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The Philistines

by Arlo Bates · English · Gutenberg #8570 · 568,253 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Philistines

Author: Arlo Bates


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8570]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8570

Credits: Produced by Eric Eldred, Charlie Kirschner, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PHILISTINES ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Charlie Kirschner, Charles Franks,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team











THE PHILISTINES

BY

ARLO BATES







    The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
                                 _All's Well that Ends Well_; iv.--3




DEDICATION.


 To my three friends who, by generously acting as amanuenses,
 have made it possible that the book should be finished, I take
 pleasure in gratefully dedicating




 "This is no square temple to the gate of which thou canst
 arrive precipitately; this is no mosque to which thou canst come
 with tumult but without knowledge."
                                     _Persian Religious Hymn_.




               CONTENTS.
CHAPTER

      I. IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING
     II. SOME SPEECH OF MARRIAGE
    III. IN WAY OF TASTE
     IV. NOW HE IS FOR THE NUMBERS
      V. 'TWAS WONDROUS PITIFUL
     VI. THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE
    VII. THIS DEED UNSHAPES ME
   VIII. A NECESSARY EVIL
     IX. THIS IS NOT A BOON
      X. THE BITTER PAST
     XI. THE GREAT ASSAY OF ART
    XII. WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED
   XIII. THIS "WOULD" CHANGES
    XIV. THE SHOT OF ACCIDENT
     XV. LIKE COVERED FIRE
    XVI. WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE
   XVII. THE HEAVY MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
  XVIII. HE SPEAKS THE MERE CONTRARY
    XIX. HOW CHANCES MOCK
     XX. VOLUBLE AND SHARP DISCOURSE
    XXI. A MINT OF PHRASES IN HIS BRAIN
   XXII. HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH
  XXIII. AS FALSE AS STAIRS OF SAND
   XXIV. THERE BEGINS CONFUSION
    XXV. AFTER SUCH A PAGAN CUT
   XXVI. O, WICKED WIT AND GIFT
  XXVII. UPON A CHURCH BENCH
 XXVIII. BEDECKING ORNAMENTS OF PRAISE
   XXIX. CRUEL PROOF OF THIS MAN'S STRENGTH
    XXX. THE WORLD IS STILL DECEIVED
   XXXI. PARTED OUR FELLOWSHIP
  XXXII. HEART-BURNING HEAT OF DUTY
 XXXIII. A BOND OF AIR
  XXXIV. WHAT TIME SHE CHANTED
   XXXV. HEARTSICK WITH THOUGHT
  XXXVI. FAREWELL AT ONCE, FOR ONCE, FOR ALL AND EVER
 XXXVII. A SYMPATHY OF WOE




THE PHILISTINES


I


                     IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING.
                                            I Henry IV.; v.--I.

When Arthur Fenton, the most outspoken of all that band of protesting
spirits who had been so well known in artistic Boston as the Pagans,
married Edith Caldwell, there had been in his mind a purpose, secret
but well defined, to turn to his own account his wife's connection with
the Philistine art patrons of the town. Miss Caldwell was a niece of
Peter Calvin, a wealthy and well-meaning man against whom but two grave
charges could be made,--that he supposed the growth of art in this
country to depend largely upon his patronage, and that he could never
be persuaded not to take himself seriously. Mr. Calvin was regarded by
Philistine circles in Boston as a sort of re-incarnation of Apollo,
clothed upon with modern enlightenment, and properly arrayed in
respectable raiment. Had it been pointed out that to make this theory
probable it was necessary to conceive of the god as having undergone
mentally much the same metamorphosis as that which had transformed his
flowing vestments into trousers, his admirers would have received the
remark as highly complimentary to Mr. Peter Calvin. To assume identity
between their idol and Apollo would be immensely flattering to the son
of Latona.

Fenton understood perfectly the weight and extent of Calvin's
influence, yet, in determining to profit by it, he did not in the least
deceive himself as to the nature of his own course.

"Honesty," he afterward confessed to his friend Helen Greyson, who
scorned him for the admission, "is doubtless a charming thing for
digestive purposes, but it is a luxury too expensive for me. The gods
in this country bid for shams, and shams I purpose giving them."

So well did he carry out his intention, that in a few years he came to
be the fashionable portrait-painter of the town; the artist to whom
people went who rated the worth of a picture by the amount they were
required to pay for it, and the reputation of the painter in
conventional circles; the man to whom a Boston society woman inevitably
turned when she wished the likeness of her charms preserved on canvas,
and when no foreigner was for the moment in vogue and on hand.

The steps by which Fenton attained to this proud eminence were obvious
enough. In the first place, he persuaded Mr. Calvin to sit to him. Mr.
Calvin always sat to the portrait painters whom he endorsed. This was a
sort of official recognition, and the results, as seen in the
needlessly numerous likenesses of the gentleman which adorned his
Beacon Hill mansion, would have afforded a cynic some amusement, and
not a little food for reflection. Once launched under distinguished
patronage, Fenton was clever enough to make his way. He really was able
to paint well when he chose, a fact which was, on the whole, of less
importance in his artistic career than were the adroitness of his
address, and his ready and persuasive sympathy. The qualifications of a
fashionable doctor, a fashionable clergyman, and a fashionable
portrait-painter are much the same; it is only in the man-milliner that
skill is demanded in addition to the art of pleasing.

As usually happens in such a case, Fenton's old friends avoided him, or
found themselves left in the distance by his rapid strides toward fame
and fortune. Then such of them as still came in contact with him made
his acquaintance in a new character, and learned to accept him as a
wholly different man from the one they had supposed themselves to know
in the days when he was never weary of pouring forth tirades against
the Philistinism he had now embraced. They admired the skill with which
he painted stuffs and gowns, but among themselves they agreed that the
old-time vigor and sincerity were painfully lacking in his work; and if
they grumbled sometimes at the prices he got, it is only just to
believe that it was seldom with any real willingness to pay, in the
sacrifice of convictions and ideals, the equivalent which he had given
for his popularity.

Fenton was one morning painting, in his luxuriously appointed studio,
the portrait of a man who was in the prime of life, and over whom
vulgar prosperity had, in forming him, left everywhere her finger marks
plainly to be seen. He was tall and robust, with light eyes and blonde
whiskers, and a general air of insisting upon his immense superiority
to all the world. That he secretly felt some doubts of the perfection
of his social knowledge, there were indications in his manner, but on
the whole the complacency of a portly bank account overcame all
misgivings of this sort. His character might have been easily inferred
from the manner in which he now set his broad shoulders expansively
back in the armchair in which he was posing, and regarded the artist
with a patronizing air of condescending to be wonderfully entertained
by his conversation.

"You are the frankest fellow I ever saw," he said, smiling broadly.

"Oh, frank," Fenton responded; "I am too frank. It will be the ruin of
me sooner or later. It all comes of being born with a habit of being
too honest with myself."

"Honesty with yourself is generally held up as a cardinal virtue."

"Nonsense. A man is a fool who is too frank with himself; he is always
sure to end by being too frank with everybody else, just from mere
habit."

Mr. Irons smiled more broadly still. He by no means followed all
Fenton's vagaries of thought, but they tickled his mental cuticle
agreeably. The artist had the name of being a clever talker, and with
such a listener this was more than half the battle. The men who can
distinguish the real quality of talk are few and far to seek; most
people receive what is said as wit and wisdom, or the reverse, simply
because they are assured it is the one or the other; and Alfred Irons
was of the majority in this.

Fenton painted in silence a moment, inwardly possessed of a desire to
caricature, or even to paint in all its ugliness, the vulgar mouth upon
which he was working. The desire, however, was not sufficiently strong
to restrain him from the judicious flattery of cleverly softening and
refining the coarse lips, and he was conscious of a faint amusement at
the incongruity between his thought and his action.

"And there is the added disadvantage," he continued the conversation as
he glanced up and saw that his sitter's face was quickly, in the
silence, falling into a heavy repose, "that frankness begets frankness.
My sitters are always telling me things which I do not want to know,
just because I am so beastly outspoken and sympathetic."

"You must have an excellent chance to get pointers," responded the
sitter, his pale eyes kindling with animation. "You've painted two or
three men this winter that could have put you up to a good thing."

"That isn't the sort of line chat takes in a studio," Fenton returned,
with a slight shrug. "It isn't business that men talk in a studio. That
would be too incongruous."

Irons sneered and laughed, with an air of consequence and superiority.

"I don't suppose many of you artist fellows would make much of a fist
at business," he observed.

"Modern business," laughed the other, amused by his own epigram, "is
chiefly the art of transposing one's debts. The thing to learn is how
to pass the burden of your obligations from one man's shoulders to
those of another often enough so that nobody who has them gets tired
out, and drops them with a crash."

His sitter grinned appreciatively.

"And they don't tell you how to do this?"

"Oh, no. The things my sitters tell me about are of a very different
sort. They make to me confidences they want to get rid of; things you'd
rather not hear. Heavens! I have all I can do to keep some men from
treating me like a priest and confessing all their sins to me."

Mr. Irons regarded the artist closely, with a curious narrowing of the
eyes.

"That must give you a hold over a good many of them," he said. "I shall
be careful what I say."

Fenton laughed, with a delightful sense of superiority. It amused him
that his sitter should be betraying his nature at the very moment when
he fancied himself particularly on his guard.

"You certainly have no crimes on your conscience that interfere with
your digestion," was his reply; "but in any case, you may make yourself
easy; I am not a blackmailer by profession."

"Oh, I didn't mean that," Mr. Irons answered, easily; "only of course
you are a man who has his living to make. Every painter has to depend
on his wits, and when you come in contact with men of another class
professionally it would be natural enough to suppose you would take
advantage of it."

The "lady's finger" in Fenton's cheek stood out white amid the sudden
red, and his eyes flashed.

"Of course a sitter," he said in an even voice, which had somehow lost
all its smooth sweetness, "is in a manner my guest, and the fact that
his class was not up to mine, or that he wasn't a gentleman even,
wouldn't excuse my taking advantage of him."

The other flushed in his turn. He felt the keenness of the retort, but
he was not dexterous enough to parry it, and he took refuge in coarse
bullying.

"Come, now, Fenton," he cried with a short, explosive laugh, "you talk
like a gentleman."

But the artist, knowing himself to have the better of the other, and
not unmindful, moreover, of the fact that to offend Alfred Irons might
mean a serious loss to his own pocket, declined to take offence.

"Of course," he answered lightly, and with the air of one who
appreciates an intended jest so subtile that only cleverness would have
comprehended it, "that is one of the advantages I have always found in
being one. I think I needn't keep you tied down to that chair any
longer to-day. Come here and see how you think we are getting on."

And the sitter forgot quickly that he had been on the very verge of a
quarrel.




II

                         SOME SPEECH OF MARRIAGE.
                                     Measure for Measure; v.--I.

When dinner was announced that night, Mrs. Arthur Fenton had not
appeared, but presently she came into the room with that guilty and
anxious look which marks the consciousness of social misdemeanors. She
was dressed in a gown of warm primrose plush, softened by draperies of
silver-gray net. It was a costume which her husband had designed for
her, and which set off beautifully her brown hair and creamy white skin.

"I hope I have not kept you waiting long," she said, "but I wanted to
dress for Mrs. Frostwinch's before dinner, and I was late about getting
home."

There was a certain wistfulness in her manner which betrayed her
anxiety lest he should be vexed at the trifling delay. Arthur Fenton
was too well bred to be often openly unkind to anybody, but none the
less was his wife afraid of his displeasure. He was one of those men
who have the power of making their disapproval felt from the simple
fact that they feel it so strongly themselves. The most oppressive of
domestic tyrants are by no means those who vent their ill-nature in
open words. The man who strenuously insists to himself upon his will,
and cherishes in silence his dislike of whatever is contrary to it, is
oftener a harder man to live with than one who is violently outspoken.
Fenton was hardly conscious of the absolute despotism with which he
ruled his home, but his wife was too susceptible to his moods not to
feel keenly the unspoken protest with which he met any infringement
upon his wishes or his pleasure. Tonight he was in good humor, and his
sense of beauty was touched by the loveliness of her appearance.

"Oh, it is no matter," he answered lightly. "How stunning you look.
That topaz," he continued, walking toward her, and laying his finger
upon the single jewel she wore fastened at the edge of the square-cut
corsage of her gown, "is exactly right. It is so deep in color that it
gives the one touch you need. It was uncommonly nice of your Uncle
Peter to give it to you."

"And of you to design a dress to set it off," returned she, smiling
with pleasure. "I am glad you like me in it."

"You are stunning," her husband repeated, kissing her with a faint
shade of patronage in his manner. "Now come on before the dinner is as
cold as a stone. A cold dinner is like a warmed-over love affair; you
accept it from a sense of duty, but there is no enjoyment in it."

Mrs. Fenton smiled, more from pleasure at his evident good nature than
from any especial amusement, and they went together into the pretty
dining-room.

Fenton acknowledged himself fond of the refinements of life, and his
sensitive, sensuous nature lost none of the delights of a
well-appointed home. He lived in a quiet and elegant luxury which would
have been beyond the attainment of most artists, and which indeed not
infrequently taxed his resources to the utmost.

The table at which the pair sat down was laid with exquisite damask and
china, the dinner admirable and well served. The dishes came in hot,
the maid was deft and comely in appearance, and the master of the
house, who always kept watch, in a sort of involuntary
self-consciousness, of all that went on about him, was pleasantly aware
that the most fastidious of his friends could have found nothing amiss
in the appointment or the service of his table. How much the perfect
arrangement of domestic affairs demanded from his wife, Fenton found it
more easy and comfortable not to inquire, but he at least appreciated
the results of her management. He never came to accept the smallest
trifles of life without emotion. His pleasure or annoyance depended
upon minute details, and things which people in general passed without
notice were to him the most important facts of daily life. The
responsibility for the comfort of so highly organized a creature, Edith
had found to be anything but a light burden. Only a wife could have
appreciated the pleasure she had in having the most delicate shades in
her domestic management noted and enjoyed; or the discomfort which
arose from the same source. It was delightful to have her husband
pleased by the smallest pains she took for his comfort; to know that
his eye never failed to discover the little refinements of dress or
cookery or household adornment; but wearing was the burden of
understanding, too, that no flaw was too small to escape his sight.
Mrs. Fenton's friends rallied her upon being a slave to her
housekeeping; few of them were astute enough to understand that, kind
as was always his manner toward her, she was instead the slave of her
husband.

The room in which they were dining was one in which the artist took
especial pleasure. He had panelled it with stamped leather, which he
had picked up somewhere in Spain; while the ceiling was covered with a
novel and artistic arrangement of gilded matting. Among Edith's wedding
gifts had been some exquisite jars of Moorish pottery, and these, with
a few pieces of Algerian armor, were the only ornaments which the
artist had admitted to the room. The simplicity and richness of the
whole made an admirable setting for the dinner table, and as the host
when he entertained was willing to take the trouble of overlooking his
wife's arrangements, the Fentons' dinner parties were among the most
picturesquely effective in Boston.

"I have two big pieces of news for you," Mrs. Fenton said, when the
soup had been removed. "I have been to call on Mrs. Stewart Hubbard
this afternoon, and Mr. Hubbard is going to have you paint him. Isn't
that good?"

Her husband looked up in evident pleasure.

"That isn't so bad," was his reply. "He'll make a stunning picture, and
the Hubbards are precisely the sort of people one likes to have
dealings with. Is he going at it soon?"

"He is coming to see you to-morrow, Mrs. Hubbard said. The picture is
to be her birthday present. I told her you were so busy I didn't know
when you could begin."

"I would stretch a point to please Mr. Hubbard. I am almost done with
Irons, vulgar old cad. I wish I dared paint him as bad as he really
looks."

"But your artistic conscience won't let you?" she queried, smiling. "He
is a dreadful old creature; but he means well."

"People who mean well are always worse than those who don't mean
anything; but I can make it up with Hubbard. He looks like Rubens' St.
Simeon. I wish he wore the same sort of clothes."

"You might persuade him to, for the picture. But my second piece of
news is almost as good. Helen is coming home."

"Helen Greyson?"

"Helen Greyson. I had a letter from her today, written in Paris. She
had already got so far, and she ought to be here very soon."

"How long has she been in Rome?" Fenton asked.

He had suddenly become graver. He had been intimate with Mrs. Greyson,
a sculptor of no mean talent, in the days when he had been a fervid
opponent of people and of principles with whom he had later joined
alliance, and the idea of her return brought up vividly his parting
from her, when she had scornfully upbraided him for his apostasy from
convictions which he had again and again declared to be dearer to him
than life.

"It is six years," Mrs. Fenton answered. "Caldwell was born the March
after she went, and he will be six in three weeks. Time goes fast. We
are getting to be old people."

Fenton stared at his plate absently, his thoughts busy with the past.

"Has Grant Herman been married six years?" he asked, after a moment.

"Grant Herman? Yes; he was married just before she sailed; but what of
it?"

Fenton laid down the fork with which he had been poking the bits of
fish about on his plate. He folded his arms on the edge of the table,
and regarded his wife.

"It is astonishing, Edith," he observed, "how well one may know a woman
and yet be mistaken in her. For six years I have supposed you to be
religiously avoiding any allusion to Helen's love for Grant Herman, and
it seems you never knew it at all."

It was Mrs. Fenton's turn to look up in surprise.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Her husband laughed lightly, yet not very joyously.

"Nothing, if you will. Nobody ever told me they were in love with each
other, but I am as sure that Helen made Herman marry Ninitta as if I
had been on hand to see the operation."

"Made him marry her? Why should he marry her if he didn't want to?"

"Oh, well, I don't know anything about it. I know Ninitta followed
Herman to America, for she told me so; and I am sure he had no idea of
marrying her when she got here. Anybody can put two and two together, I
suppose, especially if you know what infernally Puritanical notions
Helen had."

"Puritanical?"

The artist leaned back in his chair and smiled at his wife in his
superior and tantalizing fashion.

"She thought she'd outgrown Puritanism," he returned, "but really she
was, in her way, as much of a Puritan as you are. The country is full
of people who don't understand that the essence of Puritanism is a
slavish adherence to what they call principle, and who think because
they have got rid of a certain set of dogmas they are free from their
theologic heritage. There never was greater rubbish than such an idea."

Mrs. Fenton was silent. She had long ago learned the futility of
attempting any argument in ethics with Arthur, and she received in
silence whatever flings at her beliefs he chose to indulge in. She had
even come hardly to heed words which in the early days of her married
life would have wounded her to the quick. She had readjusted her
conception of her husband's character, and if she still cherished
illusions in regard to him, she no longer believed in the possibility
of changing his opinions by opposing them.

Her thoughts were now, moreover, occupied with the personal problem
which would in any case have appealed more strongly to the feminine
mind than abstract theories, and she was considering what he had told
her of Mrs. Greyson and Grant Herman, a sculptor for whom she had a
warm admiration, and a no less strong liking.

However we busy ourselves with high aims, with learning, or art, or
wisdom, or ethics, personal human interests appeal to us more strongly
than anything else. Human emotions respond instinctively and quickly to
any hint of the emotional life of others. Nothing more strikingly shows
the essential unity of the race than the readiness with which all minds
lay aside all concerns and ideas which they are accustomed to consider
higher, to give attention to the trifling details of the intimate
history of their fellows. Quite unconsciously, Edith had gathered up
many facts, insignificant in themselves, concerning the relations of
Mrs. Greyson and Herman, and she now found herself suddenly called upon
to reconsider whatever conclusions they had led her to in the light of
this new development. The sculptor's marriage with an ex-model had
always been a mystery to her, and she now endeavored to decide in her
mind whether it were possible that her husband could be right in
putting the responsibility upon Helen Greyson. The form of his remark
seemed to her to hint that the Italian's claim upon Herman had been of
so grave a nature as to imply serious complications in their former
relations; but she strenuously rejected any suspicion of evil in the
sculptor's conduct.

"I am sure, Arthur," she said, hesitatingly, "there can have been
nothing wrong between Mr. Herman and Ninitta. I have too much faith in
him."

"To put faith in man," was his answer, "is only less foolish than to
believe in woman. I didn't, however, mean to imply anything very
dreadful. The facts are enough, without speculating on what is nobody's
business but theirs. I wonder how he and Helen will get on together,
now she is coming home? Mrs. Herman is a jealous little thing, and
could easily be roused up to do mischief."

"I do not believe Helen had anything to do with their marriage," Edith
said, with conviction. "It was a mistake from the outset."

