The Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories
by Robert Herrick
#3 in our series by Robert Herrick

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories

Author: Robert Herrick

Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8113]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on June 15, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Bidwell, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS

AND OTHER STORIES

by

ROBERT HERRICK



TO

G. H. P.



LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS:

A MODERN ACCOUNT

NO. I. INTRODUCTORY AND EXPLANATORY.

(_Eastlake has renewed an episode of his past life. The formalities have
been satisfied at a chance meeting, and he continues_.)

... So your carnations lie over there, a bit beyond this page, in a
confusion of manuscripts. Sweet source of this idle letter and gentle
memento of the house on Grant Street and of you! I fancy I catch their
odor before it escapes generously into the vague darkness beyond my
window. They whisper: "Be tender, be frank; recall to her mind what is
precious in the past. For departed delights are rosy with deceitful hopes,
and a woman's heart becomes heavy with living. We are the woman you once
knew, but we are much more. We have learned new secrets, new emotions, new
ambitions, in love--we are fuller than before." So--for to-morrow they
will be shrivelled and lifeless--I take up their message to-night.

I see you now as this afternoon at the Goodriches', when you came in
triumphantly to essay that hot room of empty, passive folk. Someone was
singing somewhere, and we were staring at one another. There you stood at
the door, placing us; the roses, scattered in plutocratic profusion, had
drooped their heads to our hot faces. We turned from the music to _you_.
You knew it, and you were glad of it. You knew that they were busy about
you, that you and your amiable hostess made an effective group at the head
of the room. You scented their possible disapproval with zest, for you had
so often mocked their good-will with impunity that you were serenely
confident of getting what you wanted. Did you want a lover? Not that I
mean to offer myself in flesh and blood: God forbid that I should join the
imploring procession, even at a respectful distance! My pen is at your
service. I prefer to be your historian, your literary maid--half slave,
half confidant; for then you will always welcome me. If I were a lover, I
might some day be inopportune. That would not be pleasant.

Yes, they were chattering about you, especially around the table where
some solid ladies of Chicago served iced drinks. I was sipping it all in
with the punch, and looking at the pinks above the dark hair, and
wondering if you found having your own way as good fun as when you were
eighteen. You have gained, my dear lady, while I have been knocking about
the world. You are now more than "sweet": you are almost handsome. I
suppose it is a question of lights and the time of day whether or not you
are really brilliant. And you carry surety in your face. There is nothing
in Chicago to startle you, perhaps not in the world.

She at the punch remarked, casually, to her of the sherbet: "I wonder when
Miss Armstrong will settle matters with Lane? It is the best she can do
now, though he isn't as well worth while as the men she threw over." And
her neighbor replied: "She might do worse than Lane. She could get more
from him than the showy ones." So Lane is the name of the day. They have
gauged you and put you down at Lane. I took an ice and waited--but you
will have to supply the details.

Meantime, you sailed on, with that same everlasting enthusiasm upon your
face that I knew six years ago, until you spied me. How extremely natural
you made your greeting! I confess I believed that I had lived for that
smile six years, and suffered a bad noise for the sound of your voice. It
seemed but a minute until we found ourselves almost alone with the solid
women at the ices. One swift phrase from you, and we had slipped back
through the meaningless years till we stood _there_ in the parlor at Grant
Street, mere boy and girl. The babbling room vanished for a few golden
moments. Then you rustled off, and I believe I told Mrs. Goodrich that
musicales were very nice, for they gave you a chance to talk. And I went
to the dressing-room, wondering what rare chance had brought me again
within the bondage of that voice.

Then, then, dear pinks, you came sailing over the stairs, peeping out from
that bunch of lace. I loitered and spoke. Were the eyes green, or blue, or
gray; ambition, or love, or indifference to the world? I was at my old
puzzle again, while you unfastened the pinks, and, before the butler, who
acquiesced at your frivolity in impertinent silence, you held them out to
me. Only you know the preciousness of unsought-for favors. "Write me," you
said; and I write.

What should man write about to you but of love and yourself? My pen, I
see, has not lost its personal gait in running over the mill books.
Perhaps it politely anticipates what is expected! So much the better, say,
for you expect what all men give--love and devotion. You would not know
a man who could not love you. Your little world is a circle of
possibilities. Let me explain. Each lover is a possible conception of life
placed at a slightly different angle from his predecessor or successor.
Within this circle you have turned and turned, until your head is a bit
weary. But I stand outside and observe the whirligig. Shall I be drawn in?
No, for I should become only a conventional interest. "If the salt," etc.
I remember you once taught in a mission school.

The flowers will tell me no more! Next time give me a rose--a huge,
hybrid, opulent rose, the product of a dozen forcing processes--and
I will love you a new way. As the flowers say good-by, I will say
goodnight. Shall I burn them? No, for they would smoulder. And if I left
them here alone, to-morrow they would be wan. There! I have thrown them
out wide into that gulf of a street twelve stories below. They will
flutter down in the smoky darkness, and fall, like a message from the land
of the lotus-eaters, upon a prosy wayfarer. And safe in my heart there
lives that gracious picture of my lady as she stands above me and gives
them to me. That is eternal: you and the pinks are but phantoms. Farewell!



NO. II. ACQUIESCENT AND ENCOURAGING.

(_Miss Armstrong replies on a dull blue, canvas-textured page, over which
her stub-pen wanders in fashionable negligence. She arrives on the third
page at the matter in hand_.)

Ah, it was very sweet, your literary love-letter. Considerable style, as
you would say, but too palpably artificial. If you want to deceive this
woman, my dear sir trifler, you must disguise your mockery more artfully.

Why didn't I find you at the Stanwoods'? I had Nettie send you a card. I
had promised you to a dozen delightful women, "our choicest lot," who were
all agog to see my supercilious and dainty sir.... Why will you always
play with things? Perhaps you will say because I am not worth serious
moments. You play with everything, I believe, and that is banal. Ever
sincerely,

EDITH ARMSTRONG.



