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With the Procession

by Henry Blake Fuller · English · Gutenberg #8891 · 516,235 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: With the Procession

Author: Henry Blake Fuller


        
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8891]
                Most recently updated: August 3, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8891

Credits: Produced by Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH THE PROCESSION ***




Produced by Distributed Proofreaders









HENRY B. FULLER

With

the

Procession


Introduction by Mark Harris




I


When old Mr. Marshall finally took to his bed, the household viewed this
action with more surprise than sympathy, and with more impatience than
surprise. It seemed like the breaking down of a machine whose
trustworthiness had been hitherto infallible; his family were almost
forced to the acknowledgement that he was but a mere human being after
all. They had enjoyed a certain intimacy with him, in lengths varying
with their respective ages, but they had never made a full avowal that
his being rested on any tangible physical basis. Rather had they fallen
into the way of considering him as a disembodied intelligence, whose sole
function was to direct the transmutation of values and credits and
resources and opportunities into the creature comforts demanded by the
state of life unto which it had please Providence to call them; and their
dismay was now such as might occur at the Mint if the great stamp were
suddenly and of its own accord to cease its coinage of double-eagles and
to sink into a silence of supine idleness. His wife and children
acknowledged, indeed, his head and his hands--those it were impossible to
overlook; but his head stopped with the rim of his collar, while his
hands--those long, lean hands, freckled, tufted goldishly between joints
and knuckles--they never followed beyond the plain gilt sleeve-buttons
(marked with a Roman M) which secured the overlapping of his cuffs. No,
poor old David Marshall was like one of the early Tuscan archangels,
whose scattered members are connected by draperies merely, with no
acknowledged organism within; nor were his shining qualities fully
recognized until the resolutions passed by the Association of Wholesale
Grocers reached the hands of his bereaved----

But this is no way to begin.

       *       *       *       *       *

The grimy lattice-work of the drawbridge swung to slowly, the steam-tug
blackened the dull air and roiled the turbid water as it dragged its
schooner on towards the lumber-yards of the South Branch, and a long line
of waiting vehicles took up their interrupted course through the smoke
and the stench as they filed across the stream into the thick of business
beyond: first a yellow street-car; then a robust truck laden with
rattling sheet-iron, or piled high with fresh wooden pails and willow
baskets; then a junk-cart bearing a pair of dwarfed and bearded Poles,
who bumped in unison with the jars of its clattering springs; then,
perhaps, a bespattered buggy, with reins jerked by a pair of sinewy and
impatient hands. Then more street-cars; then a butcher's cart loaded with
the carcasses of calves--red, black, piebald--or an express wagon with a
yellow cur yelping from its rear; then, it may be, an insolently
venturesome landau, with crested panel and top-booted coachman. Then
drays and omnibuses and more street-cars; then, presently, somewhere in
the line, between the tail end of one truck and the menacing tongue of
another, a family carry-all--a carry-all loaded with its family, driven
by a man of all work, drawn by a slight and amiable old mare, and
encumbered with luggage which shows the labels of half the hotels of
Europe.

It is a very capable and comprehensive vehicle, as conveyances of that
kind go. It is not new, it is not precisely in the mode; but it shows
material and workmanship of the best grade, and it is washed, oiled,
polished with scrupulous care. It advances with some deliberation, and
one might fancy hearing in the rattle of its tires, or in the suppressed
flapping of its rear curtain, a word of plaintive protest. "I am not of
the great world," it seems to say; "I make no pretence to fashion. We
are steady and solid, but we are not precisely in society, and we are
far, very far indeed, from any attempt to cut a great figure. However, do
not misunderstand our position; it is not that we are under, nor that we
are exactly aside; perhaps we have been left just a little behind. Yes,
that might express it--just a little behind."

How are they to catch up again--how rejoin the great caravan whose fast
and furious pace never ceases, never slackens? Not, assuredly, by the
help of the little sorrel mare, whose white mane swings so mildly, and
whose pale eyelashes droop so diffidently when some official hand at a
crowded crossing brings her to a temporary stand-still. Not by the help
of the coachman, who wears a sack-coat and a derby hat, and whose frank,
good-natured face turns about occasionally for a friendly participation
in the talk that is going on behind. Can it be, then, that any hopes for
an accelerated movement are packed away in the bulging portmanteau which
rests squeezed in between the coachman's legs? Two stout straps keep it
from bursting, and the crinkled brown leather of its sides is completely
pasted over with the mementoes used by the hosts of the Old World to
speed the parting guest. "London" and "Paris" shine in the lustre of the
last fortnight; "Tangier" is distinctly visible; "Buda-Pest" may be
readily inferred despite the overlapping labels of "Wien" and "Bâle";
while away off to one corner a crumpled and lingering shred points back,
though uncertainly, to the Parthenon and the Acropolis. And in the midst
of this flowery field is planted a large M after the best style of the
White Star Line.

Who has come home bearing all these sheaves?

Is it, to begin with, the young girl who shares the front seat with the
driver, and who faces with an innocent unconcern all the clamor and evil
of a great city? There is a half-smile on her red lips, and her black
eyes sparkle with a girlish gayety--for she does not know how bad the
world is. At the same time her chin advances confidently, and her dark
eyebrows contract with a certain soft imperiousness--for she does not
know how hard the world is nor how unyielding. Sometimes she withdraws
her glance from the jostling throng to study the untidy and overlapping
labels on the big portmanteau; she betrays a certain curiosity, but she
shows at the same time a full determination not to seem over-impressed.
No, the returned traveller is not Rosy Marshall; all that _she_ knows of
life she has learned from the broadcast cheapness of English
story-tellers and from a short year's schooling in New York.

Is it, then, the older girl who fills half of the rear seat and who, as
the cruel phrase goes, will never see thirty again? She seems to be tall
and lean, and one divines, somehow, that her back is narrow and of a
slab-like flatness. Her forehead is high and full, and its bulging
outlines are but slightly softened by a thin and dishevelled bang. Her
eyes are of a light and faded blue, and have the peculiar stare which
results from over-full eyeballs when completely bordered by white. Her
long fingers show knotted joints and nails that seem hopelessly plebeian;
sometimes she draws on open-work lace mitts, and then her hands appear to
be embroiling each other in a mutual tragedy. No, poor Jane is
thoroughly, incorruptibly indigenous; she is the best and dearest girl in
half the world, as you shall see; but all her experiences have lain
between Sandusky and Omaha.

Perhaps, then, the returned traveller is the elderly woman seated by her
side. Perhaps--and perhaps not. For she seems a bit too dry and sapless
and self-contained--as little susceptible, in fact, to the gentle dews of
travel as an umbrella in a waterproof case. Moreover, it is doubtful if
her bonnet would pass current beyond the national confines. One surmises
that she became years ago the victim of arrested development; that she
is a kind of antiquated villager--a geologic survival from an earlier
age; that she is a house-keeper cumbered and encompassed by minute cares
largely of her own making. It is an easy guess that, for Eliza Marshall,
London is in another world, that Tangier is but a remote and
impracticable abstraction, and that all her strength and fortitude might
be necessary merely to make the trip to Peoria.

There is but one other occupant of the carriage remaining--the only one,
after all, who can or could be the owner of the baggage. He is a young
man of twenty-three, and he sits with his back to the horse on a little
seat which has been let down for the occasion between the usual two; his
knees crowd one of the girls and his elbows the other. He seems
uncommonly alert and genial; he focusses brilliantly the entire attention
of the party. His little black mustache flaunts with a picturesque
upward flourish, and it is supplemented by a small tuft at the edge of
his underlip--an embellishment which overlays any slight trace of
lingering juvenility with an effect which is most knowing, experienced,
caprine, if you like, and which makes fair amends for the blanched
cheeks, wrinkled brows and haggard eyes that the years have yet to
accomplish for him. A navy-blue tie sprinkled with white interlacing
circles spreads loosely and carelessly over the lapels of his coat; and
while his clever eyes dart intelligently from one side to the other of
the crowded thoroughfare, his admiring family make their own shy
observations upon his altered physiognomy and his novel apparel--upon
his shoes and his hat particularly; they become acquainted thus with the
Florentine ideal of foot-wear, and the latest thing evolved by Paris in
the way of head-gear.

This young man has passed back through London quite unscathed. Deduce
from his costume the independence of his character and the precise slant
of his propensities.

The carriage moves on, with a halt here, a spurt there, and many a jar
and jolt between; and Truesdale Marshall throws over the shifting and
resounding panorama an eye freshened by a four years' absence and
informed by the contemplation of many strange and diverse spectacles.
Presently a hundred yards of unimpeded travel ends in a blockade of
trucks and street-cars and a smart fusillade of invective. During this
enforced stoppage the young man becomes conscious of a vast unfinished
structure that towers gauntly overhead through the darkening and
thickening air, and for which a litter of iron beams in the roadway
itself seems to promise an indefinite continuation skyward.

"Two, three, four--six, seven--nine," he says, craning his neck and
casting up his eye. Then, turning with a jocular air to the elder lady
opposite, "I don't suppose that Marshall & Belden, for instance, have got
up to nine stories yet!"

"Marshall & Belden!" she repeated. Her enunciation was strikingly
ejaculatory, and she laid an impatient and unforgiving emphasis upon the
latter name. "I don't know what will happen if your father doesn't assert
himself pretty soon."

"I should think as much!" observed the elder girl, explosively; "or they
will never get up even to seven. The idea of Mr. Belden's proposing to
enlarge by taking that ground adjoining! But of course poor pa didn't put
up the building himself, nor anything; oh no! So _he_ doesn't know
whether the walls will stand a couple of extra stories or not. Upon my
word," she went on with increased warmth, "I don't feel quite sure
whether pa was the one to start the business in the first place and to
keep it going along ever since, or whether he's just a new errand-boy,
who began there a week ago! August, are we stuck here to stay forever?"

The little sorrel mare started up again and entered upon another stage of
her journey. The first lights began to appear in the store-fronts; the
newsboys were shrieking the last editions of the evening papers; the
frenzied comedy of belated shopping commenced to manifest itself upon the
pavements.

The throng of jostling women was especially thick and eager before a vast
and vulgar front whose base was heaped with cheap truck cheaply ticketed,
and whose long row of third-story windows was obscured by a great reach
of cotton cloth tacked to a flimsy wooden frame. Unprecedented bargains
were offered in gigantic letters by the new proprietors, "Eisendrath &
Heide..."--the rest of the name flapped loosely in the wind.

"Alas, poor Wethersby, I knew him well," observed Marshall, absently. He
cast a pensive eye upon the still-remaining name of the former
proprietor, and took off his hat to weigh it in his hands with a pretence
of deep speculation. "Well, the Philistines haven't got hold of _us_ yet,
have they?" he remarked, genially; he had not spent six months in Vienna
for nothing. "I suppose we are still worth twenty sous in the franc, eh?"

"I suppose," replied his mother, with a grim brevity. She rather groped
for his meaning, but she was perfectly certain of her own.

"I guess pa's all right," declared his sister, "as long as he is left
alone and not interfered with."

The evening lights doubled and trebled--long rows of them appeared
overhead at incalculable altitudes. The gongs of the cable cars clanged
more and more imperiously as the crowds surged in great numbers round
grip and trailer. The night life of the town began to bestir itself, and
little Rosy, from her conspicuous place, beamed with a bright intentness
upon its motley spectacle, careless of where her smiles might fall. For
her the immodest theatrical poster drooped in the windows of saloons, or
caught a transient hold upon the hoardings of uncompleted buildings;
brazen blare and gaudy placards (disgusting rather than indecent) invited
the passer-by into cheap museums and music-halls; all the unclassifiable
riff-raff that is spawned by a great city leered from corners, or
slouched along the edge of the gutters, or stood in dark doorways, or
sold impossible rubbish in impossible dialects wherever the public
indulgence permitted a foothold.

To Rosy's mother all this involved no impropriety. Eliza Marshall's
Chicago was the Chicago of 1860, an Arcadia which, in some dim and
inexplicable way, had remained for her an Arcadia still--bigger, noisier,
richer, yet different only in degree, and not essentially in kind. She
herself had traversed these same streets in the days when they were the
streets of a mere town, Fane, accompanying her mother's courses as a
child, had seen the town develop into a city. And now Rosy followed in
her turn, though the _urbs in horto_ of the earlier time existed only
in the memory of "old settlers" and in the device of the municipal
seal, while the great Black City stood out as a threatening and evil
actuality. Mild old Mabel had drawn them all in turn or together, and had
philosophized upon the facts as little as any of them; but Rosy's brother
(who had been about, and who knew more than he was ever likely to tell)
looked round at her now and then with a vague discomfort.

"There!" called their mother, suddenly; "did you see that?" A big lumpish
figure on the crossing had loomed up at the mare's head, a rough hand had
seized her bridle, and a raw voice with a rawer brogue had vented a piece
of impassioned profanity on both beast and driver. "Well, I don't thank
that policeman for hitting Mabel on the nose, I can tell him. August,
did you get his number?"

"No'm," answered the coachman. He turned round familiarly. "I got his
breath."

"I should think so," said Truesdale. "And such shoes as they have, and
such hands, and such linen! Didn't that fellow see what we were? Couldn't
he realize that we pay for the buttons on his coat? Mightn't he have
tried to apprehend that we were people of position here long before he
had scraped his wretched steerage-money together? And what was it he had
working in his cheek?"

"I think I know," responded August mumbling.

"Like enough," rejoined Truesdale, with his eye upon the coachman's own
jaw.

His mother's sputter of indignation died rapidly away. It was, indeed,
her notion that the guardians of the public peace should show some degree
of sobriety, respect, neatness, and self-control, as well as a reasonable
familiarity with the accents of the country; but her Arcadia was full of
painful discrepancies, and she did not add to her own pain by too serious
an attempt to reconcile them. Besides, what is a policeman compared with
a detective?

Mabel, released from the arm of the law, jarred over another line of car
tracks, whereon a long row of monsters glared at one another's slow
advances with a single great red eye, and then she struck a freer gait on
the succeeding stretch of Belgian blocks. Presently she passed a lofty
building which rose in colonnades one above another, but whose walls were
stained with smoke, whose windows were half full of shattered panes,
and whose fraudulent metallic cornice curled over limply and jarred and
jangled in the evening breeze--one more of the vicissitudes of mercantile
life.

"Well, I'm glad the fire-fiend hasn't got Marshall & Co. yet," said the
young man, restored to good-humor by the sight of another's misfortune.
He used unconsciously the old firm name.

"But he'd get us fast enough if the insurance was taken off," declared
Jane. "Do you know, Dicky," she went on, "how much that item costs us a
year? Or have you any idea how much it has amounted to in the last
twenty, without our ever getting one cent back? Well, there's ten
thousand in the Hartford and eight in the Monongahela and eleven in--"

"Dear me, Jane!" exclaimed her brother, in some surprise; "where do you
pick up all this?"

Rosy turned her head half round. "Mr. Brower tells her," she said, with a
disdainful brevity.

Her face was indistinct in the twilight, but if its expression
corresponded with the inflection of her voice, her nostrils were inflated
and her lips were curled in disparagement. To Jane, in her dark corner of
the carriage, this was patent enough. Indeed, it was sufficiently obvious
to all that Jane's years availed little to save her from the searching
criticism of her younger sister, and that Miss Rosamund Marshall bestowed
but slight esteem--or, at least, but slight approval--upon Mr. Theodore
Brower.

"Supposing he _does_ tell me!" called Jane, absurdly allowing herself to
be put on the defensive. "It's a mighty good thing, I take it. If there's
anybody else in the family but me who knows or cares anything about poor
pa's business, I should like to be told who it is!"

"That will do, Jane," sounded her mother's voice in cold correction.
"There's no need for you to talk so. Your father has run his own business
now for thirty-five years, with every year better than the year before,
and I imagine he knows how to look out for himself. Thank goodness, we
are on a respectable pavement once more."

Mabel, turning a sudden corner, had given them a quick transition from
the rattle and jar of granite to the gentle palpitation that is possible
on well-packed macadam. The carriage passed in review a series of
towering and glittering hotels, told off a score or more of residences of
the elder day, and presently drew up before the gate of an antiquated
homestead in the neighborhood of the Panoramas.

"Just the same old place," murmured Truesdale, as he writhed out of his
cramped quarters and stood on the carriage-block in the dusk to stretch
his legs. "Wonderful how we contrive to stand stock-still in the midst of
all this stir and change!"




II


It was at Vevey, one morning late in August, that Truesdale Marshall
received the letter which turned his face homeward--the summons which
made it seem obligatory for him to report at headquarters, as he phrased
it, without too great a delay. He was pacing along the terrace which
bounded the pension garden lakeward, and his eye wandered back and forth
between the superscription of the envelope and the distant mountain-shore
of Savoy, as it appeared through the tantalizing line of clipped acacias
which bordered the roadway that ran below him.

"'Richard T. Marshall, Esq.,'" he read, slowly, with his eye on the
accumulation of post-marks and renewed addresses. "They keep it up right
along, don't they? I can't make them feel that initials on an envelope
are not the best form. I can't bring them to see that 'Esq.' on foreign
letters is worse than a superfluity." He referred once more to the
mountains of Savoy; they seemed to offer no loophole of escape. "Well,
I've got to do it, I suppose."

He made some brief calculations, and found that he could put himself in
marching order within a month or so. There was the trunk stored at
Geneva; there was that roomful of furniture at
Freiburg--Freiburg-im-Breisgau; there was that brace of paintings boxed
up in Florence; and there were the frayed and loosely flying ends of
many miscellaneous friendships.

"I should think the end of October might do for them," he droned,
reflectively. "They can't mean to cut me off any shorter than that."

He saw the steamer taking on passengers between the two rotund
chestnut-trees that adorned the end of the stubby little stone pier.
Voices of shrieking gladness came across from the coffee-tables on the
terrace of the Three Crowns, his nearest neighbor to the right.

"Well, America is meeting me half way," he said; "I don't want to seem
reluctant myself. Suppose we make it Southampton, about October 15th?"

Truesdale Marshall had been away from home and friends for about the
length of time ordinarily required by a course through college, but it
was not at college that most of this period had been passed. He had left
Yale at the end of his sophomore year, and had taken passage, not for
Chicago, but for Liverpool, compromising thus his full claims on nurture
from an alma mater for the more alluring prospect of culture and
adventure on the Continent. This supplementary course of self-improvement
and self-entertainment had now continued for three years.

He had written back to his family at discreet intervals, his
communications not being altogether untinctured, it is true, by
considerations of a financial nature; and his sister Jane, who charged
herself with the preservation of this correspondence, would have
undertaken to reconstruct his route and to make a full report of his
movements up to date on ten minutes' notice. She kept his letters in a
large box-file that she had teased from her father at the store; and two
or three times a year she overhauled her previous entries, so to speak,
and added whatever new ones were necessary to bring her books down to the
present day.

She pleased herself, on the occasion of such reviews, with the thought
that her brother's long absence was so largely and so laboriously
educational. There, for example, was his winter and spring at Heidelberg,
which she figured as given over to Kant and Hegel. This sojourn was
attested by a photograph which showed her brother in a preposterous
little round cap, as well as with a bar of sticking-plaster (not markedly
philosophical, it must be confessed) upon one cheek.

Again, there was his six months' stay in Paris, during which time he had
dabbled in pigments at one of the studios affected by Americans. Her
vouchers for this period consisted of several water-colors; they were
done in a violent and slap-dash fashion, and had been inspired,
apparently, by scenes in the environs of the capital. They were marked
"Meudon" and "St. Cloud" and "Suresnes," with the dates; both names and
dates were put where they showed up very prominently. Jane was rather
overcome by these sketches on a first view, and after she had pinned them
up on the walls of her bedroom (she had made no scruple over an immediate
individual appropriation) she was obliged to acknowledge that you had to
step back some little distance in order to "get them."

Then there was his year at Milan, during which he was engaged in the
cultivation of his voice at the Conservatory. "A whole year," said
innocent Jane to herself; "think of Dick's staying in one place as long
as that!" She made no account of the easily accessible joys of Monte
Carlo, but figured him, instead, as running interminable scales at all
hours of day and night, and as participating, now and then, in the chorus
at the Scala, for which purpose, as he wrote her, he had had a pair
of tights made to order. In another letter he sent her a pen-and-ink
sketch of himself as he appeared while studying the last act of
"Favorita." He explained that the large looking-glasses surrounding him
were designed to give the disillusioned Fernando opportunity to see
whether his facial expression was corresponding to the nature of the
music he was interpreting.

