standard was that of fashionable hotels,
yet here was something that made the splendors of the Waldorf or the
Auditorium seem suddenly tawdry in comparison.  His instinctive good
taste was ravished by the old Venetian brocades, the rich dark pictures,
the Sheriton furniture, the harmonious blending of all these, and so
many other half-seen and half-comprehended things into a gracious and
exquisite whole.  Near him was the table set out for tea, with silver
that it was a joy to look at; and about the little island it made in the
vastness of the room was a wealth of red roses, marking as it were the
boundaries of coziness and intimacy.

Adair's complacency was not proof against such aristocratic and
undreamed of surroundings.  His exultation fell, and pangs of self-pity
assailed him. What was he but a child of the gutter, an outcast--a man
full of yearning for the unattainable, who had been starved and kept
down by merciless circumstances?  Such swift transitions were not
unusual in his peculiar and contradictory nature. After all, he was an
artist, even if often a brute and a fool, and somewhere within him, very
much overlaid and shrouded, there was a spark of the divine fire.  Yes,
he said to himself, he was coarse and common, and ignorant and
unrefined.  He had done much with himself; he had achieved wonders,
considering the handicap he had always been under--but admitting all
that, what enormous deficiencies still remained!  How ill at ease he was
in such a room as this!  How hard he would have to strive to hide his
lack of knowledge and breeding!  He had almost wished he had never come.
In such a place he was an intruder--a boor--condemned to blunder through
a part with no author's lines to help him.

As it turned out, nothing could have been more fortunate for him than
this dejected mood.  First appearances are everything, and he might
easily--so easily--have made an intolerable impression. Indeed, in the
cold fit, almost the terror, succeeding the impulse that had caused
Phyllis to invite him, she was prepared to find him forward, and perhaps
eager to take advantage of her recklessness, and misconstrue it.  At the
hint of such a thing she would have frozen; and the fact that she would
only have had herself to blame would have doubled her humiliation.  A
woman who makes the first advances to a man is more capable than any of
sudden revulsions.  Her pride is on edge, and morbidly apprehensive.

But the grave, quiet, handsome man awaiting her dispelled these fancies
as soon as their eyes had met.  He thanked her with an embarrassment not
unbecoming under the circumstances, for the unconventionality that had
given him the privilege of meeting her.  His smile as he said this was
charming; his respect and courtesy beyond reproach; that other nature of
his, the artist-nature, so quick and responsive in its intuitions warned
him to put a guard on himself.  Besides, if the room had over-awed him,
how much more overpowering was the apparition of this slim and radiant
woman, the mistress of all this splendor, whose pure dark face filled
him with an indefinable sense of another world in which he was but a
clod.  Though he was a connoisseur of pretty women, and had possessed in
his disreputable past many of greater physical beauty than Phyllis, not
one of them had had the least pretensions to what in her appealed to him
so strongly--distinction.  From her glossy hair to the tips of her
little feet, she was the embodiment of race, of high-breeding and high
spirit; it was as marked in her girlish beauty as in any thoroughbred.
She was the child of those who had admitted no superior save their God
and their King.

Adair found himself bereft of all his assurance. The professional
besieger, accustomed to advance with sureness and precision,
unaccountably held back, hardly knowing why his heart had turned to
water.  It seemed presumptuous enough that he should even talk on terms
of equality with one so immeasurably above him.  His humility was
painful.  He stammered.  He colored.  His hand trembled on his tea-cup
as he strove to keep alive a conversation of the usual commonplaces.

"Miss Ladd," he said suddenly, "you mustn't think I am a
gentleman--because I am not.  I am not accustomed to this kind of thing;
you are the first lady I--I've ever met."  He arrested the expostulation
on her lips and went on hurriedly. "It's much better to tell you that
right off.  I don't know those books you speak of; I don't know anything
very much; I am awfully uncultivated and ignorant.  There, I have said
it!  It will make me feel more comfortable, and it will be lots better
than pretending I am something I'm not."

"You are a great actor, Mr. Adair."

"My God," he returned with simplicity, "sometimes I'm not so sure that I
am."  Then he burst into laughter at his own artlessness--a delightful
laugh, contagious and musical, that no one could hear without liking him
the better.  Phyllis laughed, too, and somehow with it the ice seemed
broken, and constraint disappeared.  "Miss Ladd," he went on, "people
like you, and places like this, are the realities which we try so hard
to copy with our poor theatrical pasteboard and calico.  I used to hate
Mansfield for saying we ought to work as servants amongst--well, people
we couldn't meet in any other way, and yet the ones we are audacious
enough to represent on the stage.  He meant it as an insult, of
course--but he was right in some ways.  Just seeing you pour tea makes
me feel how badly we do even that!"

Phyllis, naturally, was touched and flattered.

"Why, we just pour it anyhow," she said, smiling.

"Precisely," exclaimed Adair, "and now let me do it our way!"  He drew
nearer the table, put his hand to the tea-pot, and grimacing at an
imaginary company, proceeded to pour and pass several imaginary cups
with a grotesque affectation of grace and elegance.  "Two lumps, dear
Sir James?--Patricia, the Bishop is famishing for some almond cake.--Oh,
mercy me, and what's become of the Dook?"  It was an admirable bit of
mimicry, and so gay and captivating in its satire that Phyllis thought
she had never seen anything so clever. She laughed with delight and
clapped her hands.

"Though you shock me, too," she protested. "Correze mustn't do things
like that--it isn't in keeping."

"Correze?"

"Yes, you are not Mr. Adair to me, though I know that's your name, and I
have invited you.  I can only think of you as Correze."

"Was I as good as that in the part?"

"I told you what I thought of it in my note."

"And you really meant it?"

"Would I have written if I hadn't?  It was an awful thing to do.  I
can't think of it without burning with shame.--How can you say you are
not a gentleman, Mr. Adair?  Only a gentleman would have put the right
construction on it."

He was questioning her face with his fine eyes. His intuition again
stood him in good stead.  This was not provocation, it was innocence.
To himself he said: "No, it is impossible."

Then aloud: "It was the only construction--and I felt childishly
pleased.  We're great children, you know, we actors; and after all, are
we to blame for liking approbation?  Just think a moment.  How close it
all is to the ridiculous, our standing up there and declaiming all sorts
of red-hot emotions, with painted paper on one side, and bald-headed
fiddlers on the other!  Doesn't it sometimes come over a man--sort of
shoot through him--the feeling of what a monkey-spectacle he is making
of himself?  _You_ go ahead and play Lady Macbeth in a nightgown; rage
and strut before those cold, scornful faces.  Then let one amongst them
cry: 'Bravo, bravo,' and give you a hand!--My Lord, you'd give him your
watch and chain, your diamond pin--don't you see, he returns you your
self-respect, makes your work worth the doing?--and that's what your
note did for me, Miss Ladd."

"Oh, Mr. Adair, don't talk to me about the cold, scornful faces at your
performance.  I was there twice, and saw how they called you out!"

"Miss Ladd," he said, his strong, handsome, eager face whimsically
alight, "let me confess the honest truth--an actor simply can't have
enough admiration!"

"You worry me for fear I didn't make mine warm enough!  For really, Mr.
Adair, in all sincerity, I--"

"Well, go on."

"Bravo, bravo!"  Her lips parted mockingly over her white teeth as she
pretended to applaud madly.  It was the daintiest teasing, and more
charming in the intimacy it implied than any downright praise.  Adair
glowed with a pleasure so honest and boyish that Phyllis might be
forgiven for not suspecting the baser depths he hid so well.

"I'm a conceited ass," he admitted, "and after all, isn't it enough to
turn a man's head to be here with you, and feel I owe it to the ginger I
put into Correze?  Most people get their friends by introductions and
all that, but I just snatched you out of a whole theater full of
strangers.  For you are my friend, aren't you, Miss Ladd?"

