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Light-Fingered Gentry

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Title: Light-Fingered Gentry

Creator: David Graham Phillips

Illustrator: George Brehm


        
Release date: March 31, 2015 [eBook #48621]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48621

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIGHT-FINGERED GENTRY ***




Produced by Al Haines.





[Illustration: NEVA.]




                            *LIGHT-FINGERED
                                GENTRY*


                                   BY

                        *DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS*

                AUTHOR OF "THE SECOND GENERATION," ETC.



                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                                NEW YORK
                                 MCMVII




                          COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

                       COPYRIGHT, 1906, 1907, BY
                     THE PEARSON PUBLISHING COMPANY

                      _Published, September, 1907_




                               *CONTENTS*

CHAPTER

I.--A Matrimonial Mistake
II.--A Feast and a Fiasco
III.--"Only Cousin Neva"
IV.--The Fosdick Family
V.--Narcisse and Alois
VI.--Neva Goes to School
VII.--A Woman's Point of View
VIII.--In Neva's Studio
IX.--Master and Man
X.--Amy Sweet and Amy Sour
XI.--At Mrs. Trafford's
XII.--"We Never Were"
XIII.--Overlook Lodge
XIV.--Woman's Distrust--and Trust
XV.--Armstrong Swoops
XVI.--Hugo Shows His Mettle
XVII.--Violette's Tapestries
XVIII.--Armstrong Proposes
XIX.--Two Telephone Talks
XX.--Boris Discloses Himself
XXI.--A Sensational Day
XXII.--A Duel After Lunch
XXIII.--"The Woman Boris Loved"
XXIV.--Neva Solves a Riddle
XXV.--Two Women Intervene
XXVI.--Trafford as a Dove of Peace
XXVII.--Breakfast al Fresco
XXVIII.--Foraging for Son-in-Law
XXIX.--"If I Married You"
XXX.--By a Trick
XXXI.--"I Don't Trust Him"
XXXII.--Armstrong Asks a Favor




                        *LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS*


Neva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

"She was giving Alois a free hand in planning surroundings"

"'I felt I must see you--must see you at once'"

"'You are my life, the light on my path'"




                        *LIGHT-FINGERED GENTRY*



                                  *I*

                        *A MATRIMONIAL MISTAKE*


Toward noon on a stifling July day, a woman, a young woman, left the
main walk through the deserted college grounds at Battle Field, and
entered the path that makes a faint tracing down the middle of Pine
Point.  That fingerlike peninsula juts far into Otter Lake; it is a
thicket of white pines, primeval, odorous. Not a ripple was breaking the
lake's broad, burnished reach.  The snowy islets of summer cloud hung
motionless, like frescoes in an azure ceiling.  But among the pines it
was cool, and even murmurously musical.

In dress the young woman was as somber as the foliage above and around
her.  Her expression, also, was somber--with the soberness of the
ascetic, or of the exceedingly shy, rather than of the sad.  She seemed
to diffuse a chill, like the feel of a precious stone--the absence of
heat found both in those who have never been kindled by the fire of life
and in those in whom that fire has burned itself out.  There was not a
trace of coquetry in her appearance, no attempt to display to advantage
good points that ought to have been charms. She was above the medium
height, and seemed taller by reason of the singular conformation of her
face and figure.  Her face was long and slim, and also her body, and her
neck and arms; her hands, ungloved, and her feet, revealed by her
walking skirt, had the same characteristic; the line from her throat to
the curve of her bosom was of unusual length, and also the line of her
back, of her waist, of her legs.  Her hair was abundant, but no one
would have guessed how abundant, or how varied its tints, so severely
was it plaited and bound to her head.  Her eyes were of that long narrow
kind which most women, fortunate enough to possess them, know how to use
with an effect at once satanic and angelic, at once provoking and
rebuking passions tempestuous.  But this woman had somehow contrived to
reduce even those eyes to the apparently enforced puritanism of the rest
of her exterior.  She had the elements of beauty, of a rare beauty; yet
beautiful she was not.  It was as if nature had molded her for love and
life, and then, in cruel freakishness, had failed to breathe into her
the vital breath.  A close observer might have wondered whether this
exterior was not a mask deliberately held immobile and severe over an
intense, insurgent heart and mind.  But close observers are few, and
such a secret--if secret she had--would pass unsuspected of mere shallow
curiosity.

Within a few yards of the end of the peninsula she lifted her gaze from
the ground, on which it had been steadily bent.  Across her face drifted
a slight smile--cold, or was it merely shy?  It revealed the even edge
of teeth of that blue-white which is beautiful only when the complexion
is clear and fine--and her complexion was dull, sallow, as if from
recent illness or much and harassing worry.  The smile was an
acknowledgment of the salutation of a man who had thrown away a
half-finished cigarette and had risen from the bench at the water's
edge.

"How d'ye do, Neva," said he, politely enough, but with look and tone no
man addresses to a woman who has for him the slightest sex interest.

"How are you, Horace," said she, losing the faint animation her smile
had given her face.  Somewhat constrainedly, either from coldness or
from embarrassment, she gave him her hand.

They seated themselves on the bench with its many carvings of initials
and fraternity symbols.  She took advantage of his gaze out over the
lake to look at him; but her eyes were inscrutable.  He was a big,
powerful-looking man--built on the large plan, within as well as
without, if the bold brow and eyes and the strong mouth, unconcealed by
his close-cropped fair mustache, did not mislead.  At first glance he
seemed about thirty; but there were in his features lines of experience,
of firmness, of formed character, of achievement, that could not have
come with many less than forty years.  He looked significant,
successful, the man who is much and shall be more.  He was dressed more
fashionably than would be regarded as becoming in a man of affairs,
except in two or three of our largest cities.  In contrast with his
vivid, aggressive personality--or, was it simply because of shy,
supersensitive shrinking in his presence?--the young woman now seemed
colorless and even bleak.

After a silence which she was unable or unwilling to break, he said,
"This is very mysterious, Neva--this sending for me to meet
you--secretly."

"I was afraid it might not be pleasant for you--at the house," replied
she hesitatingly.

His air of surprise was not quite sincere.  "Why not?" he inquired.
"There isn't anyone I esteem more highly than your father, and he likes
me.  If he didn't he would not have done all the things that put me
under such a heavy debt of gratitude to him."  His tone suggested that
he had to remind himself of the debt often lest he should be guilty of
the baseness of forgetting it.

"It was eighteen months yesterday," said she, "since you were--at the
house."

He frowned at what he evidently regarded as a disagreeable and therefore
tactless reminder.  "Really? Time races for those who have something to
do besides watch the clock."  Then, ashamed of his irritation, "I
suppose it's impossible, in an uneventful place like this, to appreciate
how the current of a city like Chicago sweeps a man along and won't
release him.  There's so much to think about, one has no time for
anything."

"Except the things that are important to one," replied she.  "Don't
misunderstand, please.  I'm only stating a fact--not reproaching
you--not at all."

"So, your father has turned against me."

"He has said nothing.  But his expression, when I happened to speak of
you the other day, told me it would be better for you not to come to the
house--at least, until we had had a talk."

"Well, Neva, I don't feel I have any reason to reproach myself.  I'm not
the sort of man who stands about on the tail of his wife's dress or sits
round the house in slippers.  I'm trying to make a career, and that
means work."

"Chicago is only six hours from Battle Field," she said with curiously
quiet persistence.

"When I got the position in Chicago," he reminded her with some
asperity, "I asked you to go with me. You refused."

"Did you wish me to go?"

"Did you wish to go?"

She was silent.

"You know you did not," he went on.  "We had been married nearly six
years, and you cared no more about me--"  He paused to seek a
comparison.

"Than you cared for me," she suggested.  Then, with a little more energy
and color, "I repeat, Horace, I'm not reproaching you.  All I want is
that you be frank.  I asked you to come here to-day that we might talk
over our situation honestly.  How can we be honest with each other if
you begin by pretending that business is your reason for staying away?"

He studied her unreadable, impassive face.  In all the years of their
married life she had never shown such energy or interest, except about
her everlasting painting, which she was always mussing with, shut away
from everybody; and never had she been so communicative. But it was too
late, far too late, for any sign of personality, however alluringly
suggestive of mystery unexplored, to rouse him to interest in her.  He
was looking at her merely because he wished to discover what she was
just now beating toward.  "In the fall," he said, "I'm going to New York
to live.  Of course, that will mean even fewer chances of my
coming--here--coming home."

At the word "home," which she had avoided using, a smile--her secret
smile--flitted into her face, instantly died away again.  He colored.

"I heard you were going to New York," said she. "I saw it in the
newspapers."

"I suppose _you_ will not wish to--to leave your father," he resumed
cautiously, as if treading dangerous ground.

"Do you wish me to go?"

He did not answer.  A prolonged silence which she broke: "You see,
Horace, I was right.  We mustn't any longer refuse to look our situation
squarely in the face."

His heart leaped.  When he got her letter with its mysterious, urgent
summons, a hope had sprung within him; but he had quickly dismissed it
as a mere offspring of his longing for freedom--had there ever been an
instance of a woman's releasing a man who was on his way up?  But now,
he began to hope again.

"Ever since the baby was born--dead," she went on, face and voice calm,
but fingers fiercely interlocked under a fold of her dress where he
could not see, "I've been thinking we ought not to let our mistake grow
into a tragedy."

"Our mistake?"

"Our marriage."

He waited until he could conceal his astonishment before he said, "You,
too, feel it was a mistake?"

"I feared so, when we were marrying," she replied. "I knew it, when I
saw how hard you ere trying to do your 'duty' as a husband--oh, yes, I
saw.  And, when the baby and the suffering failed to bring us together,
only showed how far apart we were, I realized there wasn't any hope.
You would have told me, would have asked for your freedom--yes, I saw
that, too--if it hadn't been for the feeling you had about father--and,
perhaps also--"  She paused, then went bravely on, "--because you were
ashamed of having married me for other reasons than love.  Don't deny
it, please. To-day, we can speak the truth to each other without
bitterness."

"I shan't deny," replied he.  "I saw that your father, who had done
everything for me, had his heart set on the marriage.  And I'll even
admit I was dazzled by the fact that yours was one of the first and
richest families in the State--I, who was obscure and poor.  It wasn't
difficult for me to deceive myself into thinking my awe of you was the
feeling a man ought to have for the woman he marries."  He seemed to
have forgotten she was there.  "I had worked hard, too hard, at
college," he went on.  "I was exhausted--without courage.  The obstacles
to my getting where I was determined to go staggered me.  To marry you
seemed to promise a path level and straight to success."

"I understand," she said.  Her voice startled him back to complete
consciousness of her presence. "There was more excuse for you than for
me."

"That's it!" he cried.  "What puzzles me, what I've often asked myself
is, 'Why did she marry me?'"

"Not for the reason you think," evaded she.

"What is that?" he asked, his tone not wholly easy.

"It wasn't because I thought you were going to have a distinguished
career."

This penetration disconcerted him, surprised him. And he might have gone
on to suspect he would do well to revise his estimate of her, formed in
the first months of their married life and never since even questioned,
had not her next remark started a fresh train of thought.  "So," she
said, with her faint smile, "you see you've had no ground for the fear
that, no matter how plainly you might show me you wished to be free, I'd
hold on to you."

"A woman might have other reasons than mere sordidness for not freeing a
man," replied he, on the defensive.

"She might _think_ she had."

"That is cynical," said he, once more puzzled.

"The truth often is--as we both well know," replied she.  Then,
abruptly, but with no surface trace of effort: "You wish to be free.
Well, you are free."

"What do you mean, Neva?" he demanded, ashamed of the exultation that
surged up in him, and trying to conceal it.

"Just what I say," was her quiet answer.

After a pause, he asked with gentle consideration of strong for weak
that made her wince, "Neva, have you consulted with anyone--with your
father or brother?"

"I haven't spoken to them about it.  Why should I?  Are not our
relations a matter between ourselves alone?  Who else could understand?
Who could advise?"

"What you propose is a very grave matter."

Again her secret smile, this time a gleam of irony in it.  "You do not
wish to be free?"

His expression showed how deeply he instantly became alarmed.  She
smiled openly.  "Don't pretend to yourself that you are concerned about
my interests," she said; "frankness to-day--please."

"I'm afraid you don't realize what you are doing," he felt compelled to
insist.  "And that is honest."

"You don't understand me.  You never did.  You never could, so long as I
am your wife.  That's the way it is in marriage--if people begin wrong,
as we did.  But, at least, believe me when I say I've thought it all
out--in these years of long, long days and weeks and months when I've
had no business to distract me."

"You are right," he said.  "We have never been of the slightest use to
each other.  We are utterly out of sympathy--like strangers."

"Worse," she replied.  "Strangers may come together, but not the husband
and wife whose interest in each other has been killed."  She gazed long
out over the lake toward the mist-veiled Wabash range before adding,
almost under her breath, "Or never was born."

"I have a naturally expansive temperament," he went on, as if in her
train of thought.  "I need friendship, affection.  You are by nature
reserved and cold."

She smiled enigmatically.  "I doubt if you know me well enough to
judge."

"At least, you've been cold and reserved with me--always, from the very
beginning."

"It would be a strange sort of woman, don't you think, who would not be
chilled by a man who regarded everyone as a mere rung in his
ladder--first for the hand, then for the foot?  Oh, I'm not criticising.
I understand and accept many things I was once foolishly sensitive
about.  I see your point of view.  You feel you must get rid of whatever
interferes with your development.  And you are right.  We must be true
to ourselves.  Worn-out clothes, worn-out friends, worn-out ties of
every kind--all must go to the rag bag--relentlessly."

He did not like it that she said these things so placidly and without
the least bitterness.  He admitted they were true; but her wisdom jarred
upon him as "unwomanly," as further proof of the essential coldness of
her nature; he would have accepted as natural and proper the most
unreasonable and most intemperate reproaches and denunciations.  He
hardened his heart and returned to the main question.  "Then you really
wish to be free?"  He liked to utter that last word, to drink in the
clarion sound of it.

"That has been settled," she replied.  "We _are_ free."

"But there are many details----"

"For the lawyers.  We need not discuss them. Besides, they are few and
simple.  I give you your freedom; I receive mine--and that is all.  I
shall take my own name.  And we can both begin again."

He was looking at her now; for the first time in their acquaintance he
was beginning to wonder whether he had not been mistaken in assigning
her to that background of neutral-colored masses against which the few
with positive personalities play the drama of life. As he sat silent,
confused, she still further amazed him by rising and extending her hand.
"Good-by," she said.  "You'll take the four-fifty train back to
Chicago?"

It seemed to him they were not parting as should two who had been so
long and, in a sense, so intimately, each in the other's life and
thought.  Yet, what was there to be said or done?  He rose, hesitated,
awkwardly touched her insistent hand, reluctantly released it.
"Good-by," he stammered.  He had an uncomfortable sense of being
dismissed--and who likes summarily to be dismissed, even by one of whose
company he is least glad?

Suddenly, upon a wave of color the beauty that nature had all but given
her, swept, triumphant and glorious, into her face, into her figure.  It
was as startling, as vivid, as dazzling as the fair, far-stretching
landscape the lightning flash conjures upon the black curtain of night.
While he was staring in dazed amazement, the apparition vanished with
the wave of emotion that had brought it into view.

Before he could decide whether he had seen or had only imagined, she was
gone, was making her way up the path alone.  A sudden melancholy
shadowed him--the melancholy of the closed chapter, of the thing that
has been and shall not be again, forever.  But the exhilarating fact of
freedom soon dissipated this thin shadow.  With shoulders erect and
firm, and confident gait he strode toward the station, his mind gone
ahead of him to Chicago, to New York, to his future, his career, his
conquest of power.  An hour after his train left Battle Field, Neva
Carlin was to Horace Armstrong simply a memory, a filed document to be
left undisturbed under its mantle of dust.




                                  *II*

                         *A FEAST AND A FIASCO*


"There'll be about six hundred of us," Fosdick had said.  "Do your best,
and send in the bill."

And the best it certainly was, even for New York with its profuse ideas
as to dispensing the rivers of other people's money that flood in upon
it from the whole country.  The big banquet hall was walled with
flowers; there were great towering palms rising from among the tables
and so close together that their leaves intermingled in a roof.  Each
table was an attempt at a work of art; the table of honor was strewn and
festooned with orchids at a dollar and a half apiece; there was music,
of course, and it the costliest; there were souvenirs--they alone
absorbed upward of ten thousand dollars.  As for the dinner itself, the
markets of the East and the South and of the Pacific Coast had been
searched; the fish had come from France; the fruit from English
hothouses; four kinds of wine, but those who preferred it could have
champagne straight through.  The cigars cost a dollar apiece, the
boutonnieres another dollar, the cigarettes were as expensive as are the
cigars of many men who are particular as to their tobacco.  Lucullus may
have spent more on some of his banquets, but he could have got no such
results. In fact, it was a "seventy-five a plate" dinner, though Fosdick
was not boasting it, as he would have liked; he was mindful of the
recent exposures of the prodigality of managers of corporations with the
investments of "the widow and the orphan and the thrifty poor."

Fosdick, presiding, with Shotwell on his right and Armstrong on his
left, swelled with pride in his own generosity and taste as he gazed
round.  True, the O.A.D. was to pay the bill; true, he had known nothing
about the arrangements for the banquet until he came to preside at it.
But was he not the enchanter who evoked it all?  He hadn't a doubt that
his was the glory, all the glory--just as, when he bought for a large
sum a picture with a famous name to it, he showed himself to be greater
than the painter.  He prided himself upon his good taste--did he not
select the man who selected the costly things for him; did he not sign
the checks?  But most of all he prided himself on his big heart.  He
loved to give--to his children, to his friends, to servants--not high
wages indeed, for that would have been bad business, but tips and
presents which made a dazzling showing and flooded his heart with the
warm milk of human kindness, whereas a small increase of wages would be
insignificant, without pleasurable sensation, and a permanent drain.  Of
all the men who devote their lives to what some people call finance--and
others call reaping where another has sown--he was the most generous.
"A great, big, beating human heart," was what you heard about Fosdick
everywhere.  "A hard, wily fighter in finance, but a man full of red
blood, for all that."

Having surveyed the magic scene his necromancy and his generosity had
created, he shifted his glance patronizingly to the man at his
right--the man for whom he had done this generous act, the retiring
president of the O.A.D., to whom this dinner was a testimonial.  As
Fosdick looked at Shotwell, his face darkened.  "The damned old
ingrate," he muttered.  "He doesn't appreciate what I've done for him."
And there was no denying it.  The old man was looking a sickly, forlorn
seventy-five, at least, though he was only sixty-five, only two years
older than Fosdick.  He was humped down in a sort of stupor, his big
flat chin on his crushed shirt bosom, his feeble, age-mottled hand
fumbling with his napkin, with his wineglass, with the knives, forks,
and spoons.

"The boys are giving you a great send off," said Fosdick.  As Shotwell
knew who alone was responsible for the "magnificent and touching
testimonial," Fosdick risked nothing in this modesty.

Shotwell, startled, wiped his mouth with his napkin.

"Yes, yes," he said; "it's very nice."

Nice!  And if Fosdick had chosen he could have had Shotwell flung down
and out in disgrace from the exalted presidency of the O.A.D., instead
of retiring him thus gloriously.  Nice!  Fosdick almost wished he
had--almost.  He would have quite wished it, if retiring Shotwell in
disgrace would not have injured the great company, so absolutely
dependent upon popular confidence.  Nice!  Fosdick turned away in
disgust.  He remembered how, when he had closed his trap upon
Shotwell--a superb stroke of business, that!--not a soul had suspected
until the jaws snapped and the O.A.D. was his--he remembered how
Shotwell had met his demand for immediate resignation or immediate
disgrace, with shrieks of hate and cursing.  "I suppose he can't get
over it," reflected Fosdick.  "Men blind themselves completely to the
truth where vanity and self-interest are concerned.  He probably still
hates me, and can't see that I was foolishly generous with him.  Where's
there another man in the financial district who'd have allowed him a
pension of half his salary for life?"

But such thoughts as these in this hour for expansion and good will
marred his enjoyment.  Fosdick turned to the man at his left, to young
Armstrong, whom he was generously lifting to the lofty seat from which
he had so forbearingly ejected the man at his right.  Armstrong--a huge,
big fellow with one of those large heads which show unmistakably that
they are of the rare kind of large head that holds a large brain--was as
abstracted as Shotwell.  The food, the wine before him, were untouched.
He was staring into his plate, with now and then a pull at his cropped,
fair mustache or a passing of his large, ruddy, well-shaped hand over
his fine brow.  "What's the matter, Horace?" said Fosdick; "chewing over
the speech?"

Armstrong straightened himself with a smile that gave his face instantly
the look of frankness and of high, dauntless spirit.  "No, I've got that
down--and mighty short it is," said he; "the fewer words I say now, the
fewer there'll be to rise up and mock me, if I fail."

