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The Great God Success: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips · English · Gutenberg #7989 · 372,025 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Great God Success: A Novel

Author: David Graham Phillips


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7989]
                Most recently updated: November 18, 2016

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, William Craig, Charles Franks and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team









THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS

A NOVEL

By John Graham (David Graham Phillips)



The Gregg Press / Ridgewood, N.J.



CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. THE CANDIDATE FROM YALE

II. THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS

III. A PARK ROW CELEBRITY

IV. IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA

V. ALICE

VI. IN A BOHEMIAN QUICKSAND

VII. A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT

VIII. A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL

IX. AMBITION AWAKENS

X. THE ETERNAL MASCULINE

XI. TRESPASSING

XII. MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH

XIII. RECKONING WITH DANVERS

XIV. THE NEWS-RECORD GETS A NEW EDITOR

XV. YELLOW JOURNALISM

XVI. MR. STOKELY IS TACTLESS

XVII. A WOMAN AND A WARNING

XVIII. HOWARD EXPLAINS HIS MACHINE

XIX. “I MUST BE RICH.”

XX. ILLUSION

XXI. WAVERING

XXII. THE SHENSTONE EPISODE

XXIII. EXPANDING AND CONTRACTING

XXIV. “MR. VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH.”

XXV. THE PROMISED LAND

XXVI. IN POSSESSION

XXVII. THE HARVEST

XXVIII. SUCCESS




THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS




I.

THE CANDIDATE FROM YALE.


“O your college paper, I suppose?”

“No, I never wrote even a letter to the editor.”

“Took prizes for essays?”

“No, I never wrote if I could help it.”

“But you like to write?”

“I’d like to learn to write.”

“You say you are two months out of college--what college?”

“Yale.”

“Hum--I thought Yale men went into something commercial; law or banking
or railroads. ‘Leave hope of fortune behind, ye who enter here’ is over
the door of this profession.”

“I haven’t the money-making instinct.”

“We pay fifteen dollars a week at the start.”

“Couldn’t you make it twenty?”

The Managing Editor of the _News-Record_ turned slowly in his chair
until his broad chest was full-front toward the young candidate for the
staff. He lowered his florid face slowly until his double chin swelled
out over his low “stick-up” collar. Then he gradually raised his eyelids
until his amused blue eyes were looking over the tops of his glasses,
straight into Howard’s eyes.

“Why?” he asked. “Why should we?”

Howard’s grey eyes showed embarrassment and he flushed to the line of
his black hair which was so smoothly parted in the middle. “Well--you
see--the fact is--I need twenty a week. My expenses are arranged on that
scale. I’m not clever at money matters. I’m afraid I’d get in a mess
with only fifteen.”

“My dear young man,” said Mr. King, “I started here at fifteen dollars a
week. And I had a wife; and the first baby was coming.”

“Yes, but your wife was an energetic woman. She stood right beside you
and worked too. Now I have only myself.”

Mr. King raised his eyebrows and became a rosier red. He was evidently
preparing to rebuke this audacious intrusion into his private affairs by
a stranger whose card had been handed to him not ten minutes before. But
Howard’s tone and manner were simple and sincere. And they happened to
bring into Mr. King’s mind a rush of memories of his youth and his wife.
She had married him on faith. They had come to New York fifteen years
before, he to get a place as reporter on the _News-Record_, she to
start a boarding-house; he doubting and trembling, she with courage and
confidence for two. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and
opened the book of memory at the place where the leaves most easily fell
apart:

He is coming home at one in the morning, worn out, sick at heart from
the day’s buffetings. As he puts his key into the latch, the door opens.
There stands a handsome girl; her face is flushed; her eyes are bright;
her lips are held up for him to kiss; she shows no trace of a day that
began hours before his and has been a succession of exasperations and
humiliations against which her sensitive nature, trained in the home of
her father, a distinguished up-the-state Judge, gives her no protection,
“Victory,” she whispers, her arms about his neck and her head upon his
coat collar. “Victory! We are seventy-two cents ahead on the week, and
everything paid up!”

Mr. King opened his eyes--they had been closed less than five seconds.
“Well, let it be twenty--though just why I’m sure I don’t know. And
we’ll give you a four weeks’ trial. When will you begin?”

“Now,” answered the young man, glancing about the room. “And I shall try
to show that I appreciate your consideration, whether I deserve it or
not.”

It was a large bare room, low of ceiling. Across one end were five
windows overlooking from a great height the tempest that rages about
the City Hall day and night with few lulls and no pauses. Mr. King’s
roll-top desk was at the first window. Under each of the other windows
was a broad flat table desk--for copy-readers. At the farthest of these
sat the City Editor--thin, precise-looking, with yellow skin, hollow
cheeks, ragged grey-brown moustache, ragged scant grey-brown hair and
dark brown eyes. He looked nervously tired and, because brown was his
prevailing shade, dusty. He rose as Mr. King came with young Howard.

“Here, Mr. Bowring, is a young man from Yale. He wishes you to teach him
how to write. Mr. Howard, Mr. Bowring. I hope you gentlemen will get on
comfortably together.”

Mr. King went back to his desk. Mr. Bowring and Howard looked each at
the other. Mr. Bowring smiled, with good-humour, without cordiality.
“Let me see, where shall we put you?” And his glance wandered along
the rows of sloping table-desks--those nearer the windows lighted by
daylight; those farther away, by electric lamps. Even on that cool,
breezy August afternoon the sunlight and fresh air did not penetrate far
into the room.

“Do you see the young man with the beautiful fair moustache,” said Mr.
Bowring, “toiling away in his shirt-sleeves--there?”

“Near the railing at the entrance?”

“Precisely. I think I will put you next him.” Mr. Bowring touched a
button on his desk and presently an office boy--a mop of auburn curls,
a pert face and gangling legs in knickerbockers--hurried up with a “Yes,
Sir?”

“Please tell Mr. Kittredge that I would like to speak to him and--please
scrape your feet along the floor as little as possible.”

The boy smiled, walking away less as if he were trying to terrorize park
pedestrians by a rush on roller skates. Kittredge and Howard were made
acquainted and went toward their desks together. “A few moments--if you
will excuse me--and I’m done,” said Kittredge motioning Howard into the
adjoining chair as he sat and at once bent over his work.

Howard watched him with interest, admiration and envy. The reporter was
perhaps twenty-five years old--fair of hair, fair of skin, goodlooking
in a pretty way. His expression was keen and experienced yet too
self-complacent to be highly intelligent. He was rapidly covering sheet
after sheet of soft white paper with bold, loose hand-writing. Howard
noticed that at the end of each sentence he made a little cross with a
circle about it, and that he began each paragraph with a paragraph sign.
Presently he scrawled a big double cross in the centre of the sheet
under the last line of writing and gathered up his sheets in the
numbered order. “Done, thank God,” he said. “And I hope they won’t
butcher it.”

“Do you send it to be put in type?” asked Howard.

“No,” Kittredge answered with a faint smile. “I hand it in to Mr.
Bowring--the City Editor, you know. And when the copyreaders come at
six, it will be turned over to one of them. He reads it, cuts it down
if necessary, and writes headlines for it. Then it goes upstairs to the
composing room--see the box, the little dumb-waiter, over there in the
wall?--well, it goes up by that to the floor above where they set the
type and make up the forms.”

“I’m a complete ignoramus,” said Howard, “I hope you’ll not mind my
trying to find out things. I hope I shall not bore you.”

“Glad to help you, I’m sure. I had to go through this two years ago when
I came here from Princeton.”

Kittredge “turned in” his copy and returned to his seat beside Howard.

“What were you writing about, if I may ask?” inquired Howard.

“About some snakes that came this morning in a ‘tramp’ from South
America. One of them, a boa constrictor, got loose and coiled around a
windlass. The cook was passing and it caught him. He fainted with fright
and the beast squeezed him to death. It’s a fine story--lots of amusing
and dramatic details. I wrote it for a column and I think they won’t cut
it. I hope not, anyhow. I need the money.”

“You are paid by the column?”

“Yes. I’m on space--what they call a space writer. If a man is of any
account here they gradually raise him to twenty-five dollars a week and
then put him on space. That means that he will make anywhere from forty
to a hundred a week, or perhaps more at times. The average for the best
is about eighty.”

“Eighty dollars a week,” thought Howard. “Fifty-two times eighty is
forty-one hundred and sixty. Four thousand a year, counting out
two weeks for vacation.” To Howard it seemed wealth at the limit of
imagination. If he could make so much as that!--he who had grave doubts
whether, no matter how hard he worked, he would ever wrench a living
from the world.

Just then a seedy young man with red hair and a red beard came through
the gate in the railing, nodded to Kittredge and went to a desk well up
toward the daylight end of the room.

“That’s the best of ‘em all,” said Kittredge in a low tone. “His name is
Sewell. He’s a Harvard man--Harvard and Heidelberg. But drink! Ye gods,
how he does drink! His wife died last Christmas--practically starvation.
Sewell disappeared--frightful bust. A month afterward they found him
under an assumed name over on Blackwell’s Island, doing three months for
disorderly conduct. He wrote a Christmas carol while his wife was dying.
It began “Merrily over the Snow” and went on about light hearts and
youth and joy and all that--you know, the usual thing. When he got the
money, she didn’t need it or anything else in her nice quiet grave over
in Long Island City. So he ‘blew in’ the money on a wake.”

Sewell was coming toward them. Kittredge called out: “Was it a good
story, Sam?”

“Simply great! You ought to have seen the room. Only the bed and the
cook-stove and a few dishes on a shelf--everything else gone to the
pawnshop. The man must have killed the children first. They lay side by
side on the bed, each with its hands folded on its chest--suppose the
mother did that; and each little throat was cut from ear to ear--suppose
the father did that. Then he dipped his paint brush in the blood and
daubed on the wall in big scrawling letters: ‘There is no God!’ Then
he took his wife in his arms, stabbed her to the heart and cut his own
throat. And there they lay, his arms about her, his cheek against hers,
dead. It was murder as a fine art. Gad, I wish I could write.”

Kittredge introduced Howard--“a Yale man--just came on the paper.”

“Entering the profession? Well, they say of the other professions that
there is always room at the top. Journalism is just the reverse. The
room is all at the bottom--easy to enter, hard to achieve, impossible to
leave. It is all bottom, no top.” Sewell nodded, smiled attractively in
spite of his swollen face and his unsightly teeth, and went back to his
work.

“He’s sober,” said Kittredge when he was out of hearing, “so his story
is pretty sure to be the talk of Park Row tomorrow.”

Howard was astonished at the cheerful, businesslike point of view
of these two educated and apparently civilised young men as to the
tragedies of life. He had shuddered at Kittredge’s story of the man
squeezed to death by the snake. Sewell’s story, so graphically outlined,
filled him with horror, made it a struggle for him to conceal his
feelings.

“I suppose you must see a lot of frightful things,” he suggested.

“That’s our business. You soon get used to it, just as a doctor does.
You learn to look at life from the purely professional standpoint. Of
course you must feel in order to write. But you must not feel so keenly
that you can’t write. You have to remember always that you’re not there
to cheer or sympathise or have emotions, but only to report, to record.
You tell what your eyes see. You’ll soon get so that you can and will
make good stories out of your own calamaties.”

“Is that a portrait of the editor?” asked Howard, pointing to a grimed
oil-painting, the only relief to the stretch of cracked and streaked
white wall except a few ragged maps.

“That--oh, that is old man Stone--the ‘great condenser.’ He’s there for
a double purpose, as an example of what a journalist should be and as a
warning of what a journalist comes to. After twenty years of fine work
at crowding more news in good English into one column than any other
editor could get in bad English into four columns, he was discharged for
drunkenness. Soon afterwards he walked off the end of a dock one night
in a fog. At least it was said that there was a fog and that he was
drunk. I have my doubts.”

“Cheerful! I have not been in the profession an hour but I have already
learned something very valuable.”

“What’s that?” asked Kittredge, “that it’s a good profession to get out
of?”

“No. But that bad habits will not help a man to a career in journalism
any more than in any other profession.”

“Career?” smiled Kittredge, resenting Howard’s good-humoured irony
and putting on a supercilious look that brought out more strongly the
insignificance of his face. “Journalism is not a career. It is either a
school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something
else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done
for to all intents and purposes years before he’s buried.”

“I wonder if it doesn’t attract a great many men who have a little
talent and fancy that they have much. I wonder if it does not disappoint
their vanity rather than their merit.”

“That sounds well,” replied Kittredge, “and there’s some truth in
it. But, believe me, journalism is the dragon that demands the annual
sacrifice of youth. It will have only youth. Why am I here? Why are you
here? Because we are young, have a fresh, a new point of view. As soon
as we get a little older, we shall be stale and, though still young in
years, we must step aside for young fellows with new ideas and a new
point of view.”

“But why should not one have always new ideas, always a new point of
view? Why should one expect to escape the penalties of stagnation in
journalism when one can’t escape them in any other profession?”

“But who has new ideas all the time? The average successful man has at
most one idea and makes a whole career out of it. Then there are the
temptations.”

“How do you mean?”

Kittredge flushed slightly and answered in a more serious tone:

“We must work while others amuse themselves or sleep. We must sleep
while others are at work. That throws us out of touch with the whole
world of respectability and regularity. When we get done at night,
wrought up by the afternoon and evening of this gambling with our brains
and nerves as the stake, what is open to us?”

“That is true,” said Howard. “There are the all-night saloons and--the
like.”

“And if we wish society, what society is open to us? What sort of young
women are waiting to entertain us at one, two, three o’clock in the
morning? Why, I have not made a call in a year. And I have not seen a
respectable girl of my acquaintance in at least that time, except once
or twice when I happened to have assignments that took me near Fifth
Avenue in the afternoon.”

“Mr. Kittredge, Mr. Bowring wishes to speak to you,” an office boy said
and Kittredge rose. As he went, he put his hand on Howard’s shoulder
and said: “No, I am getting out of it as fast as ever I can. I’m writing
books.”

“Kittredge,” thought Howard, “I wonder, is this Henry Jennings
Kittredge, whose stories are on all the news stands?” He saw an envelope
on the floor at his feet. The address was “Henry Jennings Kittredge,
Esq.”

When Kittredge came back for his coat, Howard said in a tone of frank
admiration: “Why, I didn’t know you were the Kittredge that everybody is
talking about. You certainly have no cause for complaint.”

Kittredge shrugged his shoulders. “At fifteen cents a copy, I have to
sell ten thousand copies before I get enough to live on for four months.
And you’d be surprised how much reputation and how little money a man
can make out of a book. Don’t be distressed because they keep you here
with nothing to do but wonder how you’ll have the courage to face the
cashier on pay day. It’s the system. Your chance will come.”

It was three days before Howard had a chance. On a Sunday afternoon the
Assistant City Editor who was in charge of the City Desk for the day
sent him up to the Park to write a descriptive story of the crowds. “Try
to get a new point of view,” he said, “and let yourself loose. There’s
usually plenty of room in Monday’s paper.”

Howard wandered through the Central Park for two hours, struggling for
the “new point of view” of the crowds he saw there--these monotonous
millions, he thought, lazily drinking at a vast trough of country air in
the heart of the city. He planned an article carefully as he dined
alone at the Casino. He went down to the office early and wrote
diligently--about two thousand words. When he had finished, the Night
City Editor told him that he might go as there would be nothing more
that night.

He was in the street at seven the next morning. As he walked along with
a News-Record, bought at the first news-stand, he searched every page:
first, the larger “heads”--such a long story would call for a “big
head;” then the smaller “heads”--they may have been crowded and have
had to cut it down; then the single-line “heads”--surely they found a
“stickful” or so worth printing.

At last he found it. A dozen items in the smallest type, agate, were
grouped under the general heading “City Jottings” at the end of an
inside column of an inside page. The first of these City Jottings was
two lines in length:

“The millions were in the Central Park yesterday, lazily drinking at
that vast trough of country air in the heart of the city.”

As he entered the office Howard looked appealingly and apologetically
at the boy on guard at the railing and braced himself to receive the
sneering frown of the City Editor and to bear the covert smiles of his
fellow reporters. But he soon saw that no one had observed his mighty
spring for a foothold and his ludicrous miss and fall.

“Had anything in yet?” Kittredge inquired casually, late in the
afternoon.

“I wrote a column and a half yesterday and I found two lines among the
City Jottings,” replied Howard, reddening but laughing.

“The first story I wrote was cut to three lines but they got a libel
suit on it.”





II.

THE CITY EDITOR RECONSIDERS.


At the end of six weeks, the City Editor called Howard up to the desk
and asked him to seat himself. He talked in a low tone so that the
Assistant City Editor, reading the newspapers at a nearby desk, could
not hear.

“We like you, Mr. Howard.” Mr. Bowring spoke slowly and with a
carefulness in selecting words that indicated embarrassment. “And we
have been impressed by your earnestness. But we greatly fear that you
are not fitted for this profession. You write well enough, but you
do not seem to get the newspaper--the news--idea. So we feel that in
justice to you and to ourselves we ought to let you know where you
stand. If you wish, we shall be glad to have you remain with us two
weeks longer. Meanwhile you can be looking about you. I am certain that
you will succeed somewhere, in some line, sooner or later. But I think
that the newspaper profession is a waste of your time.”

Howard had expected this. Failure after failure, his articles thrown
away or rewritten by the copyreaders, had prepared him for the blow. Yet
it crushed him for the moment. His voice was not steady as he replied:

“No doubt you are right. Thank you for taking the trouble to study my
case and tell me so soon.”

“Don’t hesitate to stay on for the two weeks,” Mr. Bowring continued.
“We can make you useful to us. And you can look about to much better
advantage than if you were out of a place.”

“I’ll stay the two weeks,” Howard said, “unless I find something
sooner.”

“Don’t be more discouraged than you can help,” said Mr. Bowring. “You
may be very grateful before long for finding out so early what many of
us--I myself, I fear--find out after years and--when it is too late.”

Always that note of despair; always that pointing to the motto over the
door of the profession: “Abandon hope, ye who enter here.” What was
the explanation? Were these men right? Was he wrong in thinking that
journalism offered the most splendid of careers--the development of the
mind and the character; the sharpening of all the faculties; the service
of truth and right and human betterment, in daily combat with injustice
and error and falsehood; the arousing and stimulating of the drowsy
minds of the masses of mankind?

Howard looked about at the men who held on where he was slipping. “Can
it be,” he thought, “that I cannot survive in a profession where the
poorest are so poor in intellect and equipment? Why am I so dull that I
cannot catch the trick?”

He set himself to study newspapers, reading them line by line, noting
the modes of presenting facts, the arrangement of headlines, the order
in which the editors put the several hundred items before the eyes
of the reader--what they displayed on each page and why; how they
apportioned the space. With the energy of unconquerable resolution he
applied himself to solving for himself the puzzle of the press--the
science and art of catching the eye and holding the attention of the
hurrying, impatient public.

He learned much. He began to develop the news-instinct, that subtle
instant realisation of what is interesting and what is not interesting
to the public mind. But the time was short; a sense of impending
calamity and the lack of self-confidence natural to inexperience made it
impossible for him effectively to use his new knowledge in the few small
opportunities which Mr. Bowring gave him. With only six days of his two
weeks left, he had succeeded in getting into the paper not a single item
of a length greater than two sticks. He slept little; he despaired not
at all; but he was heart-sick and, as he lay in his bed in the little
hall-room of the furnished-room house, he often envied women the relief
of tears. What he endured will be appreciated only by those who have
been bred in sheltered homes; who have abruptly and alone struck out
for themselves in the ocean of a great city without a single lesson
in swimming; who have felt themselves seized from below and dragged
downward toward the deep-lying feeding-grounds of Poverty and Failure.

“Buck up, old man,” said Kittredge to whom he told his bad news after
several days of hesitation and after Kittredge had shown him that he
strongly suspected it. “Don’t mind old Bowring. You’re sure to get on,
and, if you insist upon the folly, in this profession. I’ll give you a
note to Montgomery--he’s City Editor over at the _World_-shop--and he’ll
take you on. In some ways you will do better there. You’ll rise faster,
get a wider experience, make more money. In fact, this shop has only one
advantage. It does give a man peace of mind. It’s more like a club
than an office. But in a sense that is a drawback. I’ll give you a note
to-night. You will be at work over there to-morrow.”

“I think I’ll wait a few days,” said Howard, his tone corresponding to
the look in his eyes and the compression of his resolute mouth.

The next day but one Mr. Bowring called him up to the City Desk and gave
him a newspaper-clipping which read:

  “Bald Peak, September 29--Willie Dent, the three-year-old baby
  of John Dent, a farmer living two miles from here, strayed away
  into the mountains yesterday and has not been seen since. His
  dog, a cur, went with him. Several hundred men are out searching.
  It has been storming, and the mountains are full of bears
  and wild cats.”

