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Together

by Robert Herrick · English · Gutenberg #8134 · 1,048,965 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Together

Author: Robert Herrick


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8134]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8134

Credits: Produced by Susan Skinner, Eric Eldred, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOGETHER ***




Produced by Susan Skinner, Eric Eldred, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team










TOGETHER

BY

ROBERT HERRICK







PART ONE




CHAPTER I


She stood before the minister who was to marry them, very tall and
straight. With lips slightly parted she looked at him steadfastly, not at
the man beside her who was about to become her husband. Her father, with a
last gentle pressure of her arm, had taken his place behind her. In the
hush that had fallen throughout the little chapel, all the restless
movement of the people who had gathered there this warm June morning was
stilled, in the expectation of those ancient words that would unite the two
before the altar. Through the open window behind the altar a spray of young
woodbine had thrust its juicy green leaves and swayed slowly in the air,
which was heavy with earthy odors of all the riotous new growth that was
pushing forward in the fields outside. And beyond the vine could be seen a
bit of the cloudless, rain-washed sky.

There before the minister, who was fumbling mechanically at his
prayer-book, a great space seemed to divide the man and the woman from all
the others, their friends and relatives, who had come to witness the
ceremony of their union. In the woman's consciousness an unexpected
stillness settled, as if for these few moments she were poised between the
past of her whole life and the mysterious future. All the preoccupations of
the engagement weeks, the strange colorings of mood and feeling, all the
petty cares of the event itself, had suddenly vanished. She did not see
even him, the man she was to marry, only the rugged face of the old
minister, the bit of fluttering vine, the expanse of blue sky. She stood
before the veil of her life, which was about to be drawn aside.

This hushed moment was broken by the resonant tones of the minister as he
began the opening words of the sacrament that had been said over so many
millions of human beings. Familiar as the phrases were, she did not realize
them, could not summon back her attention from that depth within of awed
expectancy. After a time she became aware of the subdued movements in the
chapel, of people breaking into the remote circle of her mystery,--even
here they must needs have their part--and of the man beside her looking
intently at her, with flushed face. It was this man, this one here at her
side, whom she had chosen of all that might have come into her life; and
suddenly he seemed a stranger, standing there, ready to become her husband!
The woodbine waved, recalling to her flashing thoughts that day two years
before when the chapel was dedicated, and they two, then mere friends, had
planted this vine together. And now, after certain meetings, after some
surface intercourse, they had willed to come here to be made one...

"And who gives this woman in marriage?" the minister asked solemnly,
following the primitive formula which symbolizes that the woman is to be
made over from one family to another as a perpetual possession. She gave
herself of course! The words were but an outgrown form...

There was the necessary pause while the Colonel came forward, and taking
his daughter's hand from which the glove had been carefully turned back,
laid it gently in the minister's large palm. The father's lips twitched,
and she knew he was feeling the solemnity of his act, that he was
relinquishing a part of himself to another. Their marriage--her father's
and mother's--had been happy,--oh, very peaceful! And yet--hers must be
different, must strike deeper. For the first time she raised her shining
eyes to the man at her side...

"I, John, take thee Isabelle for my wedded wife, to have and to hold ... in
sickness and in health ... until death us do part ... and hereby I plight
thee my troth."

Those old words, heard so many times, which heretofore had echoed without
meaning to her,--she had vaguely thought them beautiful,--now came
freighted with sudden meaning, while from out the dreamlike space around
sounded the firm tones of the man at her side repeating slowly, with grave
pauses, word by word, the marriage oath. "I, John, take thee Isabelle,"
that voice was saying, and she knew that the man who spoke these words in
his calm, grave manner was the one she had chosen, to whom she had willed
to give herself for all time,--presently she would say it also,--for
always, always, "until death us do part." He was promising it with tranquil
assurance,--fidelity, the eternal bond, throughout the unknown years, out
of the known present. "And hereby I plight thee my troth." Without a tremor
the man's assured voice registered the oath--before God and man.

"I, Isabelle," and the priest took up with her this primal oath of
fidelity, body and soul. All at once the full personal import of the words
pierced her, and her low voice swelled unconsciously with her affirmation.
She was to be for always as she was now. They two had not been one before:
the words did not make them so now. It was their desire. But the old
divided selves, the old impulses, they were to die, here, forever.

She heard herself repeating the words after the minister. Her strong young
voice in the stillness of the chapel sounded strangely not her own voice,
but the voice of some unknown woman within her, who was taking the oath for
her in this barbaric ceremony whereby man and woman are bound together.
"And hereby I plight thee my troth,"--the voice sank to a whisper as of
prayer. Her eyes came back to the man's face, searching for his eyes.

There were little beads of perspiration on his broad brow, and the shaven
lips were closely pressed together, moulding the face into lines of
will,--the look of mastery. What was he, this man, now her husband for
always, his hand about hers in sign of perpetual possession and protection?
What beneath all was he who had taken with her, thus publicly, the mighty
oath of fidelity, "until death us do part"? Each had said it; each believed
it; each desired it wholly. Perversely, here in the moment of her deepest
feeling, intruded the consciousness of broken contracts, the waste of
shattered purposes. Ah, but _theirs_ was different! This absolute oath of
fidelity one to the other, each with his own will and his own desire,--this
irredeemable contract of union between man and woman,--it was not always a
binding sacrament. Often twisted and broken, men and women promising in the
belief of the best within them what was beyond their power to perform.
There were those in that very chapel who had said these words and broken
them, furtively or legally... With them, of course, it would be different,
would be the best; for she conceived their love to be of another kind,--the
enduring kind. Nevertheless, just here, while the priest of society
pronounced the final words of union, something spoke within the woman's
soul that it was a strange oath to be taking, a strange manner of making
two living beings one!

"And I pronounce you man and wife," the words ran. Then the minister
hastened on into his little homily upon the marriage state. But the woman's
thought rested at those fateful words,--"man and wife,"--the knot of the
contract. There should fall a new light in her heart that would make her
know they were really one, having now been joined as the book said "in holy
wedlock." From this sacramental union of persons there should issue to both
a new spirit...

Her husband was standing firm and erect, listening with all the
concentration of his mind to what the minister was saying--not tumultuously
distracted--as though he comprehended the exact gravity of this contract
into which he was entering, as he might that of any other he could make,
sure of his power to fulfil all, confident before Fate. She trembled
strangely. Did she know him, this other self? In the swift apprehension of
life's depths which came through her heightened mood she perceived that
ultimate division lying between all human beings, that impregnable fortress
of the individual soul.... It was all over. He looked tenderly at her. Her
lips trembled with a serious smile,--yes, they would understand now!

The people behind them moved more audibly. The thing was done; the priest's
words of exhortation were largely superfluous. All else that concerned
married life these two would have to find out for themselves. The thing was
done, as ordained by the church, according to the rules of society. Now it
was for Man and Wife to make of it what they would or--could.

The minister closed his book in dismissal. The groom offered his arm to the
bride. Facing the chapelful she came out of that dim world of wonder
whither she had strayed. Her veil thrown back, head proudly erect, eyes
mistily ranging above the onlookers, she descended the altar steps, gazing
down the straight aisle over the black figures, to the sunny village green,
beyond into the vista of life! ... Triumphant organ notes beat through the
chapel, as they passed between the rows of smiling faces,--familiar faces
only vaguely perceived, yet each with its own expression, its own reaction
from this ceremony. She swept on deliberately, with the grace of her long
stride, her head raised, a little smile on her open lips, her hand just
touching his,--going forward with him into life.

Only two faces stood out from the others at this moment,--the dark,
mischievous face of Nancy Lawton, smiling sceptically. Her dark, little
eyes seemed to say, 'Oh, you don't know yet!' And the other was the large,
placid face of a blond woman, older than the bride, standing beside a
stolid man at the end of a pew. The serene, soft eyes of this woman were
dim with tears, and a tender smile still lingered on her lips. She at
least, Alice Johnston, the bride's cousin, could smile through the tears--a
smile that told of the sweetness in life.....

At the door the frock-coated young ushers formed into double line through
which the couple passed. The village green outside was flooded with
sunshine, checkered by drooping elm branches. Bells began to ring from the
library across the green and from the schoolhouse farther down. It was
over--the fine old barbaric ceremony, the passing of the irredeemable
contract between man and woman, the public proclamation of eternal union.
Henceforth they were man and wife before the law, before their kind--one
and one, and yet not two.

Thus together they passed out of the church.




CHAPTER II


The company gathered within the chapel for the wedding now moved and talked
with evident relief, each one expressing his feeling of the solemn service.

"Very well done, very lovely!" the Senator was murmuring to the bride's
mother, just as he might give an opinion of a good dinner or some neat
business transaction or of a smartly dressed woman. It was a function of
life successfully performed--and he nodded gayly to a pretty woman three
rows away. He was handsome and gray-haired, long a widower, and evidently
considered weddings to be an attractive, ornamental feature of social life.
Mrs. Price, the bride's mother, intent upon escaping with the Colonel by
the side door and rejoining the bridal party at the house before the guests
arrived on foot, scarcely heeded the amiable Senator's remarks. This affair
of her daughter's marriage was, like most events, a matter of engrossing
details. The Colonel, in his usual gregarious manner, had strayed among the
guests, forgetful of his duties, listening with bent head to congratulatory
remarks. She had to send her younger son, Vickers, after him where he
lingered with Farrington Beals, the President of the great Atlantic and
Pacific Railroad, in which his new son-in-law held a position. When the
Colonel finally dragged himself away from the pleasant things that his old
friend Beals had to say about young Lane, he looked at his impatient wife
with his tender smile, as if he would like to pat her cheek and say, "Well,
we've started them right, haven't we?"

The guests flowed conversationally towards the door and the sunny green,
while the organ played deafeningly. But play as exultantly as it might, it
could not drown the babble of human voices. Every one wanted to utter those
excitable commonplaces that seem somehow to cover at such times deep
meanings.

"What a perfect wedding!"

"How pretty it all was!"

"Not a hitch."

"She looked the part."

"Good fellow--nice girl--ought to be happy ... Well, old man, when is your
turn coming? ... Could hear every word they said ... looked as though they
meant it, too! ..."

In an eddy of the centre aisle a tall, blond young woman with handsome,
square shoulders and dark eyes stood looking about her calmly, as if she
were estimating the gathering, setting each one down at the proper social
valuation, deciding, perhaps, in sum that they were a very "mixed lot," old
friends and new, poor and rich. A thin girl, also blond, with deep blue
eyes, and a fine bony contour of the face, was swept by the stream near the
solitary observer and held out a hand:--

"Cornelia!"

"Margaret!"

"Isn't it ideal!" Margaret Lawton exclaimed, her nervous face still stirred
by all that she had felt during the service,--"the day, the country, and
this dear little chapel!"

"Very sweet," the large woman replied in a purring voice, properly
modulated for the sentiment expressed. "Isabelle made an impressive bride."
And these two school friends moved on towards the door. Cornelia Pallanton,
still surveying the scene, nodded and said to her companion, "There's your
cousin Nannie Lawton. Her husband isn't here, I suppose? There are a good
many St. Louis people."

The guests were now scattered in little groups over the green, dawdling in
talk and breathing happily the June-scented air. The stolid man and his
placid wife who had sat near the rear had already started for the Colonel's
house, following the foot-path across the fields. They walked silently side
by side, as if long used to wordless companionship.

The amiable Senator and his friend Beals examined critically the little
Gothic chapel, which had been a gift to his native town by the Colonel, as
well as the stone library at the other end of the green. "Nice idea of
Price," the Senator was saying, "handsome buildings--pleasant little
village," and he moved in the direction of Miss Pallanton, who was alone.

Down below in the valley, on the railroad siding, lay the special train
that had brought most of the guests from New York that morning. The engine
emitted little puffs of white smoke in the still noon, ready to carry its
load back to the city after the breakfast. About the library steps were the
carriages of those who had driven over from neighboring towns; the whole
village had a disturbed and festal air.

The procession was straggling across the village street through the stile
and into the meadow, tramping down the thick young grass, up the slope to
the comfortable old white house that opened its broad verandas like
hospitable arms. The President of the Atlantic and Pacific, deserted by the
Senator, had offered his arm to a stern old lady with knotty hands partly
concealed in lace gloves. Her lined face had grown serious in age and
contention with life. She clung stiffly to the arm of the railroad
president,--proud, silent, and shy. She was _his_ mother. From her one
might conclude that the groom's people were less comfortably circumstanced
than the bride's--that this was not a marriage of ambition on the woman's
part. It was the first time Mrs. Lane had been "back east" since she had
left her country home as a young bride. It was a proud moment, walking with
her son's chief; but the old lady did not betray any elation, as she
listened to the kindly words that Beals found to say about her son.

"A first-rate railroad man, Mrs. Lane,--he will move up rapidly. We can't
get enough of that sort."

The mother, never relaxing her tight lips, drank it all in, treasured it as
a reward for the hard years spent in keeping that boarding-house in Omaha,
after the death of her husband, who had been a country doctor.

"He's a good son," she admitted as the eulogy flagged. "And he knows how to
get on with all kinds of folks...."

At their heels were Vickers Price and the thin Southern girl, Margaret
Lawton. Vickers, just back from Munich for this event, had managed to give
the conventional dress that he was obliged to wear a touch of strangeness,
with an enormous flowing tie of delicate pink, a velvet waistcoat, and
broad-brimmed hat. The clothes and the full beard, the rippling chestnut
hair and pointed mustache, showed a desire for eccentricity on the part of
the young man that distinguished him from all the other well-dressed young
Americans. He carried a thin cane and balanced a cigarette between his
lips.

"Yes," he was saying, "I had to come over to see Isabelle married, but I
shall go back after a look around--not the place for me!" He laughed and
waved his cane towards the company with an ironic sense of his
inappropriateness to an American domestic scene.

"You are a composer,--music, isn't it?" the girl asked, a flash in her blue
eyes at the thought of youth, Munich, music.

"I have written a few things; am getting ready, you know," Vickers Price
admitted modestly.

Just there they were joined by a handsome, fashionably dressed man, his
face red with rapid walking. He touched his long, well-brushed black
mustache with his handkerchief as he explained:--

"Missed the train--missed the show--but got here in time for the fun, on
the express."

He took his place beside the girl, whose color deepened and eyes turned
away,--perhaps annoyed, or pleased?

"That's what you come for, isn't it?" she said, forcing a little joke.
Noticing that the two men did not speak, she added hastily, "Don't you know
Mr. Price, Mr. Vickers Price? Mr. Hollenby."

The newcomer raised his silk hat, sweeping Vickers, who was fanning himself
with his broad-brimmed felt, in a light, critical stare. Then Mr. Hollenby
at once appropriated the young woman's attention, as though he would
indicate that it was for her sake he had taken this long, hot journey.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were other little groups at different stages on the hill,--one
gathered about a small, dark-haired woman, whose face burned duskily in the
June sun. She was Aline Goring,--the Eros of that schoolgirl band at St.
Mary's who had come to see their comrade married. And there was Elsie
Beals,--quite elegant, the only daughter of the President of the A. and P.
The Woodyards, Percy and Lancey, classmates of Vickers at the university,
both slim young men, wearing their clothes carelessly,--clearly not of the
Hollenby manner,--had attached themselves here. Behind them was Nan Lawton,
too boisterous even for the open air. At the head of the procession, now
nearly topping the hill beneath the house, was that silent married couple,
the heavy, sober man and the serene, large-eyed woman, who did not mingle
with the others. He had pointed out to her the amiable Senator and
President Beals, both well-known figures in the railroad world where he
worked, far down, obscurely, as a rate clerk. His wife looked at these two
great ones, who indirectly controlled the petty destiny of the Johnstons,
and squeezed her husband's hand more tightly, expressing thus many mixed
feelings,--content with him, pride and confidence in him, in spite of his
humble position in the race.

"It's just like the Pilgrim's Progress," she said with a little smile,
looking backward at the stream.

"But who is Christian?" the literal husband asked. Her eyes answered that
she knew, but would not tell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Just as each one had reflected his own emotion at the marriage, so each
one, looking up at the hospitable goal ahead,--that irregular, broad white
house poured over the little Connecticut hilltop,--had his word about the
Colonel's home.

"No wonder they call it the Farm," sneered Nan Lawton to the Senator.

"It's like the dear old Colonel, the new and the old," the Senator
sententiously interpreted.

Beals, overhearing this, added, "It's poor policy to do things that way.
Better to pull the old thing down and go at it afresh,--you save time and
money, and have it right in the end."

"It's been in the family a hundred years or more," some one remarked. "The
Colonel used to mow this field himself, before he took to making hardware."

"Isabelle will pull it about their ears when she gets the chance," Mrs.
Lawton said. "The present-day young haven't much sentiment for
uncomfortable souvenirs."

Her cousin Margaret was remarking to Vickers, "What a good, homey sort of
place,--like our old Virginia houses,--all but that great barn!"

It was, indeed, as the Senator had said, very like the Colonel, who could
spare neither the old nor the new. It was also like him to give Grafton a
new stone library and church, and piece on rooms here and there to his own
house. In spite of these additions demanded by comfort there was something
in the conglomeration to remind the Colonel, who had returned to Grafton
after tasting strife and success in the Middle West, of the plain home of
his youth.

"The dear old place!" Alice Johnston murmured to her husband. "It was never
more attractive than to-day, as if it knew that it was marrying off an only
daughter." To her, too, the Farm had memories, and no new villa spread out
spaciously in Italian, Tudor, or Classic style could ever equal this white,
four-chimneyed New England mansion.

On the west slope of the hill near the veranda a large tent had been
erected, and into this black-coated waiters were running excitedly to and
fro around a wing of the house which evidently held the servant quarters.
Just beyond the tent a band was playing a loud march. There was to be
dancing on the lawn after the breakfast, and in the evening on the village
green for everybody, and later fireworks. The Colonel had insisted on the
dancing and the fireworks, in spite of Vickers's jeers about pagan rites
and the Fourth of July.

The bride and groom had already taken their places in the broad hall, which
bisected the old house. The guests were to enter from the south veranda,
pass through the hall, and after greeting the couple gain the refreshment
tent through the library windows. The Colonel had worked it all out with
that wonderful attention to detail that had built up his great hardware
business. Upstairs in the front bedrooms the wedding presents had been
arranged, and nicely ticketed with cards for the amusement of aged
relatives,--a wonderful assortment of silver and gold and glass,--an
exhibition of the wide relationships of the contracting pair, at least of
the wife. And through these rooms soft-footed detectives patrolled,
examining the guests....

Isabelle Price had not wished her wedding to be of this kind, ordered so to
speak like the refreshments from Sherry and the presents from Tiffany, with
a special train on the siding. When she and John had decided to be married
at the old farm, she had thought of a country feast,--her St. Mary's girls
of course and one or two more, but quite to themselves! They were to walk
with these few friends to the little chapel, where the dull old village
parson would say the necessary words. The marriage over, and a simple
breakfast in the old house,--the scene of their love,--they were to ride
off among the hills to her camp on Dog Mountain, alone. And thus quietly,
without flourish, they would enter the new life. But as happens to all such
pretty idylls, reality had forced her hand. Colonel Price's daughter could
not marry like an eloping schoolgirl, so her mother had declared. Even John
had taken it as a matter of course, all this elaborate celebration, the
guests, the special train, the overflowing house. And she had yielded her
ideal of having something special in her wedding, acquiescing in the "usual
thing."

But now that the first guests began to top the hill and enter the hall with
warm, laughing greetings, all as gay as the June sunlight, the women in
their fresh summer gowns, she felt the joy of the moment. "Isn't it jolly,
so many of 'em!" she exclaimed to her husband, squeezing his arm gayly. He
took it, like most things, as a matter of course. The hall soon filled with
high tones and noisy laughter, as the guests crowded in from the lawn about
the couple, to offer their congratulations, to make their little jokes, and
premeditated speeches. Standing at the foot of the broad stairs, her veil
thrown back, her fair face flushed with color and her lips parted in a
smile, one arm about a thick bunch of roses, the bride made a bright spot
of light in the dark hall. All those whirling thoughts, the depths to which
her spirit had descended during the service, had fled; she was excited by
this throng of smiling, joking people, by the sense of her role. She had
the feeling of its being _her_ day, and she was eager to drink every drop
in the sparkling cup. A great kindness for everybody, a sort of beaming
sympathy for the world, bubbled up in her heart, making the repeated hand
squeeze which she gave--sometimes a double pressure--a personal expression
of her emotion. Her flashing hazel eyes, darting into each face in turn as
it came before her, seemed to say: 'Of course, I am the happiest woman in
the world, and you must be happy, too. It is such a good world!' While her
voice was repeating again and again, with the same tremulous intensity,
"Thank you--it is awfully nice of you--I am so glad you are here!"