"Fail!  Pooh!  Nonsense!  Cheer up!" cried Fosdick. "It's a big job for
a young fellow, but you're bound to win.  You've got _me_ behind you."

Armstrong looked uncomfortable rather than relieved. "They've elected me
president," said he, and his quiet tone had the energy of an inflexible
will.  "I intend to be president.  No one can save me if I haven't it in
me to win out."

Fosdick frowned, and pursed his lips until his harsh gray mustache
bristled.  "Symptoms of swollen head already," was his irritated inward
comment.  "He's been in the job forty-eight hours, and he's ready to
forget who made him.  But I'll soon remind him that I could put him
where I got him--and further down, damn him!"

"Some one is signaling you from the box straight ahead," said Armstrong.
"I think it's your daughter."

As the young woman was plainly visible and as Armstrong knew her well,
this caution of statement could not have been quite sincere.  But
Fosdick did not note it; he was bowing and smiling at the occupants of
that most conspicuous box.  At the table of honor to the right and left
of him were the directors of the O.A.D., the most representative of the
leading citizens of New York; they owned, so it was said, one fifteenth
and directly controlled about one half of the entire wealth of the
country; not a blade was harvested, not a wheel was turned, not a pound
of freight was lifted from Maine to the Pacific but that they directly
or indirectly got a "rake off"--or, if you prefer, a commission for
graciously permitting the work to be done.  In the horseshoe of boxes,
overlooking the banquet, were the families of these high mightinesses,
the wives and daughters and sons who gave the mightiness outward and
visible expression in gorgeous display and in painstaking reproduction
of the faded old aristocracies of birth beyond the Atlantic.

Fosdick had insisted on this demonstration because the banquet was to be
not only a testimonial to Shotwell, but also a formal installation of
himself and his daughter and son in the high society of the plutocracy.
Fosdick had long had power downtown; but he had lacked respectability.
Not that his reputation was not good; on the contrary, it was
spotless--as honest as generous, as honorable as honest.
Respectability, however, has nothing to do with honesty, whether reputed
or real.  It is a robe, an entitlement, a badge; it comes from
associating with the respectable, uptown as well as down.  Fosdick,
grasping this fact, after twenty years' residence in New York in
ignorance of it, had forthwith resolved to be respectable, to change the
dubious social status of his family into a structure as firm and as
imposing as his fortune.  His business associates had imagined
themselves free, uptown at least, from his vast and ever vaster power;
at one stroke he showed them the fatuous futility of their social
coldness, of their carefully drawn line between doing business with him
and being socially intimate with him, made it amusingly apparent that
their condescensions to his daughter and son in the matter of occasional
invitations were as flimsily based as were their elaborate pretenses of
superior birth and breeding.  He invited them to make a social function
of this business dinner; he made each recipient of an invitation
personally feel that it was wise to accept, dangerous to refuse.  The
hope of making money and the dread of losing it have ever been the two
all-powerful considerations in an aristocracy of any kind.
Respectability and fashion "accepted."

So, Fosdick, looking across that resplendent scene, at the radiant faces
of his daughter and son, felt the light and the warmth driving away the
shadows of Shotwell's ingratitude and Armstrong's lack of deference. But
just as he was expanding to the full girth of his big heart, he chilled
and shrunk again.  There, beside his daughter, sat old Shotwell's wife.
She was as cold as so much marble; the diamonds on her great white
shoulders and bosom seemed to give off a chill from their light.  She
was there, it is true; but like a dethroned queen in the triumphal
procession of an upstart conqueror.  She was a rebuke, a damper, a
spoiler of the feast.  She never had cared for old Shotwell; she had
married him because he was the best available catch and could give her
everything she wanted, everything she could conceive a woman's wanting.
She had tolerated him as one of the disagreeable but necessary incidents
of the journey of life.  But Shotwell's downfall was hers, was their
children's.  It meant a lower rank in the social hierarchy; it meant
that she and hers must bow before this "nobody from nowhere" and his
children. She sat there, beside Amy, in front of Hugo, the embodiment of
icy hate.

"This damn dinner is entirely too long," muttered Fosdick, though he did
not directly connect his dissatisfaction with the cold stare from
Shotwell's wife.

But Mrs. Shotwell was not interfering with the enjoyment of Amy and
Hugo.

If Fosdick had planned with an inquisitor's cunning to put her to the
most exquisite torture, he could not have been more successful.  From
his box she had the best possible view of the whole scene; and, while
Shotwell had told her only the smallest part of the truth about his
"resignation," she had read the newspaper reports of the investigation
of the O.A.D. which had preceded his downfall, and, though that
investigation had changed from an attack on him to an exoneration, after
he yielded to Fosdick, she had guessed enough of the truth to know that
this "testimonial" to him was in fact a testimonial to Fosdick.

Hugo and Amy, the children of a rich man and unmarried, had long been
popular with all the women who had unmarried sons and daughters; this
evening they roused enthusiasm.  Everybody who hoped to make, or feared
to lose, money was impressed by their charms. Amy, who was pretty, was
declared beautiful; Hugo, who looked as if he had brains, though in fact
he had not, was pronounced a marvel of serious intellectuality. The
young men flocked round Amy; Hugo's tour of the boxes was an ovation.
To an observant outsider, looking beneath surfaces to realities, the
scene would have been ludicrous and pitiful; to those taking part, it
seemed elegant, kindly, charming.  Mrs. Shotwell was almost at the
viewpoint of the outsider--not the philosopher, but he who stands hungry
and thirsty in the cold and glowers through the window at the revelers
and denounces them for their selfish gluttony. And by the way of chagrin
and envy she reached the philosopher's conclusion.  "How coarse and
low!" she thought.  "New York gets more vulgar every year."

Amy, accustomed all her life to have anything and everything she wanted,
had been dissatisfied about the family's social position and eager to
improve it; but the instant she realized they were at last "in the
push," securely there, she began to lose interest; after an hour of the
new adulation, she had enough, was looking impatiently round for
something else to want and to strive for.

Not so Hugo.  Society had seemed a serious matter to him from his
earliest days at college, when he began to try to get into the
fashionable fraternities, and failed.  He had been invited wherever any
marriageable girls were on exhibition; but he had noted, and had taken
it quickly to heart, that he was not often invited when such offerings
were not being made.  He had gone heavily into a flirtation with a young
married woman, as dull as himself.  It was in vain; she had invited him,
but her friends had not, unless she was to be there to take care of him.
He had attributed this in part to his father, in part to his married
sister--his father, who made occasional slips in grammar and was
boisterous and dictatorial in conversation; his sister, whose husband
kept a big retail furniture store and "looks the counter-jumper that he
is," Hugo often said to Amy in their daily discussions of their social
woes.  Now, all this worriment was over; Hugo, touring the boxes, felt
he had reached the summit of ambition.  And it seemed to him he had
himself brought it about--his diplomatic assiduity in cultivating "the
right people," the steady, if gradual, permeation of his physical and
mental charms.

Amy sent a note down to Armstrong, asking him to come to the box a
moment.  As he entered, Hugo was just leaving on another excursion for
further whiffs of the incense that was making him visibly as drunk, if
in a slightly different way, as the younger and obscurer members of the
staff of the O.A.D. downstairs.  At sight of Armstrong he put out his
hand graciously and said: "Ah--Horace--howdy?" in a tone that made it
difficult for Armstrong to refrain from laughing in his face.

"All right, Hugo," said he.

Hugo frowned.  For him to address one of his father's employees by his
first name was natural and proper and a mark of distinguished favor; for
one of those employees to retort in kind was a gross impertinence. He
did not see just how to show his indignation, just how to set the
impudent employee back in his place.  He put the problem aside for
further thought, and brushed haughtily by Armstrong, who, however, had
already forgotten him.

"Just let Mr. Armstrong sit there, won't you?" said Amy to the young man
in the seat immediately behind hers.

The young man flushed; she had cut him off in the middle of a sentence
which was in the middle of the climax of what he thought a most amusing
story.  He gave place to Armstrong, hating him, since hatred of an
heiress was not to be thought of.

"What is it you want so particularly to see me about?" Armstrong said to
her.

She smiled with radiant coquetry.  "Nothing at all," she replied.  "I
put that in the note simply to make sure you'd come."

Armstrong laughed.  "You're a spoiled one," said he.  And he got up,
nodded friendlily to her, bowed to her Arctic chaperon and departed, she
so astonished that she could think of nothing to say to detain him.

Her first impulse was rage--that _she_ should be treated thus! she whom
_everybody_ treated with consideration!  Then, her vanity, readiest and
most tactful of courtiers, suggested that he had done it to pique her,
to make himself more attractive in her eyes.  That mollified her, soon
had her in good humor again.  Yes, he was as much part of her court as
the others; only, being shrewder, he pursued a different method.  "And
he's got a right to hold himself dear," she said to herself, as she
watched him making his way to his seat at the table of honor.  Certainly
he did look as if he belonged at or near the head of the head table.

Soon her father was standing, was rapping for order.  Handsome and
distinguished, with his keen face and tall lean figure, his iron-gray
hair and mustache, he spoke out like one who has something to say and
will be heard:

"Gentlemen and ladies!" he began.  "We are gathered here to-night to do
honor to one of the men of our time and country.  His name is a
household word." (Applause.)  "For forty years he has made comfortable
an ever increasing number of deathbeds, has stood between the orphan and
the pangs of want, has given happy old age to countless thousands."
(Applause. Cries of "Good!  Good!")  "Ladies and gentlemen, we honor
ourselves in honoring this noble character. Speaking for the directors,
of whom I am one of the oldest--in point of service"--(Laughter.
Applause.)--"speaking for the directors, I say, in all sincerity, it is
with the profoundest regret that we permit him to partially sever his
official connection with the great institution he founded and has been
so largely instrumental in building up to its present magnificent
position.  We would fain have him stay on where his name is a guarantee
of honesty, security and success." (Cheers.)  "But he has insisted that
he must transfer the great burden to younger shoulders.  He has earned
the right to repose, ladies and gentlemen.  We cannot deny him what he
has earned.  But he leaves us his spirit."  (Wild applause.)  "Wherever
the O.A.D. is known--and where is it not known?"  (Cheers and loud
rattling of metal upon glass and china.)--"there his name is written
high as an inspiration to the young. He has been faithful; he has been
honest; he has been diligent.  By these virtues he has triumphed."
(Cheers.)  "His triumph, ladies and gentlemen, is an inspiration to us
all."  (Cheers.  Cries of "Whoope-ee" from several drunken men at the
far tables.)

"Let us rise, gentlemen, and drink to our honored, our honorable chief!"

The banqueters sprang to their feet, lifting their glasses high.  Old
Shotwell, his face like wax, rose feebly, stared into vacancy, passed
one tremulous hand over the big, flat, weak chin, sunk into his chair
again. Some one shouted, "Three cheers for Shotwell!"  Floor and boxes
stood and cheered, with much waving of napkins and handkerchiefs and
clinking of glasses.  It was a thrilling scene, the exuberant homage of
affairs to virtue.

"I see, ladies and gentlemen, that my poor words have been in the
direction of your thoughts," continued Fosdick.  "And now devolves upon
me the pleasant duty of----"

Here a beflowered hand truck, bearing a large rosewood chest, was
wheeled in front of the table of honor. The attendants threw back the
lid and disclosed a wonderful service of solid gold plate.  This
apparition of the god in visible, tangible form caused hysterical
excitement--cheers, shouts, frantic cranings and wavings from floor and
gallery.

"--The pleasant duty of presenting this slight token of appreciation
from our staff to our retiring president," ended Fosdick in a tremendous
voice and with a vast, magnanimous sweep of the arms.

Old Shotwell, dazed, lifted his chin from his shirt bosom, stared
stupidly at the chest, rose at a prod from his neighbor, bowed, and sat
down again.  Fosdick seated himself, nudged him under the table,
whispered hoarsely under cover of his mustache, "Get up.  Get up!
Here's the time for your speech."

The old man fumbled in his breast pocket, drew out a manuscript, rose
uncertainly.  As he got on his feet, the manuscript dropped to the
floor.  Armstrong saw, moved around between Shotwell and his neighbor,
picked up the manuscript, opened it, laid it on the table at Shotwell's
hand.  "Ladies and gentlemen," quavered Shotwell, in a weak voice and
with an ashen face, "I thank you.  I--I--thank you."

The diners rose again.  "Three cheers for the old chief!" was the cry,
and out they rang.  Tears were in Shotwell's eyes; tears were rolling
down Fosdick's cheeks; some of the drunken were sobbing.  As they sang,
"For he's a jolly good fellow," Fosdick's great voice leading and his
arm linked in Shotwell's, Armstrong happened to glance down at the
manuscript. The opening sentence caught his eye--"_Fellow builders of
the Mutual Association Against Old Age and Death, I come here to expose
to you the infamous conspiracy of which I have been the victim._"
Before Armstrong could stop himself, he had been fascinated into reading
the second sentence: "_I purpose to expose to you, without sparing
myself, how Josiah Fosdick has seized the O.A.D. to gamble with its
assets, using his unscrupulous henchman, Horace Armstrong, as a blind._"

Armstrong, white as his shirt, folded the manuscript and held it in the
grip a man gives that which is between him and destruction.  The singing
finished, all sat down again, Shotwell with the rest.  Had his mind
given way, or his will?  Armstrong could not tell; certain it was,
however, that he had abandoned the intention of changing the banquet
into about the most sensational tragedy that had ever shaken and torn
the business world.  Armstrong put the manuscript in his pocket.  "I'll
mail it to him," he said to himself.

But now Josiah was up again, was calling for a "few words from my
eminent young friend, whom the directors of the O.A.D., in the wise
discharge of the trust imposed upon them by three quarters of a million
policy holders, have elected to the presidency.  His shoulders are
young, gentlemen, but"--here he laid his hand affectionately upon
Armstrong--"as you can see for yourselves, they are broad and strong."
He beamed benevolently down upon Armstrong's thick, fair hair.  "Young
man, we want to hear your pledge for your stewardship."

Horace Armstrong, unnerved by the narrowly averted catastrophe, drew
several deep breaths before he found voice.  He glanced along first one
line, then the other, of the eminent and most respectable directors,
these men of much and dubious wealth which yet somehow made them the
uttermost reverse of dubious, made them the bulwarks of character and
law and property--of all they had trodden under foot to achieve
"success."  Then he gazed out upon the men who were to take orders from
him henceforth, the superintendents, agents, officials of the O.A.D.
"My friends," said he, "we have charge of a great institution.  With
God's help we will make it greater, the greatest.  It has been one of
the mainstays of the American home, the American family.  It shall
remain so, if I have your cooeperation and support."

And he abruptly resumed his seat.  There were cheers, but not loud or
hearty.  His manner had been nervous, his voice uncertain, unconvincing.
But for his presence--that big frame, those powerful features--he would
have made a distinctly bad impression. As he sat, conscious of failure
but content because he had got through coherently, old Shotwell began
fumbling and muttering, "My speech!  Where's my speech!  I've lost it.
Somebody might find it.  If the newspapers should get it----"

But the dinner was over.  The boxes were emptying, the intoxicated were
being helped out by their friends, the directors were looking uneasily
at Fosdick for permission to join their departing families. Fosdick took
Shotwell firmly by the arm and escorted him, still mumbling, to the
carriage entrance, there turning him over to Mrs. Shotwell.

"He's very precious to us all, madam," said Fosdick, indifferent to her
almost sneering coldness, and giving the old man a patronizing clap on
the shoulder. "Take good care of him."  To himself he added, "I'll
warrant she will, with that pension his for his lifetime only."

And he went home, to sleep the sleep of a good man at the end of a good
day.




                                 *III*

                          *"ONLY COUSIN NEVA"*


Letty Morris--"Mrs. Joe"--was late for her Bohemian lunch.  She called
it Bohemian because she had asked a painter, a piano player and an
actress, and was giving it in the restaurant of a studio building. As
her auto rolled up to the curb, she saw at the entrance, just going
away, a woman of whom her first thought was "What strange, fascinating
eyes!" then, "Why, it's only Cousin Neva"; for, like most New Yorkers,
she was exceedingly wary of out-of-town people, looking on them, with
nothing to offer, as a waste of time and money.  As it was, on one of
those friendly impulses that are responsible for so much of the good,
and so much of the evil, in this world, she cried, "Why, Genevieve
Carlin!  What are _you_ doing _here_?"  And she descended from her auto
and rushed up to Neva.

"How d'ye do, Letty?" said Neva distantly.  She had startled, had
distinctly winced, at the sound of those affected accents and tones
which the fashionable governesses and schools are rapidly making the
natural language of "our set" and its fringes.

"Why haven't you let me know?" she reproached. As the words left her
lips, up rose within herself an answer which she instantly assumed was
_the_ answer. The divorce, of course!  She flushed with annoyance at her
tactlessness.  Her first sensation in thinking of divorce was always
that it was scandalous, disgraceful, immoral, a stain upon the woman and
her family; but quick upon that feeling, lingering remnant of discarded
childhood training, always came the recollection that divorce was no
longer unfashionable, was therefore no longer either immoral or
disgraceful, was scandalous in a delightful, aristocratic way.  "But,"
reflected she, "probably Neva still feels about that sort of thing as we
all used to feel--at least, all the best people."  She was confirmed in
this view by her cousin's embarrassed expression.  She hastened to her
relief with "Joe and I talk of you often.  Only the other day I started
a note to you, asking you when you could visit us."

She did not believe, when Neva told the literal truth in replying: "I
came to work.  I thought I wouldn't disturb you."

"Disturb!" cried Mrs. Morris.  "You are so queer.  How long have you
been here?"

"Several weeks.  I--I've an apartment in this house."

"How delightful!" exclaimed Letty absently.  She was herself again and
was thinking rapidly.  A new man, even from "the provinces," might be
fitted in to advantage; but what could she do with another woman, one
more where there were already too many for the men available for idling?

"You must let me see something of you," said she, calmer but still
cordial.  "You must come to dinner--Saturday night."  That was Letty
Morris's resting night--a brief and early dinner, early to bed for a
sleep that would check the ravages of the New York season in a beauty
that must be husbanded, since she had crossed the perilous line of
thirty.  "Yes--Saturday--at half-past seven.  And here's one of my cards
to remind you of the address.  I must be going now. I'm horribly late."
And with a handshake and brush of the lips on Neva's cheek, the small,
brilliant, blonde cousin was gone.

"What a nuisance," she was saying to herself. "Why _did_ I let myself be
surprised into attracting her attention?  Now, I'll have to do something
for her--we're really under obligations to her father--I don't believe
Joe has paid back the last of that loan yet. Well, I can use her
occasionally to take Joe off my hands.  She looks all right--really,
it's amazing how she has improved in dress.  She seems to know how to
put on her clothes now.  But she's too retiring to be dangerous.  A
woman who's presentable yet not dangerous is almost desirable, is as
rare as an attractive man."

The delusion of our own importance is all but universal--and everywhere
most happy; but for it, would not life's cynicism broaden from the
half-hidden smirk into a disheartening sneer?  Among fashionable people,
narrow, and carefully educated only in class prejudice and pretentious
ignorance, this delusion becomes an obsession.  The whole hardworking,
self-absorbed world is watching them--so they delight in imagining--is
envying them, is imitating them.  Letty assumed that Neva had kept away
through awe, and that she would now take advantage of her politeness to
cling to her and get about in society; as Mrs. Morris thought of nothing
but society, she naturally felt that the whole world must be similarly
occupied.  She would have been astounded could she have seen into Neva's
mind--seen the debate going on there as to how to entrench herself
against annoyance from her cousin.  "Shall I refuse her invitation?"
thought Neva.  "Or, is it better to go Saturday night, and have done
with, since I must go to her house once?"  She reluctantly decided for
Saturday night.  "And after that I can plead my work; and soon she'll
forget all about me.  It's ridiculous that people who wish to have
nothing to do with each other should be forced by a stupid
conventionality to irritate themselves and each other."

Saturday afternoon, each debated writing the other, postponing the
engagement.  Neva had a savage attack of the blues; at such times she
shut herself in, certain she could not get from the outside the cheer
she craved and too keen to be content with the cheer that would offer
shallow, wordy sympathy, or, worse still, self-complacent pity.  As for
Letitia, she was quarreling with her husband--about money as usual.  She
was one of those doll-looking women who so often have serpentine craft
and wills of steel.  Morris adored her, after the habit of men with such
women; she made him feel so big and strong and intellectually superior;
and her childish, clinging ways were intoxicating, as she had great
physical charm, she so cool and smooth and golden white and delicately
perfumed.  She always got her own way with everyone; usually her
husband, her "master," yielded at the first onset.  Once in a while--and
this happened to be of those times--he held out for the pleasure of
seeing her pout and weep and then, as he yielded, burst into a radiance
like sunshine through summer rain.  If she had had money of her own he
might have got a sudden and even shocking insight into the internal
machinery of that doll's head; as it was, his delusion about the
relative intelligence and strength of himself and his Letty was intact.