NO. III. EXPLANATORY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.

(_Eastlake has the masculine fondness for seeing himself in the right_.)

I turned the Stanwoods' card down, and for your sake, or rather for the
sake of your memory. I preferred to sit here and dream about you in the
midst of my chimney-pots and the dull March mists rather than to run the
risk of another, and perhaps fatal, impression. And so far as you are
concerned your reproach is just. Do I "play with everything"? Perhaps I
am afraid that it might play with me. Imagine frolicking with tigers, who
might take you seriously some day, as a tidbit for afternoon tea--if you
should confess that you were serious! That's the way I think of the world,
or, rather, your part of it. Surely, it is a magnificent game, whose rules
we learn completely just as our blood runs too slowly for active exercise.
I like to break off a piece of its cake (or its rank cheese at times) and
lug it away with me to my den up here for further examination. I think
about it, I dream over it; yes, in a reflective fashion, I _feel_. It is a
charming, experimental way of living.

Then, after the echo becomes faint and lifeless, or, if you prefer, the
cheese too musty, I sally out once more to refresh my larder. You play
also in your way, but not so intelligently (pardon me), for you deceive
yourself from day to day that your particular object, your temporary mood,
is the one eternal thing in life. After all, you have mastered but one
trick--the trick of being loved. With that trick you expect to take the
world; but, alas! you capture only an old man's purse or a young man's
passion.

Artificial, my letters--yes, if you wish. I should say, not crude--
matured, considered. I discuss the love you long to experience. I dangle
it before your eyes as a bit of the drapery that goes to the ball of life.
But when dawn almost comes and the ball is over, you mustn't expect the
paper roses to smell. This mystifies you a little, for you are a plain,
downright siren. Your lovers' songs have been in simple measures. Well,
the moral is this: take my love-letters as real (in their way) as the
play, or rather, the opera; infinitely true for the moment, unreal for the
hour, eternal as the dead passions of the ages. Further, it is better to
feel the aromatic attributes of love than the dangerous or unlovely
reality. You can flirt with number nine or marry number ten, but I shall
be stored away in your drawer for a life.

You have carried me far afield, away from men and things. So, for a
moment, I have stopped to listen to the hum of this chaotic city as it
rises from Dearborn and State in the full blast of a commercial noon. You
wonder why an unprofitable person like myself lives here, and not in an
up-town club with my fellows. Ah, my dear lady, I wish to see the game
always going on in its liveliest fashion. So I have made a den for myself,
not under the eaves of a hotel, but on the roof, among the ventilators.
Here I can see the clouds of steam and the perpetual pall of smoke below
me. I can revel in gorgeous sunsets when the fiery light threads the smoke
and the mists and the sodden clouds eastward over the lake. And at night I
take my steamer chair to the battlements and peer over into a sea of
lights below. As I sit writing to you, outside go the click and rattle of
the elevator gates and other distant noises of humanity. My echo comes
directly enough, but it does not deafen me. Below there exists my barber,
and farther down that black pit of an elevator lies lunch, or a cigar, or
a possible cocktail, if the mental combination should prove unpleasant.
Across the hall is Aladdin's lamp, otherwise my banker; and above all is
Haroun al Raschid. Am I not wise? In the morning, if it is fair, I take a
walk among the bulkheads on the roof, and watch the blue deception of the
lake. Perhaps, if the wind comes booming in, I hear the awakening roar in
the streets and think of work. Perhaps the clear emptiness of a Sunday
hovers over the shore; then I wonder what you will say to this letter.
Will you feel with me that you should live on a housetop and eat cheese?
Do you long for a cool stream without flies, and a carpet of golden sand?
Do you want a coal fire and a husband home at six-thirty, or a third-class
ticket to the realms of nonsense? Are you thinking of Lane's income, or
Smith's cleverness, or the ennui of too many dinners?

I know: you are thinking of love while you read this, and are happy. If I
might send you a new sensation in every line, I should be happy, too, for
your prodigal nature demands novelty. I should then be master for a
moment. And love is mastery and submission, the two poles of a strong
magnet. Adieu.



NO. IV. FURTHER AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.

(_Eastlake continues apropos of a chance meeting_.)

So you rather like the curious flavor of this new dish, but it puzzles
you. You ask for facts? What a stamp Chicago has put on your soul! You
will continue to regard as facts the feeble fancies that God has allowed
to petrify. I warn you that facts kill, but you shall have them. I had
meditated a delightful sheet of love that has been disdainfully shoved
into the waste-basket. A grave moral there for you, my lady!

Do you remember when I was very young and _gauche_? Doubtless, for women
never forget first impressions of that sort. You dressed very badly, and
were quite ceremonious. I was the bantling son of one of your father's
provincial correspondents, to adopt the suave term of the foreigners. I
had been sent to Chicago to fit for a technical school, where I was to
learn to be very clever about mill machinery. Perhaps you remember my
father--a sweet-natured, wiry, active man, incapable of conceiving an
interest in life that was divorced from respectability. I think he had
some imagination, for now and then he was troubled about my becoming a
loafer. However, he certainly kept it in control: I was to become a great
mill owner.

It was all luck at first: you were luck, and the Tech. was luck. Then I
found my voice and saw my problem: to cross my father's aspirations, to be
other than the Wabash mill owner, would have been cruel. You see his
desires were more passionate than mine. I worried through the mechanical,
deadening routine of the Tech. somehow, and finally got courage enough to
tell him that I could not accept Wabash quite yet. I had the audacity to
propose two years abroad. We compromised on one, but I understood that I
must not finally disappoint him. He cared so much that it would have been
wicked. A few people in this world have positive and masterful
convictions. An explosion or insanity comes if their wills smoulder in
ineffectual silence. Most of us have no more than inclinations. It seems
wise and best that those of mere inclinations should waive their
prejudices in favor of those who feel intensely. So much for the great
questions of individuality and personality that set the modern world
a-shrieking. This is a commonplace solution of the great family problem
Turgnieff propounded in "Fathers and Sons." Perchance you have heard of
Turgnieff?