"Granted. That is what makes it so probable that Helen did it. Grant
isn't the man to make a fool of himself without outside pressure, and
in the end a sacrifice to principle is always some ridiculous
tomfoolery that can't be come at in any other way. However, we shall
see what we shall see. What time are you going to Mrs. Frostwinch's?"

"I am going to the Browning Club at Mrs. Gore's first. Will you come?"

"Thank you, no. I have too much respect for Browning to assist at his
dismemberment. I'll meet you at Mrs. Frostwinch's about ten."




III

                             IN WAY OF TASTE.
                                     Troilus and Cressida; iii.--3.

One of the most curious of modern whims in Boston has been the study of
the poems of Robert Browning. All at once there sprang up on every hand
strange societies called Browning Clubs, and the libraries were
ransacked for Browning's works, and for the books of whoever has had
the conceit or the hardihood to write about the great poet. Lovely
girls at afternoon receptions propounded to each other abstruse
conundrums concerning what they were pleased to regard as obscure
passages, while little coteries gathered, with airs of supernatural
gravity, to read and discuss whatever bore his signature.

A genuine, serious Boston Browning Club is as deliciously droll as any
form of entertainment ever devised, provided one's sense of the
ludicrous be strong enough to overcome the natural indignation aroused
by seeing genuine poetry, the high gift of the gods, thus abused. The
clubs meet in richly furnished parlors, of which the chief fault is
usually an over-abundance of bric-a-brac. The house of Mrs. Gore, for
instance, where Edith was going this evening, was all that money could
make it; and in passing it may be noted that Boston clubs are seldom of
constitutions sufficiently vigorous to endure unpleasant surroundings.
The fair sex predominates at all these gatherings, and over them hangs
an air of expectant solemnity, as if the celebration of some sacred
mystery were forward. Conversation is carried on in subdued tones; even
the laughter is softened, and when the reader takes his seat, there
falls upon the little company a hush so deep as to render distinctly
audible the frou-frou of silken folds, and the tinkle of jet fringes,
stirred by the swelling of ardent and aspiring bosoms.

The reading is not infrequently a little dull, especially to the
uninitiated, and there have not been wanting certain sinister
suggestions that now and then, during the monotonous delivery of some
of the longer poems, elderly and corpulent devotees listen only with
the spiritual ear, the physical sense being obscured by an abstraction
not to be distinguished by an ordinary observer from slumber. The
reader, however, is bound to assume that all are listening, and if some
sleep and others consider their worldly concerns or speculate upon the
affairs of their neighbors, it interrupts not at all the steady flow of
the reading.

Once this is finished, there is an end also of inattention, for the
discussion begins. The central and vital principle of all these clubs
is that a poem by Robert Browning is a sort of prize enigma, of which
the solution is to be reached rather by wild and daring guessing than
by any commonplace process of reasoning. Although to an ordinary and
uninspired intellect it may appear perfectly obvious that a lyric means
simply and clearly what it says, the true Browningite is better
informed. He is deeply aware that if the poet seems to say one thing,
this is proof indisputable that another is intended. To take a work in
straightforward fashion would at once rob the Browning Club of all
excuse for existence, and while parlor chairs are easy, the air warm
and perfumed, and it is the fashion for idle minds to concern
themselves with that rococo humbug Philistines call culture, societies
of this sort must continue.

Once it is agreed that a poem means something not apparent, it is easy
to make it mean anything and everything, especially if the discussion,
as is usually the case, be interspersed with discursions of which the
chief use is to give some clever person or other a chance to say smart
things. When all else fails, moreover, the club can always fall back
upon allegory. Commentators on the poets have always found much field
for ingenious quibbling and sounding speculation in the line of
allegory. Let a poem be but considered an allegory, and there is no
limit to the changes which may be rung upon it, not even Mrs.
Malaprop's banks of the Nile restraining the creature's headstrong
ranging. Only a failure of the fancy of the interpreter can afford a
check, and as everybody reads fiction nowadays, few people are without
a goodly supply of fancies, either original or acquired.

Although Fenton had declined to go to Mrs. Gore's with his wife, he had
finished his cigar when the carriage was announced, and decided to
accompany her, after all. The parlors were filling when they arrived,
and Arthur, who knew how to select good company, managed to secure a
seat between Miss Elsie Dimmont, a young and rather gay society girl,
and Mrs. Frederick Staggchase, a descendant of an old Boston family,
who was called one of the cleverest women of her set.

"Is Mr. Fenwick going to read?" he asked of the latter, glancing about
to see who was present.

"Yes," Mrs. Staggchase answered, turning toward him with her
distinguished motion of the head and high-bred smile. "Don't you like
him?"

"I never had the misfortune to hear him. I know he detests me, but then
I fear, that like olives and caviare, I have to be an acquired taste."

"Acquired tastes," she responded, with that air of being amused by
herself which always entertained Fenton, "are always the strongest."

"And generally least to a man's credit," he retorted quickly. "What is
he going to inflict upon us?"

"Really, I don't know. I seldom come to this sort of thing. I don't
think it pays."

"Oh, nothing pays, of course," was Fenton's reply, "but it is more or
less amusing to see people make fools of themselves."

The president of the club, at this moment, called the assembly to
order, and announced that Mr. Fenwick had kindly consented--"Readers
always kindly consent," muttered Fenton aside to Mrs. Staggchase--to
read, _Bishop Blougram's Apology_, to which they would now listen.
There was a rustle of people settling back into their chairs; the
reader brushed a lank black lock from his sallow brow, and with a tone
of sepulchral earnestness began:

  "'No more wine? then we'll push back chairs, and talk.'"

For something over an hour, the monotonous voice of the reader went
dully on. Fenton drew out his tablets and amused himself and Miss
Dimmont by drawing caricatures of the company, ending with a sketch of
a handsome old dowager, who went so soundly to sleep that her jaw fell.
Over this his companion laughed so heartily that Mrs. Staggchase leaned
forward smilingly, and took his tablets away from him; whereat he
produced an envelope from his pocket and was about to begin another
sketch, when suddenly, and apparently somewhat to the surprise of the
reader, the poem came to an end.

There was a joyful stir. The dowager awoke, and there was a perfunctory
clapping of hands when Mr. Fenwick laid down his volume, and people
were assured that there was no mistake about his being really quite
through. A few murmurs of admiration were heard, and then there was an
awful pause, while the president, as usual, waited in the
never-fulfilled hope that the discussion would start itself without
help on his part.

"How cleverly you do sketch," Miss Dimmont said, under her breath; "but
it was horrid of you to make me laugh."

"You are grateful," Fenton returned, in the same tone. "You know I kept
you from being bored to death."

"I have a cousin, Miss Wainwright," pursued Miss Dimmont, "whose
picture we want you to paint."

"If she is as good a subject as _her_ cousin," Fenton answered, "I
shall be delighted to do it."

The president had, meantime, got somewhat ponderously upon his feet,
half a century of good living not having tended to increase his natural
agility, and remarked that the company were, he was sure, extremely
grateful to Mr. Fenwick, for his very intelligent interpretation of the
poem read.

"Did he interpret it?" Fenton whispered to Mrs. Staggchase. "Why wasn't
I told?" "Hush!" she answered, "I will never let you sit by me again if
you do not behave better."

"Sitting isn't my _metier_, you know," he retorted.

The president went on to say that the lines of thought opened by the
poem were so various and so wide that they could scarcely hope to
explore them all in one evening, but that he was sure there must be
many who had thoughts or questions they wished to express, and to start
the discussion he would call upon a gentleman whom he had observed
taking notes during the reading, Mr. Fenton.

"The old scaramouch!" Fenton muttered, under his breath. "I'll paint
his portrait and send it to _Punch_."

Then with perfect coolness he got upon his feet and looked about the
parlor.

"I am so seldom able to come to these meetings," he said, "that I am
not at all familiar with your methods, and I certainly had no idea of
saying anything; I was merely jotting down a few things to think over
at home, and not making notes for a speech, as you would see if you
examined the paper."

At this point Miss Dimmont gave a cough which had a sound strangely
like a laugh strangled at its birth.

"The poem is one so subtile," Fenton continued, unmoved; "it is so
clever in its knowledge of human nature, that I always have to take a
certain time after reading it to get myself out of the mood of merely
admiring its technique, before I can think of it critically at all. Of
course the bit about 'an artist whose religion is his art' touches me
keenly, for I have long held to the heresy that art is the highest
thing in the world, and, as a matter of fact, the only thing one can
depend upon. The clever sophistry of Bishop Blougram shows well enough
how one can juggle with theology; and, after all, theology is chiefly
some one man's insistence that everybody else shall make the same
mistakes that he does."

Fenton felt that he was not taking the right direction in his talk, and
that in his anxiety to extricate himself from a slight awkwardness he
was rapidly getting himself into a worse one. It was one of those odd
whimsicalities which always came as a surprise when committed by a man
who usually displayed so much mental dexterity, that now, instead of
endeavoring to get upon the right track, he simply broke off abruptly
and sat down.

His words had, however, the effect of calling out instantly a protest
from the Rev. De Lancy Candish. Mr. Candish was the rector of the
Church of the Nativity, the exceedingly ritualistic organization with
which Mrs. Fenton was connected. He was a tall and bony young man, with
abundant auburn hair and freckles, the most ungainly feet and hands,
and eyes of eager enthusiasm, which showed how the result of New
England Puritanism had been to implant in his soul the true martyr
spirit. Fenton was never weary of jeering at Mr. Candish's uncouthness,
his jests serving as an outlet, not only for the irritation physical
ugliness always begot in him, but for his feeling of opposition to his
wife's orthodoxy, in which he regarded the clergyman as upholding her.
The rector's self-sacrificing devotion to truth, moreover, awakened in
the artist a certain inner discomfort. To the keenly sensitive mind
there is no rebuke more galling than the unconscious reproof of a
character which holds steadfastly to ideals which it has basely
forsaken. Arthur said to himself that he hated Candish for his ungainly
person. "He is so out of drawing," he once told his wife, "that I
always have a strong inclination to rub him out and make him over
again." In that inmost chamber of his consciousness where he allowed
himself the luxury of absolute frankness, however, the artist confessed
that his animosity to the young rector had other causes.

As Fenton sank into his seat, Mrs. Staggchase leaned over to quote from
the poem,--

     "'For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke.'"

The artist turned upon her a glance of comprehension and amusement, but
before he could reply, the rough, rather loud voice of Mr. Candish
arrested his attention.

"If the poem teaches anything," Mr. Candish said, speaking according to
his custom, somewhat too warmly, "it seems to me it is the sophistry of
the sort of talk which puts art above religion. The thing that offends
an honest man in Bishop Blougram is the fact that he looks at religion
as if it were an art, and not a vital and eternal necessity,--a living
truth that cannot be trifled with."

"Ah," Fenton's smooth and beautiful voice rejoined, "that is to
confound art with the artificial, which is an obvious error. Art is a
passion, an utter devotion to an ideal, an absolute lifting of man out
of himself into that essential truth which is the only lasting bond by
which mankind is united."

Fenton's coolness always had a confusing and irritating effect upon Mr.
Candish, who was too thoroughly honest and earnest to quibble, and far
from possessing the dexterity needed to fence with the artist. He began
confusedly to speak, but with the first word became aware that Mrs.
Fenton had come to the rescue. Edith never saw a contest between her
husband and the clergyman without interfering if she could, and now she
instinctively spoke, without stopping to consider where she was.

"It is precisely for that reason," she said, "that art seems to me to
fall below religion. Art can make man contented with life only by
keeping his attention fixed upon an ideal, while religion reconciles us
to life as it really is."

A murmur of assent showed Arthur how much against the feeling of those
around him were the views he was advancing.

"Oh, well," he said, in a droll _sotto voce_, "if it is coming down to
a family difference we will continue it in private."

And he abandoned the discussion.

"It seems to me," pursued Mr. Candish, only half conscious that Mrs.
Fenton had come to his aid, "that Bishop Blougram represents the most
dangerous spirit of the age. His paltering with truth is a form of
casuistry of which we see altogether too much nowadays."

"Do you think," asked a timid feminine voice, "that Blougram was
_quite_ serious? That he really meant all he said, I mean?"

The president looked at the speaker with despair in his glance; but she
was adorably pretty and of excellent social position, so that snubbing
was not to be thought of. Moreover, he was thoroughly well trained in
keeping his temper under the severest provocation, so he expressed his
feelings merely by a deprecatory smile.

"We have the poet's authority," he responded, in a softly patient
voice, "for saying that he believed only half."

There was a little rustle of leaves, as if people were looking over
their books, in order to find the passage to which he alluded. Then a
young girl in the front row of chairs, a pretty creature, just on the
edge of womanhood, looked up earnestly, her finger at a line on the
page before her.

"I can't make out what this means," she announced, knitting her girlish
brow,--

     "'Here, we've got callous to the Virgin's winks
       That used to puzzle people wholesomely.'"

"Of course he can't mean that the Madonna winks; that would be too
irreverent."

There were little murmurs of satisfaction that the question had been
asked, confusing explanations which evidently puzzled some who had not
thought of being confused before; and then another girl, ignoring the
fact that the first difficulty had not been disposed of, propounded
another.

"Isn't the phrase rather bold," she asked, "where he speaks of 'blessed
evil?'"

"Where is that?" some one asked.

"On page 106, in my edition," was the reply; and a couple of moments
were given to finding the place in the various books.

"Oh, I see the line," said an old lady, at last. "It's
one--two--three--five lines from the bottom of the page:"

      "'And that's what all the blessed evil's for.'"

"You don't think," queried the first speaker, appealing personally to
the president, "that Mr. Browning can really have meant that evil is
blessed, do you?"

The president regarded her with an affectionate and fatherly smile.

"I think," he said, with an air of settling everything, "that the
explanation of his meaning is to be found in the line which follows,--

           "'It's use in Time is to environ us.'"

"Heavens!" whispered Fenton to Mrs. Staggchase; "fancy that incarnate
respectability environed by 'blessed evil!'"

"For my part," she returned, in the same tone, "I feel as if I were
visiting a lunatic asylum." "Yes, that line does make it beautifully
clear," observed the voice of Miss Catherine Penwick; "and I think
that's so beautiful about the exposed brain, and lidless eyes, and
disemprisoned heart. The image is so exquisite when he speaks of their
withering up at once."

Fenton made a droll grimace for the benefit of his neighbor, and then
observed with great apparent seriousness,--

"The poem is most remarkable for the intimate knowledge it shows of
human nature. Take a line like:"

       'Men have outgrown the shame of being fools;'

"We can see such striking instances of its truth all about us."

"How can you?" exclaimed Elsie Dimmont, under her breath.

Fenton had not been able wholly to keep out of his tone the mockery
which he intended, and several people looked at him askance.
Fortunately for him, a nice old gentleman who, being rather hard of
hearing, had not caught what was said, now broke in with the inevitable
question, which, sooner or later, was sure to come into every
discussion of the club:

"Isn't this poem to be most satisfactorily understood when it is
regarded as an allegory?"

The members, however, did not take kindly to this suggestion in the
present instance. The question passed unnoticed, while a severe-faced
woman inquired, with an air of vast superiority,--

"I have understood that Bishop Blougram is intended as a portrait of
Cardinal Wiseman; can any one tell me if Gigadibs is also a portrait?"

"Oh, Lord!" muttered Fenton, half audibly. "I can't stand any more of
this."

And at that moment a servant came to tell him that his carriage was
waiting.




IV

                        NOW HE IS FOR THE NUMBERS.
                                       Romeo and Juliet; ii.----4.

When Mr. and Mrs. Fenton were in the carriage, driving from Mrs. Gore's
to Mrs. Frostwinch's, Arthur broke into a pleasant little laugh, as if
a sudden thought had amused him.

"Why in the world, Edith," he asked, "couldn't you let that moon-calf
Candish fight his own battle to-night? He would have tied himself all
up in two moments, with a little judicious help I should have been glad
to give him."

"I knew it," was her answer, "and that is precisely why I wanted to
stop things. What possible amusement it can be to you to get the better
of a man who is so little a match for you in argument, I don't
understand."

"I never begin," Fenton responded. "Of course if he starts it I have to
defend myself."

The stopping of the carriage prevented further discussion, and the pair
were soon involved in the crowd of people struggling toward the hostess
across Mrs. Denton Frostwinch's handsome drawing-room. Mrs. Frostwinch
belonged, beyond the possibility of any cavilling doubt, to the most
exclusive circle of fashionable Boston society. Boston society is a
complex and enigmatical thing, full of anomalies, bounded by wavering
and uncertain lines, governed by no fixed standards, whether of wealth,
birth, or culture, but at times apparently leaning a little toward each
of these three great factors of American social standing.

It is seldom wise to be sure that at any given Boston house whatever,
one will not find a more or less strong dash of democratic flavor in
general company, and there are those who discover in this fact
evidences of an agreeable and lofty republicanism. At Mrs. Frostwinch's
one was less likely than in most houses to encounter socially doubtful
characters, a fact which Arthur Fenton, who was secretly flattered to
be invited here, had once remarked to his wife was an explanation of
the dulness of these entertainments.

For Mrs. Frostwinch's parties were apt to be anything but lively. One
was morally elevated by being able to look on the comely and high-bred
face of Mrs. Bodewin Ranger, but that fine old lady had a sort of
religious scruple against saying anything in particular in company, a
relic of the days of her girlhood, when cleverness was not the fashion
in her sex and when she had been obliged to suppress herself lest she
outshine the high-minded and courtly but dreadfully dull gentleman she
married.

One had here the pleasure of shaking one of the white fingers of Mr.
Plant, the most exquisite _gourmet_ in Boston, whose only daughter had
made herself ridiculous by a romantic marriage with a country farmer.
The Stewart Hubbards, who were the finest and fiercest aristocrats in
town, and whose ancestors had been possessed not only of influence but
of wealth ever since early colonial days, were old and dear friends of
Mrs. Frostwinch and always decorated her parlors on gala nights with
their benign presence. Mr. Peter Calvin, the leader of art fashions,
high priest of Boston conservatism, and author of numerous laboriously
worthless books, seldom failed to diffuse the aroma of his patronizing
personality through the handsome parlors of this hospitable mansion
when there was any reasonable chance of his securing an audience to
admire him; and in general terms the company was what the newspapers
call select and distinguished.

For Mrs. Frostwinch was entitled to a leading place in society upon
whichever of the three great principles it was based. She was descended
from one of the best of American families, while her good-tempered if
somewhat shadowy husband was of lineage quite as unexceptional as her
own. She was possessed of abundant wealth, while in cleverness and
culture she was the peer of any of the brilliant people who frequented
her house. She was moderately pretty, dressed beautifully, was sweet
tempered, and possessed all good gifts and graces except repose and
simplicity. She perhaps worked too hard to keep abreast of the times in
too many currents, and her mental weariness instead of showing itself
by an irritable temper found a less disagreeable outlet in a certain
nervous manner apt to seem artificial to those who did not know her
well. She was a clever, even a brilliant woman, who assembled clever
and brilliant people about her, although as has been intimated, the
result was by no means what might have been expected from such material
and such opportunities. The truth is that there seems to be a fatal
connection between exclusiveness and dulness. The people who assembled
in Mrs. Frostwinch's handsome parlors usually seemed to be
unconsciously laboring under the burden of their own respectability.
They apparently felt that they had fulfilled their whole duty by simply
being there; and while the list of people present at one of Mrs.
Frostwinch's evenings made those who were not there sigh with envy at
thought of the delights they had missed, the reality was far from being
as charming as their fancy.

"I wish somebody would bring Amanda Welsh Sampson here," murmured
Arthur in his wife's ear, as the Fentons made their way toward their
hostess. "It would be too delicious to see how she'd stir things up,
and how shocked the old tabby dowagers would be."

But there were some social topics which were too serious to Edith to be
jested upon.

"Mrs. Sampson!" she returned, with an expression of being really
shocked. "That dreadful creature!"

The rooms were well filled; the clatter of innumerable tongues speaking
English with that resonant dryness which reminds one of nothing else so
much as of the clack of a negro minstrel's clappers indefinitely
reduplicated, rang in the ears with confusing steadiness. An hour was
spent in fragmentary conversations, which somehow were always
interrupted at the instant the interesting point was reached. The men
bestirred themselves with more or less alacrity, making their way about
the room with a conscientious determination to speak to everybody whom
duty called upon them to address, or more selfishly devoting themselves
to finding out and chatting with the pretty girls. Fenton found time
for the latter method while being far too politic to neglect the
former. He was chatting in a corner with Ethel Mott, when Fred Rangely,
whose successful novel had made him vastly the fashion that winter,
joined them.