Mrs. Joe did not share his enthusiasm for these "love-tilts"; she did
not mind employing the "doll game" in her dealings with the world, but
she would have liked to be her real self at home.  This, however, was
impossible if she was to get the largest results in the quickest and
easiest way.  So she wearily played on at the farce, and at times grew
heartsick with envy of the comparatively few independent--which means
financially independent--women of her set, and disliked her Joe when she
was forced to think about him distinctly, which was not often.  In
marriages where the spirit has shriveled and died within the letter,
habit soon hardens a wife to an amazing degree toward practical
unconsciousness of the existence of her husband, even though he be
uxorious.  Letty's married life bored her; but she had no more sense of
degradation in thus making herself a pander, and for hire, than had her
husband, at the same business downtown.  She saw so many of the "very
best" women doing just as she did, using each the fittest form of
cajolery and cozening to wheedle money for extravagances out of their
husbands, that it seemed as much the proper and reputable thing as going
to bullfights seems to Spaniards, or watching wild beasts devour men,
women, and children seemed to the "very best" people of imperial Rome.
For the same reason, her husband did not linger upon the real meaning of
the phrase "legal adviser" whereunder the business of himself and his
brother lawyers was so snugly and smugly masked--the business of helping
respectable scoundrels glut bestial appetites for other people's
property without fear of jail.

The quarrel had so far advanced that Saturday night was the logical time
for the climax in sentimental reconciliation.  However, Mrs. Morris
decided to endure a twenty-four hours' delay and "get Neva over with."
She repented the instant Neva appeared.  "I had no idea she could be so
good looking," thought she, in a panic at the prospect of rivalry, with
desirable available men wofully scarce.  She swept Neva with a
searching, hostile glance.  "She's really almost beautiful."

And, in fact, never before was Neva so good looking. Vanity is an air
plant not at all dependent upon roots in realities for nourishment and
growth.  Thus, she, born with rather less than the normal physical
vanity, had been unaffected by the charms she could not but have seen
had she looked at herself with vanity's sprightly optimism.  Nor was
there any encouragement in the atmosphere of old-fashioned Battle Field,
where the best people were still steeped in medieval disdain of
"foolishness" and regarded the modern passion for the joy of life as
sinful.  Also, she was without that aggressive instinct to please by
physical charm which even circumvents the regulations of a chapter of
cloistered nuns.

Until she came to New York, she had given her personal appearance no
attention whatever, beyond instinctively trying to be as unobtrusive as
possible; and even in New York her concessions to what she regarded as
waste of time were really not concessions at all, were merely the result
of exercising in the most indifferent fashion her natural good taste, in
choosing the best from New York's infinite variety as she had chosen the
best from Battle Field's meager and commonplace stocks of goods for
women.  The dress she was wearing that evening was not especially grand,
seemed quakerishly high in the neck in comparison with Letty's; for
Letty had a good back and was not one to conceal a charm which it was
permissible to display. But Neva, in soft silver-gray; with her hair,
bright, yet neither gold nor red, but all the shades between, framing
her long oval face in a pompadour that merged gracefully into a simple
knot at the back of her small head; with her regular features shown to
that advantage which regular features have only when shoulders and neck
are bared; and with her complexion cleared of all sallowness and
restored to its natural smooth pallor by the healthful air and life of
New York--Neva, thus recreated, was more than distinguished looking, was
beautiful.  "Who'd have thought it?" reflected Letty crossly.  "What a
difference clothes do make!"  But Neva was slender--"thin, painfully
thin," thought Mrs. Morris, with swiftly recovering spirits.  She
herself was plump and therefore thought "scrawniness" hideous, though
often, to draw attention to her rounded charms, she wailed piteously
that she was getting "disgracefully fat."

Neither of the men--her husband and Boris Raphael, the painter--shared
her poor opinion of Neva after the first glance.  Morris did not care
for thin women, but he thought Neva had a certain beauty--not the kind
he admired, but a kind, nevertheless.  Boris studied the young woman
with an expression that made Mrs. Joe redden with jealousy.  "You think
my cousin pretty?" said she to him, as they went down to dinner far
enough ahead of Neva and Morris to be able to talk freely.

"More than that," replied Boris, "I think her unusual."

"If you ever chance to see her in ordinary dress, you'll change your
mind, I'm sorry to say," said Letty softly.  "Poor Neva!  Hers is a sad
case.  She's one of the ought-to-bes-but-aren'ts."

"It's my business to see things as they are," was the painter's
exasperating reply.  "And I'd not in any circumstances be blind to such
a marvelous study in long lines as she."

"Marvelous!" Mrs. Morris laughed.

"Long face, long neck, long bust, long waist, long legs, long hands and
feet," explained he.  "It's the kind of beauty that has to be pointed
out to ordinary eyes before they see it.  I can imagine her passing for
homely in a rude community, just as her expression of calm might pass
for coldness."

Mrs. Morris revised her opinion of Boris.  She had thought him a most
tactful person; she knew the truth now.  A man who would praise one
woman to another could never be called tactful; to praise
enthusiastically was worse than tactless, it was boorish.  "How
impossible it is," thought she, "for a man of low origin to rise wholly
above it."  She said, "I'm delighted that my cousin pleases you," as
coldly as she could speak to a man after whom everyone was running.

"I must paint her," he said, noting Letty's anger, but indifferent to
it.  "If I succeed, everyone will see what I see.  If that woman were to
love and be loved, her face would become--divine!  Divinely human, I
mean--for she's flesh and blood.  The fire's there--laid and ready for
the match."

When he and Morris were alone after dinner he began on Neva again,
unaffected by her seeming incapacity to respond to his efforts to
interest her.  "I could scarcely talk for watching her," he said.  "She
puzzles me.  I should not have believed a girl--an unmarried
woman--could have such an expression."

"She's not a girl," explained Morris.  "She has taken her maiden name
again.  She was Mrs. Armstrong--was married until last summer to the
chap that was made president of the O.A.D. last October."

"Never heard of him," said the artist.

"That shows how little you know about what's going on downtown.  When
Galloway died--you've heard of Galloway?"

"I painted him--an old eagle--or vulture."

"We'll say eagle, as he's dead.  When he died, there was a split in the
O.A.D., which he had dominated and used for years--and mighty little he
let old Shotwell have, I understand, in return for doing the dirty work.
Well, Fosdick finally cooked up that investigation, frightened everybody
into fits, won out, beat down the Galloway crowd, threw out Shotwell and
put in this young Western fellow."

"What is the O.A.D.?"

"You must have seen the building, the advertisements everywhere--knight
in armor beating off specters of want.  It's an insurance company."

"I thought insurance companies were to insure people."

"Not at all," replied Morris.  "That's what people think they're
for--just as they think steel companies are to make steel, and coal
companies to mine coal, and railway companies to carry freight and
passengers.  But all that, my dear fellow, is simply incidental.
They're really to mass big sums of money for our great financiers to
scramble for."

"How interesting," said Raphael in an uninterested tone.  "Some time I
must try to learn about those things.  Then your cousin has divorced her
husband?  That's the tragedy I saw in her face."

"Tragedy!" Morris laughed outright.  "There you go again, Boris.  You're
always turning your imagination loose."

"To explore the mysteries my eyes find, my dear Joe," said Boris,
unruffled.  "You people--the great mass of the human race--go through
the world blindfold--blindfolded by ignorance, by prejudice, by letting
your stupid brain tell your eyes what they are seeing instead of letting
your eyes tell your brain."

"I never heard there was much to Neva Carlin."

"Naturally," replied Boris.  "Not all the people who have individuality,
personality, mind and heart, beat a drum and march in the middle of the
street to inform the world of the fact.  As for emotions--real
emotions--they don't shriek and weep; they hide and are dumb.  I, who
let my eyes see for themselves, look at this woman and see beauty
barefoot on the hot plowshares.  And you--do not look and, therefore,
see nothing."

Morris made no reply, but his expression showed he was only silenced,
not convinced.  He knew his old friend Boris was a great painter--the
prices he got for his portraits proved it; and the portraits themselves
were certainly interesting, had the air that irradiates from every work
of genius, whether one likes or appreciates the work or not.  He knew
that the basis of Raphael's genius was in his marvelous sight--"simply
seeing where others will not" was Boris's own description of his gift.
Yet when Boris reported to him what he saw, he was incredulous.  "An
artist's wild imagination," he said to himself.  In the world of the
blind, the dim-eyed man is king, not the seeing man; the seeing man--the
"seer"--passes for mad, and the blind follow those with not enough sight
to rouse the distrust of their flock.

When the painter returned to the drawing-room Neva was gone.  As his
sight did not fail him when he watched the motions of his bright, blond
little friend, Mrs. Joe, he suspected her of having had a hand in Neva's
early departure.  And she thought she had herself.  But, in fact, Neva
left because she was too shy to face again the man whose work she had so
long reverenced.  She knew she ought to treat him as an ordinary human
being, but she could not; and she yielded to the impulse to fly.

"You must take me to sec your cousin," said he, his chagrin plain.

"Whenever you like," agreed Letty, with that elaborate graciousness
which raises a suspicion of insincerity in the most innocent mind.

"Thank you," said Boris.  And to her surprise and relief he halted
there, without attempting to pin her down to day and hour.  "He asked
simply to be polite," decided she, "and perhaps to irritate me a little.
He's full of those feminine tricks."




                                  *IV*

                          *THE FOSDICK FAMILY*


In each of America's great cities, East, West, South, Far West, a cliff
of marble glistening down upon the thoroughfare where the most thousands
would see it daily; armies of missionaries, so Fosdick liked to call
them, moving everywhere among the people; other armies of officers and
clerks, housed in the clifflike palaces and garnering the golden
harvests reaped by the missionaries--such was the scene upon which
Horace Armstrong looked out from his aerie in the vastest of the palaces
oL the O.A.D.  And it inspired him.

Institutions, like individuals, have a magnetism, a power to attract and
to hold, that is quite apart from any analyzable quality or
characteristic.  Armstrong had grown up in the O.A.D., had preached it
as he rose in its service until he had preached belief in it into
himself--a belief that was unshaken by the series of damning exposures
of its Wall Street owners and users, and had survived his own
discoveries, as the increasing importance of his successive positions
had forced the "inside ring" to let him deeper and deeper into the
secrets.  He had not been long in the presidency before he saw that the
whole system for gathering in more and more policy holders, however
beneficent incidental results might be, had as its sole purpose the
drawing of more and more money within reach of greedy, unclean hands.
The fact lay upon the surface of the O.A.D. as plain as a great green
serpent sprawled upon the ooze of a marsh.  Why else would these
multimillionaire money hunters interest themselves in insurance? And not
a day passed without his having to condemn and deplore--in his own
mind--acts of the Fosdick clique.  But morals are to a great extent a
matter of period and class; Armstrong, busy, unanalytic, "up-to-date"
man of affairs, accepted without much question the current moral
standards of and for the man of affairs.  And when he saw the inside
ring "going too far," here and there, now and then, he no more thought
of denouncing it and abandoning his career than a preacher would think
of resigning a bishopric because he found that his fellow bishops had
not been made more than human by the laying on of hands.

Where he could, Armstrong ignored; where he could not ignore--he told
himself that the end excused the means.

The busy days fled.  He had the feeling of being caught in a revolving
door that took him from bedtime to bedtime again without letting him out
to accomplish anything; and he was soon so well accommodated to the
atmosphere of high finance that he was breathing it with almost no
sensation of strangeness. When old Shotwell died--of "heart
failure"--Armstrong took out the undelivered speech.

The day after the "testimonial," he had decided that to read that speech
would be dangerously near to the line between honor and dishonor;
besides, it probably contained many things which, whether true or
prejudiced, might affect his peace of mind, might inflict upon his
conscience unnecessary discomforts.  A wise man is careful not to admit
to his valuable brain space matters which do not help him in the
accomplishment of his purposes.  Should he mail the manuscript to
Shotwell?  No.  That might tempt the old man to a course of folly and
disaster.  Armstrong hid the "stick of dynamite" among his private
papers.  But now, Shotwell was dead; and--well, he still believed in the
O.A.D.--in the main; but many things had happened in the months since he
came on from the West, many and disquieting things.  He felt that he
owed it to himself, and to the O.A.D., to gather from any and every
source information about the Fosdick ring.  He unfolded the manuscript,
spread it before him on the desk.

Eleven typewritten pages, setting forth in detail how Fosdick had slyly
lured Shotwell into committing, apparently alone, certain
"indiscretions" for which there happened to be legal penalties of one to
ten years in the penitentiary at hard labor; how Shotwell, thus
isolated, was trapped--though, as he proceeded to show, he had done
nothing morally or legally worse than all the others had done, the
Fosdick faction being careful to entangle in each misdeed enough of the
Galloway faction to make itself secure.  And all the offenses were those
"mere technicalities" which high finance permits the law to condemn only
because they, when committed in lower circles, cease to be justifiable
exceptions to the rule and become those "grave infractions of social
order and of property rights" which Chamber of Commerce dinners and bar
associations of corporation lawyers so strenuously lecture the people
about. And so, Shotwell had fallen.

Armstrong read the document four times--the first time, at a gallop; the
second time, line by line; the third time, with a long, thoughtful pause
after each paragraph; the fourth time, line by line again, with one hand
supporting his brow while the index finger of the other traced under
each separate word.  Then he leaned back and gazed from peak to peak of
the skyscrapers, stretching range on range toward harbor and river.  He
was not thinking now of the wrongs, the crimes against that mass of
policy holders, so remote, so abstract.  He was listening to a
different, a more terrible sound than the vague wail of that vague mass;
he was hearing the ticking of a death-watch.  For he had discovered that
Fosdick had him trapped in just the same way.

As a precaution?  Or with the time of his downfall definitely fixed?

Armstrong began to pace the limits of his big private room.  For a turn
or so it surprised him to find that he could move freely about; for,
with the thought that he was in another man's power, had come a physical
sensation of actual chains and bolts and bars, of dungeon walls and
dungeon air.  In another man's power!  In Fosdick's power!  He, Horace
Armstrong, proud, intensely alive and passionately fond of freedom, with
inflexible ambition set upon being the master of men--he, a slave,
dependent for his place, for his authority, for his very reputation.
Dependent on the nod of a fellow man.  He straightened himself, shook
himself; he clenched his fists and his teeth until the powerful muscles
of his arms and shoulders and jaws swelled to aching, until the blood
beat in his skin like flame against furnace wall.

The door opened; he saw as he was turning that it was Josiah Fosdick; he
wheeled back toward the window because he knew that if he should find
himself full face to this master of his before he got self-control, he
would spring at him and sink his fingers in his throat and wring the
life out of him.  The will to kill!  To feel that creature under him,
under his knees and fingers; to see eyes and tongue burst out; to know
that the brain that dared conceive the thought of making a slave of him
was dead for its insolence!

"Good morning, my boy!" Josiah was saying in that sonorous, cheery voice
of his.  He always wore his square-crowned hard hat or his top hat well
back from his brow when he was under roof downtown; and he was always
nervously chewing at a cigar, which sometimes was lighted and sometimes
not.  Just now it was not lighted and the odor of it was to Armstrong
the sickening stench of the personality of his master.

"My master!" he muttered, and wiped the sweat from his forehead; with
eyes down and the look of the lion cringing before the hot iron in its
tamer's hand he muttered a response.

"I want you to put my son Hugo in as one of the fourth vice-presidents,"
continued the old man, seating himself and cocking his trim feet on a
corner of the table.  "He must be broken to the business, and I've told
him he's got to start at the bottom of the ladder."

Armstrong contrived to force a smile at this ironic pleasantry of his
master's.  He instantly saw Josiah's scheme--to have the young man
inducted into the business; presently to give him the dignity and honor
of the presidency, ejecting Armstrong, perhaps in discredit to justify
the change and to make it impossible for him to build up in another
company.

"You'll do what you can to teach him the ropes?"

"Certainly," said Armstrong, at the window.

Fosdick came up close to him, put his hand affectionately on his
shoulder.  "You've grown into my heart, Horace.  I feel as if you were
another son of mine, as if Hugo were your younger brother.  I want you
to regard him as such.  I'm old; I'll soon be off the boards.  I like to
think of you two young fellows working together in harmony.  It may be
that----"

Armstrong had himself well within the harness now. He looked calmly at
Fosdick and saw a twinkle in those good-natured, wicked eyes of his, a
warning that he had guessed Armstrong's suspicion and was about to
counter with something he flattered himself was particularly shrewd.

"It may be I'll want your present place for the boy, after a few years.
Perhaps it will be better not to put him there; again it may be a good
thing.  If I decide to do it, you'll have a better place--something
where there'll be an even bigger swing for your talents. I'll see to
that.  I charge myself with your future."

Armstrong turned away, bringing his jaws together with a snap.

"You trust me, don't you?" said Fosdick, not quite certain that
Armstrong had turned to hide an overmastering emotion of gratitude.

"I'd advise against making Hugo a vice-president just at present," said
Armstrong.

"Why?" demanded Fosdick with a frown.

"I think such a step wouldn't be wise until after this new policy
holders' committee has quieted down."

Fosdick laughed and waved his arm.  "Those smelling committees!  My boy,
I'm used to them. Every big corporation has one or more of 'em on hand
all the time.  The little fellows are always getting jealous of the men
who control, are always trying to scare them into paying larger
interest--for that's what it amounts to.  We men who run things
practically borrow the public's money for use in our enterprises. You
can call it stocks or bonds or mortgages or what not, but they're really
lenders, though they think they're shareholders and expect bigger
interest than mere money is worth.  But we don't and won't give much
above the market rate.  We keep the rest of the profits--we're entitled
to 'em.  We'd play hob, wouldn't we, lying awake of nights thinking out
schemes to enable John Jones and Tom Smith to earn thirty, forty, fifty
per cent on their money?"

"But this committee--"  There Armstrong halted, hesitating.

"Don't fret about it, young man.  The chances are it'll quiet down of
itself.  If it doesn't, if it should have in it some sturdy beggar who
persists, why, we'll hear from him sooner or later.  When we get his
figure, we can quiet him--put him on the pay roll or give him a whack at
our appropriation for legal expenses."

"But this committee--"  Armstrong stopped short--why should he warn
Fosdick?  Why go out of his way to be square with the man who had
enslaved him?  Had he not done his whole duty when he had refused to
listen to the overtures of the new combination against Fosdick?  Indeed,
was it more than a mere suspicion that such a combination existed?

"This committee--what?"

"You feel perfectly safe about it?"

"It couldn't find out anything, if there was anything to find out.  And
if it did find out anything, what'd it do with it?  No newspaper would
publish it--our advertising department takes care of that.  The State
Government wouldn't notice it--our legal department takes care of them."

"Sometimes there's a slip-up.  A few years ago----"

"Yes," interrupted Fosdick; "it's true, once in a while there's a big
enough howl to frighten a few weak brothers.  But not Josiah Fosdick,
and not the O.A.D. We keep books better than we did before the big
clean-up.  A lot of good those clean-ups did!  As if anybody could get
up any scheme that would prevent the men with brains from running things
as they damn please."

"You're right there," said Armstrong.  He had thought out the beginnings
of a new course.  "Well, if you put Hugo in, I suggest you give him my
place as chairman of the finance committee.  My strong hold is executive
work.  Let those that know finance attend to taking care of the money.
I want to devote myself exclusively to getting it in."

Armstrong saw this suggestion raised not the shadow of a suspicion in
Fosdick's mind that he was trying to get rid of his share in the
responsibility for the main part of the "technically illegal" doings of
the controllers of the company.  "You simply to retain your _ex officio_
membership?" said he reflectively.

"That's it," assented Armstrong.

"If you urge it, I'll see that it is considered.  Your time ought all to
be given to raking in new business and holding on to the old.  Yes, it's
a good suggestion. Of course, I'll see that you get your share of the
profits from our little side deals, just the same."

"Thank you," said Armstrong.  He concealed his amusement.  In the
company there were rings within rings, and the profits increased as the
center was approached.  He knew that he himself had been put in a ring
well toward the outside.  His profits were larger than his salary, large
though it was; but they were trifling in comparison with the "melons"
reserved for the inner rings, were infinitesimal beside the big melon
Josiah reserved for himself, as his own share in addition to a share in
each ring's "rake off."  The only ring Josiah didn't put himself in was
the outermost ring of all--the ring of policy holders.  There was
another feature in which insurance surpassed railways and industrials.
In them the controller sometimes had to lock up a large part of his own
personal resources in carrying blocks of stock that paid a paltry four
or five or six per cent interest, never more than seven or eight, often
nothing at all.  But in insurance, the controller played his game wholly
with other people's money. Josiah, for instance, carried a policy of ten
thousand dollars, and that was the full extent of his investment; he
held his power over the millions of the masses simply because the
proxies of the policy holders were made out in blank to his creatures,
the general agents, whom he made and, at the slightest sign of flagging
personal loyalty, deposed.