"Yes, Correze."

"You'll be making me jealous of the chap," he cried running his hands
through his hair with make-believe exasperation.  "I think he is a good
deal of a whining humbug myself, and the sly way he throws bouquets at
himself is disgusting.  Miss Ladd, I am ever so much nicer than he
is--really I am--though I see I shall never be able to convince you."

"No reason why you shouldn't try."

"Perhaps I am ashamed to," he returned, with an intensity of expression
that became him well. "You find me in a wretched little theater, the
cheapest of cheap stars--the hoodlum's pet, the shop-girl's dream--and
how can it help coloring your whole idea of me?  You admire my Correze,
but for me myself how can you have anything but contempt?  No,
no--listen--it's true--and the more you knew of my history the more
contemptuous you'd be.  I've been rated very high; I've had every chance
in the world; I've played with the biggest kind of people,
and--succeeded.  Yet I have always been the dog who hanged himself. No,
there is no mystery about it--there never is with a man who is
sinking--a man of ability.  It's his own fault every time--every, every
time."

His earnestness made Phyllis thrill.  Adair was playing his best
role--himself, and playing it with the fire and eloquence he could
always bring to it. His voice, incomparable in the beauty and range of
its tones, was never so effective as when tinged with emotion.  Nothing
was more manly, more sincere, more moving.  It rose and fell in cadences
that lingered in the ear after the words themselves were
spoken--veritable music, affecting not only the listener, but the
musician as well.  Under the spell of it he now found himself tempted
into strange confidences.  Never before had he spoken of his childhood
and early life except to lie, to brag, to romance.  Yet here, to his own
wonder, and impelled by he hardly knew what, he was unbosoming himself
of the whole ignoble truth. That instinct of his, so often wiser than
himself, so diabolically helpful, was showing him the right road.  Had
Phyllis been some little milliner this would have been no road at all;
such a one would have been too familiar with the seamy side of life to
find any glamour in the tale; such a one would have preferred the bogus
palaces and bogus splendors his instinct would then have indicated.
Phyllis' intelligence was too keen thus to be deceived; even genuine
splendors would have interested her less than this pitiful story of the
slums; it not only touched her sensibility to the quick, but enhanced
Adair in her tender and sympathetic eyes.

His father had been an Englishman--a remittance man named Mayne--George
Cyril Augustus Fitzroy Mayne.  Whether his pretensions were justified or
not, and they were inordinate, including "Wales" and "Cambridge," he was
beyond all doubt a gentleman, with grand manners, a back like a ramrod,
and a curt, military directness in speaking.  He used to say "dammy";
was fond of alluding to himself as "an old Hussar"; was wont to remark
that a gentleman could always be told by his hat and his boots; and
once, when attacked on the street, had shown extraordinary courage and
adroitness in defending himself with a light cane.  This was about all
Adair remembered of him, except that he drank hard; had recurring fits
of delirium tremens in which he raged and fought like a wild beast; and
finally, dying in a hospital ward, was buried like a dog in the Potter's
Field.

Adair's mother had been an Irish peasant girl. She was kind and
warm-hearted, and spoke with a brogue; she was always laughing and
singing, even under circumstances when a right-minded person would have
thrown himself into the East River. She drank, too.  Everybody drank.
He used to be given sips from her glass, and knew what it was to be
tipsy before he was eight.  It was about that time he began to sell
papers on the streets, for his father was dead, and his mother--  Well,
he wouldn't go into that.  But in her way she had always been good to
him.  She wouldn't let the men beat him.  When she was sent to the
Island for the second time he thought his little heart would break.  She
didn't last long after that.  How could she, gone as she was in
consumption, and drinking like a fish?  Oh, what a hell it was--what a
hell!  His pennies were all his own now, though he often had to fight to
keep them.  He was always fighting to keep them--first in desperation,
then by degrees with some coolness and science.  The bigger boys coached
him; egged him on; he became a regular little bantam.  They'd make up a
purse--a quarter or something--and set two little wretches to pounding
each other. Anything was allowed, you know--biting, kicking, scrooging,
hair pulling!  There was only one rule, and that was to win.

Well, so it went on, till he was sixteen or thereabouts, the toughest
young tough you could see on Avenue A.  He was nicknamed Fighting Joe,
and they used to get up cheap little matches for him in the back rooms
of saloons--real fighting, stripped to the waist, and four ounce gloves.
His only ambition was to get into the prize ring, and in his dreams at
night he would see his picture in the _Police Gazette_.  Then the
Settlement workers came--a pale-looking outfit, with Mission furniture
and leaflets.  They were regarded as a great infliction--as an insult to
an honest tough neighborhood. It was the correct thing to break their
windows, and lambast their followers.  Fighting Joe took a prominent
part in this righteous task.  What did it matter that several of them
were women?  What did such brutes care for that?  If ever there was a
young savage on earth it was he.

One of the women was tall and pretty--not very young--twenty-eight or
twenty-nine perhaps. Miss Cooke, she was--Miss Grace Cooke.  She would
never see him but what she would turn white with anger and fear.  You
see, everything was put down to him, all that he did do, and all that he
didn't--and totaling up both sides of it, it ran to a lot.  He couldn't
begin to remember the caddish things he was answerable for; he didn't
care to try; my God, what a brute he was, what a brute! And yet he
admired this woman; guessed he was in love with her in a calfy way; took
every chance to see her--and insult her!  Of course, there wasn't the
faintest reason why he shouldn't have walked into the Settlement, said
he was sorry, and have been received with open arms.  But people like
that can't say they are sorry--they don't know how.  Besides, the social
disgrace of it would have been awful!  Joe Mayne running with that
gospel gang!  The thing was incredible.

Late one winter afternoon he saw her in the midst of a crowd of
hobbledehoys, hooting and jeering at her.  She was walking as fast as
she dared, looking straight ahead of her, and pretending not to notice.
It was dark; the street was empty; and if she was scared she had mighty
good reason for it.  One of the fellows lurched against her, and down
she went on the sidewalk; as she tried to rise another rolled her over,
and tore her hat off. Of course, it was a great joke, and they were all
roaring with laughter.  Then it was he came running up--Joe--and when
she saw him she gave him a look he would remember to the day he died.
Oh, the terror of it--the shrinking!  But he smashed one on the jaw,
caught another between the eyes, and lifted her up, half fainting as she
was, and tried with his dirty hands to smooth her hair, and put on her
hat again.--That's how they came to be friends; that's how he came to be
landed in the Settlement; everything real in his life dated from that
moment.

He was with them two years; with them as long as she lived.  There
wasn't a good quality in him that she didn't put there.  On census
forms, and such things, when asked his religion, he always felt inclined
to write: "Grace Cooke."  By God, it would have been the truth.  She was
his religion yet, far though he had fallen away from it--oh, so far--!
She stood for everything that was good and beautiful and noble.  It
wasn't love. It was beyond all love.  She was a Madonna, a saint, and he
had had the privilege to kneel at her feet--a Caliban of the slums, a
tough, a hoodlum, unworthy to touch the hem of her garment. Then she
died, and that was the end of it.  He didn't care for the Settlement
after she died.  He got a job as chucker-out in a low place called the
Crystal Palace.  There was a dais, and performers used to sing.  He
thought he would try it himself, and made quite a hit.  Then he began
giving recitations--_The Fi-erman's Dream_, and that kind of thing, and
they caught on.  He owed it all to Grace Cooke, who had taught him to
read--(not ordinary reading, he had picked that up somehow for
himself)--but real reading, dramatic reading. From this it was a step to
monologues in costume, and from that to the vaudeville stage.