All this completely overpowered poor Jane; it enveloped her brother's
head in a roseate halo; it wrapped him in the sweet and voluminous folds
of a never-failing incense; it imparted a warm glow to his coolish summer
in the Engadine, and it illumined his archaeological prowlings through
the Peloponnesus; it opened up a dozen diverging vistas to the
enthusiastic girl herself, and advanced her rapidly in long courses of
expansion and improvement. Above all, it filled her with a raging
impatience for his return. "Between him and me," she would say to
herself, "something _may_ be done. Pa'll never do anything to get us out
of this rut; nor ma. Neither will Roger nor Alice. And Rosy--well, Rosy's
too young to count on, yet. But Richard Truesdale Marshall, the younger
son of the well-known David Marshall, of Lake Street, recently returned
from a long course of travel and study abroad"--she seemed to be quoting
from the printed column--"_can_. Especially when assisted by his sister,
the clever and intellectual Miss Jane Marshall, who--"

"Oh, bother this bang!" exclaimed Miss Jane Marshall, pettishly. She
threw her comb down between pin-cushion and cologne bottle, and flattened
a frowning and protesting glance against her mirror. "I guess I'll give
up trying to be beautiful, and just be quaint."

David Marshall received his son with less exaltation. He had a vivid
recollection of the liberal letter of credit which had started the young
man on his way, and this recollection had subsequently been touched up
and heightened by the payment of many drafts for varying but considerable
amounts; and he was now concerning himself with the practical question,
What have I got for my money? He felt his own share in the evolution
of this brilliant and cultured youth, whose corona of accomplishments
might well dazzle and even abash a plain business person; and he awaited
with interest a response to the reasonable interrogation, to what end
shall all these means be turned? He received his son with a dry and
cautious kindness, determined not to be too precipitate in ascertaining
the young man's ideas as to the future--a week more or less could make no
great difference now.

David Marshall was a tall, spare man whose slow composure of carriage
invested him with a sort of homely dignity. He wore a reddish beard, now
largely touched with white--a mixture whose effect prompted the
suggestion that his grandfather might have been a Scotchman; and the look
from his blue eyes (though now no longer at their brightest) convinced
you that his sight was competent to cover the field of vision to which he
had elected to restrict himself. He seemed completely serious, to have
been so always, to have been born half grown up, to have been dowered at
the start with too keen a consciousness of the burdens and
responsibilities of life. Coltishness, even by a retrospect of fifty
years, it was impossible to attribute to him. You imagined him as having
been caught early, broken to harness at once, and kept between the shafts
ever since. It was easy to figure him as backing into position with a
sweet and reasonable docility--a docility which saw no other course or
career for a properly minded young horse, and which looked upon the
juvenile antics of others in the herd as an unintelligible and rather
reprehensible procedure. He knew what he was for, and his way was before
him.

He had acted on his knowledge, and now, at sixty, he seemed still to be
travelling over the same long straight road, blinders at his eyes, a high
wall on either side, no particular goal in the dusty distance, and an air
of patient, self-approving resignation all about him. His burden, too,
had increased with the years--just as his rut had grown deeper. Counting
his family and his poor relations, and his employés and _their_ families
and poor relations, five or six hundred people were dependent on him.
Many of these, of course, had seats so low that they were almost choked
by the dust of the roadway; but others, more pleasantly situated, were
able to overlook the enclosing walls and to enjoy the prospect beyond.
Among these last was his younger son, who sat in the highest place of
all, and thence surveyed the universe.

The Marshall house had been built at the time of the opening of the War,
and as far "out" as seemed advisable for a residence of the better sort.
In those days no definite building-line had been established, so that it
was quite a walk from the front gate to the foot of the front steps.
Neither, at that time, was ground too valuable to make a good bit of yard
impracticable--so that the house had plenty of space on all sides. It was
a low, plain, roomy building with a sort of belvedere and a porch or two.
The belvedere was lingeringly reminiscent of the vanishing classic, and
the decorative woodwork of the porches showed some faint traces of the
romantico-lackadaisical style which filled up the years between the ebb
of the Greek and the vulgar flood-tide of Second-empire renaissance.
Taken altogether, a sedate, stable, decorous old homestead, fit for the
family within it.

In the back yard, behind a latticed screen-work, some shrubs and bushes
survived from a garden once luxuriant, but now almost vanished. There had
been a cherry-tree, too--a valiant little grower, which put forth a cloud
of white blossoms late in every May, and filled a small pail with fruit
early in every July. It was thus that Jane was enabled to celebrate her
birthday (which fell about this time of year) with a fair-sized cherry
pie; and in especially favorable seasons enough cherries were left over
to make a small tart for Rosy.

But the atmosphere had years ago become too urban for the poor
cherry-tree, which had long since disappeared from mortal ken; and the
last of the currant-bushes, too, were holding their own but poorly
against the smoke and cinders of metropolitan life. One of Jane's
earliest recollections was that of putting on her flat and taking her tin
pan and accompanying her mother out to pick currants for the annual
jelly-making. Her mother wore a flat, too, and carried a tin pan--both of
proportionate size. The flats had long since been cast aside, and the
pans had become less necessary with the dwindling of the currant-bushes;
but the jelly-making returned with every recurring July. A great many
quarts of alien currants and a great many pounds of white sugar were
fused in that hot and sticky kitchen, and then the red-stained cloths
were hung to dry upon the last remaining bushes. Jane would sometimes
reproach her parent with such a proceeding--which seemed to her hardly
less reprehensible than the seething of a kid in its mother's milk; but
Eliza Marshall had scant receptivity for any such poetical analogies. The
cloths, as seen through the lattice-work, had a somewhat sensational
aspect; they spoke of battle and murder and sudden death, and sometimes
the policeman passing by, if he was a new one, thought for a second that
he had stumbled on a "clew."

Eliza Marshall took this risk quite willingly; the idea of buying her
jelly ready-made never crossed her mind. No; she made her own year after
year, and poured it out into her little glass tumblers, and sealed each
tumbler with a half-sheet of notepaper, and marked each sheet according
to the sort of jelly it protected--sometimes she made grape or
crab-apple, too. She doled out her products very economically during the
winter and spring. Then she would discover, about the first of June,
that she had a three months' supply still on hand. Then, during the
summer, the family would live on jelly and little else.

But she remained, year after year, the same firm, determined, peremptory
person in her kitchen; she never spared herself there, and she never
spared anybody else.

She gave no more quarter at the front of the house than at the back. To
get fresh air into her dim and time-worn parlor and to keep sun and dust
and smoke out--this was her one besetting problem. There were those windy
days at the end of autumn, after the sprinkling-carts had been withdrawn
from the boulevard; there were the days (about three hundred and
sixty-five in the year) when the smoke and cinders from the suburban
trains made her house as untidy as a switch-yard; and there was her
husband's unconquerable propensity for smoking--a pleasure which she
compelled him to take outside on the foot pavement. Here, on pleasant
evenings, he would walk up and down alone, in a slow, meditative
fashion--having little to say and nobody to say it to--until bedtime
came.

This came early--from a habit early formed. The Chicago of his young
married life had given him little reason for being abroad after half-past
nine at night, and he appeared to find little more reason now than then.
It would not, indeed, have been impossible to make him see that, in the
interval, balls, concerts, spectacles, and such-like urban doings had
come on with increasing number and brilliancy, and that there were now
more interests to justify a man in remaining up until half-past ten, or
even until eleven. But you could not have convinced him that all these
opportunities were his.

Yet the consciousness of festivities sometimes obtruded upon his
indifference. Now and then on summer evenings, when the wind was from the
west, certain brazen discords originating a street or two behind the
house would come to advise him that the Circassian girl was on view, or
that a convention of lady snake-charmers was in session. Then there would
be weeks of winter nights when the frozen macadam in front of the house
would ring with a thousand prancing hoofs and rumble for an hour with a
steady flow of carriages, and the walls of the great temple of music a
few hundred yards to the north would throw back all this clamor, with the
added notes of slamming doors and shouted numbers and epic struggles
between angry drivers and determined policemen; sometimes he would extend
his smoking stroll far enough to skirt the edge of all this Babel. Then,
towards midnight, long after all staid and sensible people were abed, the
flood would roll back, faster yet under the quiet moon, louder yet
through the frosty air. But he never met the Circassian beauty, and he
would have found "l'Africaine," for example, both tedious and
unreasonable. To him each of these publics was new, and no less new than
alien. Besides, it would have seemed an uncanny thing to be abroad and
stirring at midnight.

Why did he go to bed at half-past nine? In order that he might be at the
store by half-past seven. Why must he be at the store by half-past seven?
Because a very large area to the west and northwest of the town looked to
him for supplies of teas, coffees, spices, flour, sugar, baking-powder;
because he had always been accustomed to furnish these supplies; because
it was the only thing he wanted to do; because it was the only thing he
could do; because it was the only thing he was pleased and proud to do;
because it was the sole thing which enabled him to look upon himself as a
useful, stable, honored member of society.

But it need not be supposed that the Marshalls in their young married
days had lived totally bereft of social diversion. Quite the contrary.
They had had tea-parties and card-parties now and then, and more than
once they had thrown their house open for a church sociable. But the day
came when the church jumped from its old site three blocks away to a new
site three miles away. And by that time most of their old neighbors and
fellow church-members had gone too--some southward, some northward, some
heavenward. Then business, in the guise of big hotels, began marching
down the street upon them, and business in all manner of guise ran up
towering walls behind them that shut off the summer sun hours before it
was due to sink; and traffic rang incessant gongs at their back door, and
drew lengthening lines of freight-cars across the lake view from their
front one; and Sunday crowds strolled and sprawled over the wide green
between the roadway and the waterway, and tramps and beggars and peddlers
advanced daily in a steady and disconcerting phalanx, and bolts and bars
and chains and gratings and eternal vigilance were all required to keep
mine from becoming thine; until, in the year of grace 1893, the Marshalls
had almost come to realize that they were living solitary and in a state
of siege. But they had never yet thought of capitulation nor of retreat;
they were the Old Guard; they were not going to surrender, nor to die
either.

As the advance guard of all, old David Marshall frequently occupied the
most advanced bastion of all, the parlor bay-window. Here, in the
half-dark, he was accustomed to sit and think; and his family let him sit
and think, unconscious that it would sometimes be a kindness to break in
upon the habit. He pondered on the markets and on the movements of trade;
he kept one eye for the shabby wayfarers who threw a longing look upon
his basement gratings, and another for the showers of sparks and black
plumes of smoke which came to remind him of corporate encroachments upon
municipal rights. And here one evening he sat, some few days after his
son's return, while a hubbub of female voices came to him from the next
room. His sister-in-law from three miles down the street, and his married
daughter from ten miles out in the suburbs, had come to show some
civility to the returned traveller, and the conjunction of two such stars
was not to be effected in silence. Nor was silence to be secured even by
a retreat from one room to another.

"Well, pa, you _are_ here, sure enough." A hand pulled aside the curtain
and made the bay-window a part of the parlor again. "Poking off by
yourself, and thinking--I know. When I've told you so many times not to."

It was Jane. It was her office to keep the family from disintegration.
None of them realized it--hardly she herself.

She perched on the arm of his big chair, placed her hand on his forehead,
and looked in his face with a quizzical pretence of impatience. These
little passages sometimes occurred in the bay-window--hardly anywhere
else.

"Well, what is it this time?" she asked. Her intention was
tender, but her voice issued with a kind of explosive grate--the
natural product of vocal cords racked by the lake winds of thirty springs
and wrecked by a thousand sudden and violent transitions from heat to
cold and back again. "Not Mr. Belden, I hope?"

"No, Jennie. That will come out all right, I expect. We had a talk with
the builder about it today."

He looked at her with a kind of wan and patient smile. His own voice was
dry, husky, sibilant--sixty years of Lake Michigan.

She smiled back at his "Jennie"; that was always her name on such
occasions. "It isn't about Oolong?" she asked, in burlesque anxiety.

"No."

"Well, then, is it the--Sisters?"

"Not the Sisters. They were in last week."

"Guess again, then," said Jane, perseveringly. "Is it--is it the
Benevolent Policemen?"

"No, not the Policemen. They won't be around for a month yet."

Her hand dropped to his shoulder and her eyes searched his. To another
they might have seemed staring; to him they were only intent. "Poor pa;
he's like a ten-pin standing at the end of the alley, isn't he? They all
take a turn at him, don't they?"

"I'm afraid that's about it, Jennie." He smiled rather wanly again and
smoothed her hand with his own.

"Well, what else is there?" pondered Jane. "Is it the Afro-American
bishop raising the mortgage on their chapel?"

"No. I guess the Afro-Americans have about paid things off by this time."

"How lonesome they must leave you? H'm! is it the Michigan Avenue
Property Owners assessing you again to fight the choo-choo cars?"

Her father shook his head and almost laughed.

"Is it The Wives of the Presidents'? Is it 'The Mothers of Great Men'?"

"What a girl!" he said, and laughed aloud. It seemed as if he wanted to
laugh.

She eyed him narrowly. "There's only one thing more I can think of," she
declared, screwing up her mouth and her eyes. "But I sha'n't ask you
that--it's too silly. If I imagined for a moment that you could be
thinking about old Mother Van Horn--"

She paused. Her father cast down his eyes half guiltily.

"Don't say you are, pa. That would be too absurd. You, with all the
important things you have to carry in your head, to waste a minute on
that frowzy old hag! It isn't worth it; it's nonsense."

"I don't know whether it is or not," responded her father, slowly. He
passed a careful hand through the fringe of the chair. "That's what I'd
like to find out."

"Oh, fiddlesticks!" rejoined Jane. "You sha'n't sit poking here in the
dark and thinking of any such thing as that--not another minute. Come in
and hear Dick tell how those students in Paris tied him to the wall and
daubed him all red and green, and what he did to get even. _That's_ worth
while. And you haven't seen Aunt Lyddy yet, have you? So is _that_--isn't
it? Then come along, do."




III


  "'When I was a student at Cadiz
   I played on the Spanish guitar;
 I used to make love to the ladies'--"


This brief snatch of song ended with the obvious and, indeed, inevitable
rhyme for "Cadiz," and the singer completed the stanza by throwing an
arch and rather insinuating glance at the young man who was lounging
negligently on the chair beside her own. She herself leaned back rather
negligently too, with her feet crossed; her elbows were crooked at
varying angles, her fingers pressed imaginary frets or plucked at
imaginary strings, and the spectator was supposed to be viewing an
Andalusian grace and passion abandoned to the soft yet compelling power
of music.

It was thus that Truesdale Marshall was welcomed home by his aunt Lydia.

His aunt Lydia--Mrs. Lydia Rhodes--was a plump and vivacious little
brunette of forty, with a gloss on her black hair and a sparkle in her
black eyes. She still retained a good deal of the superabundant vitality
of youth; in her own house, when the curtains were down and the company
not too miscellaneous, she was sometimes equal to a break-down or a
cake-walk. She was impelled by social aspirations of the highest nature,
and was always lamenting, therefore, that she possessed so little
dignity. She was a warm-hearted, impulsive creature, who believed
in living while on earth, and she was willing enough to believe that
others would live too, so far as opportunity offered. It seemed to
Truesdale, just now, as if she might be engaged in a mental review of his
probable experiences abroad--there, certainly, was an opportunity
offered.

"But now that you are back again we expect you to settle down and be
good--a useful member of society, you know." She threw a coquettish smile
on the young man and banished the imaginary guitar.

"Oh, really--" began Truesdale, with a flush and a frown. He glanced over
his shoulder; his mother and sisters were in animated converse on the
other side of the room.

"Yes," his aunt proceeded; "you are old enough to think about marrying.
You don't know how pleasant it would be to have a nice little home of
your own, and your own little wifey to meet you every evening with a
kiss!"

"Dear, dear!" thought Truesdale to himself; "and now she's singing that
song to _me_!" He remembered these familiar strains; they had been
directed many a time and oft to the ear of his brother Roger. Year by
year their plaintive poignancy had grown more acute, along with Roger's
strengthening determination to remain a bachelor.

Truesdale found himself wondering whether his aunt's intense allegiance
to the idea of married life was the sincere expression of a nature
overflowingly affectionate, or a species of sensitive dissimulation
cloaking a disappointment which, by this time, might well have come to be
numbered among the bygones. For it was now six years since Alfred Rhodes,
the gay, the genial, had died. He had cost his wife many anxious moments
and a few sleepless nights. He had left her a moderate fortune, an ample
freedom, and a boy of eight. She had increased her freedom by sending the
boy off to an Eastern school. He visited Eastern relatives during
vacation time, and was doomed to a longer course of knickerbockers than
it would have pleased him to forecast. His mother's heart still
palpitated youthfully; she showed herself in no haste to take her stand
in the ranks of the elder generation.

"Yes," Mrs. Rhodes proceeded, "you must get into business, and then we
shall have to find some nice girl for you."

"The same thoughtful Aunt Lydia," he observed, ironically. He gave his
mustache an upward screw, then dropped his eyes to his knees and his
fingers to the rungs of his chair. His design seemed to be to figure a
slave shrinking on the auction-block. "Do you mean to say you haven't got
one for me already?" He ignored the business side of her proposal.

"Well, you needn't put it _that_ way," she rejoined. "You know perfectly
well that I am not a match-maker, nor anything like it. And it wouldn't
please me at all to have anybody say so of me or to think of me in that
way." She was quite sincere in all this.

Truesdale, however, held the opposite view, and, considering all the
circumstances, liked his aunt none the less. She _was_ a match-maker--a
very keen and persistent one; but he felt that her excesses in this
direction were to be viewed simply as an acknowledgement to fortune for
having guided her own courses to such advantage. She had come out from
Trenton some eighteen years before with a pretty face, a light wardrobe,
a limited purse, and an invitation (extended by a benevolent aunt) to
remain as long as she liked. She had never gone back. She met Alfred
Rhodes, Eliza Marshall's younger brother; and from the slight foothold
offered by her kindly relative she had advanced to an ample fortune and a
complete freedom. She was grateful for all this, and gratitude took the
form of her extending, in turn, unlimited invitations to other girls with
pretty faces, light purses, and limited wardrobes. She almost always had
some comely niece or younger cousin in the house. She drove with them,
she shopped with them, she gave teas and receptions for them. She
summoned young men in numbers; she had her billiard-table re-covered; she
could always produce sherry and cigars when really put to it; she almost
transformed her home into a club-house. "For," said she, "I can never
forget how kind Aunt Marcia was to _me_!"

Such wide-spread beneficence as this had not, of course, excluded her
sister-in-law's daughters. It was really to her aunt Lydia that Rosamund
Marshall was indebted for her year at the New York school; her mother had
unquestioningly accepted Mrs. Rhodes's declaration that the institution
was eminently fashionable and desirable, and her father had committed her
with the greatest confidence and good-will to the conductor of the
east-bound Lake Shore express. And it was to her aunt that the girl was
now looking, after an obscure and wistful fashion, for an introduction
into society, in which, according to the belief of the family, Mrs.
Rhodes occupied a secure and brilliant position. Rosamund had been
revolving matters in her pretty and self-willed little head, and in her
proud and self-willed little heart she had decided upon a formal début.

Her mother was completely nonplussed; she would as soon have wrestled
with the differential calculus. "Why, dear me," she stammered, "there's
Alice; she never came out, and I don't see but what she's got along all
right: good home, nice husband, and everything she wants. And Jane,
now--"

"Oh, _Jane_!" said Rosy, in disdain.

Then she sulked, and reproached her mother with the flat and unprofitable
summer that had followed her return from school, and asked pointedly if
the coming winter was to be like it. "Ha!" exclaimed the poor woman to
herself; "Lyddy is to blame for this; I wish she had never mentioned New
York!" But the year at school was only a remoter cause; the more
immediate one was a pink tea which Rosamund had attended (casually, as it
were, and quite informally) a month back. This was the tigress's first
taste of blood--a pale, diluted fluid, it is true, but it worked all the
effect of a fuller and richer draught.

It developed in Rosamund a sixth sense--one which was to lead her to
lengths that none of her kin could have anticipated. And to the rest of
the family, clucking and scratching in their own retired and restricted
barn-yard, there came the day when they discovered that their little
flock contained at least one bird of a different feather--a bird that
could paddle about the social pond with the liveliest, and could quack,
if need be, with the loudest.

Jane--who had even yet no adequate sense of the strength and pungency of
her younger sister's spirit, but who would not in any event have
hesitated to rush on an individual martyrdom that might secure some
consideration for the collective family--threw herself into the
discussion at once.

"No, don't let's have any party or dance or reception or anything at all.
Not even a two-by-four tea. Don't let's try to be anybody or know
anybody, or give anything or be considered anything. Let's go right on
rusting and vegetating; let's just dry up and shake apart and blow away,
with nobody the wiser for our having been here or the sorrier for our
having gone!"

Her mother heard this outburst with some surprise and not a little
resentment. "Well, Jane, you're quite surpassing yourself to-night. What
do you mean by all this?"

Jane exploded again.

"I mean that I'm simply tired of being a nothing and a nobody in a family
of nothings and nobodies. That's what it comes to. I'm tired of being a
bump on a log. I'm tired of sitting on the fence and seeing the
procession go by. Why can't _we_ go by? Why can't _we_ know people? Why
can't _we_ make ourselves felt? Other folks do."