Fosdick was still emitting compliment and promise like a giant
pinwheel's glittering shower when the boy brought Armstrong a card.  He
controlled his face better than he thought.  "Your daughter," he said to
Fosdick, carelessly showing him the card.  "I suppose she's downtown to
see you, and they told her you were in my office."

"Amy!" exclaimed Fosdick, forgetting his manners and snatching the card.
"What the devil does _she_ want downtown?  I'll just see--it must be
important."

He hurried out.  In the second of Armstrong's suite of three offices, he
saw her, seated comfortably--a fine exhibit of fashion, and not so
unmindful of the impression her elegance was making upon the furtively
glancing underlings as she seemed or imagined herself. At sight of her
father she colored, then tossed her head defiantly.  "What is it?" he
demanded, with some anxiety.  "What has brought _you_ downtown to see
me?"

"I didn't come to see you," she replied.  "I sent my card to Mr.
Armstrong."

"Well, what do you want of him?" said Josiah, regardless of the presence
of Armstrong's three secretaries.

"I'll explain that to _him_."

"You'll do nothing of the sort.  I can't have my children interrupting
busy men.  Come along with me."

"I came to see Mr. Armstrong, and I'm going to see him," she retorted
imperiously.

Her father changed his tactics like the veteran strategist that he was.
"All right, all right.  Come in.  Only, we're not going to stay long.

"I don't want you," she said, laughing.  "I want him to show me over the
building."

"Lord bless my soul!" exclaimed Fosdick, winking at the three smiling
secretaries.  "And he the president!  Did anybody ever hear the like!"
And he took her by the arm and led her in, saying as they came, "This
young lady, finding time heavy on her hands uptown, has come to get you
to show her over the building."

Armstrong had risen to bow coldly.  "I'm sorry, but I really haven't
time to-day," said he formally.

Fosdick's brow reddened and his eyes flashed.  He had not expected
Armstrong to offer to act as his daughter's guide; but neither had he
expected this tone from an employee.  "Don't be so serious, young man,"
said he, roughness putting on the manner of good nature.  "Take my
daughter round and bring her to my office when you are through."

To give Armstrong time and the opportunity to extricate himself from the
impossible position into which he had rushed, Amy said, "What grand,
beautiful offices these are!  No wonder the men prefer it downtown to
the fussy, freaky houses the women get together uptown.  I haven't been
here since the building was opened.  Papa made a great ceremony of that,
and we all came--I was nine.  Now, Mr. Armstrong, you can count up, if
you're depraved enough, and know exactly how old I am."

Armstrong had taken up his hat.  "Whenever you're ready, we'll start,"
said he, having concluded that it would be impossible to refuse without
seeming ridiculous.

When the two were in the elevator on their way to the view from the top
of the building, Amy glanced mischievously up at him.  "You see, I got
my way," said she.  "I always do."

Armstrong shrugged and smiled stolidly.  "In trifles.  Willful people
are always winning--in trifles."

"Trifles are all that women deal in," rejoined she.


At the top, she sent one swift glance round the overwhelming panorama of
peak and precipice and canon swept by icy January wind and ran back to
the tower, drawing her furs still closer about her.  "I didn't come to
see this," she said.  "I came to find out why you don't--why you have
cut me off your visiting list.  I've written you--I've tried to get you
on the telephone.  Never did I humiliate myself so abjectly--in fact,
never before was I abject at all.  It isn't like you, to be as good
friends as you and I have been, and then, all at once, to act like
this--unless there was a reason.  I haven't many friends.  I haven't any
I like so well as you--that's frank, isn't it?  I thought we were going
to be _such_ friends."  This nervously, with an air of timidity that was
the thin cover of perfect self-possession and self-confidence.

"So did I," said Armstrong, his eyes on hers with a steadiness she could
not withstand, "until I got at your notion of friendship.  You can have
dogs and servants, hangers-on, but not friends."

"What did I do?" she asked innocently.  "Gracious, how touchy you are."

In his eyes there was an amused refusal to accept her pretense.  "You
understand.  Don't 'fake' with me.  I'm too old a bird for that snare."

"If I did anything to offend you, it was unconscious."

"Perhaps it was--at the time.  You've got the habit of ordering people
about, of having everybody do just what you wish.  But, in thinking
things over, didn't you guess what discouraged me?"

She decided to admit what could not be denied. "Yes--I did," said she.
"And that is why I've come to you.  I forgot, and treated you like the
others.  I did it several times, and disregarded the danger signals you
flew.  Let's begin once more--will you?"

"Certainly," said Armstrong, but without enthusiasm.

"You aren't forgiving me," she exclaimed.  "Or--was there--something
else?"

His eyes shifted and he retreated a step.  "You mustn't expect much from
me, you know," said he, looking huge and unapproachable.  "All my time
is taken up with business.  You've no real use for a man like me.  What
you want is somebody to idle about with you."

"That's just what I don't want," she cried, gazing admiringly up at him.
And she was sad and reproachful as she pleaded.  "You oughtn't to desert
me.  I know I can't do much for you, but--  You found me idle and oh, so
bored.  Why, I used to spend hours in trying to think of trivial ways to
pass the time.  I'd run to see pictures I didn't in the least care
about, and linger at the dressmakers' and the milliners' shops and the
jewelers'.  I'd dress myself as slowly as possible. You can't
imagine--you who have to fight against being overwhelmed with things to
do.  You can't conceive what a time the women in our station have.  And
one suggestion you made--that I study architecture and fit myself to
help in building our house--it changed my whole life."

"It was the obvious thing to do," said he, and she saw he was not in the
least flattered by her flattery which she had thought would be
irresistible.

"You forget," replied she, "that we women of the upper class are brought
up not to put out our minds on anything for very long, but to fly from
one thing to another.  I'd never have had the persistence to keep at
architecture until the hard part of the reading was finished.  I'd have
bought a lot of books, glanced at the pictures, read a few pages and
then dropped the whole business.  And it was really through you that I
got father to introduce me to Narcisse Siersdorf.  I've grown _so_ fond
of her!  Why is it the women out West, out where you come from, are so
much more capable than we are?"

"Because they're educated in much the same way as the men," replied he.
"Also, I suppose the men out there aren't rich enough yet to tempt the
women to become--odalisques.  Here, every one of you is either an
odalisque or trying to get hold of some man with money enough to make
her one."

"What is an odalisque?  It's some kind of a woman, isn't it?"

"Well--it's of that sex."

"You think I'm very worthless, don't you?"

"To a man like me.  For a man with time for what they call the
ornamental side of life, you'd be--just right."

"Was that why--the _real_ reason why--you stopped coming?"

"Yes."

He was looking at her, she at the floor, gathering her courage to make a
reply which instinct forbade and vanity and desire urged.  Hugo's head
appeared in the hatchway entrance to the tower room.  As she was facing
it, she saw him immediately.  "Hello, brother," she cried, irritation in
her voice.

He did not answer until he had emerged into the room.  Then he said with
great dignity, "Amy, father wants you.  Come with me."  This without a
glance at Armstrong.

"Would you believe he is three years younger than I?" said she to
Armstrong with a laugh.  "Run along, Hugo, and tell papa we're coming."

Hugo turned on Armstrong.  "Will you kindly descend?" he ordered, with
the hauteur of a prince in a novel or play.

"Do as your sister bids, Hugo," said Armstrong, with a carelessness that
bordered on contempt.  He was in no very good humor with the Fosdick
family and Hugo's impudence pushed him dangerously near to the line
where a self-respecting man casts aside politeness and prudence.

Hugo drew himself up and stared coldly at the "employee."  "You will
please not address me as Hugo."

"What then?" said Armstrong, with no overt intent to offend.  "Shall I
whistle when I want you, or snap my fingers?"

Amy increased Hugo's fury by laughing at him. "You'd better behave,
Hugo," she said.  "Come along."  And she pushed him, less reluctant than
he seemed, toward the stairway.

The three descended in the elevator together, Amy talking incessantly,
Armstrong tranquil, Hugo sullen. At the seventeenth floor, Armstrong had
the elevator stopped.  "Good-by," he said to Amy, without offering to
shake hands.

"Good-by," responded she, extending her hand, insistently.  "Remember,
we are friends again."

With a slight noncommittal smile, he touched her gloved fingers and went
his way.

There was no one in Fosdick's private room; so, Hugo was free to ease
his mind.  "What do you mean by coming down here and making a scandal?"
he burst out.  "It was bad enough for you to encourage the fellow's
attentions uptown--to flirt with him. You--flirting with one of your
father's employees!"

Amy's eyes sparkled angrily.  "Horace Armstrong is my best friend," she
said.  "You must be careful what you say to me about him."

"The next thing, you'll be boasting you're in love with him," sneered
her brother.

"I might do worse," retorted she.  "I could hardly do better."

"What's the matter, children?" cried their father, entering suddenly by
a door which had been ajar, and by which they had not expected him.

"Hugo has been making a fool of himself before Armstrong," said Amy.
"Why did you send him after me?"

"I?" replied Fosdick.  "I simply told him where you were."

"But I suspected," said Hugo.  "And, sure enough, I found her flirting
with him.  I stopped it--that's all."

Fosdick laughed boisterously--an unnatural laugh, Amy thought.  "Do
light your cigar, father," she said irritably.  "It smells horrid."

Fosdick threw it away.  "Horace is a mighty attractive fellow," he said.
"I don't blame you, Mimi."  Then, with good-humored seriousness, "But
you must be careful, girl, not to raise false hopes in him.  Be
friendly, but don't place yourself in an unpleasant position.  You
oughtn't to let him lose sight of the--the gulf between you."

"What gulf?"

"You know perfectly well he's not in our class," exclaimed Hugo, helping
out his somewhat embarrassed father.

"What is our class?" inquired Amy in her most perverse mood.

"Shut up, Hugo!" commanded his father.  "She understands."

"But I do not," protested Amy.

"Very well," replied her father, kissing her.  "Be careful--that's all.
Now, I'll put you in your carriage."  On the way he said gravely,
tenderly, "I'll trust you with a secret--a part of one.  I know
Armstrong better than you do.  He's an adventurer, and I fear he has got
into serious trouble, very serious. Keep this to yourself, Mimi.  Trust
your father's judgment--at least, for a few months.  Be most polite to
our fascinating friend, but keep him at a safe distance."

Fosdick could be wonderfully moving and impressive when he set himself
to it; and he knew when to stop as well as what to say.  Amy made no
reply; in silence she let him tuck the robe about her and start her
homeward.




                                  *V*

                          *NARCISSE AND ALOIS*


When Amy thought of her surroundings again, she was within a few blocks
of home.  "I won't lunch alone," she said.  "I can't, with this on my
mind."  Through the tube she bade the coachman turn back to the
Siersdorf offices.

A few minutes, and her little victoria was at the curb before a
brownstone house that would have passed for a residence had there not
been, to the right of the doorway, a small bronze sign bearing the
words, "A. and N. Siersdorf, Builders."  Two women were together on the
sidewalk at the foot of the stoop.  One, Amy noted, had a curiously long
face, a curiously narrow figure; but she noted nothing further, as there
was nothing in her toilet to arrest the feminine eye, ever on the rove
for opportunities to learn something, or to criticise something, in the
appearance of other women. The other was Narcisse Siersdorf--a strong
figure, somewhat below the medium height, like Amy herself; a certain
remote Teutonic suggestion in the oval features, fair, fine skin and
abundant fair hair; a quick, positive manner, the dress of a highly
prosperous working woman, businesslike yet feminine and attractive in
its details.  The short blue skirt, for example, escaped the ground
evenly, hung well and fitted well across the hips; the blue jacket was
cut for freedom of movement without sacrificing grace of line; and her
white gloves were fresh.  As Amy descended, she heard Narcisse say to
the other woman, "Now, please don't treat me as a 'foreign devil.'  If I
hadn't happened on you in the street, I'd never have seen you."

"Really, I've intended to stop in, every time I passed," said the other,
moving away as she saw Amy approaching.  "Good-by.  I'll send you a note
as soon as I get back--about a week."

"One of the girls from out West," Narcisse explained.  "We went to
school together for a while. She's as shy as a hermit thrush, but worth
pursuing."

"You're to lunch with me," said Amy.

Narcisse shook her head.  "No--and you're not lunching with me, to-day.
My brother's come, and we've got to talk business."

Amy frowned, remembering that those tactics were of no avail with
Narcisse.  "Please!  I want to meet your brother--I really ought to meet
him.  And I'll promise not to speak."

"He's a man; so he'd be unable to talk freely, with a woman there,"
replied Narcisse.  "You two would be posing and trying to make an
impression on each other."

"Please!"

They were in the doorway, Narcisse blocking the passage to the offices.
"Good-by," she said.  "You mustn't push in between the poor and their
bread and butter."

Amy was turning away.  Her expression--forlorn, hurt, and movingly
genuine--was too much for Narcisse's firmness.  "You're not especially
gay to-day," said she, relentingly.

Amy, quick as a child to detect the yielding note, brought her flitting
mind back to Armstrong and her troubles.  "My faith in a person I was
very fond of has been--shaken."  There was a break in her voice, and her
bright shallow eyes were misty.

"Come in," said Narcisse, not wholly deceived, but too soft-hearted not
to give Amy the benefit of the doubt, just as she gave to whining
beggars, though she knew they were "working" her.  Anyhow, was not Amy
to be pitied on general principles, and dealt gently with, as a victim
of the blight of wealth?

Amy never entered those offices without a new sensation of pleasure.
The voluntary environment of a human being is a projection, a
reflection, of his inner self, is the plain, undeceiving index to his
real life--for, is not the life within, the drama of thought, the real
life, and the drama of action but the imperfect, distorted shadowgraph?
The barest room can be most significant of the personality of its
tenant; his failure to make any impression on his surroundings is
conclusive.  The most crowded or the gaudiest room may tell the same
story as the barest.  The Siersdorfs conducted their business in five
rooms, each a different expression of the simplicity and sincerity which
characterized them and their work.  There was the same notable absence
of the useless, of the merely ornamental, the same making of every
detail contributory both to use and to beauty.  One wearies of rooms
that are in any way ostentatious; proclamation of simplicity is as
tedious as proclamation of pretentiousness.  Those rooms seemed to
diffuse serenity; they were like the friends of whom one never tires
because they always have something new and interesting to offer.
Especially did there seem to be something miraculous about Narcisse's
own private office.  It had few articles in it, and they unobtrusive;
yet, to sit in that room and look about was to have as many differing
impressions as one would get in watching a beam of white light upon a
plain of virgin snow.

"How _do_ you do it!" Amy exclaimed, as she seated herself.  She almost
always made the same remark in the same circumstances.  "But then," she
went on, "_you_ are a miracle.  Now, there's the dress you've got
on--it's a jacket, a blouse, a belt and a skirt.  But what have you done
to it?  How do you induce your dressmaker to put together such things
for you?"

"You have to tell a dressmaker what to do," replied Narcisse, "and then
you have to tell her how to do it. If she knew what to make and how,
she'd not stop at dressmaking long.  As I get only a few things, I can
take pains with them.  But you get so many that you have to accept what
somebody else has thought out, and just as they've thought it out."

"And the result is, I look a frump," said Amy, half believing it for the
moment.

"You look the woman who has too many clothes to have any that really
belong to her," replied Narcisse, greatly to Amy's secret irritation.
"There's the curse of wealth--too many clothes, to be well dressed; too
many servants, to be well served; too many and too big houses, to be
well housed; too much food, to be well fed."  Then to the office boy for
whom she had rung, "Please ask my brother if he's ready."

Soon Siersdorf appeared--about five years younger than his sister, who
seemed a scant thirty; in his dress and way of wearing the hair and
beard a suggestion of Europe, of Paris, and of the artist--a mere
suggestion, just a touch of individuality--but not a trace of pose, and
no eccentricity.  He was of the medium height, very blond, with more
sympathy than strength in his features, but no defined weakness either.
A boy-man of fine instincts and tastes, you would have said; indolent,
yet capable of being spurred to toil; taking his color from his
surroundings, yet retaining his own fiber. He was just back from a year
abroad, where he had been studying country houses with especial
reference to harmony between house and garden--for, the Siersdorfs had a
theory that a place should be designed in its entirety and that the
builder should be the designer.  They called themselves builders rather
than architects, because they thought that the separation of the two
inseparable departments was a ruinous piece of artistic
snobbishness--what is every kind of snobbishness in its essence but the
divorce of brain and hand?  "No self-respecting man," Siersdorf often
said, "can look on his trade as anything but a profession, or on his
profession as anything but a trade."

During lunch Amy all but forgot her father's depressing hints against
Armstrong in listening as the brother and sister talked; and, as she
listened, she envied.  They were so interested, and so interesting.
Their life revealed her own as drearily flat and wearily empty.  They
knew so much, knew it so thoroughly. "How could anyone else fail to get
tired of me when I get so horribly tired of myself?" she thought, at the
low ebb of depression about herself--an unusual mood, for habitually she
took it for granted that she must be one of the most envied and most
enviable persons in the world.

Narcisse suddenly said to her brother, "Whom do you think I met to-day?
Neva Carlin."  At that name Amy, startled, became alert.  "She's got a
studio down at the end of the block," Narcisse went on, "and is taking
lessons from Boris Raphael.  That shows she has real talent, unless--"
She paused with a smile.

"Probably," said Alois.  "Boris is always in love with some woman."

"In love with love," corrected Narcisse.  "Men who are always in love
care little about the particular woman who happens to be the medium of
the moment."

"I thought she was well off," said Alois; and then he looked slightly
confused, as if he was trying not to show that he had made a slip.

Narcisse seemed unconscious, though she replied with, "There are people
in the world who work when they don't have to.  And a few of them are
women."

"But I thought she was married, too.  It seems to me I heard it
somewhere."

"I didn't ask questions," said Narcisse.  "I never do, when I meet
anyone I haven't seen in a long time. It's highly unsafe."

With studied carelessness Amy now said: "I'd like to know her.  She's
the woman you were talking with at the door just now, isn't she?"

"Yes," said Narcisse.

"She looked--unusual," continued Amy.  "I wish you'd take me to see
her."

"I'll be very glad to take you," Narcisse offered, on impulse.  "Perhaps
she's really got talent and isn't simply looking for a husband.
Usually, when a woman shows signs of industry it means she's looking for
a husband, whatever it may seem to mean.  But, if Neva's in earnest
about her work and has talent, you might put her in the way of an order
or so."

"I'll go, any day," said Amy.  "Please don't forget."

She departed as soon as lunch was over, and the brother and sister set
out for their offices--not for their work; it they never left.  "Pretty,
isn't she?" said Alois.  "And extremely intelligent."

"She is intelligent in a scrappy sort of way," replied his sister.  "But
she neither said nor did anything in your presence to-day to indicate
it."

"Well, then--she's pretty enough to make a mere man think she's
intelligent."

"I saw you were beginning to fall in love with her," said the sister.

"I?  Ridiculous!"

"Oh, I know you better than you know yourself in some ways.  You've been
bent on marriage for several years now."

"I want children," said he, after a pause.

"That's it--children.  But, instead of looking for a mother for
children, you've got eyes only for the sort of women that either refuse
to have children, or, if they have them, abandon them to nurses.  Let
the Amy Fosdick sort alone, Alois.  A cane for a lounger; a staff for a
traveler."

"You're prejudiced."

"I'm a woman, and I know women.  And I have interest enough in you to
tell you the exact truth about them."

"No woman ever knows the side of another woman that she shows only to
the man she cares for."

"A very unimportant side.  Its gilt hardly lasts through the wedding
ceremony.  If you are going to make the career you've got the talent
for, you don't want an Amy Fosdick.  You'd be better off without any
wife, for that matter.  You ought to have married when you were poor, if
you were going to do it.  You're too prosperous now.  If you marry a
poor woman, you'll spoil her; if you marry a rich woman, she'll spoil
you."

"You're too harsh with your own sex, Narcisse," said Alois.  "If I
didn't know you so well, I'd think you were really hard.  Who'd ever
imagine, just hearing you talk, that you are so tender-hearted you have
to be protected from your own sentimentality? The real truth is you
don't want me to marry."

"To marry foolishly--no.  Tell me, 'Lois, what could you gain by
marrying--say, Amy Fosdick?  In what way could she possibly help you?
She couldn't make a home for you--she doesn't know the first thing about
housekeeping.  The prosperous people nowadays think their daughters are
learning housekeeping when they're learning to ruin servants by ordering
them about.  You say I'm harsh with my sex, but, as a matter of fact,
I'm only just."

"Just!" Alois laughed.  "That's the harshest word the human tongue
utters."

"I've small patience with women, I will admit. They amount to little,
and they're sinking to less. Girls used to dream of the man they'd
marry.  Now it's not the man at all, but the establishment.  Their
romance is of furniture and carriages and servants and clothes.  A man,
any man, to support them in luxury."

"I've noticed that," admitted Alois.