Sitting there in the growing dusk, and in an atmosphere so conducive to
confidence, Adair unfolded his early life with a tender, persuasive and
charming humor.  He often laughed; often he was silent; again and again
he would look up, and seek Phyllis' eyes in a lingering glance as though
to assure himself of her interest.  For once in his life he was shy; the
slim, pretty hand he gazed at so covetously was safe from any touch of
his; something told him that the least familiarity would cost him all he
had gained.--It was not policy on his part.  He was too humble to think
of policy. To be with her alone seemed presumption enough--to feel her
sympathy, her friendship.  Not a word or act of his should mar that
wonderful day.

He rose, apologizing for having stayed so long.

"It is your own fault," he said, holding out his hand, "you've made me
forget everything."

"I'm afraid it was the other way round, Mr. Adair," she returned, trying
to smile, and thankful for the darkness that veiled her face.

"Am I ever to see you again?"

She shook her head.

"You mean it is good-by, Miss Ladd?"

"Yes, it's good-by."

Her hand was in his, so soft, so motionless, yet somehow so reluctant to
leave his grasp.  His head was turning; he could not go like that.  No,
no, he could not.  He suddenly pulled her towards him, and caught her in
his arms, kissing her hair, her cheek, her mouth, with a passion that
cared little whether she was crushed or smothered in his embrace.  Good
God, what was he doing? After holding back so long, what diabolical
folly had tempted him to this?  Yet she had said it was good-by.  He had
nothing to lose.  Let her pant and struggle and tremble, he would take
tribute of her beauty nevertheless, however much she was insulted or
outraged.  His lips were wet with her tears.  He forced her to receive
his kisses on her mouth, exulting in the strength that allowed her no
escape.  But was she resisting him?  A tremor of maddening delight shot
through his frame.  Her mouth was seeking his, and he heard her
whispering breathlessly: "I love you, I love you, I love you!"

It was so unexpected, so surprising, that he let her free.  She sank
into a chair and covered her burning face, repelling him as he threw
himself on his knees beside her.

"If you don't go, I shall never forgive you!" she exclaimed.  "Haven't
you shamed me enough? Do you want me to die of humiliation?"  Then, from
the heart, came the woman's cry: "What will you think of me?"

That instinct, which in Adair took the place of conscience, honor, all
the conventional virtues and restraints, again came steadfastly to his
help.  He bent down; kissed her on the brow; and getting his hat and
cane abruptly took his departure.




                             *CHAPTER XII*


The dictionary with unhesitating positiveness informs us that
infatuation is "unreasonable or extravagant passion."  But are there not
those who have stayed unreasonably impassioned to the end, those whose
earthly parting has been but at the grave?  And does not love of the
admitted, recognized, unextravagant, very much approved,
bless-you-my-children kind only too often ring out its knell in the
divorce court? That Phyllis was infatuated with this good-looking scamp
was beyond question, if by that one meant his physical attraction held
her as much a slave as any of our ravished ancestors in the Vikings'
boats.  Her will was gone; her judgment; all her nicely-balanced
highly-critical young-ladyism.  It was horrifying to her to realize it;
her powerlessness was at once an agony and a delight; it came over her,
with a frightening sense of injustice, that a woman's happiness lies
beyond herself, and is for ever dependent on some man.

Naturally she sat down, and wrote him a sad little letter.  He was to
forget everything that had passed, and not misjudge her for an
uncontrollable impulse.  Were he to presume upon it, she would not only
die of shame, but would be forced to perceive that her trust had been
misplaced.  As a gentleman and a man of honor--and she knew him to be
both--he would understand that it was impossible for them ever to meet
again, and that her good-by was indeed irrevocable.  But her good wishes
would always attend him, and she would sign herself, in all sincerity,
his friend, Phyllis Ladd.  This done, she waited in a fever of
impatience for his answer, hoping, dreading, tumultuously inconsistent,
hot fits and cold succeeding each other in her troubled and anxious
heart.

It may be imagined how unkindly Adair took her commands.  In his large,
straggling hand, and over six sheets of hotel paper he expressed his
energetic dissent.  It was a trite letter--flowery and theatrical--her
haunting eyes, the memory of her adorable beauty, the despair of a man
who had found love only to lose it, etc.  Had Phyllis been herself it
would have made her smile. Nothing, indeed, could have shown how far she
had traveled on the road of illusion than her acceptance of these
well-worn phrases.  The tears sprang to her eyes at the smooth and
nicely-rounded description of his wretchedness; she glowed and thrilled
at the praise of herself, its boldness redeemed by what she ascribed to
a lover's ardor; the pathetic plea for another meeting was irresistible.
It might be unwise; it was sure to be painful; but, after all, it was
his right.  He loved her; he bowed to her decision; his life was hard at
best, and now doubly so; what he asked was so little for her to give,
yet to him it was everything--to see her once more before they parted
for ever.


They met this time at the corner of a remote street.  He was very pale,
very quiet, and it was not a lie he told her that he had been unable to
sleep for thinking of her.  Had she known better what those thoughts
were she would have shrunk from him.  But, fortunately or not, she did
not know.  She, too, was quiet and pale, and it was with the sense of an
impending fate that she took his arm, and slowly walked with him along
the foot-path. Unconsciously he was more masterful with her, now that
she was away from that daunting house, and that awe-inspiring
drawing-room.  The sanctity that had enveloped her there had largely
disappeared.  Here was a situation he was used to--a distractingly
pretty girl, a sidewalk rendezvous, and an infatuation that needed but
the right handling to bring it to the proper conclusion.

Yet with everything so plain--and apparently so easy, Adair himself was
in a whirl of strange and new emotions.  Something had pierced his
colossal selfishness, and was disturbing him.  It was annoying at a time
when he needed all his wits about him, and he resented it as a symptom
of unmanly weakness.  One drop of real love in that ocean of sham was
threatening to poison the whole.  He did not put it thus concretely.  He
only knew that he was uncomfortable, and not rising as he should to the
occasion.  Except for that far-away Grace Cooke he had never known a
decent woman.  His counterfeit love had been lavished on counterfeit
innocence: and counterfeit purity. Fooling, he had always been fooled.

But this proud and melting young beauty lay outside of all his
experience.  Had she defended herself he would have known better how to
attack. But she made no demur when he took her hand and kissed it; she
did not resist, when, after looking up and down the street to see if
they had it to themselves, he caught her boldly in his arms, and crushed
her against himself, murmuring a torrent of words that came so readily
to his practised lips.  How radiantly she smiled when he tore off a tiny
corner of her letter, and told her she had to eat it as a punishment.
Her saucy obedience put him in a seventh heaven, and it was with a sort
of ecstasy that he snatched it from her, fearful lest it might do her
harm.  That letter, in one sense, had been disposed of almost as soon as
they had met.  She had tried, for a moment or two, to adhere to it, and
to make him see the necessity of that good-by.  But under the glamour of
his presence she faltered and broke down, and all that was left of the
matter was her incoherent plea for forgiveness.  What tenderness she put
into this request!  There never could be a good-by between them--never,
never--and her eyes swam with tears at her disloyalty to him.

Both felt an uplifting gaiety and light-heartedness, as she said, in
extenuation of her happy laughter, that they were like people who had
grown rich overnight, for had they not discovered an enormous nugget--a
nugget of love?  It had been lying there for any to find, but they had
been the lucky ones!  They had a right to be excited, hadn't they?  The
only really serious thing was the fact that they might have missed it.
They might have stubbed against it, and passed on--like idiots. She
developed this fantasy with captivating grace and archness, Adair
meanwhile lost in admiration, not only of the delicate fancy that kept
him smiling, but of her varying expressions so revealing of unexpected
charm.  She grew prettier and prettier to him--more kissable, more
adorable.  He kept forgetting his ulterior purpose in the rapture of
being with her; he forgot his conceit, forgot his role; he was
perilously near being in love.  Perhaps he was in love.  At any rate,
when he recollected to take advantage of this unconcealed regard for
him--of all this young ardor and innocent passion--the words somehow
would not leave his tongue.