Mrs. Rhodes passed over in silence this imputation of nullity; she was
not so closely related, after all, that she need allow herself to be
disturbed by it. But sister Alice took up the cudgel with all the ardor
of an immediate connection and all the sensitiveness of a suburban
resident. She even forgot the real, essential object of her visit: to
intimate to her father that if he would give her a carriage, her husband
could pay for the keep of a horse.

She was a contentious blonde, with a thin, aquiline nose and a pair of
flashing steel-blue eyes. Several wisps of straw-colored hair blew about
her temples.

"Thank you, Jane," she said, hotly; "I don't know that I feel myself a
nobody, and I don't feel that I'm exactly a social outcast--even if I
_do_ live beyond the city limits." She turned back a floating lock with a
hasty wave. "It might be to your advantage if you moved somewhere or
other yourselves. I don't see how you can expect to see anybody or know
anybody as long as you are buried in such a sepulchre as this."

Alice was the radical, the innovator of the family. She often brought her
conservative mother to the verge of horror. Hers was the hardy, daring,
and unconventional strain of the pioneer. She liked the edge; if the edge
was a little ragged, so much the better.

"Ho!" cried Jane, sarcastically. "To see anybody or to know anybody we
ought to be out at Riverdale Park, perhaps. Riverdale Park!" she
repeated, with scornful emphasis. "There isn't any river; there isn't any
dale; there isn't any park. Nothing but a lot of wooden houses scattered
over a flat prairie, and a few trees no bigger than a broomstick, and no
more leaves on them either. In the morning the men all rush for the
train, and the rest of the day the nurse-girls trundle the babies along
the plank walks, while 'society' amuses itself. Society consists of Mrs.
Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Alice Robinson. On Wednesday,
Mrs. Smith gives a lunch to Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Robinson. On
Thursday, Mrs. Brown gives a tea to Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs.
Robinson. On Friday, Mrs. Rob--(no, Mrs. Jones--I'm losing the place)
gives a card-party to Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Robinson--in the
daytime, too, mind you. And on Saturday, Mrs. Robinson designs giving a
breakfast to Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones, but finds that the
cook is packing up her things to leave. Quiet in the suburb for a week.
Then Mrs. Smith's sister comes out from town to spend a fortnight. Well,
everybody is anxious to see Mrs. Smith's sister--a new face, you know.
So, after Mrs. Smith has started the second round with another lunch,
Mrs. Brown follows with a tea, as before, for Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Jones,
Mrs. Robinson--_and_ Mrs. Smith's sister. Then Mrs. Jones--but you've all
played the game: for breakfast I had this and that and the other. That is
society in Riverdale Park. It would be too rich for _me_!"

Alice flushed with vexation. Truesdale (who had not come home to treat
local society with too great a degree of seriousness, and who, indeed,
was like enough to take his pleasures beyond any bounds that society
might set) looked on and listened with a kind of indulgent
curiosity--like an explorer listening to the excited pow-wow of some
flock of natives in some remote African jungle.

"Yes," retorted Alice, "according to your own confession more happens
with us in a week than happens with you in a year. And you might as well
acknowledge, at the same time, that there are a few houses in the Park
where the carpets are a little less than fifteen years old, and where
they don't have hideous old what-nots loaded down with all the stuff
accumulated since the year one."

She lifted the corner of a rug with her toe, so as to disclose the
threadbare breadth that it concealed, and she threw an ironical eye upon
a sort of massive and convoluted buffet which displayed a number of
antique Dresden figurines and a pair of old candelabra compounded of
tarnished gilt and broken prisms. "And in the Park," she added, "we
always have new wall-paper at the beginning of every century--it's a
local ordinance!"

"Alice," called her mother, tartly, "take your foot away from that rug.
And don't annoy me about that worn breadth; you know very well I've tried
everywhere to match it. And don't imagine, either, that I'm going to
bundle my wedding presents out of sight for you or anybody else."

"Match it!" cried Alice, unabashed. "Match it? They used the last to
carpet the ark." She trod down the corner of the rug with a firm step.
Then, with her scornful nostrils and sharply critical eyes, she seemed to
be lifting it again.

"Well, then," said her mother. "And now leave it alone." The old lady had
not the slightest idea of replacing her time-accustomed patterns by
anything more current. Nor was her husband, apparently, of a different
mind as concerned the wallpaper. He had followed Jane in from the other
room, and he now sat there, sending a careful eye slowly along the
old-fashioned border, and finding it impossible to believe that any
one could seriously judge it to be grotesquely out of date.

"The carpet's all right, as far as I can see," declared Jane. "What if it
_is_ fifteen years old? Have you got one at Riverdale that is even
fifteen months old? You know you haven't; if you had you'd start a museum
of antiques with it. And as for our budging from this dear old place,
don't you look for it; we're attached to it, even if you're not. Besides,
to move would be to throw away the one advantage that we really have.
Why, think of it!" she continued with a gesticulating and wide-eyed
eloquence. "We have lived right here in this one house over thirty
years. How many families in this town have lived in one house thirty
years? Or twenty? Or even ten? We've always had the same door-plate on
the same door. We've always had the same number in the directory. We
started in a good neighborhood, and we've always stayed here--the only
one in all the town that has anything like an old-time flavor and an
atmosphere of its own--the only one where nice people have always lived
and do live yet. Isn't that better than a course of flats up one street
and down another? Isn't that better than a grand chain through a lot of
shingle-shangled cottages in the suburbs? I should say so. What are they
doing in the East now? They're going back to their old neighborhoods, and
the people who haven't left them at all are the ones who are right on the
top of the pile. We might have some new furniture or something of the
sort, perhaps; but that's different from asking the moving-wagons to come
and cart us out on to the prairie."

David Marshall followed his daughter's harangue with an indulgent
interest and a sympathy by no means scant. He had no profound
apprehension of social values, and no clear-cut conception of a social
career; but he appreciated her loyalty to her lifelong home and to all
its belongings and surroundings. He had reason for supposing that this
loyalty would extend to himself; but Jane was wound up to go, and had no
idea of allowing anything to stand in the way of her disposal of the
question in all its bearings.

"I suppose," she went on, inexorably, "that we imagine ourselves to be
'prominent citizens.' Well, we make a mistake if we do. We may have been
ten years ago, but not now. We've just been falling, falling, falling
behind--that's the amount of it. Now, honest, pa, dear, do the papers
ever come to you nowadays to know what you think about political
prospects or to ask your opinion on the last new street-car route
proposed? Or do they send men around for trade statistics who jubilate in
the issue of Jan. one because we sold five thousand more barrels of flour
this year than last? Now, do they?"

Marshall could not escape the justness of this pointed presentation of
new conditions. "We have enough to bother us," he said, with a slow
reluctance, "without reporters coming round."

"There it is," continued Jane. "Yes, and who cares nowadays about the
volume of the lumber trade or the mortality at the stock-yards? Why, just
those people themselves. The fact is, the town has moved to a higher
plane, and we've got to move with it, or else get left. Why, dear me, if
it wasn't for an intellectual daughter who had the gift of language and
who wrote papers and read them at the club, this family would have
scarcely a connection with latter-day society."

"Good for you, Jane," called her brother. "Give me some of them to read."

"They're pretty good," said their father, unruffledly judicial. Jane was
in the habit of reading him passages that she considered particularly
effective. In listening to her perorations he sometimes felt himself as
assisting at the liquidation of the universe.

"Now, here we are," proceeded Jane, with unabated exegetical energy, "an
old family, with position and plenty of means and everything to make an
impression. Why can't we do it? Why can't we manage to assert ourselves?
I'm not speaking for myself, of course; I'm a back number"--this half
hysterically, between a gulp and a giggle--"I'm 'gone beyond recall,' and
nobody knows that better than I myself. No; I'm speaking for all of us.
Besides, here's Rosy, just coming up, and--"

"Thank you, Jane," remarked Rosamund, with some acerbity. "You needn't
mind me. I can look after myself."

"--and it seems to me," went on Jane, ardently, "that people who have
succeeded might just as well give some outer token of it. I declare, when
I called on Mrs. Bates and went over the place and compared their house
and their way of living with ours--"

Her aunt looked up suddenly. "Mrs. Bates? What Mrs. Bates? Mrs. Granger
Bates?"

"Yes. When I saw what magnificent style she lived in, and how she had
about everything that--"

"So you know Mrs. Bates, too," her aunt again interrupted. "Pleasant
woman, isn't she? Have I ever told you how she and I used to play
backgammon together at St. Augustine?"

"_Have_ you?" muttered Jane. "I should think you had--a dozen times
over!"

"And what were you doing at _her_ house, may I ask?" her aunt queried
further. The geniality of this interrogation hardly concealed its
crudity; Jane felt herself accused of an incongruous and inexplicable
intrusion into a region of unaccustomed splendor and distinction.

"Oh, she was collecting money for her working-girls' lunchroom,"
volunteered Rosy, with a cruel bluntness.

Jane threw an air of outraged dignity upon her younger sister. "So I was.
And I spent a very pleasant hour with her," she said, with some
stateliness. "And I am going there next Wednesday to lunch," she added.

Her aunt looked at her with increasing consideration. She herself had
never been honored with an invitation to the house of Mrs. Granger
Bates--though rather than fail to respond to such an invitation she would
have crawled there (a trifle of some fourteen squares) on her hands and
knees. "Have you known her long?"

"Since ten this morning," contributed Rosy.

"Always," corrected Jane, with a whimsical brevity.

"And how do you find her?" persisted Mrs. Rhodes, with a curious
intentness. "Dear me!" she laughed, self-consciously, "how she did hate
to be beaten! How vexed she always was when I began throwing off first!
How she would bang her dice-box! How she would--"

"She's perfectly grand!" declared Jane, with the loud enthusiasm of a new
and fervent loyalty. "She's the finest woman I ever met. She's the best
woman in the world!" The poor girl attested her earnestness by a tremble
in her voice and a tear in each eye. "And she spoke so nicely of you,
poppy," Jane went on, turning to her father.

"Did she?" said her father, in return. And a quiet smile of reminiscence
played round his lips for full five minutes.

"And she inquired about all of us," Jane proceeded. "She wants to renew
the acquaintance, I think. And she asked about Rosy, too--whether she was
pretty and bright; and I said she was. I expect she's inclined to take an
interest in you," said Jane, in conclusion, turning towards her sister
and dropping these few coals of fire upon her head.

Rosamund caught the proper tone from her aunt and bowed in unaccustomed
meekness to this shower. Alice, however, as a confirmed and condemned
suburbanite, had no idea of exhibiting any great interest in one of the
acknowledged leaders of urban society--an interest which, from the very
nature of things, could have been but futile and unproductive. She
accordingly toyed carelessly and absently with the evening paper, as it
lay on the centre-table.

"H'm," she observed, presently, "those game-dinners at the Pacific are
still going on, aren't they? To-night's the thirty-eighth. Nice things,
too, as I remember them. That's the way I learned to like venison. Here
are some of the people to be there--your Mrs. Bates among them." She
looked across to her father. "Why didn't _you_ go?"

"Give me that paper, Alice," her mother called, with a sharp and sudden
cry. She ran her eye down its column and then turned to her husband.
"Why, David, how did you happen to forget? You know I wouldn't have
missed this for anything."

Marshall checked his lingering smile. He looked at his wife with an
embarrassed pain, and then dropped his eyes to the carpet. "There must
have been some misunderstanding," he stammered. "The invitation was
delayed--or it miscarried. Perhaps it went to the store and got mixed up
with the mail there," he ventured; any improbability would do to soften
the shock.

"Delayed! Miscarried!" cried Jane, in an acute access of anger and
indignation. "Don't believe it! We're dropped, that's all! Well, what
else can we expect? How are we going to hold our own against all these
thousands and thousands of newcomers if we don't do anything? That's what
I've been telling you all along. We've got to wake up and make an effort.
Give me that paper." She snatched it from her mother. "Yes, they'll all
be there--the Hubbards, the Gages, and the whole crowd of Parmelees, and
Kittie Corwith and her father, and all the rest, and--and the Beldens!
The Beldens--there!" She turned fiercely on her mother. "What do you
think of that?"

Eliza Marshall was cut to the quick. For twenty years and more she had
attended this annual dinner; she had attached herself there to former
friends and neighbors, who listened indulgently to her narrow little
dribble of reminiscent gossip--the gossip and reminiscences of the
smaller town and the earlier day. This dinner was her sole remaining
connection (little as she had realized it) with the great and complex
city of the present day, just as it was the sole reason for her
plum-colored silk and for her husband's dress-coat; and the cutting of
this last cable set her completely adrift on the wide and forlorn
sea of utter social neglect. And the Beldens!--that was the last straw of
all. She seemed to see her husband crowded from his seat at that cheery
board by a man whom he himself had taken up and made--a man who was
trying to push him from the social world, just as he was trying to push
him out of the control of the business which he had founded and
developed. It was all more than she could bear.

Jane rushed headlong into another mood. "Oh, well, the end of the world
hasn't come if we _are_ frozen out. And perhaps we're not, anyway; the
invite may get round to-morrow--who knows? So don't let's order our
sackcloth and ashes quite yet awhile. Life is still worth living, and we
have got several other strings to our bow.

"This one, for instance," nodding in the direction of Rosy, towards whom
she seemed inexhaustibly forgiving. "I have the honor to present to the
waiting world Miss Rosamund Marshall, the bud of the season and the
success of the century. Also her brother, Mr. Truesdale Marshall, who has
come home stuffed full of accomplishments, and who will now proceed to
show them. He sings--"

She stepped across to her brother, slipped her arm through his, and drew
him towards the rug in the middle of the room.

Her height was within an inch of his own. She bowed him over the edge of
the rug as over a row of footlights, crooked his other arm so that his
hand was placed over his heart, put her own hand sprawlingly in a like
position, threw back her head, and abandoned herself to a shrill
succession of scales and roulades.

"Why don't you begin?" she presently broke off to inquire.

"What a girl you are!" he said. He looked a bit sheepishly in the
direction of his father; then he stepped behind his sister, laid a hand
on each of her imperceptible biceps, and turned her face round to the
wall.

But Jane faced about at once. "Well, then, he paints--"

She dragged him toward the centre-table, grasped his wrist, and forced
him to make several dabs and passes at the fatal newspaper, which still
lay there with a bland impassivity between drop-light and book-rack.
"That's how we dash off our little sketches," she declared.

"Goodness, Jane!" cried Alice, "you've almost upset the whole inkstand!"

"And what else is there?" cried Jane, whose mood was mounting higher. She
clamped her hand on her disordered bang. "Why, of course! He
fences!--aha!"

To this address Truesdale allowed himself to respond. He had no wish to
obtrude his musical and artistic doings upon his father until a more
definite _modus vivendi_ had been brought about; but he could no longer
lend himself passively to being made an absurdity by the over-enthusiasm
of his sister. Fencing, now, was a manly art of which his father might
not disapprove.

"On guard!" he cried. With his right hand he snatched up a paper-cutter
from the table, curled up his left arm behind him, threw one of his long
legs out in front and landed it with a _flump_! on the floor five feet
ahead of his initial stand-point.

"Hurray!" cried Jane, shrilly. "What other girls do you know who've got a
brother like this?" She snatched up a brass-edged ruler that had lain
alongside the paper-cutter. Mrs. Rhodes started back; Alice's husband,
who had come in to lead the homeward march to Riverside Park, paused
astonished on the threshold.

"On guard!" echoed Jane in turn. With a _flump!_ of her own she threw
herself into an imitation of the angular crouch that her brother had
assumed. "Go it!" she called, and began to hack at the paper-cutter with
her ruler.

Save for the clash of weapons there was a complete silence. Suddenly
Truesdale reversed his position. Jane did the same, bringing a sudden and
unaccustomed weight upon her other foot. Her knee cracked loudly.
Everybody heard it. Rosy snickered.

Jane crossed the room and sat down in a shady corner. In that ten seconds
she felt ten years older.

"Where's pa?" she asked her mother in a sour tone, after Alice and her
aunt had left the house. "I do hope"--crossly--"that the next time you
let any of those wretched old women take anything away you'll have them
pay for it in advance."

"I guess your father isn't bothering much about a bedstead and a few old
chairs," retorted her mother. "If you want to know what he's thinking
about, it's that Belden again."

"Belden?"

"Yes. He has decided finally to let your father put on those two extra
stories, and what do you think he wants in exchange? He wants to make the
firm over into a stock company. He's fixing a place for that boy of
his--that's what."

"Well, haven't we got a boy, too?" retorted Jane, severely. She went out,
and gave the door a loud slam behind her.

But David Marshall, back again in the bay-window, was thinking neither of
the sinuosities of Mother Van Horn, nor of the aggressions of his junior
partner, nor even of the just-concluding courses of the annual
game-dinner. His thoughts had slipped back into the early times; he and
Sue Lathrop (the Mrs. Granger Bates of to-day) were sitting together in
the old, long-vanished Metropolitan Hall listening to the "Nightingale
Serenaders," and the year was 'fifty-seven.




IV


"Well, here goes!" said Jane, half aloud, with her foot on the lowest of
the glistening granite steps. The steps led up to the ponderous pillared
arches of a grandiose and massive porch; above the porch a sturdy and
rugged balustrade half intercepted the rough faced glitter of a vast and
variegated façade; and higher still the morning sun shattered its beams
over a tumult of angular roofs and towering chimneys.

"It _is_ swell, I declare!" said Jane, with her eye on the wrought-iron
work of the outer doors and the jewels and bevels of the inner-ones.

"Where is the thing-a-ma-jig, anyway?" she inquired of herself. She was
searching for the doorbell, and she fell back on her own rustic lingo in
order to ward off the incipient panic caused by this overwhelming
splendor. "Oh, here it is! There!" She gave a push. "And now I'm in for
it." She had decided to take the richest and best-known and most
fashionable woman on her list so start with; the worst over at the
beginning, she thought, the rest would follow easily enough.

"I suppose the 'maid' will wear a cap and a silver tray," she observed
further. "Or will it be a gold one, with diamonds around the edge?"

The door-knob turned from within. "Is Mrs. Bates--" she began.

The door opened half way. A grave, smooth-shaven man appeared; his chin
and upper lip had the mottled smudge that shows in so many of those
conscientious portraits of the olden time.

"Gracious me!" said the startled Jane to herself. She dropped
her disconcerted vision to the door-mat. Then she saw that the
man wore knee-breeches and black silk stockings.

"Heaven be merciful!" was her inward cry. "It's a footman, as I live.
I've been reading about them all my life, and now I've met one. But I
never suspected that there was really anything of the kind in _this_
town!"

She left the contemplation of the servant's pumps and stockings, and
began to grapple fiercely with the catch of her hand-bag.

The man, in the meanwhile, studied her with a searching gravity, and, as
it seemed, with some disapproval. The splendor of the front that his
master presented to the world had indeed intimidated poor Jane; but there
were many others upon whom it had no deterring effect at all. Some of
these brought art-books in monthly parts; others brought polish for the
piano legs. Many of them were quite as prepossessing in appearance as
Jane was; some of them were much less plain and dowdy; few of them
were so recklessly indiscreet as to betray themselves at the threshold
by exhibiting a black leather bag.

"There!" remarked Jane to the footman, "I knew I should get at it
eventually." She smiled at him with a friendly good-will; she
acknowledged him as a human being, and she hoped to propitiate him into
the concession that she herself was nothing less.

The man took her card, which was fortunately as correct as the most
discreet and contemporaneous stationer could fashion. He decided that he
was running no risk with his mistress, and "Miss Jane Marshall" was
permitted to pass the gate.

She was ushered into a small reception-room. The hard-wood floor was
partly covered by a meagre Persian rug. There was a plain sofa full of
forbidding angles, and a scantily upholstered chair which insisted upon
nobody's remaining longer than necessary. But through the narrow door
Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with the
pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and of a stairway which led with a
wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above.

"Did you ever!" exclaimed Jane. It was of the footman that she was
speaking; he, in fact, loomed up to the practical eclipse of all this
luxury and display. "Only eighty years from the Massacre, and hardly
eight hundred feet from the Monument!"

Presently she heard a tapping and a rustling without. She thought that
she might lean a few inches to one side with no risk of being detected in
an impropriety, and she was rewarded by seeing the splendid vacuity of
the grand stairway finally filled--filled more completely, more amply,
than she could have imagined possible through the passage of one person
merely. A woman of fifty or more was descending with a slow and somewhat
ponderous stateliness. She wore an elaborate morning gown with a broad
plait down the back, and an immensity of superfluous material in the
sleeves. Her person was broad, her bosom ample, and her voluminous gray
hair was tossed and fretted about the temples after the fashion of a
marquise of the old régime. Jane set her jaw and clamped her knotty
fingers to the two edges of her inhospitable chair.

"I don't care if she _is_ so rich," she muttered, "and so famous and so
fashionable and so terribly handsome; she can't bear _me_ down."