"It's bad enough to look on marriage as a career," continued Narcisse.
"But, pass that over.  What do the women do to fit themselves for it?  A
man learns his business--usually in a half-hearted sort of way, but
still he tries to learn a little something about it.  A woman affects to
despise hers--and does shirk it.  She knows nothing about cooking,
nothing about buying, nothing about values or quantities or economy or
health or babies or--  She rarely knows how to put on the clothes she
gets; you'll admit that most women show plainly they haven't a notion
what clothes they ought to wear.  Women don't even know enough to get
together respectably clever traps to catch the men with. The men fall
in; they aren't drawn in."

"Yet," said Alois, ironic and irritated, "the world staggers on."

"Staggers," retorted Narcisse.  "And the prosperous classes--we're
talking about them--don't even stagger on.  They stop and slide
back--what can be expected of the husbands of such wives, the sons and
daughters of such mothers?"

Narcisse was so intensely in earnest that her brother laughed outright.
"There, there, Cissy," said he, "don't be alarmed--I'm not even engaged
yet."

Narcisse made no reply.  She knew the weak side of her brother's
character, knew its melancholy possibilities of development; and she had
guessed what was passing in his mind as he and Amy were trying each to
please the other.

"You yourself would be the better--the happier, certainly--for falling
in love," pursued Alois.

"Indeed I should," she assented with sincerity. "But the man who comes
for me--or whom I set my snares for--must have something more than a
pretty face or a few sex-tricks that ought not to fool a girl just out
of the nursery."

No arrow penetrates a man's self-esteem more deeply than an insinuation
that he is easy game for women.  But Alois was no match for his sister
at that kind of warfare.  He hid his irritation, and said
good-humoredly, "When you fall in love, my dear, it'll be just like the
rest of us--with your heart, not with your head."

Narcisse looked at him shrewdly, yet lovingly, too. "I'm not afraid of
your marrying because you've fallen in love.  What I'm agitated about is
lest you'll fall in love because you want to marry."

Alois had an uncomfortable look that was confession.




                                  *VI*

                         *NEVA GOES TO SCHOOL*


Boris let a week, nearly two weeks, pass before he went to see Miss
Carlin.  He thought he was delaying in hope that the impulse to
investigate her would wane and wink out.  He had invariably had this
same hope about every such impulse, and invariably had been
disappointed.  The truth was, whenever he happened upon a woman with
certain lines of figure and certain expression of eyes--the lines and
the expression that struck the keynote of his masculine nerves for the
feminine--he pursued and paused not until he was satisfied, sated, calm
again--or hopelessly baffled.  And as he was attractive to women, and
both adroit and reckless, and not at all afraid of them, his failures
were few.

In this particular case the cause of his long delay in beginning was
that he had just maneuvered his affair with the famously beautiful Mrs.
Coventry to the point where each was trying to get rid of the other with
full and obvious credit for being the one to break off. Mrs. Coventry
was stupid; even her beauty, changelessly lovely, bored and irritated
him.  But nature had given her in default of brains a subtle craftiness;
thus, she had been able to meet Boris's every attempt to cast her off
with a move that put her in the position of seeming to be the one who
was doing the casting--and Boris had a feminine vanity in those matters.
At last, however, his weariness of his tiresome professional beauty and
his impatience to begin a new adventure combined to make him indifferent
to what people might say and think.  Instead of sailing with Mrs.
Coventry, as he had intended, he abruptly canceled his passage; and
while she was descending the bay on the _Oceanic_, he was moving toward
Miss Carlin's studio.

"You have not forgotten me?" said he in that delightfully ingenuous way
of his, as he entered the large studio and faced the shy, plainly
dressed young woman from the Western small town.

"No, indeed," replied she, obviously fluttered and flattered by this
utterly unexpected visit from the great man.

"I come as a brother artist," he explained.  He was standing before her,
handsome and picturesque in a costume that was yet conventional.  He
diffused the odor of a powerful, agreeable, distinctly feminine perfume.
The feminine details of his toilet made his strong body and aggressive
face seem the more masculine; his face, his virile, clean, blond beard,
his massive shoulders, on the other hand, made his perfume, his plaited
shirt and flowing tie, his several gorgeous rings and his too neat boots
seem the more flauntingly feminine.  "What I saw of you," he proceeded,
"and what your cousin told me, roused my interest and my curiosity."

At "curiosity" his clear, boyish eyes danced and his smile showed even,
very white teeth and part of the interior of a too ruddy, too healthily
red mouth.  Like everything about him that was characteristic, this
smile both fascinated and repelled.  Evidently this man drew an intense
physical joy from life, had made of his intellect an expert extractor of
the last sweet drop of pleasure that could be got from perfectly
healthy, monstrously acute nerves.  When he used any nerve, any of those
trained servants of his sybarite passions, it was no careless, ignorant
performance such as ordinary mortals are content with.  It was a
finished and perfect work of art--and somehow suggestive of a tiger
licking its chops and fangs and claws and fur that it might not lose a
shred of its victim's flesh.  But this impression of repulsion was
fleeting; the charm of the personality carried off, where it did not
conceal, the sinister side.  Because Boris understood his fellow beings,
especially the women, so thoroughly, they could not but think him
sympathetic, could not appreciate that he lured them into exposing or
releasing their emotions solely for his own enjoyment.

But Neva was seeing the artist so vividly that she was seeing the man
not at all.  Only those capable of real enthusiasm can appreciate how
keenly she both suffered and enjoyed, in the presence of the Boris
Raphael who to her meant the incorporeal spirit of the art she loved and
served.  He, to relieve her embarrassment and to give her time to
collect herself, turned his whole attention to her work--a portrait of
Molly, the old servant she had brought with her from Battle Field.

He seemed absorbed in the unfinished picture.  In fact, he was thinking
only of her.  By the infection to which highly sensitive people are
susceptible, he had become as embarrassed as she.  One of the chief
sources of his power with women was his ability to be in his own person
whatever the particular woman he was seeking happened to be--foolish
with the foolish, youthful with the young, wise with the sensible,
serpentine with the crafty, coarse with the grossly material, spiritual
with the high-minded.  He had all natures within himself and could show
whichever he pleased.

As he felt Neva's presence, felt the thrill of those moving graces of
her figure, the passion that those mysterious veiled eyes of hers
inspired, he was still perfectly aware of her defects, all of them, all
that must be done before she should be ready to pluck and enjoy. It was
one of her bad mornings.  Her skin was rather sallow and her eyelids
were too heavy.  Since she had been in New York, she had adopted saner
habits of regular eating and regular exercise than she had had, or had
even known about, in Battle Field.  She was beginning to understand why
most people, especially most women, go to pieces young; and for the sake
of her work, not at all because she hoped for or wished for physical
beauty, she was taking better care of herself. But latterly she had been
all but prostrate before a violent attack of the blues, and had been
eating and sleeping irregularly, and not exercising.  Thus, only a Boris
Raphael would have suspected her possibilities as she stood there,
slightly stooped, the sallowness of her skin harmonizing drearily with
her long, loose dark-brown blouse, neutral in itself and a neutralizer.
He saw at a glance the secret of her having been able to deceive
everybody, to conceal herself, even from herself. He felt the
discoverer's thrill; his blood fired like knight's at sight of secret,
sleeping princess.  But he pretended to ignore her as a personality of
the opposite sex pole, knowing that to see her and know her as she
really was he must not let her suspect she was observed. He reveled in
such adventures upon soul privacy, not the least disturbed because they
bore a not remote resemblance to that of the spy upon a nymph at the
forest pool.  He justified himself by arguing that he made no improper
use of his discoveries, but laid them upon the high and holy altars of
art and love.

Far from being discouraged by the difficulties which Neva was that
morning making so obvious, he welcomed the abrupt change from the
monotonous beauty of Doris Coventry.  She had given him no opportunity
for the exercise of his peculiar talents.  With her the banquet was
ready spread; with this woman practically everything had to be prepared.
And what a banquet it would be!  When he had developed her beauty, had
made her all that nature intended, had taught her self-confidence and
the value of externals and had given her the courage to express the
ideas and the emotions that now shrank shyly behind those marvelous eyes
of hers--  How poor, how paltry, how tedious seemed such adventures as
that with Doris Coventry beside this he was now entering!

As if he were her teacher, he took up the palette and with her
long-handled brushes made a dozen light, swift touches--what would have
been an intolerable insolence in a less than he.  To be master was but
asserting his natural right; men hated him for it, but the women liked
him and it.

"Oh!" she cried delightedly as she observed the result of what he had
done.  Then, at the contrast between his work and her own, cried "Oh,"
again, but despondently.

"You must let me teach you," said he, as if addressing the talent
revealed in her picture.

"Do you think I could learn?" she asked wistfully.

He elevated his shoulders and brows.  "We must all push on until we
reach our limit; and until we reach it, we, nor no man, can say where it
is."

"But I've no right to _your_ time," she said reluctantly.

"I teach to learn.  I teach only those from whom I get more than I give.
You see," with his engaging boyish smile, "I have the mercantile
instinct."

She looked at him doubtfully, searching for the motive behind an offer,
so curious, so improbable in and of itself.  She saw before her now the
outward and visible form of the genius she revered--a very handsome man,
a man whose knowledge how to make himself agreeable to women must
obviously have been got by much and intimate experience; a man whose
sensuous eyes and obstreperous masculinity of thick waving hair and
thick crisp reddish beard, roused in her the distrust bred by ages on
ages of enforced female wariness of the male that is ever on conquest
bent and is never so completely conqueror as when conquered.  But this
primordial instinct, never developed in her by experience, was feeble,
was immediately silenced by the aspect of him which she clearly
understood--his look of breadth and luminousness and simplicity, the
master's eye and the master's air--the great man.

"You will teach me more than I you," he insisted.

"Why?" she managed to object, wondering at her own courage as much as at
his condescension--for such an offer from such a man was, she felt,
indeed a condescension.

"Because you paint with your heart while I paint rather with my head."

"But that is the greater."

"No.  It is simply different.  Neither is great."

"Neither?"

"Only he is supremely great who works with both heart and mind."

She showed how well she understood, by saying, "Leonardo, for example?"

Boris's face was the devotee's at mention of the god. The worldliness,
the aggressive animality vanished. "Leonardo alone among painters," said
he.  "And he reached the pinnacle in one picture only--the picture of
the woman he loved yet judged."

Her own expression had changed.  The least observant would have seen
just then why Boris, connoisseur, had paused before her.  She had
dropped her mask, had come forth as the shy beauties of the field lift
their heads above the snow in response to the sun of early spring.  For
the first time in her life she had met a human being to whom life meant
precisely what it had meant to her.  His own expression of exaltation
passed with the impulse that had given it birth; but she did not see.
He was for her Boris Raphael, artist through and through.  Instead of
suspicion and shrinking, her long narrow eyes, luminous, mysterious, now
expressed confidence; she would never again be afraid of one who had in
him what this man had revealed to her.  She had always seen it in his
work; she greeted it in the man himself as one greets an old, a stanch
friend, tested in moods and times of sorrow and trial.

He glanced at her, glanced hastily away lest she should realize how
close he had thus quickly got to her soul, shy and graceful and
resplendent as a flamingo. "You will let me teach you?" said he.

"I don't understand your asking."

"Nor do I," replied he.  "All I know is, I felt I must come and offer my
services.  It only remains for you to obey your impulse to accept."

Without further hesitation she accepted; and there was firmly
established the intimate relations of master workman and apprentice,
with painting, and through painting the whole of life, as the trade, to
be learned. For, the arts are a group of sister peaks commanding the
entire panorama of truth and beauty, of action and repose; and to learn
of a master at any one of them is to be pupil to all wisdom.


Boris arranged with her to come three mornings a week to the atelier,
raftered and galleried, which he had made of the top stories of two
quaint old houses in Chelsea's one remaining green square.  Soon he was
seeing her several afternoons also, at her apartment; and they were
lunching and dining together, both alone and in the company of artists
and the sort of fashionable serious-idle people who seek the society of
artists. The part of her shyness that was merely strangeness did not
long withstand his easy, sympathetic manner, his simplicity, his
adroitness at drawing out the best in any person with whom he took pains
to exert himself. It required much clever maneuvering before he got her
rid of the shyness that came from lack of belief in her power to
interest others.  The people out West, inexpert in the social art,
awkward and shy with each other, often in intimate family life even, had
without in the least intending it, encouraged her and confirmed her in
this depressing disbelief.  In all her life she had never been so well
acquainted with anyone as with Boris after a week of the lessons; and
with him, even after two months of friendship, she would suddenly and
unaccountably close up like a sensitive plant, be embarrassed and
constrained, feel and act as if he were a stranger. Self-confidence
finally came through others, not at all through him.  Her new
acquaintances, observant, sympathetic, quickly saw what Boris pointed
out to them; and by their manner, by their many and urgent invitations
and similar delicate indirect compliments, they made her feel without
realizing it that she was not merely tolerated for his sake, but was
sought on her own account.

We hear much of the effect of things internal, little of the far more
potent effect of externals.  Boris, frankly materialistic, was all for
externals.  For him the external was not only the sign of what was
within, but also was actually its creator.  He believed that character
was more accurately revealed in dress than in conversation, in manners
than in professions.  "Show me through a woman's living place," he often
said, "and I will tell you more about her soul than she could tell her
confessor."  His one interest in Neva was her physical beauty; his one
object, to develop it to the utmost of the possibilities he alone saw.
But he was in no hurry.  He had the assiduous patience of genius that
works steadily and puts deliberate thought into every stroke.  He would
not spoil his creation by haste; he would not rob himself of a single
one of the joys of anticipation.  And his pleasure was enhanced by the
knowledge that if she so much as suspected his real design, or any
design at all, she would shut herself away beyond his reach.

"I want you as a model," said he one day, in the offhand manner he used
with her to conceal direct personal purpose.  "But you've got to make
changes in your appearance--dress--way of wearing the hair--all that."

She alarmed him by coloring vividly; he had no suspicion that it was
because she had been secretly using him as a model for several months.
"I've hurt your vanity?" said he.  "Well, I never before knew you had
that sort of vanity.  I fancied you gave the least possible attention to
your outside."

"I'll be glad to help you in any way," she hastened to assure him.
"You're quite wrong about my reason for not accepting at once.  It
wasn't wounded vanity.... I don't know whether I have much vanity or
not.  I've never thought about it."

He laughed.  "Well, you will have, when you've seen the picture I'll
make.  What a queer, puritanic lot you Westerners are!"  He seated
himself at ease astride a chair, and gazed at her impersonally, as
artist at model in whom interest is severely professional. "I suppose
you don't know you are a very beautiful woman--or could be if you half
tried."

"No, I don't," replied she indifferently.  "What do you wish me to do?"

"To become beautiful."

"Don't tease me," said she curtly.  "I hate my looks.  I never see
myself if I can help it."

He took the master's tone with her.  "You will kindly keep this away
from the personal," reprimanded he.  "I am discussing you as a model.
I've no interest in your vanity or lack of it."

She resumed her place as pupil with a meek "I beg your pardon."

"First, I want you to spend time in looking at yourself in the glass and
in thinking about yourself, your personal appearance.  I want you to do
this, so that you may be of use to me.  But you really ought to do it
for your own sake.  If you are to be an artist, you must live.  To live
you must use to its fullest capacity every advantage nature has given
you.  The more you give others, the more you will receive.  It is not to
your credit that you don't think about dress or study yourself in the
mirror.  The reverse.  If you are homely, thought and attention will
make you less so.  If you are beautiful, or could be--  What a crime to
add to the unsightliness of the world when one might add to its
sightliness!  And what an impertinence to search for, to cry for beauty,
and to refuse to do your own part."

"I hadn't thought of it in that way," confessed she, evidently impressed
by this unanswerable logic.

He eyed her professionally through the smoke of his cigarette.  "If you
are to help me with the picture I have in mind, you'll have to change
your hair--for the next few months.  Your way of wearing it, I
mean--though that will change the color too--or, rather, bring out the
color."

Neva colored with embarrassment, remembered she was but a model, braced
herself resolutely.

"For my purposes--  Just stand before that mirror there."  He indicated
the great mirror which gave him double the width of the atelier as
perspective for his work.  "Now, you'll observe that by braiding your
hair and putting it on top of your head, you ruin the lines I wish to
bring out.  The beautiful and the grotesque are very close to each
other.  Your face and figure ought to be notable as an exhibit of
beautiful lengths.  But when you put your hair on top of your head, you
extend the long lines of neck and face too far--at least, for my
purposes."

"I see," said she, herself quite forgotten; for, his impersonal manner
was completely convincing, and his exposition of the principles of art
was as important as novel and interesting.

"Do your hair well down toward the nape of the neck--and loosely.
Somewhat as it was that night at the Morrises, only--more so."

"I'll try it," she said with what sounded hopefully like the beginnings
of acquiescence.

"That's better!" exclaimed he, in approval of her docile tone.  "And
keep on trying till you get it right. You'll know.  You've got good
taste.  If you hadn't, it'd be useless to talk these things to you.  The
thing is to bring out your natural good taste--to encourage, to educate,
instead of repressing it....  No, don't turn away, yet.  I want you to
notice some color effects.  That dress you have on--  You always wear
clothes that are severely somber, almost funereal--quite funereal.  One
would think, to look at your garb, that there was no laughter anywhere
in you--no possibilities of laughter."

Neva's laughing face, looking at him by way of the mirror, showed that
she was now in just the mood he wished.  "I want to make a very human
picture," he went on.  "And, while the dominant note of the human aspect
in repose is serious--pensive to tragic--it is relieved by suggestions
of laughter.  Your dress makes your sadness look depressed, resigned,
chronic.  Yet you yourself are strong and cheerful and brave.  You do
not whimper.  Why look as if you did, and by infection depress others?
Don't you think we owe it to a sad world to contribute whatever of
lightness we can?"

She nodded.  "I hadn't thought of that," said she.

"Well, don't you think it's about time you did? ... Now, please observe
that you wear clothes with too many short lines in their making--lines
that contradict the long lines of your head and body."

She whirled away from the mirror, hung her head, with color high and
hands nervous.  "Don't, please," she said.  "You are making me miserably
self-conscious."

"Oh, very well."  He seemed offended, hurt.  "I see you've
misunderstood.  How can I get any good out of you as a model unless you
let me be frank? Why drag self, your personal feelings, to the fore?
That is not art."

A long silence, during which she watched him as he scowled at his
cigarette.  "I'm sorry," she exclaimed contritely.  "I'm both ungracious
and ungrateful."

"Vanity, I call it," he said, with pretended disdain. "Plain vanity--and
cheap, and altogether unworthy of you."

"Go on, please," she urged.  "I'll not give you further trouble."  Then
she added, to his secret delight, "Only, _please_ don't ask me to look
at myself before you--until--until--I've had a chance to improve a
little."

"To go back to the hair again," pursued he, concealing his satisfaction
over his victory.  "My notion--for my picture--is much less severe than
you are habitually--in appearance, I mean.  The hair must be easy,
graceful, loose.  It must form a background for the face, a crown for
the figure.  And I want all the colors and shades you now hide away in
those plaits."  He surveyed her absently.  "I'm not sure whether I shall
paint you in high or low neck.  Get both kinds of dresses--along the
lines I've indicated....  Have them made; don't buy those ready-to-wear
things you waste money on now....  I want to be able to study you at
leisure.  So, you'll have to put aside that prim, puritanic costume for
a while.  You won't mind?"

She had her face turned away.  She simply shook her head in answer.

"I know you despise these exterior things--so far as you personally are
concerned," he proceeded in a kindlier tone.  "I've no quarrel with
that.  My own views are different.  You pride yourself on being free
from all social ties or obligations----"

"Not at all," cried she.  "Indeed, I'm not so egotistical."

"Egotism!"  He waved it away.  "A mere word. It simply means human
nature with the blinds up.  And modesty is human nature with the blinds
down.  We are all egotists.  How is it possible for us not to be? Does
not the universe begin when we are born and end when we die?  Certainly,
you are an egotist.  But you are very short-sighted in your egotism, my
friend."

"Yes?"  She was all attention now.

"You want many things in the world--things you can't get for
yourself--things you must therefore look to others to help you get.  You
want reputation, friendship, love, to name the three principal wants,
bread being provided for you.  Well--your problem is how to get them in
fullest measure and in the briefest time--for, your wants are great and
pressing, and life is short."

"But I must have them by fair means and they must be really mine.  I
don't want what mere externals attract."

"Pish!  Tush!  Tommy rot!"  Boris left the chair, took the middle of the
floor and the manner of the instructor of a class.  "To get them you
must use to the best advantage all the gifts nature has given you--at
least, you will, if you are wise, I think.  Some of these gifts are
internal, some are external.  We are each of us encased in matter, and
we get contact with each other only by means of matter.  Externals are
therefore important, are they not?  To attract others, those of the kind
we like, we must develop our external to be as pleasing as possible to
them.  In general, we owe it to our fellow beings to be as sightly a
part of the view as we can.  In particular, we owe it to ourselves to
make the best of our minds and bodies, for our own pleasure and to
attract those who are congenial to us and can do us the most good."