Her sensitive mouth, so responsive to every look of his, the sweet
candor of her eyes, her transparent belief in him--all forbade.  There
would be time enough for that; and having made this concession to his
manhood, he straightway put the idea by, dimly realizing to himself that
it was unpleasant to him.  It takes a bad man to appreciate and exalt
the best of women; he sees her in such a contrasting light; her baser
sisters give her by relief an angelic brightness.  It is not for nothing
that they say the reformed rake makes the best husband.  Not that Adair
had gone so far as this, however.  He was not reformed, and cold chills
would have run down his back at the horrid prospect; while his own brief
career as a husband had left him with a hatred for the word and the
institution.  It was merely a fleeting impulse, stronger for the moment
than he was, and induced by his artist love of beauty, which included
this time in its comprehension, a rare, gracious and exquisite nature.

They were together for nearly two hours, and when they were forced at
last to part it seemed as though only the half had been said.  Yet not
for an instant had they ever got near the realities. With Adair these
were consciously avoided.  It was one thing to say: "I love you," with
mellow vibrations, and impassioned eyes; quite another to descend to the
practical considerations that might reasonably be expected to follow.
He felt neither in the humor to lie, nor to palter with the ugly truth,
and in a sort of anger dismissed both alternatives.  He was intoxicated
with her; she mounted to his brain like wine; he only knew one thing,
that come what might, she should never get away from him.  This was all
his dizzy head could hold. The future could take care of itself.

As for Phyllis she was in that rapt state of happiness when a woman can
do nothing but glow and worship.  Had not the king descended from his
throne for her?  At last was not her long heart-hunger gloriously
appeased?  Was she not so possessed with this demigod that all other
sublunary concerns seemed to vanish into insignificance?  She walked on
air; she exulted in the memory of his caresses; she was the more
precious to herself now that she was his, now that she belonged to him
so utterly.  She hoarded every compliment he had paid her; and wondered,
in delicious doubt, though not altogether unconvinced, whether she could
be, indeed, all that she had seemed to him. As for the deeper questions,
she had the woman's faculty of answering them in formless dreams.

They were settled in a vague, tender and altogether perfect manner.
He--and she--and a billowing bliss on which they floated evermore, hand
pressed in hand, mouth against mouth, in an ineffable and transcendant
content.

Adair, once beyond her influence, was aware of a certain sagging of that
higher nature she had conjured into being.  Not that he loved her any
less; he was on fire for her, and his coarse passion was inflamed a
thousandfold by their second meeting.  But, as he said to himself, he
had muffed it. He was not the first man to feel a twinge of guilt at
having been _good_.  He was a child of his world, of his conditions,
upbringing and environment, and ought not to be blamed over-much--rather
commended for the first faint stirrings of an embryo conscience, which,
if it had died all too soon, was still a spark of grace.

The performance tired him more than usual.  He was slack, and could not
get into his part.  As a consequence, to offset his disinclination, he
overplayed, and left the theater thoroughly exasperated, and out of
heart.  He took supper moodily by himself, and though ordinarily
abstemious--for no one with his complexion could be accused of habitual
excess--he drank high-ball after high-ball with a brutal satisfaction in
fuddling himself. He grew wickeder with every gulp, more cold-blooded
and determined.  He would see this thing through, by God.  He would take
her with him on the road.  She was ripe for it; she was crazy about
him--lady and all, there was the devil in her all right.  The nicest
women were the worst when they let themselves go.  What a fool he had
been ever to bother with the other kind.  He had always been a cheap
fellow, pleased with cheap things--with raddled actresses, and silly
tiresome shop-girls.  Here was a little piece that put them all in the
shade; prettier than the prettiest, dewy fresh, with a twist to
everything she said so that it was an endless pleasure to be with her.
She was so quick, so daintily impudent, so finely bred and educated.
God, what an armful!  God, what a little mistress for a tired and lonely
man, sick to death of common women!

He reeled up-stairs, half drunk, and sought his room, to sleep the sleep
of perfect health and perfect digestion.  Whatever else Adair was, he
was a sound and vigorous human animal, with a constitution of iron.  No
dreams disturbed his repose--no spectral finger of remorse pointed at
him.  A child could not have lain more peacefully on its cot than he.

It will be asked why he could not Have married Phyllis properly and
honestly?  Apart from other considerations was she not the only daughter
of a millionaire father?  How did Adair come to overlook this very
obvious advantage, and embark instead on all the troubles and vexations
attending an illicit connection?  To answer this question it is
necessary to go back four or five years, and rake up his marriage with
Ruby Raeburn, the dancer. She, too, had been the daughter of a rich
man--Laidlaw Wright, the Michigan lumber king.  Adair had thought he was
doing a very good thing for himself.  To have a father-in-law who is a
"lumber king" has a pleasant sound.  Without knowing exactly how it was
to happen, he looked forward confidently to a flow of dollars in his
direction, either in cash, or vicariously in royal "tips."  Surely a
lumber king would take care of his own--and of his own's husband.  Ruby
herself had not been above reproach in holding out the bait, and
everybody had congratulated him, or sneered at him for "marrying money."
Alas, for the disillusion that followed.  Laidlaw Wright was the
hardest-fisted man on the Lakes, and no bulldog, guarding a lunch
basket, could have shown more formidable fangs than he at any hand
slipping towards his money-bags.  Adair learned the sad truth that when
you possess the millionaire's daughter, it does not necessarily follow
that you possess the millionaire. His dead body must too often be
crossed first--and this event, however desirable, can not be unduly
hurried.

And meanness was not the only drawback to Laidlaw Wright's character.
He could spend money as viciously as he withheld it, and make of it a
whip of scorpions for the scourging of sons-in-law.  When Adair's
domestic unhappiness reached the acute stage, the cantankerous old
fellow jumped into the ring, snorting battle and destruction.  Money was
poured out like water; giants of the bar were retained at enormous fees;
detective bureaus' worked night and day.  Adair was shadowed; his door
was burst open at a time of all others when he would have much preferred
to have it stay shut; statutes of which he had never dreamed, lying
hidden and unrepealed in the dark recesses of the law, were evoked
against him with startling effect.  He was sent to prison in default of
the bail he could not give.  Then after eighteen weary days, which the
giants of the bar would willingly have made eighteen months, he was
tried, and his case dismissed.  But as he left the court room he was
again arrested.  That implacable old man, with his cohorts of lawyers
and detectives, had furbished up fresh charges.  The indictment was a
mile long.  Again there was bail, default, and gnashing of teeth in a
stinking cell.  Of course, he had legal remedies, but these involved
legal tender.  He had spent his last dollar; legal remedies had to be
paid for, and he had nothing to pay with. A wealthy and vindictive man,
if he choose to do so, and does not grudge the outlay, can make our
judicial machinery into a most serviceable steam-roller.

After the divorce, when all seemed settled and done with, there were
alimony bomb-shells to be contended with.  This tribute on his
son-in-law's freedom became the obsessing prepossession of Laidlaw
Wright's life.  He subordinated the lumber business to collecting this
forty-five dollars a week, until it became Adair's fixed and unalterable
purpose to escape payment by every means in his power.  North or South,
East or West, the battle went on.  Injunctions, contempt proceedings,
printed forms in immense envelopes, beginning with the familiar phrase:
"You are cited to appear before Judge So-and-So to show cause why that
you, etc., etc."--rained on Adair's head wherever Saturday night might
find it.  Incidentally eyes were blackened; blood streamed on box-office
floors; bandaged functionaries and limping attorneys cried for vengeance
in shabby court rooms--and not only cried, but often got it, in a
heaping measure. And afar, the lumber king, like a horrible spider whose
net covered the country from sea to sea, kept the wires busy and hot
with hate.