“Yes, I saw this in the _Herald_,” said Howard.

“Will you take the train that leaves at eleven tonight and get us the
story--if it is not a ‘fake,’ as I strongly suspect. Telegraph your
story if there is not time for you to get back here by nine to-morrow
night.”

“Of course it’s a fake, or at least a wild exaggeration,” thought Howard
as he turned away. “If Bowring had not been all but sure there was
nothing in it, he would never have given it to me.”

He was not well, his sleepless nights having begun to tell even upon
his powerful constitution. The rest of that afternoon and all of a night
without sleep in the Pullman he was in a depth of despond. He had been
in the habit of getting much comfort out of an observation his father
had made to him just before he died: “Remember that ninety per cent
of these fourteen hundred million human beings are uncertain where
to-morrow’s food is to come from. Be prudent but never be afraid.” But
just then he could get no consolation out of this maxim of grim cheer.
He seemed to himself incompetent and useless, a predestined failure.
“What is to become of me?” he kept repeating, his heart like lead and
his mind fumbling about in a confused darkness.

At Bald Peak he was somewhat revived by the cold mountain air of the
early morning. As he alighted upon the station platform he spoke to the
baggage-master standing in front of the steps.

“Was the little boy of a man named Dent lost in the mountains near
here?”

“Yes--three days ago,” replied the baggage-man.

“Have they found him yet?”

“No--nor never will alive--that’s my opinion.”

Howard asked for the nearest livery-stable and within twenty minutes was
on his way to Dent’s farm. His driver knew all about the lost child. Two
hundred men were still searching. “And Mrs. Dent, she’s been sittin’
by the window, list’nin’ day and night. She won’t speak nor eat and
she ain’t shed a tear. It was her only child. The men come in sayin’ it
ain’t no use to hunt any more, an’ they look at her an’ out they goes
ag’in.”

Soon the driver pointed to a cottage near the road. The gate was open;
the grass and the flower-beds were trampled into a morass. The door was
thrown wide and several women were standing about the threshold. At the
window within view of the road and the mountains sat the mother--a
young woman with large brown eyes, and clear-cut features, refined,
beautified, exalted by suffering. Her look was that of one listening for
a faint, far away sound upon which hangs the turn of the balances to joy
or to despair.

       *       *       *       *       *

That morning two of the searchers went to the northeast into the dense
and tangled swamp woods between Bald Peak and Cloudy Peak--the wildest
wilderness in the mountains. The light barely penetrates the foliage on
the brightest days. The ground is rough, sometimes precipitous, closely
covered with bushes and tangled creepers.

The two explorers, almost lost themselves, came at last to the edge of a
swamp surrounded by cedars. They half-crawled, half-climbed through the
low trees and festooning creepers to the edge of a clear bit of open,
firm ground.

In the middle was a cedar tree. Under it, seated upon the ground, was
the lost boy. His bare, brown legs, torn and bleeding, were stretched
straight in front of him. His bare feet were bruised and cut. His
gingham dress was torn and wet and stained. His small hands were smears
of dirt and blood. He was playing with a tin can. He had put a stone
into it and was making a great rattling. The dog was running to and fro,
apparently enjoying the noise. The little boy’s face was tear-stained
and his eyes were swollen. But he was not crying just then and laughter
lurked in his thin, fever-flushed face.

As the men came into view, the dog began to bark angrily, but the boy
looked a solemn welcome.

“Want mamma,” he said. “I’se hungry.”

One of the men picked him up--the gingham dress was saturated.

“You’re hungry?” asked the man, his voice choking.

“Yes. An’ I’se so wet. It wained and wained.” Then the child began to
sob. “It was dark,” he whispered, “an’ cold. I want my mamma.”

It was an hour’s tedious journey back to Dent’s by the shortest route.
At the top of the hill those near the cottage saw the boy in the arms of
the man who had found him. They shouted and the mother sprang out of the
house and came running, stumbling down the path to the gate. She caught
at the gate-post and stood there, laughing, screaming, sobbing.

“Baby! Baby!” she called.

The little boy turned his head and stretched out his thin, blood-stained
arms. She ran toward him and snatched him from the young farmer.

“Hungry, mamma,” he sobbed, hiding his face on her shoulder.

       *       *       *       *       *

Howard wrote his story on the train, going down to New York. It was a
straightforward chronicle of just what he had seen and heard. He began
at the beginning--the little mountain home, the family of three, the
disappearance of the child. He described the perils of the mountains,
the storm, the search, the wait, the listening mother, scene by scene,
ending with mother and child together again and the dog racing around
them, with wagging tail and hanging tongue. He wrote swiftly, making no
changes, without a trace of his usual self-consciousness in composition.
When he had done he went into the restaurant car and dined almost gaily.
He felt that he had failed again. How could he hope to tell such a
story? But he was not despondent. He was still under the spell of that
intense human drama with its climax of joy. His own concerns seemed
secondary, of no consequence.

He reached the office at half-past nine, handed in his “copy” and went
away. He was in bed at half-past ten and was at once asleep. At eleven
the next morning a knocking awakened him from a sound sleep that had
restored and refreshed him. “A messenger from the office,” was called
through the door in answer to his inquiry. He took the note from the boy
and tore it open:

“My dear Mr. Howard: Thank you for the splendid story you gave us last
night. It is one of the best, if not the best, we have had the pleasure
of publishing in years. Your salary has been raised to twenty-five
dollars a week.

“Congratulations. You have ‘caught on’ at last. I’m glad to take back
what I said the other day.

“HENRY C. BOWRING.”





III.

A PARK ROW CELEBRITY.


Kittredge was the first to congratulate him when he reached the office.
“Everybody is talking about your story,” he said. “I must say I was
surprised when I read it. I had begun to fear that you would never catch
the trick--for, with most of us writing is only a trick. But now I see
that you are a born writer. Your future is in your own hands.”

“You think I can learn to write?”

“That is the sane way to put it. Yes, I know that you can. If you’ll
only not be satisfied with the results that come easy, you will make a
reputation. Not a mere Park Row reputation, but the real thing.”

Howard got flattery enough in the next few days to turn a stronger
head than was his at twenty-two. But a few partial failures within a
fortnight sobered him and steadied him. His natural good sense made him
take himself in hand. He saw that his success had been to a great extent
a happy accident; that to repeat it, to improve upon it he must study
life, study the art of expression. He must keep his senses open to
impression. He must work at style, enlarge his vocabulary, learn the use
of words, the effect of varying combinations of words both as to sound
and as to meaning. “I must learn to write for the people,” he thought,
“and that means to write the most difficult of all styles.”

He was, then and always, one of those who like others and are liked by
them, yet never seek company and so are left to themselves. As he had
no money to spare and a deep aversion to debt, he was not tempted into
joining in the time-wasting dissipations that were now open to him. He
worked hard at his profession and, when he left the office, usually went
direct to his rooms to read until far into the morning. He was often
busy sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. His day at reporting was
long--from noon until midnight, and frequently until three in the
morning. But the work was far different from the grind which is the lot
of the young men striving in other professions or in business. It
was the most fascinating work imaginable for an intelligent, thirsty
mind--the study of human nature under stress of the great emotions.

His mode of thought and his style made Mr. Bowring and Mr. King give him
much of this particular kind of reporting. So he was always observing
love, hate, jealousy, revenge, greed. He saw these passions in action in
the lives of people of all kinds and conditions. And he saw little else.
The reporter is a historian. And history is, as Gibbon says, for the
most part “a record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

For many a man this has been a ruinous, one-sided development. Howard
was saved by his extremely intelligent, sympathetic point of view.
He saw the whole of each character, each conflict that he was sent to
study. If the point of the story was the good side of human nature--some
act of generosity or self-sacrifice--he did not exaggerate it into
godlike heroism but adjusted it in its proper prospective by bringing
out its human quality and its human surroundings. If the main point was
violence or sordidness or baseness, he saw the characteristics which
relieved and partially redeemed it. His news-reports were accounts of
the doings not of angels or devils but of human beings, accounts written
from a thoroughly human standpoint.

Here lay the cause of his success. In all his better stories--for
he often wrote poor ones--there was the atmosphere of sincerity, of
realism, the marks of an acute observer, without prejudice and with
a justifiable leaning toward a belief in the fundamental worth of
humanity. Where others were cynical he was just. Where others were
sentimental, he had sincere, healthful sentiment. Where others were
hysterical, he calmly and accurately described, permitting the tragedy
to reveal itself instead of burying it beneath high-heaped adjectives.
Simplicity of style was his aim and he was never more delighted by any
compliment than by one from the chief political reporter.

“That story of yours this morning,” said this reporter whose lack as
a writer was more than compensated by his ability to get intimately
acquainted with public men, “reads as if a child might have written it.
I don’t see how you get such effects without any style at all. You just
let your story tell itself.”

“Well, you see,” replied Howard, “I am writing for the masses, and fine
writing would be wasted upon them.”

“You’re right,” said Jackman, “we don’t need literature on this
paper--long words, high-sounding phrases and all that sort of thing.
What we want is just plain, simple English that goes straight to the
point.”

“Like Shakespeare’s and Bunyan’s,” suggested Kittredge with a grin.

“Shakespeare? Fudge!” scoffed Jackman. “Why he couldn’t have made a
living as a space-writer on a New York newspaper.”

“No, I don’t think he would have staid long in Park Row,” replied
Kittredge with a subtlety of meaning that escaped Jackman.

A few days before New Year’s the Managing Editor looked up and smiled as
Howard was passing his desk.

“How goes it?” he asked.

“Oh, not so badly,” Howard answered, “but I am a good deal depressed at
times.”

“Depressed? Nonsense! You’ve got everything--youth, health and freedom.
And by the way, you are going on space the first of the year. Our rule
is a year on salary before space. But we felt that it was about time to
strengthen the rule by making an exception.”

Howard stammered thanks and went away. This piece of news, dropped
apparently so carelessly by Mr. King, meant a revolution in fortune for
him. It was the transition from close calculation on twenty-five dollars
a week to wealth beyond his most fanciful dreams of six months ago. Not
having the money-getting instinct and being one of those who compare
their work with the best instead of with the inferior, Howard never felt
that he was “entitled to a living.” He had a lively sense of gratitude
for the money return for his services which prudence presently taught
him to conceal.

“Space” meant to him eighty dollars a week at least--circumstances of
ease. So vast a sum did it seem that he began to consider the problem of
investment. “I have been not badly off on twenty-five dollars a week,”
 he thought. “With, well, say forty dollars a week I shall be able to
satisfy all my wants. I can save at least forty a week and that will
mean an independence with a small income by the time I am thirty-four.”

But--a year after he was put “on space” he was still just about even
with his debts. He seemed to himself to be living no better and it
was only by careful counting-up that he could see how that dream of
independence had eluded him. A more extensive wardrobe, a little better
food, a more comfortable suite of rooms, an occasional dinner to some
friends, loans to broken-down reporters, and the mysteriously vanished
two thousand dollars was accounted for.

Howard tried to retrench, devised small ingenious schemes for saving
money, lectured himself severely and frequently for thus trifling away
his chance to be a free man. But all in vain. He remained poor; and,
whenever he gave the matter thought, which was not often, gloomy
forebodings as to the future oppressed him. “I shall find myself old,”
 he thought, “with nothing accomplished, with nothing laid by. I shall
be an old drudge.” He understood the pessimistic tone of his profession.
All about him were men like himself--leading this gambler’s life of
feverish excitement and evanescent achievement, earning comfortable
incomes and saving nothing, looking forward to the inevitable time of
failing freshness and shattered nerves and declining income.

He spasmodically tried to write stories for the magazines, contrived
plots for novels and plays, wrote first chapters, first scenes of
first acts. But the exactions of newspaper life, the impossibility of
continuous effort at any one piece of work and his natural inertia--he
was inert but neither idle nor lazy--combined to make futile his efforts
to emancipate himself from hand-to-mouth journalism.

He had been four years a reporter and was almost twenty-six years old.
He was known throughout his profession in New York, although he had
never signed an article. One remarkable “human interest” story after
another had forced the knowledge of his abilities upon the reporters and
editors of other newspapers. And he was spoken of as one of the best and
in some respects the best “all round reporter” in the city. This meant
that he was capable to any emergency--that, whatever the subject, he
could write an accurate, graphic, consecutive and sustained story and
could get it into the editor’s hands quickly.

Indeed he possessed facility to the perilous degree. What others
achieved only after long toil, he achieved without effort. This was
due chiefly to the fact that he never relaxed but was at all times
the journalist, reading voraciously newspapers, magazines and the best
books, and using what he read; observing constantly and ever trying to
see something that would make “good copy”; turning over phrases in his
mind to test the value of words both as to sound and as to meaning.
He was an incessantly active man. His great weakness was the common
weakness--failure to concentrate. In Park Row they regarded him as a
brilliant success. Brilliant he was. But a success he was not. He knew
that he was a brilliant failure--and not very brilliant.

“Why is it?” he asked himself again and again in periods of reaction
from the nervous strain of some exciting experience. “Shall I never
seize any of these chances that are always thrusting themselves at
me? Shall I always act like a Neapolitan beggar? Will the stimulus to
ambition never come?”





IV.

IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA.


Howard lived in Washington Square, South. He had gone to a
“furnished-room house” there because it was cheap. He staid because he
was comfortable and was without a motive for moving.

It was the centre of the most varied life in New York. To the north lay
fashion and wealth, to the east and west, respectability and moderate
means; to the south, poverty and squalor, vice and crime. All could be
seen and heard from the windows of his sitting room. In the evenings
toward spring he looked out upon a panorama of the human race such as
is presented by no other city in the world and by no other part of
that city. Within view were Americans of all kinds, French and Germans,
Italians and Austrians, Spaniards and Moors, Scandinavians and
negroes, born New Yorkers and born citizens of most of the capitals of
civilisation and semi-barbarism. There were actresses, dancers, shop
girls, cocottes; touts, thieves, confidence-men, mission workers;
artists and students from the musty University building, tramps and
drunkards from the “barrel-houses” and “stale-beer shops;” and, across
the square to the north, representatives of New York’s oldest and most
noted families. To the west were apartment houses whence stiff, prim
bookkeepers, floor-walkers, clerks and small shop-keepers issued with
their families on Sundays, bound for church. There were other apartment
houses--the most of them to the south--whence in the midnight hours
came slattern servants and reckless looking girls in loose wrappers and
high-heeled slippers, pitcher in hand, bound for the nearest saloon.

After dusk from early spring until late fall a multitude of interesting
sounds mingled with the roar of the elevated trains to the west and
south and the rumble of carriages in “the Avenue” to the north. Howard,
reading or writing at his window on his leisure days, heard the young
men and young women laughing and shouting and making love under the
trees where the Washington Arch glistened in the twilight. Later came
the songs--“I want you, my honey, yes I do,” or “Lu, Lu, how I love my
Lu!”, or some other of the current concert-hall jingles. Many figures
could be seen flitting about in the shadows. Usually these figures were
in pairs; usually one was in white; usually at her waist-line there was
a black belt that continued on until it was lost in the other and darker
figure.

Scraps of a score of languages--curses, jests, terms of
endearment--would float up to him. Then came the hours of comparative
silence, with the city breathing softly and regularly, with the moon
hanging low and the pale arch rising above the dark trees like a giant
ghost. There would be an occasional drunken shout or shriek; a riotous
roar of song from some staggering reveller making company for himself on
the journey home; the heavy step of the policeman. Or perhaps the only
sound to disturb the city’s sleep would be that soft tread, timid as
a mouse’s, stealthy as a jackal’s--the tread of a lonely woman with
draggled silk skirt and painted cheeks and eyes burning into the
darkness, and a heart as bitter and as sad as no money, no home, no
friends, no hope can make it.

Once he threw a silver dollar from his window to the sidewalk well in
front of her. She did not see it flash downward but she heard it ring
upon the walk. She rushed forward and twice kicked it away from her in
her frenzy to get it. When her bare hand--or was it a claw?--at last
closed upon it, she gave a low scream, looked slyly and fearfully about,
then ran as if death were at her heels.

Soon after Howard was put “on space” he took the best suite of rooms in
the house. It was a strange company which Mrs. Sands had gathered under
her roof. Except Howard there was no one, not even Mrs. Sands herself,
who did not have so much past that there was little left for future.
Indeed, perhaps none of these storm-tossed or wrecked human craft
had had more of a past than Mrs. Sands. There was no mistaking the
significance of those deep furrows filled with powder and plastered with
paint, those few hairs tinted and frizzed. But like all persons with
real pasts Mrs. Sands and her lodgers kept the veil tightly drawn. They
confessed to no yesterdays and they did not dare think of to-morrow.
They were incuriously awaiting the impulse which was sure to come, sure
to thrust them on downward.

A new lodger at Mrs. Sand’s usually took the best rooms that were to be
had. Then, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly, came the retreat upward
until a cubby-hole under the eaves was reached. Finally came precipitate
and baggageless departure, often with a week or two of lodging unpaid.
The next pause, if pause there was, would be still nearer the river-bed
or the Morgue.

One morning when he had been living in Washington Square, South,
about--three years, Howard was dressing hurriedly, the door of his
sitting-room accidentally ajar. Through the crack he saw some one
stooping over the serving tray which he had himself put outside his
door when he had finished breakfast. He looked more closely. It was
“the clergyman” from up under the eaves--an unfrocked priest, thin to
emaciation, misery written upon his face even more deeply than weakness.
He hastily bundled the bones of two chops and a bit of bread into a
stained and torn handkerchief, and sprang away up the stairs toward his
little hole at the roof.

Howard was in a hurry and so put off for the time action upon the
natural impulse. When he came back at midnight, there was soon a knock
at his door. He opened it and invited in the man at the threshold--a
tall, strongly built, erect German, with a dissipated handsome face,
heavily scarred from university duels.

“Pardon me for disturbing you,” said the German. His speech, his tone,
his manner, left no doubt as to his breeding though they raised the
gravest doubts as to his being willing to give a true account of why he
had become a tenant in that lodging house.

“Will you have a cigarette and some whiskey?” inquired Howard.

The German’s glance lit and lingered upon the bottle of Scotch on the
table. “Concentrated, double-distilled friendship,” said he as he poured
out his drink.

“But a friend that drives all others away,” smiled Howard.

“I have found it of a very jealous disposition,” replied the German with
a careless shrug of the shoulders and a lifting of the eyebrows. “But at
least this friend has the grace to stay after it has driven the others
away.”

“To stay until the last piece of silver is gone.”

“But what more does one expect of a friend? Besides, we are overlooking
one friend--the one who helped our clerical fellow-lodger of the attic
out of his troubles to-day.”

“His luck has turned?”

“Permanently. He shot himself this afternoon.”

“And only this morning I made up my mind to try to help him,” said
Howard regretfully.

“You could not have hoped to succeed so well. His case needed something
more than temporary expedient. But, to come to the point, I had a slight
acquaintance with him. He left a note for me--mailed it just before he
shot himself. In it he asked that I insert a personal in the Herald.
Unfortunately I have not the money. I thought that you as a journalist
might be able to suggest something.”

The German held out a slip of cheap writing paper on which was written:
“Helen--when you see this it will be over--L.”

“A good story,” was Howard’s first thought, his news-instinct alert. And
then he remembered that it was not for him to tell. “I will attend to
this for you to-morrow.”

“Thank you,” said the German, helping himself to the whiskey. “Have you
seen the new lodgers?”

“Those in the room behind me? Yes. I saw them at the front door as I
came in.”

“They’re a queer pair--the youngest I’ve seen in this house. I’ve been
wondering what tempest wrecked them on this forlorn coast so early in
the voyage.”

“Why wrecked?”

“My dear sir, we are all--except you--wrecks here, all unseaworthy at
least.”

“One of them was quite pretty, I thought,” said Howard, “the slender one
with the black hair.”

“They are not mates. The other girl is of a different sort. She’s more
used to this kind of life, at least to poverty. I fancy Miss Black-Hair
looks on it as a lark. But she’ll find out the truth by the time she has
mounted another story.”

“Here, to go up means to go down,” Howard said, weary of the
conversation and wishing that the German would leave.

“They say that they’re sisters,” the German went on, again helping
himself to the whiskey; “They say they have run away from home because
of a stepmother and that they are going to earn their own living. But
they won’t. They spend the nights racing about with a gang of the young
wretches of this neighbourhood. They won’t be able to stand getting up
early for work. And then----”

The German blew out a huge cloud of cigarette smoke, shrugged his
shoulders and added: “Miss Black-Hair may get on up town presently. But
I doubt it. The Tenderloin rarely recruits from down here.”