To the amiable Senator's much worn compliment,--"It's the prettiest wedding
I have seen since your mother's, and the prettiest bride, too,"--she
blushed a pleased reply, though she had confessed to John only the night
before that the sprightly Senator was "horrid,--he has such a way of
squeezing your hand, as if he would like to do more,"--to which the young
man had replied in his perplexity, due to the Senator's exalted position in
the A. and P. Board, "I suppose it's only the old boy's way of being
cordial."

Even when Nannie Lawton came loudly with Hollenby--she had captured him
from her cousin--and threw her arms about the bride, Isabelle did not draw
back. She forgot that she disliked the gay little woman, with her muddy
eyes, whose "affairs"--one after the other--were condoned "for her
husband's sake." Perhaps Nannie felt what it might be to be as happy and
proud as she was,--she was large, generous, comprehending at this moment.
And she passed the explosive little woman over to her husband, who received
her with the calm courtesy that never made an enemy.

But when "her girls" came up the line, she felt happiest. Cornelia was
first, large, handsome, stately, her broad black hat nodding above the
feminine stream, her dark eyes observing all, while she slowly smiled to
the witticisms Vickers murmured in her ear. Every one glanced at Miss
Pallanton; she was a figure, as Isabelle realized when she finally stood
before her,--a very handsome figure, and would get her due attention from
her world. They had not cared very much for "Conny" at St. Mary's, though
she was a handsome girl then and had what was called "a good mind." There
was something coarse in the detail of this large figure, the plentiful
reddish hair, the strong, straight nose,--all of which the girls of St.
Mary's had interpreted their own way, and also the fact that she had come
from Duluth,--probably of "ordinary" people. Surely not a girl's girl, nor
a woman's woman! But one to be reckoned with when it came to men. Isabelle
was conscious of her old reserve as she listened to Conny's piping,
falsetto voice,--such a funny voice to come from that large person through
that magnificent white throat.

"It makes me so happy, dear Isabelle," the voice piped; "it is all so
ideal, so exactly what it ought to be for you, don't you know?" And as
Percy Woodyard bore her off--he had hovered near all the time--she smiled
again, leaving Isabelle to wonder what Conny thought would be "just right"
for her.

"You must hurry, Conny," she called on over Vickers's head, "and make up
your mind; you are almost our last!"

"You know I never hurry," the smiling lips piped languidly, and the large
hat sailed into the library, piloted on either side by Woodyard and
Vickers. Isabelle had a twinge of sisterly jealousy at seeing her younger
brother so persistently in the wake of the large, blond girl. Dear Vick,
her own chum, her girl's first ideal of a man, fascinatingly developed by
his two years in Munich, must not go bobbing between Nan Lawton and Conny!

And here was Margaret Lawton--so different from her cousin's wife--with the
delicate, high brow, the firm, aristocratic line from temple to chin. She
was the rarest and best of the St. Mary's set, and though Isabelle had
known her at school only a year, she had felt curiosity and admiration for
the Virginian. Her low, almost drawling voice, which reflected a controlled
spirit, always soothed her. The deep-set blue eyes had caught Isabelle's
glance at Vickers, and with an amused smile the Southern girl said, "He's
in the tide!"

Isabelle said, "I am so, so glad you could get here, Margaret."

"I wanted to--very much. I made mother put off our sailing."

"How is the Bishop?" she asked, as Margaret was pushed on.

"Oh, happy, riding about the mountains and converting the poor heathen, who
prefer whiskey to religion. Mother's taking him to England this summer to
show him off to the foreign clergy."

"And Washington?"

Margaret's thin, long lips curved ironically for answer. Hollenby, who
seemed to have recollected a purpose, was waiting for her at the library
door.... "Ah, my Eros!" Isabella exclaimed with delight, holding forth two
hands to a small, dark young woman, with waving brown hair and large eyes
that were fixed on distant objects.

"Eros with a husband and two children," Aline Goring murmured, in her soft
contralto. "You remember Eugene? At the Springs that summer?" The husband,
a tall, smooth-shaven, young man with glasses and the delicate air of the
steam-heated American scholar bowed stiffly.

"Of course! Didn't I aid and abet you two?"

"That's two years and a half ago," Aline remarked, as if the simple words
covered a multitude of facts about life. "We are on our way to St. Louis to
settle."

"Splendid!" Isabelle exclaimed. "We shall have you again. Torso, where we
are exiled for the present, is only a night's ride from St. Louis."

Aline smiled that slow, warm smile, which seemed to come from the remote
inner heart of her dreamy life. Isabelle looked at her eagerly, searching
for the radiant, woodsy creature she had known, that Eros, with her dreamy,
passionate, romantic temperament, a girl whom girls adored and kissed and
petted, divining in her the feminine spirit of themselves. Surely, she
should be happy, Aline, the beautiful girl made for love, poetic, tender.
The lovely eyes were there, but veiled; the velvety skin had roughened; and
the small body was almost heavy. The wood nymph had been submerged in
matrimony.

Goring was saying in a twinkling manner:--

"I've been reckoning up, Mrs. Lane. You are the seventh most intimate girl
friend Aline has married off the last two years. How many more of you are
there?"

Aline, putting her arms about the bride's neck, drew her face to her lips
and whispered:--

"Dearie, my darling! I hope you will be so happy,--that it will be all you
can wish!" After these two had disappeared into the library, where there
was much commotion about the punch-bowl, the bride wondered--were _they_
happy? She had seen the engagement at Southern Springs,--the two most
ecstatic, unearthly lovers she had ever known.... But now? ...

Thus the stream of her little world flowed on, repeating its high-pitched
note of gratulation, of jocular welcome to the married state, as if to say,
'Well, now you are one of us--you've been brought in--this is life.' That
was what these smiling people were thinking, as they welcomed the neophytes
to the large vale of human experience. 'We have seen you through this
business, started you joyously on the common path. And now what will you
make of it?' For the occasion they ignored, good naturedly, the stones
along the road, the mistakes, the miserable failures that lined the path,
assuming the bride's proper illusion of triumph and confidence.... Among
the very last came the Johnstons, who had lingered outside while the more
boisterous ones pressed about the couple. Isabelle noticed that the large
brown eyes of the placid woman, who always seemed to her much older than
herself, were moist, and her face was serious when she said, "May it be all
that your heart desires--the Real Thing!"

A persistent aunt interrupted them here, and it was hours afterward when
Isabelle's thought came back to these words and dwelt on them. 'The real
thing!' Of course, that was what it was to be, her marriage,--the woman's
symbol of the Perfect, not merely Success (though with John they could not
fail of worldly success), nor humdrum content--but, as Alice said, the real
thing,--a state of passionate and complete union. Something in those misty
brown eyes, something in the warm, deep voice of the older woman, in the
prayer-like form of the wish, sank deep into her consciousness.

She turned to her husband, who was chatting with Fosdick, a large, heavy
man with a Dr. Johnson head on massive shoulders. One fat hand leaned
heavily on a fat club, for Fosdick was slightly lame and rolled in his
gait.

"Isabelle," he remarked with a windy sigh, "I salute my victor!"

Old Dick, Vickers's playmate in the boy-and-girl days, her playmate,
too,--he had wanted to marry her for years, ever since Vick's freshman year
when he had made them a visit at the Farm. He had grown very heavy since
then,--time which he had spent roving about in odd corners of the earth. As
he stood there, his head bent mockingly before the two, Isabelle felt
herself Queen once more, the--American woman who, having surveyed all, and
dominated all within the compass of her little world, has chosen the One.
But not Dickie, humorous and charming as he was.

"How goes it, Dickie?"

"As always," he puffed; "I come from walking or rather limping up and down
this weary earth and observing--men and women--how they go about to make
themselves miserable."

"Stuff!"

"My dear friends," he continued, placing both hands on the big cane, "you
are about to undergo a new and wonderful experience. You haven't the
slightest conception of what it is. You think it is love; but it is the
holy state of matrimony,--a very different proposition--"

They interrupted him with laughing abuse, but he persisted,--a serious
undertone to his banter. "Yes, I have always observed the scepticism of
youth, no matter what may be the age of the contracting parties and their
previous experience, in this matter. But Love and Marriage are two distinct
and entirely independent states of being,--one is the creation of God, the
other of Society. I have observed that few make them coalesce."

As relatives again interposed, Fosdick rolled off, ostentatiously thumping
his stick on the floor, and made straight for the punch-bowl, where he
seemed to meet congenial company.




CHAPTER III


Meanwhile inside the great tent the commotion was at its height, most of
the guests--those who had escaped the fascination of the punch-bowl--having
found their way thither. Perspiring waiters rushed back and forth with
salad and champagne bottles, which were seized by the men and borne off to
the women waiting suitably to be fed by the men whom they had attached.
Near the entrance the Colonel, with his old friends Beals and Senator
Thomas, was surveying the breakfast scene, a contented smile on his kind
face, as he murmured assentingly, "So--so." He and the Senator had served
in the same regiment during the War, Price retiring as Colonel and the
Senator as Captain; while the bridegroom's father, Tyringham Lane, had been
the regimental surgeon.

"What a good fellow Tyringham was, and how he would have liked to be here!"
the Senator was saying sentimentally, as he held out a glass to be
refilled. "Poor fellow!--he never got much out of his life; didn't know how
to make the most of things,--went out there to that Iowa prairie after the
War. You say he left his widow badly off?"

The Colonel nodded, and added with pride, "But John has made that right
now."

The Senator, who had settled in Indianapolis and practised railroad law
until his clients had elevated him to the Senate, considered complacently
the various dispensations of Providence towards men. He said generously:--

"Well, Tyringham's son has good blood, and it will tell. He will make his
way. We'll see to that, eh, Beals?" and the Senator sauntered over to a
livelier group dominated by Cornelia Pallanton's waving black plumes.

"Oh, marriage!" Conny chaffed, "it's the easiest thing a woman can do,
isn't it? Why should one be in a hurry when it's so hard to go back?"

"Matrimony," Fosdick remarked, "is an experiment where nobody's experience
counts but your own." He had been torn from the punch-bowl and thus
returned to his previous train of thought.

"Is that why some repeat it so often?" Elsie Beals inquired. She had broken
her engagement the previous winter and had spent the summer hunting with
Indian guides among the Canadian Rockies. She regarded herself as unusual,
and turned sympathetically to Fosdick, who also had a reputation for being
odd.

"So let us eat and be merry," that young man said, seizing a pate and glass
of champagne, "though I never could see why good people should make such an
unholy rumpus when two poor souls decide to attempt the great experiment of
converting illusion into reality."

"Some succeed," an earnest young man suggested.

Conny, who had turned from the constant Woodyard to the voluble fat man,
who might be a Somebody, remarked:--

"I suppose you don't see the puddles when you are in their condition. It's
always the belief that we are going to escape 'em that drives us all into
your arms."

"What I object to," Fosdick persisted, feeding himself prodigiously, "is
not the fact, but this savage glee over it. It's as though a lot of caged
animals set up a howl of delight every time the cage door was opened and a
new pair was introduced into the pen. They ought to perform the wedding
ceremony in sackcloth and ashes, after duly fasting, accompanied by a few
faithful friends garbed in black with torches."

Conny gave him a cold, surface smile, setting down his talk as "young" and
beamed at the approaching Senator.

"Oh, what an idea!" giggled a little woman. "If you can't dance at your own
wedding, you may never have another chance."

Conny, though intent upon the Senator, kept an eye upon Woodyard,
introducing him to the distinguished man, thinking, no doubt, that the
Chairman of the A. and P. Board might be useful to the young lawyer. For
whatever she might be to women, this large blond creature with white neck,
voluptuous lips, and slow gaze from childlike eyes had the power of drawing
males to her, a power despised and also envied by women. Those simple eyes
seemed always to seek information about obvious matters. But behind the
eyes Conny was thinking, 'It's rather queer, this crowd. And these Prices
with all their money might do so much better. That Fosdick is a silly
fellow. The Senator is worn of course, but still important!' And yet Conny,
with all her sureness, did not know all her own mental processes. For she,
too, was really looking for a mate, weighing, estimating men to that end,
and some day she would come to a conclusion,--would take a man, Woodyard or
another, giving him her very handsome person, and her intelligence, in
exchange for certain definite powers of brain and will.

The bride and groom entered the tent at last. Isabelle, in a renewed glow
of triumph, stepped over to the table and with her husband's assistance
plunged a knife into the huge cake, while her health was being drunk with
cheers. As she firmly cut out a tiny piece, she exposed a thin but
beautifully moulded arm.

"Handsome girl," the Senator murmured in Conny's ear. "Must be some sore
hearts here to-day. I don't see how such a beauty could escape until she
was twenty-six. But girls want their fling these days, same as the men!"

"Toast! Toast the bride!" came voices from all sides, while the waiters
hurried here and there slopping the wine into empty glasses.

As the bride left the tent to get ready for departure, she caught sight of
Margaret Lawton in a corner of the veranda with Hollenby, who was bending
towards her, his eyes fastened on her face. Margaret was looking far away,
across the fields to where Dog Mountain rose in the summer haze. Was
Margaret deciding _her_ fate at this moment,--attracted, repulsed, waiting
for the deciding thrill, while her eyes searched for the ideal of happiness
on the distant mountain? She turned to look at the man, drawing back as his
hand reached forward. So little, so much--woman's fate was in the making
this June day, all about the old house,--attracting, repulsing,
weighing,--unconsciously moulding destiny that might easily be momentous in
the outcome of the years....

When the bride came down, a few couples had already begun to dance, but
they followed the other guests to the north side where the carriage stood
ready. Isabelle looked very smart in her new gown, a round travelling hat
just framing her brilliant eyes and dark hair. Mrs. Price followed her
daughter closely, her brows puckered in nervous fear lest something should
be forgotten. She was especially anxious about a certain small bag, and had
the maid take out all the hand luggage to make sure it had not been
mislaid.

Some of the younger ones led by Vickers pelted the couple with rice, while
this delay occurred. It was a silly custom that they felt bound to follow.
There was no longer any meaning in the symbol of fertility. Multiply and be
fruitful, the Bible might urge, following an ancient economic ideal of
happiness. But the end of marriage no longer being this gross purpose, the
sterile woman has at last come into honor! ...

The bride was busy kissing a group of young women who had clustered about
her,--Elsie Beals, Aline, Alice Johnston, Conny. Avoiding Nannie Lawton's
wide open arms, she jumped laughingly into the carriage, then turned for a
last kiss from the Colonel.

"Here, out with you Joe," Vickers exclaimed to the coachman. "I'll drive
them down to the station. Quick now,--they mustn't lose the express!"

He bundled the old man from the seat, gathered up the reins with a
flourish, and whipped the fresh horses. The bride's last look, as the
carriage shot through the bunch of oleanders at the gate, gathered in the
group of waving, gesticulating men and women, and above them on the steps
the Colonel, with his sweet, half-humorous smile, her mother at his side,
already greatly relieved, and behind all the serious face of Alice
Johnston, the one who knew the mysteries both tender and harsh, and who
could still call it all good! ...

Vickers whisked them to the station in a trice, soothing his excitement by
driving diabolically, cutting corners and speeding down hill. At the
platform President Beals's own car was standing ready for them, the two
porters at the steps. The engine of the special was to take them to the
junction where the "Bellefleur" would be attached to the night express,--a
special favor for the President of the A. and P. The Senator had insisted
on their having his camp in the Adirondacks for a month. Isabelle would
have preferred her own little log hut in the firs of Dog Mountain, which
she and Vickers had built. There they could be really quite alone, forced
to care for themselves. But the Colonel could not understand her bit of
sentiment, and John thought they ought not to offend the amiable Senator,
who had shown himself distinctly friendly. So they were to enter upon their
new life enjoying these luxuries of powerful friends.

The porters made haste to put the bags in the car, and the engine snorted.

"Good-by, Mr. Gerrish," Isabelle called to the station agent, who was
watching them at a respectful distance. Suddenly he seemed to be an old
friend, a part of all that she was leaving behind.

"Good-by, Miss Price--Mrs. Lane," he called back. "Good luck to you!"

"Dear old Vick," Isabelle murmured caressingly, "I hate most to leave you
behind."

"Better stay, then,--it isn't too late," he joked. "We could elope with the
ponies,--you always said you would run off with me!"

She hugged him more tightly, burying her head in his neck, shaking him
gently. "Dear old Vick! Don't be a fool! And be good to Dad, won't you?"

"I'll try not to abuse him."

"You know what I mean--about staying over for the summer. Oh dear, dear!"
There was a queer sob in her voice, as if now for the first time she knew
what it was. The old life was all over. Vick had been so much of that! And
she had seen little or nothing of him since his return from Europe, so
absorbed had she been in the bustle of her marriage. Up there on Dog
Mountain which swam in the haze of the June afternoon they had walked on
snowshoes one cold January night, over the new snow by moonlight, talking
marvellously of all that life was to be. She believed then that she should
never marry, but remain always Vick's comrade,--to guide him, to share his
triumphs. Now she was abandoning that child's plan. She shook with nervous
sobs.

"The engineer says we must start, dear," Lane suggested. "We have only just
time to make the connection."

Vickers untwisted his sister's arms from his neck and placed them gently in
her husband's hands.

"Good-by, girl," he called.

Sinking into a chair near the open door, Isabelle gazed back at the hills
of Grafton until the car plunged into a cut. She gave a long sigh. "We're
off!" her husband said joyously. He was standing beside her, one hand
resting on her shoulder.

"Yes, dear!" She took his strong, muscled hand in hers. But when he tried
to draw her to him, she shrank back involuntarily, startled, and looked at
him with wide-open eyes as if she would read Destiny in him,--the Man, her
husband.

For this was marriage, not the pantomime they had lived through all that
day. That was demanded by custom; but now, alone with this man, his eyes
alight with love and desire, his lips caressing her hair, his hands drawing
her to him,--this was marriage!

Her eyes closed as if to shut out his face,--"Don't, don't!" she murmured
vaguely. Suddenly she started to her feet, her eyes wide open, and she held
him away from her, looking into him, looking deep into his soul.




CHAPTER IV


It was a hot, close night. After the Bellefleur had been coupled to the
Western express at the junction, Lane had the porters make up a bed for
Isabelle on the floor of the little parlor next the observation platform,
and here at the rear of the long train, with the door open, she lay
sleepless through the night hours, listening to the rattle of the trucks,
the thud of heavy wheels on the rails, disturbed only when the car was
shifted to the Adirondack train by the blue glare of arc lights and phantom
figures rushing to and fro in the pallid night.

The excitement of the day had utterly exhausted her; but her mind was
extraordinarily alive with impressions,--faces and pictures from this great
day of her existence, her marriage. And out of all these crowding images
emerged persistently certain ones,--Aline, with the bloom almost gone, the
worn air of something carelessly used. That was due to the children, to
cares,--the Gorings were poor and the two years abroad must have been a
strain. All the girls at St. Mary's had thought that marriage ideal, made
all of love. For there was something of the poet in Eugene Goring, the slim
scholar, walking with raised head and speaking with melodious voice. He was
a girl's ideal.... And then came Nan Lawton, with her jesting tone, and
sly, half-shut eyes. Isabelle remembered how brilliant Nan's marriage was,
how proud she herself had been to have a part in it. Nan's face was blotted
by Alice Johnston's with her phlegmatic husband. She was happy, serene, but
old and acquainted with care.

Why should she think of them, of any other marriage? Hers was to be
different,--oh, yes, quite exceptional and perfect, with an intimacy, a
mutual helpfulness.... The girls at St. Mary's had all had their emotional
experiences, which they confessed to one another; and she had had hers, of
course, like her affair with Fosdick; but so innocent, so merely kittenish
that they had almost disappeared from memory. These girls at St. Mary's
read poetry, and had dreams of heroes, in the form of football players.
They all thought about marriage, coming as they did from well-to-do
parents, whose daughters might be expected to marry. Marriage, men,
position in the world,--all that was their proper inheritance.