When Ruby was killed in what was called "the hansom cab mystery"--an
ugly affair that was never really cleared up--the old man probably
mourned less for her than for the loss of his cheerless hobby--the
persecution of Cyril Adair. However wealthy you are, you can not move
the legal steam-roller without at least a pretense of justification; and
now the justification lay with Ruby Raeburn in the grave, as stilled as
her dancing feet, as finished and done with as the life that had gone
out so tragically.

It had all left Adair with a profound hatred of marriage, and a still
profounder hatred of rich fathers-in-law.  The one suggested jail,
mortification, alimony, raided box-offices, large and determined
individuals bursting in your doors; the other an unrelenting monster,
pitiless and crafty, trailing after you night and day, like a
bloodhound.  There was no glamour to Adair in Robert Ladd's millions,
but rather a sinister and awful significance; and as for marrying
Phyllis, and putting his head again in that noose--who that had been in
hell ever willingly went back to it?  The very thought made him shudder.
He might be weak and impulsive, and easily swept off his feet by her
damned beauty--but he wasn't as weak and impulsive as _that_!




                             *CHAPTER XIII*


As had been previously arranged he met her the next day at the same
place.  He had come in a closed cab, which he had left a couple of
blocks away, and he insisted on their returning to it, and having out
their talk in its shelter.  Phyllis demurred at first; it wore an
unpleasant look to her; it was not fear exactly--she trusted Adair too
absolutely for that--but rather a disinclination in which good taste
played the bigger part.  It seemed to her low, and discreditable, and
unworthy.  Her love was too fine a thing, and too dear to her, to have
it associated with dingy cushions, a dirty floor carpet, and the
vulgarizing secrecy of that shabby interior.  It took some persuasion to
get her to consent; and though she did so at last under the spell of
that irresistible voice, it was with a sudden quenching of the
brightness that had illumined her heart.

But it never occurred to her to think the worse of Adair.  A man could
not be expected to have the sensitiveness of a woman.  His love was like
himself, robust and masterful; he fastened a string to your little
collar, and dragged you after him with a splendid insouciance.  Every
one of your four little paws might be holding back; you might be
whimpering most pitifully, but if he wanted a closed cab, in you had to
go, whether you liked it or not.  Not that you would have had him
different; it was sweet to submit; and if he were big, and direct, and
unshakable--so, too, was his love.

They drove slowly through the suburban streets, locked in each other's
arms.  He kissed her back to happiness, to rapture, the discreet
twilight screening them in its shadow.  Her qualms disappeared, her
reluctance, her shrinkings from the ugliness and commonness of that
horrid old box.  Nothing mattered so long as they could be together, and
in her exaltation she even suffered some pangs of remorse for having
resisted his pleadings at all.--She had never cared for children, but as
her arms were clasped about his neck, she felt a welling tenderness for
him that opened her understanding to the love of a mother for her
babe--the divine compassion, the exquisite desire to protect and shield,
the willingness, if need be, to die herself rather than to have it
suffer the least of harm.  She whispered this to him in words so sincere
and moving, with eyes so moist, and lips so quivering, and her whole
young face so glorified by the shining soul within, that Adair would
have been less than human had he not succumbed.

He was abashed; his carefully rehearsed plans were glad to creep out of
sight and hide; it would have needed very little for him to fall on his
knees, penitent and ashamed, and blurt out--not the truth; the truth
wasn't tellable--but enough to make him seem less of a beast to himself,
less of a hypocrite and villain.  But he paused midway; and the impulse,
which, if he had allowed it to control him might have carried him into
unsuspected regions of honor and manliness, died still-born; and left
him--if not exactly what he had been--at least not so very much the
better.

With everything so favorable to his purpose, it continued to be a
mystery to him that he still held back.  This backwardness, this fear,
was a new sensation.  He had won prettier women in his day, and had won
them briskly and straightforwardly, move by move, with cool
premeditation.

Why should he falter at this one, like a ninny? What was it about her
that checked and daunted him?  She had flung herself at him; she had
neither the will nor the knowledge to protect herself; she was as
innocent as a child, and had delivered herself over to him as
guilelessly.  But it was not her innocence that stood in his way; he had
no such scruples about innocence; innocence, if anything, ought to have
whetted the pursuit.  It was something subtler than that--this
withholding force. It was more as though she were some proud young queen
who had been craftily made drunk with drugs, and then had been abandoned
in her helplessness to become the sport of a passing soldier.... How
surprised Adair would have been had he been told that the love always on
his lips, profaned with every breath he drew, a lie in every sense save
the very lowest, was, in all good earnest, stealthily making entry in
his heart!

Making?  Why, it had been there from the first, all unknown to him.  But
like many a man the devious road seemed to him the straighter; it was
the one he meant to follow, anyhow, lead where it might; he would
overcome this strange squeamishness that annoyed and bewildered him.
What an ass he was!  He remembered his first deer, and how the rifle had
shaken in his hands--how his teeth had chattered--how it had calmly
walked past him, not twelve yards away, and disappeared unscathed.  The
boys had called it "buck fever," and had guyed him.  Hell, this was a
kind of buck fever, too, though without the excuse of inexperience ...
but still there was no sense in hurrying matters.  There was plenty of
time, old fellow, plenty of time.

Thus the day lingered out in talk and vows and kisses, with nothing
achieved in any direction, and the situation apparently unchanged.  Love
has a wonderful power of floating on without ever touching the banks of
reality!  And when one of the lovers keeps the bark deliberately in
mid-stream, and the other poor lunatic is so lost in ecstasy that her
understanding is in the skies--hours can pass like minutes, and darkness
descend all unawares.

Again they kissed and parted, and Phyllis returned home in the sweet
weariness of one who has drunk deep of the cup of love.  No unanswered
questions fretted her, no disturbing thoughts of why he had been silent
on the most important thing of all.  She was young, fresh, pretty,
well-born and rich--why then should she doubt?  What, to a little
milliner, would have been the inevitable and all-engrossing conjecture,
troubled her not a bit. Men had been proposing to her for two years;
love out of wedlock, while it might be familiar in books, was
inconceivably remote to her; marriage was like breathing; it was one of
the great unconsidered facts of life; one loved--one married.

Her preoccupation was rather with closer and dearer things--the varying
expressions of that fine and intensely alive face; the mouth with its
ever changing charm; that, smiling, could lift one to paradise, that,
laughing, seemed to gladden the whole world; the eyes so lustrous, so
melting, and yet that at a word could turn so fierce; the wavy hair that
was such a joy to her to caress; the broad shoulders that had pillowed
her girlish head, and had given her such a comforting sense of vigor and
strength--all her own by the divinest of divine rights.  Womanlike, she
was trying to merge herself in the man she loved; to subordinate her own
individuality in his; to become, if she could, a slim, small, dainty
counterpart of this God-given creature who had stooped to her from high
Heaven itself.

She ate a good dinner and enjoyed it; drank a glass of claret with a
connoisseur-like satisfaction in its fine bouquet; for she came of a
stock with a royal taste for pleasure, in little things as well as big.
If her father appeared somewhat constrained, and more grave and silent
than was his wont, she ascribed it to nothing more than a hard day at
the office; and exerted herself with all her superabundant good humor to
amuse and distract him.  But for once she was unsuccessful, and as the
meal proceeded his brown study increased. After dinner, as usual when
they were alone, they went up to his "den," the custom being for him to
smoke a cigar while she glanced over the evening papers, and read to him
what seemed to be of interest.  As she stood leaning negligently against
the mantelpiece she was surprised to notice that he did not settle
himself in his usual chair. He came up to her instead, and she felt a
sudden knocking at the heart as her uplifted eyes met his.