"When wit and beauty get into a corner together," was Rangely's
salutation, "there is sure to be mischief brewing."

"It isn't at all kind," Miss Mott retorted, "for you to emphasize the
fact that Mr. Fenton has all the wit and I not any."

"It is as kind," Fenton said, "as his touching upon the plainness of my
personal appearance."

"Your mutual modesty in appropriating wit and beauty," Rangely
returned, "goes well toward balancing the account."

"One has to be modest when you appear, Mr. Rangely," Miss Mott
declared, saucily, "simply to keep up the average."

"Come," Fenton said, "this will serve as an excellent beginning for a
quarrel. I will leave you to carry it on by yourselves. I have got too
old for that sort of amusement."

Rangely looked after the artist as the latter took himself off to join
Mrs. Staggchase, who was holding court not far away.

"You may follow if you want to," Ethel said, intercepting the glance.

Rangely laughed, a trifle uneasily.

"I don't want to," he replied, "if you will be good natured."

"Good natured? I like that! I am always good natured. You had better go
than to stay and abuse me. But then, as you have been at Mrs.
Staggchase's all the afternoon, you ought to be pretty well talked out."

The young man turned toward her with an air of mingled surprise and
impatience.

"Who said I had been there?" he demanded.

"It was in the evening papers," she returned, teasingly. "All your
movements are chronicled now you have become a great man."

"Humph! I am glad you were interested in my whereabouts."

"But I wasn't in the least."

"Are you sparring as usual, Miss Mott?" asked Mr. Stewart Hubbard,
joining them. "Good evening, Mr. Rangely."

"Oh, Mr. Hubbard," Miss Mott said, ignoring the question, "I want to
know who is to make the statue of _America_. It is going to stand
opposite our house, so that it will be the first thing I shall see when
I look out of the window in the morning, and naturally I am interested."

"Mr. Herman is making a study, and Mr. Irons has been put up to asking
this new woman for a model. What is her name? The one whose _Galatea_
made a stir last year."

"Mrs. Greyson," Rangely answered. "I used to know her before she went
to Rome."

"Is she clever?" demanded Miss Mott, with a sort of girlish
imperiousness which became her very well. "I can't have a statue put up
unless it is very good indeed."

"She might take Miss Mott as a model," Mr. Hubbard suggested, smiling.

"For America? Oh, I am too little, and altogether too civilized. I'd do
better for a model of Monaco, thank you."

"There is always a good deal of chance about you," Rangely said in her
ear, as Mr. Staggchase spoke to Mr. Hubbard and drew his attention away.

Mr. Staggchase was a thin, wintry man, looking, as Fenton once said,
like the typical Yankee spoiled by civilization. He had always in a
scene of this sort the air of being somewhat out of place, but of
having brought his business with him, so that he was neither idle nor
bored. It was upon business that he now spoke to Hubbard.

"Did you see Lincoln to-day?" he asked. "He has got an ultimatum from
those parties. They will sell all their rights for $70,000."

"For $70,000," repeated Mr. Hubbard, thoughtfully. "We can afford to
give that if we are sure about the road; but I don't know that we are.
If Irons gets hold of any hint of what we are doing he can upset the
whole thing."

"But he won't. There is no fear of that."

A movement in the crowd brought Edith Fenton at this moment to the side
of Mr. Hubbard. She was radiant to-night in her primrose gown, and the
gentleman, with whom she was always a favorite, turned toward her with
evident pleasure.

"Isn't it a jam," she said. "I have ceased to have any control over my
movements."

"That is unkind, when I fancied you allowed yourself to give me the
pleasure of seeing you," returned he with elaborate courtesy. "Let me
take you in to the supper-room."

"Thank you," Edith replied, taking his arm. "I do not object to an ice,
and I want to ask a favor. Haven't you some copying you can give a
_protegee_ of mine? She's a lovely girl, and she really writes very
nicely. I assure you she needs the work, or I wouldn't bother you."

They made their way into the hall before he answered. Then he asked,
with some seriousness,--

"Are you sure she is absolutely to be trusted?"

"Trusted? Why, of course. I'd trust her as absolutely as I would
myself."

"I asked because I do happen to have some copying I want done; but it
is of the most serious importance that it be kept secret. It is the
prospectus of a big business scheme, and if a hint of it got on the air
it would all be ruined."

Edith looked up into his face and smiled.

"Her name," she said, "is Melissa Blake, and you will find her--Or,
wait; what time shall I send her to your office to-morrow?"

Her companion smiled in turn. They had reached the door of the
supper-room, where the clatter of dishes, the popping of champagne
corks, and the rattle of silver were added to the babble of
conversation which filled the whole house. About the tables was going
on a struggle which, however well-bred, was at least sufficiently
vigorous.

"You take a good deal for granted," he said. "However, it will do no
harm for me to see the young woman. She may come at eleven. What shall
I bring you?"




V

                          'TWAS WONDROUS PITIFUL.
                                            Othello; i.--3.

"Dear John, I will give it up any day you say, and go back to
Feltonville and live on the farm; but you know"--

Melissa Blake broke off and left her chair to take a seat on the corner
of that on which her betrothed, John Stanton, was sitting, a proceeding
which made it necessary for him to put his arm about her trig waist to
support her.

"Don't think I don't understand, dear," she said, nestling up to him,
"how hard it is, and what a long drag it has been, but we should
neither of us ever feel quite satisfied to give it up. We can hold on,
can't we, as long as we are together."

He kissed her fondly, but with a certain air of distraction which
showed how full was his mind of the matter which troubled him. Two
years before, he had come to Boston, and obtained work as a carpenter,
determined to pay the debts left by his dead father, before he would
marry and settle down on the small farm which belonged to his
betrothed, and which, while it might be made to yield a living, could
by no means be looked to for more. For the sake of being near him,
Melissa had given up the school teaching of which she was fond, and
come to the city also, and although she had found the difficulty of
earning the means of support far greater than she had anticipated, she
had still clung to the fortunes of her lover, to whom her steadfastness
and unfailing cheer were of a value such as men realize only when it is
lost.

"I got a letter to-day," John went on, while Melissa stroked his
fingers fondly, "about the meadows. The time for redeeming them is up
this month, and if I try to do it I can't pay anything on the debts
this winter. The truth is "--

Melissa sat up suddenly.

"John!" she exclaimed.

"Why, what--what is the matter?"

She looked at him with wide open eyes, drawing in her under lip beneath
her white teeth, with the air of profound meditation. Then she freed
herself abruptly from his arms and went hastily to the table upon which
were her writing materials. She had been at work copying when her lover
came in, and her papers lay still open, with ink scarcely dry, where
she had stopped to welcome him. She took one sheet up and studied it
eagerly, and then turned toward him with shining eyes, her whole face
aglow.

"Oh, John!" she exclaimed.

He regarded her in puzzled silence. Then in an instant the glad light
faded from her eyes, and her lips lost their smile. An expression of
pain and almost of terror replaced the look of joy. There had suddenly
come to Melissa a sense of what she was doing. In the paper she held
was written the plan of the formation of a syndicate to purchase the
very range of meadows along the river in Feltonville of which those
mentioned by John formed a part. At Mrs. Fenton's direction, Melissa
had gone to see Mr. Hubbard, and had by him been employed to copy these
papers for use at a meeting of the proposed stockholders, which was to
take place in a few days.

"Mrs. Fenton tells me," he had said, "that you are to be trusted. It is
absolutely essential that you do not mention these plans to any living
being. Perfect secrecy is expected from you, and it is only because
Mrs. Fenton is your guarantee that I run the risk of putting them into
your hands."

"I think you can trust me," she had answered; "even if," she had added,
with the ghost of a smile, "there were anybody that I know who would be
at all likely to be interested."

And now the temptation had come to her in a way of which she had never
dreamed. She had gone on with her copying, smiling to herself at the
coincidence which put into the hands of a Feltonville girl this plan
for the metamorphosis of the sleepy old village into a bustling
manufacturing town, but she had not considered that this scheme might
have important bearing upon the fortunes of her lover. She knew that
Stanton's father had owned meadows along the river where the new
factories were to lie, and she knew also that when old Mr. Stanton died
these had been sold with a condition of redemption, but until this
moment she had not connected the facts. She did not understand
business, and had been puzzling her brain as she wrote, to understand
what was meant by the statement that a certain company would sell a
"six months' option at seventy thousand dollars" on a water-power for
two thousand dollars. She did understand now, however, that were John
in possession of the secret of the syndicate's plans, he could redeem
his father's meadows with the money he had saved toward the payment of
the debts which had forced the old man into the bankruptcy that broke
his heart, and once he owned these lands lying in the midst of the
desirable tract, John could command his own price for them. She held in
her hand the secret which would free her lover from the heavy burden of
years, and bring quickly the wedding-day for which they had both waited
and longed so patiently.

The blood bounded so hotly in Melissa's veins as she realized all this,
that she could scarcely breathe; but like a lightning flash a thought
followed which sent the tide surging back to her heart, and left her
cold and faint. She remembered that this knowledge was a trust. That
she had given her word not to betray it. With instant recoil, she
leaped to the thought that advising her lover to redeem these meadows
was not betraying the secret. Like a swift shuttle flew her mind
between argument and defence, between temptation and resistance,
between love and duty.

"Why, what is it, Milly?" John demanded, starting up and coming to her.
"What in the world makes you act so funny? Are you sick? Why don't you
speak?"

It is not easy to express the force of the struggle which went on in
poor Milly's mind. It seemed to her at that moment as if all the hopes
of her life were set against her honesty. The material issues in any
conflict between principle and inclination are of less importance than
the desire which they represent. The few thousand dollars involved in
the redemption of the Stanton meadows was little when compared to the
magnificent scheme of which this would be a mere trifling accident, but
the sum represented all the desires of Milly Blake's life, while over
against it stood all her faith, her honesty, and her religion.

For an instant she wavered, standing as if by some spell suddenly
arrested, with arms half extended. Then she flung down the paper and
threw herself upon her lover's breast with a burst of tears.

"Why, Milly," he said, soothingly. "Milly, Milly."

He was unused to feminine vagaries. His betrothed was of the outwardly
quiet order of women, and an outburst like this was incomprehensible to
him. He could only hold the weeping girl in his strong embrace,
soothing her in helpless masculine fashion, awkward, but exactly what
she needed.

"There, John," she cried at last, giving him a tumultuous hug, and
looking up into his face through her tears, "I always told you you were
engaged to a fool, and this is a new proof of it."

"But what in the world," Stanton asked, looking down into her eyes with
mingled fondness and bewilderment, "is it all about? What is the
matter?"

"It is nothing but my foolishness," she answered, leading him back to
the chair from which he had risen. "I was going to show you something
in a paper I am copying, and just in time I remembered that I had
particularly promised not to show it to anybody."

He regarded her curiously.

"But why," he asked, with a certain deliberateness which somehow made
her uneasy, "did you want to show it to me."

"Because--because--"

She could not equivocate, and her innocent soul had had little training
in the arts of evasion.

"Because what?"

Stanton leaned back in his chair, holding her by the shoulders as she
sat upon his knee, and searching her face with his strong brown eyes.
Milly's glance drooped.

"Don't ask me, John," she responded, putting her hand against his
cheek, wistfully. "Don't you see I couldn't tell you without letting
you know what is in the paper, and that is precisely the thing I
promised not to do."

There are few men in whom a woman's open refusal to yield a point, no
matter how trifling, does not arouse a tyrannous masculine impulse to
compel obedience. Stanton had really no great curiosity about the
secret, whatever it might be, but he instinctively felt that it was
right to demand the telling because his betrothed refused to speak. His
face grew more grave. The hands upon Milly's shoulders unconsciously
tightened their hold. The girl intuitively felt that a struggle was
coming, although even yet the signs were hardly tangible. She grew a
little paler, putting her hand beneath her lover's bearded chin, and
holding his face up so that she could look straight into his fearless,
honest eyes.

"Dear John," she said, wistfully, "you know I never have a secret of my
own that I keep from you in all the world."

"But why," demanded he, "can it do any harm for you to give me some
reason why you ever thought of telling me this; and just at a time,
too, when we were talking of business."

"Because," she answered, thoughtlessly, "it was about business."

A new light came into Stanton's face. His lips subtly changed their
expression.

"It must have been a chance to make some money," he said.

She grew deadly pale, but she did not answer him. He searched her face
an instant, and then he lifted her in his strong arms, rising from the
chair, and seating her in his place. He took a step forward, and
stretched out his hand to take the paper she had thrown upon the table.
With a cry of terror she sprang up and caught his arm.

"John!" she exclaimed. "Oh, for pity's sake, don't look at it."

He turned and regarded her with a more unkind glance than she had ever
seen upon his face.

"Will you tell me?" he asked.

"I can't, I can't!" she answered, half sobbing.

He looked at the paper, and then at his sweetheart. Then with a rough
motion he shook off her fingers from his arm, and without a word went
abruptly from the room.

Milly looked toward the door which had closed after him as if she could
not believe that he had really gone; then she sank down to the floor,
and, leaning her head upon a chair, she sobbed as if her heart were
broken.




VI

                          THE INLY TOUCH OF LOVE.
                                  Two Gentlemen of Verona; ii.--7.

Grant Herman looked across the breakfast table at his Italian wife
thoughtfully a moment, considering, as he often did, what was likely to
be the effect of something he was about to say. In six years of married
life he had not learned how to adapt himself to the narrower mind and
more personal views of his wife. He perhaps fell into the error, so
common to strong natures, of being unable to comprehend that by far the
larger part of the principles which influence broad minds do not for
narrow ones exist at all. He continually tried to discover what process
of reasoning led Ninitta to given results, but he was never able to
appreciate the fact that often it was by no chain of logic whatever
that certain conclusions had been arrived at. A mental habit of
catching up opinions at haphazard, of acting simply from emotions,
however transient, instead of from convictions, was wholly outside his
mental experience, and equally unrealized in his comprehension.

He regarded Ninitta, whose foreign face and beautiful figure looked as
much out of place behind the coffee urn as would the faun of Praxiteles
at an afternoon reception, and a smothered sigh rose to his lips with
the thought how utterly he was at a loss to comprehend her. It happened
in the present case, as it often did, that his failure to understand
arose chiefly from the fact that there was nothing in particular to
understand, and, when he spoke, Ninitta received his remark quite
simply.

"Mrs. Greyson is at home again," he said.

"Mrs. Greyson," she echoed, her dark eyes lighting up with genuine
pleasure. "Oh, that is indeed good. Where is she? Have you seen her?"

There shot through Herman's mind the reflection that since his wife
could not know that he married her out of love not for herself but for
Helen Greyson, it was absurd to have fancied that Ninitta would be
jealously displeased at Helen's return; and the inevitable twinge of
conscience at his wife's trusting ignorance followed.

"I haven't seen her," he answered; "she only arrived yesterday. Mrs.
Fenton told me when I met her at the Paint and Clay Exhibition last
night."

Ninitta folded her hands on the edge of the table, with a gesture of
childish pleasure.

"I wonder what she will say to Nino," she said musingly, her voice
taking a new softness.

A sudden spasm contracted the sculptor's throat. His whole being was
shaken by the return of the woman to whom all the passionate devotion
of his manhood was given, and he never heard that soft, maternal note
with which his wife spoke of his boy without emotion.

"She may say that the young rascal ought to be out of his bed in time
for breakfast," he retorted with affected brusqueness. "He has all the
Italian laziness in him."

He pushed back his chair as he spoke, and rose from the table. He
hesitated a moment, as if some sudden thought absorbed him, then he
went to his wife and kissed her forehead.

"Good-by," he said. "I sha'n't come up for lunch. Don't coddle the boy
too much."

"But when," his wife persisted, as he turned away, "shall I see Mrs.
Greyson? I want to show her the _bambino_."

She always spoke in Italian to her husband and her child, and indeed
her English had never been of the most fluent.

"The _bambino_" the father repeated, smiling. "He will be a _bambino_
to you when he is as big as I am, I suppose. I do not know about Mrs.
Greyson, but I will find out, if I can."

He left the room and went to the chamber where his swarthy boy of five
lay still luxuriously in his crib, although he was fully awake. Nino
gave a soft cry of joy at the sight of his father, and greeted him
rapturously.

"Papa," he asked in Italian, "does the kitty know how much she hurts
when she scratches? she made a long place on my arm, and it hurt like
fire."

"Do you know how much you hurt her to make her do it?" his father
returned, smiling fondly.

"Oh, but she is so soft and so little, of course I don't hurt her,"
Nino answered, with boyish logic. "Anyway, she ought not to hurt me. I
don't like to be hurt."

The foolish, childish words came back to Herman's mind a couple of
hours later, as he waited in the boarding-house parlor for Helen
Greyson. He smiled with bitterness to think how perfectly they
represented his own state of mind. He said to himself that he was tired
of being hurt, and rose at the moment to take in both his hands the
hands of a beautiful woman, to his eyes no older and no less fair than
when he had said good-by to her on his wedding morning, six years
before. He tried to speak, but tears came instead of words; choked and
blinded, he turned away abruptly, struggling to regain his composure.

The meeting after long years of those who have loved and been
separated, may, for the moment, carry them back to the time of their
parting so completely that all that lies between seems annihilated. The
old emotion reasserts itself so strongly, the past lives again so
vividly, that there seems to have been no break in feeling, and they
stand in relation to one another as if the parting were yet to come.
When they had been together a little, the time which lay between them
would once more become a reality; but at the first touch of their hands
those bitter days of loneliness ceased to exist, and they seemed to
stand together again, as when they were saying good-by six years before.

With her old time self-control, it was Helen who spoke first, and her
words recalled him from the past and its passion, to the present and
its duty.

"Tell me how Ninitta is," she said, "and the boy. I do so want to see
that wonderful boy."

The sculptor commanded his voice by a powerful effort.

"They are both well," he answered. "The boy is a wonderful little
fellow, although perhaps I am not an unprejudiced judge. Ninitta is
crazy to show him to you. She has pretty nearly effaced herself since
he came, and only lives for his benefit."

"She is a happy woman," Helen said, assuming that air of cheerfulness
which is one of the first accomplishments that women are forced by life
to learn. "I should know she would be devoted to her children."

There were a few moments of silence. Both cast down their eyes, and
then each raised them to study whatever changes time might have made in
the years that lay between them. Helen's heart was beating painfully,
but she was determined not to lose her self-control. She knew of old
how completely she could rule the mood of her companion, and she felt
that upon her calmness depended his. She had been schooling herself for
this interview from the moment she began to consider whether she might
return to America, and she was therefore less unprepared than was
Herman for the trying situation in which she now found herself; yet it
required all her strength of mind and of will not to give way to the
tide of love and emotion which surged within her breast.

Herman fixed his eyes resolutely on an ungainly group in pinkish clay
which represented an American commercial sculptor's idea of Romeo and
Juliet at the moment when the Nurse separates them with a message from
Lady Capulet. With artistic instinct he noted the stupidity of the
composition, the vulgarity of the lines, the cheap ugliness of the
group. In that singular abstraction which comes so frequently in
moments of high emotion, he let his glance wander to the pictures on
the wall, the enormities in embroidery which adorned the chair backs,
the garish hues of the rug lying before the open grate. Then it
occurred to him, with a vague sense of amusement, how great was the
incongruity between such a setting as this vulgar boarding-house
reception-room, and the woman before him. The idea brought to his mind
the contrast between the life to which Helen had come, and the life at
Rome, artistic, rich, and full of possibilities, which she had left.

The thought of Rome recalled instantly the old days there, almost a
score of years ago, when he had first known Ninitta. So vivid were the
memories which awakened, that he seemed to see again the Roman studio,
the fat old aunt, voluble and sharp eyed, who always accompanied her
niece when the girl posed; and most clearly of all did his inner vision
perceive the fresh, silent maiden whose exquisite figure was at once
the admiration and the despair of all the young artists in Rome. He
remembered how Hoffmeir had discovered the girl drawing water from an
old broken fountain he had gone out to sketch; and the difficulties
that had to be overcome before she could be persuaded to pose. The
Capri maidens are brought up to be averse to posing, and Ninitta had
not long enough breathed the air of Rome to have overcome the
prejudices of her youth. He reflected, with a bitterness rendered vague
by a certain strange impersonality of his mood, how different would
have been his life had Hoffmeir been unable to overcome the girl's
scruples. He wondered whether the fat old aunt, and the greasy,
good-natured little priest with whom she had taken counsel, would have
urged Ninitta to take up the life of a model, could they have foreseen
all the results to which this course was to lead in the end.