The woman reached the bottom step, and took a turn that for a moment
carried her out of sight. At the same time the sound of her footsteps was
silenced by one of the big rugs that covered the floor of the wide and
roomy hall. But Jane had had a glimpse, and she knew with whom she was to
deal--with one of the big, the broad, the great, the triumphant; with one
of a Roman amplitude and vigor, an Indian keenness and sagacity, an
American ambition and determination; with one who baffles circumstance
and almost masters fate--with one of the conquerors, in short.

"I don't hear her," thought the expectant girl, in some trepidation;
"but, all the same, she's got to cross that bare space just outside the
door before--yes, there's her step! And here she is herself!"

Mrs. Bates appeared in the doorway. She had a strong nose of the lofty
Roman type; her bosom heaved with breaths deep, but quiet and regular.
She had a pair of large, full blue eyes, and these she now fixed on Jane
with an expression of rather cold questioning.

"Miss Marshall?" Her voice was firm, smooth, even, rich, deep. She
advanced a foot or two within the room and remained standing there.

"Yes," responded Jane, in unnecessary corroboration. She rose
mechanically from her meagre chair. "I have come to see you," she began,
awkwardly, "about a charity that I am interested in--no, not exactly a
charity, but--"

At the ominous word "charity" Mrs. Bates's eyes took on a still colder
gleam. She faced poor Jane with the broad, even, pitiless glare of a
chilled-steel mirror.

"Really," she began, "I have a great many demands of this kind made on
me; a great many--more than might generally be imagined." She showed none
of the embarrassed evasion peculiar to the woman on whom such
requisitions are made but at infrequent intervals; she employed the
decisive, business-like tone of a woman of whom such requests are made
daily. Jane seemed to see negation coldly crystallizing before her eyes,
and she gave a mortified groan to find herself drawn so near to the
brink of humiliation. She had never begged before, and she registered an
inward vow never to beg again.

"You don't know _me_ from Adam," she blurted out, at her bluntest and
crudest, "but you must know my aunt, Mrs. Rhodes. I have heard her speak
of you very often. She met you at St. Augustine, last winter."

"Mrs. Rhodes?" the other repeated, doubtfully. She made her eyebrows take
their part in an inquiring glance, and bestowed the result upon her
caller.

"Yes," insisted Jane; "Mrs. A. L. Rhodes. She lives on Michigan--near
Thirtieth."

"Mrs. Rhodes?"--again thoughtfully repeated. She seemed to move her head
in doubt. "I _do_ go to Florida every winter, and sometimes, on the way
to our place, I stop for a day or two at St. Augustine--yes."

She looked at Jane again, as if to say, "That is really the best I can do
for you."

"She played backgammon with you there," Jane still persisted--"on the
hotel veranda. I've heard her say so twenty times."

Mrs. Bates did not change her expression. "Backgammon? Yes, I am very
fond of backgammon; I play it a great deal. Mr. Bates keeps a board in
the car especially for me. I'm always glad to meet anybody who cares to
play; and it's pleasant, I'm sure, to be on easy terms with one's
fellow-travellers."

She laid one hand in the other and gave an imperceptible sigh; she wore a
great many rings. "What more can I say for you than that?"--such seemed
to be the meaning of the expression now on her face.

"My father"--began Jane; she was loud, slow, deliberate, emphatic. What
could the woman mean by receiving her in such a fashion? Were the
Marshalls mere upstarts, nobodies, newcomers, that they must be snubbed
and turned aside in any such way as this? Jane's eyes blinked and her
nostrils quivered. "My father," she began again, in the same tone, "is
David Marshall. He is very well known, I believe, in Chicago. We have
lived here a great many years. It seems to me that there ought to--"

"David Marshall?" repeated Mrs. Bates, gently. "Ah, I _do_ know David
Marshall--yes," she said; "or did--a good many years ago." She looked up
into Jane's face now with a completely altered expression. Her glance was
curious and searching, but it was very kindly. "And you are David
Marshall's daughter?" She smiled indulgently at Jane's outburst of spunk.
"Really--David Marshall's daughter?"

"Yes," answered Jane, with a gruff brevity. She was far from ready to be
placated yet.

"David Marshall's daughter! Then, my dear child, why not have said so in
the first place, without lugging in everybody and everything else you
could think of? Hasn't your father ever spoken of me? And how is he,
anyway? I haven't seen him--to really speak to him--for fifteen years. It
may be even more."

She seemed to have laid hands on a heavy bar, to have wrenched it from
its holds, to have flung it aside from the footpath, and to be inviting
Jane to advance without let or hindrance.

But Jane stood there with pique in her breast, and her long thin arms
laid rigid against her sides. "Let her 'dear child' me, if she wants to;
she sha'n't bring me around in any such way as that."

All this, however, availed little against Mrs. Bates's new manner. The
citadel so closely sealed to charity was throwing itself wide open to
memory. The drawbridge was lowered, and the late enemy was invited to
advance as a friend.

Nay, urged. Mrs. Bates presently seized Jane's unwilling hands. She
gathered those poor, stiff, knotted fingers into two crackling bundles
within her own plump and warm palms, squeezed them forcibly, and looked
into Jane's face with all imaginable kindness. "I had just that temper
once myself," she said.

The sluice-gates of caution and reserve were opening wide; the streams of
tenderness and sympathy were bubbling and fretting to take their course.

"And your father is well? And you are living in the same old place? Oh,
this terrible town! You can't keep your old friends; you can hardly know
your new ones. We are only a mile or two apart, and yet it is the same as
if it were a hundred."

Jane yielded up her hands half unwillingly. She could not, in spite of
herself, remain completely unrelenting, but she was determined not to
permit herself to be patronized. "Yes, we live in the same old place. And
in the same old way," she added--in the spirit of concession.

Mrs. Bates studied her face intently. "Do you look like him--like your
father?"

"No," answered Jane. "Not so very much. Nor like any of the rest of the
family." The statue was beginning to melt. "I'm unique." And another drop
fell.

"Don't slander yourself," She tapped Jane lightly on the shoulder.

Jane looked at her with a protesting, or at least a questioning,
seriousness. It had the usual effect of a wild stare. "I wasn't meaning
to," she said, shortly, and began to congeal again. She also shrugged her
shoulder; she was not quite ready yet to be tapped and patted.

"But don't remain standing, child," Mrs. Bates proceeded, genially. She
motioned Jane back to her chair, and herself advanced to the roomier
sofa. "Or, no; this little pen is like a refrigerator to-day; it's so
hard, every fall, to get the steam heat running as it should. Come; it
ought to be warmer in the music-room.

"The fact is," she proceeded, as they passed through the hall, "that I
have a spare hour on my hands this morning--the first in a month. My
music-teacher has just sent word that she is down with a cold. You shall
have as much of that hour as you wish. So tell me all about your plans; I
dare say I can scrape together a few pennies for Jane Marshall."

"Her music-teacher!" thought Jane. She was not yet so far appeased nor so
far forgetful of her own initial awkwardness as to refrain from searching
out the joints in the other's armor. "What does a woman of fifty-five
want to be taking music-lessons for?"

The music-room was a lofty and spacious apartment done completely in
hard-woods; its panelled walls and ceiling rang with a magnificent
sonority as the two pairs of feet moved across the mirror-like marquetry
of the floor.

To one side stood a concert-grand; its case was so unique and so
luxurious that even Jane was conscious of its having been made by special
order and from a special design. Close at hand stood a tall music-stand
in style to correspond. It was laden with handsomely bound scores of all
the German classics and the usual operas of the French and Italian
schools. These were all ranged in precise order; nothing there seemed to
have been disturbed for a year past. "My! isn't it grand!" sighed Jane.
She already felt herself succumbing beneath these accumulated splendors.

Mrs. Bates carelessly seated herself on the piano-stool, with her back to
the instrument. "I don't suppose," she observed, casually, "that I have
sat down here for a month."

"What!" cried Jane, with a stare. "If I had such a lovely room as this I
should play in it every day."

"Dear me," rejoined Mrs. Bates, "what pleasure could I get from
practising in this great barn of a place, that isn't half full until
you've got seventy or eighty people in it? Or on this big sprawling
thing?"--thrusting out her elbow backward towards the shimmering cover of
the key-board.

"So then," said Jane to herself, "it's all for show. I knew it was. I
don't believe she can play a single note."

"What do you suppose happened to me last winter?" Mrs. Bates went on. "I
had the greatest setback of my life. I asked to join the Amateur Musical
Club. They wouldn't let me in."

"Why not?"

"Well, I played before their committee, and then the secretary wrote me a
note. It was a nice enough note, of course, but I knew what it meant. I
see now well enough that my fingers were rather stiffer than I realized,
and that my 'Twinkling Sprays' and 'Fluttering Zephyrs' were not quite up
to date. They wanted Grieg and Lassen and Chopin. 'Very well,' said I,
'just wait.' Now, I never knuckle under. I never give up. So I sent
right out for a teacher. I practised scales an hour a day for weeks and
months. Granger thought I was going crazy. I tackled Grieg and Lassen and
Chopin--yes, and Tschaikowsky, too. I'm going to play for that committee
next month. Let me see if they'll dare to vote me out again!"

"Oh, _that's_ it!" thought Jane. She was beginning to feel desirous
of meting out exact and even handed justice. She found it impossible to
withhold respect from so much grit and determination.

"But your father liked those old-time things, and so did all the other
young men." Mrs. Bates creased and folded the end of one of her long
sleeves, and seemed lapsing into a retrospective mood. "Why, some
evenings they used to sit two deep around the room to hear me do the
'Battle of Prague.' Do you know the 'Java March'?" she asked, suddenly.

"I'm afraid not," Jane was obliged to confess.

"You father always had a great fondness for that. I don't know," she went
on, after a short pause, "whether you understand that your father was one
of my old beaux--at least, I always counted him with the rest. I was a
gay girl in my day, and I wanted to make the list as long as I could; so
I counted in the quiet ones as well as the noisy ones. Your father was
one of the quiet ones."

"So I should have imagined," said Jane. Her maiden delicacy was just a
shade affrighted at the turn the talk was taking.

"When I was playing he would sit there by the hour and never say a word.
My banner piece was really a fantasia on 'Sonnambula'--a new thing here;
I was the first one in town to have it. There were thirteen pages, and
there was always a rush to see who should turn them. Your father didn't
often enter the rush, but I really liked his way of turning the best of
any. He never turned too soon or too late; he never bothered me by
shifting his feet every second or two, nor by talking to me at the hard
places. In fact, he was the only one who could do it right."

"Yes," said Jane, with an appreciative sigh; "that's pa--all over."

Mrs. Bates was twisting her long sleeves around her wrists. Presently she
shivered slightly. "Well, really," she said, "I don't see that this place
is much warmer than the other; let's try the library."

In this room our antique and Spartan Jane was made to feel the need of
yet stronger props to hold her up against the overbearing weight of
latter-day magnificence. She found herself surrounded now by a sombre and
solid splendor. Stamped hangings of Cordova leather lined the walls,
around whose bases ran a low range of ornate bookcases, constructed with
the utmost taste and skill of the cabinet-maker's art. In the centre of
the room a wide and substantial table was set with all the paraphernalia
of correspondence, and the leathery abysses of three or four vast
easy-chairs invited the reader to bookish self-abandonment.

"How glorious!" cried Jane, as her eyes ranged over the ranks and rows of
formal and costly bindings. It all seemed doubly glorious after that poor
sole bookcase of theirs at home--a huge black-walnut thing like a
wardrobe, with a couple of drawers at the bottom, receptacles that seemed
less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes. "How grand!" Jane was not
exigent as regarded music, but her whole being went forth towards books.
"Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer; and Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's
_Lives of the Poets_, and--"

"And twenty or thirty yards of Scott," Mrs. Bates broke in, genially;
"and enough Encyclopaedia Britannica to reach around the corner and back
again. Sets--sets--sets."

"What a lovely chair to sit and study in!" cried Jane, not at all abashed
by her hostess's comments. "What a grand table to sit and write papers
at!" Writing papers was one of Jane's chief interests.

"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Bates, with a quiet toleration, as she glanced
towards the shining inkstand and the immaculate blotting-pad. "But,
really, I don't suppose I've written two lines at that table since it was
put there. And as for all these books, Heaven only knows where the keys
are to get at them with. I can't do anything with them; why, some of them
weigh five or six pounds!"

Jane shrivelled and shivered under this. She regretted doubly that she
had been betrayed into such an unstinted expression of her honest
interest. "All for show and display," she muttered, as she bowed her head
to search out new titles; "bought by the pound and stacked by the cord;
doing nobody any good--their owners least of all." She resolved to admire
openly nothing more whatever.

Mrs. Bates sank into one of the big chairs and motioned Jane towards
another. "Your father was a great reader," she said, with a resumption of
her retrospective expression. "He was very fond of books--especially
poetry. He often read aloud to me; when he thought I was likely to be
alone, he would bring his Shakespeare over. I believe I could give you
even now, if I was put to it, Antony's address to the Romans. Yes; and
almost all of Hamlet's soliloquies, too."

Jane was preparing to make a stand against this woman, and here,
apparently, was the opportunity. "Do you mean to tell me," she inquired,
with something approaching sternness, "that my father--_my father_--was
ever fond of poetry and--and music, and--and all that sort of thing?"

"Certainly. Why not? I remember your father as a high-minded young man,
with a great deal of good taste; I always thought him much above the
average. And that Shakespeare of his--I recall it perfectly. It was a
chubby little book bound in brown leather, with an embossed stamp, and
print a great deal too fine for _my eyes_. _He_ always had to do the
reading; and he read very pleasantly." She scanned Jane closely. "Perhaps
you have never done your father justice."

Jane felt herself driven to defence--even to apology. "The fact is," she
said, "pa is so quiet; he never says much of anything. I'm about the only
one of the family who knows him very well, and I guess I don't know him
any too well." She felt, though, that Mrs. Bates had no right to defend
her father against his own daughter; no, nor any need.

"I suppose so," said Mrs. Bates, slowly. She crossed over to the radiator
and began working at the valve. "I _told_ Granger I knew he'd be sorry if
he didn't put in furnace-flues too. I really can't ask you to take your
things off down here; let's go upstairs--that's the only warm place I can
think of."

She paused in the hall. "Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the rooms
before you go up?"

"Yes--I don't mind," responded Jane. She was determined to encourage no
ostentatious pride; so she made her acceptance as indifferent as she felt
good manners would allow.

Mrs. Bates crossed over the hall and paused in a wide doorway. "This,"
she indicated, in a tone slightly suggestive of the cicerone, "is
the--well, the Grand Salon; at least, that's what the newspapers have
decided to call it. Do you care anything for Louis Quinze?"

Jane found herself on the threshold of a long and glittering apartment;
it was full of the ornate and complicated embellishments of the
eighteenth century--an exhibition of decorative whip-cracking. Grilles,
panels, mirror-frames all glimmered in green and gold, and a row of
lustres, each multitudinously candled, hung from the lofty ceiling.

Jane felt herself on firmer ground here than in the library, whose
general air of distinction, with no definite detail by way of guidepost,
had rather baffled her.

"Hem!" she observed, critically, as her eyes roamed over the spacious
spendor of the place, "quite an epitome of the whole rococo period; done,
too, with a French grace and a German thoroughness. Almost a real
_jardin d'hiver_, in fact. Very handsome indeed."

Mrs. Bates pricked up her ears; she had not expected quite such a
response as this. "You are posted on these things, then?"

"Well," said Jane, "I belong to an art class. We study the different
periods in architecture and decoration."

"Do you? I belong to just such a class myself--and to three or four
others. I'm studying and learning right along; I never want to stand
still. You were surprised, I saw, about my music-lessons: It _is_ a
little singular, I admit--my beginning as a teacher and ending as a
pupil. You know, of course, that I _was_ a school-teacher? Yes, I had a
little class down on Wabash Avenue near Hubbard Court, in a church
basement. I began to be useful as early as I could. We lived in a little
bit of a house a couple of blocks north of there; you know those
old-fashioned frame cottages--one of them. In the early days pa was a
carpenter--a boss-carpenter, to do him full justice; the town was
growing, and after a while he began to do first-rate. But at the
beginning ma did her own work, and I helped her. I swept and dusted, and
wiped the dishes. She taught me to sew, too; I trimmed all my own hats
till long after I was married."

Mrs. Bates leaned carelessly against the tortured framework of a
tapestried _causeuse_. The light from the lofty windows shattered on the
prisms of her glittering chandeliers and diffused itself over the
panelled loves and graces around her.

"When I got to be eighteen I thought I was old enough to branch out and
do something for myself--I've always tried to hold up my own end. My
little school went first-rate. There was only one drawback--another
school next door, full of great, rowdy boys. They would climb the fence
and make faces at my scholars; yes, and sometimes they would throw
stones. But that wasn't the worst: the other school taught book-keeping.
Now, I never was one of the kind to lag behind, and I used to lie
awake nights wondering how I could catch up with the rival institution.
Well, I hustled around, and finally I got hold of two or three children
who were old enough for accounts, and I set them to work on single entry.
I don't know whether they learned anything, but _I_ did--enough to keep
Granger's books for the first year after we started out."

Jane smiled broadly; it was useless to set a stoic face against such
confidences as these.

"We were married at the most fashionable church in town--right there in
Court-house Square; and ma gave us a reception, or something like it, in
her little front room. We weren't so very stylish ourselves, but we had
some awfully stylish neighbors--all those Terrace Row people, just around
the corner. 'We'll get there, too, some time,' I said to Granger. 'This
is going to be a big town, and we have a good show to be big people in
it. Don't let's start in life like beggars going to the back door for
cold victuals; let's march right up the front steps and ring the bell
_like_ somebody.' So, as I say, we were married at the best church in
town; we thought it safe enough to discount the future."

"Good for you!" said Jane, who was finding her true self in the thick of
these intimate revelations; "you guessed right."

"Well, we worked along fairly for a year or two, and finally I said to
Granger: 'Now, what's the use of inventing things and taking them to
those companies and making everybody rich but yourself? You pick out some
one road, and get on the inside of that, and stick there, and--The fact
is," she broke off suddenly, "you can't judge at all of this room in the
daytime. You must see it lighted and filled with people. You ought
to have been here at the _bal poudré_ I gave last season--lots of pretty
girls in laces and brocades, and powder on their hair. It was a lovely
sight."

"It must have been. I believe Rosy would have looked real pretty fixed up
that way."

"Rosy?"

"Our youngest; she's eighteen."

"Is she out?"

"Not quite; but I expect she's on the way."

"Is she pretty?"

"Yes," replied the just Jane. "Yes, Rosy is quite pretty. She's dark. She
would look lovely in yellow tulle--with a red rose somewhere."

"Is she clever?"

"H'm," said Jane, thoughtfully, "I suppose so. She's beginning to
understand how to get what she wants, anyway."

"And just the least bit selfish and inconsiderate?" insinuated Mrs.
Bates, shrewdly.

"Y--yes, I'm afraid so."

"Well, she might be quite a success; we must think about her. Come; we've
had enough of this." Mrs. Bates turned a careless back upon all her Louis
Quinze spendor. "The next thing will be something else."




V


Jane's guide passed swiftly into another large and imposing apartment.
"This I call the Sala de los Embajadores; here is where I receive my
distinguished guests."

"Good!" cried Jane, who knew Irving's _Alhambra_ by heart. "Only it isn't
Moorish; it's Baroque--and a very good example."

The room had a heavy panelled ceiling of dark wood, with a cartouche in
each panel; stacks of seventeenth-century armor stood in the corners,
half a dozen large Aubusson tapestries hung on the walls, and a vast
fireplace, flanked by huge Atlantes and crowned by a heavy pediment
broken and curled, almost filled one whole side. "That fireplace is
Baroque all over."

"See here," said Mrs. Bates, suddenly; "are you the woman who read about
the Decadence of the Renaissance Forms at the last Fortnightly?"

"I'm the woman," responded Jane, modestly.

"I don't know why I didn't recognize you before. But you sat in an
awfully bad light, for one thing. Besides, I had so much on my mind that
day. Our dear little Reginald was coming down with something--or so we
thought. And the bonnet I was forced to wear--well, it just made me blue.
You didn't notice it?"

"I was too flustered to notice anything. It was my first time there."

"Well, it was a good paper, although I couldn't half pay attention to it;
it gave me several new notions. All my decorations, then--you think them
corrupt and degraded?"

"Well," returned Jane, at once soothing and judicial, "all these later
forms are interesting from an historical and sociological point of view.
And lots of people find them beautiful, too, for that matter." Jane slid
over these big words with a practised ease.