So I prepared to follow my father's will, for I loved him exceedingly. His
life had not been happy, and his nature, as I have said, was a more
exacting one than mine. The price of submission, however, was not plain to
me until I was launched that year in Paris in a strange, cosmopolitan
world. I was supposed to attend courses at the cole Polytechnique, but I
became mad with the longings that are wafted about Europe from capital to
capital. I went to Italy--to Venice and Florence and Rome--to Athens and
Constantinople and Vienna. In a word, I unfitted myself for Wabash as
completely as I could, and troubled my spirit with vain attempts after art
and feeling.

You women do not know the intoxication of five-and-twenty--a few hundred
francs in one's pockets, the centuries behind, creation ahead. You do not
know what it is to hunger after the power of understanding and the power
of expression; to see the world as divine one minute and a mechanic hell
the next; to feel the convictions of the vagabond; to grudge each sunbeam
that falls unseen by you on some mouldering gate in some neglected city,
each face of the living wherein possible life looks out untried by you,
each picture that means a new curiosity. No, for, after all, you are
material souls; you need a Bradshaw and a Baedeker, even in the land of
dreams. All men, I like to think, for one short breath in their lives,
believe this narrow world to be shoreless. They feel that they should die
in discontent if they could not experience, test, this wonderful
conglomerate of existence. It is an old, old matter I am writing you
about. We have classified it nicely, these days; we call it the "romantic
spirit," and we say that it is made three parts of youth and two of
discontent--a perpetual expression of the world's pessimism.

I look back, and I think that I have done you wrong. Women like you have
something nearly akin to this mood. Some time in your lives you would all
be romantic lovers. The commonest of you anticipate a masculine soul that
shall harmonize your discontent into happiness. Most of you are not very
nice about it; you make your hero out of the most obvious man. Yet it is
pathetic, that longing for something beyond yourselves. That passionate
desire for a complete illusion in love is the one permanent note you women
have attained in literature. In your heart of hearts you would all (until
you become stiff in the arms of an unlovely life) follow a cabman, if he
could make the world dance for you in this joyous fashion. Some are hard
to satisfy--for example, you, my lady--and you go your restless, brilliant
little way, flirting with this man, coquetting with that, examining a
third, until your heart grows weary or until you are at peace. You may
marry for money or for love, and in twenty years you will teach your
daughters that love doesn't pay at less than ten thousand a year. But you
don't expect them to believe you, and they don't.

I am not sneering at you. I would not have it otherwise, for the world
would be one half cheaper if women like you did not follow the perpetual
instinct. True, civilization tends to curb this romantic desire, but when
civilization runs against a passionate nature we have a tragedy. The world
is sweeter, deeper, for that. Live and love, if you can, and give the lie
to facts. Be restless, be insatiable, be wicked, but believe that your
body and soul were meant for more than food and raiment; that somewhere,
somehow, some day, you will meet the dream made real, and that _he_ will
unlock the secrets of this life.

It is late. I am tired. The noises of the city begin, far down in the
darkness. This carries love.



NO. V. AROUSED.

(_Miss Armstrong protests and invites_.)

It is real, real, _real_. If I can say so, after going on all these years
with but one idea (according to my good friends) of settling myself
comfortably in some large home, shouldn't you believe it? You have lived
more interestingly than I, and you are not dependent, as most of us are.
You really mock me through it all. You think I am worthy of only a kind of
candy that you carry about for agreeable children, which you call love. To
me, sir, it reads like an insult--your message of love tucked in concisely
at the close.

No, keep to facts, for they are your _metier_. You make them interesting.
Tell me more about your idle, contemplative self. And let me see you
to-morrow at the Thorntons'. Leave your sombre eyes at home, and don't
expect infinities in tea-gabble. I saw you at the opera last night. For
some moments, while Melba was singing, I wanted you and your confectioner's
love. That Melba might always sing, and the tide always flood the marshes!
On the whole, I like candy. Send me a page of it.

E. A.



NO. VI. AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.

(_Eastlake, disregarding her comments, continues._)

Dear lady, did you ever read some stately bit of prose, which caught in
its glamour of splendid words the vital, throbbing world of affairs and
passions, some crystallization of a rich experience, and then by chance
turn to the "newsy" column of an American newspaper? (Forsooth, these must
be literary letters!) Well, that tells the sensations of going from Europe
to Wabash. I had caught the sound of the greater harmony, or struggle, and
I must accept the squeak of the melodeon. I did not think highly of
myself; had started too far back in the race, and I knew that laborious
years of intense zeal would place me only third class, or even lower, in
any pursuit of the arts. Perhaps if I had felt that I could have made a
good third class, I should have fought it out in Europe. There are some
things man cannot accomplish, however, our optimistic national creed to
the contrary. And there would have been something low in disappointing my
father for such ignoble results, such imperfect satisfaction.

So to Wabash I went. I resolved to adapt myself to the billiards and
whiskey of the Commercial Club, and to the desk in the inner office behind
the glass partitions. And I like to think that I satisfied my father those
two years in the mills. After a time I achieved a lazy content. At first I
tried to deceive myself; to think that the newsy column of Wabash was as
significant as the grand page of London or Paris. That simple yarn didn't
satisfy me many months.

Then my father died. I hung on at the mills for a time, until the strikes
and the general depression gave me valid reasons for withdrawing. To skip
details, I sold out my interests, and with my little capital came to
Chicago. My income, still dependent in some part upon those Wabash mills,
trembles back and forth in unstable equilibrium.