"How long has this been going on?" he demanded in a low voice.

"What do you mean, Papa?"

He paused as though to control himself.--She knew very well what he
meant, and shivers ran down her back.

"Your carrying on with this actor fellow. This--this Adair."  He snapped
out the name as though it tasted bitter on his lips--spat it--his gray
mustache bristling.

She was panic-stricken; her knees weakened beneath her; she had only
presence of mind enough to tell herself that lies could not help her.
But lies or not, at that moment she could not have uttered a word.  It
was all she could do to hold to the mantel for support.

Mr. Ladd drew out his pocket-book, and from it a letter.

"A man like that always has some female consort," he went on brutally,
"some woman of his own class who follows his shabby fortunes, and
considers him for the time being as her especial property; and who
protects herself when that property is in danger by ways that suggest
themselves to vulgar and common minds.  At least, I do not consider it
an unjust inference that this anonymous letter--"

Phyllis uttered a little cry, and hid her face in her hands.--So that
was what it was?--She ought to have suspected it.  But even in her shame
a dart of jealousy passed through her heart.  Who was this woman who was
trying to rob her of Adair?

"It is a typical letter of the kind," continued Mr. Ladd, with grim
persistence, "and written in a hand supposed to be disguised, as though
anything could disguise the greater matter of the writer's innate
vileness and swinishness.  It starts with the usual pretense of good
will, of friendly warning; and then passes, with hardly a transition, to
charges that in a police court would entail its being cleared of any
women amongst the spectators. Frankly, Phyllis, it is abominable--though
I am going to read it to you, not with the idea of causing you pain, of
punishing you, but to show you much better than any words of mine could
do, the sort of cattle you are getting mixed up with.  One judges men by
the company they keep; whoever this woman is, it may be presumed she
knows Adair well, and is a friend of his; otherwise what could prompt
all this venom?  The letter is a mass of lies, but it has a side-light
value on this man you're letting fool you.  They are a squalid,
contemptible crew, and all tarred with the same stick."

He stopped to put his glasses on his nose; and smoothing out the letter,
began deliberately to read it: "'You ought to know the goings-on of that
girl of yours, and if nobody else is enough your friend to tell you,
I--'"

But Phyllis cried out before he could proceed further.

"Oh, Papa," she exclaimed in passionate entreaty, "don't, don't!  You
mustn't!  You're degrading me!  I--I can't stand it!"

"You know my reasons for wanting you to hear it," he said coldly.

"And you are going to force me to?"

"Yes, I am--for your own good, Phyllis."

As their eyes met something within her seemed to break.  In all her life
her father had been everything that was kind and gentle and indulgent.
His arms had ever been her refuge; she had cried out her baby sorrows on
his shoulder; how often, in contrast to other girls, she had thought
herself the most fortunate of women to have such a father. Now, in her
direst need he was pitiless and inflexible.  He was determined to
humiliate her with that horrible letter--for his manner, everything,
said that it was horrible.  To gain his point he was willing to sweep
away the fabric of all these years. Oh, the stupidity of it, the
cruelty!  Nothing could ever be the same again between them after that.
He could degrade her, but it would cost him every iota of her love.

Her bosom swelled.  Her anger was at so white a heat that she no longer
felt the fears and shrinkings that had at first assailed her; her heart
beat high, but to another and a fiercer measure.

What a moment for him to begin again: "'You ought to know the goings-on
of that girl of yours, and if nobody else--'"

"Papa, _Papa_!"

"My dear, you must not interrupt me.  I insist on--"

"Then let me read it to myself."

He paused, looking at her in indecision; and from her to the coals in
the grate.  She perceived the meaning of his hesitation, and laughed
scornfully.

"Oh, you can trust me," she said, holding out her hand.  "Do you want my
word, or what? I won't destroy it.  Rest assured I shall give you the
pleasure of knowing I am reading every word of it."

He resigned it to her, tugging at his mustache, and watching her
covertly as she moved nearer the light and began to read.  He marveled
at her composure, her decision.  She was not evading the ugly task--her
eyes moved too slowly for that, and her face reflected too clearly the
unsparing comments on her behavior.

It was coarse beyond belief.  Only a man half out of his wits could have
allowed any woman of his family to read such a thing.  Many of the
expressions she had never heard before, but it is a peculiarity of gross
Anglo-Saxon to be readily understood.  Nothing was lost on Phyllis,
either in the description of the man she loved, or the accusations of
the vilest kind leveled at herself. It was an infamous production,
soiling and disgusting, nakedly spiteful, and nakedly pornographic.

She perused it unflinchingly to the end; studied the signature, "One who
knows," and handed it back to her father.

"I thought people were put in prison for writing such letters," she said
in an even voice.

"So they are," he returned curtly, "though that isn't quite the point."

"What is the point?"

"To know how much of it is true."

Again her composure startled him.  "Is it possible you believe any of
it?" she asked.

"Yes, I do," he said.--He was holding the letter in his hand, like a
lawyer in court, cross-examining a witness.  He was determined to get at
the bottom of all this.

"Is it true you went to the theater twice?"

"As a spectator--yes."

"Is it true that you wrote a letter to him?"

"Yes."

"Is it true you invited him here?"

"Yes, he came once."

"And it's true you met him afterwards on one of the streets in the
Richmond district?"

"Yes."

"It's true you let him kiss you there before everybody--embrace you--hug
you like a silly servant-girl?"

She ignored the insult, and answered imperturbably: "It was a deserted
place; I didn't know any one was spying on us."

"And it's true to-day you met him again?"

"Yes."

"And drove together in a closed cab?"

"Yes."

"Now, Phyllis, my girl, on your honor; I am asking you this as your
father; I have the right to ask it, and the right to a sacredly truthful
answer--the affair has gone no further than this?"

"No."

"On your honor?"

"On my honor."

"And all the rest of it?"--He touched the letter.

"Lies, Papa--revolting, hideous lies."

He stumbled towards his chair; seated himself in it; reached for the
cigar-box.  He had expected a scene; he had expected tears, pleading,
and repentance.  He had a penetrating sense of having mismanaged
everything.  Perhaps he ought not to have shown her that letter.  It had
shocked her through and through, but not in the way he had intended.  He
had meant it to be like a surgeon's knife--one sure swift stroke, and
she was to rise cured, disillusioned.  The effect had been
disconcertingly different; he had affronted her to the quick, he had
roused a defiance all the more to be feared because it was cool,
subdued, controlled--the kind that is apt to last.--He lit his cigar,
and blew out breath after breath of smoke.  He must not make another
mistake.  He would think a little while before he began again.

She glided slowly towards the door, but with an air so unconcerned, so
free from any suggestion of flight, that he suspected nothing.  The fact
of her leaving the door ajar seemed to imply an immediate return.
Several minutes passed before he suddenly became uneasy.  So peremptory
was his conviction that she was near that he cried: "Phyllis, Phyllis,"
before rising to find out what had become of her.  But she was not in
the corridor outside.  He sought her boudoir--nor was she here either.
Her bedroom off it?  It was empty, too. Thoroughly alarmed, he descended
the stairs, softly calling out, "Phyllis, Phyllis!"  He was answered by
a servant's voice below: "Is it you, Sir?"

"Yes, Henry, I am looking for Miss Phyllis?"

"She went out a minute ago, Sir."

"Went out?"

"Yes, Sir."