After St. Mary's there had been two winters in St. Louis,--her first real
dinners and parties, her first real men. Then a brief season in Washington
as Senator Thomas's guest, where the horizon, especially the man part of
it, had considerably widened. She had made a fair success in Washington,
thanks to her fresh beauty and spirit, and also, she was frank to confess,
thanks to the Senator's interest and the reputation of her father's wealth.
Then had come a six months with her mother and Vickers in Europe, from
which she returned abruptly to get engaged, to begin life seriously.

These experimental years had seemed to her full of radiant avenues, any one
of which she was free to enter, and for a while she had gone joyously on,
discovering new avenues, pleasing herself with trying them all
imaginatively. At the head of all these avenues had stood a man, of course.
She could recall them all: the one in St. Louis who had followed her to
Washington, up the Nile, would not be turned away. Once he had touched her,
taken her hand, and she had felt cold,--she knew that his was not her way.
In Washington there had been a brilliant congressman whom the Senator
approved of,--an older man. She had given him some weeks of puzzled
deliberation, then rejected him, as she considered sagely, because he spoke
only to her mind. Perhaps the most dangerous had been the Austrian whom she
had met in Rome. She almost yielded there; but once when they were alone
together she had caught sight of depths in him, behind his black eyes and
smiling lips, that made her afraid,--deep differences of race. The Prices
were American in an old-fashioned, clean, plain sense. So when he
persisted, she made her mother engage passage for home and fled with the
feeling that she must put an ocean between herself and this man, fled to
the arms of the man she was to marry, who somehow in the midst of his busy
life managed to meet her in New York.

But why him? Out of all these avenues, her possibilities of various fate,
why had she chosen him, the least promising outwardly? Was it done in a
mood of reaction against the other men who had sought her? He was most
unlike them all, with a background of hard struggle, with limitations
instead of privileges such as they had. The Colonel's daughter could
understand John Lane's persistent force,--patient, quiet, sure. She
remembered his shy, inexperienced face when her father first brought him to
the house for dinner. She had thought little of him then,--the Colonel was
always bringing home some rough diamond,--but he had silently absorbed her
as he did everything in his path, and selected her, so to speak, as he
selected whatever he wanted. And after that whenever she came back to her
father's home from her little expeditions into the world, he was always
there, and she came to know that he wanted her,--was waiting until his
moment should come. It came.

Never since then had she had a regret for those possibilities that had been
hers,--for those other men standing at the other avenues and inviting her.
From the moment that his arms had held her, she knew that he was the
best,--so much stronger, finer, simpler than any other. She was proud that
she had been able to divine this quality and could prefer real things to
sham. During the engagement months she had learned, bit by bit, the story
of his struggle, what had been denied to him of comfort and advantage, what
he had done for himself and for his mother. She yearned to give him what he
had never had,--pleasure, joy, the soft suavities of life, what she had had
always.

Now she was his! Her wandering thoughts came back to that central fact.

Half frightened, she drew the blanket about her shoulders and listened. He
had been so considerate of her,--had left her here to rest after making
sure of her comfort and gone forward to the stuffy stateroom to sleep,
divining that she was not yet ready to accept him; that if he took her now,
he should violate something precious in her,--that she was not fully won.
She realized this delicate instinct and was grateful to him. Of course she
was his,--only his; all the other avenues had been closed forever by her
love for him, her marriage to him. Ah, that should be wonderful for them
both, all the years that were to come! Nevertheless, here on the threshold,
her wayward soul had paused the merest moment to consider those other
avenues, what they might have offered of experience, of knowledge, had she
taken any other one of them. Were she here with another than him, destiny,
her inmost self, the whole world of being would be changed, would be other
than it was to be! What was that mysterious power that settled fate on its
grooves? What were those other lives within her soul never to be lived, the
lives she might have lived? Bewildered, weary, she stretched out her arms
dreamily to life, and with parted lips sank into slumber....

The sun was streaming through the open door; the train had come to a halt.
Isabelle awoke with a start, afraid. Her husband was bending over her and
she stared up directly into his amused eyes, looked steadily at him,
remembering now all that she had thought the night before. This was her
avenue--this was _he_ ... yet she closed her eyes as he bent still nearer
to kiss her neck, her temples, her lips. Like a frightened child she drew
the clothes close about her, and turned from his eager embraces. Beyond his
face she saw a line of straight, stiff firs beside the track, and the blue
foot-hills through which the train was winding its way upwards to the
mountains. She stretched herself sleepily, murmuring:--

"Dear, I'm so tired! Is it late?"

"Ten o'clock. We're due in half an hour. I had to wake you."

"In half an hour!" She fled to the dressing-room, putting him off with a
fleeting kiss.

One of the Senator's guides met them at the station with a buckboard. All
the way driving upwards through the woods to the camp they were very gay.
It was like one of those excursions she used to take with Vickers when he
was in his best, most expansive mood, alternately chaffing and petting her.
Lane was in high spirits, throwing off completely that sober self which
made him so weighty in his world, revealing an unexpected boyishness. He
joked with the guide, talked fishing and shooting. With the deep breaths of
mountain air he expanded, his eyes flashing a new fire of joy at sight of
the woods and streams. Once when they stopped to water the horses he seized
the drinking-cup and dashed up the slope to a spring hidden among the
trees. He brought back a brimming cupful of cold water, which she emptied.
Then with a boyish, chivalrous smile he put his lips to the spot where she
had drunk and drained the last drop. "That's enough for me!" he said, and
they laughed self-consciously. His homage seemed to say that thus through
life he would be content with what she left him to drink,--absurd fancy,
but at this moment altogether delightful.... Later she rested, pillowing
her head on his shoulder, covered by his coat, while the trap jolted on
through the woods between high hills. Now and then he touched her face with
the tips of his strong fingers, brushing away the wandering threads of
hair. Very peaceful, happy, feeling that it was all as she would have
wished it, she shut her eyes, content to rest on this comrade, so strong
and so gentle. Life would be like this, always.

The Senator's camp was a camp only in name, of course; in fact it was an
elaborate and expensive rustic establishment on a steep bluff above a
little mountain lake. The Japanese cook had prepared a rich dinner, and the
champagne was properly iced. The couple tiptoed about the place, looking at
each other in some dismay, and John readily fell in with her suggestion
that they should try sleeping in the open, with a rough shelter of
boughs,--should make their first nest for themselves. The guide took them
to a spot some distance up the lake and helped them cut the fir boughs, all
but those for the bed, which they insisted upon gathering for themselves.
After bringing up the blankets and the bags he paddled back to the camp,
leaving them to themselves in the solitude of the woods, under the black,
star-strewn sky.

Alone with him thus beside their little fire her heart was full of dream
and content, of peace and love. They two seemed to have come up out of the
world to some higher level of life. After the joyous day this solitude of
the deep forest was perfect. When the fire had died down to the embers, he
circled her with his arms and kissed her. Although her body yielded to his
strong embrace her lips were cold, hard, and her eyes answered his passion
with a strange, aloof look, as if her soul waited in fear.... She knew what
marriage was to be, although she had never listened to the allusions
whispered among married women and more experienced girls. Something in the
sex side of the relations between men and women had always made her shrink.
She was not so much pure in body and soul, as without sex, unborn. She knew
the fact of nature, the eternal law of life repeating itself through desire
and passion; but she realized it remotely, only in her mind, as some
necessary physiological mechanism of living, like perspiration, fatigue,
hunger. But it had not spoken in her body, in her soul; she did not feel
that it ever could speak to her as it was speaking in the man's lighted
eyes, in his lips. So now as always she was cold, tranquil beneath her
lover's kisses.

And later on their bed of boughs, with her husband's arms about her, his
heart throbbing against her breast, his warm breath covering her neck, she
lay still, very still,--aloof, fearful of this mystery to be revealed, a
little weary, wishing that she were back once more in the car or in her own
room at the Farm, for this night, to return on the morrow to her comrade
for another joyous, free day.

"My love! ... Come to me! ... I love you, love you!" ...

The passionate tone beat against her ears, yet roused no thrilling
response. The trembling voice, the intensity of the worn old words coming
from him,--it was all like another man suddenly appearing in the guise of
one she thought she knew so well! The taut muscles of his powerful arm
pressing against her troubled her. She would have fled,--why could one be
like this! Still she caressed his face and hair, kissing him gently. Oh,
yes, she loved him,--she was his! He was her husband.' Nevertheless she
could not meet him wholly in this inmost intimacy, and her heart was
troubled. If he could be content to be her companion, her lover! But this
other thing was the male, the something which made all men differ from all
women in the crisis of emotion--so she supposed--and must be endured. She
lay passive in his arms, less yielding than merely acquiescent, drawn in
upon herself to something smaller than she was before....

When he slept at her side, his head pillowed close to hers on the fragrant
fir, she still lay awake, her eyes staring up at the golden stars, still
fearful, uncomprehending. At last she was his, as he would have
her,--wholly his, so she said, seeking comfort,--and thus kissing his brow,
with a long, wondering sigh she fell asleep by his side.

In the morning they dipped into the cold black lake, and as they paddled
back to the camp for breakfast while the first rays of the warm sun shone
through the firs in gold bars, she felt like herself once more,--a
companion ready for a frolic. The next morning Lane insisted on cooking
their breakfast, for he was a competent woodsman. She admired the deft way
in which he built his little fire and toasted the bacon. In the undress of
the woods he showed at his best,--self-reliant, capable. There followed a
month of lovely days which they spent together from sunrise to starlight,
walking, fishing, canoeing, swimming,--days of fine companionship when they
learned the human quality in each other. He was strong, buoyant, perfectly
sure of himself. No emergency could arise where he would be found wanting
in the man's part. The man in him she admired,--it was what first had
attracted her,--was proud of it, just as he was proud of her lithe figure,
her beauty, her gayety, and her little air of worldliness. She began to
assume that this was all of marriage, at least the essential part of it,
and that the other, the passionate desire, was something desired by the man
and to be avoided by the woman.

They liked their guide, one of those American gypsies, half poacher, half
farmer. He kept a wife and family in a shack at the foot of the lake, and
Isabelle, with a woman's need for the natural order of life, sought out and
made friends with the wild little brood. The woman had been a mill-hand,
discovered by the woodsman on a chance visit to the town where she worked,
and made his wife, his woman. Not yet thirty, she had had eight children,
and another was coming. Freckled, with a few wisps of thin blond hair, her
front teeth imperfect, she was an untidy, bedraggled object, used and
prematurely aged. Nevertheless the guide seemed attached to her, and when
on a Sunday the family went down to the settlement, following the trail
through the camp, Isabelle could see him help the woman at the wire fence,
carrying on one arm the youngest child, trailing his gun in the other hand.

"He must care for her!" Isabelle remarked.

"Why, of course. Why not?" her husband asked.

"But think--" It was all she could say, not knowing how to put into words
the mournful feeling this woman with her brood of young gave her. What joy,
what life for herself could such a creature have? Isabelle, her imagination
full of comfortable houses with little dinner parties, pretty furniture,
books, theatres, charity committees,--all that she conceived made up a
properly married young woman's life,--could not understand the existence of
the guide's wife. She was merely the man's woman, a creature to give him
children, to cook the food, to keep the fire going. He had the woods, the
wild things he hunted; he had, too, his time of drink and rioting; but she
was merely his drudge and the instrument of his animal passion. Well,
civilization had put a few milestones between herself and Molly Sewall! In
the years to come her mind would revert often to this family as she saw it
filing down the path to the settlement, the half-clothed children peeping
shyly at her, the woman trailing an old shawl from her bent shoulders, the
man striding on ahead with his gun and his youngest baby, careless so long
as there was a fire, a bit of food, and the forest to roam in....

So passed these days of their honeymoon, each one perfect, except for the
occasional disquieting presence of passion, of unappeasable desire in the
man. This male fire was as mysterious, as inexplicable to her as that first
night,--something to be endured forgivingly, but feared, almost hated for
its fierce invasion of her. If her husband could only take her as
companion,--the deep, deep friend, the first and best for the long journey
of life! Perhaps some day that would content him; perhaps this flower of
passion came only at first, to be subdued by the work of life. She never
dreamed that some day she herself might change, might be waked by passion.
And yet she knew that she loved her husband, yearned to give him all that
he desired. Taking his face between her hands, she would kiss it gently,
tenderly, as a mother might kiss a hot, impulsive child trying to still a
restless spirit within.

This mystery of passion! It swept over the man, transfiguring him as the
summer storm swept across the little lake, blackening the sky with shadows
through which the lightning played fearsomely. She saw this face hot with
desire of her, as the face of a stranger,--another one than the strong,
self-contained man she had married,--a face with strange animal and
spiritual depths in it, all mixed and vivified. It was the brute, she said
to herself, and feared. Brute and God lie close together; but she could not
see the God,--felt only the fury of the brute.

Like the storm it passed off, leaving him as she loved him, her tender and
worshipping husband. It never entered her thought that she might love any
man more than she loved him, that perhaps some day she would long for a
passion to meet her own heart. She saw now no lack in her cold limbs, her
hard lips, her passionless eyes. She was still Diana,--long, shapely,
muscular. In her heart she loved this Diana self, so aloof from desire!

The last night of their stay in the mountains she revolved all these things
in her mind as they lay side by side on their fir couch, he asleep in a
deep, dreamless fatigue, she alert and tense after the long day in the
spirituous air, the night wind sighing to her from the upper branches of
the firs. To-morrow they would start for the West, to begin the prose of
life. Suddenly a thought flashed over her that stopped the beat of her
pulse,--she might already have conceived! She did not wish to escape having
children, at least one or two; she knew that it was to be expected, that it
was necessary and good. He would want his child and she also, and her
father and mother would be made happy by children. But her heart said,--not
yet, already. Something in which her part had been so slight! She felt the
injustice of Nature that let conception come to a woman indifferently,
merely of desire in man and acquiescence in woman. How could that be! How
could woman conceive so blindly? The child should be got with joy, should
flower from a sublime moment of perfect union when the man and the woman
were lifted out of themselves to some divine pinnacle of experience, of
soul and body union and self-effacement. Then conception would be but the
carrying over of their deep yearning, each for the other, the hunger of
souls and bodies to create.

Now she saw that it could be otherwise, as perhaps with her this very
moment: that Nature took the seed, however it might fall, and nourished it
wherever it fell, and made of it, regardless of human will, the New
Life,--heedless of the emotion of the two that were concerned in the
process. For the first time she saw that pitiless, indifferent face of
Nature, intent only on the Result, the thing created, scorning the
spiritual travail of the creator, ignoring any great revelation of the man
and the woman that would seem to count for so much in this process of
life-making. Thus a drunken beast might beget his child in the body of a
loathing woman, blind souls sowing life blindly for a blind future.

The idea clutched her like fear: she would defy this fate that would use
her like any other piece of matrix, merely to bear the seed and nourish it
for a certain period of its way, one small step in the long process. Her
heart demanded more than a passive part in the order of Nature. Her soul
needed its share from the first moment of conception in making that which
she was to give to the race. Some day a doctor would explain to her that
she was but the soil on which the fertile germ grew like a vegetable,
without her will, her consent, her creating soul! But she would reject that
coarse interpretation,--the very blasphemy of love.

And here, at this point, as she lay in the dark beneath the sighing firs,
it dawned in her dimly that something was wanting in her marriage, in the
union with the man she had chosen. She had taken him of her own free
choice; she was willingly his; she would bear his children if they came.
Her body and her soul were committed to him by choice, and by that ceremony
of marriage before the people in the chapel,--to take her part with him in
the endless process of Fate, the continuance of life.

Nevertheless, lying there in full contemplation of this new life that might
already be putting its clutch upon her life, to suck from her its own
being, she rebelled at it all. Her heart cried for her part, her very own,
for that mysterious exaltation that should make her really one with the
father in the act of creation, in the fulfilment of Love. And somehow she
knew assuredly that this could not be, not with this man by her side, not
with her husband....

She turned to him, pillowed there at her side, one hand resting fondly on
her arm. Her eyes stared at him through the darkness, trying to read the
familiar features. Did he, too, know this? Did he feel that it was
impossible ever to be really one with her? Did he suspect the terrible
defeat she was suffering now? A tear dropped from her eye and fell on the
upturned face of the sleeper. He moved, murmured, "dearest," and settled
back into his deep sleep; taking his hand from her arm. With a little cry
she fell on him and kissed him, asking his forgiveness for the mistake
between them. She put her head close to his, her lips to his lips; for she
was his and yet not his,--a strange division separating them, a cleavage
between their bodies and their souls.

"Why did we not know?" something whispered within. But she answered herself
more calmly,--"It will all come right in the end--it must come right--for
his sake!"




CHAPTER V


When young John Lane first came to St. Louis to work as a clerk in the
traffic department of the Atlantic and Pacific, he had called on Colonel
Price at his office, a dingy little room in the corner of the second story
of the old brick building which had housed the wholesale hardware business
of Parrott and Price for a generation. The old merchant had received the
young man with the pleasant kindliness that kept his three hundred
employees always devoted to him.

"I knew your father, sir!" he said, half-closing his eyes and leaning back
in his padded old office chair. "Let me see--it was in sixty-two in camp
before Vicksburg. I went to consult him about a boil on my leg. It was a
bad boil,--it hurt me.... Your father was a fine man--What are you doing in
St. Louis?" he concluded abruptly, looking out of his shrewd blue eyes at
the fresh-colored young man whose strong hands gripped squarely the arms of
his chair.

And from that day Lane knew that the Colonel never lost sight of him. When
his chance came, as in time it did come through one of the mutations of the
great corporation, he suspected that the old hardware merchant, who was a
close friend of the chief men in the road, had spoken the needed word to
lift the clerk out of the rut. At any rate the Colonel had not forgotten
the son of Tyringham Lane, and the young man had often been to the
generous, ugly Victorian house,--built when the hardware business made its
first success.

Nevertheless, when, three years later John Lane made another afternoon
visit to that dingy office in the Parrott and Price establishment, his
hands trembed nervously as he sat waiting while the Colonel scrawled his
signature to several papers.

"Well, John!" the old man remarked finally, shoving the papers towards the
waiting stenographer. "How's railroadin' these days?"

"All right," Lane answered buoyantly. "They have transferred me to the
Indiana division, headquarters at Torso--superintendent of the Torso and
Toledo."

"Indeed! But you'll be back here some day, eh?"

"I hope so!"

"That's good!" The Colonel smiled sympathetically, as he always did when he
contemplated energetic youth, climbing the long ladder with a firm grip on
each rung.

"I came to see you about another matter," Lane began hesitantly.

"Anything I can do for you?"

"Yes, sir; I want to marry your daughter,--and I'd like you to know it."

The old merchant's face became suddenly grave, the twinkle disappearing
from his blue eyes. He listened thoughtfully while the young man explained
himself. He was still a poor man, of course; his future was to be made. But
he did not intend to remain poor. His salary was not much to offer a girl
like the Colonel's daughter; but it would go far in Torso--and it was the
first step. Finally he was silent, well aware that there was small
possibility that he should ever be a rich man, as Colonel Price was, and
that it was presumptuous of him to seek to marry his daughter, and
therefore open to mean interpretation. But he felt that the Colonel was not
one to impute low motives. He knew the very real democracy of the
successful merchant, who never had forgotten his own story.

"What does Belle say?" the Colonel asked.

"I should not have come here if I didn't think--" the young man laughed.

"Of course!"

Then the Colonel pulled down the top of his desk, signifying that the day's
business was done.

"We have never desired what is called a good match for our girl," he
remarked slowly in reply to a further plea from Lane. "All we want is the
best;" he laid grave emphasis on this watchword. "And the best is that
Isabelle should be happy in her marriage. If she loves the man she marries,
she must be that.... And I don't suppose you would be here if you weren't
sure you could make her love you enough to be happy!"

The old man's smile returned for a fleeting moment, and then he mused.

"I am afraid it will be hard for her to settle down in a place like
Torso--after all she's had," Lane conceded. "But I don't expect that Torso
is the end of my rope. I shall give her a better chance than that, I hope."

The Colonel nodded sympathetically.

"I shouldn't consider it any hardship for my daughter to live in Torso or
in any other place--if she has a good husband and loves him. That is all,
my boy!"

Lane, who realized the grades of a plutocratic democracy better than three
years before, and knew the position of the Prices in the city, comprehended
the splendid simplicity, the single-mindedness of the man, who could thus
completely ignore considerations of wealth and social position in the
marriage of his only daughter.

"I shall do my best, sir, to make her happy all her life!" the young man
stammered.

"I know you will, my boy, and I think you will succeed, if she loves you as
you say she does."