"I shall have to think about that," said she, and he saw that she was
more than half converted.  "I've always been taught to regard those
things as trivial."

"Trivial!  Another word that means nothing. Life--this life--is all we
have.  How can anything that makes for its happiness or unhappiness be
trivial? You with your passion for beauty would have everything
beautiful, exquisite, except yourself!  What selfishness!  You don't
care about your own appearance because you don't see it."

She laughed.  "Really, am I so bad as all that?"

"The trouble with you is, you haven't thought about these things, but
have accepted the judgment of others about them.  And what others?  Why,
sheep, cattle, parrots--the doddering dolts who make public opinion in
any given place or at any given time."

She nodded slowly, thoughtfully.

"Another point.  You are trying to have a career. Now, that's something
new in the world--for women to have careers.  You face at best a hard
enough struggle. You must do very superior work indeed, to convince
anyone you are entitled to equal consideration with men as a worker.
Why handicap yourself by creating an impression that you are eccentric,
bizarre?"

Neva looked astonished.  "I don't understand," said she.

"What is the normal mode for a woman?  To be feminine--careful of her
looks, fond of dress, as pleasing to the eye as possible.  Do you strive
to be normal in every way but the one way of making a career, and so
force people to see you're a real woman, a well-balanced human being?"

Neva had the expression of one in the dark, toward whom light is
beginning to glimmer.

"A woman," proceeded he, the impersonal instructor, "a woman going in
for a career and so, laying herself open to suspicion of being
'strong-minded' and 'masculine' and all sorts of hard, unsympathetic,
unfeminine things that are to the mutton-headed a sign of want of
balance--a woman should be careful to remove that impression.  How?  By
being ultra-feminine, most fashionable in dress, most alluring in
appearance--  Do you follow me?"

"Perfectly," said Neva.  "You've given me a great deal to think
about....  Why, how blind we are to the obvious!  Now that I see it, I
feel like a fool."

"Use the same good taste in your own appearance that you use in bringing
out beauty in your surroundings.  Note that----"

Boris paused abruptly; his passion was betraying itself both in his eyes
and in his voice.  But he saw that Neva had, as usual, forgotten the
teacher in the lesson.  He felt relieved, yet irritated, too.  Never
before had he found a woman who could maintain, outwardly at least, the
fiction of friendship unalloyed with passion.  "She acts exactly as if
she were another man," said he discontentedly to himself, "except when
she treats me as if I were another woman."

He did not return to the subject of her appearance. And his judgment
that he had said enough--and his confidence in her good taste--were
confirmed a few days later.  She came in a new hat, a new blouse, and
with her hair done as he had suggested.  The changes were in themselves
slight; but now that her complexion had been cleared and taken on its
proper color--a healthy pallor that made her eyes sparkle and glow,
every little change for the better wrought marvels.  A good complexion
alone has redeemed many a woman from downright ugliness; Neva's
complexion now gave her regular features and blue-white teeth and
changeful, mysterious eyes their opportunity.  The new blouse, one of
the prettiest he had ever seen, took away the pinched-in look across the
shoulders to which he had objected.  As for her hair, it was no longer a
_melange_ of light brown and dark brown, but a halo of harmonizing tints
from deepest red to brightest gold, a merry playground for sunbeams.  He
was astounded, startled. "Why, she has really marvelous hair!" he
muttered. Then he laughed aloud; she, watching him for signs of his
opinion, wore an expression like a child's before its sphinxlike
teacher.  She echoed his laugh.

"My advice about the mirror was not so bad, eh?" said he.

"No, indeed," replied she, with the first gleam of coquetry he had ever
seen.


Puzzling over her seeming unconsciousness of the, to him, all-important
fact that she was a woman and he a man, he decided that it must be a
deliberately chosen policy, the result of things she had heard about
him. He had always avoided talking of his conquests, though he
appreciated that it was the quick and easy road to a fresh conquest; but
it pleased him to feel that his reputation as a rake, a man before whom
women struck the flag at the first sign from him, was as great as his
fame for painting.  And it seemed to him that, if Neva had heard, as she
must, she could not but be in a receptive state of mind.  "That's why
she's on her guard," he concluded.  "She's secretly at war with the
old-fashioned notions in which she was bred."

He could not long keep silent.  "Has somebody been slandering me to my
friend?" asked he abruptly, one day, after they had both been silently
at work for nearly an hour.

She paused, glanced at him, shook her head--a very charming head it was
now, with the hair free about her temples and ears and in a loose coil
low upon her neck.  "No," said she, apparently with candor.  "Why?"

"It seemed to me you were peculiar of late--distant with me."

"Really, it isn't so.  You know I'd not permit anyone to speak against
you to me."

"But--well, a man of my sort always has a lot of stories going round
about him--things not usually regarded as discreditable--but you might
not take so lenient a view."

Her face turned toward her easel again, her expression unreadably
reserved.

"Not that I've been a saint," he went on.  "We who have the artistic
temperament--  What does that temperament mean but abnormal sensibility
of nerves, all the nerves?"

"That is true," assented she.

Then she was not so cold as she seemed!  She understood what it was to
feel.  "Of course," he proceeded, "I appreciate your ideas on those
subjects.  At least I assume you have the ideas of the people among whom
you were brought up."

She was silent for a moment.  Then she said, as if she were carefully
choosing her words, "I've learned that standards of morals, like
standards of taste, are individual.  There are many things about human
nature as I see it in--in my friends--that I do not understand.  But I
realize I deserve no credit for being what I am when I have not the
slightest temptation to be otherwise."

Silence again, as he wondered whether her remark was a chance shot or a
subtle way of informing him that, if he were thinking of her as a woman
and a possibility, he was wasting energy.  "What I wished to say," he
finally ventured, "was that I had the right to expect you to accept me
for what I am to you.  You cannot judge of what I may or may not have
been to anyone else, of what others may or may not have been to me."

"What you are to me," replied she earnestly, "I've no right, or wish, to
go beyond that."

"And," pursued he with some raillery, "don't forget we should be
grateful for all varieties of human nature--the valleys that make the
peaks, the peaks that make the abysses.  What a world for suicide it
would be, if human nature were one vast prairie and life one long Sunday
in Battle Field....  What did you hear about me?"

"Nothing that interested me."

"Really?"  He could not help showing pique.

"Nothing that would have changed me, if I had believed."

"I warned you it might be true," he interrupted.

"True or false, it was not part of the Boris Raphael I admire and
respect."

He shifted his eyes, colored, was silenced.  He did not like her frank
friendliness; he did not want her respect, or the sort of admiration
that goes with respect. But he somehow felt cheap and mean and ashamed
before her, had a highly uncomfortable sense of being an inferior before
a superior.  He was glad to drop the subject.  "At least," reflected he,
"the longer the delay, the richer the prize.  She was meant for some
man.  And what other has my chance?"

And, meanwhile, following his instinct and his custom, he showed her of
his all-sided nature only what he thought she would like to see; time
enough to be what he wished, when he should have got her where he
wished--a re-creation for the gratification of as many sides of him as
she had, or developed, capacity to delight.




                                 *VII*

                       *A WOMAN'S POINT OF VIEW*


Narcisse, summoned by a telephone message, went to Fosdick's house.  As
she entered the imposing arched entrance, Amy appeared, on the way to
take her dog for a drive.  "It's father wants to see you," said she.
"I'll take you to him, and go.  I'd send Zut alone, but the coachman and
footman object to driving the carriage with no one but him in it.
Fancy! Aren't some people too silly in their snobbishness--and the upper
class isn't in it with the lower classes, is it?"

"You don't begin to know how amusing you are sometimes," said Narcisse.

"Oh, I'm always forgetting.  You've got ideas like Armstrong.  You know
him?"

"I've met him," said Narcisse indifferently.  "You say your father wants
to see me?"

Amy looked disappointed.  Her mind was full of Armstrong, and she wished
to talk about him with Narcisse, to tell her all she thought and felt,
or thought she thought and felt.  "There's been a good deal of talk that
he and I are engaged," she persisted.  "You had heard it?"

"I never hear things of that sort," said Narcisse coldly.  "I'm too
busy."

"Well--there's nothing in it.  We're simply friends."

"I'm sorry," said Narcisse.

Amy bridled.  "Sorry!  I'm sure _I_ care nothing about him."

"Then, I'm glad," said Narcisse.  "I'm whatever you like.  Is your
father waiting for me?"

Narcisse liked old Fosdick--his hearty voice, his sturdy optimism, his
genial tolerance of all human weaknesses, even of crimes, his passion
for the best of everything, his careless generosity.  "It's fine," she
often thought, "to see a man act about his own hard-earned wealth as if
he had found it in a lump in the street or had won it in a lottery."  He
seemed in high spirits that morning, though Narcisse observed that the
lines in his face looked heavier than usual.  "Sorry to drag you clear
up here about such a little matter," said he when they two were seated,
with his big table desk between them.  "I just wanted to caution you and
your brother.  Quite unnecessary, I know; still, it's my habit to
neglect nothing.  I'm thinking of the two buildings you are putting up
for us--for the O.A.D. How are they getting on?  I've so much to attend
to, I don't often get round to details I know are in perfectly safe
hands."

"We start the one in Chicago next month, and the one here in May--I
hope."

"Good--splendid!  Rush them along.  You--you and your
brother--understand that everything about them is absolutely private
business.  If any newspaper reporter--or anybody--on any pretext
whatever--comes nosing round, you are to say nothing.  Whatever is given
out about them, we'll give out ourselves down at the main office."

"I'll see to that," said Narcisse.  "I'm glad you are cautioning us.  We
might have given out something.  Indeed, now that I think of it, a man
was talking with my brother about the buildings yesterday."

Fosdick leaned forward with sudden and astonishing agitation.  "What did
he want?" he cried.

"Merely some specifications as to the cost of similar buildings."

"Did your brother give him what he asked for?" demanded the old man.

"Not yet.  I believe he's to get the figures together and give them to
him to-morrow."

Fosdick brought his fist down on the table and laughed with a kind of
savage joy.  "The damned scoundrels!" he exclaimed.  Then, hastily,
"Just step to the telephone, Miss Siersdorf, and call up your brother
and tell him on no account to give that information."

Narcisse hesitated.  "But--that's a very common occurrence in our
business," objected she.  "I don't see how we can refuse--unless the man
is a trifler. Anyone who is building likes to have a concrete example to
go by."

"Please do as I ask, Miss Siersdorf," said Fosdick. "We'll discuss it
afterwards."

Narcisse obeyed, and when she returned said, "My brother will give out
nothing more.  But I find I was mistaken.  He gave the estimates
yesterday afternoon."

Fosdick sank back in his chair, his features contracted in anger and
anxiety.  When she tried to speak, he waved her imperiously into
silence.  "I must think," he said curtly.  "Don't interrupt!"  She
watched his face, but could make nothing definite of its vague
reflections of his apparently dark and stormy thoughts. Finally he said,
in a nearer approach to his usual tone and manner, "It's soon remedied.
Your brother can send for the man.  You know who he was?"

"His name was Delmar.  He represented the Howlands, the Chicago drygoods
people."

"Um," grunted Fosdick, reflecting again; then, as if he had found what
he was searching for, "Yes--that's the trail.  Well, Miss Siersdorf, as
I was saying, your brother will send for Delmar and will tell him there
was a mistake.  And he'll give him another set of figures--say, doubling
or trebling the first set.  He'll say he neglected to make allowance for
finer materials and details of stonework and woodwork--hardwood floors,
marble from Italy, and so forth and so forth.  You understand.  He'll
say he meant simply the ordinary first-rate office building--and wasn't
calculating on such palaces as he's putting up for the O.A.D."

Narcisse sat straight and silent, staring into her lap.  Fosdick's cigar
had gone out.  She had never before objected especially to its odor; now
she found it almost insupportable.

"You'd better telephone him," continued Fosdick. "No--I'll just have the
butler telephone him to come up here.  We might as well make sure of
getting it straight."

Narcisse did not stir while Fosdick was out of the room, nor when he
resumed his seat and went on, "All this is too intricate to explain in
detail, Miss Siersdorf, but I'll give you an idea of it.  It's a
question of the secrecy of our accounts."

"But we know nothing of your company's accounts, Mr. Fosdick," said she.
"You will remember that, under our contracts, we have nothing whatever
to do with the bills--that they go direct to your own people and are
paid by them.  We warned you it was a dangerous system, but you insisted
on keeping to it.  You said it was your long established way, that a
change would upset your whole bookkeeping, that----"

"Yes--yes.  I remember perfectly," interrupted Fosdick, all good humor.

"You can't hold us responsible.  We don't even know what payments have
been made."

"Precisely--precisely."

"It's a stupid system, permit me to say.  It allows chances for no end
of fraud on you--though I think the people we employed are honest and
won't take advantage of it.  And, if your auditors wanted to, they could
charge the company twice or three times or several times what the
building cost, and----"

"Exactly," interrupted Fosdick, an unpleasant sharpness in his voice.
"Let's not waste time discussing that.  Let me proceed.  We wish no one
to know what our buildings cost."

"But--you have to make reports--to your stockholders--policy holders
rather."

"In a way--yes," admitted Fosdick.  "But all the men who have the
direction and control of large enterprises take a certain latitude.  The
average citizen is a picayunish fellow, mean about small sums.  He
wouldn't understand many of the expenditures necessary to the conduct of
large affairs.  He even prefers not to be irritated by knowing just
where every dollar goes. He's satisfied with the results."

"But how does he know the results shown him are the real results?  Why,
under that system, figures might be juggled to cheat him out of nearly
all the profits."

"The public is satisfied to get a reasonable return for the money it
invests--and _we_ always guarantee that," replied Fosdick grandly.

Narcisse looked at him with startled eyes, as if a sharp turn of the
road had brought her to the brink of a yawning abyss.  It suddenly
dawned on her--the whole system of "finance."  In one swift second a
thousand disconnected facts merged into a complete, repulsive whole.
So, _this_ was where these enormous fortunes came from!  The big fellows
inveigled the public into enterprises by promises of equal shares; then
they juggled accounts, stole most of the profits, saddled all the losses
on the investors.  And she had admired the daring of these great
financiers!  Why, who wouldn't be daring, with no conscience, no honor,
and a free hand to gamble with other people's money, without risking a
penny of his own!  And she had admired their generosity, their
philanthropy, when it was simply the reckless wastefulness of the thief,
after one rich haul and before another!  She saw them, all over the
world, gathering in the mites of toiling millions as trust funds, and
stealing all but enough to encourage the poor fools to continue sending
in their mites!  She read it all in Josiah's face now, in the faces of
her rich clients; and she wondered how she could have been so blind as
not to see it before.  That hungry look, sometimes frankly there, again
disguised by a slimy over-layer of piety, again by whiskers or fat, but
always there.  Face after face of her scores of acquaintances among the
powerful in finance rose beside Josiah's until she shrank and paled.
Under the slather of respectability, what gross appetites, what
repulsive passions! But for the absence of the brutal bruisings of
ignorance and drink, these facts would seem exhibits in a rogues'
gallery.

Josiah had no great opinion of the brains of his fellow men.  Women he
regarded as mentally deficient--were they not incapable of comprehending
business?  So, while he saw that Narcisse was not accepting his
statement as the honorable, though practical, truth he believed it to
be, he was not disturbed.  "I see you don't quite follow me," he said
with kindly condescension. "Business is very complex.  My point is,
however, that our accounts are for our own guidance, and not for our
rivals to get hold of and use in exciting a lot of silly, ignorant
people."

Alois Siersdorf now entered and was effusively welcomed.  "What's the
matter?" he exclaimed.  "Have I made a mess of some sort?"

"Not at all, my boy," said Fosdick, clapping him on the back.  "Our
rivals have got up an investigating committee--have set on some of our
policy holders to pretend to be dissatisfied with our management.  I
thought until yesterday that the committee was simply a haphazard
affair, got together by some blackmailing lawyer.  Then I learned that
it was a really serious attempt of a rival of mine to take the company
away from me.  They're smelling round for things to 'expose'--the old
trick.  They think this is a rare good time to play it because the
damn-fool public has been liquored up with all sorts of brandy by
reformers and anarchists and socialists, trying to set it on to tear
down the social structure.  No man's reputation is safe.  You know how
it is in big affairs.  It takes a broad-gage man to understand them.  A
little fellow thinks he sees thief and robber and swindler written
everywhere, if he gets a peep at the inside.  I don't know what we're
coming to, with the masses being educated just enough to imagine they
know, and to try to take the management of affairs out of the hands of
the substantial men."

With lip curling Narcisse looked at her brother, expecting to see in his
face some sign of appreciation of the disgusting comedy of Fosdick's
cant; but he seemed to be taking Josiah and his oration quite seriously;
to her amazement he said, "I often think of that, Mr. Fosdick.  We must
have a stronger government, and abolish universal suffrage.  This thing
of ignorant men, with no respect for the class with brains and property,
having an equal voice with us has got to stop or we'll have ruin."

A self-confessed thief trying to justify himself by slandering those he
had robbed, and angry with them because they were not grateful to him
for not having taken all their property--and her brother applauding!

"You're right," said Fosdick, clapping him on the knee.  "I've been
trying to explain to your sister--though I'm afraid I don't make myself
clear.  The ladies--even the smartest of them--are not very attentive
when we men talk of the business side of things. However, I suggested to
her that you recall those specifications you gave my enemies----"

"Is it possible!" exclaimed Siersdorf, shocked. "Yes--yes--I see--I
understand.  But I can straighten it all out.  I was rather vague with
Delmar.  I'll send for him and tell him I was calculating on very
different kinds of buildings for him--something much cheaper----"

"Precisely!" cried Josiah.  "Your brother's got a quick mind, Miss
Siersdorf."

Narcisse turned away.  Her brother had not even waited for Fosdick to
unfold his miserable chicane; his own brain had instantly worked out the
same idea; and, instead of in shame suppressing it, he had uttered it as
if it were honest and honorable!

"There's another matter," continued Fosdick.  He no longer felt that he
must advance cautiously. Sometimes, persons not familiar with large
affairs, not accustomed to dealing under the conditions that compel
liberal interpretation of the moral code, had been known to balk, unless
approached gradually, unless led by gentle stages above narrow ideas of
the just and the right.  But clearly, the Siersdorfs, living in the
atmosphere of high finance, did not need to be acclimated. "It may be
this committee can get permission from the State Government to pry into
our affairs.  I don't think it can; indeed, I almost know it can't;
we've got the Government friendly to us and not at all sympathetic with
these plausible blackmailers and disguised anarchists.  Still, it's
always well to provide for any contingency.  If you should get a tip
that you were likely to be wanted as witnesses you could arrange for a
few weeks abroad, and not leave anything--any books or papers--for these
scoundrels to nose into, couldn't you?"

"Certainly," assented Siersdorf, with great alacrity.  "You may be sure
they'll get nothing out of us."

"Then, that's settled," said Fosdick.  "And now, let's have lunch, and
forget business.  I want to hear more about those plans for Amy's house
down in Jersey. She has told me a good deal, but not all."

"We can't stop to lunch," interposed Narcisse, with a meaning look at
her brother.  "We must go back to the office at once."  And when she saw
that Fosdick was getting ready for a handshake, she moved toward the
door, keeping out of his range without pointedly showing what she was
about.  In the street with her brother she walked silently, moodily
beside him, selecting the softest words that would honestly express the
thoughts she felt she must not conceal from him.

"A great man, Fosdick," said Alois.  "One of the biggest men in the
country--a splendid character, strong, able and honorable."

"Why do you say that just at this time?" asked his sister.

Alois reddened a little, avoided meeting her glance.

"To convince yourself?" she went on.  "To make us seem less--less
dishonest and cowardly?"

He flashed at her; his anger was suspiciously ready. "I felt you were
taking that view of it!" he cried. "You are utterly unpractical.  You
want to run the world by copybook morality."

"Because I haven't thrown 'Thou shalt not steal' overboard?  Because I
am ashamed, Alois, that we are helping this man Fosdick to cover his
cowardly thief tracks?"

"You don't understand, Cissy," he remonstrated, posing energetically as
the superior male forbearing with the inferior female.  "You oughtn't to
judge what you haven't the knowledge to judge correctly."

"He is a thief," retorted she bluntly.  "And we are making ourselves his
accomplices."

Alois's smile was uncomfortable.  With the manner of a man near the
limit of patience with folly, he explained, "What you are giving those
lurid names to is nothing but the ordinary routine of business,
throughout the world.  Do you suppose the man of great financial
intellect would do the work he does for small wages?  Do you imagine the
little people he works for and has to work through, the beneficiaries of
all those giant enterprises, would give him his just due voluntarily?
He's a man of affairs, and he works practically, deals with human nature
on human principles--just as do all the great men of action."

Narcisse stopped short, gazed at him in amazement. "Alois!" she
exclaimed.