Chicago was too much like Wabash just then. I went to Florence to join a
man, half German Jew, half American, wholly cosmopolite, whom I had known
in Paris. His life was very thin: it consisted wholly of interests--a
tenuous sort of existence. I can thank him for two things: that I did not
remain forever in Italy, trying to say something new, and that I began a
definite task. I should send you my book (now that it is out and people
are talking about it), but it would bore you, and you would feel that you
must chatter about it. It is a good piece of journeyman work. I gathered
enough notes for another volume, and then I grew restless. Business called
me home for a few months, so I came back to Chicago. Of all places! you
say. Yes, to Chicago, to see this brutal whirlpool as it spins and spins.
It has fascinated me, I admit, and I stay on--to live up among the
chimneys, hanging out over the cornice of a twelve-story building; to soak
myself in the steam and smoke of the prairie and in the noises of a city's
commerce.

Am I content? Yes, when I am writing to you; or when the pile of
manuscripts at my side grows painfully page by page; or when, peering out
of the fort-like embrasure, I can see the sun drenched in smoke and mist
and the "sky-scrapers" gleam like the walls of a Colorado canon. I have
enough to buy me existence, and at thirty I still find peepholes into
hopes.

Are these enough facts for you? Shall I send you an inventory of my room,
of my days, of my mental furniture? Some long afternoon I will spirit you
up here in that little steel cage, and you shall peer out of my window,
tapping your restless feet, while you sniff at the squalor below. You will
move softly about, questioning the watercolors, the bits of bric--brac,
the dusty manuscripts, the dull red hangings, not quite understanding the
fox in his hole. You will gratefully catch the sounds from the mound below
our feet, and when you say good-by and drop swiftly down those long
stories you will gasp a little sigh of relief. You will pull down your
veil and drive off to an afternoon tea, feeling that things as they are
are very nice, and that a little Chicago mud is worth all the clay of the
studios. And I? I shall take the roses out of the vase and throw them
away. I shall say, "Enough!" But somehow you will have left a suggestion
of love about the place. I shall fancy that I still hear your voice, which
will be so far away dealing out banalities. I shall treasure the words you
let wander heedlessly out of the window. I shall open my book and write,
"To-day she came--_beatissima hora_."



NO. VII. OF THE NATURE OF A CONFESSION.

(_Miss Armstrong is nearing the close of her fifth season. Prospect and
retrospect are equally uninviting. She wills to escape_.)

I shall probably be thinking about the rents in your block, and wondering
if the family had best put up a sky-scraper, instead of doing all the
pretty little things you mention in your letter. At five-and-twenty one
becomes practical, if one is a woman whose father has left barely enough
to go around among two women who like luxury, and two greedy boys at
college with expensive "careers" ahead. This letter finds me in the trough
of the wave. I wonder if it's what you call "the ennui of many dinners?"
More likely it's because we can't keep our cottage at Sorrento. Well-a-
day! it's gray this morning, and I will write off a fit of the blues.

I think it's about time to marry number nine. It would relieve the family
immensely. I suspect they think I have had my share of fun. Probably you
will take this as an exquisite joke, but 'tis the truth, alas!

Last night I was at the Hoffmeyers' at dinner. It was slow. All such
dinners are slow. The good Fraus don't know how to mix the sheep and the
goats. For a passing moment they talked about you and about your book in a
puzzled way. They think you so clever and so odd. But I know how hollow he
is, and how thin his fame! I got some points on the new L from the
Hoffmeyers and young Mr. Knowlton. That was interesting and exciting. We
dealt in millions as if they were checkers. These practical men have a
better grip on life than the cynics and dreamers like you. You call them
plebeian and _bourgeois_ and Philistine and limited--all the bad names in
your select vocabulary. But they know how to feel in the good, old,
common-sense way. You've lost that. I like plebeian earnestness and push.
I like success at something, and hearty enjoyment, and good dinners, and
big men who talk about a million as if it were a ten-spot in the game.

You see I am looking for number nine and my four horses. Then I mean to
invite you to my country house, to have a lot of "fat" girls to meet you
who will talk slang at you, and one of them shall marry you--one whose
father is a great newspaper man. And your new papa will start you in the
business of making public opinion. You will play with that, too, but,
then, you will be coining money.

No, not here in Chicago, but if you had talked to me at Sorrento as you
write me from your sanctum on the roof, I might have listened and dreamed.
The sea makes me believe and hope. I love it so! That's why I made mamma
take a house near the lake--to be near a little piece of infinity. Yes, if
you had paddled me out of the harbor at Sorrento, some fine night when the
swell was rippling in, like the groaning of a sleepy beast, and the hills
were a-hush on the shore, then we might have gone on to that place you are
so fond of, "the land east of the sun, and west of the moon."



NO. VIII. BIOGRAPHIC AND JUDICIAL.

(_Eastlake replies analytically_.)

But don't marry him until we are clear on all matters. I haven't finished
your case. And don't marry that foreign-looking cavalier you were riding
with to-day in the park. You are too American ever to be at home over
there. You would smash their fragile china, and you wouldn't understand.
England might fit you, though, for England is something like that dark
green, prairie park, with its regular, bushy trees against a Gainsborough
sky. You live deeply in the fierce open air. The English like that.
However, America must not lose you.

You it was, I am sure, who moved your family in that conventional
pilgrimage of ambitious Chicagoans--west, south, north. Neither your
father nor your mother would have stirred from sober little Grant Street
had you not felt the pressing necessity for a career. Rumor got hold of
you first on the South Side, and had it that you were experimenting with
some small contractor. The explosion which followed reached me even in
Vienna. Did you feel that you could go farther, or did you courageously
run the risk of wrecking him then instead of wrecking yourself and him
later? Oh well, he's comfortably married now, and all the pain you gave
him was probably educative. You may look at his flaunting granite house on
that broad boulevard, and think well of your courage.