Then the Colonel took his hat from the nail behind the door, and the two
men continued their conversation in the street. They did not turn up town
to the club and residence quarter, but descended towards the river, passing
on their way the massive skeleton of the ten-story building that was to
house, when completed, the Parrott and Price business. It rose in the smoky
sunset, stretching out spidery tendons of steel to the heavens, and from
its interior came a mighty clangor. The Colonel paused to look at the new
building,--the monument of his success as a merchant.

"Pretty good? Corbin's doing it,--he's the best in the country, they tell
me."

Soon they kept on past the new building into an old quarter of the city,
the Colonel apparently having some purpose that guided his devious course
through these unattractive streets.

"There!" he exclaimed at last, pointing across a dirty street to a shabby
little brick house. "That's the place where Isabelle's mother and I started
in St. Louis. We had a couple of rooms over there the first winter. The
store was just a block further west. It's torn down now. I passed some of
the best days of my life in those rooms on the second story.... It isn't
the outside that counts, my boy!" The Colonel tucked his hand beneath the
young man's arm, as they turned back to the newer quarters of the city.

Mrs. Price, it should be said, did not accept Lane's suit as easily as the
Colonel. Her imagination had been expanded by that winter in Washington,
and though she was glad that Isabelle had not accepted any of "those
foreigners," yet Harmony Price had very definite ideas of the position that
the Colonel's daughter might aspire to in America.... But her objections
could not stand before the Colonel's flat consent and Isabelle's decision.

"They'll be a great deal better off than we were," her husband reminded
her.

"That's no reason why Belle should have to start where we did, or anywhere
near it!" his wife retorted. What one generation had been able to gain in
the social fight, it seemed to her only natural that the next should at
least hold.

The Colonel gave the couple their new home in Torso, selecting, with a fine
eye for real estate values, a large "colonial" wooden house with ample
grounds out beyond the smoke of the little city, near the new country club.
Mrs. Price spent an exciting three months running back and forth between
New York, St. Louis, and Torso furnishing the new home. Isabelle's liberal
allowance was to continue indefinitely, and beyond this the Colonel
promised nothing, now or later; nor would Lane have accepted more from his
hand. It was to the Torso house that the Lanes went immediately after their
month in the Adirondacks.

       *       *       *       *       *

Torso, Indiana, is one of those towns in the Mississippi Valley which makes
more impression the farther from New York one travels. New York has never
heard of it, except as it appears occasionally on a hotel register among
other queer places that Americans confess to as home. At Pittsburg it is a
round black spot on the map, in the main ganglia of the great A. and P. and
the junction point of two other railroads. At Cincinnati it is a commercial
centre of considerable importance, almost a rival. While Torso to Torso is
the coming pivot of the universe.

It is an old settlement--some families with French names still own the
large distilleries--on the clay banks of a sluggish creek in the southern
part of the state, and there are many Kentuckians in its population.
Nourished by railroads, a division headquarters of the great A. and P.,
near the soft-coal beds, with a tin-plate factory, a carpet factory, a
carriage factory, and a dozen other mills and factories, Torso is a black
smudge in a flat green landscape from which many lines of electric railway
radiate forth along the country roads. And along the same roads across the
reaches of prairie, over the swelling hills, stalk towering poles, bearing
many fine wires glistening in the sunlight and singing the importance of
Torso to the world at large.

The Lanes arrived at night, and to Isabelle the prairie heavens seemed dark
and far away, the long broad streets with their bushy maple trees empty,
and the air filled with hoarse plaints, the rumbling speech of the
railroad. She was homesick and fearful, as they mounted the steps to the
new house and pushed open the shining oak door that stuck and smelled of
varnish. The next morning Lane whisked off on a trolley to the A. and P.
offices, while Isabelle walked around the house, which faced the main
northern artery of Torso. From the western veranda she could see the roof
of the new country club through a ragged group of trees. On the other side
were dotted the ample houses of Torso aristocracy, similar to hers, as she
knew, finished in hard wood, electric-lighted, telephoned, with many baths,
large "picture" windows of plate glass, with potted ferns in them, and much
the same furniture,--wholesome, comfortable "homes." Isabelle, turning back
to her house to cope with the three Swedes that her mother had sent on from
St. Louis, had a queer sense of anti-climax. She swept the landscape with a
critical eye, feeling she knew it all, even to what the people were saying
at this moment in those large American-Georgian mansions; what Torso was
doing at this moment in its main street.... No, it could not be for the
Lanes for long,--that was the conviction in her heart. Their destiny would
be larger, fuller than any to be found in Torso. Just what she meant by a
"large, full life," she had never stopped to set down; but she was sure it
was not to be found here in Torso.

Here began, however, the routine of her married life. Each morning she
watched her husband walk down the broad avenue to the electric car,--alert,
strong, waving his newspaper to her as he turned the corner. Each afternoon
she waited for him at the same place, or drove down to the office with the
Kentucky horses that she had bought, to take him for a drive before dinner.
He greeted her each time with the same satisfied smile, apparently not
wilted by the long hours in a hot office. There was a smudged, work-a-day
appearance to his face and linen, the mark of Torso, the same mark that the
mill-hands across the street from the A. and P. offices brought home to
their wives.... Thus the long summer days dragged. For distraction there
was a mutiny in the crew of Swedish servants, but Isabelle, with her
mother's instinct for domestic management, quickly produced order, in spite
of the completely servantless state of Torso. She would telegraph to St.
Louis for what she wanted and somehow always got it. The house ran,--that
was her business. It was pretty and attractive,--that was also her
business. But this woman's work she tossed off quickly. Then what? She
pottered in the garden a little, but when the hot blasts of prairie heat in
mid-August had shrivelled all the vines and flowers and cooked the beds
into slabs of clay, she retired from the garden and sent to St. Louis for
the daily flowers. She read a good deal, almost always novels, in the vague
belief that she was "keeping up" with modern literature, and she played at
translating some German lyrics.

Then people began to call,--the wives of the Torso great, her neighbors in
those ample mansions scattered all about the prairie. These she reported to
John with a mocking sense of their oddity.

"Mrs. Fraser came to-day. What is she? Tin-plate or coal?"

"He's the most important banker here," her husband explained seriously.

"Oh,--well, she asked me to join the 'travel-class.' They are going through
the Holy Land. What do you suppose a 'travel-class' is?"...

Again it was the wife of the chief coal operator, Freke, "who wanted me to
know that she always got her clothes from New York." She added gently, "I
think she wished to find out if we are fit for Torso society. I did my best
to give her the impression we were beneath it."...

These people, all the "society" of Torso, they met also at the country
club, where they went Sundays for a game of golf, which Lane was learning.
The wife of the A. and P. superintendent could not be ignored by Torso, and
so in spite of Isabelle's efforts there was forming around her a social
life. But the objective point of the day remained John,--his going and
coming.

"Busy day?" she would ask when he bent to kiss her.

"They're all busy days!"

"Tell me what you did."

"Oh," he would answer vaguely, "just saw people and dictated letters and
telegrams,--yes, it was a busy day." And he left her to dress for dinner.

She knew that he was weary after all the problems that he had thrust his
busy mind into since the morning. She had no great curiosity to know what
these problems were. She had been accustomed to the sanctity of business
reserve in her father's house: men disappeared in the morning to their work
and emerged to wash and dress and be as amusing as they might for the few
remaining hours of the day. There were rumors of what went on in that
mysterious world of business, but the right kind of men did not disclose
the secrets of the office to women.

It never occurred to Lane to go over with her the minute detail of his full
day: how he had considered an application from a large shipper for
switching privileges, had discussed the action of the Torso and Northern in
cutting the coal rates, had lunched with Freke, the president of a coal
company that did business with the A. and P.; and had received, just as he
left the office, the report of a serious freight wreck at one end of his
division. As he had said, a busy day! And this business of life, like an
endless steel chain, had caught hold of him at once and was carrying him
fast in its revolution. It was his life; he liked it. With cool head and
steady nerves he set himself at each problem, working it out according to
known rules, calling on his trained experience. He did not look into the
future, content with the preoccupation of the present, confident that the
future, whatever and wherever it might be, would be crowded with affairs,
activity, which he would meet competently....

"Well, what have _you_ been doing?" he asked as he sat down, fresh from his
bath, and relaxed comfortably in anticipation of a pleasant dinner.
Isabelle made a great point of dinner, having it served formally by two
maids, with five "Busy day?" she would ask when he bent to kiss her.

"They're all busy days!"

"Tell me what you did."

"Oh," he would answer vaguely, "just saw people and dictated letters and
telegrams,--yes, it was a busy day." And he left her to dress for dinner.

She knew that he was weary after all the problems that he had thrust his
busy mind into since the morning. She had no great curiosity to know what
these problems were. She had been accustomed to the sanctity of business
reserve in her father's house: men disappeared in the morning to their work
and emerged to wash and dress and be as amusing as they might for the few
remaining hours of the day. There were rumors of what went on in that
mysterious world of business, but the right kind of men did not disclose
the secrets of the office to women.

It never occurred to Lane to go over with her the minute detail of his full
day: how he had considered an application from a large shipper for
switching privileges, had discussed the action of the Torso and Northern in
cutting the coal rates, had lunched with Freke, the president of a coal
company that did business with the A. and P.; and had received, just as he
left the office, the report of a serious freight wreck at one end of his
division. As he had said, a busy day! And this business of life, like an
endless steel chain, had caught hold of him at once and was carrying him
fast in its revolution. It was his life; he liked it. With cool head and
steady nerves he set himself at each problem, working it out according to
known rules, calling on his trained experience. He did not look into the
future, content with the preoccupation of the present, confident that the
future, whatever and wherever it might be, would be crowded with affairs,
activity, which he would meet competently....

"Well, what have _you_ been doing?" he asked as he sat down, fresh from his
bath, and relaxed comfortably in anticipation of a pleasant dinner.
Isabelle made a great point of dinner, having it served formally by two
maids, with five courses and at least one wine, "to get used to living
properly," as she explained vaguely.

"Mrs. Adams called." She was the wife of the manager of the baking-powder
works and president of the country club, a young married woman from a
Western city with pretensions to social experience. "John," Isabelle added
after mentioning this name, "do you think we shall have to stay here long?"

Her husband paused in eating his soup to look at her. "Why--why?"

"It's so second-classy," she continued; "at least the women are, mostly.
There's only one I've met so far that seemed like other people one has
known."

"Who is she?" Lane inquired, ignoring the large question.

"Mrs. Falkner."

"Rob Falkner's wife? He's engineer at the Pleasant Valley mines."

"She came from Denver."

"They say he's a clever engineer."

"She is girlish and charming. She told me all about every one in Torso.
She's been here two years, and she seems to know everybody."

"And she thinks Torso is second-class?" Lane inquired.

"She would like to get away, I think. But they are poor, I suppose. Her
clothes look as if she knew what to wear,--pretty. She says there are some
interesting people here when you find them out.... Who is Mr. Darnell? A
lawyer."

"Tom Darnell? He's one of the local counsel for the road,--a Kentuckian,
politician, talkative sort of fellow, very popular with all sorts. What did
Mrs. Falkner have to say about Tom Darnell?"

"She told me all about his marriage,--how he ran away with his wife from a
boarding-school in Kentucky--and was chased by her father and brothers, and
they fired at him. A regular Southern scrimmage! But they got across the
river and were married."

"Sounds like Darnell," Lane remarked contemptuously.

"It sounds exciting!" his wife said.

The story, as related by the vivacious Mrs. Falkner, had stirred Isabelle's
curiosity; she could not dismiss this Kentucky politician as curtly as her
husband had disposed of him....

They were both wilted by the heat, and after dinner they strolled out into
the garden to get more air, walking leisurely arm in arm, while Lane smoked
his first, cigar. Having finished the gossip for the day, they had little
to say to each other,--Isabelle wondered that it should be so little! Two
months of daily companionship after the intimate weeks of their engagement
had exhausted the topics for mere talk which they had in common. To-night,
as Lane wished to learn the latest news from the wreck, they went into the
town, crossing on their way to the office the court-house square. This was
the centre of old Torso, where the distillery aristocracy still lived in
high, broad-eaved houses of the same pattern as the Colonel's city mansion.
In one of these, which needed painting and was generally neglected, the
long front windows on the first story were open, revealing a group of
people sitting around a supper-table.

"There's Mrs. Falkner," Isabelle remarked; "the one at the end of the
table, in white. This must be where they live."

Lane looked at the house with a mental estimate of the rent.

"Large house," he observed.

Isabelle watched the people laughing and talking about the table, which was
still covered with coffee cups and glasses. A sudden desire to be there, to
hear what they were saying, seized her. A dark-haired man was leaning
forward and emphasizing his remarks by tapping a wine glass with along
finger. That might be Tom Darnell, she thought.... The other houses about
the square were dark and gloomy, most of them closed for the summer.

"There's a good deal of money in Torso," Lane commented, glancing at a
brick house with wooden pillars. "It's a growing place,--more business
coming all the time."

He looked at the town with the observant eye of the railroad officer, who
sees in the prosperity of any community but one word writ large,--TRAFFIC.

And that word was blown through the soft night by the puffing locomotives
in the valley below, by the pall of smoke that hung night and day over this
quarter of the city, the dull glow of the coke-ovens on the distant hills.
To the man this was enough--this and his home; business and the woman he
had won,--they were his two poles!




CHAPTER VI


"You see," continued Bessie Falkner, drawing up her pretty feet into the
piazza cot, "it was just love at first sight. I was up there at the hotel
in the mountains, trying to make up my mind whether I could marry another
man, who was awfully rich--owned a mine and a ranch; but he was so dull the
horses would go to sleep when we were out driving ... And then just as I
concluded it was the only thing for me to do, to take him and make the best
of him,--then Rob rode up to the hotel in his old tattered suit--he was
building a dam or something up in the mountains--and I knew I couldn't
marry Mr. Mine-and-Ranch. That was all there was to it, my dear. The rest
of the story? Why, of course he made the hotel his headquarters while he
was at work on the dam; I stayed on, too, and it came along--naturally, you
know."

Mrs. Falkner dipped into a box of candy and swung the cot gently to and
fro. The men were still talking inside the house and the two wives had come
outside for long confidences. Isabelle, amused by this sketch of the
Colorado courtship, patted the blond woman's little hand. Mrs. Falkner had
large blue eyes, with waving tendrils of hair, which gave her face the look
of childish unsophistication;--especially at this moment when her
voluptuous lips were closing over a specially desired piece of candy.

"Of course it would come along--with you!"

"I didn't do a thing--just waited," Bessie protested, fishing about the
almost empty box for another delectable bit. "He did it all. He was in such
a hurry he wanted to marry me then and there at the hotel and go live up in
the mountains in a cabin above the dam where he was at work. He's romantic.
Men are all like that then, don't you think? But of course it couldn't be
that way; so we got married properly in the fall in Denver, and then came
straight here. And," with a long sigh, "we've been here ever since. Stuck!"

"I should think you would have preferred the cabin above the dam," Isabelle
suggested, recalling her own romantic notion of Dog Mountain. Mrs. Falkner
made a little grimace.

"That might do for two or three months. But snowed in all the winter, even
with the man you like best in all the world? He'd kill you or escape
through the drifts ... You see we hadn't a thing, not a cent, except his
salary and that ended with the dam. It was only eighty a month anyway. This
is better, a hundred and fifty," she explained with childish frankness.
"But Rob has to work harder and likes the mountains, is always talking of
going back. But I say there are better things than hiding yourself at the
land's end. There's St. Louis, or maybe New York!"

Isabelle wondered how the Falkners were able to support such a hospitable
house--they had two small children and Bessie had confided that another was
coming in the spring--on the engineer's salary.

"And the other one," Mrs. Falkner added in revery, "is more than a
millionnaire now."

Her face was full of speculation over what might have been as the wife of
all that money.

"But we are happy, Rob and I,--except for the bills! Don't you hate bills?"

Isabelle's only answer was a hearty laugh. She found this pretty, frank
little "Westerner" very attractive.

"It was bills that made my mother unhappy--broke her heart. Sometimes we
had money,--most generally not. Such horrid fusses when there wasn't any.
But what is one to do? You've got to go on living somehow. Rob says we
can't afford this house,--Rob is always afraid we won't get through. But we
do somehow. I tell him that the good time is coming,--we must just
anticipate it, draw a little on the future."

At this point the men came through the window to the piazza. Bessie shook
her box of candy coquettishly at Lane, who took the chair beside her.
Evidently he thought her amusing, as most men did. Falkner leaned against
the white pillar and stared up at the heavens. Isabelle, accustomed to men
of more conventional social qualities, had found the young engineer glum
and odd. He had a stern, rather handsome face, a deep furrow dividing his
forehead and meeting the part of his thick brown hair, which curled
slightly at the ends. "If he didn't look so cross, he would be quite
handsome," thought Isabelle, wondering how long it might be before her host
would speak to her. She could see him as he rode up to the hotel piazza
that day, when Bessie Falkner had made up her mind on the moment that she
could not marry "the other man." Finally Falkner broke his glum silence.

"Do you eat candy, Mrs. Lane? Pounds of it, I mean,--so that it is your
staple article of diet."

"Tut, tut," remarked his wife from her cot. "Don't complain."

His next remark was equally abrupt.

"There's only one good thing in this Torso hole," he observed with more
animation than he had shown all the evening, "and that's the coke-ovens at
night--have you noticed them? They are like the fiery pits, smouldering,
ready for the damned!"

It was not what she expected from a civil engineer, in Torso, Indiana, and
she was at a loss for a reply.

"You'd rather have stayed in Colorado?" she asked frankly.

He turned his face to her and said earnestly, "Did you ever sleep out on a
mountain with the stars close above you?--'the vast tellurian galleons'
voyaging through space?"

Isabelle suspected that he was quoting poetry, which also seemed odd in
Torso.

"Yes,--my brother and I used to camp out at our home in Connecticut. But I
don't suppose you would call our Berkshire Hills mountains."

"No," he replied dryly, "I shouldn't."

And their conversation ended. Isabella wished that the Darnells had not
been obliged to go home immediately after supper. The young lawyer knew how
to talk to women, and had made himself very agreeable, telling stories of
his youth spent among the mountains with a primitive people. She had
observed that he drank a good deal of whiskey, and there was something in
his black eyes that made her uncomfortable. But he was a man that women
liked to think about: he touched their imaginations. She did not talk about
him to John on their way home, however, but discussed the Falkners.

"Don't you think she is perfectly charming?" (Charming was the word she had
found for Bessie Falkner.) "So natural and amusing! She's very Western--she
can't have seen much of life--but she isn't a bit ordinary."

"Yes, I like her," Lane replied unenthusiastically, "and he seems original.
I shouldn't wonder if he were clever in his profession; he told me a lot
about Freke's mines."

What he had learned about the Pleasant Valley mines was the chief thing in
the evening to Lane. He did not understand why Isabelle seemed so much more
eager to know these people--these Darnells and Falkners--than the Frasers
and the Adamses. She had made fun of the solemn dinner that the Frasers had
given to introduce them into Torso "society."

"I wonder how they can live on that salary," Isabelle remarked. "One
hundred and fifty a month!"

"He must make something outside."

       *       *       *       *       *

After the Lanes had gone, Bessie Falkner prepared yawningly for bed,
leaving her husband to shut up the house. Her weekly excitement of
entertaining people over, she always felt let down, like a poet after the
stir of creation. It was useless to go over the affair with Rob, as he was
merely bored. But she spent hours thinking what the women said and how they
looked and deciding whom she could have the next time. On her way to bed
she went into the nursery where her two little girls were asleep in their
cots beside the nurse, and finding a window open woke the nurse to reprove
her for her carelessness. In the hall she met her husband bringing up the
silver.

"Emma is so thoughtless," she complained. "I shall have to let her go if I
can find another servant in this town."

Her husband listened negligently. The Falkners were perpetually changing
their two servants, or were getting on without them.

"Mrs. Lane's maids all wear caps," Mrs. Falkner had observed frequently to
her husband.

Bessie had strict ideas of how a house should be run, ideas derived from
the best houses that she was familiar with. Since the advent of the Lanes
she had extended these ideas and strove all the harder to achieve
magnificent results. Though the livery of service was practically unknown
in Torso, she had resolved to induce her cook (and maid of all work) to
serve the meals with cap and apron, and also endeavored to have the
nursemaid open the door and help serve when company was expected.

"What's the use!" her husband protested. "They'll only get up and go."