He disregarded her rebuke, her reminder of the time when he had thought
and talked very differently. "Suppose," he persisted, "these great
fortunes didn't exist; suppose Fosdick were ass enough to take a salary
and divide up the profits; suppose all these people of wealth we work
for were to be honest according to your definition of the word--what
then?  Why, millions of people would get ten or twelve dollars a year,
or something like that, more than they now have, and there'd be no great
fortunes to encourage art, to employ people like us, to endow colleges
and make the higher and more beautiful side of life."

"That's too shallow to answer," said Narcisse sternly.  "You know
better, Alois.  You know it's from the poor that intellect and art and
all that's genuine and great and progressive come--never from the rich,
from wealth.  But even if it were not so, how can _you_ defend anything
that means a sacrifice of character?"  She stopped in the street and
looked at him. "Alois, _what_ has changed you?"

"Come," he urged rather shamefacedly.  "People are watching us."

They went on in silence, separated at the offices with a few constrained
words.  They did not meet again until the next morning--when he sought
her.  He looked much as usual--fresh, handsome, supple in body and mind.
Her eyes were red round the edges of the lids and her usually healthy
skin had the paleness that comes from a sleepless night.  "Well," he
said, with his sweet, conciliatory smile--he had a perfect disposition,
while hers was often "difficult."  "Do you still think I'm wrong--and
desperately wicked?"

"I haven't changed my mind," she answered, avoiding his gaze.

He frowned; his face showed the obstinacy that passes current for will
in a world of vacillators.

"You've always left business to me," he went on. "Just continue to leave
it.  Rest assured I'll do nothing to injure my honor in the opinion of
any rational, practical person--or the honor of the firm."

She was not deceived by the note of conciliation in his voice; she knew
he had his mind fixed.  She was at her desk, stiffly erect, gazing
straight ahead.  Her expression brought out all the character in her
features, brought out that beauty of feminine strength which the best of
the Greeks have succeeded in giving their sculptured heroines.  Without
warning she flung herself forward, hid her face and burst into tears.
"Oh, I _hate_ myself!" she cried.  "I'm nothing but a woman, after
all--miserable, contemptible, weak creatures that we are!"

He settled himself on the arm of her chair and drew her into his arm.
"You're a finer person in every way than I am," he said; "a better brain
and a better character.  But, Cissy dear, don't judge in matters that
aren't within your scope."

"Do as you please," she replied brokenly.  "I'm a woman--and where's the
woman that wouldn't sacrifice anything and everything for love?"

She had, indeed, spent a night of horror.  She felt that what he had
done was frightful dishonor--was proof that he was losing his moral
sense and, what seemed to her worse, becoming a pander to the class for
which they did most of the work they especially prided themselves upon.
She felt that, for his sake no less than for her own, she ought to join
the issue squarely and force him to choose the right road, or herself go
on in it alone.  But she knew that he would let her go. And she had only
him.  She loved him; she would not break with him; she could not.

"You know nothing about those buildings, anyhow," he continued.  "Just
forget the whole business. I'll take care of it.  Isn't that fair?"

"Anything!  Anything!" she sobbed.  "Only, let there be peace and love
between us."




                                 *VIII*

                           *IN NEVA'S STUDIO*


Shown into the big workroom of Neva's apartment with its light softened
and diffused by skillfully adjusted curtains and screens, Narcisse
devoted the few minutes before Neva came to that thorough inspection
which an intelligent workman always gives the habitat of a fellow
worker.

"What a sensitive creature she is!" was the reminiscent conclusion of
the builder after the first glance round.  A less keen observer might
have detected a nature as delicately balanced as an aspen leaf in the
subtle appreciation of harmony and contrast, of light and shade.  And
there were none of the showy, shallow tricks of the poseur; for, the
room was plain, as a serious worker always insists on having his
surroundings. It appeared in the hanging of the few pictures, in the
colors of the few rugs and draperies, of walls, ceiling, furniture, in
the absence of anything that was not pleasing; the things that are not
in a room speak as eloquently of its tenant as do the things that are
there.

"Not a scrap of her own work," thought Narcisse, with a smile for the
shyness that omission hinted.

"Pardon my keeping you waiting," apologized Neva, entering in her long,
brown blouse with stains of paint.  "I was at work when you were
announced."

"And you had to hustle everything out of sight, so I'd have no chance to
see."

Neva nodded smiling assent.  "But I'm better than I used to be.  Really,
I am.  My point of view is changing--rapidly--so rapidly that I wake up
each morning a different person from the one who went to bed the night
before."

Narcisse was thinking that the Neva before her was as unlike the Neva of
their school days as a spring landscape is unlike the same stretch in
the bleak monotones of winter.  "Getting more confidence in yourself?"
suggested she aloud.  "Or are you beginning to see that the world is an
old fraud whose judgments aren't important enough to make anyone
nervous?"

"Both," replied Neva.  "But I can't honestly claim to be self-made-over.
Boris teaches me a great deal beside painting."

Narcisse changed expression.  As they talked on and on--of their work,
of the West, of the college and their friendship there, Neva felt that
Narcisse had some undercurrent of thought which she was striving with,
whether to suppress or express, she could not tell. The conversation
drifted back to New York, to Boris. There was something of warning in
Narcisse's face, and something of another emotion less clearly defined
as she said with a brave effort at the rigidly judicial, "Boris is a
great man; but first of all a man.  You know what that means when a man
is dealing with a woman."

Neva's lip curled slightly.  "That side of human nature doesn't interest
me."

Narcisse, watching her closely, could not but be convinced that the
indifference in her tone was not simulated.  "Not yet," she thought.
Then, aloud, "That side doesn't often interest a woman until she finds
she must choose between becoming interested in it and losing the man
altogether."

Neva looked at her with a strange, startled expression, as if she were
absorbing a new and vital truth, self-evident, astonishing.

"Boris has lived a long time," continued Narcisse. "And women have
conquered him so often that they've taught him how to conquer them."

"I don't know much about him, beyond the painting," said Neva.  "And I
don't care to know."

The silence that fell was constrained.  It was with tone and look of
shyness more like Neva than like herself that Narcisse presently went
on, "I owe a great deal to Boris.  He made me what I am....  He broke my
heart."

Neva gave her a glance of wonder and fear--wonder that she should be
confiding such a secret, fear lest the confidence would be repented.
Narcisse's expression, pensive but by no means tragic, not even
melancholy, reassured her.  "You know," she proceeded, "no one ever does
anything real until his or her heart has been broken."

Neva, startled, listened with curious, breathless intentness.

"We learn only by experience.  And the great lesson comes only from the
great experience."

"Yes," said Neva softly.  She nodded absently. "Yes," she repeated.

"When one's heart is broken ... then, one discovers one's real self--the
part that can be relied on through everything and anything."

Neva, with studied carelessness, opened a drawer in the stand beside her
and began to examine the tips of a handful of brushes.  Her face was
thus no longer completely at the mercy of a possible searching glance
from her friend.

"Show me anyone who has done anything worth while," continued Narcisse,
"and I'll show you a man or a woman whose heart has been broken--and
mended--made strong....  It isn't always love that does the breaking.
In fact, it's usually something else--especially with men.  In my case
it happened to be love."

Neva's fingers had ceased to play with the brushes. Her hands rested
upon the edge of the drawer lightly, yet their expression was somehow
tense.  Her eyes were gazing into--Narcisse wondered what vision was
hypnotizing them.

"It was ten years ago--when I was studying in Paris.  I can see how he
might not be attractive to some women, but he was to me."  Narcisse
laughed slightly.  "I don't know what might have happened, if he hadn't
been drawn away by a little Roumanian singer, like an orchid waving in a
perfumed breeze.  All Paris was quite mad about her, and Boris got her.
She thought she got him; but he survived, while she--  When she made her
way back to Paris, she found it perfectly calm."

"And you still care for him?" said Neva gently.

Narcisse laughed healthily.  "I mended my heart, accepted my lesson....
Isn't it queer, how differently one looks at a person one has cared for,
after one is cured?"

"I don't know," said Neva, in a slow, constrained way.  "I've never had
the experience."

After a silence Narcisse went on, "I've no objection to your repeating
to him what I've said.  It was a mere reminiscence, not at all a
confession."

Neva shook her head.  "That would bring up a subject a woman should
avoid with men.  If it is never opened, it remains closed; if it's ever
opened, it can't be shut again."

Narcisse was struck by the penetration of this, and proceeded to
reexamine Neva more thoroughly.  Nothing is more neglected than the
revision from time to time of our opinions of those about us.  Though
character is as mobile as every other quantity in this whirling
kaleidoscope of a universe, we make up our minds about our acquaintances
and friends once for all, and refuse to change unless forced by some
cataclysm. As their talk unfolded the Neva beneath the surface, it soon
appeared to Narcisse that either she or Neva had become radically
different since their intimacy of twelve years before.  "Probably both
of us," she decided. "I've learned to read character better, and she has
more character to read.  I remember, I used to think she was one of
those who would develop late--even for a woman."

"It was stupid of me," she said to Neva, "but I've been assuming you are
just as you were.  Now it dawns on me that you are as new to me as if
you were an entire stranger.  You are different--outside and inside."

"Inside, I've certainly changed," admitted Neva. "Don't you think we're,
all of us, like the animals that shed their skins?  We live in a mental
skin, and it seems to be ours for good and all; but all the time a new
skin is forming underneath; and then, some fine day, the old skin slips
away, and we're quite new from top to tip--apparently."

Narcisse's expression was encouraging.

"That happened to me," continued Neva.  "But I didn't realize it--not
completely--until the divorce was over and I was settled here, in this
huge wilderness where the people can't find each other or even see each
other, for the crowd.  It was the first time in my life.  I could look
about me with the certainty I wasn't being watched, peeped at, pressed
in on all sides by curious eyes--hostile eyes, for all curious eyes are
hostile. But you were born and brought up in a small town. You know."

"Yes," said Narcisse.  "Everybody lives a public life in a little town."

"Here I could, so to speak, stand in the sun naked and let its light
beat on my body, without fear of peepers and pryers."  She drew a long
breath and stretched out her arms in a gesture of enormous relief. "I
dare to be myself.  Free!  All my life I'd been shut in, waiting and
hoping some one would come and lead me out where there was warmth and
affection.  Wasn't that vanity!  Now, I'm seeking what I want--the only
way to get it."

Narcisse's face took on an expression of cynicism, melancholy rather
than bitter.  "Don't seek among your fellow beings.  They're always off
the right temperature--they either burn you or freeze you."

"Oh, but I'm not trying to get warmth, but to give it," replied Neva.
"I'm not merchandising.  I'm in a business where the losses are the
profits, the givings the gains."

"The only businesses that really pay," said Narcisse.  "The returns from
the others are like the magician's money that seemed to be gold but was
only withered mulberry leaves.  Won't you let me see some of your
work--anything?"

Neva drew aside a curtain, wheeled out an easel, on it her unfinished
portrait of Raphael.  At first glance--and with most people the first
glance is the final verdict--there seemed only an elusive resemblance to
Raphael.  It was one of those portraits that are forthwith condemned as
"poor likenesses."  But Narcisse, perhaps partly because she was
sympathetically interested in Neva's work and knew that Neva must put
intelligence into whatever she did, soon penetrated to the deeper
purpose.  The human face is both a medium and a mask; it both reveals
and covers the personality behind.  It is more the mask and less the
medium when the personality is consciously facing the world.  A portrait
that is a good likeness is, thus, often a meaningless or misleading
picture of the personality, because it presents that personality when
carefully posed for conscious inspection.  On the other hand, a portrait
that is hardly recognizable by those who know best, and least, the
person it purports to portray, may be in fact a true, a profound, a
perfect likeness--a faithful reproduction of the face as a medium, with
the mask discarded.  The problem the painter attempts, the problem
genius occasionally solves but mere talent rarely, and then imperfectly,
is to combine the medium and the mask--to paint the mask so
transparently that the medium, the real face, shows through; yet not so
transparently that eyes which demand a "speaking likeness" are
disappointed.

Neva, taught by Raphael to face and wrestle with that problem, was in
this secret unfinished portrait striving for his "living likeness" only.
She had learned that painting the "speaking likeness" is an unimportant
matter to the artist as artist--however important it may be to him as
seeker of profitable orders or of fame's brassy acclaim so vulgar yet so
sweet.  She was not seeking fame, she was not dependent upon
commissions; she was free to grapple the ultimate mystery of art.  And
this attempt to fix Raphael, the beautiful-ugly, lofty-low, fine-coarse,
kind-cruel personality that walked the earth behind that
gorgeous-grotesque external of his, was her first essay.

"All things to all men--and all women, like the genius that he is," said
Narcisse, half to herself.  Then to Neva, "What does _he_ think of it?"

"He hasn't seen it....  I doubt if I'll ever show it to him--or to
anybody, when it's finished."

"It does threaten to be an intrusion on his right of privacy," said
Narcisse.  "No, he's not attracting you in the least as a man."

Neva looked amused.  "Why did you say that?"

"Because the picture is so--so impersonal."  She laughed.  "How angry it
would make him."

When Narcisse, after a long, intimacy-renewing, or, rather,
intimacy-beginning, stop, rose to go, she said, "I'm going to bring my
friend, Amy Fosdick, here some time soon.  She has asked me and I've
promised her.  She is very eager to meet you."

Instantly Neva made the first vivid show of her old-time shy constraint.
"I've a rule against meeting people," stammered she.  "I don't wish to
seem ungracious, but----"

"Oh!" said Narcisse, embarrassed.  "Very well."

An awkward silence; Narcisse moved toward the door.  "I fear I've
offended you," Neva said wistfully.

"Not at all," replied Narcisse, and she honestly tried to be cordial in
accepting denial.  "You've the right to do as you please, surely."

"In theory, yes," said Neva, with a faint melancholy smile.  "But only
in theory."

Now unconsciously and now consciously we are constantly testing those
about us, especially our friends, to learn how far we can go in imposing
our ever aggressive wills upon them; and the stronger our own
personalities the more irritating it is to find ourselves flung back
from an unyielding surface where we had expected to advance easily.  In
spite of her sense of justice, Narcisse was irritated against Neva for
refusing.  But she also realized she must get over this irritation, must
accept and profit by this timely hint that Neva's will must be
respected.  Most friendship is mere selfishness in masquerade--is mere
seeking of advantage through the supposedly blindly altruistic
affections of friends. Narcisse, having capacity for real friendship,
was eager for a real friend.  She saw that Neva was worth the winning.
And now that Alois was breaking away--  Stretching out her hands
appealingly, she said, "Please, dear, don't draw away from me."

Neva understood, responded.  Now that Narcisse was not by clouded face
and averted eye demanding explanation as a right, she felt free to give
it.  "There's a reason, Narcisse," said she, "a good reason why I shan't
let Miss Fosdick come here and gratify her curiosity."

"Reason or no reason," exclaimed Narcisse, "forget my--my
impertinence....  I--I want--I need your friendship."

"Not more than I need yours," said Neva.  "Not so much.  You have your
brother, while I have no one."

"My brother!"  Tears glistened in Narcisse's eyes.  "Yes--until he
becomes some other woman's lover."  She embraced Neva, and departed
hastily, ashamed of her unwonted show of emotion, but not regretting it.




                                  *IX*

                            *MASTER AND MAN*


When Waller, the small, dark, discreet factotum to Fosdick, came to
Armstrong's office to ask him to go to Mr. Fosdick "as soon as you
conveniently can," Armstrong knew something unusual was astir.

Fosdick rarely interfered in the insurance department of the O.A.D.
Like all his fellow financiers bearing the courtesy title of "captains
of industry," he addressed himself entirely to so manipulating the sums
gathered in by his subordinates that he could retain as much of them and
their usufruct as his prudence, compromising with his greediness,
permitted.  In the insurance department he as a rule merely noted
totals--results.  If he had suggestion or criticism to make, he went to
Armstrong.  That fitted in with the fiction that he was no more in the
O.A.D. than an influential director, that the Atlantic and Southwestern
Trunk Line was his chief occupation.

Armstrong descended to the third floor--occupied by the A.S.W.T.L. which
was supposed to have no connection with the purely philanthropic O.A.D.,
"sustainer of old age and defender of the widow and the orphan."  He
went directly through the suite of offices there to Fosdick's own den.
Fosdick had four rooms.  The outermost was for the reception of all
visitors and the final disposition of such of them as the underlings
there could attend to.  Next came the office of the mysterious, gravely
smiling Waller, with his large white teeth and pretty mustache and the
folding picture frame containing photographs of wife and son and two
daughters on his desk before him--what an air of the home hovering over
and sanctifying the office diffused from that little panorama!  Many
callers supposed that Waller's office was Fosdick's, that Fosdick almost
never came down there, that Waller was for all practical purposes
Fosdick.  The third room was for those who, having convinced the outer
understrappers that they ought to be admitted as far as Waller,
succeeded in convincing Waller that they must be personally inspected
and heard by the great man himself.  In this third room, there was no
article of furniture but a carpet.  Waller would usher his visitor in
and leave him standing--standing, unless he chose to sit upon the floor;
for there was no chair to sit upon, no desk or projection from the wall
to lean against.  Soon Fosdick would abruptly and hurriedly enter--the
man of pressing affairs, pausing on his way from one supremely important
matter to another.  Fosdick calculated that this seatless private
reception room saved him as much time as the two outer visitor-sifters
together; for not a few of the men who had real business to bring before
him were garrulous; and to be received standing, to be talked with
standing, was a most effective encouragement to pointedness and brevity.

The fourth and innermost room was Fosdick's real office--luxurious,
magnificent even; the rugs and the desk and chairs had cost the policy
holders of the O.A.D. nearly a hundred thousand dollars; the pictures,
the marble bust of Fosdick himself, the statuary, the bookcases and
other furnishings had cost the shareholders of the A.S.W.T.L. almost as
much more.

Armstrong found Fosdick talking with Morris, Joe Morris, who was one of
his minor personal counsel, and was paid in part by a fixed annual
retainer from the A.S.W.T.L., in part from the elastic and generously
large legal fund of the O.A.D.  As Armstrong entered, Fosdick said:
"Well, Joe, that's all.  You understand?"

"Perfectly," said Morris.  And he bowed distantly to Armstrong, bowed
obsequiously to his employer and departed.

"What's the matter between you and Joe Morris?" asked Fosdick, whose
quick eyes had noted the not at all obvious constraint.

"We know each other only slightly," replied Armstrong.  Then he added,
"Mrs. Morris is a cousin of my former wife."

"Oh--beg pardon for intruding," said Fosdick carelessly.  "Sit down,
Horace," and he leaned back in his chair and gazed reflectively out into
vacancy.

Armstrong seated himself and waited with the imperturbable, noncommittal
expression which had become habitual with him ever since his discovery
that he was Fosdick's prisoner, celled, sentenced, waiting to be led to
the block at Fosdick's good pleasure.

At last Fosdick broke the silence.  "You were right about that
committee."

Apparently this did not interest Armstrong.

"That was a shrewd suspicion of yours," Fosdick went on.  "And I ought
to have heeded it.  How did you happen to hit on it?"

Armstrong shrugged his shoulders.

"Just a guess, eh?  I thought maybe you knew who was back of these
fellows."

"Who is back of them?" asked Armstrong--a mere colorless, uninterested
inquiry.

"Our friends of the Universal Life," replied Fosdick, assuming that
Armstrong's question was an admission that he did not know.  "They've
plotted with some of the old Galloway crowd in our directory to throw me
out and get control."  Fosdick marched round and round the room, puffing
furiously at his cigar.  "They think they've bought the governor away
from me," he presently resumed.  "They think--and he thinks--he'll order
the attorney-general to entertain the complaints of that damned
committee."  Here Fosdick paused and laughed--a harsh noise, a gleaming
of discolored, jagged teeth through heavy fringe of mustache.  "I've
sent Morris up to Albany to see him.  When he finds out I've got a
certain canceled check with his name on the back of it, I guess--I
_rather_ guess--he'll get down on that big belly of his and come
crawling back to me.  I've sent Morris up there to show him the knout."

"Isn't that rather--raw?" said Armstrong, still stolid.

"Of course it's raw.  But that's the way to deal with fellows like
him--with most fellows, nowadays."  And Fosdick resumed his march.
Armstrong sat--stolid, waiting, matching the fingers of his big, ruddy
hands.

"Well, what do you think?" demanded his master, pausing, a note of
irritated command in his voice.

Armstrong shrugged his shoulders.  A disinterested observer might have
begun to suspect that he was leading Fosdick on; but Fosdick, bent upon
the game, had no such suspicion.

"I want your opinion.  That's why I sent for you," he cried impatiently.

"You've got your mind made up," said Armstrong. "I've nothing to say."

"Don't you think my move settles it?"

"No doubt, the governor'll squelch the investigation."

"_Certainly_ he will!  And that means the end of those fellows' attempt
to make trouble for us through our own policy holders."