Good God, she was gone!




                             *CHAPTER XIV*


Once outside the door, she had raced downstairs like the wind, put on
her hat anyhow, and sped into the darkness, without waiting for wrap or
gloves.  Her first idea had been to reach the theater, but as she turned
down side streets in order to evade pursuit and get the Fairmount Avenue
car line, she realized that this involved too much time.  Her watch,
hastily looked at under a lamp, showed that it was after eight o'clock,
and that she could not hope to gain the theater before the first act
began.  She decided to telephone instead, and accordingly, walking very
fast, and sometimes running until a pain in her side forced her to
desist, she made her way to Fairmount Avenue, and to a drug-store she
knew to be there.  It was the matter of a moment to look up the number
of the Thalia Theater, unhook the receiver, and get central.

"Nick-el," murmured that impersonal arbiter of human destinies.

"I don't understand--please give me my number, I'm in such a hurry."

"Nick-el!"

"Drop a nickel in the slot, Miss," said the clerk helpfully.

She had come away without her purse.  She hadn't a penny!

As quick as thought she pulled off one of her rings, and laid it on the
counter.

"I have forgotten my purse," she said.  "Please let me have a quarter,
and I'll redeem the ring to-morrow."

She had been resourceful enough to recollect she needed more than a
nickel--there was the trolley fare to the theater and back.

The clerk took the ring with no great willingness; examined it with
every apparent intention of denying her request; then examined her with
the same sharp look.  The horrid creature recognized her, and his manner
changed to a cringing deference.  "Oh, Miss Ladd, I beg your pardon, I
didn't know it was you, Miss Ladd.  A quarter?  Why certainly, Miss
Ladd.  Only too happy to oblige you, Miss Ladd.  Take back your ring,
and pay any time at your convenience, Miss Ladd."  He rang open his cash
register, and passed her three nickels and a dime, together with the
ring.  "Put it back where it belongs," he said, smirking and rubbing his
hands.  "My, what would the boss say to me if I told him I had kept Miss
Phyllis Ladd's ring!"

She thanked him, and again gave the number at the telephone, dropping in
the nickel that had cost her so much.  The clerk, though he had moved
away, was all eyes and ears, and she had an unpleasant sensation of
being watched.  But it was too late to draw back now.  Her need was too
urgent, too desperate for such irritating trifles to deter her from her
purpose.  The horrid creature would stare.  Well, let him stare!  He
would chatter about it, too, of course.  Well, let him chatter!

"Thalia Theater--box-office."

"I want to speak to Mr. Adair at once."

"It's impossible--he's in his dressing-room, and we ring up in eight
minutes."

"I simply have to speak to him."

"Can't do it--it's against the rules."

"Oh, you must, you simply must!"

"Who are you?"

"Miss Ladd!"

"Who did you say?"

"Miss Ladd--L-A-D-D."

"What is it, please, that you want to see Mr. Adair about?"

"Something very important."

"I'm sorry, but I can't do it."

"No, no, please.  Mr. Adair will never forgive you if you don't."  Then
she had an inspiration. Where or how she had learned the name she hardly
knew, but it flashed across her mind at this moment.  "Is Mr. Merguelis
there?"

"I am Mr. Merguelis."

"Mr. Tom Merguelis?"

"Yes."

"Then you might know who I am.  Mr. Adair--"

"Oh, say, yes--you're not the little lady that he--"

"Yes, that's me."

"But, my dear, he's in his dressing-room, and that's on the level."

"I simply must talk to him for a second, and you must go and get him."

"Hello, hello--is that you?  Hello--yes, my dear, I'm sending for him.
Please hold the line."

What an age it seemed, standing there with the receiver to her ear, and
her heart bursting with impatience.  Meaningless scraps of talk strained
her attention; when these stopped she was in terror lest she had been
cut off; at last there was the peculiar jarring and disturbance that
showed someone getting into touch at the other end, followed by Adair's
strong clear challenge.

"Who wants Mr. Adair?"

"I do--it's Phyllis."

"Oh, my little girl, I'm in a frightful rush. Hurry up, tell me what's
the matter?"

"I want to see you as soon as I can--something awful has happened."

"What?"

"I can't tell you here--but can't you guess?"

"Trouble at home?"

"Yes."

"Found out?"

"Yes."

"Your father?"

"Yes."

Adair paused.  Events were moving faster than he had anticipated.  He
was both thrilled and bewildered at the suddenness of it all.

"It's risky," he said, in a voice that shook a little, "but you'll have
to come up and see me here--there's nothing else for it."

"That's what I want to do," she answered.

"I'll fix it up with the door-keeper to take you to my dressing-room.
Just say you have an appointment with me, and he'll understand.  Wait
there for me until the first act is over--will you?"

"Yes, Cyril."

"And you will excuse me if I run?  They'll have to hold the curtain as
it is."

"Yes, yes--and I'll be there."

"Au revoir, sweetheart!"

"Good-by--I won't be long."


The stage-door, like most stage-doors, was to be found in a cut-throat
alley, so dark, dangerous, and forbidding in its aspect that it took all
of Phyllis' courage to enter it.  A ratty-looking individual, so
compactly built into the entrance that he could open the door by a shove
of his boot, exerted this labor-saving device in answer to her knock,
and glowered at her from over the paper he was reading.

"What do you want?" demanded the ratty individual.

"I have an appointment with Mr. Adair."

He rose without a word; and leading her up some steps, guided her inside
the theater.  In the twilight of the wings were some stage-hands in
overalls; an actor whom she recognized as the wicked prince, sitting on
a soap-box, waiting listlessly for his cue; from the stage itself came
the sound of voices raised to an unreal pitch, and strangely exciting
and fantastic, in a cadence that was neither recitative nor speech.  She
could not help noticing, even in her agitation, the shabby, dilapidated,
disorderly appearance of everything--the ropes, the dusty props, the
frayed material of the scenes, the general air of
comfortlessness--receiving the shock that comes to every one on first
seeing the theater from the wrong side.  But the ratty individual gave
her no time to take more than a passing glance, leading the way with
whispered warnings through a gorge of canvas, and down a twisting iron
stair to the dressing-rooms below.  He stopped at one of the little
cabin-like doors, opened it, and ushered her in.  Then he left her, and
shuffled away with diminishing footfalls.

The dressing-room was bald, bare, uncarpeted, and painted a staring
white.  Below a mirror flanked by two flaring gas-jets there ran a sort
of shelf on which were grease-paints, crayons, brushes, a pot of
cold-cream, a pot of rouge, and other necessaries for "making up."  From
nails on the wall--common, every-day nails--there straggled an untidy
line of men's clothes.  On a box in the corner was a wash-basin,
pitcher, soap, and a towel that was none too clean.  Three empty chairs,
and a wall decoration completed the picture.  The wall decoration was a
printed notice, in large and emphatic letters: "Smoking positively
prohibited in this theater.  Ladies must not use alcohol curling-irons."

Most young women, in a situation so equivocal and so unfamiliar, would
have been ill at ease, frightened, apprehensive of many vague and dimly
suspected dangers.  But Phyllis' faith in Adair had none of this
faltering quality.  She loved, and loving she trusted.  Her tremors had
ended the moment the door had closed her in--the moment, in fact, when
the others would have trembled most. To her, on the contrary, the little
room breathed security for the very reason that it was Adair's. With
adorable folly she pressed kisses on all his outstretched possessions;
nuzzled her cheek against his coat; put her little foot beside one of
his big man's shoes, delighting in the contrast--and altogether felt
greatly comforted and refreshed.