"They impressed my notables, anyway," retorted Mrs. Bates. "We
entertained a great deal during the Fair--it was expected, of course,
from people of our position. We had princes and counts and honorables
without end. I remember how delighted I was with my first prince--a
Russian. H'm! later in the season Russian princes were as plentiful as
blackberries: you stepped on one at every turn. We had some of the
English, too. One of their young men visited us at Geneva during the
summer. I never quite made out who invited him; I have half an idea that
he invited himself. He was a great trial. Queer about the English, isn't
it? How can people who are so clever and capable in practical things ever
be such insolent tom-fools in social things? Do you know Arthur Paston?"

"No. Was he one of them?

"Not exactly. He lives here. We thought we had Americanized him; but now
he has slipped back and is almost as bad as he was to start with. Arthur
Scodd-Paston--that's the way his cards read to-day. Do you care for
paintings?"

"Of course. Is Arthur Scodd-Paston like one?"

"You bad girl! Well, we might just stick our noses in the picture-gallery
for a minute.

"We're almost beginners in this branch of industry," she expounded, as
she stood beside Jane in the center of the room under the coldly diffused
glare of the skylight. "In my young days it was all Bierstadt and De
Haas; there wasn't supposed to be anything beyond. But as soon as I began
to hear about Millet and the Barbizon crowd, I saw there was. Well, I set
to work, as usual. I studied and learned. I _want_ to learn. I want to
move; I want to keep right up with the times and the people. I got books
and photographs, and I went to all the galleries. I read the artists'
biographies and took in all the loan collections. Now I'm loaning, too.
Some of these things are going to the Art Institute next week--that
Daubigny, for one. It's little, but it's good; there couldn't be anything
more like him, could there?

"We haven't got any Millet yet, but that morning thing over there is a
Corot--at least, we think so. I was going to ask one of the French
commissioners about it last summer, but my nerve gave out at the last
minute. Mr. Bates bought it on his own responsibility. I let him go
ahead, for, after all, people of our position would naturally be expected
to have a Corot. I don't dare tell you what he paid for it. If I
did"--she pointed to their joint reflection in the opposite mirror--"we
should have a fretful porcupine here in no time."

"Don't, then," pleaded Jane, looking at her own reflection and clasping
her hands across her forehead; "this miserable bang gives me enough
trouble as it is."

"There's some more high art," said Mrs. Bates, with a wave of her hand
towards the opposite wall. "Carolus-Duran; fifty thousand francs; and he
wouldn't let me pick out my own costume, either. You have never seen me
on dress-parade; take a look at me now." She gathered up the tail of her
gown and modestly scuttled out of the room.

Poor dowdy Jane stood in silent awe before this sumptuous canvas, with
her long, interlaced fingers strenuously tugging at each other and her
wide eyes half popping from her head. She was as completely overpowered
and shattered as an uncouth and angular raft under the thunderous
downpour of Niagara. Presently she turned; Mrs. Bates stood peeping in
from without, her eyes all a-twinkle.

"And now," she said, "let's go up-stairs." Jane followed her, too dazed
to speak or even to smile.

Mrs. Bates hastened forward, lightfootedly. "Conservatory--_that's_
Moorish," she indicated, casually; "nothing in it but orchids and things.
Come along." Jane followed--dumbly, humbly.

Mrs. Bates paused on the lower step of her great stairway. A huge vase of
Japanese bronze flanked either newel, and a Turkish lantern depended
above her head. The bright green of a dwarf palm peeped over the
balustrade, and a tempered light strained down through the painted window
on the landing-stage.

"There!" she said; "you've seen it all." She stood there in a kind of
impassioned splendor, her jewelled fingers shut tightly and her fists
thrown out and apart so as to show the veins and cords of her wrists.
"_We_ did it, we two--just Granger and I. Nothing but our own hands and
hearts and hopes, and each other. We have fought the fight--a fair field
and no favor--and we have come out ahead. And we shall stay there, too;
keep up with the procession is my motto, and head it if you can. I _do_
head it, and I feel that I'm where I belong. When I can't foot it with
the rest, let me drop by the wayside and the crows have me. But they'll
never get me--never! There's ten more good years in me yet; and if we
were to slip to the bottom to-morrow, we should work back to the top
again before we finished. When I led the grand march at the Charity Ball
I was accused of taking a vainglorious part in a vainglorious show. Well,
who would look better in such a rôle than I, or who has earned a better
right to play it? There, child! ain't that success? ain't that glory?
ain't that poetry?--H'm," she broke off suddenly, "I'm glad Jimmy wasn't
by to hear that! He's always taking up his poor mother."

"Jimmy? Is he humble-minded--do you mean?"

"Humble-minded? One of my boys humble-minded? No, indeed; he's
grammatical, that's all; he prefers 'isn't.' Come up."

Mrs. Bates hurried her guest over the stairway and through several halls
and passages, and introduced her finally into a large and spacious room
done in white and gold. In the glittering electrolier wires mingled with
pipes and bulbs with globes. To one side stood a massive brass bedstead
full panoplied in coverlet and pillow-cases, and the mirror of the
dressing-case reflected a formal row of silver-backed brushes and combs.

"My bedroom," said Mrs. Bates. "How does it strike you?"

"Why," stammered Jane, "It's all very fine, but--"

"Oh yes; I know what they say about it--I've heard them a dozen times.
'It's very big and handsome and all, but not a bit home-like. _I_
shouldn't want to sleep here.' Is that the idea?"

"About," said Jane.

"Sleep here!" echoed Mrs. Bates. "I _don't_ sleep here. I'd as soon think
of sleeping out on the prairie. That bed isn't to _sleep_ in; it's for
the women to lay their hats and cloaks on. Lay yours there now."

Jane obeyed. She worked herself out of her old blue sack, and disposed
it, neatly folded, on the brocaded coverlet. Then she took off her mussy
little turban and placed it on the sack. "What a strange woman," she
murmured to herself. "She doesn't get any music out of her piano; she
doesn't get any reading out of her books; she doesn't even get any sleep
out of her bed." Jane smoothed down her hair and awaited the next stage
of her adventure.

"This is the way." Mrs. Bates led her through a narrow side-door, and
Jane found herself in a small room where another young woman sat before a
trim bird's-eye-maple desk, whose drawers and pigeonholes were stuffed
with cards and letters and papers. "This is my office. Miss Marshall,
Miss Peters," she said, in the tone of introduction.

The other girl rose. She was tall and slender, like Jane. She had a pasty
complexion and weak, reddish eyes. Her expression was somewhat plaintive
and distressed--irritating, too, in the long run.

"Step along," called Mrs. Bates. She traversed the "office," passed into
a room beyond, pushed Jane ahead of her, and shut the door. "I don't care
if it _does_ hurt her feelings." Mrs. Bates's reference appeared to be to
Miss Peters.

The door closed with a light click, and Jane looked about her with a
great and sudden surprise. Poor stupid, stumbling child!--she understood
at last in what spirit she had been received and on what footing she had
been placed.

She found herself in a small, cramped, low-ceiled room which was filled
with worn and antiquated furniture. There was a ponderous old mahogany
bureau, with the veneering cracked and peeled, and a bed to correspond.
There was a shabby little writing-desk, whose let-down lid was lined with
faded and blotted green baize. On the floor there was an old Brussels
carpet, antique as to pattern, and wholly threadbare as to surface.
The walls were covered with an old-time paper whose plaintive
primitiveness ran in slender pink stripes alternating with narrow green
vines. In one corner stood a small upright piano whose top was littered
with loose sheets of old music, and on one wall hung a set of thin
black-walnut shelves strung together with cords and loaded with a variety
of well-worn volumes. In the grate was a coal fire. Mrs. Bates sat down
on the foot of the bed and motioned Jane to a small rocker that had been
re-seated with a bit of old rugging.

"And now," she said, cheerily, "let's get to business. Sue Bates, at your
service."

"Oh, no," gasped Jane, who felt, however dumbly and mistily, that this
was an epoch in her life. "Not here; not to-day."

"Why not? Go ahead; tell me all about the charity that isn't a charity.
You'd better; this is the last room--there's nothing beyond." Her eyes
were twinkling, but immensely kind.

"I know it," stammered Jane. "I knew it in a second." She felt, too, that
not a dozen persons had ever penetrated to this little chamber. "How good
you are to me!"

Presently, under some compulsion, she was making an exposition of her
small plans. Mrs. Bates was made to understand how some of the old
Dearborn Seminary girls were trying to start a sort of clubroom in some
convenient down-town building for typewriters and saleswomen and others
employed in business. There was to be a room where they could get lunch,
or bring their own to eat, if they preferred; also a parlor where they
could fill up their noon hour with talk or reading or music; it was the
expectation to have a piano and a few books and magazines.

"I remembered Lottie as one of the girls who went with us there, down on
old Dearborn Place, and I thought perhaps I could interest Lottie's
mother," concluded Jane.

"And so you can," said Lottie's mother, promptly. "I'll have Miss
Peters--but don't you find it a little warm here? Just pass me that
hair-brush."

Mrs. Bates had stepped to her single little window. "Isn't it a gem?" she
asked. "I had it made to order; one of the old-fashioned sort, you
see--two sash, with six little panes in each. No weights and cords, but
simply catches at the side. It opens to just two widths; if I want
anything different, I have to contrive it for myself. Sometimes I use a
hair-brush and sometimes a paper-cutter."

"Dear me," asked Jane, "is that sort of thing a rarity? 'Most every
window in our house is like this. I prop mine with a curling-iron."

"And now," said Mrs. Bates, resuming, "how much is it going to take to
start things? I should think that five hundred dollars would do to get
you under way." She opened the door. "Miss Peters, won't you please make
out a check for five hun--"

"Oh, bless your soul!" cried Jane, "we don't need but three hundred all
together, and I can't have one woman--"

"Three hundred, then," Mrs. Bates called into the next room.

"Oh, goodness me!" cried Jane, despairingly, "I don't want one woman to
give it all. I've got a whole list here. You're the first one I've seen."

"Well, how much, then? Fifty?"

"Fifty, yes. That's quite as much as I expected--more."

"Fifty, Miss Peters; payable to Jane Marshall." She looked at Jane
quizzically. "You _are_ unique, sure enough."

"I want to be fair," protested Jane.

The door closed on Miss Peters. Mrs. Bates dropped her voice. "Did you
ever have a private secretary?"

"Me?" called Jane. "I'm my own."

"Keep it that way," said Mrs. Bates, impressively. "Don't ever change--no
matter how many engagements and appointments and letters and dates you
come to have. You'll never spend a happy day afterwards. Tutors are bad
enough--but, thank goodness, my boys are past that age. And men servants
are bad enough--every time I want to stir in my own house I seem to have
a footman on each toe and a butler standing on my train; however, people
in our position--well, Granger insists, you know. But Minnie
Peters--Minnie Peters is the worst of all. Every so often"--in a low
voice and with her eye on the door--"she has one of her humble days, and
then I want to die. That was what was the matter before you came--I
didn't really mean to seem cross to you. I just have to take her and
shake her and say, 'Now, Minnie Peters, how can you be so bad to me? How
can you think I would do anything to hurt your feelings, when your mother
was my very best friend? Why are you always looking for a chance to find
a slight, when'--Oh, thanks, thanks!"--Miss Peters having appeared with
the check. Mrs. Bates clapped on the signature at her little old desk.
"There, my child. And good-luck to the club-room.

"And now business is over," she continued. "Do you like my posies?" She
nodded towards the window where, thanks to the hair-brush, a row of
flowers in a long narrow box blew about in the draught.

"Asters?"

"No, no, no! But I hoped you'd guess asters. They're chrysanthemums--you
see, fashion will penetrate even here. But they're the smallest and
simplest I could find. What do I care for orchids and American beauties,
and all those other expensive things under glass? How much does it please
me to have two great big formal beds of gladiolus and foliage plants in
the front yard, one on each side of the steps? Still, with our position,
I suppose it can't be helped. No; what I want is a bed of portulacca, and
some cypress vines running up strings to the top of a pole. As soon as I
get poor enough to afford it I'm going to have a lot of phlox and London
pride and bachelor's buttons out there in the back yard, and the girls
can run their clotheslines somewhere else."

"It's hard to keep flowers in a city," said Jane.

"I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rosebush in
the front yard. I hated so to leave it behind--one of those little
yellow brier-roses. No, it wasn't yellow; it was just--'yaller.' And it
always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh,
child"--wistfully--"if I could only smell it now!"

"Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympathetically.

"I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach-basket
and a fire-shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of yellow
sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all I've got
from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the wall-paper."

"The wall-paper?"

"Not the identical same, of course. It's like what I had in my bedroom
when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to
match it. At first I just tried on Twenty-second Street. Then I went
down-town. Then I tried all the little places away out on the West Side.
Then I had the pattern put down on paper, and I made a tour of the
country. I went to Belvidere, and to Beloit, and to Janesville, and to
lots of other places between here and Geneva. And finally--"

"Well, what--finally?"

"Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order. I
chased harder than anybody ever chased for a Raphael, and I spent more
than if I had hung the room with Gobelins; but--"

She stroked the narrow strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and
cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. "Isn't it just too quaintly
ugly for anything?"

"It isn't any such thing," cried Jane. "It's just as sweet as it can be!
I only wish mine was like it."

Mrs. Bates glanced from the wall-paper to the window-box, and from the
window down into the back yard, where, beneath the week's washing,
flapping in the breeze and the sun, she saw next summer's flowers already
blooming.

"Did you read that paragraph last week," she asked, suddenly, "about my
having been a washer-woman once?"

"No. What was it in?"

"One of those miserable society papers. Do you know there's a man in this
town who makes his living by sending such things to New York? Something
scandalous, if possible; if not scandalous, then libellous; if not
actually libellous, then derogatory and offensive."

"I never read such stuff," said Jane; "especially about people I like. I
always skip it,"

"Yes, but it's true. I can't deny it. I _was_ a washerwoman for a whole
year. I washed all Granger's shirts and starched them and ironed them,
and put them away and got them out and washed them again for months and
months. Every one went through the mill pretty often, too; there weren't
very many of them.

"Those are Granger's shirts out on the line there, now--the big ones.
Those in the other row are Jimmy's--the little ones."

"H'm!" observed Jane, standing beside her at the window; "which _are_ the
little ones?"

Mrs. Bates laughed. "Well, perhaps there isn't much difference. Jimmy is
eighteen and large for his age, but of course his _seem_ the littlest. I
had them made in the house, but he set off to college before I could
finish with them. Perhaps they're just as well here, until the Sophomores
have finished with _him_.

"Yes," she went on, proudly, "I could wash shirts then, and I can make
shirts now. A woman, it seems to me, may do anything for herself or for
those belonging to her; and I've always tried to be a lady and a woman
too. I made all Jimmy's button-holes and worked all the initials on the
tabs." She looked appealingly at Jane. "I know you think I'm a silly old
thing...."

"I don't either!" cried Jane, loudly, with a tremble on her lip and a hot
tear starting in each eye. "I don't either; you know I don't! You know
what I think! You're a dear, good, lovely woman; and I've been just as
mean and hateful to you as I could! I don't see," she went on, in a great
burst on contrition, "how you could talk to me; I don't see how you could
let me stay one minute in your house. If you only knew all the mean,
ugly, uncharitable things I have thought about you since that man let me
in! How could you stand me? How could you keep from having me turned
out?"

"I am used to being misunderstood," said Mrs. Bates, quietly. "I took you
at first for your father's sake, and I kept you for your own. It's a long
time since I have met a girl like you; I didn't suppose there was one
left in the whole town. You are one of _us_--the old settlers, the
aborigines. Do you know what I'm going to do some time? I'm going to have
a regular aboriginal pow-wow, and all the old-timers shall be invited.
We'll have a reel, and forfeits, and all sorts of things; and off to one
side of the wigwam there shall be two or three beautiful young squaws to
pour firewater. Will you be one of them?"

"Well," Jane hesitated, "I'm not so very young, you know; nor so very
beautiful, either."

"You are to me," responded Mrs. Bates, with a caloric brevity.

"Nobody shall come," she went on, "who wasn't here before the War. Those
who came before the Incorporation--that was in '37, wasn't it?--shall be
doubly welcome. And if I can find any one who passed through the Massacre
(as an infant, you understand), he shall have the head place. I mean to
ask your father--and your mother," she added, with a firm but delicate
emphasis. "I must call on her presently."

She fixed her eyes on the fireplace. "I suppose I was silly--the way I
acted when your father married," she went on, carefully. "We were only
friends; there was really nothing between us; but I was piqued and--oh,
well, you know how it is."

"I!" cried Jane, routed by her alarm from her contrite and tearful mood.
"I? Not the least bit, I assure you!" She blushed and gulped and ducked
her head and half hid her face behind her hand. "Not the least in the
world. Why, if I were to die to-morrow nobody would care but pa and ma
and Roger and Truesdale and Alice; well--and Rosy; yes, perhaps Rosy
would care for me--if I was dead. But nobody else; oh, dear, no!" She
stared at Mrs. Bates with a hard, wide brightness.

Mrs. Bates considerately shifted her gaze to the front of the bureau. She
ran her eye down one row of knobs: "I wonder who he is?" And up the
other: "I hope he is worthy of her."

Doubly considerate, she turned her back, too. She began to rummage among
the drawers of her old desk. "There!" she said, presently, "I knew I
could put my hands on it."

She set a daguerreotype before Jane. Its oval was bordered with a narrow
line of gilded metal and its small square back was covered with embossed
brown leather. "There, now! Do you know who that is?"

Jane looked back and forth doubtfully between the picture and its owner.
"Is it--is it--pa?"

Mrs. Bates nodded.

Jane regarded the daguerreotype with a puzzled fascination. "Did my
father ever wear his hair all wavy across his forehead that way, and have
such a thing tied around his throat, and wear a vest all covered with
those little gold sprigs?"

"Precisely. That's just the way he looked the last time we danced
together. And what do you suppose the dance was? Guess and guess and
guess again! It was this."

Mrs. Bates whisked herself on to the piano-stool and began to play and to
sing. Her touch was heavy and spirited, but her voice was easily audible
above the instrument.


"'Old Dan Tucker, he got drunk;
He jumped in the fire and he kicked up a chunk
Of red-hot charcoal with his shoe.
Lordy! how the ashes flew-hoo!'"


Jane dropped the daguerreotype in time to take up the refrain:


  "'Clear the road for old Dan Tucker!
  You're too late to get your supper.
  Clear the road for old Dan--'"


"Aha! you know it!" cried Mrs. Bates, gayly.

"Of course," responded Jane. "My education may be modern, on the whole;
but it hasn't neglected the classics completely! Gentlemen forward!" she
said, with a sudden cry, which sent Mrs. Bates's fingers back to the
keyboard; "_gentlemen_ forward to Mister Tucker!" Mrs. Bates pounded
loudly, and Jane pirouetted up to her from behind.

"_Ladies_ forward to Mister Tucker!" cried Jane, and Mrs. Bates left the
stool and began dancing towards her. Then she danced back and took her
seat again; but with the first chord:

"ALL forward to Mister Tucker!" called Jane again; and they met face to
face in the middle of the room and burst out laughing. The door opened on
a narrow crack, and there appeared Miss Peters's plaintive and inquiring
countenance.

Mrs. Bates banished her assistant by one look of pathetic protest.
"There!" she said, transferring the look to Jane, "you see how it always
is when I am trying to have a good time! Even at my own table I can't
budge or crack a joke; with those two men behind my chair I feel like my
own tombstone. Lock that door," she said to Jane; "I _will_ have a good
time, in spite of them! Sit down; I'm going to play the 'Java March' for
you."

She struck out several ponderous and vengeful chords. "Why," called Jane,
"is _that_ the 'Java March'?"

She spread out her elbows and stalked up and down singing:


  "'Oh, the _Dutch_ compa-_nee_
  Is the _best_ compa-_nee_!'"


"Right again!" cried Mrs. Bates. "You _are_ one of us--just as I said!"

"Well, if that's the 'Java March,'" said Jane, "it's in an old book we
used to have about the house years and years ago. Only, if you bring it
up as an example of pa's taste--"

"He liked it because I played it, perhaps," said Mrs. Bates, quietly.
"Besides, why should you put it to those shocking words? It _is_ in that
book," she continued, "and I've got one here just like it."

"Is it the one with 'Roll on, Silver Moon,' and 'Wild roved the Indian
maid, bright What's-her-name'?"

"Bright Alfarata. Same one, exactly. Bring up another chair, and we'll go
through a whole programme of classics--pruggrum, I mean."

"Let's see, though," said Jane, looking at her watch. "Mercy me! where
has the morning gone? It's after eleven o'clock."

"Supposing it is after eleven; supposing it was after a hundred and
eleven? You're going to stay to lunch."

"I'd love to so much; but I just can't. I've got too many other scalps to
take. So many thanks for yours! I'm going to work north towards the
Monument--another Massacre!"

"Well, Wednesday, then, without fail."

They retraced their steps past the mournful Miss Peters and through the
vast state bedroom. On the stairs Mrs. Bates said:

"I _do_ remember your aunt, Mrs. Rhodes, now," The conscientious creature
had been taxing her memory for an hour. Jane felt that this was a
tribute, not to her aunt, but to herself.