Your father died. You moved northward to that modest house tucked in
lovingly under the ample shelter of the millionnaires on the Lake Shore
Drive. I fancy there has always been the gambler in your nerves; that you
have sacrificed your principle to getting a rapid return on your money.
And you have dominated your family: you sent your two brothers to Harvard,
and filled them with ambitions akin to yours. Now you are impatient
because the thin ice cracks a bit.

But I have great faith: you will mend matters by some shrewd deal with the
manipulators at Hoffmeyer's, or by marrying number nine. You will do it
honestly--I mean the marrying; for you will convince him that you love, so
far as love is in you, and you will convince yourself that marriage, the
end of it all, is unselfish, though prosaic. You will accept resignation
with an occasional sigh, feeling that you have gone far, perhaps as far as
you can go. I trust that solution will not come quickly, however, because
I cannot regard it as a brilliant ending to your evolution. For you have
kept yourself sweet and clean from fads, and mean pushing, and the vulgar
machinery of society. You never forced your way or intrigued. You have
talked and smiled and bewitched yourself straight to the point where you
now are. You were eager and curious about pleasures, and the world has
dealt liberally with you.

Were you perilously near the crisis when you wrote me? Did the reflective
tone come because you were brought at last squarely to the mark, because
you must decide what one of the possible conceptions of life you really
want? Don't think, I pray you; go straight on to the inevitable solution,
for when you become conscious you are lost.

Do you wonder that I love you, my hybrid rose; that I follow the heavy
petals as they push themselves out into their final bloom; that I gather
the aroma to comfort my heart in these lifeless pages? I follow you about
in your devious path from tea to dinner or dance, or I wait at the opera
or theatre to watch for a new light in your face, to see your world
written in a smile. You are dark, and winning, and strong. You are pagan
in your love of sensuous, full things. You are grateful to the biting air
as it touches your cheek and sends the blood leaping in glad life. You
love water and fire and wind, elemental things, and you love them with
fervor and passion. All this to the world! Much more intimate to me, who
can read the letters you scrawl for the impudent, careless world. For deep
down in the core of that rose there lies a soul that permeates it all--a
longing, restless soul, one moment revealing a heaven that the next is
shut out in dark despair.

Yes, keep the cottage by the sea for one more dream. Perchance I shall
find something stable, eternal, something better than discontent and
striving; for the sea is great and makes peace.



NO. IX. CRITICISM.

(_Miss Armstrong vindicates herself by scorning._)

You are a tissue of phrases. You feel only words. You love! What mockery
to hear you handle the worn, old words! You have secluded yourself in
careful isolation from the human world you seem to despise. You have no
right to its passions and solaces. Incarnate selfishness, dear friend, I
suspect you are. You would not permit the disturbance of a ripple in the
contemplative lake of your life such as love and marriage might bring.

Pray what right may you have to stew me in a saucepan up on your roof, and
to send me flavors of myself done up nicely into little packages labelled
deceitfully "love"? It is lucky that this time you have come across a
woman who has played the game before, and can meet you point by point. But
I am too weary to argue with a man who carries two-edged words, flattery
on one side and sneers on the reverse. Mark this one thing, nevertheless:
if I should decide to sell myself advantageously next season I should be
infinitely better than you,--for I am only a woman.

E. A.



NO. X. THE LIMITATION OF LIFE.

(_Eastlake summarizes, and intends to conclude._)

My lady, my humor of to-day makes me take up the charges in your last
letters; I will define, not defend, myself. You fall out with me because I
am a dilettante (or many words to that one effect), and you abuse me
because I deal in the form rather than the matter of love. Is that not
just to you?

In short, I am not as your other admirers, and the variation in the
species has lost the charm of novelty.

Believe me that I am honest to-day, at least; indeed, I think you will
understand. Only the college boy who feeds on Oscar Wilde and sentimental
pessimism has that disease of indifference with which you crudely charge
me. It is a kind of chicken-pox, cousin-French to the evils of literary
Paris. But I must not thank God too loudly, or you will think I am one
with them at heart.

No, I am in earnest, in terrible earnest, about all this--I mean life and
what to do with it. That is a great day when a man comes into his own, no
matter how paltry the pittance may be the gods have given him--when he
comes to know just how far he can go, and where lies his path of least
resistance. That I know. I am tremendously sure of myself now, and, like
your good business men, I go about my affairs and dispose of my life with
its few energies in a cautious, economical way.

What is all this I make so much to-do about? Very little, I confess, but
to me more serious than L's and sky-scrapers; yes, than love. Mine is an
infinite labor: first to shape the true tool, and then to master the
material! I grant you I may die any day like a rat on a housetop, with
only a bundle of musty papers, the tags of broken conversations, and one
or two dead, distorted nerves. That is our common risk. But I shall
accomplish as much of the road as God permits the snail, and I shall have
moulded something; life will have justified itself to me, or I to life.
But that is not our problem to-day.

Why do I isolate myself? Because a few pursuits in life are great
taskmasters and jealous ones. A wise man who had felt that truth wrote
about it once. I must husband my devotions: love, except the idea of love,
is not for me; pleasure, except the idea of pleasure, is too keen for me;
energy, except the ideas energy creates, is beyond me. I am limited,
definite, alone, without you.

I confess that two passions are greater than any man, the passion for God
and the passion of a great love. They send a man hungry and naked into the
street, and make his subterfuges with existence ridiculous. How rarely
they come! How inadequate the man who is mistaken about them! We peer into
the corners of life after them, but they elude us. There are days of
splendid consciousness, and we think we have them--then----

No, it is foolish, _bte_, dear lady, to be deceived by a sentiment;
better the comfortable activities of the world. They will suit you best;
leave the other for the dream hidden in a glass of champagne.

But let me love you always. Let me fancy you, when I walk down these
gleaming boulevards in the silent evenings, as you sit flashingly lovely
by some soft lamplight, wrapped about in the cotton-wools of society. That
will reconcile me to the roar of these noonday streets. The city exists
for _you_.



NO. XI. UNSATISFIED.