He could not understand the amount of earnest attention and real feeling
that his wife put into these things,--her pride to have her small domain
somewhat resemble the more affluent ones that she admired. Though her
family had been decidedly plain, they had given her "advantages" in
education and dress, and her own prettiness, her vivacity and charm, had
won her way into whatever society Kansas City and Denver could offer. She
had also visited here and there in different parts of the country,--once in
New York, and again at a cottage on the New England coast where there were
eight servants, a yacht, and horses. These experiences of luxury, of an
easy and large social life, she had absorbed through every pore. With that
marvellous adaptability of her race she had quickly formed her ideals of
"how people ought to live." It was frequently difficult to carry out these
ideals on a circumscribed income, with a husband who cared nothing for
appearances, and that was a source of constant discontent to Bessie.

"Coming to bed?" she asked her husband, as she looked in vain for the
drinking water that the maid was supposed to bring to her bedside at night.

"No," Falkner answered shortly. "I've got to make out those estimates
somehow before morning. If you will have people all the time--"

Bessie turned in at her door shrugging her shoulders. Rob was in one of his
"cross" moods,--overworked, poor boy! She slowly began to undress before
the mirror, thinking of Isabelle Lane's stylish figure and her perfect
clothes. "She must have lots of money," she reflected, "and so nice and
simple! He's attractive, too. Rob is foolish not to like them. He showed
his worst side to-night. If he wants to get on,--why, they are the sort of
people he ought to know." Her husband's freakish temper gave her much
trouble, his unexpectedly bearish moods when she was doing her very best
for him, "bringing him out" as she put it, making the right kind of
friends,--influential ones, so that he might have some chance in the
scramble for the good things of life. Surely that was a wife's part. Bessie
was satisfied that she had done much for her husband in this way, developed
him socially; for when he rode up to the mountain hotel, he was solitary,
moody, shy. Tonight he hadn't kissed her,--in fact hadn't done so for
several days. He was tired by the prolonged heat, she supposed, and worried
about the bills. He was always worried about expenses.

As the clothes slipped from her still shapely figure, she stood before the
glass, thinking in a haze of those first lover-days that had departed so
soon. Now instead of petting her, Rob spent his hours at home upstairs in
his attic workroom, doing extra work or reading. Could it be that he was
growing tired of her, so soon, in four years? She glanced over her shoulder
at her pretty arms, her plump white neck reflected in the glass, and smiled
unconsciously with assurance. Oh, he would come back to the lover-mood--she
was still desirable! And as the smile curved her lip she thought, "I
married him for love!" She was very proud of that....

The house was now deliciously cool and quiet. Bessie sank into her bed with
a sigh, putting out one hand for a magazine and turning on the electric
light beside the bed. It had been a tiresome day, with the supper to bring
off. There had been six courses, and everything had been very nice. The
black cook she had engaged to prepare the meal was a treasure, could serve
a better dinner than Mrs. Fraser's or Mrs. Adams's. She herself had made
the salad and prepared the iced grape-fruit. Every limb ached--she was
always so tired. She loved this last quiet hour of the day that she had by
herself, now that the nurse took both the children. With her delicate
health the nurse had been a necessity. She usually looked blooming and
rosy, but was always tired, always had been as long as she could remember.
The doctor had told Falkner after the second child came that his wife would
always be a delicate woman, must be carefully protected, or she would
collapse and have the fearful modern disease of nerves. So Falkner had
insisted on having the best nurse obtainable to relieve her from the
wearing nights,--though it meant that somehow eighteen hundred dollars must
grow of itself!

As midnight sounded from the court-house clock, Bessie laid down the
magazine and stretched her tired limbs, luxuriating in the comfort of her
soft bed. The story she had been reading was sentimental,--the love of a
cowboy for the fair daughter of a railroad president. She longed for the
caresses of her cow-boy lover, and wondered dreamily if Lane were a devoted
husband. He seemed so; but all men were probably alike: their first desires
gratified, they thought of other things. So she put out the light and
closed her eyes, in faint discontent with life, which was proving less
romantic than she had anticipated.

She had her own room. At first it had held two beds, her husband sharing
the room with her. But as the house was large he had taken a room on the
third story. Nowadays, as Bessie knew, the better sort of American
household does not use the primitive double bed. For hygiene and comfort
enlightened people have taken to separate beds, then separate quarters. A
book might be written on the doing away of the conjugal bed in American
life! There should be interesting observations on the effect of this
change, social, and hygienic, and moral,--oh, most interesting!  ... A
contented smile at last stole over the young wife's face. Was she dreaming
of her babies, of those first days of love, when her husband never wished
her out of his sight, or simply of the well-ordered, perfectly served,
pretty supper that she had given for the Lanes whom she was most anxious to
know well? The supper had quite met her aspirations except in the matter of
caps and aprons, had satisfied her cherished ideal of how "nice people"
lived in this world.

That ideal is constantly expanding these days. In America no one is classed
by birth or profession. All is to make, and the women with their marvellous
powers of absorption do the shaping. In a thousand ways they learn "how to
live as other people do,"--in magazines and on bill boards, in the theatre,
the churches, the trains, the illustrated novel. Suggestions how to live!

Meantime upstairs in the mansard room of the old house Falkner was figuring
over stresses and strains of an unemotional sort. When past midnight he
shoved the papers into the drawer, a familiar thought coursed through his
brain: somehow he must sell himself at a dearer price. Living was not cheap
even in Torso, and the cost of living was ever going higher, so the papers
said and the wives. There were four of them now, a fifth to come in a few
months. There should be a third servant, he knew, if they were to live
"like other people." With a gesture that said, "Oh, Hell!" he jumped from
his chair and took down a volume of verse from the pine shelf above the
mantel and lighted a cigarette. For a few minutes he might lose himself and
forget the fret of life, in the glowing pictures of things not seen.

The book dropped from his hand. He had carried it in his mountain kit, had
read it to Bessie when they were engaged. She had listened, flattered,
looking at him and smoothing his hair. But after marriage she confessed
flatly that she was not "literary." So they had read together a book of
travels, then a novel, then a magazine, and latterly nothing. Taking
another cigarette, the man read on, and before his tired eyes rose the
purple peaks of the Rockies, the shining crests of snow, the azure sky. And
also a cabin in a green meadow beside a still mountain lake, and a woman
fair and tall and straight, with blue eyes and a caressing hand,--a child
on one arm. But Bessie was sleeping downstairs. Putting out his light, the
man went to bed.

The man on horseback riding up the trail to look into the girl's eyes that
summer afternoon!




CHAPTER VII


The two young wives quickly became very intimate. They spent many mornings
together "reading," that is, they sat on the cool west veranda of the
Lanes's house, or less often on the balcony at the Falkners's, with a novel
turned down where their attention had relaxed, chatting and sewing.
Isabelle found Bessie Falkner "cunning," "amusing," "odd," and always
"charming." She had "an air about her," a picturesque style of gossip that
she used when instructing Isabelle in the intricacies of Torso society.
Isabelle also enjoyed the homage that Bessie paid her.

Bessie frankly admired Isabella's house, her clothes, her stylish self, and
enjoyed her larger experience of life,--the Washington winter, Europe, even
the St. Louis horizon,--all larger than anything she had ever known.
Isabelle was very nearly the ideal of what she herself would have liked to
be. So when they had exhausted Torso and their households, they filled the
morning hours with long tales about people they had known,--"Did you ever
hear of the Dysarts in St. Louis? Sallie Dysart was a great belle,--she had
no end of affairs, and then she married Paul Potter. The Potters were very
well-known people in Philadelphia, etc." Thus they gratified their
curiosity about _lives_, all the interesting complications into which men
and women might get. Often Bessie stayed for luncheon, a dainty affair
served on a little table which the maid brought out and set between them.
Sometimes Bessie had with her the baby girl, but oftener not, for she
became exacting and interfered with the luncheon.

Bessie had endless tidbits of observation about Torsonians. "Mrs. Freke was
a cashier in a Cleveland restaurant when he married her. Don't you see the
bang in her hair still? ... Mrs. Griscom came from Kentucky,--very old
family. Tom Griscom, their only son, went to Harvard,--he was very wild.
He's disappeared since.... Yes, Mrs. Adams is common, but the men seem to
like her. I don't trust her green eyes. Mr. Darnell, they say, is always
there. Oh, Mr. Adams isn't the one to care!"

Often they came back to Darnell,--that impetuous, black-haired young lawyer
with his deep-set, fiery eyes, who had run away with his wife.

"She looks scared most of the time, don't you think? They say he drinks.
Too bad, isn't it? Such a brilliant man, and with the best chances. He ran
for Congress two years ago on the Democratic ticket, and just failed. He is
going to try again this next fall, but his railroad connection is against
him.... Oh, Sue Darnell,--she is nobody; she can't hold him--that's plain."

"What does she think of Mrs. Adams?"

Bessie shrugged her shoulders significantly.

"Sue has to have her out at their farm. Well, they say she was pretty gay
herself,--engaged to three men at once,--one of them turned up in Torso
last year. Tom was very polite to him, elaborately polite; but he left town
very soon, and she seemed dazed.... I guess she has reason to be afraid of
her husband. He looks sometimes--well, I shouldn't like to have Rob look at
me that way, not for half a second!"

The two women clothed the brilliant Kentuckian with all the romance of
unbridled passion. "He sends to Alabama every week for the jasmine Mrs.
Adams wears--fancy!"

"Really! Oh, men! men!"

"It's probably _her_ fault--she can't hold him."

That was the simple philosophy which they evolved about marriage,--men were
uncertain creatures, only partly tamed, and it was the woman's business to
"hold" them. So much the worse for the women if they happened to be tied to
men they could not "hold." Isabelle, remembering on one occasion the
flashing eyes of the Kentuckian, his passionate denunciation of mere
commercialism in public life, felt that there might be some defence for
poor Tom Darnell,--even in his flirtation with the "common" Mrs. Adams.

Then the two friends went deeper and talked husbands, both admiring, both
hilariously amused at the masculine absurdities of their mates.

"I hate to see poor Rob so harassed with bills," Bessie confided. "It is
hard for him, with his tastes, poor boy. But I don't know what I can do
about it. When he complains, I tell him we eat everything we have, and I am
sure I never get a dress!"

Isabelle, recollecting the delicious suppers she had had at the Falkners's,
thought that less might be eaten. In her mother's house there had always
been comfort, but strict economy, even after the hardware business paid
enormous profits. This thrift was in her blood. Bessie had said to Rob that
Isabelle was "close." But Isabelle only laughed at Bessie when she was in
these moods of dejection, usually at the first of the month. Bessie was so
amusing about her troubles that she could not take her seriously.

"Never mind, Bessie!" she laughed. "He probably likes to work hard for
you,--every man does for the woman he loves."

And then they would have luncheon, specially devised for Bessie's epicurean
taste. For Bessie Falkner did devout homage to a properly cooked dish.
Isabelle, watching the contented look with which the little woman swallowed
a bit of jellied meat, felt that any man worth his salt would like to
gratify her innocent tastes. Probably Falkner couldn't endure a less
charming woman for his wife. So she condoned, as one does with a clever
child, all the little manifestations of waywardness and selfishness that
she was too intelligent not to see in her new friend. Isabelle liked to
spoil Bessie Falkner. Everybody liked to indulge her, just as one likes to
feed a pretty child with cake and candy, especially when the discomforts of
the resulting indigestion fall on some one else.

"Oh, it will all come out right in the end!" Bessie usually exclaimed,
after she had well lunched. She did not see things very vividly far
ahead,--nothing beyond the pleasant luncheon, the attractive house, her
adorable Isabelle. "I always tell Rob when he is blue that his chance will
come some day; he'll make a lucky strike, do some work that attracts public
attention, and then we'll all be as happy as can be."

She had the gambler's instinct; her whole life had been a gamble, now
winning, now losing, even to that moment when her lover had ridden up to
the hotel and solved her doubts about the rich suitor. In Colorado she had
known men whose fortunes came over night, "millions and millions," as she
told Isabelle, rolling the words in her little mouth toothsomely. Why not
to her? She felt that any day fortune might smile.

"My husband says that Mr. Falkner is doing excellent work,--Mr. Freke said
so," Isabelle told Bessie.

"And Rob talks as if he were going to lose his job next week! Sometimes I
wish he would lose it--and we could go away to a large city."

Bessie thus echoed the feeling in Isabelle's own heart,--"I don't want to
spend my life on an Indiana prairie!" To both of the women Torso was less a
home, a corner of the earth into which to put down roots, than a
way-station in the drama and mystery of life. Confident in their husbands'
ability to achieve Success, they dreamed of other scenes, of a larger
future, with that restlessness of a new civilization, which has latterly
seized even women--the supposedly stable sex.

       *       *       *       *       *

As the year wore on there were broader social levels into which Isabelle in
company with Bessie dipped from time to time. The Woman's Club had a
lecture course in art and sociology. They attended one of the lectures in
the Normal School building, and laughed furtively in their muffs at "Madam
President" of the Club,--a portly, silk-dressed dame,--and at the
ill-fitting black coat of the university professor who lectured. They came
away before the reception.

"Dowds!" Bessie summed up succinctly.

"Rather crude," Isabelle agreed tolerantly.

During the winter Isabelle did some desultory visiting among the Hungarians
employed at the coke-ovens, for Bessie's church society. Originally of
Presbyterian faith, she had changed at St. Mary's to the Episcopal church,
and latterly all church affiliations had grown faint. The Colonel
maintained a pew in the first Presbyterian Church, but usually went to hear
the excellent lectures of a Unitarian preacher. Isabelle's religious views
were vague, broad, liberal, and unvital. Bessie's were simpler, but
scarcely more effective. Lane took a lively interest in the railroad
Y.M.C.A., which he believed to be helpful for young men. He himself had
been a member in St. Louis and had used the gymnasium. Isabelle got up an
entertainment for the Hungarian children, which was ended by a disastrous
thunderstorm. She had an uneasy feeling that she "ought to do something for
somebody." Alice Johnston, she knew, had lived at a settlement for a couple
of years. But there were no settlements in Torso, and the acutely poor were
looked after by the various churches. Just what there was to be done for
others was not clear. When she expressed her desire "not to live selfishly"
to her husband, he replied easily:--

"There are societies for those things, I suppose. It ought to be natural,
what we do for others."

Just what was meant by "natural" was not clear to Isabelle, but the word
accorded with the general belief of her class that the best way to help in
the world was to help one's self, to become useful to others by becoming
important in the community,--a comfortable philosophy. But there was one
definite thing that they might accomplish, and that was to help the
Falkners into easier circumstances.

"Don't you suppose we could do something for them? Now that the baby has
come they are dreadfully poor,--can't think of going away for the summer,
and poor Bessie needs it and the children. I meant to ask the Colonel when
he was here last Christmas. Isn't there something Rob could do in the
road?"

Lane shook his head.

"That is not my department. There might be a place in St. Louis when they
begin work on the new terminals. I'll speak to Brundage the next time he's
here."

"St. Louis--Bessie would like that. She's such a dear, and would enjoy
pretty things so much! It seems as if she almost had a right to them."

"Why did she marry a poor man, then?" Lane demanded with masculine logic.

"Because she loved him, silly! She isn't mercenary."

"Well, then,--" but Lane did not finish his sentence, kissing his wife
instead. "She's rather extravagant, isn't she?" he asked after a time.

"Oh, she'll learn to manage."

"I will do what I can for him, of course."

And Isabelle considered the Falkners' fate settled; John, like her father,
always brought about what he wanted.

       *       *       *       *       *

They spent the Christmas holidays that year with her parents. Lane was
called to New York on railroad business, and Isabelle had a breathless ten
days with old friends, dining and lunching, listening to threads of gossip
that had been broken by her exile to Torso. She discovered an unexpected
avidity for diversion, and felt almost ashamed to enjoy people so keenly,
to miss her husband so little. She put it all down to the cramping effect
of Torso. So when the Colonel asked her how she liked her new home, she
burst forth, feeling that her opportunity had come:--

"It doesn't agree with me, I think. I've grown frightfully thin,--John says
I mustn't spend another summer there.... I hope we can get away soon. John
must have a wider field, don't you think?"

"He seems to find Torso pretty wide."

"He's done splendid work, I know. But I don't want him side-tracked all his
life in a little Indiana town. Don't you think you could speak to the
Senator or Mr. Beals?"

The Colonel smiled.

"Yes, I could speak to them, if John wants me to."

"He hasn't said anything about it," she hastened to add.

"So you are tired of Torso?" he asked, smiling still more.

"It seems so good to be here, to hear some music, and go to the theatre; to
be near old friends," she explained apologetically. "Don't you and mother
want us to be near you?"

"Of course, my dear! We want you to be happy."

"Why, we are happy there,--only it seems so out of the world, so
second-class. And John is not second-class."

"No, John is not second-class," the Colonel admitted with another smile.
"And for that reason I don't believe he will want me to interfere."

Nevertheless she kept at her idea, talking it over with her mother. All her
friends were settled in the great cities, and it was only natural that she
should aspire to something better than Torso--for the present, St. Louis.
So the Colonel spoke to Lane, and Lane spoke to his wife when they were
back once more in the Torso house. He was grave, almost hurt.

"I'm sorry, Belle, you are so tired of life here. I can take another
position or ask to be transferred; but you must understand, dear, that
whatever is done, it must be by myself. I don't want favors, not even from
the Colonel!"

She felt ashamed and small, yet protested: "I don't see why you should
object. Every one does the same,--uses all the pull he has."

"There are changes coming,--I prefer to wait. The man who uses least pull
usually hangs on longest."

As he walked to the office that morning, the thought of Isabelle's
restlessness occupied his mind. "It's dull for her here, of course. It
isn't the kind of life she's been used to, or had the right to expect as
the Colonel's daughter." He felt the obligation to live up to his wife,
having won her from a superior position. Like a chivalrous American
gentleman he was not aggrieved because even during the first two years of
marriage, he--their life together--was not enough to satisfy his wife. He
did not reflect that his mother had accepted unquestioningly the Iowa town
to which his father had brought her after the War; nor that Isabelle's
mother had accepted cheerfully the two rooms in the little brick house near
the hardware store. Those were other days.

He saw the picture of Isabelle standing beside the dining-room window with
the sun on her hair,--a developed type of human being, that demanded much
of life for satisfaction and adjustment. He plunged into his affairs with
an added grip, an unconscious feeling that he must by his exertions provide
those satisfactions and adjustments which his wife's nature demanded for
its perfect development.




CHAPTER VIII


It was to be Isabella's first real dinner-party, a large affair for Torso.
It had already absorbed her energies for a fortnight. The occasion was the
arrival of a party of Atlantic and Pacific officials and directors, who
were to inspect the Torso and Northern, with a view to its purchase and
absorption. The Torso and Northern was only a little scab line of railroad,
penetrating the soft-coal country for a couple of hundred miles, bankrupt
and demoralized. When Lane saw President Beals at Christmas, he pointed out
to him what might be made of this scrap-heap road, if it were rehabilitated
and extended into new coal fields. Beals had shown no interest in the Torso
and Northern at that time, and Lane forgot the matter until he noticed that
there was a market for Torso and Northern equipment bonds, which before had
been unsalable at twenty. Seeing them rise point by point for a month, he
had bought all he could pay for; he knew the weather signs in the railroad
world. When the inspection party was announced, his sagacity was proved.

Isabelle was excited by the prospect of her dinner for the distinguished
visitors. Who should she have of Torso's best to meet them? The Frasers and
the Griscoms, of course. John insisted on inviting the Frekes, and Isabelle
wanted the Darnells and the Adamses, though her husband demurred at
recognizing the bond. But Tom Darnell was so interesting, his wife urged,
and she was presentable. And the Falkners? There was no special reason for
having them, but Isabelle thought it might be a good thing for Rob to meet
some influential people, and Bessie would surely amuse the men. Isabelle's
executive energy was thoroughly aroused. The flowers and the wines were
ordered from St. Louis, the terrapin from Philadelphia, the fish and the
candies from New York. Should they have champagne? Lane thought not,
because "it's not quite our style." But Isabelle overbore his objections:--

"The Adamses always have it, and the Senator will expect it and all the New
York crowd."

Her husband acquiesced, feeling that in these things his wife knew the
world better than he,--though he would have preferred to offer his superior
officers a simpler meal.