Then, with a sudden stinging consciousness, the thought came of all
that her decision had meant to his life. The old question whether he
had done right in marrying Ninitta forced itself upon him as if it were
some enemy springing up from ambush. He raised his eyes, and his glance
met that of Mrs. Greyson.

"It is no use, Helen," he broke out, impulsively, "we must talk
frankly. It is idle to suppose that we can go on in an artificial
pretence that we have nothing to say."

She put up her hand appealingly.

"Only do not drive me away again," she pleaded. "Don't say things that
I have no right to hear!"

A dark red stained Herman's cheek, and the tears came into his eyes.

"No," he returned. "If any one is to be driven away it shall not be
you."

"But why need we trouble the things that are past," she went on, with
wistful eagerness. "Why cannot we accept it all in silence, and be
friends."

He looked at her with a passionate, penetrating glance. She felt a wild
and foolish longing to fling herself upon the floor and embrace his
feet; but the old Puritan training, the resistant fibre inherited from
sturdy ancestors, still did not fail her.

"You have your wife," she hurried on, "your home, your boy. That is
enough. That"--

"That is not enough," he interrupted, with an emphasis, which seemed
stern. "Helen, I shall not talk love to you. I am another woman's
husband. I made a ghastly mistake when I married Ninitta, but it is
done. She loves me; she is happy, and I love"--his voice faltered into
a wonderful softness more eloquent than words,--"I love Nino."

She would not let him go on. She sprang up and ran to him, taking his
hands in hers with a touch that made his blood rush tingling through
his veins.

"Yes," she cried, "you love Nino! Think of that! Think most of all that
whatever you are, good or bad, you are for your son, for Nino! Come!
There is safety for us in that. We will go and talk with Nino between
us. Then we shall say nothing of which we can be ashamed or regret."

There came to Herman a vision of his boy clasped in Helen's arms which
made him feel as if suffocating with the excess of his emotion. He rose
blindly, only half conscious of what he was doing; and without giving
time for objections Helen hastened to dress herself for the street, and
in a few moments they were walking together toward the sculptor's house.

To Herman's surprise, his wife was absent when he reached home. The
maid did not know where she had gone. She often went out in the morning
without saying where she was going, and of course the servant did not
ask.

"That is odd," Herman said; "but she has probably gone shopping or
something of the sort. It is too bad, she had so set her heart on
showing you the _bambino_, as she calls him, herself."

But it proved that Nino also was out, having been taken for a walk; and
so Helen, who returned home at once, saw neither of them.




VII

                          THIS DEED UNSHAPES ME.
                                     Measure for Measure; iv.--4.

Ninitta had not gone shopping. She was posing for Arthur Fenton, at his
studio. Even the presence of her boy could not wholly make up to the
Italian for the loss of all the old interest and excitement of her life
as a model. The boy was with his nurse or at the kindergarten for long
hours during which Ninitta, who had few of the resources with which an
educated woman would have filled her time, mingled longings for her old
life with blissful gloatings over Nino's beauty and cleverness. Her
husband was always kind, but since his marriage delicacy of sentiment
had made him shrink from having his wife pose even for himself, while
naturally no thought of her doing so for another would have been
entertained for a moment.

Ninitta had been so long in the life, to pose had been so large a part
of her very existence, that she hardly knew how to do without the
old-time flavor. Mrs. Fenton had perceived something of this without at
all appreciating the strength of the feeling of the sculptor's wife,
and she had at one time tried to interest Ninitta in what might perhaps
be called missionary work among the models of Boston, a class of whose
calling Edith held views which her husband was not wholly wrong in
calling absurdly narrow. She was met at once by the difficulty that it
was impossible to make Ninitta see that missionary work was needed
among the models, and the effort resulted in nothing except to convince
Mrs. Fenton that she could do little with the Italian.

Just how Arthur Fenton had persuaded her to pose without her husband's
knowledge, Ninitta could not have told; and the artist himself would
have assured any investigator, even that speculative spirit which held
the place left vacant by the dismissal of his conscience, that he had
never deliberately tried to entice her. He had talked to her of the
picture he was painting for a national competitive exhibition, it is
true, and dwelt upon the difficulty of procuring a proper model; he had
met her on the street one day and taken her into his studio to see it;
he had regretted that it was impossible to ask her; and of a hundred
apparently blameless and trivial things, the result was that this
morning, while Helen and Herman were walking across the Common to find
her, Ninitta was lying amid a heap of gorgeous stuffs and cushions in
Fenton's studio, while he painted and talked after his fashion.

It is as impossible to trace the beginnings of any chain of events as
it is to find the mystery of the growth of a seed. Whatever Arthur
Fenton's faults, he certainly believed himself to be one who could not
betray a friend. The ideal which he vaguely called honor, and which
served him as that ultimate ethical standard which in one shape or
another is necessary to every human being, forbade his taking advantage
of any one whose friendship he admitted. His instinct of
self-indulgence had, however, made him so expert a casuist that he was
able to silence all inner misgivings by arguing that the demands of art
were above all other laws. He reasoned that Ninitta's posing could do
no possible harm to Grant Herman, while the success of his _Fatima_
depended upon it; and since art was his religion, he came at last to
feel as if he were nobly sacrificing his prejudices to his highest
convictions in violating for the sake of art his principle which
forbade his deceiving her husband.

Least of all, in asking the Italian to pose, had Fenton been actuated
by any intention of tempting her to evil. He needed a model for the
_Fatima_ as he needed his canvas and brushes; and his satisfaction at
having induced Ninitta to serve his purpose was in kind much the same
as his pleasure that his brushes and canvas were exactly what he wanted.

But it is always difficult to tell to what an action may lead; and most
of all is it hard to foresee the consequences which will follow from
the violation of principle. Perhaps the air of secrecy with which
Ninitta found it necessary to invest her coming, had an intoxicating
effect upon the artist; perhaps it was simply that his persistent
egotism moved him to test his power. Men often feel the keenest
curiosity in regard to the extent of their ability to commit crimes
into which they have yet not the remotest intention of being betrayed;
and especially is this true in their relations to women. Men of a
certain vanity are always eager to discover how great an influence for
evil they could exercise over women, even when they have not the nerve
or the wickedness to exert it. A man must be morally great to be above
finding pleasure in the belief that he could be a Don Juan if he chose;
and moral grandeur was not for Arthur Fenton.

From whatever cause, the fact was, that as he painted this morning and
reflected, with a complacency of which he was too keen an analyst not
to know he should have been ashamed, how he had secured the model he
desired despite her husband, the speculation came into his mind how far
he could push his influence over Ninitta. At first a mere impersonal
idea, the thought was instantly, by his habit of mental definiteness,
realized so clearly that his cheek flushed, partly, it is to be said to
his credit, with genuine shame. He looked at the beautiful model, and
turned away his eyes. Then, hardly conscious of what he was doing, he
laid down his palette, and took a step forward.

At that instant the studio bell rang sharply. He started with so
terrible a sense of being discovered in a crime, that his jaw trembled
and his knees almost failed under him.

Then instantly he recovered his self-possession, although his heart was
beating painfully, and looked up at the clock.

"Heavens!" he exclaimed. "I had no idea how late it was! It is that
beastly Irons for his last sitting. I'd forgotten all about him."

Ninitta rose from her position and hurried toward the screen behind
which she dressed.

"Don't let him in," she said. "He knows me."

The bell rang again, as they stood looking at each other.

"I will try to send him off," Arthur said. "Dress as quickly as you
can."

She retreated behind the screen while he went to the door and unlocked
it. Instantly Irons stepped inside.

"You must excuse me," the artist said. "I'll be ready for you in
fifteen minutes. I have a model here, and got to painting so busily
that I forgot the time. Come back in a quarter of an hour."

"Oh, I don't mind," Irons said, advancing into the studio. "I'll look
round until you are ready."

"But I never admit sitters when I have a model," Fenton protested,
standing before him. "I shall have to ask you to go."

The other stopped and looked at the artist with suspicion in his eyes.

"What a fuss you make," he commented coarsely. "No intrigue, I suppose?"

A hot flush sprang into Fenton's face. He tried to assume a haughty
air, but the consciousness of being entrapped in a misdemeanor had not
left him. The need of getting Mrs. Herman out of the studio unseen
would have been awkward at any time; when to this was added the sense
of guilt and shame which was begotten of the base impulse to which he
had almost yielded, the situation became for him painfully embarrassing.

"I am not in the habit of carrying on intrigues with my models," he
replied, haughtily. "Or," he added, regaining self-possession, "of
discussing my affairs with others."

Mr. Irons laughed in a significant way which made Arthur long to kill
him on the spot, and, stepping past Fenton, he walked further into the
studio.

"Don't put on airs with me," he said. "Your looks give you away. You've
been up to some mischief."

He paused an instant before the unfinished picture on the easel, then
when the artist coolly took the canvas and placed it with its face to
the wall, he turned with deliberate rudeness and craned his neck so
that he could look behind the screen. A leering smile came over his
coarse features. Without a word he went over to the most distant corner
of the studio, where he apparently became absorbed in studying a sketch
hanging on the wall.

There was a dead silence of some moments. Fenton was literally
speechless with rage, yet, too, his quick wit was busy devising some
way of escape from the unpleasant predicament in which he found
himself. He did not speak, nor did Mr. Irons turn until Ninitta had
completed her toilet and slipped hastily out. As the door closed after
her, Irons wheeled about and confronted the indignant artist with a
smile of triumphant glee.

"Sly dog!" he said.

Fenton advanced a step toward his tormentor with his clenched hand half
raised as if he would strike.

"What do you mean?" he demanded. "Do you call yourself a gentleman?"

"Oh, come, now," the other responded, with an easy wave of the hand,
"no heroics, if you please. They won't go down with me. She's a
devilish fine woman, and I don't blame you."

"I tell you," began Fenton, "you"--

"Oh, of course, of course. I know all that. But sit down while I say
something to you."

As if under the constraining influence of a nightmare, Fenton obeyed
when Mr. Irons, having seated himself in an easy chair, waved him into
another with a commanding gesture. The artist felt himself to have lost
his place as the stronger of the two, of which he had hitherto been
proudly conscious, and he sat angrily gnawing his lip while his
tormentor regarded him with smiling malice.

"Do you remember telling me one day," Irons asked, fixing his narrow
eyes on the other's disturbed face, "that you could make your sitters
tell you things?"

Fenton stared at his questioner in angry silence, but did not answer.

"Now, if," continued Irons; "I say if, you observe,--if Stewart Hubbard
should chance to tell you where the new syndicate mean to locate their
mills, it might be a mighty good thing for you."

Still Fenton said nothing, but his regard became each moment more
wrathful.

"Of course," the sitter continued, with an assumption of airy lightness
which grated on every nerve of the hearer, "you are not in a position
to turn such knowledge to advantage; but I am, and I am always inclined
to help a bright fellow like you when there is a good chance. So if you
should come to me and say that the mills are to be so and so, I'd do
all I could to make things pleasant for you. I happen to belong to a
syndicate myself that has bought a mill privilege at Wachusett, and it
is important to us to have the new railroad go our way, and we'd like
to know how far the other fellows' plans are dangerous to our
interests, don't you see."

Still Fenton did not speak. He had grown very pale, and his lips were
set firmly together. His hands clasped the arms of his chair so
strongly that the blood had settled under the middle of the nails. Mr.
Irons looked at him with narrow, piercing eyes. He paused a moment and
then went on.

"You are perfectly capable of keeping a secret," he said in a hard,
deliberate tone, "so I don't in the least mind telling you what we
should do. Your sitters always tell you things, you know; and you are
to be trusted. The case is here; our syndicate stand in with the
railroad corporation and ask the Railroad Commissioners for a
certificate of exigency, to authorize laying the new branch out through
Wachusett. Now we have information that Staggchase and Stewart Hubbard
and that set, are planning to spring a petition asking for special
legislation locating the road somewhere else. Of course, they'll have
to get it in under a suspension of the rules, but they can work that
easily enough. The Commissioners will have to hold on, then, until the
Legislature finishes with that petition."

He paused again, with an air which convinced the artist that he was
going on with this elaborate explanation to cover his awkwardness.
Fenton did not speak, and his visitor continued,--

"The Commissioners might settle the matter now, but they won't, and
we've got to have the fight, I suppose; so, of course, you can see how
it is for our interest to know just what we are fighting."

He rose as he spoke, and with an air of deliberation, buttoned his
overcoat, which he had not removed.

"I don't think you feel like painting this morning," he observed, "and
I'll come in again. I'll leave you to think over what I have said."

Fenton rose also, regarding him with fierce, level eyes.

"And suppose," he said, "that I call you a damned scoundrel, and forbid
you ever to set foot in my studio again?"

The other laughed, with the easy assurance of a bully who feels himself
secure.

"Oh, you won't," he replied. "If you did,--well, I am on the committee
for the new statue, and have to see Herman now and then you know, and I
should, perhaps, ask him why his wife poses for you. Good morning."

And with a chuckling laugh, he took himself out.




VIII

                             A NECESSARY EVIL.
                                      Julius Caesar; ii.--2.

"Oh, I assure you that my temper has been such for a week that my
family have threatened to have me sent to a nervine asylum," Ethel Mott
observed to Fred Rangely, who was calling on her, ostensibly to inquire
after her health, some trifling indisposition having kept her housed
for a few days. "What with my cold and my vexation at losing things I
wanted to go to, I have been positively unendurable."

"That's your way of looking at it," he responded; "but I hardly fancy
that anybody else found it out. But what has there been to lose, except
the Throgmorton ball?"

"Well, first there was the concert Saturday night."

"Do you care so much about the Symphonies, then? I thought you were the
one girl in Boston who doesn't pretend to care for music."

"Oh, but we have lovely seats this year, and the nicest people all
about us, you know. Thayer Kent and his mother are directly behind us."

"Where he can lean forward and talk to you," interrupted Rangely,
jealously.

"Yes," she said, nodding with a gleam of mischievous laughter in her
dark eyes. "And I do have a nice time at the Symphonies. Besides, I
don't in the least object to the music, you know."

Fred fixed his gaze on a large old-fashioned oil painting on the
opposite wall, a copy from some of the innumerable pastorals which have
been made in imitation of Nicholas Poussin. It was of no particular
value, but it was surrounded by a beautiful carved Venetian frame, and
was one of those things which confer an air of distinction upon a
Boston parlor, because they are plainly the art purchases of a bygone
generation.

"But you have, of course, had no end of girls running in to see you,"
he observed.

"Yes; but, then, that didn't make up for the Throgmorton ball. You ask
what else there was to lose; I should think that was enough. Why, Janet
Graham says she never had such a lovely time in her life."

"Is Miss Graham engaged to Fred Gore?" Rangely asked.

Ethel's gesture of dissent showed how little she would have approved of
such a consummation.

"No, indeed," she returned. "Fred Gore only wants Janet's money,
anyway; and she can't abide him, any more than I can."

"Then, you have the correct horror of a marriage for money."

"I think a girl is a fool to let a man marry her for her money. She'd
much better give him her fortune and keep herself back. Then she'd at
least save something. I don't approve of people's marrying for money
anyway; although, of course," she added, with a twinkle in her eye, "I
think it is wicked to marry without it."

There shot through Rangely's mind the reflection that Thayer Kent had
not an over-abundance of this world's goods; and to this followed the
less pleasant thought that he was himself in the same predicament.

"But Jack Gerrish hasn't anything," he said, aloud.

"But Janet has enough, so she can marry anybody she wants to," was the
reply; "and Jack Gerrish is too perfectly lovely for anything."

The visitor laughed, but he was evidently not at his ease. He was
always uncomfortably conscious that Ethel had not the slightest
possible scruple against laughing at him, and he was not a little
afraid of her well-known propensity to tease. Ethel regarded him with
secret amusement. A woman is seldom displeased at seeing a man
disconcerted by her presence, even when she pities him and would fain
put him at his ease. It is a tribute to her powers too genuine to be
disputed, and while she may labor to overcome the man's feeling, her
vanity cannot but be gratified that he has it.

"Did you ever know anything like the way Elsie Dimmont is going on with
Dr. Wilson?" Ethel said, presently, by way of continuing the
conversation. "I can't see what she finds to like in him. He's as
coarse as Fred Gore, only, of course, he's cleverer, and he isn't
dissipated."

"Wilson isn't a half bad fellow," Rangely replied, rather
patronizingly. "Though, of course, I can understand that you wouldn't
care for that kind of a man."

"Am I so particular, then?"

"Yes, I think you are."

"Thank you for nothing."

"Oh, I meant to be complimentary, I assure you. Isn't it a compliment
to be thought particular in your tastes?"

"That depends upon how you are told. Your manner was not at all
calculated to flatter me. It said too plainly that you thought me
captious."

"But I don't."

"Of course you wouldn't own it," Ethel retorted, playing with a
tortoise-shell paper-cutter she had picked up from the table by which
she sat; "but your manner was not to be mistaken. It betrayed you in
spite of yourself."

Rangely knew how foolish he was to be affected by light banter like
this, but for his life he could not have helped it. The fact that Ethel
knew how easily she could tease him lent a tantalizing sparkle to her
eyes. She smiled mockingly as he vainly tried to keep the flush from
rising in his cheeks.

"You are singularly fond of teasing," he observed, in a manner he
endeavored to make cool and philosophical.

"Now you are calling me singular as well as captious."

"The girl who is singular," returned he, in an endeavor to turn the
talk by means of an epigram which only made matters worse for him, "the
girl who is singular runs great risk of never becoming plural."

Ethel laughed merrily, her glee arising chiefly from a sense of the
chance he was giving her to work up one of those playful mock quarrels
which amused her and so thoroughly teased her admirer.

"Upon my word, Mr. Rangely," she said, assuming an air of indignant
surprise, "is it your idea of making yourself agreeable to tell an
unfortunate girl that she is destined to be an old maid? I could stand
being one well enough, but to be told that I've got to be is by no
means pleasant."

He knew she was playing with him, but he could not on that account meet
her on her own ground. He endeavored to protest.

"You are trying to make me quarrel."

"Make you quarrel?" she echoed. "I like that! Of course, though, to be
so full of faults that you can't help abusing me is one way of making
you quarrel."

"How you do twist things around!" exclaimed he, beginning to be
thoroughly vexed.

She pursed up her lips and regarded him with an expression more
aggravating than words could have been. She had been for several days
deprived of the pleasure of teasing anybody, and her delight in vexing
Rangely made his presence a temptation which she was seldom able to
resist. She was unrestrained by any regard for the young author which
should make her especially concerned how seriously she offended him;
and when she now changed the conversation abruptly, it was with a
forbearing air which was anything but soothing to his nerves.

"Don't you think," she asked, "that Mr. Berry was absurd in the way he
acted about playing at Mrs. West's?"

"No, I can't say that I do," the caller retorted savagely. "Mrs. West
gives out that she is going to give the neglected native musicians at
last a chance to be heard, and then she invites them to play their
compositions in her parlor. Westbrooke Berry isn't the man to be
patronized in any such way. Just think of her having the cheek to give
to a man whose work has been brought out in Berlin an invitation which
is equivalent to saying that he can't get a public hearing, but she'll
help him out by asking her guests to listen to him. Heavens! Mrs. West
is a perfectly incredible woman."

Ethel smiled sweetly. In her secret heart she agreed with him; but it
did not suit her mood to show that she did so.

"You seem bound to take the opposite view of everything to-day," she
said, in tones as sweet as her smile; "or perhaps it is only that my
temper has been ruined by my cold. I told you it had been bad."

He rose abruptly.

"If everything is to put us more at odds," he said, rather stiffly,
"the sooner I withdraw, the better. I am sorry I have fallen under your
displeasure; it is generally my ill luck to annoy you."

And in a few moments he was going down the street in a frame of mind
not unusual to him after a call upon Miss Mott, from whose house he was
apt to come away so ruffled and irritated that nothing short of a
counteracting feminine influence could restore his self-complacency.

This office of comforter usually fell to the lot of Mrs. Frederick
Staggchase. Indeed, his fondness for this lady was so marked as to give
rise to some question among his intimates whether he were not more
attached to her than to the avowed object of his affection.