The bottle was empty and the German bowed himself out. As the night was
hot, Howard opened the door a few moments afterward. At the other end of
the short hall light was streaming through the open door of the room the
two girls had taken. Before he could turn, there was a shadow and “Miss
Black-Hair” was standing in her doorway:

“Oh,” she began, “I thought----”

Howard paused, looking at her. She was above the medium height--tall
for a woman--and slender. Her loose wrapper, a little open at her round
throat, clung to her, attracting attention to all the lines of her form.
Her hair was indeed black, jet black, waving back from her forehead in a
line of curving and beautiful irregularity. Her skin was clear and dark.
There were deep circles under her eyes, making them look unnaturally
large, pathetically weary. In repose her face was childish and sadly
serious. When she smiled she looked older and pert, but no happier.

“I thought,” she continued with the pert, self-confident smile, “that
you were my sister Nellie. I’m waiting for her.”

“You’re in early tonight,” said Howard, the circles under her eyes
reminding him of what the German had told him.

“I haven’t slept much for a week,” the girl replied, “I’m nearly dead.
But I won’t go to bed till Nellie comes.”

Howard was about to turn when she went on: “We agreed always to stay
together. She broke it tonight. My fellow got too fresh, so I came home.
She said she’d come too. That was an hour ago and she isn’t here yet.”

“Isn’t she rather young to be out alone at this time?”

Howard could hardly have told why he continued the conversation. He
certainly would not, had she been less beautiful or less lonely and
childish. At his remark about her sister’s youth she laughed with an
expression of cunning at once amusing and pitiful.

“She’s a year older than me,” she said, “and I guess I can take care of
myself. Still she hasn’t much sense. She’ll get into trouble yet. She
doesn’t understand how to manage the boys when they’re too fresh.”

“But you do, I suppose?” suggested Howard.

“Indeed I do,” with a quick nod of her small graceful head, “I know what
I’m about. _My_ mother taught _me_ a few things.”

“Didn’t she teach your sister also?”

“Miss Black-Hair” dropped her eyes and flushed a little, looking like a
child caught in a lie. “Of course,” she said after a pause.

“How long have you been without your mother?”

“I’ve been away from home four months. But I saw her in the street
yesterday. She didn’t see me though.”

“Then you’ve got a step-father?”

“No, I haven’t. Nellie told that to Mrs. Sands. But it’s not so. You
know Nellie’s not my sister?”

“I fancied not from what you said a moment ago.”

“No, she used to be nurse girl in our family. We just say we’re sisters.
I wish she’d come. I’m tired of standing. Won’t you come in?”

She went into her room, her manner a frank and simple invitation. Howard
hesitated, then went just inside the door and half sat, half leaned upon
the high roll of the lounge. The room was cheaply furnished, the lounge
and a closed folding bed almost filling it. Upon the mantel, the bureau
and the little table were a few odds and ends that stamped it a woman’s
room. A street gown of thin pale-blue cloth was thrown over a rocking
chair. As the girl leaned back in this chair with her face framed in the
pale-blue of the gown, she looked tired and sad and beautiful and very
young.

“If Nellie doesn’t look out, I’ll go away and live alone,” she said, and
the accompanying unconscious look of loneliness touched Howard.

“You might go back home.”

“You don’t know my home or you wouldn’t say that. You don’t know my
father.” She had got upon the subject of herself, and, once in that road
she kept it with no thought of turning out. “He can’t treat me as he
treats mother. Why, he goes away and stays for days. Then he comes home
and quarrels with her all the time. They never both sit through a meal.
One or the other flares up and leaves. He generally whipped me when he
got very mad--just for spite.”

“But there’s your mother.”

“Yes. She doesn’t like my going away. But I can’t stand it. Papa
wouldn’t let me go anywhere or let anybody come to see me. He says
everybody’s bad. I guess he’s about right. Only he doesn’t include
himself.”

“You seem to have a poor opinion of people.”

“Well, you can’t blame me.” She put on her wise look of experience and
craft. “I’ve been away, living with Nellie for four months and I’ve seen
no good to speak of. A girl doesn’t get a fair chance.”

“But you’ve got work?”

“Oh, yes. We both stayed down in a restaurant, Nellie’s got a place as
waiter. That’s the best she could do. The man said I was good-looking
and would catch trade. So he made me cashier. I get six dollars a week
to Nellie’s three. But it’s a bad place. The men are always slipping
notes in my hand when they give me their checks. Then the boss, he’s
always bothering around.”

“But you don’t have to work hard?”

“From nine till four. We get our lunch free. I pay three dollars on the
room and Nellie pays one.”

If Howard had not seen many such problems in economics before, he would
have been astonished at any one even hoping to be able to get two meals
a day, clothing and carfare out of two or three dollars a week. As it
was, he only wondered how long a girl who had been used at least to
comfort would endure this. “It’s easy for the other girl,” he thought,
“because she’s used to it. But this one--” and he decided that the
“trouble” would begin as soon as her clothing was worn out.

He noticed that she was pulling at the third finger of her right hand
where she would have worn rings if she had had any. “You’ve had to pawn
your rings?” he ventured.

She looked at him startled. “Did Nellie tell you?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, “I saw that you were missing your rings and suspected
the rest.”

“Yes; that’s so. I’ve pawned all my jewelry except a bracelet. Nellie
can’t get along on her three dollars. She eats too much.”

“I should think you’d rather be at home.”

“As I told you before,” she said impatiently, “anything’s better than
home. Besides, I’m pretty well off. I go where I please, stay out as
late as I please and have all the company I want. At home I’d have to be
in bed at ten o’clock.”

There was a sound at the front door down in the darkness. The girl
started from the chair, listened, then exclaimed: “There she comes now.
And it’s two o’clock!”

Howard took the hint, smiled and said: “Well, good-night. I’ll see you
again.”

“Good-night,” the girl answered absently.

From his room Howard heard Nellie coming up the stairs. “You’re a nice
one!” came in “Miss Black-Hair’s” indignant voice, “Where have you been?
Where did you and Jack go?”

The answer came in a sob--“Oh, Alice, you’ll never forgive me!”

Their door closed upon the two girls but Howard could still hear
Nellie’s voice tearful, pleading. There was the sound of some one
falling heavily upon the lounge, then sobs and cries of “Oh! Oh!”
 As Howard went into his bedroom, he could hear the voices still more
plainly through the thin wall. He caught the words only once. “Miss
Black-Hair,” her voice shaking with anger, exclaimed: “Nellie Baker, you
are a wicked girl, I shall go away.”




V.

ALICE.

Several nights later Howard came upon Alice at the front door, where a
young man was detaining her in a lingering good-bye. Another night as
he was passing her room he saw her stretched upon the floor, her head
supported by her elbows and an open book in front of her. She looked so
childlike that Howard paused and said: “What is it--a fairy story?”

“No, it’s a love story,” she replied, just glancing at him with a faint
smile and showing that she did not wish to be interrupted. The same
night as he was going to bed he heard the angry voices of the two girls.
A week later, toward the end of July, he found Alice sitting on the
front stoop, when he came from dinner. She was obviously in the depths
of the “blues.” Her eyes, the droop of the corners of her mouth, even
the colour of her skin indicated anxiety and depression. She looked so
forlorn that he said gently: “Wouldn’t you like to walk in the Square?”

She rose at once. “Yes, I guess so.” They crossed to the green. She was
wearing the pale-blue gown and it fitted her well. Neither in the gown
nor in the big hat with its coquettish flowers nodding over the brim was
there much of fashion. But there was a certain distinction in her
walk and her manner of wearing her clothes; and to a pretty face and a
graceful form was added the charm of youth, magnetic youth.

“Do you want to walk?” she asked, lassitude in her voice.

“No, let us sit,” he said, and they went to a bench near the arch. It
was twilight. The children were still romping and shouting. Many fat
elderly women--mothers and grandmothers--were solemnly marching about,
talking in fat, elderly voices.

“You have the blues?” asked Howard, thinking it might make her feel
better to talk of her troubles. “If I were your doctor, I should
prescribe a series of good cries.”

“I don’t cry,” said the girl. “Sometimes I wish I could. Nellie cries
and gets over things. I feel awful inside and sick and my eyes burn. But
I can’t cry.”

“You’re too young for that.”

“Oh, in some ways I’m young; again, I’m not. I hate everybody this
evening.”

“What’s the matter? Has Nellie deserted you?”

“She? Not much. I had to tell her to go”--this with a joyless little
laugh--“she quit work and wouldn’t behave herself. So now I’m going on
alone.”

“And you won’t go home?”

“Never in the world,” she said with almost fierce energy; then some
thought made her laugh in the same way as before. Howard decided that
she had not told him everything about her home life, even though she had
rattled on as if there were nothing to conceal. He sat watching her, she
looking straight before her, her small bare hands clasped in her lap.
He was pitying her keenly--this child, at once stunted and abnormally
developed, this stray from one of the classes that keeps their women
sheltered; and here she was adrift, without any of those resources of
experience which assist the girls of the tenements.

Her features were small, sensitive, regular. Her eyes were brown with
lines of reddish gold raying from the pupils. Her chin and mouth were
firm enough, yet suggested weakness through the passions. Her clear
skin had the glow of youth and health upon its smooth surface. She was
certainly beautiful and she certainly had magnetism.

“What do you think is going to become of you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, after a deep sigh. “A girl doesn’t have a fair
chance. I don’t seem to be able to have any fun without getting into
trouble. I don’t know what to think. It’s all so black. I wish I was
dead.”

Her dreary tone put the deepest pathos into her words. Howard had seen
despondency in youth before--had felt it himself. But there had always
been a certain lightness in it. Here was a mere child who evidently
thought, and thought with reason, that there was no hope for her; and
her despair was not a passing cloud or storm, but a settled conviction.

“There doesn’t seem to be any chance for a young girl,” she repeated
as if that phrase summed up all that was weighing upon her. And Howard
feared that she, was right. Even the readiest of all commodities,
advice, failed him. “What can she do?” he thought. “If she has no home,
worth speaking of”--then he went on aloud:

“Haven’t you friends?”

She laughed again with that slight moving of the lips and with eyes
mirthless. “Who wants me for a friend? Nobody’d think I was respectable.
And I guess I’m not so very. There’s Nellie and her--friends. Oh, the
girls join in with the men to drag other girls down. But I won’t do
that. I don’t care what becomes of me--except that.”

“Why?” he asked, curious for her explanation of this aversion.

“I don’t know why,” she replied. “There doesn’t seem to be any good
reason. I’ve thought I would several times. And then--well, I just
couldn’t.”

Howard turned the subject and tried to draw her out of this mood. They
sat there for several hours and became well acquainted. He found that
she had an intelligent way of looking at things, that she observed
closely, and that she appreciated and understood far more than he had
expected.

It was the beginning of a series of evenings spent together. He took her
with him on many of his assignments and they often dined together at
“Le Chat Noir” or the “Restaurant de Paris,” or “The Manhattan” over
in Second Avenue. Late in June she bought a new gown--a pale-grey with
ribbons and hat to match. Howard was amused at the anxious expression
in her gold-brown eyes as she waited for his opinion. And when he said:
“Well, well, I never saw you look so pretty,” she looked much prettier
with a slight colour rising to tint the usual pallor of her cheeks.

One Sunday he came home in the afternoon and found her helping the maid
at straightening his rooms. As he lay on the lounge smoking he watched
her lazily. She handled his books with a great deal of awe. She opened
one of them and sat on the floor in the childlike way she often had. She
read several sentences aloud. It was a tangle of technical words on the
subject of political economy.

“What do you have such stupid things around for?” she said, smiling and
rising. She began to arrange the books and papers on the table. He was
looking at her but thinking of something else when he became conscious
that she had got suddenly white to the lips. He jumped to his feet.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, “are you going to faint?”

Her eyes were shining as with fever out of a ghostly face. Her lips
trembled as she answered: “Oh it’s nothing. I do this often.” She went
slowly into the back room where the maid was. In a few minutes she
returned, apparently as usual. She flitted about uneasily, taking up now
one thing, now another in a purposeless, nervous way.

“I never was in here before,” she said. “You’ve got lots of pretty
things. Whose picture is this?”

“That? Oh, my sister-in-law out in Chicago.”

Howard did not then understand why she became so gay, why her eyes
danced with happiness, why as soon as she went into the hall she began
to sing and kept it up in her own room, quieting down only to burst
forth again. He did not even especially note the swift change, the, for
her, extraordinary mood of high spirits. It was about this time that
their relations began to change.

Howard had thought of her, or had thought that he thought of her, only
as a lonely and desolate child, to be taught so far as he was capable of
teaching and she of learning. He was conscious of her extreme youth and
of the impassable gulf of thought and taste between them. He did not
take her feelings into account at all. It never occurred to him that
this part of friend and patron which he was playing was not safe for
him, not just and right toward her.

One night he took her to a ball at the Terrace Garden--a
respectable, amusing affair “under the auspices of the
Young-German-American-Shooting-Society.” The next day a reporter for the
_Sun_ whom he knew slightly said to him with a grin he did not like:
“Mighty pretty little girl you’re taking about with you, Howard. Where’d
you pick her up?”

Howard reddened, angry with himself for reddening, angry with the _Sun_
man for his impudence, ashamed that he had put himself and Alice in such
a position. But the incident brought the matter of his relation with her
sharply and clearly before his mind and conscience.

“This must stop,” he said to himself; “it must stop at once. It is
unjust to her. And it is dragging me into an entanglement.”

But the mischief had been done. She loved him. And with the confidence
of youth and inexperience, she was disregarding all the obstacles,
was giving herself up to the dream that he would presently love her in
return, with the end as in the story books. Indeed love stories became
her constant companions. Where she once read them for amusement, she now
read them as a Christian reads his Bible--for instruction, inspiration,
faith, hope and courage.

One evening in July--it was in the week of Independence Day--Howard’s
windows and door were thrown wide to get the full benefit of whatever
stir there might be in the air. He was sprawled upon the lounge, the
table drawn close and upon it a lamp shedding a dim light through the
room but enough near by to let him read. He had dropped his book and was
thinking whether a stroll in the Square in the moonlight would repay the
trouble of moving. There were steps in the hall and then, peeping round
the door-frame was the face of his young neighbour.

“Hello,” he said, “I thought you were out somewhere. Come in.”

“No, I’m going to bed,” she answered, nevertheless gradually edging into
the room. She was wearing a loose wrapper of flowered silk, somewhat
worn and never very fine. Her black hair hung in a long thick braid to
her waist and she looked even younger than usual.

“Where have you been all evening?” asked Howard.


“Oh, I’ve been up to see a friend. She lives in Harlem, and she wants me
to come and live with her.”

“Are you going?” Howard inquired, noting that he was interested and not
pleased. “The house wouldn’t seem natural without you.”

She gave him a quick, gratified glance and, advancing further into the
room, sat upon the arm of the big rocking-chair. “She gave me a good
talking to,” she went on with a smile. “She told me I ought not to live
alone at my age. She said I ought to live with her and meet some friends
of hers. She said maybe I’d find a nice fellow to marry.”

Howard thought over this as he smoked and at last said in an
ostentatiously judicial tone: “Well, I think she’s right. I don’t see
what else there is to do. You can’t live on down here alone always.
What’s become of Nellie?”

“Nellie’s got to be a bad girl,” said Alice with a blush and a dropping
of the eyes. “She’s in Fourteenth Street every night. She says she
doesn’t care what happens to her. I saw her last night and she wanted
me to come with her. She says it’s of no use for me to put on airs. She
says I’ve got no friends and I might as well join her sooner as later.”

“Well?” Howard was keeping his eyes carefully away from hers.

“Oh, I sha’n’t go with her. As long as a girl has got anything at all
to live for, she doesn’t want that. Besides I’d rather go to the East
River.”

“Drowning’s a serious matter,” said Howard with a smile and with banter
in his tone.

“Yes, it is,” said the girl seriously, “I’ve thought of it. And I don’t
believe I could.”

“Then you’d better go with your friend and get married.”

“I don’t want to get married,” she replied, shaking her head slowly from
side to side.

“That’s what all the girls say,” laughed Howard. “But of course you
will. It’s the only thing to do.”

“Then why don’t you get married?” asked Alice, tracing one of the
flowers in her wrapper with her slim, brown forefinger.

“I couldn’t if I would and I wouldn’t if I could.”

“Oh, you could get a nice girl to marry you, I’m sure,” she said, the
colour rising faintly toward her long, downcast lashes.

“But who would get the money? It takes money to keep a nice girl.”

“Oh, not much,” said Alice earnestly, yet with a queer hesitation in her
voice. “You oughtn’t to marry those extravagant girls. I’ve read about
them and I think they don’t make very good wives, real wives to save
money and--and care.”

“You seem to know a good deal about these things for your age,” said
Howard, much amused and showing it.

“I don’t care,” she persisted, “you ought to get married.”

Howard felt that this was the time to clear the girl’s mind of any
“notions” she might have got. He would be very clever, very adroit. He
would not let her suspect that he had any idea of her thoughts. Indeed
he was not perfectly certain that he had. But he would gently and
frankly tell her the truth.

“I shall never get married,” he said, sitting up and talking as one who
is discussing a case which he understands thoroughly yet has no personal
interest in. “I haven’t the money and I haven’t the desire. I am what
they would call a confirmed bachelor. I wouldn’t marry any girl who
had not been brought up as I have been. We should be unhappy together
unsuited each to the other. She would soon hate me. Besides, I wish to
be free. I care more for freedom than I ever shall for any human being.
As I am now, so I shall always be, a wandering fellow without ties. It
is not a pleasant prospect for old age. But I have made up my mind to it
and I shall never marry.”

The girl’s hands had dropped limp into her lap; her face was down so
that he could barely see the burning blush which overspread it.

“You don’t mean that,” she said in a voice that was queer and choked.

“Oh yes, I do, little girl,” he answered, intending to smile when she
should look up.

When she did lift her eyes, his smile could not come. For her face was
grey and her lips bloodless and from her eyes looked despair. Howard
glanced away instantly. With rude hand he had suddenly toppled into
the dust this child’s dream-castle of love and happiness which he had
himself helped her build. He felt like a criminal. But partly from a
sense of duty, chiefly from the cowardice of self-preservation, he made
no effort to lighten her suffering.

“I should only prolong it,” he thought, “only make matters worse.
To-morrow--perhaps.”

If she had been worldly wise, even if she had not been so completely
absorbed in her worship of him that her woman-instincts were dormant,
she would herself have found hope. But she had not a suspicion that
these strong words of apparent finality were spoken to give himself
courage, to keep him from obeying the impulse to respond to the appeal
of her youth to his, her aloneness to his, her passion to his. She
believed him literally.

There was a long silence. He heard her move, heard a suppressed cry and
glanced toward her again. She was darting from the room. A second later
her door crashed. He started up and after her, hesitated, returned to
his book--but not to his reading.

Toward noon the next day, he passed her room on his way out. The
door was wide open; none of her belongings was in sight; the maid was
sweeping energetically. She paused when she saw him.

“Miss Alice left this morning,” she said, “and the room’s been let to
another party.”





VI.

IN A BOHEMIAN QUICKSAND.


Howard could have got her new address; and for many weeks habit, at
first steadily, afterward intermittently, teased him to look her up.
He was amazed at her hold upon him. At times the longing for her was so
intense that he almost suspected himself of being in love with her.

“I escaped from that none too soon,” he congratulated himself. “It
wasn’t nearly so one-sided as I thought.”

He had never been gregarious. Thus far he had not had a single intimate
friend, man or woman. He knew many people and knew them well. They liked
him and some of them sought his friendship. These were often puzzled
because it was easy to get acquainted with him, impossible to know him
intimately.

The explanation of this combination of openness and reserve,
friendliness and unapproachableness, was that his boyhood and youth had
been spent wholly among books. That life had trained him not to look to
others for amusement, sympathy or counsel, but to depend upon himself.
As his temperament was open and good-natured and sympathetic, he was as
free from enemies and enmities as he was from friends and friendships.

Women there had been--several women, a succession of idealizations which
had dispersed in the strong light of his common sense. He had never
disturbed himself about morals in what he regarded as the limited sense.
He always insisted that he was free; and he was careful only of his
personal pride and of taking no advantage of another. What he had said
to Alice about marriage was true--as to his intentions, at least. A poor
woman, he felt, he could not marry; a rich woman, he felt, he would not
marry. And he cared nothing about marriage because he was never lonely,
never leaned or wished to lean upon another, abhorred the idea of
any one leaning upon him; because he regarded freedom as the very
corner-stone of his scheme of life.

The nearest he had come to companionship was with Alice. With the other
women whom he had known in various degrees from warmth to white-heat,
there had been interruptions, no such constant freedom of access, no
such intermingling of daily life. Her he had seen at all hours and in
all circumstances. She never disturbed him but was ready to talk when
he wished to listen, listened eagerly when he talked, and was silent
and beautiful and restful to look at when he wished to indulge in the
dissipation of mental laziness.