(_Miss Armstrong wills to drift_.)

... Come to Sorrento....



NO. XII. THE ILLUSION.

(_Eastlake resumes some weeks later. He has put into Bar Harbor on a
yachting trip. He sits writing late at night by the light of the binnacle
lamp_.)

Sweet lady, a few hours ago we slipped in here past the dark shore of your
village, in almost dead calm, just parting the heavy waters with our prow.
It was the golden set of the summer afternoon: a thrush or two were
already whistling clear vespers in he woods; all else was fruitfully calm.

And then, in the stillness of the ebb, we floated together, you and I,
round that little lighthouse into the sheltering gloom of the woods. Then
we drifted beyond it all, in serene solution of this world's fret! To-
morrows you may keep for another.

This night was richly mine. You brought your simple self, undisturbed by
the people who expect of you, without your little airs of experience. I
brought incense, words, devotion, and love. And I treasure now a few pure
tones, some simple motions of your arm with the dripping paddle, a few
pure feelings written on your face. That is all, but it is much. We got
beyond necessity and the impertinent commonplace of Chicago. We had
ourselves, and that was enough.

And to-night, as I lie here under the cool, complete heavens, with only a
twinkling cottage light here and there in the bay to remind me of unrest,
I see life afresh in the old, simple, eternal lines. These are _our_ days
of full consciousness.

Do you remember that clearing in the woods where the long weeds and grass
were spotted with white stones--burial-place it was--their bright faces
turned ever to the sunshine and the stars? They spoke of other lives than
yours and mine. Forgotten little units in our disdainful world, we pass
them scornfully by. Other lives, and perhaps better, do you think? For
them the struggle never came which holds us in a fist of brass, and
thrashes us up and down the pavement of life. Perhaps--can you not, at one
great leap, fancy it?--two sincere souls could escape from this brass
master, and live, unmindful of strife, for a little grave on a hillside in
the end? They must be strong souls to renounce that cherished hope of
triumph, to be content with the simple, antique things, just living and
loving--the eternal and brave things; for, after all, what you and I burn
for so restlessly is a makeshift ambition. We wish to go far, "to make the
best of ourselves." Why not, once for all, rely upon God to make? Why not
live and rejoice?

And the little graves are not bad: to lie long years within sound of this
great-hearted ocean, with the peaceful, upturned stones bearing this full
legend, "This one loved and lived...." Forgive me for making you sad.
Perhaps you merely laugh at the intoxication your clear air has brought
about. Well, dearest lady, the ships are striking their eight bells for
midnight, the gayest cottages are going out, light by light, and somewhere
in the still harbor I can hear a fisherman laboriously sweeping his boat
away to the ocean. Away!--that is the word for us: I, in this boat
southward, and ever away, searching in grim fashion for an accounting with
Fate; you, in your intrepid loveliness, to other lives. And if I return
some weeks hence, when I have satisfied the importunate business claims,
what then? Shall we slip the cables and drift quietly out "to the land
east of the sun and west of the moon"?



NO. XIII. SANITY.

(_Eastlake refuses Miss Armstrong's last invitation, continues, and
concludes_.)

Last night was given to me for insight. You were brilliantly your best,
and set in the meshes of gold and precious stones that the gods willed for
you. There was not a false note, not an attribute wanting. Over your head
were mellow, clear, electric lights that showed forth coldly your
faultless suitability. From the exquisitely fit pearls about your neck to
the scents of the wine and the flowers, all was as it should be. I watched
your face warm with multifold impressions, your nostrils dilate with
sensuousness, appreciation, your pagan head above the perfect bosom; about
you the languid eyes of your well-fed neighbors.

The dusky recesses of the rooms, heavy with opulent comfort, stretched
away from our long feast. There you could rest, effectually sheltered from
the harsh noises of the world. And I rejoiced. Each minute I saw more
clearly things as they are. I saw you giving the nicest dinners in
Chicago, and scurrying through Europe, buying a dozen pictures here and
there, building a great house, or perhaps, tired of Chicago, trying your
luck in New York; but always pressing on, seizing this exasperating life,
and tenaciously sucking out the rich enjoyments thereof! For the gold has
entered your heart.

What splendid folly we played at Sorrento! If you had deceived yourself
with a sentiment, how long would you have maintained the illusion? When
would the morning have come for your restless eyes to stare out at the
world in longing and the unuttered sorrow of regret? Ah, I touch you but
with words! The cadence of a phrase warms your heart, and you fancy your
emotion is supreme, inevitable. Nevertheless, you are a practical goddess:
you can rise beyond the waves toward the glorious ether, but at night you
sink back. 'Tis alluring, but--eternal?

Few of us can risk being romantic. The penalty is too dreadful. To be
successful, we must maintain the key of our loveliest enthusiasm without
stimulants. You need the stimulants. You imagined that you were tired,
that rest could come in a lover's arms. Better the furs that are soft
about your neck, for they never grow cold. Perchance the lover will come,
also, as a prince with his princedom. It will be comfortable to have your
cake and the frosting, too. If not, take the frosting; go glittering on
with your pulses full of the joys, until you are old and fagged and the
stupid world refuses to revolve. Remember my sure word that you were meant
for dinners, for power and pleasure and excitement. Trust no will-o'-the-
wisp that would lead you into the stony paths of romance.

Some days in the years to come I shall enter at your feasts and watch you
in admiration and love. (For I shall always love you.) Then will stir in
your heart a mislaid feeling of some joy untasted. But you will smile
wisely, and marvel at my exact judgment. You will think of another world
where words and emotions alone are alive, where it is always high tide,
and you will be glad that you did not force the gates. For life is not
always lyric. Farewell.



NO. XIV. THAT OTHER WORLD.

(_Miss Armstrong writes with a calm heart_.)

I have but a minute before I must go down to meet _him_. Then it will be
settled. I can hear his voice now and mother's. I must be quick.