"Yes," Mrs. Bates went on, "she's a little, plump, dark woman, and when
she sits down she wiggles and flounces and goes all in a heap--like
this." Mrs. Bates illustrated by means of the window-seat on the landing.

"Yes," assented Jane. She could not reproach Mrs. Bates for thus
indulging her sense of humor in order to recoup herself for the tax on
her memory.

"And when she goes down-stairs, it's like this." She gathered up her gown
and sidled down affectedly over the remaining steps.

"That's it," said Jane, joining her in the hall below.

Mrs. Bates opened the front door herself. "You can take the choo-choo
cars at Sixteenth, you know, and get off at Van Buren. Oh, dear; excuse
my baby-talk; our little Reginald--two months old, you know. I'll have
Lottie home for that lunch of ours."

"Don't apologize," said Jane. "I often use the same expression myself."

"Why, is there a baby at your house!"

"Well," said Jane, rather lamely, "Alice has got a little girl three
years old."

"So David Marshall is a grandfather? But what is there extraordinary in
that?--I'm one myself." She stood in the big porch looking down the
street--at nothing." Well, now I _am_ going to," she said, half to
herself. "_That_ settles it!"

She accompanied Jane half-way down the steps, bareheaded as she was, and
in her morning-gown. A society reporter who happened to be passing
originated the rumor that she had gone insane.

"Good-luck, my child. Use my name everywhere. Take all that anybody
offers. Good-by! Good-by!"

Jane retraced her steps to kiss her. She had not kissed her own mother
for ten years.




VI

Within a month after Truesdale Marshall's return home the understanding
between himself and his father might fairly have been classified among
the facts accomplished; and it was brought about, too, by those
indefinite courses, those impalpable procedures through which, in actual
life, so many understandings are really arrived at. Truesdale, therefore,
never received word that his father "wished to see him in the
library"--as in the story-books. Nor did the two ever draw their chairs
together in the middle of the stage close to the footlights, and have it
out--as at the theatre. When Truesdale spoke at all he spoke
casually--with more or less of implication or insinuation--to his mother
or his sisters. When he spoke not at all, he acted--and his actions spoke
as loudly and effectually as actions are held commonly to do. His father,
therefore, learned presently, and with enough distinctness to serve all
purposes, that the filial back was no more ready now than ever before to
submit to harness; that rules and regulations were sure to be resented;
that dates and duties were fretful affairs at best; that engagements and
responsibilities were far too irksome to be endured; and, above all, that
anything like "hours" would be most emphatically beyond the pale of a
moment's consideration. Truesdale professed to regard himself as having
returned once more to the life of the frontier; and being thus placed,
what could he be but a pioneer? Very well; he _would_ be a pioneer--the
pioneer of a leisure class.

He made, however, one concession to his father: he consented to a
reduction in his allowance.

He had led himself to believe that now, at last, in the town of his birth
the career of a man of leisure was completely practicable. During his
long absence from home his family had sent him at intervals copies of the
local newspapers--sheets whose utterances were triumphantly optimistic,
even beyond their triumphant and optimistic wont. Furthermore, his
courses over the Continent had brought him into contact with many
travellers more lately from home than himself, whose strange and topping
tales--carried, indeed, in a direction the reverse of that taken by most
such reports--had told him much of contemporaneous achievement behind
them, and had filled him with a half-belief that no expectations founded
on such a base could be exorbitant. A great light had arisen; the city,
notably a metropolis for many years already, had opened out into a
cosmopolis; the poet had at last arrived, and the earth was now tolerable
for the foot of man.

He visited on the South shore the great white shell from which the spirit
had taken its formal leave but a week before, and he acknowledged the
potency of the poet's spell. "It _is_ good," he assented; "better than I
could have thought--better than anybody over there could be made to
believe. I might have tried to get home a fortnight sooner, perhaps."

He met half-way the universal expectation that the spirit of the White
City was but just transferred to the body of the great Black City close
at hand, over which it was to hover as an enlightenment--through which it
might permeate as an informing force.

"Good!" he thought; "there's no place where it's needed more or where it
might do more good." The great town, in fact, sprawled and coiled about
him like a hideous monster--a piteous, floundering monster, too. It
almost called for tears. Nowhere a more tireless activity, nowhere a more
profuse expenditure, nowhere a more determined striving after the ornate,
nowhere a more undaunted endeavor towards the monumental expression of
success, yet nowhere a result so pitifully grotesque, grewsome,
appalling. "So little taste," sighed Truesdale; "so little training, so
little education, so total an absence of any collective sense of the fit
and the proper! Who could believe, here, that there _are_ cities
elsewhere which fashioned themselves rightly almost by intuition--which
took shape and reached harmony by an unreasoned instinct, as you might
say?"

But let that pass; he must take the town as he found it. Between his own
transplanted artistic interests on the one hand and his association with
the great throng of artists that the _Aufklärung_ had doubtless brought
and held, he should do well enough. He figured mornings given over to
music and painting--his own; and afternoons of studio-rounds, when
fellow-artists would turn him their unfinished canvasses to the light, or
would pull away the clinging sheets from their shapes of dampened clay;
and evenings when the room would thicken with smoke and tall glasses
would make rings on the shining tops of tables, while a dozen agile wits
had their own way with Monet and Bourget and Verlaine. For the rest,
_concerts_, _spectacles_, _bals_; if need be, receptions; or, if pushed
to it, five-o'clock tea--with the chance that one other man might be
present. Thus the winter. As for the summer: "No canoeing, of course, on
the Lahn and the Moselle; I must fall back upon the historic Illinois,
with its immemorial towns and villages and crumbling cathedrals, and the
long line of ancient and picturesque châteaux between Ottawa and Peoria.
No more villeggiatura at Frascati or Fiesole; I shall have to flee from
the summer heats to the wild ravines and gorges of DuPage County--and
raise turnips and cabbages there with the rest of them."

Putting aside for the present all thought of the coming summer, Truesdale
set himself to the formation of a circle. He had gone away as a boy and
had come back as a young man. He had grown beyond his old acquaintances,
he thought, and apart from them--of which last there could be no doubt on
either side; and it struck him that the easiest and simplest thing to do
would be to drop them all and to start afresh. To drop everybody and to
start afresh was something he was completely habituated to. He did it
through the year at intervals of from three to six months; during the
busy summer season among the Swiss pensions he had done it once every
fortnight, or oftener. His nature was full of adaptability, receptivity,
fluidity; he made friends everywhere he went, and snatched up
acquaintances at every corner.

Among the first in his new batch were Theodore Brower and Arthur Paston.
They were both older than he, but he declared, _net_, that his
non-travelled compatriots of his own age were impossible. These two new
acquaintances he appeared to like equally well; and Jane, whose kindling
ambition had devoted her brother to a brilliant social career, and whose
forenoon with Mrs. Bates had done little enough to quench the mounting
flame, wondered how such an augury was to be read; for Brower was wholly
out of society, while Paston was understood to be (save for some slight
but inevitable business entanglements) wholly in it. She decided,
finally, that, as Truesdale had met Brower in their own
house--involuntarily, as it were--while he had met Paston outside (as a
result, inferentially, of his own endeavors and advances), the brilliant
future of her brother was in no danger of being compromised. Then she
restored the just balance between the two by the thought that Truesdale
had taken very kindly to Theod--to Mr. Brower, after all; much more so
than Rosy, whose sauciness (she could think of no other word) Jane found
herself unable to forgive.

Theodore Brower was some ten years older than Truesdale. His hair was
beginning to retreat before his advancing forehead, and about his eyes
were coming to appear those lines proper to the man who is in business
for himself and pretty largely absorbed in it. He had a pair of shrewd
but kindly brown eyes and a straightforward and serious manner. He held
his hand more or less on the pulsing actualities of the town, and at one
time or another he took Truesdale to most of his clubs--the Crepuscular,
the Consolation, the Simplicity, the Universe. At most of these they
dined moderately and discussed immoderately, except at the Simplicity,
whose avowed object was to free Man from the tyranny of Things. There
they discussed and did not dine at all.

Brower called at the Marshall house at discreet intervals; now and then,
provided there was a plausible pretext for business, the interval was
shortened. He looked after all of old Mr. Marshall's insurance interests,
and the alterations in the business premises of Marshall & Belden seemed
to furnish him with such a pretext. The various policies required various
permits from various companies, and numerous changes to correspond with
the changes in the building itself. True, Brower might have sent one of
his young men to the store; but he preferred to come himself to the
house.

His presence there, under this ruse, was attended by various phenomena.
It was then that Jane would pant over the banister and palpitate in
doorways, and start and hesitate and advance and retreat, and presently
go gliding along the hall, and finally look in through the open door to
say, with affected surprise and disappointment:

"Why, dear me, it's only Mr. Brower, after all!"

Then the humiliation which she joyfully supposed him to suffer through
the infliction of such an indignity would be cancelled by a
fifteen-minute talk which, as regarded Jane's intention at least, would
be quite gracious and brilliant. Brower went through this ordeal serenely
enough, and never hesitated to expose himself again.

To Rosamund these subterfuges were too obvious for comment; this she
reserved for those other occasions when Brower's attentions were not made
to assume the mask of business. She objected that he came generally in a
sack-coat, that he sometimes presented himself too early, that he
dispensed with the mediatory services of a card, that he asked at the
door for "Miss Jane," and that she herself was always treated by him as a
child.

"Doesn't he know," protested Rosy, "that Jane is 'Miss Marshall'? And
does he think that I shall let him go on calling me by a mere nickname?"

She appeared to feel instinctively the point and the justness of these
her various exceptions, though where she collected her data it might have
been difficult definitely to say. She was served by intuition, perhaps;
or by a sixth sense--the social sense--which was now rapidly developing
from some recess hidden and hitherto all unsuspected.

Though Brower was out of Society, Truesdale did not find him on this
account any the more in Bohemia; he merely occupied the firm and definite
middle-ground of business. But Paston, on the other hand, while firmly
set in the flowery field of society, was quite capable of lifting a foot
now and then to put it within the borders of another and a different
area. Truesdale first met him in a sculptor's studio, at the top of one
of the great down-town office buildings; the young Briton was escorting a
pair of young women of his own circle who seemed disposed to encourage
art to the extent of seeing how the thing was done, and whose interest
was largely exhausted with an understanding of certain mechanical
processes. He and Truesdale subsequently grazed against each other at
places where young women, again, were present, whose interest in matters
aesthetic was in varying proportions, and whose social foothold was in
the lower strata--or substrata, as the case might be. Paston handled life
with the easy freedom of a man who, after all, was away from home; and
Truesdale was not far behind. Home, with him, was everywhere--or, rather,
nowhere; he had a great capacity for gypsy-like jauntings and an immense
abhorrence of superfluous luggage, and among the most superfluous of all
luggage he included scruples first and foremost. As soon expect a swallow
to carry a portmanteau.

During his first year abroad he had dabbled a good deal in French
fiction; this was at Geneva, before his long and intimate sojourn in
Paris. His taste had been formed, in the first instance, by the more
frivolous productions of the Romantic school--by "Mademoiselle de
Maupin," in part; by the "Vie de Boheme," more largely; and this taste
had taken a confirmed set through the perusal of other works of a like
trend--more contemporaneous and therefore still more deleterious. At
Geneva he had permitted himself various fond imaginings of Mimi and
Musette as they might disclose themselves in Paris--it was useless, all,
to expect the encounter in this strenuous little stronghold of Calvinism;
but Mimi and Musette, the actual, the contemporaneous, once met at short
range, were far, far from the _gracieuse_ and _mignonne_ creations of
Murger and of 1830. And if disappointing in Paris, how much more so in
Chicago?--where impropriety was still wholly incapable of presenting
itself in a guise that could enlist the sympathies of the fastidious.
Truesdale, whether or no, found himself restricted within reasonable
bounds by his own good taste. Nor was Paston permitted much greater
latitude; whatever his taste, the condition of his finances would alone
have checked him from straying too widely outside the beaten path.

Paston was less reticent about the worldly status of himself and his
family than might have been expected; he treated the subject in a broad,
free fashion, with a great pretense to openness. Few apprehended the
general and essential cautiousness of his disclosures; most people fell
easily enough into the notion that so much frank jocularity had no other
object than to entertain them; the young man was doubtless exaggerating,
possibly inventing.

"Absurd situation, isn't it?" he would set forth in his large and genial
way. "Poor father! six girls to see married off; and five boys to start
in life--quite as bad. One in the Army, one in the Navy, one in the
Church, one in the Civil Service, and one--in America. No other way;
somebody had to come to America--the youngest, naturally. And here he
is."

"Fancy that, Bessie! Imagine that, Allie!" his hearers would cry. Then
they would ask him about the fox-hunting in Bucks, and tease him for
further particulars about his sister Edith, who had married Lord
Such-a-one.

The subject of America he treated with some tact--with some forbearance,
he himself may have thought. If asked point-blank whether he liked it, he
would reply that his preference, naturally, must be for England. If asked
further whether he liked Chicago--an inquiry which courtesy might well
have withheld--he would answer promptly and plainly, No. And there the
matter would end: he never gave detailed explanations. He was prepared,
it came to be understood, to put the best face on a bad matter. He
remained, however, a loyal subject of the Queen, and prayed for as speedy
a sight of Boxton Park, Witham, Essex, as fortune would permit. And in
the meantime he enjoyed such makeshift pleasures as came his way.

Among these was that of leaving his card at several good houses--the card
of Arthur Gerald Scodd-Paston. People met him at functions as Mr.
Scodd-Paston, but most of them found his name rather a large mouthful;
after they had used it enough times to show that they had caught it and
were not unable to wield it, they would dispense with the forepart and
use the Paston alone. This usage received the approval of a certain
few who had had the privilege of addressing royalty--or subroyalty--and
who remembered that, after they had used the expression "Your Royal
Highness" a few times, they were entitled to an occasional lapse into the
simpler "you." At the office, where he was by no means a royal highness,
he was always Paston, and Paston merely.

His father was a general in the British army, but lately retired. He
never referred to this dignitary, as such, save twice. These early
references, pointed but discreet he held to suffice; he estimated,
properly enough, that his father's fame, once started, might be trusted
to spread of itself; and it did--along with the son's modesty.

It was doubtless to his father's personal influence that he was indebted
for his connection with a great mortgage and investment company, which
extended, in a chain of many links, all the way from London to Colorado,
and a foothold in whose Chicago office he had been fortunate enough to
secure. The salary connected with the place was but so-so; yet the place
itself, as agreed to among the Englishry of Chicago, was in no degree
unsuited to a young man of good family, fair education, small resources,
and limited prospects, and a desire to make a decorous and
self-respecting figure in society--such society as Western conditions
offered. They said the position was as good--socially--as any in one of
the branch Canadian banks; some of the more intensely English (the
Canadians themselves) were fain to acknowledge that it was even better.

So Paston did his "office work" of whatever kind during the day, and
distributed his cards through the evening hours, and dined out with a
good-will whenever occasion offered. This was often enough; he soon
became known as one of the most persistent diners-out in town, and one of
the most accomplished. His animal spirits were overflowing; his plump and
ruddy person seemed to be at once grace, appetizer, and benediction; his
fund of stories and anecdotes (constantly replenished from the most
approved sources) was inexhaustible; he carried everything through almost
single-handed, by reason of his abounding vitality and never-ending
good-nature. Everybody wanted him who could get him; his presence
lessened by half the rigors of entertaining. He therefore lodged quietly
in a retired little house in the edge of a good neighborhood; they gave
him his breakfast there, and warded off those who came to spy out the
leanness of the land. He was thus seldom called upon to take thought
for the morrow--having once passed, that is to say, the crucial hour of
lunch.

He led germans and promoted other social industries. His vacations he
could have spent six times over at all manner of desirable places. On
Sundays, through the summer, he was possessed briefly of the freedom of
the scattered suburban settlements along the North shore. He always got a
hundred cents out of every dollar, and in many instances he got the
hundred cents and kept the dollar too.

Truesdale was slow in making up his mind to introduce Paston into his own
household. But Paston presently made his entrée there under other
auspices; and within a month from that day Rosamund Marshall was studying
Debrett and was taking hurdles at a riding-academy.

For a third new acquaintance Truesdale was indebted to his aunt Lydia; he
had felt certain, all along, that some such indebtedness would befall.
His aunt lived two or three miles due south from his father's, near the
last brace of big hotels. Her house had a rather imposing but impassive
front of gray-stone, with many neighbors, more or less varying the same
type, to the right and to the left and over the way. The house had never
the absolute effect of extending hospitality; but he understood the
possibilities of the interior, and knew that a cup of tea late on a
November afternoon was among them.

As he drew near he found this house and the other houses combined in a
conspiracy of silence against the musical addresses of a swarthy
foreigner who had a foothold a yard beyond the curbstone, and who was
turning the crank of his instrument with all the rapid regularity of the
thorough mechanician. The whole street rang. "'Ah, perchè non posso
odiarti!'" hummed Truesdale in unison with the organ, as the performer,
after an intricate cadenza, returned to the original theme. "That's the
only recognizable thing I've heard these fellows play since I came over.
I wonder who puts together all the shocking stuff they are loaded up with
nowadays."

The melody, so plaintive and cloying as a vocal performance, leaped
forward briskly enough under the rapid lashings to and fro of the crank;
the elbow of the organist moved with a swift rhythm as his searching eye
tried vainly to wring a penny or two from some one of all these opulent
facades. "Good Heaven!" cried Truesdale; "how little feeling, how little
expression! Here," he said to the man in Italian; "take this half lira
and let _me_ have a chance. Bellini was never meant to go like that."

The man, with a cheerful grin, yielded up his instrument to this engaging
youth who was able to address him so pointedly in his own language, and
Truesdale, with his eye on his aunt's upper windows, proceeded to indulge
himself in a realization of his ideal. His aunt was vastly susceptible to
music, and he would heap upon her (in the absence of any other) all those
passionate reproaches for cruelty and faithlessness proper to the
rôle--welling crescendos and plaintive diminuendos and long, slow
rallentandos, followed quickly by panting and impassioned accelerandos.
In other words, he would show this music-cobbler the possibilities of his
instrument and the emotional capacity of the human soul. Incidentally, he
should earn his cup of tea.


"Why, oh why do I strive in vain to h-a-te thee,
Cruel creature, as deeply as I would?"


began Truesdale, blithely, with his eye on the one window whose shade was
not completely lowered. But at the third or fourth measure he paused
disconcerted. He had adopted a varying rhythm to express each last fine
shade of the text, and the air was already littered with abrupt and
disjointed phrases which began with a quick snarl or with a prolonged
nasal wail, leaving a sudden hiatus here, and giving there a long,
lingering scream on some mere passing note.

"Dear me!" exclaimed Truesdale, "this won't do at all. Here, signor
organista, just set that thing back, will you, and we'll start again."


"Why, oh why do I strive in vain to hate thee?"


More notes shattered themselves on the stone walls about him--singly,
in bunches, in long, detached wails. The organ yelped and snarled as
Truesdale, time routed and accent annihilated, abandoned himself to the
expression and the phrasing of the true Italian school. Two or three
passing children paused on the pavement; a park policeman, stationed on
the next corner, walked his sedate iron-gray slowly along to the point of
disturbance.

Presently the object of all this attention showed herself. Mrs. Rhodes
appeared at the window with that expression of indignant protest which
forecasts an appeal to the authorities. When she saw the offending cause
her indignation did not greatly diminish; she refused to smile even when
Truesdale extended his hat for the usual tribute. He saw her lips move,
however, with a quick exclamation which brought a second person to the
window. Then both immediately withdrew.

"Another niece, I swear!" said Truesdale; "and I've walked right into
it." He gave the man a second dime. "I guess you understand it better
than I do, after all," he said, magnanimously.

"What was your idea in making me ridiculous that way?" his aunt asked in
severe reproach, as she advanced to meet him in the reception-hall. "Do
you want to set me up as a laughingstock for all my friends and
neighbors? After all I've told Bertie about your music, too! I don't know
whether I shall let you know her or not."

"It was pretty rocky, wasn't it?" Truesdale admitted, with a cheery
impartiality. "I'm afraid it takes more practice than I've ever had a
chance to give it. And perhaps I don't understand the genius of the
instrument. Where do you suppose they learn to do it? How long a course
is necessary, do you fancy, to get a complete grip on the technique?"

His aunt's protest had been purely personal. With a broader outlook and a
better understanding she might have protested on behalf of a slighted
neighborhood, or, indeed, of a misprized town. A finer vision might have
seen in Truesdale's prank a good-natured, half-contemptuous indifference
alike to place and people. "I don't know _what_ the Warners over the way
will think," she emitted, as if that were all.

She presently relented as to the new inmate of her household. "Come,
Bertie!" she called; "step up, like a good girl. This is my nephew
Truesdale--you've heard all about him; Miss Bertie Patterson, of
Madison."