An hour after he had made his precipitate retreat from Ethel's, he
found himself sitting in the library at Mrs. Staggchase's, with his
hostess comfortably enthroned in a great chair of carved oak on the
opposite side of the fire. The conversation had somehow turned upon
marriage. There is always a certain fascination, a piquant if faint
sense of being upon the borderland of the forbidden, which makes such a
discussion attractive to a man and woman who are playing at making love
when marriage stands between them.

"But, of course," Rangely had said, "two married people can't live at
peace when one of them is in love with somebody else."

Mrs. Staggchase clasped with her slender hand the ball at the end of
the carved arm of the chair in which she was sitting, looking absently
at the rings which adorned her fingers. She possessed to perfection the
art of being serious, and the air with which she now spoke was
admirably calculated to imply a deep interest in the subject under
discussion. "I do not understand," she observed, thoughtfully, "why a
man and woman need quarrel because they happen to be married to each
other, when they had rather be married to somebody else. It wouldn't be
considered good business policy to pull against a partner because one
might do better with some other arrangement; and it does seem as if
people might be as sensible about their marriage relations as in their
business."

Her companion glanced at her, and then quickly resumed his intent
regard of the fire beside which he sat.

"But people are so unreasonable," he remarked.

Mrs. Staggchase assented, with a characteristic bend of the head, and a
movement of her flexible neck. She looked up with a smile.

"I think Fred and I are a model couple," she said. "Fred came into my
room this noon, just as I had finished my morning letters.
'Good-morning,' he said, 'I hope you weren't
frightened.'--'Frightened?' I said, 'what at?'--'Do you mean to say you
didn't know I was out all night?'--'I hadn't an idea of it,' said I.
He'd been playing cards at the club all night, and had just come in. He
says that the next time, he shan't take the trouble to expose himself."

Rangely laughed in a somewhat perfunctory way.

"But if that is a model fashion of living, what becomes of the old
notions of kindred souls, and all that sort of thing?" he asked. "I
shouldn't want my wife"--

He paused, rather awkwardly, and Mrs. Staggchase took up the sentence
with a smile of amusement, in which there was no trace of annoyance.
She was too well aware how completely she was mistress of the
situation, in dealing with Rangely, to be either vexed or embarrassed
in talking with him.

"To be as frank with another man as I am with you?" she finished for
him. "Oh, very likely not. You have all the masculine jealousy which is
aroused in an instant by the idea that a woman should be at liberty to
like more than one man. You are half a century behind us. Marriage as
you conceive it is the old-fashioned article, for the use of families
in narrow circumstances intellectually as well as pecuniarily. Love in
a cottage is necessary, because people under those conditions can't
live unless they are extravagantly devoted to each other. Marriage with
us is just what it ought to be, an arrangement of mutual convenience.
Fred and I suit each other perfectly, and are sufficiently fond of each
other; but there are sides of his nature to which I do not answer, and
of mine that he does not touch. He finds somebody who does; I find
somebody on my part. You, for instance."

Rangely leaned back in his chair, and clasped his plump white fingers,
regarding Mrs. Staggchase with a smile of amusement and admiration.

"You are so awfully clever," was his response, "that you could really
never be uncommonly fond of anybody. You'd analyze the whole business
too closely."

She laughed slightly, and went on with what she was saying, without
heeding his interruption.

"Fred and I make good backgrounds for each other, and, after all, that
is what is required. You answer to my need of companionship in another
direction, and since that side of my nature is unintelligible to my
husband, he is not defrauded, while I should be if I starved my desire
for such friendship, to please an idea like yours, that a wife should
find her all in her husband. Fortunately, Mr. Staggchase is a broader
man than you are."

"Thank you," Rangely retorted, with a faint tinge of annoyance visible,
despite his air of jocularity. "Arthur Fenton says a broad man is one
who can appreciate his own wife. If Mr. Staggchase does that"--

"Come," interrupted Mrs. Staggchase, smiling with the air of one who
has had quite enough of the topic, "don't you think the subject is
getting to be unfortunately personal? I have a favor to ask of you."

Rangely was too well aware of the uselessness of trying to direct the
conversation to make any attempt to continue the talk, which, moreover,
had taken a turn not at all to his liking. He settled himself in his
chair, in an attitude of easy attention.

"I am always delighted to do you a favor," he said. "It isn't often I
get a chance."

The relations between these two were not easy to understand, unless one
accepted the simplest possible theory of their friendship. It was, on
the part of Mrs. Staggchase, only one of a succession of platonic
intimacies with which her married life had been enriched. She found it
necessary to her enjoyment that some man should be her devoted admirer,
always quite outside the bounds of any possible love-making, albeit
often enough she permitted matters to go to the exciting verge of a
flirtation which might merit a name somewhat warmer than friendship.
She was a brilliant and clever woman who allowed herself the luxury of
gratifying her vanity by encouraging the ardent attentions of some man,
which, if they ever became too pressing, she knew how to check, or, if
necessary, to stop altogether. She was fond of talking, and she frankly
avowed her conviction that women were not worth talking to. She liked
an appreciative masculine listener with whom she could converse, now in
a strain of bewildering frankness, now in a purely impersonal and
intellectual vein, and who, however he might at times delude himself by
misconstruing her confidences into expressions of personal regard, was
clever enough to comprehend the little corrective hints by which, when
necessary, she chose to undeceive him.

Analyzed to its last elements, her feeling, it must be confessed, was
pretty nearly pure selfishness; but she was able, without effort, and
by half-unconscious art, to throw over it the air of being
disinterested friendship. Such a nature is essentially false, but
chiefly in that it gives to a passing mood the appearance of a
permanent sentiment, and, while seeking only self-gratification, seems
actuated by genuine desire to give pleasure to another.

The attitude of Rangely toward Mrs. Staggchase was, perhaps, no more
unselfish, and was certainly no more noble, but his sentiment was at
least more genuine. He was flattered by her preference, and he was
bewildered by her cleverness. He liked to believe himself capable of
interesting her, and without in the most remote degree desiring or
anticipating an intrigue, he was ready to go as far as she would allow
in his devotion. He was constantly tormented by a vague phantom of
conquest, which danced with will-o'-the-wisp fantasy before him, and
from day to day he endeavored to discover how deeply in love she was
willing he should fall. He was really fond of her, a fact that did not
prevent his entertaining a half-hearted passion for Ethel Mott, the
result of this mixture of emotion being that he was the slave, albeit
with a difference, of either lady with whom he chanced to be. That he
was the plaything of Mrs. Staggchase's fancy he was far from realizing,
although from the nature of things he naturally regarded his fondness
for Miss Mott as the permanent factor in the case. He even felt a
certain compunction for the regret he supposed Mrs. Staggchase would
feel when he should decide formally to transfer his allegiance to her
rival; a misgiving he might have spared himself had he been wise enough
to appreciate the situation in all its bearings. The lady understood
perfectly how matters stood, but Rangely was her junior, and, besides,
no man in such a case ever comprehends that he is being played with.

"It is in regard to the statue of _America_ that I want you to be
useful," Mrs. Staggchase said, replying to her visitor's proffer of
service with a smile. "Do you know what the chances are in regard to
the choice of a sculptor?"

"Why, I suppose Grant Herman will have the commission."

"But I think not."

"You think not? Who will then?"

"That is just it. Mr. Hubbard has been backing Mr. Herman; and Mr.
Irons, who never will agree to anything that Mr. Hubbard wants, is
putting up the claims of this new woman, just to be contrary."

"What new woman? Mrs. Greyson?"

"Yes. Mrs. Frostwinch told me all about it yesterday. Now there is a
young man that we are interested in"--

"Who is 'we'?" interrupted Rangely.

"Oh, Mrs. Frostwinch, and Mrs. Bodewin Ranger, and a number of us."

"But whom have you got on the committee?"

"Mr. Calvin; and don't you see that Mr. Calvin's name in a matter of
art is worth a dozen of the other two."

"Yes," Rangely assented, rather doubtfully, "in the matter of giving
commissions it certainly is."

Mrs. Staggchase smiled indulgently, playing with the ring in which
blazed a splendid ruby, and which she was putting on and off her finger.

"If you think," she said, "that you are going to entrap me into a
discussion of the merits of art and Philistinism, you are mistaken. I
told you long ago that I was a Philistine of the Philistines,
deliberately and avowedly. The true artistic soul which you delight to
call Pagan is only the servant of Philistinism, and I own that I prefer
to stand with the ruling party. As, indeed," she added, with a
mischievous gleam in her eye, "do many who will not confess it."

Rangely flushed. The thrust too closely resembled reproaches which in
his more sensitive moments he received at the hand of his own inner
consciousness, so to speak, not to make him wince. He felt himself,
besides, becoming involved in a painful position. He had long been the
intimate friend of Grant Herman, and felt that the sculptor had a right
to expect whatever aid he could give him in a matter like this.

"But who," he asked, "is your _protege?_"

"His name," Mrs. Staggchase replied, "is Orin Stanton. He is a fellow
of the greatest talent, and he has worked his way"--

Rangely put up his hand in a gesture of impatience.

"I know the fellow," he said. "He made a thing he called _Hop Scotch_,
of which Fenton said the title was far too modest, since he'd not only
scotched the subject but killed it."

"One never knew Mr. Fenton to waste the chance of saying a good thing
simply for the sake of justice," Mrs. Staggchase observed, with
unabated good humor. "But you are to help us in the _Daily Observer_,
and there is to be no discussion about it. Since you know you are too
good-natured not to oblige me in the end, why should you not do it
gracefully and get the credit of being willing."

And then, being a wise woman, she disregarded Rangely's muttered
remonstrance and turned the conversation into a new channel.




IX

                            THIS IS NOT A BOON.
                                         Othello; iii.--3.

If the old-time opinion that a woman whose name is a jest with men has
lost her claims to respect, Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson might be supposed
to have little ground for the inner anger she felt at the scantness of
the courtesy with which she was treated by Mr. Irons. That gentleman
was calling upon her in her tiny suite of rooms at the top of one of
those apartment hotels which stand upon the debatable ground between
the select regions of Back Bay and the scorned precincts of the South
End, and he was apparently as much at home as if the sofa upon which he
lounged were in his own dwelling.

The apartment of Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson gave to the experienced eye
evidences of a pathetic struggle to make scanty resources furnish at
least an appearance of luxury. The walls were adorned with amateur
china painting in the shape of dreadful placques and plates in livid
hues; there was abundance of embroidery that should have been
impossible, in garish tints and uneven stitches; much shift had been
made to produce an imposing appearance by means of cheap Japanese fans
and the inexpensive wares of which the potteries at Kioto, corrupted by
foreign influence, turn out such vast quantities for the foreign
market. Against the wall stood an upright piano--if a piano could be
called upright which habitually destroyed the peace of the entire
neighborhood--and over it was placed a scarf upon which apparently some
boarding-school miss had taken her first lesson in painting wild
flowers.

The room was small, and so well filled with furniture that there seemed
little space for the long limbs of Alfred Irons, who, however, had
contrived to make himself comfortable by the aid of various cushions
covered with bright-colored sateens. He had lighted a cigar without
thinking it necessary to ask leave, and had even made himself more easy
by putting one leg across a low chair.

Mrs. Sampson was fully aware that in her struggles with life she had
sometimes provoked laughter, often disapproval, and now and then given
rise to positive scandal, yet she was still accustomed to at least a
fair semblance of respect from the men who came to see her; women, it
is to be noted, being not often seen within her walls, since those who
were willing to come she did not care to receive, and those whom she
invited seldom set her name down on their calling lists. Among
themselves, at the clubs or elsewhere, the men speculated more or less
coarsely and unfeelingly upon the foundations of the numerous scandals
which had from time to time blossomed like brilliant and life-sapping
parasites upon the tree of Mrs. Sampson's reputation. Her name, either
spoken boldly or too broadly hinted at to be misunderstood, adorned
many a racy tale told in smoking-rooms after good dinners, or when the
hours had grown small in more senses than one; and her career was made
to point more than one moral drawn for the benefit of the sisters and
daughters of the men who joked and sneered concerning her.

Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was born of a good old Boston family, to
which she clung with a desperate clutch which her relatives ignored so
far as with dignity they were able. Her father had been a lawyer of
reputation, and his portrait was still displayed prominently in the
daughter's parlor, a circumstance which had given Chauncy Wilson
opportunity for a jest rather clever than elegant concerning Judge
Welsh's well-known fondness in life for watching the progress of
criminal cases. Of her husband, the late Mr. Sampson, there was very
little said, and not much was known beyond the fact that having run
away from school to marry him, Amanda had shared a shady and it was
whispered rather disreputable existence for three years, at the end of
which she was fortunately relieved from the matrimonial net by his
timely decease; an event of which she sometimes spoke to her more
intimate male friends with undisguised satisfaction.

It might not have been easy to tell how far Mrs. Sampson's subsequent
career was forced upon her by circumstances, and how far it was the
result of her own choice. She always represented herself as the victim
of a hard fate: but her relatives, one of whom was Mr. Staggchase,
declared that Amanda had no capabilities of respectability in her
composition. Mrs. Staggchase, upon whom marriage had conferred the
privilege of expressing her mind with the freedom of one of the family,
while it happily spared her from the responsibility of an actual
relative, declared that everything had been done to keep Mrs. Sampson
within the bounds of propriety, but all in vain. The income from the
estate of the late Judge Welsh was not large, and as Mrs. Sampson's
tastes, especially in dress, were somewhat expensive, it followed that
she was often reduced to devices for increasing her bank account which
were generally adroit and curious, but often not of a character to be
openly boasted of. She had had some business transactions already with
Irons, who was at this moment laying out the plan of work in a fresh
operation where she might make herself useful.

"Of course," he said, "all the men from Wachusett way are on our side,
and the men from the other part of the county will be against us."

"What other part of the county?" Mrs. Sampson inquired.

She had laid down her sewing and was listening intently, with a look of
keen intelligence, the tips of her long and rather large fingers
pressed closely together. She hated Irons devoutly, but his scheme
meant financial profit to her, and various bills were troublesomely
overdue.

"That's what we have to discover. When we find out, I'll let you know.
The other syndicate have been deucedly close-mouthed about their plans,
but of course they can't keep dark a great while longer; and in any
case I am on the track of the information."

"And what," Mrs. Sampson asked, with an air of innocence too obviously
artificial, "am I expected to do?"

Irons glanced at her with a wink, taking in her plain, vivacious face
with its sparkling eyes, her fine figure, and stylish, if somewhat too
pronounced, presence.

"The old game," he said. "Show a tender and sisterly interest in a few
of the country members. There are one or two men from the western part
of the state that we want to capture at once before the thing is
started. Do you know anybody in that region?"

"My father, Judge Welsh," she answered with an amusing touch amid her
frankness of the air with which she always mentioned her ancestors in
society, "had numerous connections there."

"Ah, that is good," the visitor responded, with evident satisfaction.

He knocked the ashes from his cigar into a tiny bronze which Mrs.
Sampson had put within his reach when he showed signs of throwing them
upon the carpet, and then plunged into a discussion of the members of
the State Legislature with whom it was possible for Mrs. Sampson to
establish an acquaintance, and whom she was likely to be able to
influence. He drew from his pocket a list of men, and with quite as
business-like an air his hostess produced a similar document from her
desk; the pair being soon deep in consultation over the schedules.

Lobbying in Massachusetts is not by the public recognized as a
well-organized business, and yet any one who desires to secure personal
influence to aid or to hinder legislation is seldom at a loss to find
people well experienced in such work. The lobby to the eyes of the
public, moreover, consists entirely of men, if one excepts the group of
foolish intriguers in favor of the vagaries of proposed law-making by
which it is supposed the distinctions of sex may be abolished. There
are in the city, however, women who by no means lack experience in
manipulating the votes of country members, and who are but too willing
to sell their services to whoever can make it to their pecuniary
interest to favor a bill.

Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was extremely adroit and careful in
concealing her connection with the law-making of the State. She was in
evidence in most public places; at the theatres, the concert halls, the
County Club races, and at every fashionable entertainment to which her
cleverness could procure her admission, her conspicuous figure, made
more prominent by a certain indefinable loudness of style, a marked
dash of manner, and gowns in a taste rather daring than refined, was
too conspicuous to be overlooked. Yet it is doubtful if she had ever
been up the steps leading to the gilded-domed capitol in her life. She
went about much; and the unchaperoned life which in virtue of her
widowhood and her love of freedom she chose to lead, the width of the
circle over which her acquaintance extended, allowed her to carry on
her work unobserved; so that while a great variety of stories of one
sort of queerness or another were told of Mrs. Sampson, this particular
side of her career was almost unknown.

"There is Mr. Greenfield," Mrs. Sampson observed, tapping her teeth
with her pencil. "His wife was a cousin of my husband. I don't know
them at all, but I could easily ask him to come and see me. It would be
only proper to offer him the hospitality of the town, you know."

"Good!" cried Mr. Irons, slapping his open palm down on his knee.
"Greenfield's the hardest nut we've got to crack in the whole business.
He's the sort of man you can't talk to on a square business basis.
You've got to mince things damned fine with him, and he's chairman of
the Railroad Committee, you know. He'd have a tremendous amount of
influence, anyway."

"He's a little tin god at Fentonville, I've heard," Mrs. Sampson
responded, laughing in the mechanical way which was her habit. "When
he's at home they say the sun doesn't rise there till he's given his
permission."

Irons in his excitement took his leg down from its supporting chair and
sat up straight, dropping his list of members to the floor and clasping
his knees with his heavy hands.

"Now look here, old lady," he said, "here's a chance to show your
mettle. If you'll manage Greenfield, I'll run the rest of the hayseed
crowd, and I'll make it something handsomer than you ever had in your
life."

The woman smiled a smile of greed and cunning.

"I'll take care of him," she said. "And he shall never know he has been
taken care of either."

Irons laughed with coarse jocoseness.

"A man has very little chance that falls into your clutches," he
observed, "but in this particular case you've got a heavy contract on
hand. Greenfield's got his price, of course, like everybody else, but
I'm hanged if I know what it is. If you offered him tin he'd simply fly
out on the whole thing and nobody could hold him. There isn't any
particular pull in politics on him. This new-fashioned independence has
knocked all that to pieces; and Greenfield is an Independent from the
word go. I don't know what you're to bait your hook with, unless it's
your lovely self."

Mrs. Sampson began a laugh, and then recovering herself, she frowned.

"Don't be personal," she said. "I won't stand it."

She began to feel that the circumstances were such as to make her
important to her caller's schemes, and her air by insensible degrees
became more assured and less subservient. She knew her man, and she was
prepared for his becoming proportionately more respectful. He dusted a
little heap of ashes from the small table beside him and scattered them
with his foot, in a well-meant attempt to cover the traces of his
previous untidiness. She watched him with a covert sneer.

"Even so difficult a problem as that," she said, with a slight toss of
the head, a bit of antique coquetry which impressed him with a new
sense of her thorough self-possession, and imposed itself upon his
untrained mind as the air of a true woman of the world; "I fancy I can
solve. Leave him to me. I'll find out what can be done with him."

"If he can be got hold of," Irons remarked, reflectively, "he will
carry the whole thing through. They'd believe him up at Feltonville if
he told them it was right to walk backward and vote to give their
incomes to the temperance cranks."

He rose to go as he spoke, unconsciously assuming with the overcoat he
put on that air of stiffness and immaculate propriety which he wore
always in public. He seldom allowed himself the undignified freedom
which marked his intercourse with Mrs. Sampson, and he liked the rest
he found in being for a time his vulgar, ill-bred self with no
restraints of artificial manner.

"Well, good afternoon," he said, extending his large hand, into which
she laid hers with a certain faint air of condescension. "I've got to
go to a meeting of the committee on the new statue. They've got a new
fellow they are trying to push in, a young unlicked cub that Peter
Calvin's running. I'll let you know anything that's for our advantage."

When he was gone, Mrs. Sampson produced a brush and a dustpan from
behind the books on a whatnot and carefully collected the scattered
ashes of his cigar.

"Vulgar old brute!" she muttered. "To think of my having to clean up
after him; his mother was my grandmother's laundress."

Then she smiled contemptuously, and added by way of self-consolation,--

"But it will all count in the bill, Al Irons."




X

                             THE BITTER PAST.
                                  All's Well That Ends Well; v.--3.

"Do you see much of Mrs. Herman?" Helen Greyson asked of Edith Fenton,
as they sat at luncheon together in the latter's pretty dining-room.