The inspection party returned from their trip over the Torso and Northern
in the best of spirits. Lane felt sure that the purchase had been decided
upon by this inner coterie of the A. and P., of which the mouthpiece,
Senator Thomas, had emitted prophetic phrases,--"valuable possibilities
undeveloped," "would tap new fields,--good feeder," etc., etc. Lane thought
pleasantly of the twenty equipment bonds in his safe, which would be
redeemed by the Atlantic and Pacific at par and accrued interest, and he
resolved to secure another block, if they were to be had, before the sale
was officially confirmed by the directors. Altogether it had been an
agreeable jaunt. He had met several influential directors and had been
generally consulted as the man who knew the exact local conditions. And he
was aware that he had made a favorable impression as a practical railroad
man....

When his guests came down to the drawing-room, he was proud of what his
wife had done. The house was ablaze with candles--Bessie had persuaded
Isabelle to dispense with the electric light--and bunches of heavy,
thick-stemmed roses filled the vases. A large silver tray of decanters and
cocktails was placed in the hall beside the blazing fire. The Senator had
already possessed himself of a cocktail, and was making his little speeches
to Isabelle, who in a Paris gown that gave due emphasis to her pretty
shoulders and thin figure, was listening to him gayly.

"Did you think we lived in a log-cabin, Senator?" she protested to his
compliments. "We eat with knives and forks, silver ones too, and sometimes
we even have champagne in Torso!"...

Lane, coming up with the first Vice-president, Vernon Short, and a Mr.
Stanton, one of the New York directors ("a great swell," and "not just
money," "has brains, you know," as the Senator whispered), was proud of his
competent wife. She was vivaciously awake, and seemed to have forgotten her
girlish repugnance to the amorous Senator. As she stood by the drawing-room
door receiving her guests, he felt how much superior to all the Torso
"leaders" she was,--yes, she deserved a larger frame! And to-night he felt
confident that he should be able before long to place her in it.... The
Senator, having discharged his cargo of compliments, was saying:--

"Saw your friend Miss Pallanton that was--Mrs. Woodyard--at the Stantons's
the other night, looking like a blond Cleopatra. She's married a bright
fellow, and she'll be the making of him. He'll have to hop around to please
her,--I expect that's what husbands are for, isn't it, Lane?"

And here Isabelle passed him over to Bessie, who had come without Falkner,
he having made some silly excuse at the last moment,--"just cross," as
Bessie confided to Isabelle. She was looking very fresh in a gown that she
and Isabelle's seamstress had contrived, and she smiled up into the
Senator's face with her blandest child-manner. The Senator, who liked all
women, even those who asked his views on public questions, was especially
fond of what he called the "unsophisticated" variety, with whom his title
carried weight.

When they reached the dining room, Lane's elation rose to a higher pitch.
The table, strewn with sweet jasmine and glossy leaves, was adorned with
all the handsome gold and silver service and glass that Isabelle had
received at her marriage. It was too barbarically laden to be really
beautiful; but it was in the best prevailing taste of the time, and to
Lane, who never regarded such matters attentively, "was as good as the
best." Looking down the long table after they were seated, he smiled with
satisfaction and expanded, a subtle suavity born of being host to
distinguished folk unlocking his ordinarily reticent tongue, causing him
even to joke with Mrs. Adams, whom he did not like.

The food was excellent, and the maids, some borrowed, some specially
imported from St. Louis, made no mistakes, at least gross ones. The feast
moved as smoothly as need be. Isabelle, glancing over the table as the game
came on, had her moment of elation, too. This was a real dinner-party, as
elaborate and sumptuous as any that her friends in St. Louis might give.
The Farrington Beals, she remembered, had men servants,--most New York
families kept them, but that could hardly be expected in Torso. The dinner
was excellent, as the hungry visitors testified, and they seemed to find
the women agreeable and the whole affair unexpectedly cosmopolitan, which
was pleasing after spending a long week in a car, examining terminals and
coal properties. Indeed, it was very much the same dinner that was being
served at about that hour in thousands of well-to-do houses throughout the
country all the way from New York to San Francisco,--the same dishes, the
same wines, the same service, almost the same talk. Nothing in American
life is so completely standardized as what is known as a "dinner" in good,
that is well-to-do, society. Isabelle Lane, with all her executive ability,
her real cleverness, aspired to do "the proper thing," just as it was done
in the houses of the moderately rich everywhere.

The model of hospitality is set by the hotel manager and his chef, and all
that the clever hostess aspires to do is to offer the nearest copy of this
to her guests. Neither the Lanes nor any of their guests, however, felt
this lack of distinction, this sameness, in the entertainment provided for
them. They had the comfortable feeling of being in a cheerful house, well
warmed and well lighted, of eating all this superfluous food, which they
were accustomed to eat, of saying the things they always said on such
occasions....

Isabelle had distributed her Torsonians skilfully: Bessie was adorable and
kept three men hanging on her stories. Mrs. Adams, on the other side of
Stanton, was furtively eying Darnell, who was talking rather loudly, trying
to capture the Senator's attention from Bessie. Across the table Mrs.
Darnell, still the striking dark-haired schoolgirl, was watching her
husband, with a pitiful something in her frightened eyes that made Isabelle
shrink.... It was Darnell who finally brought the conversation to a full
stop.

"No, Senator," he said in his emphatic voice, "it is not scum like the
assassin of the President that this country should fear!"

"We're paying now for our liberal policy in giving homes to the anarchistic
refuse of Europe," the Senator insisted. "Congress must pass legislation
that will protect us from another Czolgocz."

Darnell threw up his head, his lips curving disdainfully. He had emptied
his champagne glass frequently, and there was a reckless light in his dark
eyes. Isabelle trembled for his next remark:--

"You are wrong, sir, if you will allow me to say so. The legislation that
we need is not against poor, feeble-minded rats like that murderer. We have
prisons and asylums enough for them. What the country needs is legislation
against its honored thieves, the real anarchists among us. We don't get 'em
from Europe, Senator; we breed 'em right here,--in Wall street."

If some one had discharged assafoetida over the table, there could not have
been a more unpleasant sensation.

"You don't mean quite that, Darnell," Lane began; but the Kentuckian
brushed him to one side.

"Just that; and some day you will see what Americans will do with their
anarchists. I tell you this land is full of discontent,--men hating
dishonesty, privilege, corruption, injustice! men ready to fight their
oppressors for freedom!"

The men about the table were all good Republicans, devout believers in the
gospel of prosperity, all sharers in it. They smiled contemptuously at
Darnell's passion.

"Our martyred President was a great and good man," the Senator observed
irrelevantly in his public tone.

"He was the greatest breeder of corruption that has ever held that office,"
retorted the Kentuckian. "With his connivance, a Mark Hanna has forged the
worst industrial tyranny the world has ever seen,--the corrupt grip of
corporations on the lives of the people."

"Pretty strong for a corporation lawyer!" Lane remarked, and the men
laughed cynically.

"I am no longer a corporation hireling," Darnell said in a loud voice.

Isabelle noticed that Mrs. Adams's eyes glowed, as she gazed at the man.

"I sent in my resignation last week."

"Getting ready for the public platform?" some one suggested. "You won't
find much enthusiasm for those sentiments; wages are too high!"

There was a moment of unpleasant silence. The Kentuckian raised his head as
if to retort, then collected himself, and remarked meekly:--

"Pardon me, Mrs. Lane, this is not the occasion for such a discussion. I
was carried away by my feelings. Sometimes the real thought will burst
out."

The apology scarcely bettered matters, and Isabelle's response was flat.

"I am sure it is always interesting to hear both sides."

"But I can't see that to a good citizen there can be two sides to the
lamentable massacre of our President," the Senator said severely. "I had
the privilege of knowing our late President intimately, and I may say that
I never knew a better man,--he was another Lincoln!"

"I don't see where Mr. Darnell can find this general discontent," the
Vice-president of the A. and P. put in suavely. "The country has never been
so prosperous as during the McKinley-Hanna regime,--wages at the high
level, exports increasing, crops abundant. What any honest and industrious
man has to complain of, I can't see. Why, we are looking for men all the
time, and we can't get them, at any price!"

"'Ye shall not live by bread alone,'" Darnell muttered. It was a curious
remark for a dinner-party, Isabelle thought. Mrs. Adams's lips curled as if
she understood it. But now that the fiery lawyer had taken to quoting the
Bible no one paid any further attention to him, and the party sank back
into little duologues appropriate to the occasion. Later Bessie confessed
to Isabelle that she had been positively frightened lest the Kentuckian
would do "something awful,"--he had been drinking, she thought. But Darnell
remained silent for the brief time before the ladies left the room, merely
once raising his eyes apologetically to Isabelle with his wine-glass at his
lips, murmuring so that she alone could hear him,--"I drink to the gods of
Prosperity!" She smiled back her forgiveness. He had behaved very badly,
almost wrecked her successful dinner; but somehow she could not dislike
him. She did not understand what he was saying or why he should say it when
people were having a good time; but she felt it was part of his interesting
and uncertain nature....

Presently the coffee and cigars came and the women went across the hall,
while the men talked desultorily until the sound of Bessie's voice singing
a French song to Isabella's accompaniment attracted them. After the next
song the visitors went, their car being due to leave on the Eastern
express. They said many pleasant things to Isabelle, and the Senator,
holding her hand in his broad, soft palm, whispered:--

"We can't let so much charm stay buried in Torso!"

So when the last home guest had departed and Lane sat down before the fire
for another cigar, Isabelle drew her chair close to his, her heart beating
with pleasant emotions.

"Well?" she said expectantly.

"Splendid--everything! They liked it, I am sure. I felt proud of you,
Belle!"

"It was all good but the fish,--yes, I thought our party was very nice!"
Then she told him what the Senator had said, and this time Lane did not
repel the idea of their moving to wider fields. He had made a good
impression on "the New York crowd," and he thought again complacently of
the Torso and Northern equipment bonds.

"Something may turn up before long, perhaps."

New York! It made her heart leap. She felt that she was now doing the
wife's part admirably, furthering John's interests by being a competent
hostess, and she liked to further his interests by giving pleasant dinners,
in an attractive gown, and receiving the admiration of clever men. It had
not been the way that her mother had helped on the Colonel; but it was
another way, the modern way, and a very agreeable way.

"Darnell is an awful fool," Lane commented. "If he can't hold on to himself
any better than he did to-night, he won't get far."

"Did you know that he had resigned?"

"No,--it's just as well he has. I don't think the A. and P. would have much
use for him. He's headed the wrong way;" and he added with hardly a pause,
"I think we had better cut the Darnells out, Isabelle. They are not our
sort."

Isabelle, thinking that this was the man's prejudice, made no reply.

"It was too bad Rob Falkner wouldn't come. It would have been a good thing
for him to meet influential people."

Already she spoke with an air of commanding the right sort that her husband
had referred to.

"He doesn't make a good impression on people," Lane remarked. "Perhaps he
will make good with his work."

As a man who had made his own way he felt the great importance of being
able to "get on" with people, to interest them, and keep them aware of
one's presence. But he was broad enough to recognize other roads to
success.

"So you were quite satisfied, John?" his wife asked as she kissed him
good-night.

"Perfectly--it was the right thing--every way--all but Darnell's rot; and
that didn't do much harm."

So the two went to their rest perfectly satisfied with themselves and their
world. Lane's last conscious thought was a jumble of equipment bonds, and
the idea of his wife at the head of a long dinner table in some very grand
house--in New York.




CHAPTER IX


The Darnells had a farm a few miles out of Torso, and this spring they had
given up their house on the square and moved to the farm permanently.
Bessie said it was for Mrs. Darnell's health; men said that the lawyer was
in a tight place with the banks; and gossip suggested that Darnell
preferred being in Torso without his wife whenever he was there. The farm
was on a small hill above a sluggish river, and was surrounded by a growth
of old sycamores and maples. There was a long stretch of fertile fields in
front of the house, dotted by the huge barns and steel windmills of
surrounding farms.

One Sunday in early May the Lanes were riding in the direction of the
Darnell place, and Isabelle persuaded her husband to call there. "I
promised to ride out here and show him the horses," she explained. The
house was a shabby frame affair, large for a farmhouse, with porticoes and
pillars in Southern style. They found the Darnells with the Falkners in the
living-room. Tom Darnell was reading an Elizabethan play aloud, rolling out
the verse in resounding declamation, punctuated by fervid
appreciation,--"God! but that's fine!" "Hear this thing sing." "Just listen
to this ripper."

  "O God! O God! that it were possible
   To undo things done; to call back yesterday!
   That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass,
   To untell the days, and to redeem the hours!" ...

When the Lanes had found chairs before the fire, he kept on reading, but
with less enthusiasm, as if he felt an alien atmosphere. Falkner listened
to the lines with closed eyes, his grim jaw relaxed, the deep frown
smoothed. Bessie stroked a white cat,--it was plain that her thoughts were
far away. Mrs. Darnell, who looked slovenly but pretty, stared vacantly out
of the window. The sun lay in broad, streaks on the dusty floor; there was
an air of drowsy peace, broken only by the warm tones of the lawyer as his
voice rose and fell over the spirited verse. Isabelle enjoyed it all; here
was something out of her usual routine. Darnell's face, which reflected the
emotion of the lines, was attractive to her. He might not be the "right
sort"; but he was unusual.... Finally Darnell flung the book into the
corner and jumped up.

"Here I am boring you good people with stuff dead and gone these hundreds
of years. Falkner always starts me off. Let's have a drink and take a look
at the horses."

The living-room was a mess of furniture and books, wineglasses, bottles,
wraps, whips, and riding-boots. Lane looked it over critically, while
Darnell found some tumblers and poured out wine. Then they all went to the
stable and dawdled about, talking horse. The fields were green with the
soft grass, already nearly a foot high. Over the house an old grape-vine
was budding in purple balls. There was a languor and sweetness to the air
that instigated laziness. Although Lane wished to be off, Isabelle lingered
on, and Darnell exclaimed hospitably: "You stay to dinner, of course! It is
just plain dinner, Mrs. Lane,"--and he swept away all denial. Turning to
his wife, who had said nothing, he remarked, "It's very good of them to
come in on us like this, isn't it, Irene?"

Mrs. Darnell started and mumbled:--

"Yes, I am sure!"

His manners to his wife were always perfect, deferential,--why should she
shrink before him? Isabelle wondered.... Dinner, plentiful and appetizing,
was finally provided by the one negro woman. Darnell tried to talk to Lane,
but to Isabelle's surprise her husband was at a disadvantage:--the two men
could not find common ground. Then Darnell and Falkner quoted poetry, and
Isabelle listened. It was all very different from anything she knew. While
the others waited for their coffee, Darnell showed her the old
orchard,--"to smell the first blossoms." It was languorously still there
under the trees, with the misty fields beyond. Darnell said dreamily:--

"This is where I'd like to be always,--no, not six miles from Torso, but in
some far-off country, a thousand miles from men!"

"You, a farmer!" laughed Isabelle. "And what about Congress, and the real
anarchists?"

"Oh, you cannot understand! You do not belong to the fields as I do." He
pointed ironically to her handsome riding skirt. "You are of the cities, of
people. You will flit from this Indiana landscape one day, from provincial
Torso, and spread your gay wings among the houses of men. While I--" He
made a gesture of despair,--half comic, half serious,--and his dark face
became gloomy.

Isabelle was amused at what she called his "heroics," but she felt
interested to know what he was; and it flattered her that he should see her
"spreading gay wings among the houses of men." These days she liked to
think of herself that way.

"You will be in Washington, while we are still in Torso!" she answered.

"Maybe," he mused. "Well, we play the game--play the game--until it is
played out!"

'He is not happy with his wife,' Isabelle concluded sagely; 'she doesn't
understand him, and that's why she has that half-scared look.'

"I believe you really want to play the game as much as anybody," she
ventured with a little thrill of surprise to find herself talking so
personally with a man other than her husband.

"You think so?" he demanded, and his face grew wistful. "There is nothing
in the game compared with the peace that one might have--"

Lane was calling to her, but she lingered to say:--

"How?"

"Far away--with love and the fields!"

They walked back to where John was holding the horses. She was oddly
fluttered. For the first time since she had become engaged a man had
somehow given her that special sensation, which women know, of confidence
between them. She wished that John had not been so anxious to be off, and
she did not repeat to him Darnell's talk, as she usually did every small
item. All that she said was, after a time of reflection, "He is not a happy
man."

"Who?"

"Mr. Darnell."

"From what I hear he is in a bad way. It is his own fault. He has plenty of
ability,--a splendid chance."

She felt that this was an entirely inadequate judgment. What interested the
man was the net result; what interested the woman was the human being in
whom that result was being worked out. They talked a little longer about
the fermenting tragedy of the household that they had just left, as the
world talks, from a distance. But Isabelle made the silent
reservation,--'she doesn't understand him--with another woman, it would be
different.'...

Their road home lay through a district devastated by the mammoth sheds of
some collieries. A smudged sign bore the legend:--

PLEASANT VALLEY COAL COMPANY

Lane pulled up his horse and looked carefully about the place. Then he
suggested turning west to examine another coal property.

"I suppose that Freke man is awfully rich," Isabelle remarked, associating
the name of the coal company with its president; "but he's so common,--I
can't see how you can stand him, John!"

Lane turned in his saddle and looked at the elegant figure that his wife
made on horseback.

"He isn't half as interesting as Tom Darnell or Rob," she added.

"I stand him," he explained, smiling, "for the reason men stand each other
most often,--we make money together."

"Why, how do you mean? He isn't in the railroad."

"I mean in coal mines," he replied vaguely, and Isabelle realized that she
was trespassing on that territory of man's business which she had been
brought up to keep away from. Nevertheless, as they rode homeward in the
westering golden light, she thought of several things:--John was in other
business than the railroad, and that puffy-faced German-American was in
some way connected with it; business covered many mysteries; a man did
business with people he would not ordinarily associate with. It even
crossed her mind that what with sleep and business a very large part of her
husband's life lay quite beyond her touch. Perhaps that was what the
Kentuckian meant by his ideal,--to live life with some loved one far away
in companionship altogether intimate.

But before long she was thinking of the set of her riding-skirt, and that
led to the subject of summer gowns which she meant to get when she went
East with her mother, and that led on to the question of the summer itself.
It had been decided that Isabelle should not spend another summer in the
Torso heat, but whether she should go to the Connecticut place or accept
Margaret Lawton's invitation to the mountains, she was uncertain. Thus
pleasantly her thoughts drifted on into her future.




CHAPTER X


If Isabelle had been curious about her husband's interest in the Pleasant
Valley Coal Company, she might have developed a highly interesting chapter
of commercial history, in which Mr. Freke and John Lane were enacting
typical parts.

The Atlantic and Pacific railroad corporation is, as may easily be
inferred, a vast organism, with a history, a life of its own, lying like a
thick ganglia of nerves and blood-vessels a third of the way across our
broad continent, sucking its nourishment from thousands of miles of rich
and populous territory. To write its history humanly, not statistically,
would be to reveal an important chapter in the national drama for the past
forty years,--a drama buried in dusty archives, in auditors' reports,
vouchers, mortgage deeds, general orders, etc. Some day there will come the
great master of irony, the man of insight, who will make this mass of
routine paper glow with meaning visible to all!

Meanwhile this Atlantic and Pacific, which to-day is a mighty system, was
once only a handful of atoms. There was the period of Birth; there was the
period of Conquest; and finally there has come the period of Domination.
Now, with its hold on the industry, the life of eight states, complete,
like the great Serpent it can grumble, "I lie here possessing!"

Farrington Beals came to be President of the Atlantic and Pacific at the
close of the period of Conquest. The condottieri leaders, those splendid
railroad brigands of the seventies and eighties, had retired with "the
fruits of their industry." To Farrington Beals and his associate was left
the care of the orchard. It was their task to solidify a conglomerate mass
of interest-bearing burden, to operate the property with the greatest
efficiency possible, in order that it might support the burdens laid upon
it and yet other burdens to come as the land waxed rich,--all burdens being
ultimately passed to the broad back of the Public, where burdens seem
naturally to belong. To this end, Beals men, as they were called, gradually
replaced throughout the length and breadth of the system the old
operatives, whose methods belonged to the coarse days of brigandage! These
Beals men were youngsters,--capable, active, full of "jump," with the word
"traffic, traffic" singing always in their ears. Beals was a splendid
"operator," and he rapidly brought the Atlantic and Pacific into the first
rank of the world's railroads. That shrewd and conservative statesman,
Senator Alonzo Thomas (who had skilfully marshalled the legal and political
forces during the period of Conquest) was now chairman of the Board, and he
and the President successfully readjusted the heterogeneous mass of bonds
and stocks, notes and prior liens, taking advantage of a period of
optimistic feeling in the market to float a tremendous general mortgage.
When this "Readjustment" had been successfully put through, the burden was
some forty or fifty millions larger than before,--where those millions went
is one of the mysteries to reward that future Carlyle!--but the public load
was adjusted more trimly. So it was spoken of as a "masterly stroke of
finance," and the ex-statesman gained much credit in the highest circles.