Miss Patterson of Madison was a shy, brown-eyed little girl who, at a
guess, had been in long dresses but a year or two; as she faced Truesdale
she seemed to be wondering if she might venture to smile. She had never
before been south of the Wisconsin State line; but Mrs. Rhodes, having
exhausted the ranks of her own nieces, was now giving a tardy recognition
to the nieces of her late husband. Bertie Patterson had come for the
winter, and she was finding a great deal of pleasure and interest
(slightly tinctured with awe) in a town which for some years she had
favored with a highly idealistic anticipation.

"Nice little thing," admitted Truesdale, inwardly; "but Aunt Lydia has
got to leave _me_ alone."

Mrs. Rhodes took him into the drawing-room, and had Bertie Patterson make
him his tea. She did this very nicely; she helped rather than hindered
the effect by her hesitancy and lack of complete confidence. She had
never poured tea many times before for a young man--never at all for just
such a young man as this.

"Now," said his aunt, presently. She emitted this monosyllable with a
falling inflection, and followed it by a full stop. She took his teacup
from him. "You know what little Tommy Tucker did." She placed her thumb
on one of the upper black notes of the piano and waved her fingers over
the remainder of the keyboard. "'Just a song at twilight,'" She quoted,
with a coaxing smile.

"All right," said Truesdale, promptly. "Thanks for this chance to redeem
myself. I'll show you now how it really ought to go."

And he did. At Milan he had seen reflected in his looking-glass not only
Fernando, but Elvino, too, besides Edgardo and Manrico, and that whole
romantic brotherhood. He resuscitated them all, with as much sentiment,
romance, passion, drama, as each individual case required, while Bertie
Patterson sat in the fading light behind the great three-cornered screen
of the up-tilted cover and clasped her hands and brought her generous
idealizing faculty into its fullest play.

Then he sang a few German lieder of a more contemporaneous cast. Then his
aunt asked him for that last sweet little thing of his own. "I don't
believe Bertie has ever heard a composer sing one of his own songs."

As he concluded, his aunt gave a long and appreciative sigh. "There!" she
breathed. Then: "Why do you act like a crazy, when you can be so nice if
you only will?"




VII


"Drive on a little farther, Martin," Mrs. Bates directed her coachman; "I
can never work my way through all that mess."

Beds of mortar and piles of brick half filled the roadway, and the posts
of a kind of rough plank canopy, which formed a shelter for pedestrians,
rose flush with the curbstone. Far above this improvised shelter
bricklayers were adding the courses of a new story or two to the walls of
a shabby and smoke-stained old structure, and immediately below it the
march of traffic and the hubbub of trade proceeded upon the broad flag
sidewalk as fully as contractors and their underlings would permit.
"Right over there," Mrs. Bates indicated; "between that sand-pile and the
row of flour-barrels."

Porters in blue overalls hurried boxes and tubs across the wide walk to
the waiting carts of suburban grocers. Through the dingy windows there
showed rows of shelves set with bottles of olives or cluttered with glass
jars containing various grades of molasses. From the narrow window of a
small, close pen, a few feet within the door, a shipping-clerk, wearing a
battered straw hat of the past summer, thrust out bills of lading to
draymen and issued directions to a gang of German and Swedish
roustabouts.

"I have taken a great time to come," Mrs. Bates observed to herself. She
rubbed a streak of lime from her fur coat, and stooped to pick a splinter
from the hem of her skirt. "Who's the one to ask, I wonder?"

She secured the interest of a plump, round-shouldered young German, whose
viscous hands had just left a syrup-cask, and whose wide blue eyes stared
at this unaccustomed visitor with an honest wonder. He ventured to lead
her as far as a door in a grimy glass partition which closed off a large
room filled with desks, gas-shades, clerks, and account-books. Circles of
teacups stood on the round tops of oak tables; little pasteboard trays of
coffee were disposed on the wide window-ledges, and were also ranged on
the top of a substantial balustrade that shut off two or three gentlemen
in high silk hats from the other occupants of the place.

Mrs. Bates threw herself upon the guidance of a young office-hand--the
sole person present who seemed sufficiently disengaged to notice her. He
asked her, with a mixture of surprise and deference, what name he should
give.

"Sue Lathrop, say," she responded, in an access of large and liberal
recklessness.

She was led through another door, in another dingy glass partition, to a
smaller room at one corner, and as she passed along she threw a general
glance over her surroundings. "So _he's_ here, then!" she said, under her
breath, as one of the gentlemen took off his hat and set it carefully on
top of a desk. "I'd forgotten all about his being in business with David.
It's just as well if he didn't see me. No love lost," she added, grimly.

She paused on the threshold of this last doorway; apparently she had
fallen upon the final moments of some small conference. A tall, spare old
man was delaying the resumption of his correspondence to call a last word
after a younger one, who had just set his hat upon the back of his head
and was now moving towards the exit.

"Try a summons--yes," said the elder; "that would have been the best
thing to start with, wouldn't it?"

"I don't quite see it that way,' replied the other, in the tone of heated
defence. "he took the goods, and must have had them on the premises."

"You didn't find them, though. I don't quite see the use of your having
gone with a writ of replevin after goods that I were bought to be sold
again as soon as might be."

"Such old stuff isn't worked off in any such haste as that. It's as I
tell you--word was got around to her that the writ had been issued. The
place was all turned upside down; the things had been hidden away."

"Who could have told her?"

"Who?" cried the other, with a scornful impatience. "Somebody connected
with the court. Who else could? Who else knew? Well, I'll try the other
thing; there is plenty yet to be learned about justice-court justice, no
doubt." He passed out with snapping eyes and a curl on his lips, and the
older man again bent himself over his desk.

It was a cramped little room with a breadth or two of worn oilcloth on
the floor. Two or three shelves, set across the dingy window, supported a
range of glass jars filled with nutmegs and orris-root. On the tilted
flagging, outside, the tops of a row of blue gasoline barrels held each a
half-pint of the past night's shower, and across the muddy street bunches
of battered bananas hung from the rusty framework of several shabby old
awnings.

"Poor David! twenty years and more of _this_!" Mrs. Bates stood within
the doorway. It was easy enough to figure her as already
forgotten--easier still when the old man's half-guilty start at length
acknowledged her presence.

She stepped forward with an undaunted cordiality. "Well, David, here I am
at last, you see. The mountain wouldn't come to Mohammed, so"--She tapped
her foot smartly on the oilcloth. "Here stands Sue Lathrop, with a long
memory and a disposition to meet the mountain half-way, or
three-quarters, or seven-eighths, or to trudge the whole distance--even
to the last yard. One, two, three!" she counted, as she stepped up to
his desk and flung out her hand.

The old man rose with something like alacrity. He banished his slight
frown of preoccupation and hastened to replace it by an expression of--so
to speak--apologetic cordiality.

"Mrs. Bates," he murmured. "It's very kind of you to come here--very. My
daughter--" he hesitated. He finished the sentence by drawing up a chair
and clearing its seat of the ruck of morning papers.

"I take the chair," she said, as if in burlesque assumption of the
guidance of some public meeting, "but not as any 'Mrs. Bates.' You know,
David, that I haven't come here to be treated with any such formality as
that."

He looked at her with a half-smiling wistfulness, as if he would be glad
enough to take her tone, were the thing only possible. But for such a
juncture as this he had little initiative and less momentum, and he
realized it all too well.

Mrs. Bates seated herself and threw open her furs. Her affluence, her
expansiveness, her easy mastery of the situation seemed to crowd this
square and ineffective old man quite into a corner. She counted his
wrinkles and his gray hairs; she noted the patient dulness of his eye and
the slow deliberation of his movements. "He _is_ old," she thought;
"older than I should have imagined. I might have bestirred myself and
come before."

She turned on him with a flash of her own magnificent and abounding
vitality. "I want you to assure me that I am not in the way--that I am
not interrupting business. This is not the 'busy day,' I hope, that the
little placards in the offices tell about." She must meet his unreadiness
with the fluency over which she had such a fortunate and unfailing
command. "This isn't the busy hour of the day, nor the busy day of the
week, nor the busy week of the year?"

Marshall smiled slowly. He felt himself coming to a better adjustment
with her mature and massive comeliness, her rich and elaborate attire,
her full-toned and friendly fluency. "We are always busy, and are
expecting to be busier still; but we are never too busy for a call like
this." He considered that that was doing pretty fairly for an old man who
was immersed in affairs and altogether alien to the amenities of the
great world.

Mrs. Bates rubbed again at the lime-streak on her fur. "Expecting
to be busier, yes; and preparing for it accordingly." But why "we"?--she
was not calling on the firm. "I'm sure I broke in on something at the
very start." She made him a determined tender of this handle--something
or other, apparently, he must be offered to take hold of.

"Only a little matter with my son. It was ending as you came in."

"Your son?" Here was an opening, indeed. "Not the one just home from
abroad?"

"Oh no. That's Truesdale. Roger, now, has stayed at home; and he has done
the better for it, I think. He looks after my law business. He has never
had any of the disadvantages of European travel," the old man concluded,
with a kind of gentle grimness.

Mrs. Bates's eyes flashed; here, to her thinking, was a glimmer of the
real David, after all.

"My boys haven't been over either," she responded. She cast aside any
lingering fear that no "talk" could ensue; it must, it should. "No," she
went on, "neither one of them; and I'm none too sure that they ever
_will_ go. But as for college--well, _that_ I absolutely insisted upon.
When my first boy was getting along to that age the question gave me a
good deal of anxiety. Mr. Bates had his views and I had mine. Granger was
for clapping him right into business; for a week I was positively
alarmed. Up to that time my husband and I had staved forward
abreast--neither had ever disappointed the other, nor lagged behind the
other; but I was afraid that the point had been reached at last
where I must drop him behind and go ahead alone. 'My dear husband,' I
began--and when I begin like that he knows I mean business--'my dear
husband, do you realize what the next twenty years are holding for this
town? Do you know the promise they have for a young man of family who is
properly qualified and started? Do we want our boys to get their manners
from the daily hustle of La Salle Street? Do we want them to get their
physique by doubling over books all day in a close, unwholesome office?
What's the good of all our millions if we can't start our children in
life with good health and good manners? Let them build up sound bodies
and let them learn the usages of good society--how to associate on equal
terms, in fact, with men of their own class. Give them a chance at tennis
and baseball. As for their Latin and Greek, it won't do them any real
harm--they'll forget it all in due season.' And so forth, and so
forth," added Mrs. Bates, conscious of the growing length of her
tirade. "Well, I had my way in the end--I usually do--besides the
satisfaction of finding that Granger Bates was still capable of stepping
right along with his wife. Billy came home--a big, handsome, gentlemanly
fellow--and was put into the business on the very day he was twenty-one.
He's doing well, and Jimmy will follow in due course. Your oldest boy is
a lawyer, then. What's the other one?"

"He's a gentleman--so far," answered Marshall, rather ruefully. "I'm
afraid he's almost too clever to be anything else."

"H'm," pondered Mrs. Bates, with a sympathetic thoughtfulness; "that's
bad--bad. I'd sooner have a boy of mine dead than a mere gentleman. And I
shouldn't want him too clever, either. My Billy, before we sent him off
to college, showed signs of cleverness; it worried me a good deal. He
wanted to write; and there was one time when he thought he wanted to
paint. Of course we couldn't allow anything like that. I was willing
enough that he should be posted on the best books, and be able to tell a
good painting from a bad one--to be a patron of the arts, if so minded.
But to do things of that sort himself--oh, really, you know, that was
altogether out of the question. He's with his father now, as I say, and
he's where he belongs. How old is your other boy--Roger? Twenty-eight?
Twenty-nine?"

"Thirty. He went right from the High School to the Law School. No
college, no Europe; yet for all that--"

"For all that, he's doing well, eh? He's got quite a practice, has he?
He's a smart fellow? He's a good lawyer?"

Marshall hesitated. A week previous his affirmative would have come more
promptly. "Yes," he said at length, "Roger is pretty good in his line. He
does for himself; he never makes any demands on his father. He is
practising right along, and--and learning. He does quite well--in some
things." The old gentleman's tone and manner expressed a delicate and
disappointed qualification; and his thought seemed gliding away to
something in no wise connected with the present talk.

Mrs. Bates brought him back to the actualities of the moment; she had no
idea of permitting her impromptu address on education (furthest of all
things from her thoughts as she had entered) to be succeeded by an
absolute hiatus. She therefore made inquiries of the customary civility
about the other members of the Marshall family. She asked with a firm and
ceremonial emphasis after Mrs. Marshall, and expressed herself as pleased
at the prospect of renewed relations between the two families. "We are
the old settlers, you know. There are only a few of us left, and we ought
to hang together." She inquired further about his youngest daughter,
whose social fortunes she seemed disposed to promote; she even made a
civil reference to the remote dweller at Riverdale Park. And then, with
every appearance of relish, she approached the subject of the other
daughter who came between--"the girl who gave me an art course in my own
house," she declared, with twinkling eyes.

Marshall smiled. "That's Jane, true enough. She has always been kind of
literary and artistic, and lately she has become architectural too. She
is down here once or twice a week to help Bingham put on these extra
stories."

"Bingham? My Bingham? Tom Bingham? He's the one who built our house," she
explained.

"That's the one. Jane held out, at first, for an architect and a design;
she had an idea that here was the chance, finally, to make this old block
an ornament to the city. But I thought differently. So I had Bingham's
people take off the cornice and run up two stories like the others.
To-morrow they'll put the cornice back again, and we shall be under cover
before the snow flies."

"Well, between Jane and Tom Bingham you're in pretty good hands. Have you
had him before for anything? He's a grand fellow. It'll do you lots of
good to know him--as much good as it has done me to know your girl.
David," she went on, with a little touch of solemnity, "she's a fine
girl, she's a splendid girl; and she thinks everything of her father."

"So she does," admitted the old gentleman, with a guarded smile. His
comments on his daughter's affection for him were never profuse.

"When she came to see me the other day," Mrs. Bates continued, "it was
like a whiff of air from the old times. It was like one of the Old
Settler receptions that the Calumet people used to give--only better. Why
did they stop them, I wonder? Are the old settlers giving out? Or has the
town become too proud and indifferent? Or what?"

"I'm afraid it's the fault of the old settlers themselves," responded
Marshall, with a grave and quiet smile. "They won't stay to be received."

"Yes, I know," said Mrs. Bates, with a soft little sigh. "They are
dropping off one by one. David!" she exclaimed suddenly, leaning forward
with a wistful smile, "we ought never to have drifted apart as we did. We
ought not to have lost sight of each other for all these years. I'm
sure"--in earnest questioning--"that we remember enough about the old
times to care to see each other once in a while still?"

Marshall dropped his eyes to his desk, and his long, lean fingers picked
out the border of its blue baize covering. He was half touched, half
embarrassed. "I hope so," he said.

"What gay times we used to have!" she went on, still determined, despite
his meagre response, upon an evocation of their youthful past. "Such
dances and sleigh-rides, and everything! You were ever so good to me in
those old days; I haven't forgotten how you took me to the Diorama and
the Bell-Ringers and what all besides. And 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' too--I'm
sure I should never have seen it but for you; certainly I haven't had
much disposition to see it of _late_ years--especially since they have
put the blood-hounds in! And there was Topsy and Eva, too--oh, dear, I
believe I should like to see it again, after all; don't they give it over
on the West Side now and then? You must remember how they wore those tall
pointed hats and those red petticoats and those black velvet bands across
themselves in front--not the blood-hounds--and how they had the bells on
different little tables according to their size--not Topsy and Eva; I'm
talking about the Peake family, you understand. And there was Adelina
Patti, too--a mere slip of a girl, in the quaintest little old clothes. I
go every time she comes; I wouldn't miss one of her farewells for
anything. You go, too, I suppose?"

"The same old Sue," he said, smiling. "I? No; I haven't seen her since
that first time, so long ago."

"Yes," she cried, "I _am_ the same old Sue; and I always shall be to the
friends of those dear old days! But you, David--how is it with you
yourself?"

She looked at him closely, earnestly, studiously. He felt that she was
disappointed in him, and he felt almost disappointed in himself. She had
come to him extending, as it were, an olive branch--living, lustrous,
full-foliaged; and in return he seemed able to offer nothing beyond a
mere splinter-like twig--dry, sapless, unpliant. He was conscious that he
was not all she had expected to find him, nor all that she was entitled
to expect to find him; he was even conscious, but more dimly, that he
was not quite all that he had meant to be; no, nor all that, in her eyes,
he should have liked to be. Yet, in the end, he was a successful man, and
she must know it. True, he had not rolled up any such enormous fortune as
that of Granger Bates, nor did he make in the public eye any such
splendid and enviable figure. All the same, however, he could command the
world to the extent of three million dollars; nor was he displeased
that his caller should have come at a time when indications of future
prosperity greater still were so patent all over the premises.

Mrs. Bates smoothed her gloves upon each other and cast her eye over the
nutmegs and orris-root and the other furnishings of the apartment, and
heaved a little sigh and rose to go.

"I am glad to have had these few minutes with you, David; but I feel that
I have no right to take up any more of them. I am sure this _is_ your
busy day, after all."

She looked up into his face, which was coming once more to be overcast
with its accustomed aspect of preoccupation, and gave him her hand. He
took it kindly enough, and she bestowed on his a quiet little pressure.
It was hardly cordial; it was far indeed from effusive. Yet she had
hoped, half an hour before, to have it both.

"Ten years ago," she said, "I might have satisfied myself about you
without coming here at all." She stood at the end of his desk, and
stirred with an unconscious finger the loose memoranda in a wire basket
on the corner of it. "The papers used to speak of you, and now and then
something would come by word of mouth. But I am hearing less about you of
late. Hold your own, David. Don't let the world forget you. You have done
well, as I know, and you are entitled to your place in the public eye."

She looked him in the face, smilingly but very earnestly. "I had great
hopes for you in the early days, and I find that I am jealous for you
even yet. You have made a good deal of money, they tell me, and you are
getting ready to make a good deal more--_that_ I see for myself. But
doesn't it seem to you," she proceeded, carefully, "that things are
beginning to be different?--that the man who enjoys the best position and
the most consideration is not the man who is making money, but the man
who is giving it away--not the man who is benefiting himself, but the man
who is benefiting the community. _There_ is an art to cultivate,
David--the art of giving. Give liberally and rightly, and nothing can
bring you more credit."

Marshall regarded her with a dubious smile. Nobody had ever before
attempted to fit his head to such a cap as this.

"As I have said so many times to Mr. Bates, 'Make it something that
people can _see_.' Imagine a man disposed to devote two or three hundred
thousand dollars to the public, and giving it to help pay off the
municipal debt. How many people would consider themselves benefited by
the gift, or would care a cent for the name of the giver? Or fancy his
giving it to clean up the streets of the city. The whole affair would be
forgotten with the coming of the next rain-storm. 'No,' said I to
Granger, it must be something solid and something permanent; it must
be a building.' And it's _going_ to be a building. You drive out with me
to the University campus this time next year, David, and you'll see Bates
Hall--four stories high, with dormers and gables and things, and the name
carved in gray-stone over the doorway, to stay there for the next century
or two. I think I shall name it Susan Lathrop Bates Hall (Granger is
willing), and make it a girls' dormitory. They'll call the girls
'Susans,' I dare say; but I sha'n't mind, and I don't suppose they will
either. Besides, boys would be sure to be called 'Grangers,' so what's
the difference?" She smiled whimsically, and made a feint to depart.

"But there are plenty of other things," she paused to impart. "People are
always running to us about schools and hospitals. A few loose thousands,
for example, would help the Orchestra guarantee--Granger has contributed
there, too. And lately he has been approached about an endowed theater.
There are plenty of ways."

"Your husband is fond of music?"

"Oh, well, he doesn't object to it. He can sit out an evening in our box
very comfortably. But a man of his position is naturally expected to
support a great artistic enterprise. Besides, Granger thinks a good deal
of the reputation of the city."

"Yes, there are plenty of ways, as you say," the old man rejoined, with
his preoccupied smile. "The 'charity' page of our ledger shows that. No
man in business is allowed to forget his obligations to the 'public.' I
am just beginning to become acquainted with the public--our public. A
justice-court is a good place for us to learn what it is and who compose
it, and what their attitude is toward us--the public that we are expected
to do so much for."

Mrs. Bates, with her hand on the door-knob, felt herself obliged to
decline this theme so tardily introduced--though the old man's tart tone
promised great possibilities. She would have thanked David Marshall for a
prompter contribution of conversational material; she felt that her own
efforts during this interview had been out of all proportion to his. She
made no response, and he stepped forward to conduct her through the outer
office to her carriage. "You needn't go through all those porters again,"
he said.

Just inside the outer doorway stood two gentlemen; their faces were
turned towards the street as they watched the preparations for the upward
trip of a great length of metallic cornice. "Why," said Mrs. Bates, as
one of them turned half round, "isn't that Tom Bingham, now?"