"Why, no," was the somewhat hesitating answer. "I really see very
little of her. The fact is we have so little common ground to meet on.
--You know Arthur says I am dreadfully narrow, and I am sometimes
afraid he is right. I have tried to know her, but of course I couldn't
take her into society. She wouldn't enjoy it, and she wouldn't feel at
home, even if she'd go with me."

Helen smiled with mingled amusement and wistfulness.

"No," she responded. "I can't exactly fancy Ninitta in society. She'd
be quite out of her element. My master in Rome, Flammenti, had a way of
saying a thing was like the pope at a dancing-party, and I fancy
Ninitta at an afternoon tea would be hardly less out of place."

"But she must be very lonely," Edith said, stirring her coffee
meditatively. "She used to have a few Italians come to see her; people
she met that time she ran away, you remember, and we brought her home,
but they don't come now."

"Why not?"

Edith smiled and raised her eyebrows.

"A question of caste, I believe."

"Of caste?" echoed Helen. "What do you mean?"

"When her son was born," Edith responded, "she told them that the
_bambino_ was born a gentleman, and couldn't associate with them."

Helen laughed lightly; then her face clouded, and she sighed.

"Poor Ninitta!" she said. "There is something infinitely pitiful in her
devotion and faithfulness to her youthful love."

Edith's face assumed an expression of mingled perplexity and disquiet.
With eyes downcast she seemed for a moment to be seeking a phrase in
which properly to express some thought which troubled her. Then she
looked up quickly.

"I don't know that I ought to say it," she remarked, "but I can't help
feeling that Ninitta is not so fond of her husband as she used to be.
Of course I may be mistaken, but either I overestimated her devotion
before they were married, or she cares less for him now."

An expression of pain contracted Helen's brow.

"Isn't it possible," she suggested, "that her being more demonstrative
in her love for the boy makes her seem cold toward her husband?"

"No," returned Edith, shaking her head, "it is more than that. I fancy
sometimes that she unconsciously expected to be somehow transformed
into his equal by marrying him; and that the disappointment of being no
more on a level with him when she became his wife than before, has made
her somehow give him up, as if she concluded that she could never
really belong to his life. Of course I don't mean," she added, "that
Ninitta would reason this out, and very likely I am all wrong, anyway,
but certainly something of this kind has happened."

"Poor Ninitta," repeated Helen, "fate hasn't been kind to her."

"But Mr. Herman?" Edith returned. "What do you say of him? I think his
case is far harder. What a mistake his marriage was. I cannot conceive
how he was ever betrayed into such a _mesalliance_. She cannot be a
companion to him; she does not understand him: she is only a child who
has to be borne with, and who tries his patience and his endurance."

Edith had forgotten her husband's suggestion that her companion was
responsible for Grant Herman's marriage; but Helen, who for six years
had been questioning with herself whether she had done well in urging
the sculptor to marry his model, heard this outburst with beating heart
and flushing cheek. Had Helen allowed Herman to break his early pledge
to Ninitta, and marry his later love, it is probable that all her life
would have been shadowed by a consciousness of guilt. The conscience
bequeathed to her, as Fenton rightly said, by Puritan ancestors, would
ever have reproached her with having come to happiness over the ruins
of another woman's heart and hopes. Having in the supreme hour of
temptation, however, overcome herself and given him up, it was not
perhaps strange that Helen unconsciously fell somewhat into the
attitude of assuming that this sacrifice gave her not only the right to
sit in judgment upon Ninitta, but also that of having done somewhat
more than might justly have been demanded of her. She had often found
herself wondering whether she had been wise; whether her devotion to an
ideal had not been overstrained; and if she ought not to have
considered rather the happiness of the man she loved than devotion to
an abstract principle.

It was also undoubtedly true, although Helen had not herself reflected
upon this phase of the matter, that her half a dozen years' residence
in Europe had softened and broadened her views. In the present age of
the world there is no method possible by which one can resist the whole
tendency of modern thought and prevent himself from moving forward with
it, unless it be active and violent controversy. No man can be a
fanatic without opposition, either real or vividly fancied, upon which
to stay his resolution, and it is equally difficult to maintain a stand
at any given point of faith unless one has steadily to fight with vigor
for the right to possess it.

It is probable that to-day Helen might have found it more difficult
than six years before to urge Herman to marry Ninitta, since besides
the self-sacrifice then involved would now be a doubtfulness of
purpose. She sat silent some moments, reflecting deeply, while her
hostess watched her with a loving admiration which was growing very
strongly upon her.

"But what is to be done now," Helen asked slowly. "You would not have
him cast her off?"

"Oh, no," returned Edith, in genuine consternation. "Now, it is six
years too late."

"I am afraid I do not wholly agree with your point of view," answered
Mrs. Greyson, roused by the doubt in her own mind to a need to combat
the assumption that the marriage was a mistake. "I certainly do not
feel that the mere ceremony is the great point. See!" she continued,
becoming more animated, and half involuntarily saying aloud what she
had so often said in her own mind; "a man makes a woman love him. As
time goes on, he outgrows her. It is no fault of hers. Why should the
fact that he has or has not come into the marriage relations affect her
claims on him? Isn't he in honor bound to marry her?"

"But suppose," Edith returned, "that he has not only outgrown her but
made some other woman love him too?"

It was merely a chance shot of argument, but it smote Helen so that she
trembled as she sat.

"Is not that woman to be considered?" Edith continued. "Is the good of
the man to count for nothing? Mr. Herman is sacrificed to an old
mistake. Perhaps it is right that he should pay the price of his error;
and that in the end it will be overruled for his good, we may hope. But
it is hard to have patience now with the state of things."

Helen tapped her teaspoon nervously against her cup.

"But what can be done?"

"Nothing," Mrs. Fenton said, without the slightest hesitation. "You and
I may think these things, but it would be a crime for Mr. Herman to
think them."

"It might be cowardice to yield to them," responded Helen; "but how
crime? And how can one help the thoughts from turning whithersoever
they will?"

Edith pushed back her plate, leaned forward with folded arms resting
upon the edge of the table. She flushed a little, as she did sometimes
when she felt it her duty to say something to her husband which it was
hard to utter.

"I do not think you and I agree in this," she said, in a voice which
her earnestness made somewhat lower than before. "Marriage is to me a
sacrament, and this very fact gives it a nature different from ordinary
promises. We promise to love until death do us part. To me that is as
imperative as any vow I can make to God and man."

"But love," Helen urged, with a somewhat perplexed air, "is not a thing
to be coerced."

"It must be," Edith returned, inflexibly. "Even if my husband ceased to
love me, that does not absolve me. I must fulfil my promise and my
duty."

"But," Helen responded, doubtfully and slowly, "it seems to me a
sacrilege to live with a man after one has ceased to love him."

"But I would love him," Edith broke in almost fiercely. "That is just
the point. One must refuse to cease to love him."

"But if he ceased to love her?"

A flush came into Edith's clear cheek, and her eyes shone. Half
unconsciously to herself, she was fighting with the doubts which would
now and then rise in her own mind of her husband's affection.

"Then," she said, in a low voice, "one must still be worthy of his
love; one must do one's duty. Besides," she added, looking up with a
gleam of hope, "when one has made a solemn vow, as a wife vows to love
her husband until death part them, I firmly believe that strength to
keep that vow will not be withheld."

Helen was silent a moment. She by no means agreed to the position Edith
took. She had no belief in those promises in virtue of which the
sacraments of the church took on a peculiar sanctity; she did not at
all trust to any special help bestowed by higher powers. She did not,
however, care to argue upon these points, and she said more lightly,--

"You task womanhood pretty heavily."

"A little woman who is a _protegee_ of mine," Edith returned, in the
same manner, "said rather quaintly the other day, that women were made
so there should be somebody to be patient with men. She's having
trouble with her lover, I suspect, and takes it hardly."

"But," Helen persisted more gravely, "it seems to me that you set
before the unloved wife a task to which humanity is absolutely unequal."

"You remember St. Theresa and her two sous," Edith replied, her eyes
shining with deep inner feeling; "how she said, 'St. Theresa and two
sous are nothing, but St. Theresa and two sous and God are everything.'
I can't argue, but for myself, I could not live if I should give up my
ideal of duty."

As often it had happened before, Helen found herself so deeply moved by
the fervor and the genuineness of Edith's faith, that she felt it
impossible to go on with an argument which could convince only at the
expense of weakening this rare trust. She brought the conversation back
to its starting point.

"But about Ninitta," she said. "I saw her yesterday, and she acted as
if she had something on her mind. She somehow seemed to be trying to
tell me something. I told her that the _bambino_, as she calls Nino,
must keep her occupied most of the time, and she said the nurse stole
him away half of the day; she has the peasant instinct to take entire
charge of her own child."

"If that is a peasant instinct," Edith rejoined laughing, "I am afraid
I am a peasant."

"Oh, but you are reasonable about it, and know that it is better for
the boy to have change and so on. She acts as if she felt it to be a
conspiracy between the nurse and her husband to steal the child's
affections from her. Really, I felt as if she was coming to love Nino
so fiercely that she had fits of almost hating her husband."

The ringing of the door bell and the entrance of the servant with a
card interrupted the conversation, and Helen had only time to say,--

"Of course on general principles you know I do not agree with you.
Indeed, I should find it hard to justify what I consider the most
meritorious acts of my life if I did. But I do want to say that, given
your creed, your view of marriage seems to me the noble--indeed, the
only one."

As Helen walked home in the gray afternoon, sombre with a winter mist,
she thought over the conversation and measured her life by its
principles.

"If one accepts Edith's standard," she reflected, "it is impossible not
to accept her conclusions. She is a St. Theresa, with her strict
adherence to forms and her loyalty to her convictions. But surely one's
own self has some claims. My first duty to whatever the highest power
is,--the All, perhaps,--must be to do the best I can with myself. It
could not be my duty to go on living with Will"--

She stopped, with a faint shudder, raising her eyes and looking about
upon the wet and dreary landscape with an almost furtive glance, as if
she were oppressed by the fear that the eyes of the husband with whom
she had found it impossible to live, and who for six years had been
under the sod, dead by his own hand, might be watching her unawares. It
was one of those moments when a bygone emotion is so vividly revived,
as if some long hidden landscape were revealed by a sudden lightning
flash. The years had brought her immunity from the poignancy of the
pain of old sorrows, but for one brief and bitter instant she cowed
with the old fear, she trembled with the old-time agony.

Then she smiled at the unreasonableness of her feeling, and dropping
her eyes, walked on with slightly quickened steps.

"It cannot be a woman's duty to go on living with a man who is dragging
her down, or even who prevents her from realizing her best; and yet,
there is the influence. That is a trick of my old Puritan training, of
course, but after all it is right to consider. One must count influence
as a factor if one believes in civilization, and I do believe in
civilization; certainly, I would not go back to barbarism. But is a
woman to be tied down--oh! how a woman is always tied down! Limitation
--limitation--limitation; that is the whole story of a woman's life;
and the harder she struggles to get away from her bonds the more she
proves to herself by the pain of the wrist cut by the fetters how
impossible it is to break them. Women contrive to deceive men sometimes
into believing that they have overcome the limitations of their sex;
and they even deceive themselves; but they never deceive each other. A
woman may believe that she herself has accomplished the impossible, but
she knows no one of her sisters has."

She smiled sadly and yet humorously, pausing a moment on the curbstone
before crossing the wet and icy street. Then as she went on and a
coachman pulled up his horses almost upon their haunches to let her
pass, she took up the thread of her reflections once more,--

"Yet surely women must not rebel against civilization. Civilization is
after all quite as largely as anything else a determined ignoring and
combatting on the part of mankind of the cruel disadvantages under
which nature has put women. No; we must look at it in the large; we
must hold to the conventional even, rather than fight against
civilization, however wrong and illogical and heartless civilization
may be. It is the best we have and we go to the wall without it."

She had reached her boarding-house and fitted her latch-key into the
lock. As she opened the door she looked back into the gathering dusk of
the misty afternoon, and her thought was almost as if it were a last
word flung to some presence to be left behind and shut out, a
personality with whom she had argued, and who had logically defeated
but not convinced her.

"And yet," she said inwardly, with a sudden swelling of defiance and
conviction, "not for all the universe could I have done it. I could not
go on living with Will,--though," she added, a sudden compunction
seizing her, "I was fond of him in a way, poor fellow."

And the door closed.




XI

                         THE GREAT ASSAY OF ART.
                                             Macbeth; iv.--3.

The inner history of the effigies which in Boston do duty as statues
would be most interesting reading, amusing or depressing as one felt
obliged to take it. To know what causes led to the production and then
to the erection of these monstrosities could hardly fail to be
instructive, although the knowledge might be rather dreary.

The subject has been too much discussed to make it easy to touch it,
but all this examination has by no means resulted in general
enlightenment, as was sufficiently evident at the meeting of the
committee in charge of the new statue of _America_ about to be erected
in a properly select Back Bay location. The committee consisted of
Stewart Hubbard, Alfred Irons, and Peter Calvin, three names which were
seldom long absent from the columns of the leading Boston daily
newspapers. Mr. Irons had been strongly objected to by both his
associates, neither of whom felt quite disposed to assume even such
equality as might seem to follow from joint membership of the
committee. That gentleman had, however, sufficient influence at City
Hall to secure appointment, a whim which had seized him to pose as a
patron of art being his obvious motive; and neither Mr. Hubbard nor Mr.
Calvin was prepared to go quite to the length of declining to serve
with the obnoxious parvenu.

Stewart Hubbard was a most admirable example of the best type of an
American gentleman. Arthur Fenton once described him as "a genuine old
Beacon street, purple window-glass swell;" a description expressive, if
not especially elegant. Tall and well-built, with the patrician written
in every line of his handsome face, his finely shaped head covered with
short hair, snowy white although he had hardly passed middle age, his
clear dark eyes straightforward and frank in their glances, he was a
striking and pleasing figure in any company. He had graduated, like his
ancestors for three or four generations, at Harvard; and if he knew
less about art than his place on the committee made desirable, he at
least had a pretty fair idea of what authorities could be trusted.

Peter Calvin's place in Boston art matters has already been spoken of.
He took himself very seriously, moving through life with a sunny-faced
self-complacency so inoffensive and sincere as to be positively
delightful. He was too good-natured and in all respects of character
too little virile to meet Irons with anything but kindness, but as he
was a trifle less sure of his social standing than Hubbard, he was
naturally more annoyed at the choice of the third member of the
committee. He made not a few protests to his friends, and gently
represented himself as a martyr to his devotion to the cause of art
from having accepted the place he held.

When one considered, however, the way in which committees upon art
matters are made up at City Hall, it becomes evident that the wonder
was not that the present body was no better, but that it should be so
good. The truth was that the choice of Hubbard and Calvin had been
considered a great concession to the unreasonable prejudices of the
self-appointed arbitrators of art affairs in town. A short time before,
a committee consisting of a butcher, a furniture dealer and a North End
ward politician, had been sent to New York on a matter connected with a
public monument, and their action had been so egregiously absurd as to
bring down upon their heads and upon the heads of those who appointed
them such a torrent of ridicule that even the tough hide of City Hall
could not withstand it. It was felt that the public was more alive on
art matters than had been suspected; and when a South Boston
liquor-dealer manifested a singular but unmistakable desire to be
appointed on the _America_ committee, he had been promptly suppressed
with the information that this was to be "a regular bang-up, silver-top
committee," and was forced to soothe his disappointed ambition with
such consolation as lay in the promise that next time he should be
counted in.

When the committee had been named, a hint was dropped in one or two
newspaper offices that the powers which work darkly at City Hall
expected due credit for the self-sacrifice involved in putting on two
men at least from whom no reward was to be expected. The journals
improved the opportunity, and praised highly the choice of all three of
the members. When this called out a protest from the artists, because
no artist had been appointed, City Hall had no words adequate to the
expression of its disgust.

"That's what comes of trying to satisfy them fellows," one City Father
observed, in an indignant and unstilted speech to his colleagues. "They
want the earth, and nothing else will satisfy them. What if they ain't
got no artist on the committee; everybody knows that Peter Calvin's a
man who's published a lot of books about art, and it stands to reason
he's a bigger gun than a feller that just paints."

The committee paid no attention to the discussion concerning their
fitness, of which indeed they did not know a great deal, but came
together in a matter-of-fact way, precisely as they would have
assembled to transact any other business.

"I don't know what you think," Mr. Irons observed, as the three
gentlemen settled themselves in the easy-chairs of Mr. Hubbard's
private office and lighted their cigars, "but it seems to me we had
better try to come to some reasonably definite idea of what we want
this monument to be before we go any farther. It will be time enough to
talk about who's to get the order when we've made up our minds what the
order is to be."

Both the words and the manner rasped the nerves of Mr. Calvin almost
beyond endurance. He was accustomed to phrasing his views with
elegance, and although in truth his ideas in the matter on hand were
not widely different from those of Mr. Irons, the latter had stated the
proposition with a boldness which made it impossible for him to agree
with it. By birth, by instinct, and by lifelong training a faithful
servant of the god Dagon, he yet seldom professed his allegiance
frankly. He sheltered his slavish adherence to conventions under a
decent show of following convictions; so that the pure and
straightforward Philistinism which Mr. Irons professed from simple lack
of a knowledge of the secrets of what might perhaps be called the
priestly cult of Philistia, appeared to Peter Calvin shockingly crude
and offensive.

"Perhaps," he said, with a smile which was hardly less sweet than
usual, so well trained were the muscles of his face in producing it,
"it can hardly be said that we can decide. The artist after all cannot
be expected to accept too many limitations if he is to produce a work
of art. His genius must have full play."

Secretly, Irons had a most profound respect for the other's art
knowledge, and he was too anxious to appear well in his capacity as a
member of the statue committee to be willing to run any risks by
attempting to controvert any aesthetic proposition laid down by Mr.
Calvin. He was by no means fond of the man, however, and to his dislike
his envy of Calvin's reputation, socially and aesthetically, added
venom. He hastened now, with quite unnecessary vigor, to defend himself
from the mildly implied attack.

"I suppose we have got to give an order--or a commission, if the word
suits you better--of some sort; and whatever it is to be it needs to be
defined."

His manner was so evidently belligerent that Mr. Hubbard hastened to
interpose.

"That is pretty well defined for us, isn't it?" he said. "We were
directed to give a commission for a single figure representing America,
to be executed in bronze and not to exceed a fixed sum in cost. That
does not leave much latitude, so far as I can see, beyond the right of
selecting or rejecting models shown us. For my own part, I may as well
say at once, I am in favor of giving Mr. Herman whatever terms he wants
to make a model, and trusting everything to him. Of course we should
still have the right to veto the arrangement if the figure he made
should not prove satisfactory."

Mr. Hubbard spoke with a certain elegant deliberation and precision
which Irons supposed himself to regard as affected, while secretly he
thoroughly envied it.

"Oh, we all know what Herman would do," Irons retorted. "He'd make one
of those things that nobody could understand, and then say it was
artistic. We want something to please folks."

Irons was more concerned about his popularity than even in regard to
the reputation as an art patron he was laboriously striving to build
up. He was an inordinately vain man, but he was an exceedingly shrewd
one. His self-esteem was gratified by seeing his name among those of
men influential in art matters; he bought pictures largely for the
pleasure of being talked of as a man who patronized the proper
painters, and he was looked upon as likely at no distant day to become
president of a club which Fenton dubbed the Discourager of Art; but he
realized that for a man who still had some political aspirations there
was a substantial value in popular favor not to be found in any
reputation for culture, however delightful the latter might be. He
distinctly intended to please the public by his action in regard to the
statue, a resolution which was rendered the more firm by the fact that
he vastly over-estimated the interest which the public was likely to
take in the matter. He trimmed the ashes from his cigar as he spoke,
with an air which was intended to convey the idea that he would stand
no nonsense.

"Won't Mr. Herman enter a competitive trial?" Calvin asked. "We might
ask two or three others and then select the best model."

"He won't go into a competition. He says it's beneath an artist's
dignity."

"Damned nonsense!" blustered Irons, sitting up in his chair in
excitement over such an extraordinary proposition. "Don't we all go
into competitions whenever we send in sealed proposals? Beneath his
dignity! Great Scott! The cockiness of artists is enough to take away a
man's breath."

Mr. Hubbard, who was a lawyer chiefly occupied, as far as business
went, in managing his own large property and certain trust funds, and
Mr. Calvin, who had never in his life soiled his aristocratic hands
with any business whatever, smiled in the mutual consciousness that
"sealed proposals" were as much outside their experience as
competitions were foreign to that of Grant Herman. The thought, passing
and trivial as it was, moved their sympathy a little toward the
sculptor's view of the matter, although since secretly Mr. Calvin was
determined that the commission should be given to Orin Stanton, the
fact made little difference.