As she loved him, she showed him only the best that there was in her and
showed it in the most attractive of all lights.

While he was still wavering or fancying that he was wavering, the
Managing Editor sent him to “do” a great strike-riot in the coal regions
of Pennsylvania. He was there for three weeks, active day and night,
interested in the new phases of life--the mines and the miners, the
display of fierce passions, the excitement, the peril.

When he returned to New York, Alice had ceased to tempt him.

       *       *       *       *       *

One midnight in the early spring he was in his sitting room, reading
and a little bored. There came a knock at the door. He hoped that it was
some one bringing something interesting or coming to propose a search
for something interesting. “Come in,” he said with welcome in his voice.
The door opened. It was Alice.

She was dressed much as she had been the first time he talked with
her--a loose, clinging wrapper open at the throat. There was a change
in her face--a change for the better but also for the worse. She looked
more intelligent, more of a woman. There was more sparkle in her eyes
and in her smile. But--Howard saw instantly the price she had paid. As
the German had suggested, she had “got on up town.”

She was pulling at the long broad blue ribbons of her negligee. Her
hands were whiter and her pink finger nails had had careful attention.
She smiled, enjoying his astonishment. “I have come back,” she said.

Howard came forward and took her hand. “I’m glad, very glad to see you.
For a minute I thought I was dreaming.”

“Yes,” she went on, “I’m in my old room. I came this afternoon. I must
have been asleep, for I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I hope it isn’t bad luck that has flung you back here.”

“Oh, no. I’ve been doing very well. I’ve been saving up to come. And
when I had enough to last me through the summer, I--I came.”

“You’ve been at work?”

She dropped her eyes and flushed. And her fingers played more nervously
with her ribbons.

“You needn’t treat me as a child any longer,” she said at last in a low
voice; “I’m eighteen now and--well, I’m not a child.”

Again there was a long pause. Howard, watching her downcast face, saw
her steadying her expression to meet his eyes. When she looked, it was
straight at him--appeal but also defiance.

“I don’t ask anything of you,” she said, “we are both free. And I
wanted to see you. I was sick of all those others--up there. I’ve
never had--had--this out of my mind. And I’ve come. And I can see you
sometimes. I won’t be in the way.”

Howard went over to the window and stared out into the lights and
shadows of the leafy Square. When he turned again she had lighted and
was smoking one of his cigarettes.

“Well,” he said smiling down at her, “Why not? Put on a street gown and
we’ll go out and get supper and talk it over.”

She sprang up, her face alight. She was almost running toward the door.
Midway she stopped, turned and came slowly back. She put one of her arms
upon his shoulder--a slender, cool, smooth, white arm with the lace of
the wide sleeve slipping away from it. She turned her face up until her
mouth, like a rosebud, was very near his lips. There was appeal in her
eyes.

“I’m very, very glad to see you,” Howard said as he kissed her.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so Howard’s life was determined for the next four years.

He worked well at his profession. He read a great deal. He wrote fiction
and essays in desultory fashion and got a few things printed in the
magazines. He led a life that was a model of regularity. But he knew the
truth--that Alice had ended his career.

He was content. Ambition had always been vague with him and now his
habit of following the line of least resistance had drifted him
into this mill-pond. Sometimes, he would give himself up to
bitter self-reproach, disgusted that he should be so satisfied, so
non-resisting in a lot in every way the reverse of that which he had
marked out for himself. If he had been chained he might, probably would,
have broken away. But Alice never attempted to control him. His will
was her law. She was especially shrewd about money matters, so often the
source of disputes and estrangements. Two months after she reappeared,
she proposed that they take an apartment together.

“I saw one to-day in West Twelfth Street at seventy dollars a month,”
 she said, “and I’m sure I could manage it so that you would be much
better off than you are now.”

He viewed this plan with suspicion. It definitely committed him to a
mode of life which he had always regarded as degrading both to the man
and the woman and as certain of a calamitous ending. So he made excuses
for delay, fully intending never to yield. But although Alice did not
speak of her plan again, he found himself more and more attracted by it,
caught himself speculating about various apartments he happened to see
as he went about the streets. She must have been conscious of what was
going on in his mind; for when, a month after she had spoken, he said
abruptly: “Where was that apartment you saw?” she went straight on
discussing the details as if there had been no interval. She was ready
to act.

The apartment was taken in her name--Mrs. Cammack, the “Mrs.” being
necessary to account for him. They selected the furniture together, he
as interested as she and very pleased to find that she had the same good
taste in those matters that she had in dress. She took all the troubles
and annoyances upon herself. When she invited him to assist in the
arrangement, it was in matters that amused him and at times when she was
sure he had nothing else to do. It is not strange that he got a wholly
false idea of the difficulties of setting up an establishment.

After a month of selecting and discussing, of pleasure in the new
experience, pleasure in Alice’s enthusiasm and excitement and happiness,
he found himself master of five attractive and comfortable rooms, his
clothing, his books, all his belongings properly arranged. The door was
opened for him by a cleanlooking coloured maid, with a tiny white cap on
her head.

As he looked around and then at the beautiful face with the wistful,
gold-brown eyes so anxiously following his wandering glance, he was very
near to loving her. Indeed, he was like a husband who has left out that
period of passionate love which extends into married life until it gives
place to boredom, or to dislike, or to some such sympathetic affection
as he felt for Alice. “It is just this that holds me,” he thought, in
his infrequent moods of dissatisfaction. “If we quarrelled or if there
were any deep feeling on my side, I should not be in this mess. I should
be”--Well, where would he be? “Probably worse off,” he usually added.

Certainly he could not have been freer, for she never questioned
him; and, if she was ever uneasy or jealous when he came in late--for
him--without telling her where he had been, she never showed it. She had
no friends, and he often wondered how she passed the time when he was
not with her. Whenever he inquired he got the same answer: She had been
busying herself with their home; she had been planning to save money or
to make him more comfortable; she had been reading to improve her mind
and to enable herself to start him talking on subjects that interested
him.

No matter how unexpectedly he looked in upon her life or her mind, he
found--himself.

One day she said to him--it was after two years of this life: “Something
is worrying you. Is it about me? You look at me so queerly at times.”

“Yes,” he answered. “It is about you. Tell me, Miss Black-Hair, do you
never think of getting old?”

“No,” she smiled. “I shall wait until I am twenty-five before I begin to
think of that.”

“But don’t you see that this sort of thing must stop sometime? It is
unjust to you. When I think of it, I reproach myself for permitting us
to get into it.”

“I am happy,” she said, looking straight at him, terror in her eyes.

“But you have no friends?”

“Who has? And what do I want with friends?”

“But don’t you see, I can’t introduce you to anybody. I can’t talk about
you to the people I know. I am always having to explain you away, always
having to act as if I were ashamed of this, my real life. At times I am
Anglo-Saxon enough to be really ashamed of it. And I ought to be and am
ashamed of myself.”

“Don’t let’s talk about it. You and I understand. Why should we bother
about the rest of the world?”

“No, we _must_ talk about it. I have been going over it carefully. We
must--must be married.”

He laid his hand upon hers. She blushed deeply and lowered her head.
A tear dropped upon the front of her gown and hung glittering in the
meshes of the white lace. She crept into his arms and buried her face
upon his shoulder and sobbed. He had never seen her even look like tears
before.

“We must be married,” he repeated, patting her on the shoulder.

She shook her head in negation.

“Yes,” he said firmly, mentally noting that this was the very first time
he had ever caught her in a pretense.

“No.” Her tone was as firm as his. She lifted her head and put her
cheek against his. “It makes me very proud that you ask it. But--I--I do
not----”

“Do not--what?”

“I do not want--I will not--risk losing you.”

“But you won’t lose me. You will have me more than ever.”

“Some men--yes. But not you.”

“And why not I, O Wisdom?”

“Because--because--do you think I have watched you all this time,
without learning something about you? The way to keep you is to leave
you free. I do not want your name. I do not want your friends I do not
want to be respectable. I want--just you.”

“But are we not as good as married now?”

“Yes--that’s it. And I want it to keep on. I never cared for anybody
until I saw you. I shall never care for anybody else. I never shall try.
I want you as long as I can have you. And then----”

“And then,” Howard laughed or rather, pretended to laugh, “and then,
‘Oh, dig me a grave both wide and deep, wide and deep.’ How like
twenty-years-old that is.”

She seemed not to hear his jest and presently went on: “Do you remember
the evening before I left, down there at Mrs. Sands’s?”

“The night you proposed to me?” Howard said, pulling her ear.

She smiled faintly and continued: “I thought it all out that night. I
intended to come back just as I did. I went deliberately. I----”

Howard put his hand over her lips.

“O, I am not going to tell anything,”, said she, evading his fingers.
“Only this--that I understood you then, understood just why you
would never marry. Not so clearly as I understand it now, but still
I--understood. And you have been teaching me ever since, teaching me
manners, teaching me how to read and think and talk. And more than all,
you’ve taught me your way of looking at life.”

Howard held her away from him and studied her face, surprise in his
eyes. “Isn’t it strange?” he said.

“Here I’ve been seeing you day after day all this time, have had a
chance to know you better than I ever knew any one in my life, have had
you very near to me day and night. And just now, as I look at you, I see
the real you for the first time in two years.”

“I have been wondering when you would look at me again,” said Alice with
a small, sly smile.

“Why, you are a woman grown. Where is the little girl I knew, the little
girl who used to look up to me?”

“Oh, she’s gone these two years. She proposed to you and, when you
refused her, she--died.”

“Yes--we must be married,” Howard went on. “Why not? It is more
convenient, let us say.”

Alice shook her head and put her cheek against his again and clasped his
fingers in hers. “No, my instinct is against it. Some day--perhaps.
But not now, not now. I want you. I want only you. We are together out
here--out beyond the pale. Inside, others would come in and--and surely
come between us. I want no others--none.”





VII.

A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT.


Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him
as a “coming man.” While his style of writing was steadily improving,
he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper
which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered
why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant
spoke of him as an impressive example of the “journalistic blight.”
 Those who looked deeper saw the truth--a dangerous facility, a perilous
inertia, a fatal entanglement. Facility enabled him to earn a good
living with ease, working as he chose. Inertia prevented him from
seeking opportunities for advancement. Entanglement shut him off from
the men and women of his own kind who would have thrust opportunities
upon him and compelled him.

Howard himself saw this clearly in his occasional moods of
self-criticism. But as he saw no remedy, he raged intermittently and
briefly, and straightway relapsed. Vanity supplied him with many
excuses and consolations. Was he not one of the best reporters in the
profession? Where was there another, where indeed in any profession were
there many of his age, making five thousand a year? Was he not always
improving his mind? Was he not more and more careful in his personal
habits? Was he not respected by all who knew him; looked upon as a
successful man; regarded by those with whom he came in daily contact as
a leader in the profession, a model for style, a marvel for facility and
versatility and for the quantity of good “copy” he could turn out in a
brief time? But with all the soothings of vanity he never could quite
hide from himself that his life was a failure up to that moment.

“Why try to lie to myself?” he thought. “It’s never a question of what
one has done but always of what one could have and should have done.
I am thirty and I have been marking time for at least four years.
Preparing by study and reading? Yes, but not preparing for anything.”

On the whole he was glad that Alice had refused to marry him. Her reason
was valid. But there was another which he thought she did not see. He
was deceived as to the depth of her insight because he did not watch her
closely. He had no suspicion how many, many times, in their moments
of demonstrativeness, she listened for those words which never came,
listened and turned away to hide from him the disappointment in her
eyes.

He did not love her--and she knew it. She did not inspire ambition in
him--and she knew it. She simply kept him comfortable and contented.
She simply prevented his amatory instincts from gathering strength
vigorously to renew that search which men and women keep up incessantly
until they find what they seek. She knew this also but never permitted
herself to see it clearly.

He was pleased with her but not proud of her. He was not exactly ashamed
of his relation with her but--well, he never relaxed his precautions for
keeping it conventionally concealed. He still had a room at his club
and occupied it occasionally. He laughed at himself, despised himself
in a--gentle, soothing way. But he excused himself to himself with
earnestness despite his sarcasms at his own expense. And for the most
of the time he was content--so well, so comfortably content that if his
mind had not been so nervously active he would have taken on the form
and look of settled middle-life.

There was just the one saving quality--his mental alertness. All his
life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him
from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from
plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was
now keeping him from the sluggard’s fate.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the last day of January--six weeks after his thirtieth birthday--he
came home earlier than usual, as they were going to the theatre and were
to dine at seven. He found Alice in bed and the doctor sitting beside
her.

“You’ll have to get some one else to go with you, I’m afraid,” she said
with good-humoured resignation, a trifle over-acted. “My cold is worse
and the doctor says I must stay in bed.”

“Nothing serious?” Howard asked anxiously, for her cheeks were flaming.

“Oh, no. Just the cold. And I am taking care of myself.”

He accompanied the doctor to the door of the apartment. At the threshold
the doctor whispered: “Make some excuse and come to my office. I wish to
see you particularly.”

He grew pale. “Don’t let her see,” urged the doctor. He went back to
Alice, sick at heart. “I must go out and arrange for some one else to do
the play for me,” he said. “I shall spend the evening with you.”

She protested, but faintly. He went to the doctor’s office.

“She must go south at once,” he began, after looking at Howard steadily
and keenly. “Nothing can save her life. That may prolong it.”

Howard seemed not to understand.

“She must go to-morrow or she’ll be gone forever in ten days.”

“Impossible,” Howard said in a dull, dazed tone.

“At once, I tell you--at once.”

“Impossible,” Howard repeated. He was saying to himself, “And only this
afternoon I wished I were free and wondered how I could free myself.” He
laughed strangely.

“Impossible,” he said again. And again he laughed. The room swam around.
He stood up. “Impossible!” he said a fourth time, almost shouting it.
And he struck the doctor full in the face, reeled and fell headlong to
the floor. When he recovered consciousness he was lying on a lounge, the
doctor’s assistant standing beside him.

“I must go to her,” he exclaimed and sat up. He saw the doctor a few
feet away, holding a cloth odorous of arnica to his cheek. Howard
remembered and began, “I beg your pardon,”--The doctor interrupted with:
“Not at all. I’ve had many queer experiences but never one like that.”
 But Howard had ceased to hear. He was staring vacantly at the floor,
repeating to himself, “And I wished to be free. And I am to be free.”

“You must go back to her. Take her south tomorrow. Asheville is the best
place.”

Howard was on his way to the door. “We shall go by the first train,” he
said.

“Pardon me for telling you so abruptly,” said the doctor, following him.
“But I saw that you weren’t--that is I couldn’t help noticing that you
and she were--And usually the man in such cases--well, my sympathy is
for the woman.”

“Do you think a man voluntarily lives with a woman because he hates
her?” Howard asked, with an angry sneer. He bowed coldly and was gone.

As he looked at Alice he saw that it was of no use to try to deceive
her. “We must go South in the morning,” he almost whispered, taking her
hand and kissing it again and again, slowly and gently.

The next day but one they were at Asheville and two weeks later Howard
could not hide from himself that she would soon be gone.

       *       *       *       *       *

Her bed was drawn up to the open window and she Was propped with
pillows. A mild breeze was flooding the room with the odours of the pine
forests and the gardens. She looked out, dilated her nostrils and her
eyes.

“Beautiful!” she murmured. “It is so easy to die here.”

She put out her hand and laid it in his.

“I want you, my Alice.” He was looking into her eyes and she into his.
“I need you. I can’t do without you.”

She smiled with an expression of happiness. “Is it wrong,” she asked,
“to take pleasure in another’s pain? I see that you are in pain, that
you suffer. And, oh, it makes me happy, so happy.”

“Don’t,” he begged. “Please don’t.”

“But listen,” she went on. “Don’t you see why? Because I--because I love
you. There,” she was smiling again. “I promised myself I never, never
would say it first. And I’ve broken my word.”

“What do you mean?”

“For nearly four years--all the years I’ve really lived--I have had only
one thought--my love for you. But I never would say it, never would say
‘I love you,’ because I knew that you did not love me.”

He was beginning to speak but she lifted her hand to his lips. Then she
put it back in his and pushed her fingers up his coat-sleeve until they
were hidden, resting upon his bare arm.

“No, you did not.” Her voice was low and the words came slowly. “But
since we came here, you have loved me. If I were to get well, were to go
back, you would not. Ah, if you knew, if you only knew how I have wanted
your love, how I have lain awake night after night, hour after hour,
whispering under my breath ‘I love you. I love you. Why do you not love
me?’”

Howard put his head down so that his face was hid from her in her lap.

“After the doctor had talked to me a few minutes, had asked me a few
questions,” she went on, “I knew. And I was not sorry. It was nearly
over, anyhow, dear. Did you know it? I often wondered if you did. Yes, I
saw many little signs. I wouldn’t admit it to myself until this illness
came. Then I confessed it to myself. And I was not sorry we were to
part this way. But I did not expect”--and she drew a long
breath--“happiness!”

“No, no,” he protested, lifting his face and looking at her. She drank
in the expression of his eyes--the love, the longing, the misery--as if
it had been a draught of life.

“Ah, you make me so happy, so happy. How much I owe to you. Four long,
long, beautiful years. How much! How much! And at last--love!”

There was silence for several minutes. Then he spoke: “I loved you
from the first, I believe. Only I never appreciated you. I was
so self-absorbed. And you--you fed my vanity, never insisted upon
yourself.”

“But we have had happiness. And no one, no one, no one will ever be to
you what I have been.”

“I love you.” Howard’s voice had a passionate earnestness in it that
carried conviction. “The light goes out with you.”

“With this little candle? No, no, dear--_my_ dear. You will be a great
man. You will not forget; but you will go on and do the things that I’m
afraid I didn’t help, maybe hindered, you in trying to do. And you will
keep a little room in your heart, a very little room. And I shall be in
there. And you’ll open the door every once in a while and come in and
take me in your arms and kiss me. And I think--yes, I feel that--that I
shall know and thrill.”

Her voice sank lower and lower and then her eyes closed, and presently
he called the nurse.

The next day he rose from his bed, just at the connecting door between
his room and hers, and looked in at her. The shades were drawn and only
a faint light crept into the room. He thought he saw her stir and went
nearer.

“Why, they’ve made you very gay this morning,” he laughed, “with the red
ribbons at your neck.”

There was no answer. He came still nearer. The red ribbons were long
streamers of blood. She was dead.






VIII.

A STRUGGLE FOR SELF-CONTROL.


He left her at Asheville as she wished--“where I have been happiest and
where I wish you to think of me.” On the train coming north he reviewed
his past and made his plans for the future.

As to the past he had only one regret--that he had not learned to
appreciate Alice until too late. He felt that his failure to advance had
been due entirely to himself--to his inertia, his willingness to seize
any pretext for refraining from action. As to the future--work, work
with a purpose. His mind must be fully and actively occupied. There must
be no leisure, for leisure meant paralysis.

At the Twenty-third Street ferry-house he got into a hansom and gave
the address of “the flat.” He did not note where he was until the hansom
drew up at the curb. He leaned forward and looked at the house--at their
windows with the curtains which she had draped so gracefully, which she
and he had selected at Vantine’s one morning. How often he had seen her
standing between those curtains, looking out for him, her blue-black
hair waving back from her forehead so beautifully and her face ready to
smile so soon as ever she should catch sight of him.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. The blood was pounding through his
temples and his eyeballs seemed to be scalding under the lids.

“Never again,” he moaned. “How lonely it is.”

The cabman lifted the trap. “Here we are, sir.”

“Yes--in a moment.” Where should he go? But what did it matter? “To a
hotel,” he said. “The nearest.”

“The Imperial?”

“That will do--yes--go there.”

He resolved never to return to “the flat.” On the following day he sent
for the maid and arranged the breaking up. He gave her everything except
his personal belongings and a few of Alice’s few possessions--those he
could keep, and those which he must destroy because he could not endure
the thought of any one having them.

At the office all understood his mourning; but no one, not even
Kittredge, knew him well enough to intrude beyond gentler looks and
tones. Kittredge had written a successful novel and was going abroad for
two years of travel and writing. Howard took his rooms in the Royalton.
They dined together a few nights before he sailed.

“And now,” said Kittredge, “I’m my own master. Why, I can’t begin to
fill the request for ‘stuff.’ I can go where I please, do as I
please. At last I shall work. For I don’t call the drudgery done under
compulsion work.”

“Work!” Howard repeated the word several times absently. Then he leaned
forward and said with what was for him an approach to the confidential:
“What a mess I have been making of my life! What waste! What folly! I’ve
behaved like a child, an impulsive, irresponsible child. And now I must
get to work, really to work.”