The Senator and the President are excellent men, as any financier will tell
you. They are charitable and genial, social beings, members of clubs, hard
working and intelligent, public spirited, too,--oh, the very best that the
Republic breeds! To see Farrington Beals, gray-haired, thoughtful, almost
the student, clothed in a sober dark suit, with a simple flower in the
buttonhole, and delicate glasses on the bridge of his shapely nose,--to see
him modestly enter the general offices of the Atlantic and Pacific, any one
would recognize an Industrial Flywheel of society. To accompany him over
the system in his car, with a party of distinguished foreign stockholders,
was in the nature of a religious ceremony, so much the interests of this
giant property in his care seemed allied with the best interests of our
great land!

Thus Beals men ran the road,--men like John Hamilton Lane, railroad men to
the core, loyal men, devoted to the great A. and P. And traffic increased
monthly, tonnage mounted, wheels turned faster, long freight trains wound
their snaky coils through the Alleghanies, over the flat prairies, into
Eastern ports, or Western terminals--Traffic, Traffic! And money poured
into the treasury, more than enough to provide for all those securities
that the Senator was so skilled in manufacturing. All worked in this
blessed land of freedom to the glory of Farrington Beals and the profit of
the great A. and P.

What has Isabelle to do with all this? Actually she was witness to one
event,--rather, just the surface of it, the odd-looking, concrete outside!
An afternoon early in her married life at Torso, she had gone down to the
railroad office to take her husband for a drive in the pleasant autumn
weather. As he was long in coming to meet her, she entered the brick
building; the elevator boy, recognizing her with a pleasant nod, whisked
her up to the floor where Lane had his private office. Entering the outer
room, which happened to be empty at this hour, she heard voices through the
half-open door that led to the inner office. It was first her husband's
voice, so low that she could not hear what he was saying. Presently it was
interrupted by a passionate treble. Through the door she could just see
John's side face where he was seated at his desk,--the look she liked best,
showing the firm cheek and jaw line, and resolute mouth. Over his desk a
thin, roughly dressed man with a ragged reddish beard was leaning on both
arms, and his shoulders trembled with the passion of his utterance.

"Mr. Lane," he was saying in that passionate treble, "I must have them
cars--or I shall lose my contract!"

"As I have told you a dozen times, Mr. Simonds, I have done my best for
you. I recognize your trouble, and it is most unfortunate,--but there seems
to be a shortage of coalers just now."

"The Pleasant Valley company get all they want!" the man blurted out.

Lane merely drummed on his desk.

"If I can't get cars to ship my coal, I shall be broke, bankrupt," the thin
man cried.

"I am very sorry--"

"Sorry be damned! Give me some cars!"

"You will have to see Mr. Brundage at St. Louis," Lane answered coldly. "He
has final say on such matters for the Western division. I merely follow
orders."

He rose and closed his desk. The thin man with an eloquent gesture turned
and rushed out of the office, past Isabelle, who caught a glimpse of a
white face working, of teeth chewing a scrubby mustache, of blood-shot
eyes. John locked his desk, took down his hat and coat, and came into the
outer office. He kissed his wife, and they went to drive behind the
Kentucky horses, talking of pleasant matters. After a time, Isabelle asked
irrelevantly:--

"John, why couldn't you give that man the cars he wanted?"

"Because I had no orders to do so."

"But aren't there cars to be had when the other company gets them?"

"There don't happen to be any cars for Simonds. The road is friendly to Mr.
Freke."

And he closed his explanation by kissing his wife on her pretty neck, as
though he would imply that more things than kisses go by favor in this
world. Isabelle had exhausted her interest in the troubled man's desire for
coal cars, and yet in that little phrase, "The road is friendly to Mr.
Freke," she had touched close upon a great secret of the Beals regime.
Unbeknownst to her, she had just witnessed one of those little modern
tragedies as intense in their way as any Caesarian welter of blood; she had
seen a plain little man, one of the negligible millions, being "squeezed,"
in other words the operation in an ordinary case of the divine law of
survival. Freke was to survive; Simonds was not. In what respects Simonds
was inferior to Freke, the Divine Mind alone could say. When that
convulsive face shot past Isabelle in Lane's office, it was merely the
tragic moment when the conscious atom was realizing fully that he was not
to be the one to survive! The moment when Suspense is converted into
Despair....

Nor could Isabelle trace the well-linked chain of cause and effect that led
from Simonds about-to-be-a-bankrupt _via_ Freke and the Pleasant Valley
Coal Company through the glory of the A. and P. (incidentally creating in
the Senator his fine patriotism and faith in the future of his country) to
her husband's check-book and her own brilliant little dinner, "where they
could afford to offer champagne." But in the maze of earthly affairs all
these unlike matters were related, and the relationship is worth our
notice, if not Isabelle's. If it had been expounded to her, if she had seen
certain certificates of Pleasant Valley stock lying snugly side by side
with Torso Northern bonds and other "good things" in her husband's
safe,--and also in the strong boxes of Messrs. Beals, Thomas, Stanton, _et
al_., she would have said, as she had been brought up to say, "that is my
husband's affair."...

The Atlantic and Pacific, under the shrewd guidance of the amiable Senator,
was a law-abiding citizen, outwardly. When the anti-rebate laws were
passed, the road reformed; it was glad to reform, it made money by
reforming. But within the law there was ample room for "efficient" men to
acquire more money than their salaries, and they naturally grasped their
opportunities, as did the general officers. Freke, whom Isabelle disliked,
with her trivial woman's prejudice about face and manners, embodied a
Device,--in other words he was an instrument whereby some persons could
make a profit, a very large profit, at the expense of other persons. The A.
and P. 'was friendly to Freke.' The Pleasant Valley Coal Company never
wanted cars, and it also enjoyed certain other valuable privileges, covered
by the vague term "switching," that enabled it to deliver its coal into the
gaping hulls at tidewater at seventy to eighty cents per ton cheaper than
any of its competitors in the Torso district. No wonder that the Pleasant
Valley company, with all this "friendliness" of the A. and P., prospered,
and that Mr. Freke, under one name or another, swallowed presently, at a
bargain, the little mine that the man Simonds had struggled to operate, as
well as thousands of acres of bituminous coal lands along the Pleasant
River, and along the Torso Northern road. (Perhaps the inwardness of that
Inspection Party can now be seen, also.) The signs of the Pleasant Valley
Coal Company and its aliases squatted here and there all through the Torso
coal region. As the Senator would say, it was a very successful business,
"thanks to the initiative of Mr. Freke." And that poor Simonds, who had
amply demonstrated his inability to survive, his utter lack of adaptation
to his environment, by not being able to be friendly with the great A. and
P., went--where all the inefficient, non-adaptable human refuse goes--to
the bottom. _Bien entendu!_

Freke was the Pleasant Valley Coal Company,--that is, he was its necessary
physiognomy,--but really the coal company was an incorporated private farm
of the officers and friends of the A. and P.,--an immensely profitable
farm. Lane in his callow youth did not know this fact; but he learned it
after he had been in Torso a few weeks. He was quick to learn, a typical
Beals man, thoroughly "efficient," one who could keep his eyes where they
belonged, his tongue in his mouth, and his ears open. As he told Isabelle
that Sunday afternoon, "he had had many business dealings with Freke,"
alias the Pleasant Valley Company, etc., and they had been uniformly
profitable.

For the fatherly Senator and the shrewd Beals believed that the "right
sort" should make a "good thing"; they believed in thrift. In a word, to
cut short this lengthy explanation, the great Atlantic and Pacific, one of
the two or three most efficiently operated railroads in the United States,
was honeycombed with that common thing "graft," or private "initiative"!
From the President's office all the way down to subordinates in the traffic
department, there were "good things" to be enjoyed. In that growing bunch
of securities that Lane was accumulating in his safe, there were, as has
been said, a number of certificates of stock in coal companies--and not
small ones.

And this is why Lane maintained social as well as financial relations with
the coarse Mr. Freke. And this is why, also, Lane felt that they could
afford "the best," when they undertook to give a dinner to the
distinguished gentlemen from New York. Of course he did not explain all
this to Isabelle that pleasant Sunday afternoon. Would Isabelle have
comprehended it, if he had? Her mind would have wandered off to another
dinner, to that cottage at Bedmouth, which she thought of taking for the
summer, or to the handsome figure that John made on horseback. At least
nine out of ten American husbands would have treated the matter as Lane
did,--given some sufficient general answer to their wives' amateurish
curiosity about business and paid their figures due compliments, and
thought complacently of the comfortable homes to which they were
progressing and the cheerful dinners therein,--all, wife, home, dinner, the
result of their fortunate adaptation to the environments they found
themselves in....

Perhaps may be seen by this time the remote connection between that tragic
gesture of Frank Simonds on the Saturday afternoon, calling on heaven and
the Divine Mind that pitilessly strains its little creatures through the
holes of a mighty colander--between that tragic gesture, I say, and
Isabelle's delightful dinner of ten courses,--champagne and terrapin!

       *       *       *       *       *

But this tiresome chapter on the affairs of the Atlantic and Pacific
railroad,--will it never be done! So sordid, so commonplace, so newspapery,
so--just what everything in life is--when we might have expected for the
dollar and a quarter expended on this pound of wood pulp and
ink,--something less dull than a magazine article; something about a
motor-car and a girl with a mischievous face whom a Russian baron seeks to
carry away by force and is barely thwarted by the brave American college
youth dashing in pursuit with a new eighty h. p., etc., etc. Or at least if
one must have a railroad in a novel (when every one knows just what a
railroad is), give us a private car and the lovely daughter of the
President together with a cow-punching hero, as in Bessie's beloved story.
But an entire chapter on graft and a common dinner-party with the champagne
drunk so long ago--what a bore!

And yet in the infinite hues of this our human life, the methods by which
our substantial hero, John Hamilton Lane, amassed his fortune, are worthy
of contemplation. There is more, O yawning reader, in the tragic gesture of
ragged-bearded Frank Simonds than in some tons of your favorite brand of
"real American women"; more in the sublime complacency of Senator Alonzo
Thomas, when he praised "that great and good man," and raised to his memory
his glass of Pommery brut, triple sec, than in all the adventures of
soldiers of fortune or yellow cars or mysterious yachts or hectic Russian
baronesses; more--at least for the purpose of this history--in John's
answer to Isabelle's random inquiry that Sunday afternoon than in all the
"heart-interest" you have absorbed in a twelvemonth. For in the atmosphere
of the ACTS here recorded, you and I, my reader, live and have our being,
such as it is--and also poor Frank Simonds (who will never appear again to
trouble us). And to the seeing eye, mystery and beauty lie in the hidden
meaning of things seen but not known....

Patience! We move to something more intimate and domestic, if not more
thrilling.




CHAPTER XI


The child was coming!

When Isabelle realized it, she had a shock, as if something quite outside
her had suddenly interposed in her affairs. That cottage at Bedmouth for
the summer would have to be given up and other plans as well. At first she
had refused to heed the warning,--allowed John to go away to New York on
business without confiding in him,--at last accepted it regretfully. Since
the terrifying fear those first days in the Adirondack forest lest she
might have conceived without her passionate consent, the thought of
children had gradually slipped out of her mind. They had settled into a
comfortable way of living, with their plans and their expectations. "That
side of life," as she called it, was still distasteful to her,--she did not
see why it had to be. Fortunately it did not play a large part in their
life, and the other, the companionable thing, the being admired and petted,
quite satisfied her. Children, of course, sometime; but "not just yet."

"It will be the wrong time,--September,--spoil everything!" she complained
to Bessie.

"Oh, it's always the wrong time, no matter when it happens. But you'll get
used to it. Rob had to keep me from going crazy at first. But in the end
you like it."

"It settles Bedmouth this year!"

"It is a bore," Bessie agreed sympathetically, feeling sorry for herself,
as she was to have spent six weeks with Isabelle. "It takes a year out of a
woman's life, of course, no matter how she is situated. And I'm so
fearfully ugly all the time. But you won't be,--your figure is better."

Bessie, like most childlike persons, took short views of immediate matters.
She repeated her idea of child-bearing:--

"I hated it each time,--especially the last time. It did seem so
unnecessary--for us.... And it spoils your love, being so afraid. But when
it comes, why you like it, of course!"

John arrived from his hurried trip to New York, smiling with news. He did
not notice his wife's dejected appearance when he kissed her, in his
eagerness to tell something.

"There is going to be a shake-up in the road," he announced. "That's why
they sent for me."

"Is there?" she asked listlessly.

"Well, I am slated for fourth Vice-president. They were pleased to say
handsome things about what I have done at Torso. Guess they heard of that
offer from the D. and O."

"What is fourth Vice-president?" Isabelle inquired.

"In charge of traffic west--headquarters at St. Louis!"

He expected that his wife would be elated at this fulfilment of her
desires; but instead Isabelle's eyes unaccountably filled with tears. When
he understood, he was still more mystified at her dejection. Very tenderly
holding her in his arms, he whispered his delight into her ears. His face
was radiant; it was far greater news than his promotion to the fourth
vice-presidency of the A. and P.

"And you knew all this time!" he exclaimed reproachfully.

"I wasn't sure!"

He seemed to take the event as natural and joyful, which irritated her
still more. As Bessie had said, "Whatever ties a woman to the home, makes
her a piece of domestic furniture, the men seem to approve of!"

"What a fright I look already!" Isabelle complained, gazing at the dark
circles under her eyes in the glass. She thought of Aline, whose complexion
like a Jacqueminot rose had been roughened and marred. Something still
virginal in her soul rebelled against it all.

"Oh, not so bad," Lane protested. "You are just a little pinched. You'll be
fitter than ever when it's over!"

The man doesn't care, she thought mutinously. It seems to him the proper
thing,--what woman is made for. Isabelle was conscious that she was made
for much more, for her own joy and her own activity, and she hated to part
with even a little of it!

He could not understand her attitude. As a man he had retained the
primitive joy in the coming of the child, any child,--but _his_ child and
the first one above all! Compared with that nothing was of the least
importance. Seeing her pouting into the glass, he said reproachfully:--

"But you like children, Belle!"

And taking her again into his arms and kissing her, he added, "We'll give
the little beggar a royal welcome, girl!"

His grave face took on a special look of content with the world and his
share in it, while Isabelle continued to stare at herself in the glass and
think of the change a child would make in her life. Thus the woman of the
new generation, with her eagerness for a "large, full life," feels towards
that process of nature for which the institution of marriage was primarily
designed.

       *       *       *       *       *

So for a time longer Isabelle tried to ignore the coming fact, to put it
out of her mind, and grasp as much of her own life as she could before the
life within her should deprive her of freedom. As Lane's new duties would
not begin until the summer, it was arranged that Isabelle should spend the
hot weeks at the Grafton farm with her mother, and then return to St. Louis
for her confinement in her old home. Later they would settle themselves in
the city at their leisure.... It was all so provoking, Isabelle persisted
in thinking. They might have had at least a year of freedom in which to
settle themselves in the new home. And she had had visions of a few months
in Europe with Vickers, who was now in Rome. John might have come over
after her. To give up all this for what any woman could do at any time!

As the months passed she could not evade the issue. By the time she was
settled in her old room at the Farm she had grown anaemic, nervous. The
coming of the child had sapped rather than created strength as it properly
should have done. White and wasted she lay for long hours on the lounge
near the window where she could see the gentle green hills. Here her cousin
Alice Johnston found her, when she arrived with her children to make Mrs.
Price a visit. The large, placid woman knelt by Isabelle's side and
gathered her in her arms.

"I'm so glad, dear! When is it to be?"

"Oh, sometime in the fall," Isabelle replied vaguely, bored that her
condition already revealed itself. "Did you want the first one?" she asked
after a time.

"Well, not at the very first. You see it was just so much more of a risk.
And our marriage was a risk without that.... I hated the idea of becoming a
burden for Steve. But with you it will be so different, from the start. And
then it always makes its own place, you see. When it comes, you will think
you always wanted it!"

She smiled in her large human way, as if she had tested the trials of life
and found that all held some sweet. Isabelle looked down at her thin arms.
The Johnstons had four, and they were so poor! As if divining her thought,
Alice said:--

"Every time I wondered how we were going to survive, but somehow we did.
And now it will all be well, with Steve's new position--"

"What is that?"

"Hasn't John told you? It has just been settled; Steve is going into the A.
and P.,--John's assistant in St. Louis."

"I'm so glad for you," Isabelle responded listlessly. She recalled now
something that her husband had said about Johnston being a good man, who
hadn't had his chance, and that he hoped to do something for him.

"Tremendous rise in salary,--four thousand," Alice continued buoyantly. "We
shan't know what to do with all that money! We can give the children the
best education."

Isabelle reflected that John's salary had been five thousand at Torso, and
as fourth Vice-president would be ten thousand. And she still had her
twenty-five hundred dollars of allowance from her father. Alice's elation
over Steve's rise gave her a sudden appreciation of her husband's growing
power,--his ability to offer a struggling man his chance. Perhaps he could
do something for the Falkners also. The thought took her out of herself for
a little while. Men were free to work out their destiny in life, to go
hither and thither, to alter fate. But a woman had to bear children. John
was growing all this time, and she was separated from him. She tried to
believe that this was the reason for her discontent, this separation from
her husband; but she knew that when she had been perfectly free, she had
not shared largely in his activity....

"You must tell me all about the St. Mary's girls," Alice said. "Have you
seen Aline?"

"Yes,--she has grown very faddy, I should think,--arts and crafts and all
that. Isn't it queer? I asked her to visit us, but she has another one
coming,--the third!"

Isabelle made a little grimace.

"And Margaret?"

"She has suddenly gone abroad with her husband--to Munich. He's given up
his business. Didn't her marriage surprise you?"

"Yes, I thought she was going to marry that Englishman who was at your
wedding."

"Mr. Hollenby? Yes, every one did. Something happened. Suddenly she became
engaged to this Pole,--a New York man. Very well connected, and has money,
I hear. Conny wrote me about him." ...

So they gossiped on. When Alice rose to leave her, Isabelle held her large
cool hand in hers. The older woman, whose experience had been so unlike
hers, so difficult, soothed her, gave her a suggestion of other kinds of
living than her own little life.

"I'm glad you are here," she said. "Come in often, won't you?"

And her cousin, leaning over to kiss her as she might a fretful child who
had much to learn, murmured, "Of course, dear. It will be all right!"




CHAPTER XII


The Steve Johnstons had had a hard time, as Isabelle would have phrased it.

He had been a faithful, somewhat dull and plodding student at the technical
school, where he took the civil engineering degree, and had gone forth to
lay track in Montana. He laid it well; but this job finished, there seemed
no permanent place for him. He was heavy and rather tongue-tied, and made
no impression on his superiors except that of commonplace efficiency. He
drifted into Canada, then back to the States, and finally found a place in
Detroit.

Here, while working for thirty dollars a week, he met Alice Johnston,--she
also was earning her living, being unwilling to accept from the Colonel
more than the means for her education,--and from the first he wished to
marry her, attracted by her gentle, calm beauty, her sincerity, and
buoyant, healthy enjoyment of life. She was teaching in a girls' school,
and was very happy. Other women had always left the heavy man on the road,
so to speak, marking him as stupid. But Alice Johnston was keener or kinder
than most young women: she perceived beneath the large body a will, an
intelligence, a character, merely inhibited in their envelope of large
bones and solid flesh, with an entire absence of nervous system. He was
silent before the world, but not foolish, and with her he was not long
silent. She loved him, and she consented to marry him on forty dollars a
week, hopefully planning to add something from her teaching to the budget,
until Steve's slow power might gain recognition.