"You evidently don't want to undergo the general condemnation that has
fallen on whoever has had a share in the Boston statues thus far," Mr.
Calvin observed, glancing at Irons with a genial smile. "If you are
going to set yourself to hit the popular taste and keep yourself clear
of the claws of the critics at the same time, I fear you've a heavy
task laid out."

"The critics always pitch into everything," Irons responded with a
growl. "It's the taste of the people I want to please. I believe in art
as a popular educator, and people can't be educated by things they
won't look at."

"Oh, as to that," Stewart Hubbard rejoined, with a twinkle in his eye,
"conventionality is after all the consensus of the taste of mankind."

Peter Calvin was at a loss to tell whether his friend was in earnest or
was only quizzing Irons, so he contented himself with an appreciative
look, and a smile of dazzling warmth. Irons, on the other hand, looked
toward the speaker with suspicion.

"I haven't much sympathy with a good deal of the stuff artists talk,"
he continued, following his own train of thought. "It doesn't square
very well with common sense and ain't much more than pure gassing, I
think. The truth is, genius is mostly moonshine. The man I call a
genius is the one that makes things work practically."

"In other words," said Calvin, spurred to emulate Hubbard's epigram,
and involuntarily glancing toward the latter for approval, "you think a
genius is a man who is able to harness Pegasus to the plough, and make
him work without kicking things to pieces."

"That's about it," Irons assented; "and I think Herman is too
toploftical and full of cranky theories. They say Mrs. Greyson has hit
the nail exactly on the head in that statue she showed in Paris last
year. That pleased the critics and the public both, and that's exactly
what we are after. I think we ought to ask her to make a design."

Mr. Calvin saw and seized the opportunity easily to introduce his own
especial candidate.

"If each of you have a sculptor," he said, lightly, "I can hardly do
less than to have one, too. There's an exceedingly clever fellow just
home from Rome, that I want to see given a chance. He's done some very
promising work, and I look upon him as the coming man."

The two men regarded him with some interest, as one who has introduced
a new element into a game. Mr. Hubbard leaned back in his chair, and
sent a puff of cigar smoke floating upward, before he answered.

"I can't enter my man for the triangular contest," said he. "He won't
go into a competition unless he's paid for making the design. He says,
in so many words, that he doesn't want the commission to make the
statue unless he can do it in his own way. He will be unhindered, or he
will let the whole thing alone."

"For my part," Mr. Irons responded, settling himself in his chair, with
a certain air of determination, "I don't take a great deal of stock in
this letting an artist have his own way. He might put up a naked woman,
or any rubbish he happened to think of. The amount of the matter is
that it isn't such a devilish smart thing to make a figure as they try
to make out. Any man can do it that has learned the trade, and I
haven't any great amount of patience with the fuss these fellows make
over their statues."

Neither of his companions felt inclined to enter into a general
discussion of the principles underlying art work, and, although neither
agreed with this broad statement, there was no direct response offered.
Calvin and Hubbard looked at each other, and the latter asked,--

"Have you any notion what Mrs. Greyson would do?"

"No, I have never talked with her."

"Very likely she'd give us another figure like those that are stuck all
over Boston, like pins in a pincushion," Hubbard objected. "Some
carpet-knight, with a face spread over with a grin as inane as that of
Henry Clay on a cigar-box cover."

Irons laughed contemptuously, and rose, throwing away his cigar stub.

"Well, I must go," he announced. "We don't seem to be getting ahead
very fast. I'll try and find out if she'll go into a competition, and
you two had better do the same with your folks. Then we shall at least
have something to go upon. The _Daily Observer_ has already begun to
ask why something isn't done, and I'd like to get the thing finished
up, myself."

The two others rose also, and it was thereby manifest that this
unproductive sitting of the committee was at an end.




XII

                       WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED.
                                        Comedy of Errors; i.--1.

Never was a man more utterly wretched than was Arthur Fenton, after the
luckless day when Mr. Irons had lighted upon the presence of Mrs.
Herman at the studio. He raged against himself, against chance, most of
all against the unmannerly and coarse-minded fellow who had forced
himself into the studio, and then persisted in imagining evil which had
never existed. He experienced all the acute anguish of finding himself
in the toils, and of the added sting from wounded vanity, since he felt
that he had been wanting in adroitness and presence of mind. It is to
be doubted if he did not suffer more than would have been the case had
the injurious suspicions of Irons been correct. To a vain man, it is
often harder to be entrapped through stupidity or awkwardness than
through crime.

Fenton realized well enough how impossible it was now to correct the
evil that had been done. He might have explained away the fact that
Ninitta had been his model, but his own bearing under the accusation
had produced an impression not to be eradicated. The wavering before
his eyes, for a single instant, of the will-o'-the-wisp fire of sudden
temptation had blinded him, so that he had been guilty of a cursed
piece of folly, which had put him at once in the power of Irons. He
knew enough of the latter to be pretty sure that he was capable of
keeping his threat to enlighten Herman concerning his wife's visit to
the studio, and disgrace in the eyes of Herman meant more than Arthur
dared to think. Sensitive to the last fibre of his being, the artist
grew faint with exquisite pain at the thought of what he must endure
from a scandal spread among his friends. An accusation without
foundation would have been almost more than he could bear, but one
supported by such circumstantial evidence as lay behind the story Irons
would tell if he set himself to make trouble,--the bare idea drove
Fenton wild.

Fenton had always prided himself upon his superiority to public
opinion, but without public respect he could not but be supremely
miserable. It is true that he valued his own good opinion above that of
the world. It was his theory that the ultimate appeal in matters of
conduct was always to the man's inner consciousness, and in this
highest court only the man himself could be present, all the world
being shut out. It followed that a person's own opinion of his acts was
of infinitely more weight than that of any or all other people
whosoever.

"All standards are arbitrary," he was accustomed to say, "and all terms
are relative. Every man must make his own ethical code, and nobody but
the man himself can tell how far he lives up to it. Why should I care
whether people who do not even know what my rules of conduct are,
consider my course correct or not? Very likely the things they condemn
are the things it has cost me most struggle and self-denial to achieve.
We have outgrown old ethical systems, because the world has become
enlightened enough to perceive that every mind must make its own code;
to realize that what a man is must be his religion."

This course of reasoning was one shared by many of Fenton's friends,
and indeed by a goodly company of nineteenth century thinkers. Fenton
was in reality only going with the majority of liberalists in regarding
sincerity to personal conviction as the highest of ethical laws; and he
was generally pretty logical in choosing the approval of his inward
knowledge to that of the world outside. Yet his vanity was keenly
sensitive to disapprobation, and when the censure of the world
coincided with the condemnation of his own reason he suffered. To
self-contempt was added a baffled sense of having been discovered; and
as his imagination now ran forward to picture the effects of Irons's
disclosure, the suffering he endured was really pitiful.

"Nobody will understand," he said to himself one day, half in bitter
self-contempt and half in self-defence, "that I couldn't help doing as
I did; no cruelty surpasses that of holding weak and sensitive natures
accountable for shortcomings they are born incapable of avoiding."

And having accomplished an epigram at his own expense, he felt as if he
had to some degree atoned for his fault, just as a flagellant looks
upon his self-scourging as expiatory.

How to act in the position in which he had been placed by Irons's
insulting proposal was a question which he found more difficult to
answer than according to his theories, it should have been. When a man
becomes his own highest law he is constantly exposed to the danger of
finding his theories of conduct utterly confounded by a change in
self-interest; and Fenton began to have a most painful sense of being
ethically wholly at sea. He had not yielded to temptation, however. He
had given Stewart Hubbard a couple of sittings, and so great had been
his fear lest he should inadvertently gather from his sitter some hint
of the knowledge he had been urged to obtain, that he had half
unconsciously been reserved and silent. The picture was going badly,
and the sitter wondered what had come over the witty and vivacious
artist.

Besides these vexations the artist had, moreover, other causes for
uneasiness at this time. His financial affairs were by no means in
satisfactory condition. He had been filling a good many orders and
getting excellent prices for his work, yet somehow he had been all the
year running behindhand. He lived beyond his means, priding himself
upon being the one Boston artist who had been born, bred, and educated
a gentleman, as he chose to put it to himself, and who was able to live
as a man of the world should. His summer had been passed at Newport, a
place which Edith by no means liked, and where her ideas of propriety
and religion were constantly offended, especially in regard to the
sanctity of marriage. He entertained sumptuously, spent money freely at
the clubs, and, in a word, tried to be no less a man of fashion than an
artist.

The result was beginning to be disastrous. Living pretty closely up to
his income, a few losses and a speculation or two which turned out
unlucky, were sufficient to embarrass him seriously. It was the old
trite and dreary story of extravagance and its inevitable consequence;
and as Fenton had no talent for finance, his struggles rather made
matters worse than bettered them, as the efforts of a fly to escape
from the web, even although they may damage the net, are apt to end
also in binding the victim more securely.

The truth was that the painter, like many another man endowed with
imaginative gifts, had little practical knowledge of affairs beyond a
talent for spending money; and it is amazing how stupid a clever man
can contrive to be when he is taken out of his sphere. For such men
there is no safety save in keeping out of debt, and once the balance
was on the wrong side of his account, Fenton, self-poised as he was,
lost his head. It troubled and worried him to be in debt even when he
could see his way clear to paying everything, and now that matters
began to get too complicated to be settled by plain and obvious
arithmetic, he was miserable.

In the midst of these unhappy complications, he was one morning working
upon the portrait of Miss Damaris Wainwright, whose cousin and aunts,
the Dimmonts, had induced her to have it painted, although she was in
deep mourning. He was interested in the lovely, melancholy girl, and he
felt that he was doing some of the best work of his life in her
portrait. He sometimes was proud of his skill, and at others he was
unreasonably vexed that this picture should be so much better than that
of Mr. Hubbard promised to be.

He had been talking this morning half-absently, and merely for the sake
of keeping his sitter interested. He had not noticed that her whole
being was keyed up to a pitch of intense feeling, and he had almost
unconsciously accomplished the really difficult task of putting his
sitter at her ease and making her ready to talk.

Suddenly, after a brief silence, she said,--"You provoke confidences."

Some note in her voice and the closeness of connection between her
words and the thought in his own mind that he certainly must be able to
do what Irons asked, arrested Fenton's attention.

"Yes," he returned, his air of sincerely meaning what he said being by
no means wholly unreal; "that is because I am unworthy of them."

Miss Wainwright smiled. The self-detraction seemed delicate, and the
unexpectedness of the reply amused her.

"That is perhaps a modest thing to say, Mr. Fenton," she responded,
"but the truth must be--if you'll pardon my saying anything so
personal--that you are very sympathetic."

The artist moved backward a step from his easel, regarding his work
with that half-shutting of the eyes and turning of the head which seems
to be an essential of professional inspection.

"Even so," persisted he, "a sympathetic person is one whose emotions
are fickle enough to give place to whatever others any sudden accident
brings up; and if one's feelings are so transient, how can he be worthy
of confidence?"

"I can't argue with you," Damaris replied, smiling and shaking her
head, "but all the same I don't agree with what you say."

"Oh, I hoped you wouldn't when I said it," Fenton threw back lightly.

He went on with his work, outwardly tranquil, as if he had no thought
beyond the perfect shading of the cheek he was painting; but his mind
was in a tumult. He thought how easy it is to deceive; how constantly,
indeed, we do deceive whether we will or no; how foolish it is to rule
our lives by standards which rest so largely on mere seeming; how--Bah!
Why should he pretend to himself? He was not really concerned with
generalities or great moral principles. He was trying to decide whether
he should worm a secret out of Hubbard to throw as a sop to that vile
cursed cad, Irons, to keep his foul mouth shut about Ninitta. Heavens!
What a tangle he had got into simply because he wanted a decent model
for his picture! The abominable prudery and hypocrisy of the time lay
behind the whole matter. But this would never do. He must work now; not
think of these exciting things. It was hardly a brief moment before to
his last words he added aloud,--

"Did what you said mean that I was to be favored with a confidence?"

A painful, deep problem was weighing upon her heart, wearing away her
reason and her life alike. She had almost been ready to ask advice of
the artist, although she by no means knew him well enough to render so
intimate a conversation other than strange.

"Not necessarily," was her reply to Fenton's question.

She found it after all impossible to utter anything definite upon the
subject which lay so near her heart. She even felt a dim wonder whether
she had really ever seriously contemplated speaking of it, even never
so remotely.

"I was thinking," she continued, "of the point the conversation had
reached this morning when I left my friend at the door downstairs."

"It was some great moral problem, I think you said," Fenton responded,
trying to recall accurately what she had told him earlier in the
sitting of a talk she had had with a friend on her way to the studio.
"The object of life, or something of that sort. Well, the object of
life is to endure life, I suppose, just as the object of time is to
kill time."

"We had got so far in our talk as to decide," Miss Wainwright went on,
too much absorbed in recalling the interview she was relating to notice
the painter's words, "he decided, that is, not I--that the only thing
to do is to enjoy the present and to let the future go; but I object
that one cannot help dreading what might come."

She spoke, of course, solely with reference to her own inner
experiences, but Fenton, with the egotism which is universal to
humanity, received the words in their application to his own case. If
he could but determine what would come, he might decide how to act in
this hard present. Yet, whatever that future might be, he must at any
cost extricate himself from this coil which pressed so cruelly upon him.

"Even so he would be right," he answered her words. "Happiness in this
world consists, at best, in a choice of evils, and at least one may
make of the present a sauce _piquante_ to cover the flavor of the dread
of the future."

"You take a more desperate view of the matter than my friend," Miss
Wainwright said, sighing bitterly. "His only fear is that I shall lose
everything by not making sure of whatever present happiness is
possible."

Fenton glanced at her curiously, aware no less from her tone and manner
than from her words that the conversation was touching her as well as
himself through some keen personal experience. A feeling of sharp and
irritating remorse stung him from the thought that he, whose whole
sensuous nature strove for selfish joyousness in life, was discussing
this question from his own standpoint, while the pale, lovely girl
before him was regarding the whole problem from the high plane of duty.
Instinctively he set himself to justify his position against hers; to
demonstrate that his Pagan, selfish philosophy was the true guide.

"Oh," he cried out with sudden vehemence, waving his palette with a
gesture of supreme impatience, "I do take a desperate view! Life is
desperate, and the most absurd of all the multitudinous ways of making
it worse is to waste the present in dreading the future. I've no
patience with the notion that seems to be so many people's creed, that
we can do nothing nobler than to be as miserable as possible. It is a
dreadful remainder of that awful malady of Puritanism. Besides, where
is the logic of supposing we shall be better prepared for any
misfortune that may come if we can only contrive to dread it enough
beforehand. Good heavens! We all need whatever strength we can get from
happiness whenever it comes, as much as a plant needs the sunshine
while it lasts. You wouldn't prepare a delicate plant for cloudy days
by keeping it in the shadow; and I think one is simply an idiot who
keeps in the shade to accustom himself to-day after to-morrow's storm."

His excitement increased as he went on. He was arguing against the
coward sense that he had deserved the troubles which had come upon him.
He was saying in as plain language as the conditions of the
conversation would allow, that he had been right in gratifying his
desires; in living as he wished without too closely considering the
consequences which were likely to follow. He spoke with a bitter
earnestness born of the intense strain under which he was laboring; and
he did not consider how his words might or might not affect his hearer.
The thought came into his mind how he had deliberately sacrificed his
convictions in marrying Edith Caldwell and going over to Philistinism;
and he reflected that this decision had shaped his life. Already his
course was determined; it was idle to ignore the fact.

Why should he hesitate from squeamish scruples to do what Irons asked
when to meet the consequences of the latter's anger would not only be
supremely disagreeable but contrary to his whole theory of life?

It was one of Fenton's peculiarities that he never knowingly shrank
from telling himself the truth about his thoughts and actions with the
most brutal frankness. Indeed, it might not be too much to say that
this self-honesty was a sort of fetish to which he made expiatory
sacrifices in the shape of the most cruelly disagreeable admissions
before his inner consciousness. He constantly settled his moral
accounts by setting down on the credit side "Self-contempt to balance,"
a method of mental bookkeeping by no means rare, albeit seldom carried
on in connection with such clear powers of moral discrimination as
Fenton possessed when he chose to exercise them.

"If you chance on ill-luck," he ran on, arguing aloud with himself
concerning the possible consequences of betraying Mr. Hubbard's trust,
"you'll be glad you were happy while it was possible; and if the fates
make you the one person in a million, by letting you get through life
decently, you surely can't think it would be better to spend it moping
until you are incapable of enjoying anything."

The form of his speech was still that of one talking simply from the
point of view of his hearer. It did not for a moment occur to Damaris
Wainwright that in all he had said there had been anything but a
perfectly disinterested discussion of the principles involved in her
own questions and in her own perplexities. Yet, as a matter of fact,
his words were but the surface indications of the conflict going on in
his own mind. He was arguing down his disinclination to accept the
obvious and dishonorable means of escaping from an unpleasant position;
he was fighting against the better instincts of his nature, and trying
to convince himself that the easy course was the one to be chosen, the
one logically following from the conclusions forced upon him by his
study of life.

"But duty!" she interposed, rather timidly, as he paused.

She was confused by his persistent ignoring of all the standards by
which she was accustomed to judge, and she threw out the question as
one in desperation brings forward a last argument, half foreseeing that
it will be useless.

"Duty!" he echoed, fiercely. "Life is an outrage, and what duty can
take precedence of righting it as far as we can. That old fool of a
Ruskin--I beg your pardon, Miss Wainwright, if you're fond of him--did
manage to say a sensible thing when he told a boarding-school full of
girls that their first duty was to want to dance. To allow that there
is any duty above making the best of life is a species of moral
suicide."

She looked at him with an expression of profoundest feeling. She was
too little used to arguments of this sort to discern that the whole
matter was involved in the definition one gave to the phrase "The best
of life," and that to assume that this meant mere selfish or sensuous
enjoyment, was to beg the whole question. She was carried away by the
dramatic fashion in which he ended, dashing down his palette and
throwing himself into a chair.

"There!" he exclaimed, with an air of whimsical impatience. "Now I've
got so excited that I can't paint! That's what comes of having
convictions." The struggle was over. He brushed all doubts and
questions aside. There was but one thing to do, and, disagreeable as it
might be, he must accept the situation. The mention of the word "duty"
reminded him that he had long ago settled in his own mind the folly of
being bound down by superstitions masquerading under grand names as
ethical principles. The duty of self-preservation was above all others.
He must defend himself, no matter if he did violate the principles by
which fools allowed their lives to be narrowed and hampered. He would
set himself to work upon Hubbard to-morrow, and get this unpleasant
thing over.

His sitter came down from the dais upon which she had been sitting, and
held out her hand.

"You have decided my life for me," she said, in a low voice, "and I
thank you."

Those who knew her perplexities had argued with her in vain; and this
stranger, talking to his own inner self, had said the final word which
had moved her to a conclusion they had not been able to force upon her.

He looked up with a smile, as he pressed her hand, but he said nothing;
refraining from adding, as he might have done truthfully,--

"And I have decided my own."




XIII

                          THIS "WOULD" CHANGES.
                                             Hamlet; iv.--7.

Melissa Blake was growing paler in these days, worn with the ache of a
hurt love. Since the night on which he had parted from her in anger,
John had been to see her only on brief errands which he could not well
avoid, and while he had made no allusion to the difference which
separated them, it was evident that he still brooded over his fancied
grievance.

This phase of John's character, its least amiable characteristic, which
marred it amid many excellent qualities, was not wholly unknown to
Melissa. She was by far the more clear-headed of the two, and she
understood her lover with much greater acuteness than he was able to
bring to the task of comprehending her. It was from intelligent
perception and not merely from the feminine instinct for making
excuses, that she said to herself that John was worn out with the
strain of burdens long and uncomplainingly borne; and she was, it might
be added, near enough to the primitive savagery of the rustic New
Englanders of the last generation, to find it perfectly a matter of
course that a man should make of his womenfolk a sort of scapegoat upon
whom to visit his wrath against the sins alike of fate and of his
fellows.