So you tested me and found me wanting in "inevitableness." I was too much
clay, it seems, and "pagan." What a strange word that is! You mean I love
to enjoy; and, perhaps you are right, that I need my little world. Who
knows? One cannot read the whole story--even you, dear master--until we
are dead. We can never tell whether I am only frivolous and sensuous, or
merely a woman who takes the best substitute at hand for life. I do not
protest, and I think I never shall. I, too, am very sure--_now_. You have
pointed out the path and I shall follow it to the end.

But one must have other moments, not of regret, but of wonder. Did you
have too little faith? Am I so cheap and weak? Before you read this it
will all be over.... Now and then it seems I want only a dress for my
back, a bit of food, rest, and your smile. But you have judged otherwise,
and perhaps you are right. At any rate, I will think so. Only I know that
the hours will come when I shall wish that I might lie among those little
white gravestones above the beach.

CHICAGO, November, 1893.



A QUESTION OF ART

I

John Clayton had pretty nearly run the gamut of the fine arts. As a boy at
college he had taken a dilettante interest in music, and having shown some
power of sketching the summer girl he had determined to become an artist.
His numerous friends had hoped such great things for him that he had been
encouraged to spend the rest of his little patrimony in educating himself
abroad. It took him nearly two years to find out what being an artist
meant, and the next three in thinking what he wanted to do. In Paris and
Munich and Rome, the wealth of the possible had dazzled him and confused
his aims; he was so skilful and adaptable that in turn he had wooed almost
all the arts, and had accomplished enough trivial things to raise very
pretty expectations of his future powers. He had enjoyed an uncertain
glory among the crowd of American amateurs. When his purse had become
empty he returned to America to realize on his prospects.

On his arrival he had elaborately equipped a studio in Boston, but as he
found the atmosphere "too provincial" he removed to New York. There he was
much courted at a certain class of afternoon teas. He was in full bloom of
the "might do," but he had his suspicions that a fatally limited term of
years would translate the tense into "might have done." He argued,
however, that he had not yet found the right _milieu_; he was fond of that
word--conveniently comprehensive of all things that might stimulate his
will. He doubted if America ever could furnish him a suitable _milieu_ for
the expression of his artistic instincts. But in the meantime necessity
for effort was becoming more urgent; he could not live at afternoon teas.

Clayton was related widely to interesting and even influential people. One
woman, a distant cousin, had taken upon herself his affairs.

"I will give you another chance," she said, in a business-like tone, after
he had been languidly detailing his condition to her and indicating
politely that he was coming to extremities. "Visit me this summer at Bar
Harbor. You shall have the little lodge at the Point for a studio, and you
can take your meals at the hotel near by. In that way you will be
independent. Now, there are three ways, any one of which will lead you out
of your difficulties, and if you don't find one that suits you before
October, I shall leave you to your fate."

The young man appeared interested.

"You can model something--that's your line, isn't it?"

Clayton nodded meekly. He had resolved to become a sculptor during his
last six months in Italy.

"And so put you on your feet, professionally." Clayton sighed. "Or you can
find some rich patron or patroness who will send you over for a couple of
years more until your _chef d' oeuvre_ makes its appearance." Her pupil
turned red, and began to murmur, but she kept on unperturbed. "Or, best of
all, you can marry a girl with some money and then do what you like." At
this Clayton rose abruptly.

"I haven't come to that," he growled.

"Don't be silly," she pursued. "You are really charming; good character;
exquisite manners; pleasant habits; success with women. You needn't feel
flattered, for this is your stock in trade. You are decidedly interesting,
and lots of those girls who are brought there every year to get them in
would be glad to make such an exchange. You know everybody, and you could
give any girl a good standing in Boston or New York. Besides, there is
your genius, which may develop. That will be thrown in to boot; it may
bear interest."

Clayton, who had begun by feeling how disagreeable his situation was when
it exposed him to this kind of hauling over, ended by bursting into a
cordial laugh at the frank materialism with which his cousin presented his
case. "Well," he exclaimed, "it's no go to talk to you about the claims
and ideals of art, Cousin Della, but I will accept your offer, if only for
the sake of modelling a bust of 'The Energetic Matron (American).'"

"Of course, I don't make much of ideals in art and all that," replied his
cousin, "but I will put this through for you, as Harry says. You must
promise me only one thing: no flirting with Harriet and Mary. Henry has
been foolish and lost money, as you know, and I cannot have another beggar
on my hands!"



II

By the end of July Clayton had found out two things definitely; he was
standing in his little workshop, pulling at his mustache and looking
sometimes at a half-completed sketch, and sometimes at the blue stretch of
water below the cliff. The conclusions were that he certainly should not
become interested in Harriet and Mary, and, secondly, that Mount Desert
made him paint rather than model.

"It's no place," he muttered, "except for color and for a poet. A man
would have to shut himself up in a cellar to escape those glorious hills
and the bay, if he wanted to work at that putty." He cast a contemptuous
glance at a rough bust of his Cousin Della, the only thing he had
attempted. As a solution of his hopeless problem he picked up a pipe and
was hunting for some tobacco, preparatory to a stroll up Newport, when
someone sounded timidly at the show knocker of the front door.

"Is that you, Miss Marston?" Clayton remarked, in a disappointed tone, as
a middle-aged woman entered.

"The servants were all away," she replied, "and Della thought you might
like some lunch to recuperate you from your labors." This was said a
little maliciously, as she looked about and found nothing noteworthy going
on.

"I was just thinking of knocking off for this morning and taking a walk.
Won't you come? It's such glorious weather and no fog," he added,
parenthetically, as if in justification of his idleness.

"Why do you happen to ask me?" Miss Marston exclaimed, impetuously. "You
have hitherto never paid any more attention to my existence than if I had
been Jane, the woman who usually brings your lunch." She gasped at her own
boldness. This was not coquettishness, and was evidently unusual.