"So we married," she said to Isabelle, recounting her little life history
in the drowsy summer afternoon. "And we were so happy on what we had! It
was real love. We took a little flat a long way out of the city, and when I
came home afternoons from the school, I got the dinner and Steve cooked the
breakfasts,--he's a splendid cook, learned on the plains. It all went
merrily the first months, though Aunt Harmony thought I was such a fool to
marry, you remember?" She laughed, and Isabella smiled at the memory of the
caustic comments which Mrs. Price had made when Alice Vance, a poor niece,
had dared to marry a poor man,--"They'll be coming to your father for help
before the year is out," she had said. But they hadn't gone to the Colonel
yet.

"Then little Steve came, and I had to leave the school and stay at home.
That was hard, but I had saved enough to pay for the doctor and the nurse.
Then that piece of track elevation was finished and Steve was out of work
for a couple of months. He tried so hard, poor boy! But he was never meant
to be an engineer. I knew that, of course, all along.... Well, the baby
came, and if it hadn't been for my savings,--why, I should have gone to the
hospital!

"Just then Steve met a man he had known at the Tech, and was given that
place on a railroad as clerk in the traffic department. He was doubtful
about taking it, but I wasn't. I was sure it would open up, and even
twenty-five dollars a week is something. So he left for Cleveland a week
after the baby was born, and somehow I packed up and followed with the baby
when I could.

"That wasn't the end of hard times by any means. You see Ned came the next
year,--we're such healthy, normal specimens!" She laughed heartily at this
admission of her powers of maternity. "And it wasn't eighteen months before
Alice was coming.... Oh, I know that we belong to the thriftless pauper
class that's always having children,--more than it can properly care for.
We ought to be discouraged! But somehow we have fed and clothed 'em all,
and we couldn't spare one o' the kiddies. There's James, too, you know. He
came last winter, just after Steve had the grippe and pneumonia; that was a
pull. But it doesn't seem right to--to keep them from coming--and when you
love each other--"

Her eyes shone with a certain joy as she frankly stated the woman's
problem, while Isabelle looked away, embarrassed. Mrs. Johnston continued
in her simple manner:--

"If Nature doesn't want us to have them, why does she give us the power?
... I know that is wretched political economy and that Nature really has
nothing to do with the modern civilized family. But as I see other women,
the families about me, those that are always worrying over having children,
trying to keep out of it,--why, they don't seem to be any better off. And
it is--well, undignified,--not nice, you know.... We can't spare 'em, nor
any more that may come! ... As I said, I believed all along that Steve had
it in him, that his mind and character must tell, and though it was
discouraging to have men put over him, younger men too, at last the
railroad found out what he could do."

Her face beamed with pride.

"You see Steve has a remarkable power of storing things up in that big head
of his. Remembers a lot of pesky little detail when he's once fixed his
mind on it,--the prices of things, figures, and distances, and rates and
differentials. Mr. Mason--that was the traffic manager of our
road--happened to take Steve to Buffalo with him about some rate-making
business. Steve, it turned out, knew the situation better than all the
traffic managers. He coached Mr. Mason, and so our road got something it
wanted. It was about the lumber rate, in competition with Canadian roads.
Mr. Mason made Steve his assistant--did you ever think what an awful lot
the rate on lumber might mean to _you_ and yours? It's a funny world.
Because Steve happened to be there and knew that with a rate of so much a
thousand feet our road could make money,--why, we had a house to live in
for the first time!

"Of course," she bubbled, "it isn't just that. It's Steve's head,--an
ability to find his way through those great sheets of figures the railroads
are always compiling. He stores the facts up in that big round head and
pulls 'em out when they are wanted. Why, he can tell you just what it would
cost to ship a car of tea from Seattle to New York!"

Isabella had a vision of Steve Johnston's large, heavy head with its thick,
black hair, and she began to feel a respect for the stolid man.

"John said he had great ability," she remarked. "I'm so glad it all came
out right in the end."

"I had my first servant when the promotion came, and that spring we took a
little house,--it was crowded in the flat, and noisy."

"You will find it so much easier now, and you will like St. Louis."

"Oh, yes! But it hasn't been really bad,--the struggle, the being poor. You
see we were both well and strong, and we loved so much, and we always had
the problem of how to live,--that draws you together if you have the real
thing in you. It isn't sordid trying to see what a quarter can be made to
do. It's exciting."

As she recalled the fight, a tender smile illuminated her face and curved
her lips upward. To her poverty had not been limiting, grinding, but an
exhilarating fight that taxed her resources of mind and body.

"Of course there are a lot of things you can't have. But most people have
more than they know how to handle, no matter where they are!"

Isabelle was puzzled by this remark, and explained Alice Johnston's content
by her age, her lack of experience, at least such experience as she had
had. For life to her presented a tantalizing feast of opportunities, and it
was her intention to grasp as many of these as one possibly could. Any
other view of living seemed not only foolish but small-minded. Without any
snobbishness she considered that her sphere and her husband's could not be
compared with the Johnstons'. The Lanes, she felt, were somehow called to
large issues.

Nevertheless, Isabelle could understand that Alice's marriage was quite a
different thing from what hers was,--something to glorify all the petty,
sordid details, to vivify the grimy struggle of keeping one's head above
the social waters.

"Now," Alice concluded, "we can save! And start the children fairly. But I
wonder if we shall ever be any happier than we have been,--any closer,
Steve and I?"

Alice, by her very presence, her calm acceptance of life as it shaped
itself, soothed Isabelle's restlessness, suggested trust and confidence.

"You are a dear," she whispered to her cousin. "I am so glad you are to be
near me in St. Louis!"




CHAPTER XIII


Isabelle saw the fat headlines in the Pittsburg paper that the porter
brought her,--"Congressman Darnell and his wife killed!" The bodies had
been found at the bottom of an abandoned quarry. It was supposed that
during a thunder-storm the night before, as he was driving from Torso to
his farm in company with his wife, the horses had become uncontrollable and
had dashed into the pit before Darnell could pull them up. He had just
taken his seat in Congress. Isabelle remembered that he called the day
before she left Torso, and when she had congratulated him on his election,
had said jokingly: "Now I shall get after your husband's bosses, Mrs. Lane.
We shan't be on speaking terms when next we meet." He seemed gay and vital.
So it had ended thus for the tempestuous Kentuckian....

John was waiting for her at the station in Torso, where she was to break
the journey. His face was eager and solicitous. He made many anxious
inquiries about her health and the journey. But she put it all to one side.

"Tell me about the Darnells. Isn't it dreadful!"

"Yes," he said slowly, "it is very bad." Lane's voice was grave, as if he
knew more than the published report.

"How could it have happened,--he was such a good driver? He must have been
drunk."

"Tom Darnell could have driven all right, even if he had been drunk. I am
afraid it's worse than that."

"Tell me!"

"There are all sorts of rumors. He came up from Washington unexpectedly,
and his wife met him at the station with their team. They went to the hotel
first, and then suddenly started for the farm in the midst of the storm. It
was a terrible storm.... One story is that he had trouble with a bank; it
is even said he had forged paper. I don't know! ... Another story was about
the Adams woman,--you know she followed him to Washington.... Too bad! He
was a brilliant fellow, but he tied himself all up, tied himself all up,"
he observed sententiously, thus explaining the catastrophe of an unbalanced
character.

"You mean it was--suicide?" Isabelle questioned.

"Looks that way!"

"How awful! and his wife killed, too!"

"He was always desperate--uncontrolled sort of fellow. You remember how he
went off the handle the night of our dinner."

"So he ended it--that way," she murmured.

And she saw the man driving along the road in the black storm, his young
wife by his side, with desperate purpose. She remembered his words in the
orchard, his wistful desire for another kind of life. "The Adams woman,
too," as John expressed it, and "he couldn't hold his horses." This nature
had flown in pieces, liked a cracked wheel, in the swift revolution of
life. To her husband it was only one of the messes recorded in the
newspapers. But her mind was full of wonder and fear. As little as she had
known the man, she had felt an interest in him altogether disproportionate
to what he said or did. He was a man of possibilities, of streaks, of
moods, one that could have been powerful, lived a rich life. And at
thirty-three he had come to the end, where his passions and his ideals in
perpetual warfare had held him bound. He had cut the knot! And she had
chosen to go with him, the poor, timid wife! ... Surely there were strange
elements in people, Isabelle felt, not commonly seen in her little
well-ordered existence, traits of character covered up before the world,
fissures running back through the years into old impulses. Life might be
terrible--when it got beyond your hand. She could not dismiss poor Tom
Darnell as summarily as John did,--"a bad lot, I'm afraid!"

"You mustn't think anything more about it," her husband said anxiously, as
she sat staring before her, trying to comprehend the tragedy. "I have
arranged to take you on to-morrow. The Colonel writes that your brother
Ezra is seedy,--touch of malaria, he thinks. The Colonel is looking forward
a lot to your coming."

He talked on about the little domestic things, but she held that picture in
the background of her mind and something within her said over and over,
'Why should it be like that for any one!'

And all the next day, on their way to St. Louis, she could not dismiss the
thought from her mind: 'Why, I saw him only a few weeks ago. How well he
read that poetry, as if he enjoyed it! And what he said that night at
dinner he really meant,--oh, he believed it! And he was sorry for his
wife,--yes, I am sure he was sorry for her. But he loved the other
woman,--she understood him. And so he ended it. It's quite dreadful!'

       *       *       *       *       *

The Colonel met them at the station with his new motor. His face was a bit
grave as he said in answer to their inquiry:--

"No, it is not malaria, I am afraid. The doctors think it is typhoid. There
has been a great deal of it in the city this summer, and the boy wouldn't
take a vacation, was afraid I would stay here if he did. So I went up to
Pelee, instead."

It was typhoid, and young Price died within the week. In the hush that
followed the death of her brother Isabelle lay waiting for the coming of
her child.... Her older brother Ezra! He was like a sturdy young tree in
the forest, scarce noticed in the familiar landscape until his loss. Quiet,
hard-working "Junior," as the family called him,--what would the Colonel do
without him? The old man--now he was obviously old even to Isabelle--would
come to her room and sit for long hours silent, as if he, too, was waiting
for the coming of the new life into his house.

These two deaths so unlike, the tragic end of Darnell and her brother's
sudden removal, sank deep into her, sounding to her in the midst of her own
childish preoccupation with her own life, the intricacy, the mystery of all
existence. Life was larger than a private garden hedged with personal
ambitions. She was the instrument of forces outside her being. And in her
weakness she shrank into herself.

They told her that she had given birth to a daughter--another being like
herself!




PART TWO



CHAPTER XIV


Colonel Price was a great merchant, one of those men who have been the
energy, the spirit of the country since the War, now fast disappearing,
giving way to another type in this era of "finance" as distinguished from
"business." When the final review was ended, and he was free to journey
back to the little Connecticut village where three years before he had left
with his parents his young wife and their one child, he was a man just over
thirty, very poor, and weak from a digestive complaint that troubled him
all his life. But the spirit of the man was unbroken. Taking his little
family with him, he moved to St. Louis, and falling in there with a couple
of young men with like metal to himself, who happened also to possess some
capital, he started the wholesale hardware business of Parrott, Price, and
Co., which rapidly became the leading house in that branch of trade
throughout the new West. The capital belonged to the other men, but the
leadership from the start to Colonel Price. It was his genius as a trader,
a diviner of needs, as an organizer, that within twenty years created the
immense volume of business that rolled through the doors of their old
warehouse. During the early years the Colonel was the chief salesman and
spent his days "on the road" up and down the Mississippi Valley, sleeping
in rough country taverns, dining on soda biscuit and milk, driving many
miles over clayey, rutty roads,--dealing with men, making business.

Meanwhile the wife--her maiden name was Harmony Vickers--was doing her part
in that little brick house which the Colonel had taken Lane to see. There
she worked and saved, treating her husband's money like a sacred fund to be
treasured. When the colonel came home from his weekly trips, he helped in
the housework, and nursed the boy through the croup at night, saving his
wife where he could. It was long after success had begun to look their way
before Mrs. Price would consent to move into the wooden cottage on a quiet
cross street that the Colonel wanted to buy, or employ more than one
servant. But the younger children as they came on, first Vickers, then
Isabelle, insensibly changed the family habits,--also the growing wealth
and luxury of their friends, and the fast increasing income of the Colonel,
no longer to be disguised. Yet when they built that lofty brick house in
the older quarter of the city, she would have but two servants and used
sparingly the livery carriage that her husband insisted on providing for
her. The habit of fearsome spending never could wholly be eradicated. When
the Colonel had become one of the leading merchants of the city, she
consented grudgingly to the addition of one servant, also a coachman and a
single pair of horses, although she preferred the streetcars on the next
block as safer and less troublesome; and she began gradually to entertain
her neighbors, to satisfy the Colonel's hospitable instincts, in the style
in which they entertained her.

Mrs. Price had an enormous pride in the Colonel and in his reputation in
St. Louis, a pride that no duke's wife could exceed. It was the Colonel who
had started the movement for a Commercial Association and was its first
president. As his wife she had entertained under her roof a President of
the United States, not to mention a Russian prince and an English peer. It
was the Colonel, as she told her children, who had carried through the
agitation for a Water Commission; who urged the Park system; who saved the
Second National Bank from failure in the panic days of ninety-three. She
knew that he might have been governor, senator, possibly vice-president, if
it had not been for his modesty and his disinclination to dip into the
muddy pool of politics. As she drove into the city on her errands she was
proudly conscious that she was the wife of the best-known private citizen,
and as such recognized by every important resident and every quick-witted
clerk in the stores where she dealt. To be plain Mrs. Ezra Price was ample
reward for all the hardship and deprivation of those beginning years!

She was proud, too, of the fact that the money which she spent was honest
money. For the hardware merchant belonged to the class that made its
fortunes honestly, in the eye of the Law and of Society, also. Although
latterly his investments had carried him into real estate, railroads, and
banks, nevertheless it was as the seller of hardware that he wished to be
known. He was prouder of the Lion brand of tools than of all his stock
holdings. And though for many years a director in the Atlantic and Pacific
and other great corporations, he had always resolutely refused to be drawn
into the New York whirlpool; he was an American merchant and preferred to
remain such all his life rather than add a number of millions to his estate
"by playing faro in Wall Street."

The American merchant of this sort is fast disappearing, alas! As a class
it has never held that position in the East that it had in the West. In the
older states the manufacturer and the speculator have had precedence.
Fortunes built on slaves and rum and cotton have brought more honor than
those made in groceries and dry goods. Odd snobbery of trade! But in that
broad, middle ground of the country, its great dorsal column, the merchant
found his field, after the War, to develop and civilize. The character of
those pioneers in trade, men from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, was
such as to make them leaders. They were brave and unselfish, faithful, and
trusting of the future. With the plainest personal habits and tastes,
taking no tarnish from the luxury that rose about them, seeing things
larger than dollars on their horizon, they made the best aristocracy that
this country has seen. Their coat of arms bore the legend: Integrity and
Enterprise.

For their fortunes were built not speculatively, but on the ancient
principles of trade, of barter between men, which is to divine needs and
satisfy them, and hence they are the only fortunes in our rich land that do
not represent, to some degree, human blood, the sacrifice of the many for
the few. They were not fattened on a protective tariff, nor dug in wild
speculation out of the earth, nor gambled into being over night on the
price of foodstuffs, nor stolen from government lands, nor made of water in
Wall Street. These merchants earned them, as the pedler earns the profit of
his pack, as the farmer reaps the harvest of his seed. They earned them by
labor and sagacity, and having them, they stood with heads erect, looking
over their world and knowing that such as it is they helped to build it.

The day of the great merchant has already gone. Already the names of these
honorable firms are mere symbols, cloaking corporate management, trading on
the old personalities. No one saw the inevitable drift clearer than Colonel
Price. In common with his class he cherished the desire of handing on the
structure that he had built to the next generation, with the same
sign-manual over the door,--to his son and his grandson. So he had resisted
the temptation to incorporate the business and "take his profits." There
was a son to sit in his seat. The sons of the other partners would not be
fit: Starbird's only son, after a dissipated youth, was nursing himself
somewhere on the Riviera; his daughter had married an Easterner, and beyond
the quarterly check which the daughter and son received from the business,
this family no longer had a share in it. As for Parrott there was a younger
son serving somewhere in the immense establishment, but he had already
proved his amiable incapacity for responsibility. The second generation, as
the Colonel was forced to admit, was a disappointment. Somehow these
merchants had failed to transmit the iron in their blood to their children.
The sons and sons-in-law either lacked ability and grit, or were frankly
degenerate,--withered limbs!

With the Colonel it had promised to be different; that first boy he had
left behind when he went to the War had grown up under his eye, was
saturated with the business idea. Young Ezra had preferred to leave the
military academy where he had been at school and enter the store at
eighteen. At twenty-six he had been made treasurer of the firm, only a few
months before his death.... The Colonel's thin figure bent perceptibly
after that autumn of ninety-seven. He erected a pseudo-Greek temple in
Fairview Cemetery, with the name Price cut in deep Roman letters above the
door, to hold the ashes of his son,--then devoted all his energies to
measures for sanitary reform in the city. He was a fighter, even of
death....

Vickers had cabled at once when the news reached him that he was sailing
for home. He and Isabelle had inherited their mother's nervous constitution
and had come later in the family fortunes. They had known only ease and
luxury, tempered as it was by their father's democratic simplicity and
their mother's plain tastes. Insensibly they had acquired the outlook of
the richer generation, the sense of freedom to do with themselves what they
pleased. Both had been sent East to school,--to what the Colonel had been
told were the best schools,--and Vickers had gone to a great university.

There for a time the boy had tried to compete in athletics, as the one
inevitable path of ambition for an American boy at college; but realizing
soon that he was too slightly built for this field, he had drifted into
desultory reading and sketching for the college comic paper. Then a social
talent and a gift for writing music gave him the composition of the score
for the annual musical play. This was a hit, and from that time he began to
think seriously of studying music. It was agreed in the family that after
his graduation he should go abroad "to see what he could do." Ezra had
already taken his place in the hardware business, and the younger son could
be spared for the ornamental side of life, all the more as he was delicate
in health and had not shown the slightest evidence of "practical ability."
So the summer that he took his degree, a creditable degree with honors in
music, the Prices sailed for Europe to undertake one of those elaborate
tasting tours of foreign lands that well-to-do American families still
essay. In the autumn it concluded by the Colonel's establishing the family
in Munich and returning to his affairs. Vickers had been in Europe most of
the time since, living leisurely, studying, writing "little things" that
Isabelle played over for the Colonel on the piano.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now he had come home at the family call,--an odd figure it must be
confessed in St. Louis, with his little pointed beard, and thin mustache,
his fondness for flowing neckwear and velveteen waistcoats, his little
canes and varnished boots. And he stayed on; for the family seemed to need
him, in a general way, though it was not clear to him what good he could do
to them and there were tempting reasons for returning to Rome. In spite of
the sadness of the family situation the young man could not repress his
humorous sense of the futility of all hopes built upon himself.

"Just think of me selling nails,"--he always referred to the hardware
business as "selling nails,"--he said to his mother when she spoke to him
of the Colonel's hope that he would try to take his brother's place. "All I
know about business is just enough to draw a check if the bank will keep
the account straight. Poor Colonel! That germ ought to have got me instead
of Junior!"

"You owe it to your father, Vick. You can't be more useless than Bob
Parrott, and your father would like to see you in the office--for a time
any way."

Vickers refrained from saying that there was an unmentioned difference
between him and Bob Parrott. Young Parrott had never shown the desire to do
anything, except play polo; while he might,--at least he had the passion
for other things. The family, he thought, took his music very lightly, as a
kind of elegant toy that should be put aside at the first call of real
duty. Perhaps he had given them reason by his slow preparation, his waiting
on the fulness of time and his own development to produce results for the
world to see. Isabelle alone voiced a protest against this absorption of
the young man into the family business.

"Why, he has his own life! It is too much of a sacrifice," she
remonstrated.

"Nothing that can give your father comfort is too much of a sacrifice,"
Mrs. Price replied sharply.

"It can't last long," Isabelle said to Vickers. "The Colonel will see,--he
is generous."

"He will see that I am no good fast enough!"

"He will understand what you are giving up, and he is too large hearted to
want other people to do what they are not fitted to do."

"I don't suppose that the family fortunes need my strong right arm
exactly?" the young man inquired.

"Of course not! It's the sentiment, don't you see?"

"Yes, of course, the sentiment for nails!" the young man accepted
whimsically. "Poor Junior did the sentiment as well as the business so
admirably, and I shall be such a hollow bluff at both, I fear."

Nevertheless, the next morning Vickers was at breakfast on time, and when
the Colonel's motor came aroun

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