She waited for John to relent from his unjust anger, but she did not
protest, and when he chose once more to be gracious unto his handmaiden
he would be met only with faithful affection and with no reproaches.
From the abstract standpoint, nothing could be farther astray than the
fulness and freedom of Milly's forgivenesses; practically, this
illogical feminine weakness made life easier and happier, not alone for
everybody about her, but for herself as well. Doubtless such a yielding
disposition tempted her lover to injustices he would never have
ventured with a more spirited woman, but after all her forgiveness was
so divine as almost to turn the transgression into a virtue for causing
it.

When the account of Milly's life was made up, there must be put into
the record long, wordless stretches of uncomplaining and prayerful
patience, hidden from the eyes of all mankind. The capabilities of
women of this sort for quiet suffering are as infinitely pathetic as
they are measureless; and, although she was silent, the dark rings
under her eyes and the lagging step told how her sorrow was wearing
upon her. She went on faithfully with her work; she held still to the
faith that somehow help was sure to come; and as only such women can
be, she was patient with the patience of a god.

Milly was surprised one afternoon by a visit from Orin Stanton, the
half brother of John. The sculptor had never before come to see her,
and, although Milly was little given to censoriousness, she could not
avoid the too-obvious reflection that, in one known to be so
consistently self-seeking as was Orin, the probability was that some
selfish motive lay behind the call. Orin had never been especially fond
of Milly, and since his return from Europe, where he had been
maintained by the liberality of an old lady, who, in a summer visit to
Feltonville, had been attracted by his talent for modelling in clay, he
had avoided as far as possible all intercourse with his townspeople.
The old lady, who took much innocent pleasure in imagining herself the
patroness of a future Phidias, died suddenly one day, leaving the will
by which provision was made for young Stanton's future unhappily
without signature; a fact which ever after furnished him with definite
grounds upon which to found his accusations against society and fate.

It was largely in virtue of this interesting and pathetic story that
Mrs. Frostwinch and Mrs. Bodewin Ranger had taken it upon themselves to
better the fortunes of Stanton. Large-hearted ladies in Boston, as
elsewhere in the world, find no difficulty in discovering signs of
genius in a work of art where they deliberately look for it; and being
moved by the sculptor's history,--in which, to say sooth, there was
nothing remarkable, and, save the disappointment in regard to the will,
little that was even striking--his patronesses were not slow in coming
to regard his productions with admiration curiously resembling
momentary veneration. They in a mild way instituted a Stanton cult, as
a minor interest in lives already richly full, and when more weighty
matters did not interfere, Mrs. Frostwinch, in varying degrees of
enthusiasm, could be charming in her praises of the sculptor, whom she
designated as "adorably ursine," and of his work, which in turn, she
termed "irresistibly insistent," whatever that might mean.

Bearish, Orin Stanton certainly was, whether one did or did not find
the quality adorable. He was heavy in mould, with a face marked by none
of the delicacy one expects in an artist and to which his small eyes
and thick lips lent a sensual cast. Milly had always found his
countenance repulsive, strongly as she strove not to be affected by
mere outward appearances. He wore his hair long, its coarse, reddish
masses showing conspicuously in a crowd, when he got to going about
among such people as hunt lions in Boston.

Mrs. Bodewin Ranger patronized him from afar, and could not be brought
to invite him to her house.

"Really, my dear," the beautiful old lady said to her husband; "it
seems to me that people are not wise in asking Mr. Stanton about so
much. It only unsettles him, and he should be left to associate with
persons in his own class."

"I quite agree with you," her husband replied, as he had replied to
every proposition she had advanced for the half century of their
married life.

Mrs. Frostwinch was less rigid. It is somewhat the fashion of the more
exclusive of the younger circles of Boston to make a more or less
marked display of a democracy which is far more apparent than real.
Partly from the genuine and affected respect for culture and talent
which is so characteristic of the town, and partly from some remnants
of the foolish superstition that the persons who produce interesting
works of art must themselves be interesting, the social leaders of the
town are, as a rule, not unwilling to receive into a sort of
lay-brotherhood those who are gifted with talent or genius. No fashion
of place or hour, however, can change the essential facts of life; and
it is perhaps quite as much the incompatibility of aim, of purpose in
life, as any instinctive arrogance on either side, that makes any
intimate union impossible. It is inevitable that members of any
exclusive circle shall regard others concerning whose admission there
has been question with some shade of more or less conscious patronage,
and sensitive men of genius are very likely as conscious of "the pale
spectrum of the salt" as was Mrs. Browning's poet Bertram, invited into
company where he did not belong, because it was socially too high and
intellectually and humanely too low. The members of what is awkwardly
called fashionable society are too thoroughly trained in the knowledge
of the principles of birth, wealth, and mutual recognition upon which
their order is founded, to be likely to lose sight of the fact that
artists and authors and actors, not possessing, however great their
cleverness in other directions, these especial qualifications, can only
be received into the charmed ring on sufferance; and nothing could be
more absurd or illogical than to blame them for recognizing this fact.

Mrs. Frostwinch, at least, was in no danger of forgetting where she
stood in relation to such lions as she invited to her house. She
understood accurately how to be gracious and yet to keep them in their
place. Indeed, she did this instinctively, so thoroughly was she imbued
with the spirit of her class. She did not open her doors to many people
on the score of their talent, and least of all did she encourage lions
of appearance so coarse and uncouth as Orin Stanton. She found the role
of lady patroness amusing, however, and, although she would not have
put the sculptor's name on the lists of guests for a dinner or an
evening reception, she did invite him to a Friday afternoon, when she
knew Stewart Hubbard was likely to be present; and a glowing knowledge
of this honor was in Orin's mind when he went to call on Melissa.

"I've no doubt you're surprised to see me," Orin said, brusquely, as he
seated himself, still in his overcoat. "The truth is, I don't run round
a great deal, and if I do, it's where it will do me some good."

Milly smiled to herself. She was not without a sense of humor.

"Naturally, I don't expect you to waste your time on me," she answered.
"You must be very busy, and I suppose you have lots of engagements."

"Oh, of course," he returned, with an obvious thrill of
self-satisfaction. "The Boston women are always interested in art, and
I could keep going all the time, if I had a mind to. I'm going to Mrs.
Frostwinch's to-morrow. She wants to introduce me to Mr. Hubbard, one
of the committee on the new statue."

To Orin's disappointment this fact seemed to make little impression
upon Milly, who was far too ignorant of Boston's social distinctions to
realize that an invitation to one of Mrs. Frostwinch's Fridays was an
honor greatly to be coveted.

"I am glad if people are interesting themselves in your work, Orin,"
she said, with a manner she tried not to make formal.

She had never been able to like Orin, and since the time when he had
not only utterly refused to share with John the burden of their
father's debts but had scoffed at what he called his brother's "idiocy"
in paying them, Milly had found comfort in having a definite and
legitimate excuse for disliking him. She regarded him as greatly
gifted; in the eyes of Feltonville people, Orin's talents, since they
had received the sanction of substantial patronage, had loomed into
greatness somewhat absurdly disproportionate to their actual value. She
was not insensible of the honor of being connected, as the betrothed of
John, with so distinguished a man as she felt Orin to be; but she
neither liked nor trusted him.

"Oh, there are some people in Boston who know a good thing when they
see it," the young man responded, intuitively understanding that here
he need not take the trouble to affect any artificial modesty. "It's
about that that I came to talk to you."

"About--I don't think I understand."

"I want your help."

"My help? How can I help you?"

The sculptor tossed his hat into a chair, and leaned forward, tapping
on one broad, thick palm with the fingers of the other hand.

"They tell me," he said, "that you know Mrs. Fenton pretty well; Arthur
Fenton's wife,--he's an awful snob, I hate him."

"Mrs. Fenton has been very kind to me," Milly responded, involuntarily
shrinking a little, and speaking guardedly.

"Well, put it any way you like. If she's interested in you, that's all
I want," Stanton went on, in his rough way. "You'll have a pull on her
through the church racket, I suppose."

Melissa looked at him with pain and disgust in her eyes. She always
shrank from Orin's rough coarseness; and she always felt helpless
before him. She made no reply, but played nervously with the pen she
had laid down upon his entrance. He regarded her curiously.

"You see," he said, with a clumsy attempt at easy familiarity, "Mrs.
Fenton's a niece of Mr. Calvin, who is on the statue committee. Mrs.
Frostwinch says Mr. Calvin's the man who has most influence in the
committee, and it occurred to me that it would be a good thing if you'd
put Mrs. Fenton up to taking my part with Calvin. You see," he
continued, in an offhand manner, "artists don't get any show nowadays
unless they keep their eyes open, and I mean to be wide awake. I'm
ready to do a good turn, too, for anybody that helps me. John told me
the other day that you and he had had a row, and if you can do me a
good turn in this, I may be able to pay you by smoothing John down."

Milly flushed painfully. Her delicacy was outraged, but, too, her
combative instinct was roused to defend her lover.

"John and I haven't quarrelled," she said, in a voice a little raised;
"he is worried about the debts and that makes him out of sorts,
sometimes, that is all."

A look of shrewd cunning came into Orin's narrow eyes. He suspected the
allusion to John's determination to clear his father's memory from
dishonor to be a clever device to win a concession from him. He looked
upon the remark as a statement from Milly of the price of her aid.

"If I get this commission," he said, watching the effect of his words,
"I shall be in a position to help John pay off those debts, and I shall
tell him he has you to thank for my helping him out in his
foolishness,--for it is foolishness to waste money on dead debts."

A glad light sprang into Milly's face. She was too childlike to suspect
the thought which led Orin to make this proffer, and the hope of having
John aided at once and of being able to contribute to the bringing
about of this result, made her heart beat joyfully. "You know how glad
I shall be if I can help you," she said quickly. "I will speak to Mrs.
Fenton when I see her to-morrow; though I do not see what good I can do
you," her honesty forced her to add, with sudden self-distrust.

"Oh, you just put in and do your level best," Orin responded, with the
smile which Mrs. Frostwinch had once called his "deplorably Satanic
grin," "and it is sure to come out all right. There are other wires
being pulled."




XIV

                          THE SHOT OF ACCIDENT.
                                            Othello; iv.--I.

It was not often that Arthur Fenton permitted himself to be
ill-tempered at home. He had too keen an appreciation of good taste to
allow his dark humors to vent themselves upon the heads of those with
whom he lived.

"A man is to be excused for being cross abroad," he was wont to
observe, "but only a brute is peevish at home."

On the morning following his conversation with Damaris Wainwright,
however, he was decidedly out of sorts, and proved but ill company for
his wife at the breakfast table. She ventured some simple remark in
relation to a plan which Mr. Candish had for the re-decoration of the
Church of the Nativity, and her husband retorted with an open sneer.

"Oh, don't talk about Mr. Candish to me," he said. "He is that obsolete
thing, a clergyman."

"I supposed," Edith responded good-naturedly, "that a question of
artistic decoration would interest you, even if it was connected with a
church."

"I hate anything connected with a religion," Fenton observed savagely.
"A religion is simply an artificial scheme of life, to be followed at
the expense of all harmony with nature."

It was evident to Edith that her husband was nervous and irritable, and
with wifely protective instinct she attributed his condition to
overwork. She did not take up the challenge which he in a manner flung
down. She seldom argued with him now; she cast about in her mind for a
safe topic of conversation, and, by ill-luck, hit upon the one least
calculated to restore Arthur to good humor and a sane temper.

"Helen was in last evening," she said. "She is troubled about Ninitta;
but I think it is because she isn't used to her ways."

Fenton started guiltily.

"What about Ninitta?" he demanded.

"Helen says she acts strangely, as if she had something on her mind;
and that she complains bitterly that her husband doesn't care for her."

Arthur shrugged his shoulders. He was on his guard now, and perfectly
self-possessed.

"No?" he said, inquiringly. "Why should he?"

"Why should he?" echoed his wife indignantly. Then she recovered
herself, and let the question pass, saying simply: "That would lead us
into one of our old discussions about right and wrong."

"Those struggles and quibbles between right and wrong," Fenton retorted
contemptuously, "have ceased to amuse me. They were interesting when I
was young enough for them to have novelty, but now I find grand
passions and a strong will more entertaining than that form of
amusement."

Edith raised her clear eyes to his with a calmness which she had
learned by years of patient struggle.

"And yet," she answered, "the people whom I have found most true, most
helpful, and even most comfortable, have been those who believed these
questions of right and wrong the most vital things in the universe."

"Oh, certainly," was the reply. "A superstition is an admirable thing
in its place."

He rose from the table as he spoke, and stood an instant with his hand
upon the back of his chair, looking at her in apparent indecision. She
saw that he was troubled, and she longed to help him, but she had
learned that his will was definite and unmanageable, and she secretly
feared that her inquiry would be fruitless when she asked,--

"What is it that troubles you this morning, Arthur? Has anything gone
wrong?"

"Things are always wrong," replied he. Then, with seeming irrelevance,
he added: "People are so illogical! They so insist that a man shall
think in the beaten rut. They are angry because I don't like the taste
of life. Good Heavens! Why haven't I the same right to dislike life
that I have to hate sweet champagne? If other people want to live and
to drink Perrier Jouet, I am perfectly willing that they should, but,
for my own part, I don't want one any more than the other."

What he said sounded to Edith like one of the detached generalities he
was fond of uttering, and if she had learned that beneath his seemingly
irrelevant words always lay a connecting thread of thought, she had
learned also that she could seldom hope to discover what this cord
might be. To understand his words, now, it would have been necessary
for her to be aware of the net spread for him by Irons, the struggle in
his mind as he talked with Miss Wainwright, and the effort he was now
making to bring himself up to the firmness needed for the important
interview with Mr. Hubbard which lay before him. In the sleepless hours
of the night, Fenton had gone over the ground again and again; he had
painted to himself the baseness of the thing he meant to do, and all
his instincts of loyalty, of taste, of good-breeding, rose against it;
but none the less did he cling doggedly to his determination. His
purpose never wavered. His decision had been made, and this summing up
of the cost did not shake him; it only made him miserable by the keen
appreciation it brought him of the bitter humiliation fate--for so he
viewed it--was heaping upon his head.

The strength and weakness which are often mingled in one character,
like the iron and clay in the image of the prophet's vision, make the
most surprising of the many strange paradoxes of human life. Fenton was
sensuous, selfish, yielding, yet he possessed a tenacity of purpose, a
might of will, which nothing could shake. He looked across the table
now, at his sweet-faced, clear-eyed wife, with a dreadful sense of her
purity, her honor, her remoteness; it cut him to the quick to think
that the breach of trust he had in view would fill her mind with
loathing; yet the possibility of therefore abandoning his purpose did
not occur to him. Indeed, such was his nature, that it might be said
that the possibility of abandoning his deliberately formed intention,
on this or on any other grounds, did not for him exist.

It was one of the peculiarities which he shared with many sensitive and
sensuous natures, that his first thought in any unpleasant situation
was always a reflection upon the bitterness of existence. He always
thought of the laying down of life as the easiest method of escape from
any disagreeable dilemma. He was infected with the distaste of life,
that disease which is seldom fatal, yet which in time destroys all save
life alone. He thought now how he hated living, and the inevitable
reflection came after, how easy it were to get out of the coil of
humanity. A faint smile of bitterness curled his lips as he recalled a
remark which Helen Greyson had once quoted to him as having been made
of him by her dead husband. "He'll want to kill himself, but he won't.
He's too soft-hearted, and he'd never forget other people and their
opinions." He had acknowledged to himself that this was true, and he
wondered whether Mrs. Greyson appreciated its justice.

The thought of Helen brought up the old days when he had been so
frankly her friend that he had told her everything that was in his
heart except those things which vanity bade him conceal lest he fall in
her estimation.

It was so long since he had known a friend on those intimate terms
under which it makes no especial difference what is said, since even in
silence the understanding is perfect, and the pleasure of talking
depends chiefly on the exchange of the signs of complete mutual
comprehension, that the old days appealed to him with wonderful power.
There is an immeasurable and soothing restfulness in such intercourse,
especially to a man like Fenton, in whom exists an inner necessity
always to say something when he talks; and as he recalled them now,
something almost a sob rose in Arthur's throat. Many men suppose
themselves to be cultivating their intellect when they are only, by the
gratification of their tastes, quickening their susceptibilities; and
Fenton's whole self-indulged existence had resulted chiefly in
rendering him more sensitive to the discomforts of a universe in the
making of which other things had been considered besides his pleasure.

He looked across the breakfast table at his wife. He noted with
appreciation the beautiful line of her cheek outlined against the dark
leather of the wall behind her. He felt a twinge of remorse for coming
so far short of her ideal of him. He knew how resolutely she refused to
see his worst side, and he reflected with philosophy half bitter and
half contemptuous, that no woman ever lived who could wholly outgrow
the feeling that to believe or to disbelieve a thing must in some
occult way affect its truth. At least she had fulfilled all the
unspoken promises, so much more important than vows put into words
could be, with which she had married him. A remorseful feeling came
over his mind, and instantly followed the instinctive self-excuse that
she could never suffer as keenly as he suffered, no matter how greatly
he disappointed her.

"People are to be envied or pitied," he said aloud, "not for their
circumstances, but for their temperaments."

Edith looked up inquiringly. He went round to where she was sitting,
smiling to think how far she must be from divining his thought.

"I stayed at the club too late last night," he said, stooping to kiss
her smooth white forehead in an unenthusiastic, habitual way which
always stung her. "Some of the fellows insisted upon my playing poker,
and I got so excited that I didn't sleep when I did get to bed."

Edith sighed, but she made no useless remonstrances.

Walking down to his studio, carefully dressed, faultlessly booted and
gloved, and, as Tom Bently was accustomed to say, "too confoundedly
well groomed for an artist," Fenton tried in vain to determine how he
should manage the important conversation with Mr. Hubbard. He had
racked his brains in the night in vain attempts to solve this problem,
but in the end he was forced to leave everything for chance or
circumstances to decide.

When Stewart Hubbard sat before him, Fenton was conscious of a tingling
excitement in every vein, but outwardly he was only the more calm. A
close observer might have noticed a nervous quickness in his movements,
and a certain shrillness in his voice, but the sitter gave no heed to
these tokens, which he would have regarded as of no importance had he
seen them. The talk was at first rather rambling, and was not kept up
with much briskness on either side. Fenton, indeed, was so absorbed in
the task which lay before him that he hardly followed the other's
remarks, and he suddenly became aware that he had lost the thread of
conversation altogether, so that he could not possibly imagine what the
connection was when Hubbard observed,--

"Yes, it is certainly the hardest thing in the world for one being to
comprehend another."

Fenton rallied his wits quickly, and retorted with no apparent
hesitation,--

"It is so. Probably a cat couldn't possibly understand how a human
mother can properly bring up a child when she has no tail for her
offspring to play with."

"That wasn't exactly what I meant," the other returned, laughing; "but
what a fellow you are to give an unexpected turn to things."

"Do you think so?" the artist said. Then, with a painful feeling of
tightness about the throat, and a soberness of tone which he could not
prevent, he added,--"That is a reason why I have always felt that I was
one of those comparatively rare persons whom wealth would adorn, if
somebody would only show me an investment to get rich on."

"You are one of those still rarer persons who would adorn wealth," Mr.
Hubbard retorted, ignoring the latter part of the artist's remark.
"Only that you are so astonishingly outspoken, that you might cause a
revolution if you had Vanderbilt's millions to add weight to your
words. It doesn't do to be too honest."

The sigh which left Fenton's lips was almost one of relief, although he
felt that this first attempt to turn the talk into financial channels
had failed.

"No," he replied. "Civilized honesty consists largely in making the
truth convey a false impression, so that one is saved a lie in words
while telling one in effect."

"It is strange how we cling to that old idea that as long as the letter
of what we say is true it is no matter if the spirit be false," was Mr.
Hubbard's response. "I thought of it yesterday at the meeting of the
committee on the statue, when we were all sitting there trying to get
the better of each other by telling true falsehoods."

"How does the statue business come on?" Fenton asked.

"Not very fast. I am sure I wish I was out of it. America always was a
trouble, and this time is no exception to the rule."

"I hope," Arthur said, speaking with more seriousness, "that Grant
Herman will be given the commission. He's all and away the best man."

He had secretly a feeling that he was putting an item on the credit
side of his account with the sculptor in urging his fitness for this
work.

"It is hard to do anything with Calvin and Irons. I've always been for
Herman, but I don't mind telling you in confidence that I stand alone
on the committee."

"Isn't there any way of helping things on? Wouldn't a petition from the
artists do some good?"

"It might. But if you get up one don't let me know. I'd rather be able
to say that I had no 

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