"Why?" said Armstrong.

"Don't you think so?"  Fosdick dropped into his chair.  "I'm not quite
satisfied," he said.  "Give me your views."

"This committee has made a lot of public charges against the management
of the O.A.D.  It may be that when you try to smother the investigation,
the demand will simply break out worse than ever."

"Pooh!" scoffed Fosdick.  "That isn't worth talking about.  I was
thinking only of what other moves that gang could make.  The public
amounts to nothing.  The rank and file of our policy holders is content.
What have these fellows charged?  Why, that we've spent all kinds of
money in all kinds of ways to build up the company.  Now, what does the
average investor say--not in public but to himself--when the management
of his company is attacked along that line?  Why, he says to himself,
'Better let well enough alone.  Maybe those fellows don't give me all my
share; but they do give me a good return for my money, as much as most
shareholders in most companies get.'  No, my dear Horace, even a rotten
management needn't be afraid of its public so long as it gives the
returns its public expects.  Trouble comes only when the public _gets
less than it expected_."

Armstrong did not withhold from this shrewdness the tribute of an
admiring look.  "Still," he persisted, "the public seems bent on an
investigation."

"Mere clamor, and no backing from the press except those newspapers that
it ain't worth while to stop with a chunk of advertising.  All the
reputable press is with us, is denouncing those blackmailers for
throwing mud at men of spotless reputation."  Fosdick swelled his chest.
"The press, the public, know _us_, believe in _us_.  Our directory reads
like a roll call of the best citizens in the land.  And the poor results
from that last big tear-up are still fresh in everybody's mind.  Nobody
wants another."

A pause, then Armstrong: "Still, it might be better to have an
investigation."

"What!" exclaimed Fosdick.

"You say we've nothing to conceal.  Why not show the public so?"

"Of course we haven't got anything to conceal," cried Fosdick defiantly.
"At least, _I_ haven't."

"Why not have an investigation, then?"

That reiterated word "investigation" acted on the old financier like the
touch of a red-hot iron. "Because I don't want it!" he shouted.  "Damn
it, man, ain't I above suspicion?  Haven't I spent my life in serving
the public?  Shall I degrade myself by noticing these lying, slandering
scoundrels?  Shall I let 'em open up my private business to the mob that
would misunderstand?  Shall I let them roll _me_ in the gutter?
No--sir--ree!"

"Then, you are against a policy of aggression? You intend simply to sit
back and content yourself with ignoring attacks."

Fosdick subsided, scowling.

"Suppose you allowed an investigation----"

"I don't want to hear that word again!" said Fosdick between his teeth.

Armstrong slowly rose.  "Any further business?" he asked curtly.

"Sit down, Horace.  Don't get touchy.  Damn it, I want your advice."

"I haven't any to offer."

"What'd you do if you were in my place?"

This was as weak as it sounded.  In human societies concentrations of
power are always accidental, in the sense that they do not result from
deliberation; thus, the men who happen to be in a position to seize and
wield the power are often ill-equipped to use it intelligently.  Fosdick
had but one of the two qualities necessary to greatness--he could
attack.  But he could not defend.  So long as his career was dependent
for success upon aggression, he went steadily ahead.  It is not so
difficult as some would have us believe to seize the belongings of
people who do not know their own rights and possessions, and live in the
habitual careless, unthinking human fashion.  But now that his
accumulations were for the first time attracting the attention of
robbers as rich and as unscrupulous as himself, he was in a parlous
state.  And, without admitting it to himself, he was prey to uneasiness
verging on terror.  Our modern great thieves are true to the
characteristics of the thief class--they have courage only when all the
odds are in their favor; let them but doubt their absolute security, and
they lose their insolent courage and fall to quaking and to seeing
visions of poverty and prison.

"What would you do?" Fosdick repeated.

"What do your lawyers say?"

Fosdick sneered.  "What do they always say? They echo _me_.  I have to
tell them what to do--and, by God, I often have to show 'em how to do
it."  The fact was that Fosdick, like almost all the admired "captains
of industry," was a mere helpless appetite with only the courage of an
insane and wholly unscrupulous hunger; but for the lawyers, he would not
have been able to gratify it.  In modern industrialism the lawyer is the
honeybird that leads the strong but stupid bear to the forest hive--and
the honeybird gets as a reward only what the bear permits.  "Give me
your best judgment, Horace," pursued Fosdick.

"In your place, I'd fight," said Armstrong.

"How?"

"I'd order the governor to appoint an investigating committee, made up
of _reliable_ men.  I'd appoint one of my lawyers as attorney to
it--some chap who wasn't supposed to be my lawyer.  I'd let it
investigate me, make it give me a _reasonably, plausibly_ clean bill of
health.  Then, I'd set it on the other fellows, have it tear 'em to
pieces, make 'em too busy with home repairs to have time to stick their
noses over my back fence."

Fosdick listened, appreciated, and hated Armstrong for having thought of
that which was so obvious once it was stated and yet had never occurred
to him.

"Of course," said Armstrong carelessly, "there are risks in that course.
But I don't believe you can stop an investigation altogether.  It's
choice among evils."

"Well, we'll see," said Fosdick.  "There's no occasion for hurry.  This
situation isn't as bad as you seem to think."

It had always been part of his basic policy to minimize the value of his
lieutenants--it kept them modest; it moderated their demands for bigger
pay and larger participation in profits; it enabled him to feel that he
was "the whole show" and to preen himself upon his liberality in giving
so much to men actually worth so little.  He was finding it difficult to
apply this policy to Armstrong.  For, the Westerner was of the sort of
man who not only makes it a point to be more necessary to those he deals
with than they are to him, but also makes it a point to force them to
see and to admit it. Armstrong's quiet insistence upon his own value
only roused Fosdick to greater efforts to convince him, and himself,
that Armstrong was a mere cog in the machine. He sent him away with a
touch of superciliousness. But--no sooner was he alone than he rang up
Morris.

"Come over at once," he ordered.  "I've changed my mind.  I've got
another message for you to take up there with you."

It would have exasperated him to see Armstrong as he returned to his own
offices.  The Westerner had lost all in a moment that air of stolidity
under which he had been for several months masking his anxiety.  He
moved along whistling softly; he joked with the elevator boy; he shut
himself in his private office, lit a cigar and lay back in his chair and
stared at the ceiling, his expression that of a man whose thoughts are
delightful company.




                                  *X*

                        *AMY SWEET AND AMY SOUR*


Now that Fosdick saw how he could clear himself, and more, of those he
had been variously describing as pryers, peepers, ingrates, traitors and
blackmailers, he was chagrined that he had been so near to panic.  He
couldn't understand it, so he assured himself; with nothing to conceal,
with hands absolutely clean, with not an act on the record that was not
legitimate, such as the most respectable men in the most respectable
circles not only approved but did--with these the conditions, how had he
been so upset?

"I suppose," he reflected, "as a man gets older, he becomes foolishly
sensitive about his reputation.  Then, too, the world is eager to twist
evil into everything--and I have so many in my own class who are jealous
of me, of my standing."

The silliest thing he had done, he decided, was that talk with the
Siersdorfs.  Why, if they were at all evil-minded, they might suspect he
was using those construction accounts for swindling purposes, instead of
making a perfectly legitimate convenience of them to adjust the
bookkeeping to the impossible requirements of law and public opinion.
"It's an outrage," he thought, "that we can't have the laws fixed so it
would be possible to carry on business without having to do things
liable to misconstruction, if made generally public.  But we can't.  As
it is, look at the swindlers who have taken advantage of the laws we
absolutely had to have the legislature make."  Yes, it was a blunder to
take the Siersdorfs into his confidence--though the young man did show
that he had brains enough to understand the elements of large affairs.
Still, he might some time make improper use of the knowledge--unless----

Fosdick decided that thereafter the vouchers should pass through
Siersdorf's hands, should have Siersdorfs O.K.  "Then, if any question
arises, it will be to his interest to treat confidential matters
confidentially.  Or, if he should turn against me, he'd be unable to
throw mud without miring himself."

And now Fosdick saw why he had instantly jumped for the Siersdorfs.
They alone were not personally involved in any of the "private business"
of the O.A.D. All the directors, all the officials, all the important
agents, were involved, and therefore would not dare turn traitor if they
should be vile enough to contemplate it.  But the Siersdorfs were
independent, yet perilously in possession of the means to make trouble.

"I must fix them," said Fosdick.  "I must clinch them."

Thus it came about that within a week Alois was helping the directors of
the O.A.D. to keep their accounts "adjusted"--was signing vouchers for
many times the amounts that were being actually expended upon the
building.  He hesitated before writing the firm name upon the first of
these documents.  On the face of it, the act did look--peculiar.  True,
it was a simple matter of bookkeeping; still, he'd rather not be
involved.  There seemed no way out of it, however. To refuse was to
insult Fosdick--and that when Fosdick was showing his confidence in and
affection for him. Also, it meant putting in jeopardy three big orders
in hand--the two office buildings and Overlook.

"It'd break Narcisse's heart to have to give up doing Overlook," he said
to himself.  Yes, he would sign the vouchers; now that he felt he was
acting, at least in large part, for his dear sister's sake, he had no
qualms.  Having passed the line, he looked back with amusement.  He
debating as a moral question a matter of business routine!  A matter
approved by such a character, such a figure as Josiah Fosdick!

Some of these "technically inaccurate" vouchers were before him when
Narcisse happened into his office. Though there was "nothing wrong with
them--nothing whatever," and though she would not have known it if there
had been, he instinctively slipped the blotting pad over them.

"What are you hiding there?" she teased innocently.  "A love letter?"

He frowned.  "You've got that on the brain," he retorted, with a
constrained smile.  "What do you want--now?"

"Amy's here.  Have you time to go over the plans?"

"Yes--right away," said he, with quick complete change of manner.

She winced.  So sensitive had she become on the subject of her brother
and her friend that she was hurt by the most casual suggestion from
either of interest in the other.  Regarding her brother as irresistible,
she assumed that, should he ask Amy, he would be snapped in, like fly by
frog.  "Yet," said she to herself, "they're utterly unsuited.  He'd
realize it as soon as he was married to her.  Why can't a man ever see
through a woman until he's had an affair with her and gotten over her?"

"Shall we look at the plans here or in your room?" he asked.

"I'll send her here....  It won't be necessary for me to come, will it?"

"No.  We'll hardly get round to your part to-day," said Alois.  And Amy
went in alone, and spent the entire afternoon with Alois.  And most
attractive he made himself to Amy.  In his profession, he had many
elements of strength; he hated shams, had a natural sense of the
beautiful, unspoiled by the conventionalities that reduce most
architects to slavish copyists.  He did not think things fine simply
because they were old; neither did he think them ugly or stale for that
reason.  He knew how to judge on merit alone; and he had educated Amy
Fosdick to the point where she at least appreciated his views and ideas.
When a man gets a woman trained to that point, he thinks her a marvel of
independent intellect, with germs of genius--if she is at all attractive
to him physically.  He forgot that, until Amy had "taken up" the
Siersdorfs, she had been as enthusiastic about the barren and
conventional Whitbridge as she now was about them.  Appreciation is one
of the most deceptive qualities in the world, where it is genuine.
Through it we are all constantly disguising from ourselves and from
others our own mental poverty.

Usually appreciation is little more than a liking for the person whose
ideas we think we understand and share.  In Amy's case, there was a good
deal of real understanding.  She had much natural good taste, enough to
learn to share in the amusement of Narcisse and Alois at the silly
imitations of old-world palaces her acquaintances were hastening to
house themselves in--palaces built for a forever departed era of the
human race, for a past people of a past and gone social order; she also
saw, when Alois pointed it out to her, the silliness of the mania for
antiques which in our day is doing so much to suffocate originality and
even good taste.  She learned to loathe the musty, fusty rags and
worm-eaten woods the crafty European dealers manufacture, "plant," and
work off on those Americans who are bent upon the same snobbishness in
art education that they are determined to have in the other forms of
education.  Encouraged by Narcisse and Alois, she came boldly out
against that which she had long in secret doubted and disliked.  She was
more than willing that they should build her a house suitable as a
habitation for a human being in the twentieth century--a house that was
ventilated and convenient and scientific. And she was giving Alois a
free hand in planning surroundings of spontaneous beauty rather than of
the kind that pleased the narrower and more precise fancy of a narrower
age, to which the idea of freedom of any sort was unknown.

[Illustration: "She was giving Alois a free hand in planning
surroundings."]

"Gracious!  It's after half past four!" she exclaimed, as if she had
just become conscious of the fact, when in truth she had been
impatiently watching the clock by way of a mirror for nearly an hour.

"So it is!" said Alois, immensely flattered by her unconsciousness of
time.

"I want to take these plans with me--to show them to some one."

Alois felt that the "some one" was a man, and a very particular
friend--else, she would have spoken the name.  "Very well," he said,
faintly sullen.

"Don't be disturbed," was her absent reply.  "I'll take good care of
them."  She saw the change in him; but, not thinking of him as a man,
but as an intelligence only, she did not grasp the cause.  "Thank you so
much," she went on, "for being so patient with me. How splendid it must
be to have always with one a mind like yours--or Narcisse's.  Well,
until to-morrow, or next day."  And, looking as charming as only a
pretty woman with a fortune can look to a man who wants both her and her
fortune, she left him desolate.

The "some one" was indeed a man.  But he--Armstrong--did not arrive
until half an hour after the appointed time.  She came into the small
salon into which he had been shown, her gloves, hat and wraps on and the
big roll of plans under her arm; and no one would have suspected that
she had been waiting for him since ten minutes before five and had spent
most of the time in primping.  "I'm all blown to pieces," she
apologized, as she entered.  "Have I kept you waiting?  I really
couldn't help it."

"I just got here," said Armstrong.  "I, too, was late--business, as
always."  Which was true enough; but the whole truth would have been
that he forgot the appointment until its very hour.  "I'll not keep you
long," he continued.  "I've got to dress for an early dinner."

She was so disappointed that she did not dare speak, lest she should
show her ill humor--and she knew Armstrong detested a bad disposition in
a woman.  She rang for tea; when the servants had brought it and were
gone, she began fussing with her coat.  He, preoccupied, did not see her
hinted signals until she said, "Please, do help me."

As he drew off the coat there floated to him a delightful perfume, a
mingling of feminine and flowers, of freshness and delicacy, a
stimulating suggestion of the sensuous refinements which a woman with
taste and the means can employ as powerful allies in her siege of man.
She looked up at him--her eyes were, save her teeth, her best feature.
She just brushed his arm in one of those seemingly unconscious,
affectionate-friendly gestures which are intended to be encouraging
without being "unwomanly."  "How is my friend to-day?" she inquired.

"So-so," replied he, taking her advances at their face value.

"You never come here unless I send for you, and you always have some
excuse for going soon."

He smiled good-natured raillery.  "How sure of yourself you feel!"

"Why do you say that?"

"Your remark.  You are always making that kind of remarks.  They're
never made except by women who feel sure."

"But I don't," protested she.  "On the contrary, I'm very humble--where
you're concerned."  She gave him a long look.  "And you know that's
true."

He laughed at her with his eyes.  "No.  I shan't do it.  You'll have
only your trouble for your pains."

She colored.  "What _do_ you mean?"

"That I won't propose to you.  You've been trying to inveigle me into it
for nearly a year now.  But you'll have to do without my scalp."

The big Westerner's jesting manner carried his remark, despite its
almost insolent frankness.  Besides, what with Amy's content with
herself and partiality for him, it would have been difficult for him to
offend her. Never before had she been able to lure him so near to the
one subject she wished to discuss with him.  "What conceit," cried she,
all smiles.  "You fancy I've been flirting with you.  I might have
known!  Men always misunderstand a woman's friendship.  I suppose you
imagine I'm in love with you."

"Not in the least.  No more than I with you."

She looked crestfallen at this.  Whether a woman has much or little to
give a man, whether she wants his love or not, she always wishes to feel
that it is there waiting for her.  "Why do you imagine I wish you to ask
me to marry you?" she asked, swiftly recovering and not believing him.

He did not answer that.  Instead he said: "You came very near to getting
your way about a year ago. I had about made up my mind to marry you."

"To marry me," she echoed ironically.

"To marry you," he repeated in his attractive, downright fashion.

"Well--why didn't you?"

"I decided I didn't need you," said he, most matter-of-fact.  "I saw I'd
be repeating the blunder I made when I married before.  When I got out
of college, I was so discouraged by the prospect, I felt so weak without
money or influence, that I let myself drift into a great folly--for it
is a folly to imagine that money or influence are of any value in making
a career.  They're the results of a career, not its cause.  Once more,
when I faced the big battle here in New York, I was fooled for a while
in spite of myself by the same old delusion. I saw that the successful
men all had great wealth, and I made the same old shallow mistake of
supposing their wealth gave them their success.  But I got back to the
sensible point of view very quickly."

"And so--I--escaped."

"Escaped is the word for it."

"You are flattering--to-day."

"That sarcasm because I did not so much as speak of your charms, I
suppose?"

"You might have said I was personally a little of a temptation."

"Why go into that?" rejoined he, with an intonation that gave her a
chance to be flattered, if she chose. "Of course, if I had decided I
needed you in my career, I'd have flung myself over ears into love.  As
it was, don't you think my keeping away from you complimentary?"

This was the nearest he had ever come to an admission that she was
attractive to him; she straightway exaggerated it into a declaration of
love.  Very few women make or even understand a man's clear distinction
between physical attraction and love; Amy thought them one and the same.

"You are so hard!" said she.  "I wonder at myself for liking you."  As
she spoke, she rapidly thought it out with the aid of her vanity; men
and women, in their relations with each other, always end by taking
counsel of vanity.  He wanted her; he had taken this subtle means to get
within her defenses and, without running the risk of a refusal, find out
whether he could get her, whether a woman of her wealth and position
would condescend to him.  It was with her sweetest, candidest smile that
she went on, "Now it is all settled.  You don't want to marry me; you
aren't in love with me.  I need not be afraid of any designs, mercenary
or otherwise.  At last, we can be real friends."

He reflected, then said with a judicial, impersonal air, "No matter how
well a man plays the game of man and man, he usually plays the game of
man and woman badly.  Why?  Because he thinks the conditions are
different.  He is deceived by woman's air of guilelessness into
imagining he has the game all his own way."

"What has that got to do with what I said to you?" asked she, her color
a confession that the question was unnecessary.

He again laughed at her with his eyes.  "Why did you think it had?"

She pouted.  "You are in a horrible mood to-day."

He rose.  "Thanks for the hint."

She began to unroll the plans.

"Now, _there's_ the man for you," said he, with a gesture toward her
bundle of blue prints.

"Who?"

"Siersdorf."

"If I had to choose, I'd prefer--even you."

"Siersdorf is adaptable and appreciative.  He's good to look at, has a
good all-round mind, is extraordinary in his specialty.  You couldn't do
better."

"I don't want him," she cried impatiently.  "I prefer to suit myself in
marrying."  She stood before him, her hands behind her, the pretty face
tilted daringly upward.  "Are you trying to make me dislike you?"

He looked down at her; there was not a hint in his expression that her
dare was a temptation.  "I must be going," said he.

Tears gathered in her eyes, made them brilliant, took away much of their
natural hardness.  "Won't you be friends?" she appealed.

He continued to look straight into her eyes until her expression told
him she knew he was not deceived by her maneuverings and strategies.
Then he said, "No," with terse directness of manner as well as of
speech.  "No, because you do not want friends.  You want victims."

In sudden anger she flung off her mask.  "I am a good hater," she
warned.  "You don't want me to turn against you, do you?"

His face became sad and somewhat bitter.  There had been a time when
such a menace from a source so near his career would have alarmed him,
would have set him to debating conciliation.  But his self-confidence
had developed beyond that stage, had reached the point where a man feels
that, if any force from without can injure him, the sooner he finds it
out, the more quickly he will be able to make a career founded upon the
only unshakable ground, his own single strength.

"I've taken a great deal off you," she went on in a menacing tone, a
tone intended to remind him that he was an employee.  "You ought to be
more careful. I'm not all sweetness.  I can be hard and unforgiving when
I cease to like."

He laughed unpleasantly as vanity thus easily divested itself of its
mask of love.  "And to cross you is all that's necessary to rouse your
dislike."

"That's all," said she.  And now she looked like her father in his rare
exhibitions of his true self.  She had never deceived Armstrong
altogether.  But he was too masculine not to have lingerings of the
universal male delusion that feminine always and necessarily means at
least something of sweetness and tenderness.

"Shall we be friends?" she demanded sharply, imperiously.  At bottom,
she could not believe anyone would stand against the power that gave her
a scepter--the power of wealth.  "Friends, or--not?"

"As you please," replied he, bowing coldly.  And he went, his last look
altogether calm, not without a tinge of contempt.  He realized that he
had come there to put an end to his flirtation with her, to assert his
own independence, to free himself from the entanglement which his
temporary weakness of the first days in overwhelming New York had led
him into.

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