“With your talents a year or so of work would free you.”

“Oh, I’m free.” Howard hesitated and flushed. “Yes, I’m free,” he
repeated bitterly. “We are all free except for the shackles we fasten
upon ourselves and can unlock for ourselves. I don’t agree with you that
earning one’s daily bread is drudgery.”

“Well, let’s see you work--work for something definite. Why don’t you
try for some higher place on the paper--correspondent at Washington or
London--no, not London, for that is a lounging job which would ruin even
an energetic man. Why not try for the editorial staff? They ought
to have somebody upstairs who takes an interest in something besides
politics.”

“But doesn’t a man have to write what he doesn’t believe? You know
how Segur is always laughing at the protection editorials he writes,
although he is a free-trader.”

“Oh, there must be many directions in which the paper is free to express
honest opinions.”

Howard began that very night. As soon as he reached his club where he
was living for a few days he sat down to the file of the _News-Record_
and began to study its editorial style and method. He had learned a
great deal before three o’clock in the morning and had written a short
editorial on a subject he took from the news. In the morning he read his
article again and decided that with a few changes--adjectives cut out,
long sentences cut up, short sentences made shorter and the introduction
and the conclusion omitted--it would be worth handing in. With the
corrected article in his hand he knocked at the door of the editor’s
room.

It was a small, plainly furnished office--no carpet, three severe
chairs, a revolving book case with a battered and dusty bust of Lincoln
on it, a table strewn with newspaper cuttings. Newspapers from all
parts of the world were scattered about the floor. At the table sat the
editor, Mr. Malcolm, whom Howard had never before seen.

He was short and slender, with thin white hair and a smooth, satirical
face, deeply wrinkled and unhealthily pale. He was dressed in black
but wore a string tie of a peculiarly lively shade of red. His most
conspicuous feature was his nose--long, narrow, pointed, sarcastic.

“My name is Howard,” began the candidate, all but stammering before Mr.
Malcolm’s politely uninterested glance, “and I come from downstairs.”

“Oh--so you are Mr. Howard. I’ve heard of you often. Will you be
seated?”

“Thank you--no. I’ve only brought in a little article I thought I’d
submit for your page. I’d like to write for it and, if you don’t mind,
I’ll bring in an article occasionally.”

“Glad to have it. We like new ideas; and a new pen, a new mind, ought to
produce them. If you don’t see your articles in the paper, you’ll know
what has happened to them. If you do, paste them on space slips and
send them up by the boy on Thursdays.” Mr. Malcolm nodded and smiled and
dipped his pen in the ink-well.

The editorial appeared just as Howard wrote it. He read and reread it,
admiring the large, handsome editorial type in which it was printed, and
deciding that it was worthy of the excellent place in the column which
Mr. Malcolm had given it. He wrote another that very day and sent it
up by the boy. He found it in his desk the next noon with “Too
abstract--never forget that you are writing for a newspaper” scrawled
across the last page in blue pencil.

In the two following months Howard submitted thirty-five articles.
Three were published in the main as he wrote them, six were “cut” to
paragraphs, one appeared as a letter to the editor with “H” signed to
it. The others disappeared. It was not encouraging, but Howard kept on.
He knew that if he stopped marching steadily, even though hopelessly,
toward a definite goal, a heavy hand would be laid upon his shoulder to
drag him away and fling him down upon a grave.

As it was, desperately though he fought to refrain from backward
glances, he was now and again taken off his guard. A few of her pencil
marks on the margin of a leaf in one of his books; a gesture, a little
mannerism of some woman passing him in the street--and he would be ready
to sink down with weariness and loneliness, like a tired traveller in a
vast desert.

He completely lost self-control only once. It was a cold, wet May night
and everything had gone against him that day. He looked drearily round
his rooms as he came in. How stiff, how forbidding, how desert they
seemed! He threw himself into a big chair.

“No friends,” he thought, “no one that cares a rap whether I live or
die, suffer or am happy. Nothing to care for. Why do I go on? What’s the
use if one has not an object--a human object?”

And their life together came flooding back--her eyes, her kisses,
her attentions, her passionate love for him, so pervasive yet so
unobtrusive; the feeling of her smooth, round arm about his neck; her
way of pressing close up to him and locking her fingers in his; the
music of her voice, singing her heartsong to him yet never putting it
into words----

He stumbled over to the divan and stretched himself out and buried his
face in the cushions. “Come back!” he sobbed. “Come back to me, dear.”
 And then he cried, as a man cries--without tears, with sobs choking up
into his throat and issuing in moans.

“Curious,” he said aloud when the storm was over and he was sitting up,
ashamed before himself for his weakness, “who would have suspected me of
this?”





IX.

AMBITION AWAKENS.


Howard was now thirty-two. He was still trying for the editorial staff;
but in the last month only five of his articles had been printed to
twenty-three thrown away. A national campaign was coming on and the
_News-Record_ was taking a political stand that seemed to him sound and
right. For the first time he tried political editorials.

The cause aroused his passion for justice, for democratic equality and
the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded
in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of
statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of
only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet
calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet
direct--these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling,
rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, careful balancing of
words for exact shades of meaning.

“I shall never learn to write,” had been his complaint of himself
to himself for years. And in these days it seemed to him that he was
farther from a good style than ever. His standards had risen, were
rising; he feared that his power of accomplishment was failing.
Therefore his heart sank and his face paled when an office boy told him
that Mr. Malcolm wished to see him.

“I suppose it’s to tell me not to annoy him with any more of my
attempts,” he thought. “Well, anyway, I’ve had the benefit of the work.
I’ll try a novel next.”

“Take a seat,” said Mr. Malcolm with an absent nod. “Just a moment, if
you please.”

On a chair beside him was the remnant of what had been a huge
up-piling of newspapers--the exchanges that had come in during the past
twenty-four hours. The Exchange Editor had been through them and Mr.
Malcolm was reading “to feel the pulse of the country” and also to make
sure that nothing of importance had been overlooked.

On the floor were newspapers by the score, thrown about tumultuously.
Mr. Malcolm would seize a paper from the unread heap, whirl it open and
send his glance and his long pointed nose tearing down one column and up
another, and so from page to page. It took less than a minute for him
to finish and filing away great sixteen page dailies. A few seconds
sufficed for the smaller papers. Occasionally he took his long shears
and with a skilful twist cut out a piece from the middle of a page and
laid it and the shears upon the table with a single motion.

“Now, Mr. Howard.” Malcolm sent the last paper to increase the chaos on
the floor and faced about in his revolving chair. “How would you like to
come up here?”

Howard looked at him in amazement. “You mean----”

“We want you to join the editorial staff. Mr. Walker has married him a
rich wife and is going abroad to do literary work, which means that he
is going to do nothing. Will you come?”

“It is what I have been working for.”

“And very hard you have worked.” Mr. Malcolm’s cold face relaxed into
a half-friendly, half-satirical smile. “After you’d been sending up
articles for a fortnight, I knew you’d make it. You went about it
systematically. An intelligent plan, persisted in, is hard to beat in
this world of laggards and hap-hazard strugglers.”

“And I was on the point of giving up--that is, giving up this particular
ambition,” Howard confessed.

“Yes, I saw it in your articles--a certain pessimism and despondency.
You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent
quality--but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working
evenly without regard to his feelings or physical condition. The night
my oldest child died--I was editor of a country newspaper--I wrote my
leaders as usual. I never had written better. You can be absolute master
inside, if you will. You can learn to use your feelings when they’re
helpful and to shut them off when they hinder.”

“But don’t you think that temperament----”

“Temperament--that’s one of the subtlest forms of self-excuse. However,
the place is yours. The salary is a hundred and twenty-five a week--an
advance of about twelve hundred a year, I believe, on your average
downstairs. Can you begin soon?”

“Immediately,” said Howard, “if the City Editor is satisfied.”

An office boy showed him to his room--a mere hole-in-the-wall with just
space for a table-desk, a small table, a case of shelves for books of
reference, and two chairs. The one window overlooked the lower end
of Manhattan Island--the forest of business buildings peaked with the
Titan-tenements of financial New York. Their big, white plumes of
smoke and steam were waving in the wind and reflecting in pale pink the
crimson of the setting sun.

Howard had his first taste of the intoxication of triumph, his first
deep inspiration of ambition. He recalled his arrival in New York, his
timidity, his dread lest he should be unable to make a living--“Poor
boy,” they used to say at home, “he will have to be supported. He is too
much of a dreamer.” He remembered his explorations of those now familiar
streets--how acutely conscious he had been that they were paved with
stone, walled with stone, roofed with a stony sky, peopled with faces
and hearts of stone. How miserably insignificant he had felt!

And all these years he had been almost content to be one of the crowd,
like them exerting himself barely enough to provide himself with the
essentials of existence. Like them, he had given no real thought to the
morrow. And now, with comparatively little labour, he had put himself
in the way to become a master, a director of the enormous concentrated
energies summed up in the magic word New York.

The key to the situation was--work, incessant, self-improving,
self-developing. “And it is the key to happiness also,” he thought.
“Work and sleep--the two periods of unconsciousness of self--are the two
periods of happiness.”

His aloofness freed him from the temptations of distraction. He knew no
women. He did not put himself in the way of meeting them. He kept away
from theatres. He sunk himself in a routine of labour which, viewed from
the outside, seemed dull and monotonous. Viewed from his stand-point of
acquisition, of achievement, it was just the reverse.

The mind soon adapts itself to and enjoys any mental routine which
exercises it. The only difficulty is in forming the habit of the
routine.

Howard was greatly helped by his natural bent toward editorial writing.
The idea of discussing important questions each day with a vast
multitude as an audience stirred his imagination and aroused his
instincts for helping on the great world-task of elevating the race.
This enthusiasm pleased and also amused his cynical chief.

“You believe in things?” Malcolm said to him after they had become well
acquainted. “Well, it is an admirable quality--but dangerous. You will
need careful editing. Your best plan is to give yourself up to your
belief while you are writing--then to edit yourself in cold blood.
That is the secret of success, of great success in any line, business,
politics, a profession--enthusiasm, carefully revised and edited.”

“It is difficult to be cold blooded when one is in earnest.”

“True,” Malcolm answered, “and there is the danger. My own enthusiasms
are confined to the important things--food, clothing and shelter. It
seems to me that the rest is largely a matter of taste, training and
time of life. But don’t let me discourage you. I only suggest that you
may have to guard against believing so intensely that you produce the
impression of being an impracticable, a fanatic. Be cautious always; be
especially cautious when you are cocksure you’re right. Unadulterated
truth always arouses suspicion in the unaccustomed public. It has the
alarming tastelessness of distilled water.”

Howard was acute enough to separate the wisdom from the cynicism of his
chief. He saw the lesson of moderation. “You have failed, my very able
chief,” he said to himself, “because you have never believed intensely
enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the
adulteration--the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a
critic, destructive but never constructive.”

At first his associates were much amused by his intensity. But as he
learned to temper and train his enthusiasm they grew to respect both his
ability and his character. Before a year had passed they were feeling
the influence of his force--his trained, informed mind, made vigorous by
principles and ideals.

Malcolm had the keen appreciation of a broad mind for this honest,
intelligent energy. He used the editorial “blue-pencil” for alteration
and condensation with the hand of a master. He cut away Howard’s
crudities, toned down and so increased his intensity, and pointed it
with the irony and satire necessary to make it carry far and penetrate
easily.

Malcolm was at once giving Howard a reputation greater than he deserved
and training him to deserve it.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the office next to Howard’s sat Segur, a bachelor of forty-five who
took life as a good-humoured jest and amused his leisure with the New
Yorkers who devote a life of idleness to a nervous flight from boredom.
Howard interested Segur who resolved to try to draw him out of his
seclusion.

“I’m having some people to dinner at the Waldorf on Thursday,” he said,
looking in at the door. “Won’t you join us?”

“I’d be glad to,” replied Howard, casting about for an excuse for
declining. “But I’m afraid I’d ruin your dinner. I haven’t been out for
years. I’ve been too busy to make friends or, rather, acquaintances.”

“A great mistake. You ought to see more of people.”

“Why? Can they tell me anything that I can’t learn from newspapers or
books more accurately and without wasting so much time? I’d like to know
the interesting people and to see them in their interesting moments. But
I can’t afford to hunt for them through the wilderness of nonentities
and wait for them to become interesting.”

“But you get amusement, relaxation. Then too, it’s first-hand study of
life.”

“I’m not sure of that. Yawning is not a very attractive kind of
relaxation, is it? And as for study of life, eight years of reporting
gave me more of that than I could assimilate. And it was study of
realities, not of pretenses. As I remember them, ‘respectable’ people
are all about the same, whether in their vices or in their virtues. They
are cut from a few familiar, ‘old reliable’ patterns. No, I don’t think
there is much to be learned from respectability on dress parade.”

“You’ll be amused on Thursday. You must come. I’m counting on you.”

Howard accepted--cordially as he could not refuse decently. Yet he had
a presentiment or a shyness or an impatience at the interruption of
his routine which reproached him for accepting with insistence and
persistence.





X.

THE ETERNAL MASCULINE.


It was the first week in November, and in those days “everybody” did not
stay in the country so late as now. There were many New Yorkers in
the crowd of out-of-town people at the Waldorf. Howard was attracted,
fascinated by the scene--carefully-groomed men and women, the air of
gaiety and ease, the flowers, the music, the lights, the perfumes. At a
glance it seemed a dream of life with evil and sorrow and pain banished.

“No place for a working man,” thought he, “at least not for my kind of
a working man. It appeals too sharply to the instincts for laziness and
luxury.”

He was late and stood in the entrance to the palm-garden, looking about
for Segur. Soon he saw him waving from a table near the wall under the
music-alcove.

“The oysters are just coming,” said Segur. “Sit over there between Mrs.
Carnarvon and Miss Trevor. They are cousins, Howard, so be cautious what
you say to one about the other. Oh, here is Mr. Berersford.”

The others knew each other well; Howard knew them only as he had seen
their names in the “fashionable intelligence” columns of the newspapers.
Mrs. Carnarvon was a small thin woman in a black velvet gown which made
her thinness obtrusive and attractive or the reverse according as one’s
taste is toward or away from attenuation. Her eyes were a dull, greenish
grey, her skin brown and smooth and tough from much exposure in the
hunting field. Her cheeks were beginning to hang slightly, so that one
said: “She is pretty, but she will soon not be.” Her mouth proclaimed
strong appetites--not unpleasantly since she was good-looking.

Miss Trevor was perhaps ten years younger than her cousin, not far from
twenty-four. She had a critical, almost amused yet not unpleasant way
of looking out of unusually clear blue-green eyes. Her hair was of an
ordinary shade of dark brown, but fine and thick and admirably arranged
to set off her long, sensitive, high bred features. Her chin and mouth
expressed decision and strong emotions.

There was a vacant chair between Segur and Berersford and it was
presently filled by a fat, middle-aged woman, neither blonde nor
brunette, with a large, serene face. Upon it was written a frank
confession that she had never in her life had an original thought
capable of creating a ripple of interest. She was Mrs. Sidney, rich,
of an “old” family--in the New York meaning of the word “old”--both by
marriage and by birth, much courted because of her position and because
she entertained a great deal both in town and at a large and hospitable
country house.

The conversation was lively and amused, or seemed to amuse, all. It was
purely personal--about Kittie and Nellie and Jim and Peggie and Amy and
Bob; about the sayings and doings of a few dozen people who constituted
the intimates of these five persons.

Mrs. Carnarvon turned to the silent Howard at last and began about the
weather.

“Horrible in the city, isn’t it?”

“Well, perhaps it is,” replied Howard. “But I fancied it delightful. You
see I have not lived anywhere but New York for so long that I am hardly
capable to judge.”

“Why everybody says we have the worst climate in the world.”

“Far be it from me to contradict everybody. But for me New York has the
ideal climate. Isn’t it the best of any great city in the world? You
see, we have the air of the sea in our streets. And when the sun shines,
which it does more days in the year than in any other great city, the
effect is like champagne--or rather, like the effect champagne looks as
if it ought to have.”

“I hate champagne,” said Mrs. Carnarvon. “Marian, you must not drink it;
you know you mustn’t.” This to Miss Trevor who was lifting the glass to
her lips. She drank a little of the champagne, then set the glass down
slowly.

“What you said made me want to drink it,” she said to Howard. “I was
glad to hear your lecture on the weather. I had never thought of it
before, but New York really has a fine climate. And only this afternoon
I let that stupid Englishman--Plymouth--you’ve met him? No?--Well, at
any rate, he was denouncing our climate and for the moment I forgot
about London.”

“Frightful there, isn’t it, after October and until May?”

“Yes, and the air is usually stale even in the late spring. When it’s
warm, it’s sticky. And when it’s cold, it’s raw.”

“You are a New Yorker?”

“Yes,” said Miss Trevor faintly, and for an instant showing surprise at
his ignorance. “That is, I spend part of the winter here--like all New
Yorkers.”

“All?”

“Oh, all except those who don’t count, or rather, who merely count.”

“How do you mean?” Howard was taking advantage of her looking into her
plate to smile with a suggestion of irony. She happened to glance up and
so caught him.

“Oh,” she said, smiling with frank irony at him, “I mean all those
people--the masses, I think they’re called--the people who have to be
fussed over and reformed and who keep shops and--and all that.”

“The people who work, you mean?”

“No, I mean the people you never meet about anywhere, the people who
read the newspapers and come to the basement door.”

“Oh, yes, I understand.” Howard was laughing. “Well, that’s one way of
looking at life. Of course it’s not my way.”

“What is your way?”

“Why, being one of those who count only in the census, I naturally take
a view rather different from yours. Now I should say that _your_ people
don’t count. You see, I am most deeply interested in people who read
newspapers.”

“Oh, you write for the papers, like Jim Segur? What do you write?”

“What they call editorials.”

“You are an editor?”

“Yes and no. I am one of the editors who does not edit but is edited.”

“It must be interesting,” said Miss Trevor, vaguely.

“More interesting than you imagine. But then all work is that. In
fact work is the only permanently interesting thing in life. The rest
produces dissatisfaction and regret.”

“Oh, I’m not so very dissatisfied. Yet I don’t work.”

“Are you quite sure? Think how hard you work at being fitted for gowns,
at going about to dinners and balls and the like, at chasing foxes and
anise seed bags and golf balls.”

“But that is not work. It is amusing myself.”

“Yes, you think so. But you forget that you are doing it in order that
all these people who don’t count may read about it in the papers and so
get a little harmless relaxation.”

“But we don’t do it to get into the papers.”

“Probably not. Neither did this--what is it here in my plate, a lamb
chop?--this lamb gambol about and keep itself in condition to form a
course at Segur’s dinner. But after all, wasn’t that what it was really
for? Then think how many people you support by your work.”

“You make me feel like a day-labourer.”

“Oh, you’re a much harder worker than any day labourer. And the saddest
part of it to me is that you work altogether for others. You give, give
and get in return nothing but a few flattering glances, a few careless
pats on the back of your vanity. I should hate to work so hard for so
little.”

“But what would you do?” Miss Trevor was looking at him, interested and
amused.

“Well, I’d work for myself. I’d insist on a return, on getting back
something equivalent or near it. I’d insist on having my mind improved,
or having my power or my reputation advanced.”

“I was only jesting when I said that about people not counting.”

“Altogether?”

“No, not altogether. I don’t care much about the masses. They seem to
me to be underbred, of a different sort. I hate doing things that are
useful and I hate people that do useful things--in a general way, I
mean.”

“That is doubtless due to defective education,” said Howard, with a
smile that carried off the thrust as a jest.

“Is that the way you’d describe a horror of contact with--well, with
unpleasant things?” Miss Trevor was serious.

“But is it that? Isn’t it just an unconscious affectation, taken up
simply because all the people about you think that way--if one can call
the process thinking? You don’t think, do you, that it is a sign of
superiority to be narrow, to be ignorant, to be out of touch with the
great masses of one’s fellow-beings, to play the part of a harlequin or
a ballet-girl on the stage of life? I understand how a stupid ass can
fritter away his one chance to live in saying and hearing and doing
silly things. But ought not an intelligent person try to enjoy life, try
to get something substantial out of it, try to possess himself of its
ideas and emotions? Why should one play the fool simply because those
about one are incapable of playing any other part?”

“I’m surprised that you are here to-night. Still, I suppose you’ll give
yourself absolution on the plea that one must dine somewhere.”

“But I’m not wasting my time. I’m learning. I’m observing a phase of
life. And I’m seeing the latest styles in women’s gowns and--”

“Is that important--styles, I mean?”

“Do you suppose that my kind of people, the working classes, would spend
so much time and thought in making anything that was not important?
There is nothing more important.”