After a while she heard a tremendous commotion overhead that swelled,
sank and swelled again as the house broke into applause at the end of
the act.  There was a lumbering, scratchy, pattering sound as of a dozen
pianos being moved at once by stalwart men in slippers--it was the new
scene being set.  The passageway outside, previously so still, resounded
with a rush of feet--with exclamations and laughter as the company
scudded to make their respective changes.  The door was flung open, and
there, brisk and smiling, on the threshold stood Correze!

Phyllis ran to his arms, and hiding her face against him began to cry.
She was so happy, so wretched; the misery of that last hour had tried
her more than she knew; her joy at seeing Adair seemed to exhaust the
little strength she had left, and her conflicting emotions could find
vent only in tears.  How sweet it was to be petted, to be soothed--to
feel so small, and weak, and helpless in that powerful clasp!  Her tears
flowed afresh. Flowed at the thought of her love for him, of his love
for her, at the beauty, wonder, and solace of it all.  Nothing could
ever harm them as long as they had each other, nothing, nothing.

She made him take a chair, and seating herself at his feet crossed her
arms on his knees and looked up at him.  In this position it seemed
easier to confide, easier to answer his persistent questions, easier at
the same time to satisfy her craving to nestle close.  As Adair heard of
the letter he turned as black as a thunder-cloud and his hands clenched.

"I know whom I've to thank for that!" he exclaimed furiously.  "The
damned little treacherous hound, I could choke her for it!  I've seen
something working in her eyes all along, but I never dreamed she could
be as low and contemptible as that!  And so she was keeping tab on us,
was she, with all her mean little eyes and ears, the dyed toad!"

"Cyril, you really know who it is?"

He made a hissing sound--a disgusted assent. "She isn't twenty feet from
here," he exclaimed, "unless she is at the key-hole this moment."  He
rose; stepped to the door, and looked out.  "Not here," he said.

"But tell me, is she one of the actresses in the company?"

"Never you mind," he returned roughly; and then, with a quick remorse at
the look in Phyllis' face, he apologized in a roundabout fashion by
denouncing the stage in general.  "It's a low, dirty business," he
cried, "and the people in it are a low, dirty lot; and I guess I'm not
so damned much better myself; and if you had a spark of sense you'd
clear out, and never see me again!  Do you hear what I'm telling you,
little chap?  Do you hear, Phyllis girl?"  He put down his hand, and
caught her ear between his thumb and finger, giving it a shake.  "Skin
out, you darling baby.  Your father's right.  Go back with my
compliments, and tell him I said so!"

His jeering tone hurt her; there was too much sincerity in his
self-contempt, too genuine a ring to his proposed dismissal.  The
contradictory creature, stung to the quick by that letter, and
indignantly conscious of much of its truth, was floundering towards
righteousness, like a walrus after a floe.  Hell, he didn't mean her any
harm. Let her get out.

"You'd better hurry," he said, pinching her ear again.  "I'm just a
cheap actor, as common as the dirt in the road, and you're a beautiful
young lady a million times too good for this kind of game. All that you
can get out of it is dishonor and disgrace.  Go away--let's drop
it--love somebody who's worth loving."

He tried to push her from him, but she clung only the tighter, her face
paling at his earnestness, and stubbornly looking up at his.

"You couldn't say that if you were--what you say you are."

"How do you know it isn't a trick!" he exclaimed, "just another move in
the game--just to get you a little further out of your depth, and then
drown you?"  His hands closed round her neck with brutal pleasure in her
youth, her softness, her delicacy, her powerlessness.

"It's strange," he said wonderingly, "but at this moment when you have
never been more tempting to me, I am willing to let you go--want to let
you go.  It's the first good resolution in my life, yet you stick here
like an infatuated little noodle, waiting for it to pass."

She snuggled closer against him.

"Am I tempting?"

"My God, yes."

"And you love me?"

"Oh, my darling, I do, I do!"

"And wouldn't it be nice for a poor little lonesome cheap actor, who's
really a great big splendid noble person of genius, if he only knew
it--to have me to pet him and love him and adore him, and kiss away his
morbid, silly moods, and make such a darling baby of him that he'd burst
out crying if I were out of his sight a minute?"

He looked at her sharply for an underlying meaning--a comprehension--an
assent.  But her candor and innocence were transparent; the purity
beneath those limpid depths shone like a diamond in a pool.  Her love
took no thought of anything base or wrong, either in him or in her; all
she sought was the assurance that he loved her, and wanted her; and this
achieved she was content to leave the rest to him with unquestioning
faith.  She did not come of the class to whom marriage is vividly seen
as a protection, a safe-guard, a coveted lien on a pocket-book and a
man, enforceable by the police; to her it was more one of those
inevitable formalities that attend all the big events of life, from
being born to being buried, and which one accepts as a matter of course.

Adair, in a gust of passion, caught her up on his knees, and crushed her
unresisting body in his arms.  Everything was forgotten in the maddening
rapture of the moment.  The fragrance of her young beauty over-mastered
him.  His head reeled in the greatest of all intoxications--the
woman-drunkenness that makes men crazy.  Between his clenched teeth he
whispered: "You are mine, and I am going to keep you--you shall never
get away now.  You had your chance, but it's gone, fool that I was ever
to offer it.  But now I'll kill you first; do you hear, Phyllis, I'll
kill you first, for you're mine, body and soul, and you've gone too far
ever to draw back."  His voice sank lower; he was beside himself; all he
knew was that she was shaking convulsively--that her face, her lips were
burning--that love, shame, devouring fever all flamed in the eyes she
tried to hide from him.

A knock at the door startled him to his feet. Rap, rap, rap!

"You're called, Mr. Adair," said the voice from without.

"All right, Williams!"

His quick, matter-of-fact tone was as much a shock to Phyllis as the
interruption itself.  To fall from the clouds, and then land so squarely
and coolly on the earth below was a performance disturbing to witness.
It seemed to cast suspicion on his sincerity up above.  But the
misgiving was a fleeting one, for as he turned to her, she perceived in
his air of concern and resolution that she was still the dominant
thought in his mind.

"See here, Phyllis," he said, speaking fast, "this means only one thing.
The company leaves Saturday night after the show to jump to Ferrisburg.
You must come with me--that's all there is to it.--Will you?"

She bowed her head, for somehow she could not answer in words.

"It won't do for us to see each other till then; but you ring me up on
Saturday between twelve and one at the St. Charles Hotel, and we'll fix
up the dates.  Have you got that straight?"

She bowed her head again, more overcome than ever.

"Don't worry about a trunk, or any damned foolishness of that sort.
Trunks have busted more elopements than six-shooters--just a nightie and
a tooth-brush, and we'll manage the rest at Ferrisburg!"  His glance
sought for some evasion, some backwardness, but there was neither.

"It's the only thing to do," she said simply. "Only, only--"  She was
holding fast to his hand, swaying a little.

He waited for some objection; some silly, feminine obstacle--

"You do love me, don't you?" she asked as pleadingly as a child.  "If
you love me I could do anything.  Tell me you love me, Cyril."

He kissed her hastily, saying "yes," and again "yes," and ran out of the
dressing-room.  A thin deferential man peeped in.  "I'm Mr. Adair's
dresser, Miss," he said.  "He told me to show you the way out.  If you
would be so good as to follow me, Miss."

                     *      *      *      *      *

"Good-night, Miss!"




                              *CHAPTER XV*


In the meanwhile, Mr. Ladd, closely buttoned up and walking to keep
himself warm, restlessly paced the drive-way, awaiting Phyllis' return.
At every nearing footfall he would stiffen and stop, and his throat
would contract with something very much like trepidation.  His anger was
all gone.  In its place was not only contrition and self-reproach for
having shown her that letter, but a very real alarm of the situation he
had precipitated. He had been inconceivably stupid--inconceivably unkind
and blundering.  He had driven the girl strai

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