"Yes," said Marshall; "he looks in occasionally."

"How do you do, Mr. Bingham?" she said, hastening up to him with a jocular
cast in her eye. She knew the Bingham Construction Company as the
builders of a score of handsome residences, and of as many of the vast
structures which towered all over the business district. It seemed droll
to her to find him here, giving personal heed to mere alterations and
repairs. "What will be the next thing--building-blocks? Let me send you a
box of them, I beg of you."

Bingham turned round altogether--a tall, stalwart man whose face was full
of the serenity that comes from breadth and poise, but whose mind, as she
herself knew well enough, was too habituated to the broad treatment of
big matters to have any aptitude for repartee and chatter. She liked to
disconcert him, and it was usually an easy thing to do. "And I wish,
while you have your hand in, you would just come up and nail some
weather-strips on my dining-room windows."

Bingham smiled slightly. "Send on your blocks," he said--"if you think
they will help me any _there_." He pointed towards the cornices of the
building opposite. Above their broken skyline a tall steel frame (on the
next street behind) rose some two hundred feet into the air; along the
black lines which its upper stage etched against the sky a dozen men
swarmed in spidery activity and sent down the sharp clang of metal on
metal to the noisier world below.

"Mine, too," he said, shortly, as if the vast monument were its own
sufficient spokesman. He seemed proud of himself and of the town where
such things could be accomplished.

Mrs. Bates flashed forth a look full of admiration for both man and work.
"I'll take that all back about the weather-strips; but if you _could_
bring up your kit to-morrow morning and make us an extra coal-bin in the
furnace-room---Too proud for that, too? Well, then, just come up to
dinner to-morrow evening--only the family. And bring your sister, if
she'll accept on such short notice."

The other gentleman, whom Mrs. Bates had overlooked, and indeed
forgotten, turned round. "You know Mr. Belden, Mrs. Bates?" was
Marshall's introduction.

Belden was a man between forty-five and fifty. His costume and
countenance were alike much more contemporaneous than his partner's. His
dress was self-consciously fashionable, and he wore a carefully trained
mustache, whose dark brown was beginning to show threads of gray. His
cheeks and his forehead seemed in their smoothness as if coated with some
impermeable and indestructible hard-finish. He had a resolute chin and a
pair of hard, steel-gray eyes, which were set much too close together to
leave great room for any attribution of an open-minded generosity. He and
Mrs. Bates, under Marshall's promptings, bowed icily, and a cold and
chilling silence immediately ensued.

"Just like me," said Mrs. Bates, as she effected a hurried departure,
"to blunder up against him as I did. I wonder if he and David get along
at all well together. And the idea of my extending invitations to dinner
under his very nose! Well, it can't be helped now."

She thought this the only offence of which Belden might accuse her. But
he was piqued by her apparent disparagement of their building, and he was
still more incensed by her having called on his partner at their place of
business. For Marshall must know--everybody must know--that the Beldens,
though neighbors of the Bateses, had never been admitted, and never
were to be admitted, into their house.

Belden stood behind the vast spread of dingy plate-glass, and watched
Bingham putting Mrs. Bates into her carriage. He found additional offence
in the gay nod which she sent to Marshall through the carriage window.

"In spite of you," he muttered; "we are moving up in spite of you.
Prevent us, if you can!"




VIII


Susan Bates drove homeward, filled with a vague dissatisfaction. "I
expected too much," she said to herself, as she half opened the door
again to free the skirt that Bingham had fastened there. "I ought to have
chosen a different time and place. I might have known that he would be
deep in his business--I ought not to have taken him with the harness
actually on his back."

She sighed as she thought of all the things she had meant to say, but had
come away without saying--the thousand and one minor reminiscences of
those early days in the straggling and struggling prairie town. She had
imagined a mutual evocation of the past, and it had not been
accomplished. But presently consolation came: she realized all at once
that her present mood was but one of those early reminiscences made
modern. She recalled now how many times he had taken his departure from
that little parlor, leaving her to feel just as she felt now--piqued,
balked, impatient over his slow, taciturn, unresponsive ways. But her
impatience and her pique had always passed off in due time, and he had
always returned, his same kindly and inscrutable self. "I believe he
meant to do the best he could. Anyway, I shall follow things up, all the
same," she declared to the opposite cushions. Her thought deflected in
the direction of Belden. "I wonder how they get along together. He is not
at all the man that I should think of David being associated with--as a
matter of choice. I never heard how the partnership began. I never
understood why it kept up so long as it has."

The partnership, as a matter of fact, dated back twenty years, and had
originated through a kind of crisis in the affairs of Marshall & Co.--the
only weak spot in the history of the firm. After several years of
unbroken prosperity, David Marshall (with thousands of others) had been
overtaken by fire. A year or two later fire was followed by panic, and
Marshall felt himself crowded towards the brink of ruin. In a moment of
weakness he permitted himself a course to which only so great an
emergency could have prompted him. The situation was saved by a species
of legerdemain--of card-shuffling, so to speak--which was quite outside
the lines of mercantile morality, and barely inside the lines of legality
itself. An instrument willing to lend itself to this feat of juggling was
needed, and was found in a pushing young fellow who left a rival house to
play discreetly and shrewdly the rôle of figure-head that the juncture
required. Marshall had long ago made full amends to the men whose
welfare he had temporarily sacrificed to his own salvation, but he had
never shaken off Belden, who remained constantly as a reminder of his
early and only lapse from rectitude. In moments when conscience became
tender under the quickening touch of reminiscence, Belden was upon him
not only as a punishment, but as an incubus.

Belden had never yielded a single inch of the foothold gained by his
sudden intrusion upon the affairs of the concern. His first demand was
for the headship of a department; he had required, next, an interest as a
partner; he had exacted, more lately, the presence of his name in the
style and title of the firm; and to-day he was moving towards the making
of the firm over into a stock company. He was younger than Marshall,
stronger, more aggressive, more ambitious, more adventuresome; nor was it
difficult to imagine him as fundamentally insolent and selfish.

His standard of mercantile morality was never higher than at the
beginning, and his standard of social propriety was felt to leave much to
desire. His first entry into the firm seemed to have been accompanied by
a clairvoyant confidence and assurance and ambition. He was understood to
have divorced his first wife, an amiable, faithful, but limited little
creature, under circumstances of some cruelty, and even barbarity, to
form a second union more in harmony with his mounting ideas for the
future. A subtle atmosphere of distaste and disapproval had enveloped him
and his for many years, and the social advances of himself and his wife
had been, however determined, but slow--almost imperceptible.

Finally, what could not be accomplished in the West was accomplished, to
some extent, in the East. Statira Belden was of New England origin; her
family had resided for years in a small town which the taste of a few
Boston families of consideration was turning into a summer resort. They
contrived their cottages, and she contrived hers. She discreetly
renovated the old "homestead," as she called it, and arranged to reside
in eastern Massachusetts through the summer season. She made a few
careful acquaintances among her neighbors, and presently found it
possible to spend a profitable and distinguished winter month in the Back
Bay. One step more brought her to her goal. Social exchange between
Boston and New York being practically at par, she passed from one town to
the other with an unimpaired currency. In Manhattan she was received with
sufficient frequency by people sufficiently distinguished, and
announcements in correspondence with the facts were borne westward by
various metropolitan dailies and weeklies. She herself followed, in due
course; she had now conquered a certain foothold at home, and her
progress there was distinctly perceptible.

The last stronghold of the opposition existed, much to her mortification,
in her own immediate neighborhood, where a stubborn little clique (as she
called it) continued, under the leadership of Susan Bates, to ignore her.
The Belden carriage-block, measuring diagonally across the street, was
three hundred feet from that of the Bateses, but the distance might as
well have been three hundred miles. Mrs. Bates, who, on some occasion or
other, had met her face to face, continued to hold sturdily the
impression that her eyes were at once too furtive and too bold, and that
her hair was too yellow for a woman of her age; "or, for that matter, too
yellow for a woman of _any_ age."

In view of these considerations and others, Mrs. Bates was the reverse of
pleased when Jane, one morning, came up to her little room, sat down on
the foot of the bed, and announced that Mrs. Belden, among others, was
likely to be bidden to Rosy's coming-out.

"Ma doesn't like her so extra well," Jane admitted, candidly; "she thinks
they might have done something for Rosy this past summer. But it would
seem awful to pa if his own partner's wife wasn't asked; and, besides, we
don't know so very many people _to_ ask, anyway."

Mrs. Bates had made her advances in due form to the women of the Marshall
family. Throughout the call the talk had been frankly, inevitably
personal, and Susan Bates had treated Eliza Marshall, whose difficult and
captious character she at once apprehended, with the most elaborate and
ingenious simplicity. Rosy was passed in review and then dexterously
dispensed with, after having aroused the caller's interest and approval;
and the subsequent talk ran along quite freely on the child's deserts and
prospects. Mrs. Bates was quite direct and unadorned; and, though Rosy's
future was the only common ground upon which the two women could meet,
yet she handled this material with such a sympathetic persistence that
Eliza Marshall was fain to believe that she and her caller had been knit
in a close community of interests from time immemorial.

Mrs. Bates divined readily enough that nothing would be more galling to
Eliza Marshall than a betrayal of her own social ignorance. "How glad we
ought to be," she said, in an innocent, left-handed fashion, "that girls
are no longer brought out at a crush. Imagine, once more, that crowd of
people surging up and down your stairs, and trampling each other
underfoot as they try to dance in a room not a quarter big enough, and
ten times too many poor flowers wilting all over the house, and a big
band of music going it for dear life, and fifty or a hundred carnages
tangled up in a noisy crowd outside;--why go through all that for the
sake of getting a new little girl acquainted with a few of her mother's
friends?"

Eliza Marshall fastened her intent but inexpressive gaze upon her
caller's face and said never a word. The function thus sketched by Mrs.
Bates was the precise function that for the past fortnight she had been
imagining and dreading. She had filled her secluded old parlors with the
squeak and the blare of music; alien draperies in their swift gyrations
had whisked her immemorial ornaments from her immemorial old "whatnot";
in the dining-room a squad of custard-colored waiters had opposed a firm
front to the hungry hordes that assaulted the various viands on the
table; and a thousand teasing points of form and usage had afflicted her
with worry, uncertainty, and possible mortification and despair. She saw
now that nothing like her imagined entertainment was desirable, or even
tolerable, to-day, and she gave unconsciously a little sigh of relief.

Mrs. Bates divined further that, having instructed ignorance, she must
now allay timidity. She must represent the coming function as a mere
bagatelle for simplicity and informality.

"Isn't it pleasant to think that things are being made so much easier
for us than they used to be? Otherwise, I should have been dead long
before this. Nothing to do but for our little girl to stand up with her
mother and two or three of her mother's friends in one room, and for two
or three other people to look after the tea and other things in some
other room off behind somewhere or other." Mrs. Bates waved her hand
genially towards the rear rooms. "When Lottie came out I said to Mrs.
Ingles, 'Now you must just take the tea part of it off my hands. Get
some girls for me--you know about the ones I want--and see that their
gowns are right; and then I shall be at peace, knowing that people are
nibbling their biscuits'--or crackers" (this in a tone unconsciously
expository)--"'dawdling with their spoons, as they ought to.' A few, of
course, really drank tea; but the others--well, they had had tea
somewhere half an hour before, or expected to have it somewhere half an
hour after. How tired we all get of this old rigmarole, don't we?"

Eliza Marshall bowed gravely. For her this tiresome old rigmarole was a
complete novelty. "Lyddy's niece," she said, turning to Jane; "that girl
from Madison--she could pour for one, couldn't she?"

"Sure," assented Jane. "_Our_ niece, too--sort o'," she added,
correctively; for Eliza Marshall made little of certain vague ties to a
half-brother.

Mrs. Bates cast her eye round the dim, old-fashioned room. One might have
fancied her as exploring for the portraits of two or three mature female
relations of the Marshalls.

"I don't know whether I am right in asking it," she began, with a
fetching pretence of hesitancy; "but I am an old friend of the family--in
a sense--and so interested in Rosy, too. If I might help you receive--"

Mrs. Marshall heard this proposal with a second little sigh of relief,
and accepted as a matter of course. Indeed, outside of Mrs. Rhodes--and
possibly Mrs. Belden--she had absolutely no one to whom she could turn.

"And Aunt Lyddy for another," said Jane.

"Yes," assented Mrs. Bates, in the tone of indorsement. "Mrs. Rhodes and
I are acquainted"--with a sly look towards Jane; "and there--with your
other sister, perhaps--our little party is made up."

"And about the people to be invited," Eliza Marshall proceeded, with some
little show of initiative. Her task was becoming less and less
formidable; she felt herself approaching this supposed ordeal with
something almost like buoyancy.

"Let's have it nice and little and cosey," suggested Mrs. Bates, with a
cosey little air of her own. "Twenty-five or thirty at the outside." She
wondered inwardly where even so small a number could be got. "Why, _six_
would do--if they were the right six! And why should we want more than
three carriages before the house at any one time?--not to have a man
shouting numbers, I hope!"

She drew her wraps together and rose to go. "If I might ask for cards for
one or two of my own friends?--nice, pleasant people, who would be glad
to become acquainted among the old families," she added, diplomatically.
"If she can only be kept from suspecting how swell they really are, till
it's all over!" was the good creature's inner thought. "Of course Rosy's
appearance here isn't public, nor any equivalent for it; that will come
later. I myself shall want to do something for her on the South side, and
there will be one or two good houses for her on the North side--oh, our
little duck will swim, when once put into the pond, as you shall see.
After _that_, we shall want only a kind papa to pay the bills and a
patient maid to sit up until three or four in the morning."

Mrs. Bates got herself away in great good-humor and kept that humor until
the following day, when Jane came to announce the participation of Mrs.
Belden.

"Have her pour tea!" cried Susan Bates, without a moment's hesitation.
"Let her come early, and let her stay late, and pour and pour and pour
until the last cup is drunk. I can't promise your mother that I shall be
there throughout, but I will be there for half an hour--during the
middle, perhaps. And tea--well, I never drink it, even at home."

Jane looked at her in some surprise.

"And don't let your mother change her rooms any," Mrs. Bates went on,
rapidly. "They're right as they are--in perfect agreement. They have a
quiet tone; and a low, quiet tone, after all, is the best thing--and the
hardest thing to get. And not too many flowers."

"Never fear," said Jane, grimly. "She won't change anything."

"And don't let her have too much on the table. Give them tea and
chocolate and sandwiches and Albert biscuits--that's plenty. And if your
second girl shows, a cap would do no harm. Put a slice of lemon in every
cup--that discourages lots of people."

Jane laughed. "But ma doesn't want to discourage her friends."

"My good girl," said Mrs. Bates, impressively, "this whole function has
only one object. That object is to show your sister for five minutes to
Cecilia Ingles."

"Oh, that's it?"

"That's it, and all of it."

Mrs. Bates's function came off on the appointed afternoon, and was so
limited in size and so simple in character that Eliza Marshall would have
reproached herself for slighting her own child, had not Susan Bates,
before her early departure, whispered in the old lady's ear a word of
complete approbation.

Rosy herself flashed and sparkled in the dim and depressing old parlor
like a garnet set in dull gold. Indeed, it must be confessed that she
showed some of the hard glitter of such a jewelled fabrication, as well
as its splendor. Cecilia Ingles, who could not but admire her beauty and
her readiness, thought that her tone was a little too hard, and that in
her excess of aplomb she pushed self-possession to the verge of
self-assertion. Rosy, in fact, entered society not with the tentative
step and slow advance of one who cautiously feels an unaccustomed way,
but by a single confident and intuitive leap. As she stood there beside
her mother, dressed in a pale yellow gown and playing carelessly with her
bunch of red roses, she shifted any embarrassment incident to the
occasion from her own shoulders to those of her mother's friends--two or
three of whom, retired and aging persons, withdrew feeling their own
social rustiness quite keenly.

Jane, who had no definite rôle to play, but who did general utility all
over the house, was enabled to observe various episodes from various
points of view. When the actual test came she had little more aptitude
for the social graces than her mother had, and she imitated her mother's
own cautious reserve. She did not meet Mrs. Ingles at all, but she
witnessed from a distant doorway the conjunction which Mrs. Bates
effected between the leading luminary of the day and the newly-discovered
asteroid. Jane ungrudgingly acknowledged Cecilia Ingles to be
magnificently beautiful, and her dress to be a miracle of taste, and her
advances to be most winningly gracious. "And she's just about my own age,
too," thought poor Jane, in half-unconscious comparison. "And the way
that little chit stands up there and talks to her! I couldn't, for a
hundred worlds. Rosy acts as if she was just as pretty herself--well, I
suppose she is; and of just as good position--h'm, _that's_ all
right enough, I'm sure; and just as used to the ways of the world--well,
so she will be, fast enough." And the dear girl gave a long slow
sigh--partly that the family had at last such a champion, partly that she
herself should have been doomed to such complete uselessness in so high a
cause. She quite failed to realize that she alone and no other was the
real motive-power of her family's tardy spurt.

As for Mrs. Bates, Jane caught quite another side of her. She showed
herself profoundly formal and punctilious. She seemed to have dilated for
the occasion, with the express determination of dominating it. "She acts
mighty queer," said honest Jane, who was the same to one and all, to-day
and tomorrow; "but I suppose she knows what tone to take. If she acts
like that, though, the next time I see her, I shall want to stop knowing
her. She calls it a 'function,' and I suppose she's trying to make it
like one. But one's enough."

Jane observed, furthermore, that her aunt Lydia was inclined to neglect
her own part in the ceremony in order to perform pirouettes and
pigeon-wings (so to speak) before the backgammon-player of the tropics.
"If Aunt Lyddy forgets, after all," said Jane, anxiously, "and _does_
mention Florida, why, I've told a fib for nothing." Jane had informed
Mrs. Rhodes that the Bateses had lost their youngest child at
Jacksonville, and so could not bear the slightest mention of the South;
though she knew perfectly well that the youngest child of the Bateses was
a lusty youth of eighteen, with strong hopes of becoming one of the Yale
football team next season.

In the midst of the ceremonial Truesdale sauntered in and passed through
the rooms with a graceful indifference; he was the last to be
disconcerted by an assemblage purely feminine. He had doffed for the hour
most of his imported eccentricities in the way of dress, and had
consented to appear, properly enough, in a double-breasted black
frock-coat with extremely long skirts. He had an orchid in his
button-hole--a large one, very vivid and flamboyant. Jane had looked,
rather, for a chrysanthemum--one of those immeasurable blooms worn by the
young men in _Life_. "But Dick _will_ be individual," she acknowledged.
"Thank goodness it wasn't a peony, or worse. He _does_ look nice, if he
is my brother; and he's the only young man I know with violet eyes."

Truesdale drifted into the tea-room, and Jane presently saw him lounging
in a chair alongside Bertie Patterson. The table was officered after the
fashion that Mrs. Bates had suggested--by Mrs. Belden, who, in the
absence of her own daughter, kept away by illness, had brought, instead,
another girl, her daughter's friend, a visitor from New York. Truesdale
failed to catch her name.

Mrs. Belden herself was somewhat large and inclined to be a bit
high-colored and full-blown. An excess of blond down lined her cheeks
just below and before her ears, and her light-colored eyebrows spread
themselves rather broadly and dispersedly on her forehead. A superfluity
of straw-colored hair, of a shade essentially improbable waved about her
ears and temples, and a high gold comb emphasized the loose knot into
which it was drawn behind. "She would do better on the stage," Truesdale
said to himself; "she has gotten herself up for the photographer. And if
all those rings are her own, she has more than any one woman needs."

The girl with her, whose name presently came to him as Gladys--"Gladys
what?" he wondered--let herself loose on him at once with a fusillade of
ready familiarities. The field was clear, for Bertie Patterson, at his
side, had few words to interpose. Her large brown eyes rested half
appealingly upon him in the intervals of her constrained and halting
little service, and he readily divined the poor child as in a lonely and
uncomfortable minority.

"To-day is only my second time," she said to him, with a kind of
appealing protest; "you mustn't watch me and criticise me." She had just
finished her ministrations on a pair of old-time family friends whom
Rosy, in the fulness of her social efflorescence, had banished for
consolation and reassurance to the tea-room. Somehow, the guests that had
fallen to her side of the table had all been of this character. "When was
the first?"

"Why, don't you know? The day you--you--"

"Oh, _that_ day!" laughed Truesdale. "I didn't know you were there, of
course. You must have thought me absurd."

"No; not--not--absurd. But on such a long, wide street, with so many
handsome houses all around--"

Truesdale smiled. "Poor little thing! I believe she admires Michigan
Avenue; I believe she's impressed by it." To him this thoroughfare was
not completely innocent of the cheap and vulgar restlessness which is the
dominant note of all American street architecture. "But let her admire
it, if she can. Think what I expected to find Piccadilly!"

"I enjoy driving do

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