“Then you don’t think we women are wasting time when we talk about dress
so much?”

“On the contrary, it is an evidence of your superior sagacity. Women
talk trade, ‘shop,’ as soon as they get away from the men. They talk men
and dress--fish and nets.”

Berersford heard the word fish and interrupted.

“Do you go South next month, Marian?”

“Yes--about the fifteenth.” Miss Trevor explained to Howard: “Bobby--Mr.
Berersford here--always fishes in Florida in January.”

The conversation again became general and personal. Howard knew none of
the people of whom they were talking and all that they said was of
the nature of gossip. But they talked in a sparkling way, using good
English, speaking in agreeable voices with a correct accent, and
indulging in a great deal of malicious humour.

As they separated Mrs. Sidney, to whom Howard had not spoken during the
evening, said to Segur: “You must bring Mr. Howard on Sunday afternoon.”

“Will you drop Marian at the house for me?” Mrs. Carnarvon asked her. “I
want to go on to Edith’s.”

Segur went with Mrs. Sidney and Marian to their carriage. “Who is Mr.
Howard?” Mrs. Sidney said, and Miss Trevor drew nearer to hear the
answer.

“One of the editorial writers down on the paper and a very clever
one--none better. He works hard and is desperately serious and a regular
hermit.”

“I think he’s very handsome--don’t you, Marian?”

“I found him interesting,” said Miss Trevor.

Howard thought a great deal about Miss Trevor that night, and she was
still in his head the next day. “This comes of never seeing women,” he
said to himself. “The first girl I meet seems the most beautiful I ever
saw, and the most intellectual. And, when I think it over, what did she
say that was startling?”

Nevertheless he went with Segur the next Sunday to Mrs. Sidney’s great
house in the upper Avenue overlooking the Park.

“Why do I come here?” he asked himself. “It is a sheer waste of time.
Mrs. Sidney can do me no good, or I her. It must be the hope of seeing
Miss Trevor.”

When the gaudy and be-powdered flunkey held back the heavy curtains of
the salon to announce him and Segur, he saw Miss Trevor on a low chair
absently staring into the fire. Yet when he had spoken to Mrs. Sidney
and turned toward her she at once stretched out her hand with a slight
smile. Some others came in and Howard was free to talk to her. He sat
looking at her steadily, admiring her almost perfect profile, delicate
yet strong.

“And what have you been doing since I saw you?” Miss Trevor asked.

“Writing little pieces about politics for the paper,” replied Howard.

“Politics? I detest it. It is all stealing and calling names, isn’t it?
And something dreadful is always going to happen if somebody or other
isn’t elected, or is elected, to something or other. And then, whether
he is or not, nothing happens. I should think the men who have been so
excited and angry and alarmed would feel very cheap. But they don’t. And
the next time they carry on in just the same ridiculous way.”

“Politics is like everything else--interesting if you understand what it
is all about. But like everything else, you can’t understand it without
a little study at first. It’s a pity women don’t take an interest. If
they did the men might become more reasonable and sane about it than
they are now. But you--what have you been doing?”

“I--oh, industriously superintending the making of my new nets.” Marian
laughed and Howard was flattered. “And also, well, riding in the Park
every morning. But I never do anything interesting. I simply drift.”

“That’s so much simpler and more satisfactory than threshing and
splashing about as I do. It seems so fussy and foolish and futile. I
wish--that is, sometimes I wish--that I had learned to amuse myself in
some less violent and exhausting way.”

“Marian--I say, Marian,” called Mrs. Sidney. “Has Teddy come down?”

Miss Trevor coloured slightly as she answered: “No, he comes a week
Wednesday. He’s still hunting.”

“Hunting,” Howard repeated when Mrs. Sidney was again busy with the
others. “Now there is a kind of work that never bothers a man’s brains
or sets him to worrying. I wish I knew how to amuse myself in some such
way.”

“You should go about more.”

“Go--where?”

“To see people.”

“But I do see a great many people. I’m always seeing them--all day
long.”

“Yes--but that is in a serious way. I mean go where you will be
amused--to dinners for instance.”

“I don’t dare. I can’t work at work and also work at play. I must work
at one or the other all the time. I can do nothing without a definite
object. I can’t be just a little interested in anything or anybody.
With me it is no interest at all or else absorption until interest is
exhausted.”

“Then if you were interested in a woman, let us say, you’d be absorbed
until you found out all there was, and then you’d--take to your heels.”

“But she might always be new. She might interest me more and more.
Anyhow I fancy that she would weary of me long before I wearied of her.
I think women usually weary first. Men are very monotonous. We are as
vain as women, if not vainer, without their capacity for concealing it.
And vanity makes one think he does not need to exert himself to please.”

“But why do people usually say that it is the men that are difficult to
hold?”

“Because the men hold the women, not through the kind of interest we are
talking about, but through another kind--quite different. Women are
so lazy and so dependent--dependent upon men for homes, for money, for
escort even.”

Miss Trevor was flushing, as if the fire were too hot--at least she
moved a little farther away from it. “Your ideal woman would be a
shop-girl, I should say from what you’ve told me.”

“Perhaps--in the abstract. I really do think that if I were going to
marry, I should look about for a working-girl, a girl that supported
herself. How can a man be certain of the love of a woman who is
dependent upon him? I should be afraid she was only tolerating me as a
labour-saving device.”

Miss Trevor laughed. “There certainly is no vanity in that remark,” she
said. “Now I can’t imagine most of the men I know thinking that.”

“It’s only theory with me. In practice doubtless I should be as
self-complacent as any other man.”

They left Mrs. Sidney’s together and Howard walked down the Avenue with
her. It seemed a wonderful afternoon--the air dazzling, intoxicating.
He was filled with the joy of living and was glad this particular tall,
slender, distinguished-looking girl was there to make his enjoyment
perfect. They were gay with the delight of being young and in health and
attractive physically and mentally each to the other. They looked each
at the other a great deal, and more and more frankly.

“Am I never to see you again?” he asked as he rang the bell for her.

“I believe Mrs. Carnarvon is going to invite you to dine here Thursday
night.”

“Thank you,” said Howard.

Miss Trevor coloured. But she met his glance boldly and laughed. Howard
wondered why her laugh was defiant, almost reckless.

       *       *       *       *       *

He saw Segur at the club after dinner that same night. “And how do you
like Miss Trevor?” Segur began as the whiskey and carbonic were set
before them.

“A very attractive girl,” said Howard.

“Yes--so a good many men have thought in the last five years. She’s
marrying Teddy Danvers in the spring, I believe. At any rate it’s
generally looked on as settled. Teddy’s a good deal of a ‘chump.’
But he’s a decent fellow--good-looking, good-natured, domestic in his
tastes, and nothing but money.”

Howard was smiling to himself. He understood Miss Trevor’s sudden
consciousness of the nearness of the fire, her flush when Mrs. Sidney
asked about “Teddy,” and the recklessness in her parting laugh.

“Well, Teddy’s in luck,” he said aloud.

“Not so sure of that. She’s quite capable of leading him a dance if he
bores her. And bore her he will. But that is nothing new. This town is
full of it.”

“Full of what?”

“Of weary women--weary wives. The men are hobby-riders. They have just
one interest and that usually small and dull--stocks or iron or real
estate or hunting or automobiles. Our women are not like the English
women--stupid, sodden. They are alive, acute. They wish to be
interested. Their husbands bore them. So--well, what is the natural
temptation to a lazy woman in search of an interest?”

“It’s like Paris--like France?”

“Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not
fond of intrigue for its own sake--at least, not as a rule.”

“Doesn’t interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It’s the American blood
coming out--the passion for achievement. They want a man of whom they
can be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it
well.”

“I doubt that,” replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. “When a woman
loves a man, she wants to absorb him.”

Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed
thought about Teddy Danvers’s fiancée--the first temptation that had
entered his loneliness since Alice died.

In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following
her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she
was and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of
the Valley of the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true
relations and true proportions. But only there was it possible for
the gap between him and Alice to close--that gap of which she was more
acutely conscious than he, and which she made wider far than it really
was by being too humble with him, too obviously on her knees before him.
Such superiority as she thought he possessed is not in human nature; but
neither is it in human nature to refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon
a pedestal if the opportunity presses.

In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal
masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit
of the eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most
alluringly personified in this beautiful, graceful girl, at once
appreciative and worthy of appreciation.

Perhaps she appealed most strongly to Howard in her vivid suggestion of
the open air--of health and strength and nature. He had been leading a
cloistered existence and his blood had grown sluggish. She gave him the
sensation that a prisoner gets when he catches a glimpse from his barred
window of the fields and the streams radiating the joy of life and
freedom. And Marian was of his own kind--like the women among whom he
had been brought up. She satisfied his idea of what a “lady” should be,
but at the same time she was none the less a woman to him--a woman to
love and to be loved; to give him sympathy, companionship; to inspire
him to overcome his weaknesses by striving to be worthy of her; to bring
into his life that feminine charm without which a man’s life must be
cold and cheerless.

He knew that he could not marry her, that he had no right to make love
to her, that it was unwise to go near her again. But he had no power to
resist the temptation. And even in those days he had small regard for
the means when the end was one upon which he had fixed his mind. “Why
not take what I can get?” he thought, as he dreamed of her. “She’s
engaged--her future practically settled. Yes, I’ll be as happy as she’ll
let me.” And he resumed his idealising.

At his time of life idealisation is still not a difficult or a long
process. And in this case there was an ample physical basis for it--and
far more of a mental basis than young imagination demands. He took the
draught she so frankly offered him; he added a love potion of his own
concocting, and drank it off.

He was in love.




XI.

TRESPASSING.


For the first time since he had been in newspaper work, Howard came to
the office the next day in a long coat and a top hat. He left early and
went for a walk in the Avenue. But Miss Trevor was neither driving
nor walking. He repeated this excursion the next afternoon with better
success. At Fortieth Street he saw her and her cousin half a block ahead
of him. He walked slowly and examined her. She was satisfactory from
the aigrette in her hat to her heels--a long, narrow, graceful figure,
dressed with the expensive simplicity characteristic of the most
intelligent class of the women of New York and Paris. She walked as
if she were accustomed to walking. Mrs. Carnarvon had that slight
hesitation, almost stumble, which indicates the woman who usually drives
and never walks if she can avoid it. As they paused at the crowded
crossing of Forty-second Street he joined them. When Mrs. Carnarvon
found that he was “just out for the air” she left them, to go home--in
Forty-seventh Street, a few doors east of the Avenue.

“Come back to tea with her,” she said as she nodded to Howard.

“We have at least an hour.” Howard was looking at Miss Trevor with his
happiness dancing in his eyes. “Why shouldn’t we go to the Park?”

“I believe it’s not customary,” objected Miss Trevor in a tone that made
the walk in the Park a certainty.

“I’m glad to hear that. I don’t care to do customary things as a rule.”

“I see that you don’t.”

“Do you say so because I show what I am thinking so plainly that you
can’t help seeing it--and don’t in the least mind?”

“Why shouldn’t you be glad to be alive and to be seeing me this fine
winter day?”

“Why indeed!” Howard looked at her from head to foot and then into her
eyes.

“We are not in the Park yet.” Miss Trevor accompanied her hint with a
laugh and added: “I feel reckless to-day.”

“You mean you forget that there is any to-morrow. _I_ have shut out
to-morrow ever since I saw you.”

“And yesterday?” She noted that he coloured slightly, but continued to
look at her, his eyes sad. “But there is a to-morrow,” she went on.

“Yes--my work, my career is my to-morrow and yours is----”

“Well?”

“Your engagement, of course.”

Miss Trevor flushed, but Howard was smiling and she did not long resist
the contagion.

“My to-morrow,” he continued, “is far more menacing than yours. Yours
is just an ordinary, every-day, cut-and-dried affair. Mine is full
of doubts and uncertainties with the chances for failure and
disappointment. If I can turn my back on my to-morrow, surely you can
waive yours for the moment?”

“But why are you so certain that I wish to?”

“Instinct. I could not be so happy as I am with you if you were not
content to have me here.”

They spoke little until they were well within the Park. There they
turned down a by-path and took the walk skirting the lower lake. Miss
Trevor looked at Howard with a puzzled expression.

“I never met any one like you,” she said. “I have always felt so sure of
myself. You take me off my feet. I feel as if I did not know where I was
going and--didn’t much care. And that’s the worst of it.”

“No, the best of it. You are a star going comfortably through your
universe in a fixed orbit. You maintain your exact relations with your
brother and sister stars. You keep all your engagements, you never
wobble in your path--everything exact, mathematical. And up darts a
wild-haired, impetuous comet, a hurrying, bustling, irregular wanderer
coming from you don’t know where, going you don’t know whither. We pass
very near each to the other. The social astronomers may or may not note
a little variation in your movement--a very little, and soon over. They
probably will not note the insignificant meteor that darted close up to
you--close enough to get his poor face sadly scorched and his long hair
cruelly singed--and then hurried sadly away. And----”

“And--what? Isn’t there any more to the story?” Marian’s eyes were
shining with a light which she was conscious had never been there
before.

“And--and----” Howard stopped and faced her. His hands were thrust deep
in the pockets of his overcoat. He looked at her in a way that made the
colour fly from her face and then leap back again. “And--I love you.”

“Oh”--Marian said, hiding her face in her white muff. “Oh.”

“I don’t wish to touch you,” he went on, “I just wish to look at you--so
tall, so straight, so--so alive, and to love you and be happy.” Then he
laughed and turned. “But you’ll catch cold. Let us walk on.”

“So you are trying to make a career?” she asked after a few minutes’
silence.

“Yes--trying--or, rather, I was. And shall again when you have gone your
way and I mine.”

Marian was amazed at herself. Every tradition, every instinct of her
life was being trampled by this unknown whom she had just met. And she
was assisting in the trampling. In fact it was difficult for her to
restrain herself from leading in the iconoclasm. She looked at him in
wonder and delighted terror.

“Why do you look at me in that way?” he said, turning his head suddenly.

“Because you are stronger than I--and I am afraid--yet I--well--I like
it.”

“It is not I that is stronger than you, nor you that are stronger than
I. It is a third that is stronger than both of us. I need not mention
the gentleman’s name?”

“It is not necessary. But I’d like to hear you pronounce it. At least I
did a moment ago.”

“I’ll not risk repetition. I’ve been thinking of what might have been.”

“What?” Marian laughed a little, rather satirically. “A commonplace
engagement and a commonplace wedding and a commonplace honeymoon leading
into a land of commonplace disillusion and yawning--or worse?”

“Not unlikely. But since we’re only dreaming why not dream more to our
taste? Now as I look at your strong, clear, ambitious profile, I can
dream of a career made by two working as one, working cheerfully day
in and day out, fair and foul weather, working with the certainty of
success as the crown.”

“But failure might come.”

“It couldn’t. We wouldn’t work for fame or for riches or for any outside
thing. We would work to make ourselves wiser and better and more worthy
each of the other and both of our great love.”

Again they were walking in silence.

“I am so sad,” Marian said at last. “But I am so happy too. What has
come over me? But--you will work on, won’t you? And you will accomplish
everything. Yes, I am sure you will.”

“Oh, I’ll work--in my own way. And I’ll get a good deal of what I want.
But not everything. You say you can’t understand yourself. No more can I
understand myself. I thought my purpose fixed. I knew that I had nothing
to do with marrying and giving in marriage, so I kept away from danger.
And here, as miraculously as if a thunderbolt had dropped from this open
winter sky, here is--you.”

They were in the Avenue again--“the awakening,” Howard said as the flood
of carriages rolled about them.

“You will win,” she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh
Street. “You will be famous.”

“Probably not. The price for fame may be too big.”

“The price? But you are willing to work?”

“Work--yes. But not to lie, not to cheat, not to exchange self-respect
for self-contempt--at least, I think, I hope not.”

“But why should that be necessary?”

“It may not be if I am free--free to meet every situation as it arises,
with no responsibility for others resting upon me in the decision. If I
had a wife, how could I be free? I might be forced to sell myself--not
for fame but for a bare living. Suppose choice between freedom with
poverty and comfort with self-contempt were put squarely at me, and I a
married man. She would decide, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes, and if she were the right sort of a woman, decide instantly for
self-respect.”

“Of course--if I asked her. But do you imagine that when a man loves a
woman he lets her know?”

“It would be a crime not to let her know.”

“It would be a greater crime to put her to the test--if she were a woman
brought up, say, as you have been.”

“How can you say that? How can you so overestimate the value of mere
incidentals?”

“How can I? Because I have known poverty--have known what it was to
look want in the face. Because I have seen women, brought up as you have
been, crawling miserably about in the sloughs of poverty. Because I have
seen the weaknesses of human nature and know that they exist in me--yes,
and in you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and
self-reliant. It is easy to talk of misery when one does not understand
it. It is easy to be the martyr of an hour or a day. But to drag into a
sordid and squalid martyrdom the woman one loves--well, the man does not
live who would do it, if he knew what I know, had seen what I have seen.
No, love is a luxury of the rich and the poor and the steady-going. It
is not for my kind, not for me.”

They were pausing at Mrs. Carnarvon’s door.

“I shall not come in this afternoon,” he said. “But to-morrow--if I
don’t come in to-day, don’t you think it will be all right for me to
come then?”

“I shall expect you,” she said.

The talk of those who had come in for tea seemed artificial and flat.
She soon went up-stairs, eager to be alone. Mechanically she went to her
desk to write her customary daily letter to Danvers. She looked vacantly
at the pen and paper, and then she remembered why she was sitting there.

“You are a traitor,” she said to her reflection in the mirror over the
desk. “But you will pay for your treason. Has not one a right to that
for which she is willing to pay?”




XII.

MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH.


To be sure of a woman a man must be confident either of his own powers
or of her absolute frankness and honesty. It was self-assurance that
made Edward Danvers blindly confident of Marian.

His father, a man with none but selfish uses for his fellow men, had
given him a pains-taking training as a vigilant guard for a great
fortune. His favourite maxim was, “Always look for motives.” And he once
summed up his own character and idea of life by saying: “I often wake at
night and laugh as I think how many men are lying awake in their beds,
scheming to get something out of me for nothing.”

There could be but one result of such an education by such an educator.
Danvers was acutely suspicious, saved from cynicism and misanthropy
by his vanity only. He was the familiar combination of credulity and
incredulity, now trusting not at all and again trusting with an utter
incapacity to judge. Had he been far more attractive personally, he
might still have failed to find genuine affection. To be liked for one’s
self alone or even chiefly is rarely the lot of any human being who has
a possession that is all but universally coveted--wealth or position or
power or beauty.

Danvers and Marian had known each the other from childhood. And she
perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else
of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness,
his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his
narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities--his kindness of heart,
his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense
of justice which made him a good employer and a good landlord. They had
much in common--the same companions, the same idea of the agreeable and
the proper, the same passion for out-door life, especially for hunting.
He fell in love with her when she came back from two years in England
and France, and she thought that she was in love with him. She
undoubtedly was fond of him, proud of his handsome, athletic look and
bearing, proud of his skill and daring in the hunting field.

One day--it was in the autumn a year before Howard met her--they were
“in at the death” together after a run across a stiff country that
included several dangerous jumps. “You’re the only one that can keep
up with me,” he said, admiring her glowing face and star-like eyes,
her graceful, assured seat on a hunter that no one else either cared or
dared to ride.

“You mean you are the only one who can keep up with _me,_” she laughed,
preparing for what his face warned her was coming.

“No I don’t, Marian dear. I mean that we ought to go right on keeping up
with each other. You won’t say no, will you?”

Marian was liking him that day--he was looking his best. She
particularly liked his expression as he proposed to her. She had
intended to pretend to refuse him; instead her colour rose and she said:
“No--which means yes. Everybody expects it of us, Teddy. So I suppose we
mustn’t disappoint them.”

The fact that “everybody” did expect it, the fact that he was the great
“catch” in their set, with his two hundred and fifty thousand a year,
his good looks and his good character--these were her real reasons,
with the first dominant. But she did not admit it to herself then. At
twenty-four even the mercenary instinct tricks itself out in a most
deceptive romantic disguise if there is the ghost of an opportunity.
Besides, there was no reason, and no sign of an approaching reason, for
the shadow of a suspicion that life with Teddy Danvers would not be full
of all that she and her friends regarded as happiness.

But she would not marry immediately. She was tenacious of her freedom.
She was restless, dissatisfied with herself and not elated by her
prospects. She had an excellent mind, reasonable, appreciative,
ambitious. Until she “came out” she had spent much time among books; but
as she had had no capable director of her reading, she got from it
only a vague sense, that there was somewhere something in the way of
achievement which she might possibly like to attain if she knew what it
was or where to look for it. As she became settled in her place in the
routine of social life, as her horizon narrowed to the conventional
ideas of her set, this sense of possible and attractive achievement
became vaguer. But her restlessness did not diminish.

“I never saw such an ungrateful girl,” was Mrs. Carnarvon’s comment
upon one of Marian’s outbursts of almost peevish fretting. “What do you
want?”

“That’s just it,” exclaimed Marian, half-laughing. “What _do_ I want?
I look all about me and I can’t see it. Yet I know that there must be
something. I think I ought to have been a man. Sometimes I feel
like running away--away off somewhere. I feel as if I were getting
second-bests, paste substitutes for the real jewels. I feel as I did
when I was a child and demanded the moon. They gave me a little gilt
crescent and said: ‘Here is a nice little moon for baby;’ and it made me
furious.”

Mrs. Carnarvon looked irritated. “I don’t understand it. You are getting
the best of everything. Of course you can’t expect to be happy. I don’t
suppose that any one is happy. But all the solid things of life are
yours, and you can and should be comfortable and contented.”

“That’s just it,” answered Marian indignantly. “I have always been
swaddled in cotton wool. I have never been allowed really to feel. I
think it is the spirit of revolt in me. Yes, I ought to have been a man.
I’m sure that then I could have made life a little less tiresome.”

It was this dissatisfaction that postponed the announcement of the
engagement from month to month until a year had slipped away.

Instead of coming to New York, Danvers went off to Montana for a
mountain-lion hunt with two Englishmen who had been staying with him in
“The Valley.” He would join Marian for the trip South, the engagement
would be announced, and the wedding would be in May--such was the
arrangement which Marian succeeded in making. It settled everything and
at the same time it gave her a month of freedom in New York. She hinted
enough of this programme to Howard to enable him to grasp its essential
points.

“A month’s holiday,” was his comment. They were alone on the second seat
of George Browning’s coach, driving through the Park. “If we were like
those people”--he was looking at a young man and young woman, side by
side upon a Park bench, blue with cold but absorbed in themselves and
obviously ecstatic. Marian glanced at them with slightly supercilious
amusement and became so interested that she turned her head to follow
them with her eyes after the coach had passed.

“Is he kissing her?” asked Howard.

“No--not yet. But I’m sure he will as soon as we have turned the
corner.” She said nothing for a moment or two, her glance straight ahead
and upon vacancy, he admiring the curve of her cheek at the edge of its
effective framing of fur.

“But we are not----” She spoke in a low tone, regretful, pensive, almost
sad. “We are not like them.”

“Oh, yes we are. But--we fancy we are not. We’ve sold our birthright,
our freedom, our independence for--for----”

“Well--what?”

“Baubles--childish toys--vanities--shadows. Doesn’t it show what
ridiculous little creatures we human beings are that we regard the most
valueless things as of the highest value, and think least of the true
valuables. For, tell me, Lady-Whom-I-Love, what is most valuable in
the few minutes of this little journey among the stars on the good ship
Mother Earth?”

“But you would not care always as you care now? It would not, could not,
last. If we--if we were like those people on the bench back there, we’d
go on and--and spoil it all.”

“Perhaps--who can say? But in some circumstances couldn’t I make you
just as happy as--as some one else could?”

“Not if you had made me infinitely happier at one time than even you
could hope to make me all the time. At least I think not. It would
always be--be racing against a record; we both would be, wouldn’t we?”

Howard looked at her with an expression which transfigured his face and
sent the colour flaming to her cheeks. “That being the case,” he said,
“let us--let us make the record one that will not be forgotten--soon.”

During the month he saw her almost every day. She was most ingenious in
arranging these meetings. They were together afternoons and evenings.
They were often alone. Yet she was careful not to violate any
convention, always to keep, or seem to be keeping, one foot “on the
line.” Howard threw himself into his infatuation with all his power of
concentration He practically took a month’s holiday from the office.
He thought about her incessantly. He used all his skill with words in
making love to her. And she abandoned herself to an equal infatuation
with equal absorption. Neither of them spoke of the past or the future.
They lived in the present, talked of the present.

One day she spoke of herself as an orphan.

“I did not know that,” he said. “But then what do I know about you in
relation to the rest of the world? To me you are an isolated act of
creation.”

“You must tell me about yourself.” She was looking at him, surprised.
“Why, I know nothing at all about you.”

“Oh, yes, you do. You know all that there is to know--all that is
important.”

“What?” She was asking for the pleasure of hearing him say it.

“That I love you--you--all of you--all of you, with all of me.”

Her eyes answered for her lips, which only said smilingly: “No, we
haven’t time to get acquainted--at least not to-day.”

       *       *       *       *       *

She was to start for Florida at ten the next morning. Mrs. Carnarvon was
going away to the opera, giving them the last evening alone. Marian had
asked this of her point-blank.

“You are an extraordinarily sensible as well as strong-willed girl,
Marian,” Mrs. Carnarvon replied.

“I can’t find it in my heart to blame you for what you’re doing. The
fact that I haven’t even hinted a protest, but have lent myself to your
little plots, shows that that young man has hypnotized me also.”

“You needn’t disturb yourself, as you know,” Marian said gaily. “I’m not
hypnotized. I shall not see Mr. Howard again until--after it’s all over.
Perhaps not then.”

He came to dinner and they were not alone until almost nine. She sat
near the open fire among the cushions heaped high upon the little sofa.
She had never been more beautiful, and apparently never in a happier
mood. They both laughed and talked as if it were the first instead of
the last day of their month. Neither spoke of the parting; each avoided
all subjects that pointed in direction of the one subject of which both
thought whenever their minds left the immediate present. As the little
clock on the mantle began to intimate in a faint, polite voice the
quarter before eleven, he said abruptly, almost brusquely:

“I feel like a coward, giving you up in this way. Yes--giving you up;
for you have a traitor in your fortress who has offered me the keys, who
offers them to me now. But I do not trust you; and I can’t trust myself.
The curse of luxury is on you, the curse of ambition on me. If we had
found each the other younger; if I had lived less alone, more in the
ordinary habit of dependence upon others; if you had been brought up
to live instead of to have all the machinery of living provided and
conducted for you--well, it might have been different.”

“You are wrong as to me, right as to yourself. But yours is not the
curse of ambition. It is the passion for freedom. It would be madness
for you, thinking as you do, even if you could--and you can’t.”

He stood up and held out his hand. She did not rise or look at him.

“Good night,” she said at last, putting her hand in his. “Of course I
am thinking I shall see you tomorrow. One does not come out of such a
dream,”--she looked up at him smiling--“all in a moment.”

“Good night,” he smiled back at her. “I shall not open ‘the fiddler’s
bill’ until--until I have to.” At the door he turned. She had risen and
was kneeling on the sofa, her elbow on its low arm, her chin upon her
hand, her eyes staring into the fire. He came toward her.

“May I kiss you?” he said.

“Yes.” Her voice was expressionless.

He bent over and just touched his lips to the back of her neck at the
edge of her hair. He thought that she trembled slightly, but her face
was set and she did not look toward him. He turned and left her. Half an
hour later she heard the bell ring--it was Mrs. Carnarvon. She wished to
see no one, so she fled through the rear door of the reception room and
up the great stairway to lock herself in her boudoir. She sank slowly
upon the lounge in front of the fire and closed her eyes. The fire died
out and the room grew cold. A warning chilliness made her rise to get
ready for bed.

“No,” she said aloud. “It isn’t ambition and it isn’t lack of love.
It’s a queer sort of cowardice; but it’s cowardice for all that. He’s
a coward or he wouldn’t have given up. But--I wonder--how am I going to
live without him? I need him--more than he needs me, I’m afraid.”

She was standing before her dressing table. On it was a picture of
Danvers--handsome, self-satisfied, healthy, unintellectual. She looked
at it, gave a little shiver, and with the end of her comb toppled it
over upon its face.





XIII.

RECKONING WITH DANVERS.


On that journey south Marian for the first time studied Danvers as a
husband in prospect.

The morning after they left New York, their private car arrived at
Savannah. At dark the night before they were rushing through a snow
storm raging in a wintry landscape. Now they were looking out upon
spring from the open windows. As soon as the train stopped, all except
Marian and Danvers left the car to walk up and down the platform.
Danvers, standing behind Marian, looked around to make sure that none of
the servants was about, then rubbed his hand caressingly and familiarly
upon her cheek.

“Did you miss me?” he asked.

Marian could not prevent her head from shrinking from his touch.

“There’s nobody about,” Danvers said, reassuringly. But he acted upon
the hint and, taking his hand away, came around and sat beside her.

“Did you miss me?” he repeated, looking at her with an expression in his
frank, manly blue eyes that made her flush at the thought of “treason”
 past and to come.

“Did _you_ miss _me_?” she evaded.

“I would have returned long ago if I had not been ashamed,” he answered,
smiling. “I never thought that I should come not to care for as good
shooting as that. You almost cost me my life.”

“Yes?” Marian spoke absently. She was absorbed in her mental comparison
of the two men.

“I got away from the others and was looking at your picture. They
started up a lion and he came straight at me from behind. If he hadn’t
made a misstep in his hurry and loosened a stone, I guess he would have
got me. As it was, I got him.”

“You mean your gun got him.”

“Of course. You don’t suppose I tackled him bare-handed.”

“It might have been fairer. I don’t see how you can boast of having
killed a creature that never bothered you, that you had to go thousands
of miles out of your way to find, and that you attacked with a gun,
giving him no chance to escape.”

“What nonsense!” laughed Danvers. “I never expected to hear you say
anything like that. Who’s been putting such stuff into your head?”

Marian coloured. She did not like his tone. She resented the suggestion
of the truth that her speech was borrowed. It made her uncomfortable to
find herself thus unexpectedly on the dangerous ground.

“I suppose it must have been that newspaper fellow Mrs. Carnarvon has
taken up. She talked about him for an hour after you left us to go to
bed last night.”

“Yes, it was--was Mr. Howard.” Marian had recovered herself. “I want you
to meet him some time. You’ll like him, I’m sure.”

“I doubt it. Mrs. Carnarvon seemed not to know much about him. I suppose
he’s more or less of an adventurer.”

Marian wondered if this obvious dislike was the result of one of those
strange instincts that sometimes enable men to scent danger before any
sign of it appears.

“Perhaps he is an adventurer,” she replied. “I’m sure I don’t know. Why
should one bother to find out about a passing acquaintance? It is enough
to know that he is amusing.”

“I’m not so sure of that. He might make off with the jewels when you had
your back turned.”

As soon as she had made her jesting denial of her real lover Marian was
ashamed of herself. And Danvers’ remark, though a jest, cut her. “What
I said about a passing acquaintance was not just or true,” she said
impulsively and too warmly. “Mr. Howard is not an adventurer. I admire
and like him very much indeed. I’m proud of his friendship.”

Danvers shrugged his shoulders and looked at her suspiciously.

“You saw a good deal of this--this friend of yours?” he demanded, his
mouth straightening into a dictatorial line.

At this Marian grew haughty and her eyes flashed: “Why do you ask?” she
inquired, her tone dangerously calm.

“Because I have the right to know.” He pointed to the diamond on her
third finger.

“Oh--that is soon settled.” Marian drew off the ring and held it out to
him. “Really, Teddy, I think you ought to have waited a little longer
before insisting so fiercely on your rights.”

“Don’t be absurd, Marian.” Danvers did not take the ring but fixed his
eyes upon her face and changed his tone to friendly remonstrance. “You
know the ring doesn’t mean anything. It’s your promise that counts. And
honestly don’t you think your promise does give me the right to ask you
about your new friends when you speak of them, of one of them, in--in
such a way?”

“I don’t intend to deceive you,” she said, turning the ring around
slowly on her finger. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I suppose the only
way to speak is just to speak.”

“Do you think you are in love with this man, Marian?”

She nodded, then after a long pause, said, “Yes, Teddy, I love him.”

“But I thought----”

“And so did I, Teddy. But he came, and I--well I couldn’t help it.”

As he did not speak, she looked at him. His face was haggard and white
and in his eyes which met hers frankly there was suffering.

“It wasn’t my fault, Teddy,” Marian laid her hand on his arm, “at least,
not altogether. I might have kept away and I didn’t.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you. I blame him.”

“But it wasn’t his fault. I--I--encouraged him.”

“Did he know that we were engaged?”

“Yes,” reluctantly.

“The scoundrel! I suspected that he was rotten somewhere.”

“You are unjust to him. I have not told you properly.”

“Did he tell you that he cared for you?”

“Yes--but he didn’t try to get me to break my engagement.”

“So much the more a scoundrel, he. Tell me, Marian--come to your senses
and tell me--what in the devil did he hang about you for and make love
to you, if he didn’t want to marry you? Would an honest man, a decent
man, do that?”

Marian’s face confessed assent.

“I should think you would have seen what sort of a fellow he is. I
should think you would despise him.”

“Sometimes it seems to me that I ought to. But I always end by despising
myself--and--and--it makes no difference in the way I feel toward him.”

“I think I would do well to look him up and give him a horse-whipping.
But you’ll get over him, Marian. I am astonished at your cousin. How
could she let this go on? But then, she’s crazy about him too.”

Marian smiled miserably. “I’ve owned up and you ought to congratulate
yourself on so luckily getting rid of such an untrustworthy person as
I.”

“Getting rid of you?” Danvers looked at her defiantly. “Do you think I’m
going to let you go on and ruin yourself on an impulse? Not much! I hold
you to your promise. You’ll come round all right after you’ve been away
from this fellow for a few days. You’ll be amazed at yourself a week
from now.”

“You don’t understand, Teddy.” Marian wished him to see once for all
that, whatever might be the future for her and Howard, there was no
future for her and him. “Don’t make it so hard for me to tell you.”

“I don’t want to hear any more about it now, Marian. I can’t stand it--I
hardly know what I’m saying--wait a few days--let’s go on as we have
been--here they come.”

The others of the party came bustling into the car and the train
started. For the rest of the journey Danvers avoided her, keeping to the
smoking room and the game of poker there. Marian could neither read nor
watch the landscape. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry that
she had told him. She hated to think that she had inflicted pain and she
could not believe, in spite of what she had seen in his eyes, that his
feeling in the matter was more than jealousy and wounded vanity.

“He doesn’t really care for me,” she thought. “It’s his pride that is
hurt. He will flare out at me and break it off. I do hope he’ll get
angry. It will make it so much easier for me.”

Late in the afternoon she took Mrs. Carnarvon into her confidence. “I’ve
told Teddy,” she said.

“I might have known!” exclaimed her cousin. “What on earth made you do
that?”

“I don’t know--perhaps shame.”

“Shame--trash! Your life is going to be a fine turmoil if you run to
Teddy with an account of every little mild flirtation you happen
to have. Of all the imbeciles, the most imbecile is the woman who
confesses.”


“But how could I marry him when----”

“When you don’t love him?”

“No--I might have done that. I like him. But, when I love another man.”

“It does make a difference. But you ought to be able to foresee that
you’ll get over Howard in a few weeks----”

“Precisely what Teddy said.”

“Did he? I’m surprised at his having so much sense. For, if you’ll
forgive me, I don’t think Teddy will ever set New York on fire--at
least, he’s--well, he has the makings of an ideal husband. And has he
broken it off?”

“No. He wouldn’t have it.”

“Really? Well he _is_ in love. Most men in his position--able to get any
girl he wants--would have thrown up the whole business. Yes, he must be
awfully in love.”

“Do you think that?” Marian’s voice spoke distress but she felt only
satisfaction. “Oh, I hope not--that is, I’d like to think he cared a
great deal and at the same time I don’t want to hurt him.”

“Don’t fret yourself about these two men. Just go on thinking as you
please. You’ll be surprised how soon Howard will fade.” Mrs. Carnarvon
smiled satirically at some thought--perhaps a memory. “You’re a good
deal of a goose, my dear, but you are a great deal more of a woman.
That’s why I feel sure that Teddy will win.”

With such an opportunity--with the field clear and the woman
half-remorseful over her treachery, half-indignant at the man who had
shown himself so weak and spiritless--a cleverer or a less vain man than
Danvers would have triumphed easily. And for the first week he did make
progress. He acted upon the theory that Marian had been hypnotized and
that the proper treatment was to ignore her delusion and to treat her
with assiduous but not annoying consideration. He did not pose as an
injured or jealous lover. He was the friend, always at her service,
always thinking out plans for her amusement. He made no reference to
their engagement or to Howard.

Several people of their set were at the hotel and Marian was soon
drifting back into her accustomed modes of thought. The wider horizon
which she fancied Howard had shown her was growing dim and hazy. The
horizon which he had made her think narrow was beginning again to
seem the only one. This meant Danvers; but he was not acute enough to
understand her and to follow up his advantage.

One morning as he was walking up and down under the palms, waiting for
Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian, Mrs. Fortescue called him. She was a cold,
rather handsome woman. In her eyes was the expression that always
betrays the wife or the mistress who loathes the man she lives with,
enduring him only because he gives her that which she most wants--money.
She had one fixed idea--to marry her daughter “well,” that is, to money.

“Can you join us to-day, Teddy?” she asked. “We need one more man.”

“I’m waiting for Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian,” he explained.

“Oh, of course.” Mrs. Fortescue smiled. “What a nice girl she is--so
clever, so--so independent. I admired her immensely for deciding to
marry that poor, obscure young fellow. I like to see the young people
romantic.”

Danvers flushed angrily and pulled at his mustache. He tried to smile.
“We’ve teased her about it a good deal,” he said, “but she denies it.”

“I suppose they aren’t ready to announce the engagement yet,” Mrs.
Fortescue suggested. “I suppose they are waiting until he betters
his position a little. It’s never a good idea to have too long a time
between the announcement and the marriage.”

“Perhaps that is it.” Danvers tried to look indifferent but his eyes
were sullen with jealousy.

“I always rather thought that you and Marian were going to make a match
of it,” continued Mrs. Fortescue. Just then her daughter came down the
walk. She was fashionably dressed in white and blue that brought out all
the loveliness of her golden hair and violet eyes and faintly-coloured,
smooth fair skin. Danvers had not seen her since she “came out,” and was
dazzled by her radiance.

They say that every man must be a little in love with every pretty
woman he sees. And Danvers at once gave Ellen Fortescue her due. She
sat silent beside her mother, looking the personification of innocence,
purity and poetry. Her mother continued subtly to poison Danvers against
Marian, to make him feel that she had not appreciated him, that she
had trifled with him, that she had not treated him as his dignity and
importance merited. When she and Mrs. Carnarvon appeared, he joined them
tardily, after having made an arrangement with the Fortescues for the
next day.

That evening he danced several times with Ellen Fortescue and adopted
the familiar lover’s tactics--he set about making Marian jealous. He
scored the customary success. When she went to bed she lay for several
hours looking out into the moonlight, raging against the Fortescues and
against Danvers. The mere fact that a man whom she regarded as hers was
permitting himself to show marked attention to another woman would have
been sufficient. But in addition, Marian was perfectly aware of the
material advantages of this particular man. She did not want to marry
him; at least she was of that mind at the moment. But she might change
her mind. Certainly, if there was to be any breaking off, she wished
it to be of her doing. She did not fancy the idea of him departing
joyfully.

She was far too wise to show that she saw what was going on. She praised
Miss Fortescue to Danvers with apparent frankness and insisted on him
devoting more time to her. Danvers persisted in his scheme boldly for a
week and then, just as Marian was despairing and was casting about for
another plan of campaign, he gave in. They were sitting apart in the
shadow near one of the windows of the ball-room. He had been sullen all
the evening, almost rude.

“How much longer are you going to keep me in suspense?” he burst out
angrily.

“In suspense?”

“You know what I mean. I think I’ve been very patient.”

“You mean our engagement?” Marian was looking at him, repelled by his
expression, his manner, the tone of his voice, his whole mood.

“Yes--I want your decision.”

“I have not changed.”

“You still love that--that newspaper fellow?”

“No, I don’t mean that.” Marian felt her irritation against Danvers
suddenly vanish and in its place a Sense of relief and of calmness. “I
mean toward you. It won’t do, Teddy. We shall get on well as friends.
But I can’t think of you in--in that way.”

Mrs. Fortescue had so swollen his vanity that he was astounded at
Marian’s decision. He rapidly went over in his mind all the advantages
he offered as a husband, and then looked at her as if he thought her
beside herself.

“Look here, Marian,” he protested. “You can’t mean it. Why, it’s all
settled that we are to marry. It would be madness for you to break
it off. I can give you everything--everything. And he can’t give you
anything.” Then with fatal tactlessness: “He won’t even give you the
little that he can, according to your own story.”

“Yes, it’s madness, isn’t it, Teddy, to refuse you--fascinating you,
who can give everything. But that’s just it. You have too much. You
overwhelm me. I should feel like a cheat, taking so much and giving so
little.”

“Don’t,” he begged, his self-complacence and superiority all gone.
“Don’t mind my blundering, please, dear. I want you. I can’t say it. I
haven’t any gift of words. But you’ve known me all my life and you know
that I love you. I’ve set my heart on it, Mary Ann,”--it was the name
he used to tease her with when they were children playing together--“You
won’t go back on me now, will you?”

“I wish I could do as you wish, Teddy.” Marian was forgetful of
everything but the unhappiness she was causing this friend of so many,
many years and of so many, many memories. “But I can’t--I can’t.”

“Marry me, dear, anyhow. You will care afterward.” Marian was silent and
Danvers hoped. “You know all about me. I’ll not give you any surprises.
I shan’t bother you. And I’ll make you happy.”

“No,” she said firmly. “You mustn’t ask it. I’ll tell you why. I have
thought of marrying you regardless of this. Only last night I thought of
it--finally, went over the whole thing. Listen, Teddy--if I were married
to you--and if he should come--and he would come sooner or later--if
he should come and say ‘Come with me,’--I’d go--yes, I’m sure I’d go.
I can’t explain why. But I know that nothing would stand in the
way--nothing.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Marian shrank from him. She was
horrified by the malignant fury that sparkled in his eyes and raged in
his voice. “That damned scoundrel is worthy of you and you of him. But
I’ll get you yet. I never was crossed in anything in my life and I’ll
not be beaten here.”

“And I thought you were my friend!” Marian was looking at him, pale, her
eyes wide with amazement. “Is it really you?”

He laughed insolently. “Yes--you’ll see. And he’ll see. I’ll crush him
as if he were an egg shell. And as for you--you perjurer--you liar!”

He looked at her with coarse contempt, rose and stalked away. Marian sat
rigid. She was conscious of the insult. But even that humiliation was
not so strong in her mind as the astounding revelation of Danvers. She
remembered that even as his eyes blazed hatred at her, he looked at her,
at her neck, her bare arms, with the baffled desire of brute passion.
She did not fully understand the look, but she felt that it was a
degradation far greater than his insulting words.

She slipped, almost skulked to her room, her eyes down, her face in
a burning flush, her scarf drawn tightly about her neck. As her door
closed behind her, she fell upon her bed and began to sob hysterically.
She started up with a scream to find her cousin standing beside her.

“I’m so sorry. Forgive me.” Mrs. Carnarvon’s voice had lost its wonted
levity. “I saw that you were in trouble and followed. I knocked and
I thought I heard you answer. What is it, Marie? May I ask? Can I do
anything?”

Marian drew her down to the bed and buried her face in her lap. “Oh,
I feel so unclean,” she said. “It was--Teddy. Would you believe it,
Jessie, Teddy! I looked on him as a brother. And he showed me that he
was not my friend--that he didn’t even love me--that he--oh, I shall
never forget the look in his eyes. He made me feel like a--like a
_thing_.”

Mrs. Carnarvon smothered a smile. “Of course Teddy’s a brute,” she said.
“I thought you knew. He’s a domesticated brute, like most of the men and
some of the women. You’ll have to get used to that.”

By refusing to fall in with her mood, Mrs. Carnarvon had gone far toward
curing it. Marian stopped sobbing and presently said:

“Oh, I know all that. But I didn’t expect it from Teddy--and toward me.
And--” she shuddered--“I was thinking, actually thinking of marrying
him. I wish never to see him again. And he pretended to be my friend!”

“And he was, no doubt, until he got you on the brain in another way, in
the way he calls love. There isn’t any love that has friendship in it.”

“We must go away at once.”

“Unless Teddy saves us the trouble by going first, as I suspect he
will.”

“Jessie, he hates me and--and--Mr. Howard.”

“So you talked to him about Howard again, did you?” Mrs. Carnarvon
was indignant. “You are old enough to know better, Marian. You carry
frankness entirely too far. There is such a thing as truth running
amuck.”

“He said he would crush Howard. And I believe he really meant it.”

“Teddy is a man who believes in revenges--or thinks he does. His father
taught him to keep accounts in grievances, and no doubt he has opened an
account with Howard. But don’t be disturbed about it. His father would
have insisted on balancing the account. Teddy will just keep on hating,
but won’t do anything. He’s not underhanded.”

“He’s everything that is vile and low.”

“You’re quite mistaken, my dear. He’s what they call a manly fellow--a
little too masculine perhaps, but----”

A knock interrupted and Mrs. Carnarvon, answering it, took from the
bell-boy a note for Marian who read it, then handed it to her. Mrs.
Carnarvon read: “I apologise for the way I said what I did this evening,
not for what I said. Because you had forgotten yourself, had played the
traitor and the cheat was, perhaps, no excuse for my rudeness. You have
fallen under an evil influence. I hope no harm will come to you, for I
can’t get over my feeling for you. But I have done my best and have not
been able to save you. I am going away early in the morning.

“E. D.”

“Melodramatic, isn’t it?” laughed Mrs. Carnarvon. “So he’s off. How
furious Martha Fortescue and Ellen will be. But they’ll go in pursuit,
and they’ll get him. A man is never so susceptible as when he’s
broken-hearted. Well, I must go. Good-night, dear. Don’t mope and whine.
Take your punishment sensibly. You’ve learned something--if it’s only
not to tell one man how much you love another.”

“I think I’ll go abroad with Aunt Retta next month.”

“A good idea--you’ll forget both these men. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” answered Marian dolefully, expecting to resume her
thoughts of Danvers. But, instead, he straightway disappeared from
her mind and she could think only of Howard. She was free now. The one
barrier between him and her of which she had been really conscious was
gone. And her heart began to ache with longing for him. Why had he not
written? What was he doing? Did he really love her or was his passion
for her only a flash of a strong and swift imagination?

No, he loved her--she could not doubt that. But she could not understand
his conduct. She felt that she ought to be very unhappy, yet she was
not. The longer she thought of him and the more she weighed his words
and looks, the stronger became her trust in him. “He loves me,” she
said. “He will come when he can. It may be even harder for him than for
me.”

And so, explanation failing--for she rejected every explanation that
reflected upon him--she hid and excused him behind that familiar refuge
of the doubting, mystery.




XIV.

THE NEWS-RECORD GETS A NEW EDITOR.


A few minutes after leaving Marian that last night at Mrs. Carnarvon’s,
Howard was deep in a mood of self-contempt. He felt that he had faced
the crisis like a coward. He despised the weakness which enfeebled him
for effort to win her and at the same time made it impossible for him to
thrust her from his mind.

In the working hours his will conquered with the aid of fixed habit and
he was able to concentrate upon his editorials. But in his rooms, and
especially after the lights were out, his imagination became master,
deprived him of sleep and occasionally lifted him to a height of hope
in order that it might dash him down the more cruelly upon the rocks of
fact.

At last he was forced to face the situation--in his own evasive fashion.
It was impossible to go back. That loneliness which often threatened him
after Alice’s death had become the permanent condition of his life. “I
will work for her,” he said. “Until I have made a place for her I dare
not claim her. So much I will concede to my weakness. But when I have
won a position which reasonably assures the future, I shall claim
her--no matter what has happened in the meanwhile.”

He would have smiled at this wild resolution had he been in a less
distracted state of mind or had he been dealing with any other than a
matter of love. But in the circumstances it gave him heart and set him
to work with an energy and effectiveness which still further increased
Mr. Malcolm’s esteem for him.

“Will you dine with me at the Union Club on Wednesday?” Mr. Malcolm
asked one morning in mid-February. “Mr. Coulter and Mr. Stokely are
coming. I want you to know them better.”

Howard accepted and wondered that he took so little interest.
For Stokely and Coulter were the principal stockholders of the
_News-Record_, and with Malcolm formed the triumvirate which directed it
in all its departments. Mr. Malcolm held only a few shares of stock,
but received what was in the newspaper-world an immense salary--thirty
thousand a year. He was at once an able editor and an able diplomatist.
He knew how to make the plans of his two associates conform to
conditions of news and policy--when to let them use the paper, or,
rather, when to use the paper himself for their personal interests; when
and how to induce them to let the paper alone. Through a quarter of a
century of changing ownerships Malcolm had persisted, chiefly because
he had but one conviction--that the post of editor of the _News-Record_
exactly suited him and must remain his at any sacrifice of personal
character.

Howard had met Stokely and Coulter. He liked Stokely who was owner of a
few shares more than one-third; he disliked Coulter who owned just under
one-half.

Stokely was a frank, coarse, dollar-hunter, cheerfully unscrupulous in a
large way, acute, caring not at all for principles of any kind, letting
the paper alone most of the time because he was astute enough to know
that in his ignorance of journalism he would surely injure it as a
property.

Coulter was a hypocrite and a snob. Also he fancied he knew how to
conduct a newspaper. He was as unscrupulous as Stokely but tried to mask
it.

When Stokely wished the _News-Record_ to advocate a “job,” or steal, or
the election of some disreputable who would work in his interest,
he told Malcolm precisely what he wanted and left the details of the
stultification to his experienced adroitness. When Coulter wished
to “poison the fountain of publicity,” as Malcolm called the paper’s
departures from honesty and right, he approached the subject by stealth,
trying to convince Malcolm that the wrong was not really wrong, but was
right unfortunately disguised.

He would take Malcolm into his confidence by slow and roundabout
steps, thus multiplying his difficulties in discharging his “duty.” If
Coulter’s son had not been married to Malcolm’s daughter, it is probable
that not even his complete subserviency would have enabled him to keep
his place.

“If you had told me frankly what you wanted in the first place, Mr.
Coulter,” he said after an exasperating episode in which Coulter’s
Pharisaic sensitiveness had resulted in Malcolm’s having to “flop” the
paper both editorially and in its news columns twice in three days, “we
would not have made ourselves ridiculous and contemptible. The public
is an ass, but it is an ass with a memory at least three days long. Your
stealthiness has made the ass bray at us instead of with and for us.
And that is dangerous when you consider that running a newspaper is like
running a restaurant--you must please your customers every day afresh.”

Coulter was further difficult because of his anxieties about social
position for himself and his family. He was disturbed whenever the
_News-Record_ published an item that might offend any of the people
whose acquaintance he had gained with so much difficulty, and for
whose good will he was willing to sacrifice even considerable
money. Personally, but very privately, he edited the _News-Record’s_
“fashionable intelligence” columns on Sunday and made them an exhibit of
his own sycophancy and snobbishness which excited the amused disgust of
all who were in the secret.

Malcolm liked Howard, admired him, in a way envied his fearlessness, his
earnestness for principles. For years he had had it in mind to retire
and write a history of the Civil War period which had been his own
period of greatest activity and most intimate acquaintance with the
behind-the-scenes of statecraft. Howard’s energy, steady application,
enthusiasm for journalism and intelligence both as to editorials and as
to news made Malcolm look upon him as his natural successor.

“I think Howard is the man we want,” he said to his two associates when
he was arranging the dinner. “He has new ideas--just what the paper
needs. He is in touch with these recent developments. And above all he
has judgment. He knows what not to print, where and how to print what
ought to be printed. He is still young and is over-enthusiastic. He has
limitations, but he knows them and he is eager and capable to learn.”

It was a “shop” dinner, Howard doing most of the talking, led on by
Malcolm. The main point was the “new journalism,” as it was called, and
how to adapt it to the _News-Record_ and the _News-Record_ to it.

Malcolm kept the conversation closely to news and news-ideas, fearing
that, if editorial policies were brought in, Howard would make “breaks.”
 He soon saw that his associates were much impressed with Howard, with
his judgment, with his knowledge of the details of every important
newspaper in the city, with his analysis of the good and bad points in
each.

“I’ll drop you at your corner,” said he to Howard at the end of the
dinner. As they drove up the Avenue he began: “How would you like to be
the editor of the _News-Record_? My place, I mean.”

“I don’t understand,” Howard answered, bewildered.

“I am going to retire at once,” Malcolm went on. “I’ve been at it nearly
fifty years--ever since I was a boy of eighteen and I’ve been in charge
there almost a quarter of a century. I think I’ve earned a few years of
leisure to work for my own amusement. I’m pretty sure they’ll want you
to take my place. Would you like it?”

“I’m not fit for it,” Howard said, and he meant it. “I’m only an
apprentice. I’m always making blunders--but I needn’t tell you about
that.”

“You can’t say that you are not fit until you have tried. Besides, the
question is not, are _you_ fit? but, is there any one more fit than you?
I confess I don’t see any one so well equipped, so certain to give the
paper all of the best that there is in him.”

“Of course I’d like to try. I can only fail.”

“Oh, you won’t fail. But you may quarrel with Stokely and
Coulter--especially Coulter. In fact, I’m sure you’ll quarrel with
them. But if you make yourself valuable enough, you’ll probably win out.
Only----”

Malcolm hesitated, then went on:

“I stopped giving advice years ago. But I’ll venture a suggestion.
Whenever your principles run counter to the policy of the paper, it
would be wise to think the matter over carefully before making an issue.
Usually there is truth on both sides, much that can be said fairly
and honestly for either side. Often devotion to principle is a mere
prejudice. Often the crowd, the mob, can be better controlled to right
ends by conceding or seeming to concede a principle for the time. Don’t
strike a mortal blow at your own usefulness to good causes by making
yourself a hasty martyr to some fancied vital principle that will seem
of no consequence the next morning but one after the election.”

“I know, Mr. Malcolm, judgment is all but impossible. And I have been
trying to learn what you have been teaching me with your blue pencil,
what you now put into words. But there is something in me--an instinct,
perhaps--that forces me on in spite of myself. I’ve learned to curb and
guide it to a certain extent, but as long as I am I, I shall never learn
to control it. Every man must work out his own salvation along his own
lines. And with my limitations of judgment, it would be fatal to me, I
feel, to study the art of compromise. Where another, broader, stronger,
more master of himself and of others, would succeed by compromising, I
should fail miserably. I should be lost, compassless, rudderless. I have
often envied you your calmness, your ability to see not only to-morrow
but the day after. But, if I ever try to imitate you, I shall make a sad
mess of my career.”

As he ended Howard looked uneasily at the old editor, expecting to see
that caustic smile with which he preceded and accompanied his sarcasms
at “sentimental bosh.” But instead, Malcolm’s face was melancholy; and
his voice was sad and weary as he answered the young man who was just
starting where he had started so many years ago:

“No doubt you are right. I’m not intending to try to dissuade you
from--from the best there is in you. All I mean is that caution,
self-examination, self-doubt, calm consideration of the other
side--these are as necessary to success as energy and resolute action.
All I suggest is that its splendour does not redeem a splendid folly.
Its folly remains its essential characteristic.”

Three weeks later Howard became editor-in-chief of the _News-Record_.
His salary was fifteen thousand a year; and Stokely and Coulter, acting
upon Malcolm’s advice, gave him a “free hand” for one year. They agreed
not to interfere during that time unless the circulation or the profits
showed a decrease at the end of a quarter.

The next morning Howard, in the Madison Avenue car on his way to the
office, read among the “Incidents in Society:”

Mrs. George Alexander Provost and her niece, Miss Marion Trevor, sailed
in the _Campania_ yesterday. They will return in July for the Newport
season.





XV.

YELLOW JOURNALISM.


While several of the New York dailies were circulating from two to three
hundred thousand copies, the _News-Record_--the best-written, the most
complete, and, where the interests of the owners did not interfere, the
most accurate--circulated less than one hundred thousand. The Sunday
edition had a circulation of one hundred and fifty thousand where two
other newspapers had almost half a million.

The theory of the _News-Record_ staff was that their journal was too
“respectable,” too intelligent, to be widely read; that the “yellow
journals” grovelled, “appealed to the mob,” drew their vast crowds by
the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the
_News-Record’s_ smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from
vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the
popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy of the profession.

Howard did not assent to these self-complacent excuses. He was
democratic and modern, and the aristocratic pose appealed only to his
sense of humour and his suspicions. He believed that the success of
the “yellow journals” with the most intelligent, alert and progressive
public in the world must be based upon solid reasons of desert, must be
in spite of, not because of, their follies and exhibitions of bad taste.
He resolved upon a radical departure, a revolution from the policy of
satisfying petty vanity and tradition within the office to a policy of
satisfying the demands of the public.

He gave Segur temporary charge of the editorial page, and, taking a desk
in the news-room, centred his attention upon news and the news-staff.
But he was careful not to agitate and antagonise those whose coöperation
was necessary to success. He made only one change in the management; he
retired old Bowring on a pension and appointed to the city editorship
one of the young reporters--Frank Cumnock.

He chose Cumnock for this position, in many respects the most important
on the staff of a New York daily, because he wrote well, was a judge of
good writing, had a minute knowledge of New York and its neighbourhood
and, finally and chiefly, because he had a “news-sense,” keener than
that of any other man on the paper.

For instance, there was the murder of old Thayer, the rich miser in East
Sixteenth Street. It was the sensation in all the newspapers for two
weeks. Then they dropped it as an unsolvable mystery. Cumnock persuaded
Mr. Bowring to let him keep on. After five days’ work he heard of a
deaf and dumb woman who sat every afternoon at a back window of her flat
overlooking the back windows of Thayer’s house. He had a trying struggle
with her infirmity and stupidity, but finally was rewarded. On the
afternoon of the murder, in its very hour (which the police had been
able to discover), she had seen a man and woman in the bathroom of the
Thayer house. Both were agitated and the man washed his hands again
and again, carefully rinsing the bowl afterward. From her description
Cumnock got upon the track of Thayer’s niece and her husband, found the
proof of their guilt, had them watched until the _News-Record_ came out
with the “beat,” then turned them over to the police.

Also, Cumnock was keen at taking hints of good news-items concealed in
obscure paragraphs. The Morris Prison scandal was an example of this. He
found in the New England edition of _The World_ a six-line item giving
an astonishing death rate for the Morris Prison. He asked the City
Editor to assign him to go there; and within a week the press of the
entire country was discussing the _News-Record’s_ exposure of the
barbarities of torture and starvation practised by Warden Johnson and
his keepers.

“We are going to print the news, all the news and nothing but the news,”
 Howard said to Cumnock. “They’ve put you here because, so they tell me,
you know news no matter how thoroughly it is concealed or disguised.
And I assure you that no one shall interfere with you. No favours to
anybody; no use of the news-columns for revenge or exploitation. The
only questions a news-item need raise in your mind are: Is it true?
Is it interesting? Is it printable in a newspaper that will publish
anything which a healthy-minded grown-person wishes to read?”

“Is that ‘straight’?” asked Cumnock. “No favourites? No suppressions? No
exploitations?”

“‘Straight’--‘dead straight’! And if I were you I’d make this
particularly clear to the Wall Street and political men. If
anybody”--with stress upon the anybody--“comes to you about this, send
him to me.”

Howard was uneasy about the managing editor, Mr. King. But he soon found
that his fears were groundless. Mr. King was without petty vanity, and
cordially and sincerely welcomed his control.

“We look too dull,” King began when Howard asked him if he had any
changes to suggest. “We need more and bigger headlines, and we need
pictures.”

“That is it!” Howard was delighted to find that King and he were in
perfect accord. “But we must not have pictures unless we can have the
best. Just at present we can’t increase expenses by any great amount.
What do you say to trying what we can do with all the news, larger
headlines and plenty of leads?”

“I’m sure we can do better with our class of readers by livening up the
appearance of our headlines than we could with second-rate pictures.”

“I hope,” Howard said earnestly, “that we won’t have to use that
phrase--‘our class of readers’--much longer. Our paper should interest
every man and woman able to read. It seems to me that a newspaper’s
audience should be like that of a good play--the orchestra chairs full
and the last seat in the gallery taken. I suppose you know we’re not an
‘organ’ any longer?”

“No, I didn’t.” Mr. King looked surprised. “Do you mean to say that
we’re free to print the news?”

“Free as freedom. In our news columns we’re neither Democrat nor
Republican nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social
connections. We are going to print a newspaper--all the news and nothing
but the news.”

Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched
fingers. “Hum--hum,” he said. “This _is_ news. Well--the circulation’ll
go up. And that’s all I’m interested in.”

Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of
exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made
his changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came
to him a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he
had hinted. He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of
the vanity of men, their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive
opposition to improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the
hysteria which raged in the offices of the “yellow journals.” He wished
to avoid an epidemic of that hysteria--the mad rush for sensation
and novelty; the strife of opposing ambitions; the plotting and
counter-plotting of rival heads of departments; the chaos out of which
the craziest ideas often emerged triumphant, making the pages of the
paper look like a series of disordered dreams.

He was indifferent to the semblance of authority, to the shadows for
which small men are forever struggling. What he wanted, all he wanted,
was--results.

The first opposition came from the night editor, who for twent

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