"Why! I really wish you would come," said the young man, helplessly. "Then
I'll have a chance to know you better."

"Well! I will." She seemed to have taken a desperate step. Miss Jane
Marston, Della's sister-in-law, had always been the superfluous member of
her family. Such unenviable tasks as amusing or teaching the younger
children, sewing, or making up whist sets, had, as is usual with the odd
members in a family, fallen to her share. All this Miss Marston hated in a
slow, rebellious manner. From always having just too little money to live
independently, she had been forced to accept invitations for long visits
in uninteresting places. As a girl and a young woman, she had shown a
delicate, retiring beauty that might have been made much of, and in spite
of gray hair, thirty-five years, and a somewhat drawn look, arising from
her discontent, one might discover sufficient traces of this fading beauty
to idealize her. All this summer she had watched the wayward young artist
with a keen interest in the fresh life he brought among her flat
surroundings. His buoyancy cheered her habitual depression; his eagerness
and love of life made her blood flow more quickly, out of sympathy; and
his intellectual alertness bewildered and fascinated her. She was still
shy at thirty-five, and really very timid and apologetic for her
commonplaceness; but at times the rebellious bitterness at the bottom of
her heart would leap forth in a brusque or bold speech. She was still
capable of affording surprise.

"Won't I spoil the inspiration?" she ventured, after a long silence.

"Bother the inspiration!" groaned Clayton. "I wish I were a blacksmith, or
a sailor, or something honest. I feel like a hypocrite. I have started out
at a pace that I can't keep up!"

Miss Marston felt complimented by this apparent confidence. If she had had
experience in that kind of nature, she would have understood how
indifferent Clayton was to her personally. He would have made the same
confession to the birds, if they had happened to produce the same
irritation in his mind.

"They all say your work is so brilliant," she said, soothingly.

"Thunder!" he commented. "I wish they would not say anything kind and
pleasant and cheap. At college they praised my verses, and the theatres
stole my music for the Pudding play, and the girls giggled over my
sketches. And now, at twenty-six, I don't know whether I want to fiddle,
or to write an epic, or to model, or to paint. I am a victim of every
artistic impulse."

"I know what you should do," she said, wisely, when they had reached a
shady spot and were cooling themselves.

"Smoke?" queried Clayton, quizzically.

"You ought to marry!"

"That's every woman's great solution, great panacea," he replied,
contemptuously.

"It would steady you and make you work."

"No," he replied, thoughtfully, "not unless she were poor, and in that
case it would be from the frying-pan into the fire!"

"You should work," she went on, more courageously. "And a wife would give
you inspiration and sympathy."

"I have had too much of the last already," he sighed. "And it's better not
to have it all of one sort. After awhile a woman doesn't produce pleasant
or profitable reactions in my soul. Yes, I know," he added, as he noticed
her look of wonderment, "I am selfish and supremely egotistical. Every
artist is; his only lookout, however, should be that his surroundings
don't become stale. Or, if you prefer to put it more humanely, an artist
isn't fit to marry; it's criminal for him to marry and break a woman's
heart."

After this heroic confession he paused to smoke. "Besides, no woman whom I
ever knew really understands art and the ends which the artist is after.
She has the temperament, a superficial appreciation and interest, but she
hasn't the stimulus of insight. She's got the nerves, but not the head."

"But you just said that you had had too much sympathy and molly-coddling."

"Did I? Well, I was wrong. I need a lot, and I don't care how idiotic. It
makes me courageous to have even a child approve. I suppose that shows how
closely we human animals are linked together. We have got to have the
consent of the world, or at any rate a small part of it, to believe
ourselves sane. So I need the chorus of patrons, admiring friends, kind
women, etc., while I play the Protagonist, to tell me that I am all right,
to go ahead. Do you suppose any one woman would be enough? What a great
posture for an arm!" His sudden exclamation was called out by the attitude
that Miss Marston had unconsciously assumed in the eagerness of her
interest. She had thrown her hand over a ledge above them, and was leaning
lightly upon it. The loose muslin sleeve had fallen back, revealing a
pretty, delicately rounded arm, not to be suspected from her slight
figure. Clayton quickly squirmed a little nearer, and touching the arm
with an artist's instinct, brought out still more the fresh white flesh
and the delicate veining.

"Don't move. That would be superb in marble!" Miss Marston blushed
painfully.

"How strange you are," she murmured, as she rose. "You just said that you
had given up modelling, or I would let you model my arm in order to give
you something to do. You should try to stick to something."

"Don't be trite," laughed Clayton, "and don't make me consistent. You will
keep yourself breathless if you try that!"

"I know what you need," she said, persistently unmindful of his
admonition. "You need the spur. It doesn't make so much difference _what_
you do--you're clever enough."

"'Truth from the mouths of babes----'"

"I am not a babe." She replied to his mocking, literally. "Even if I am
stupid and commonplace, I may have intuitions like other women."

"Which lead you to think that it's all chance whether Raphael paints or
plays on the piano. Well, I don't know that you are so absurd. That's my
theory: an artist is a fund of concentrated, undistributed energy that has
any number of possible outlets, but selects one. Most of us are artists,
but we take so many outlets that the hogshead becomes empty by leaking.
Which shall it be? Shall we toss up a penny?"

"Painting," said Miss Marston, decisively. "You must stick to that."

"How did you arrive at that conclusion--have you observed my work?"

"No! I'll let you know some time, but now you must go to work. Come!" She
rose, as if to go down to the lodge that instant. Clayton, without feeling
the absurdity of the comedy, rose docilely and followed her down the path
for some distance. He seemed completely dominated by the sudden enthusiasm
and will that chance had flung him.

"There's no such blessed hurry," he remarked at last, when the first
excitement had evanesced. "The light will be too bad for work by the time
we reach Bar Harbor. Let's rest here in this dark nook, and talk it all
over."

Clayton was always abnormally eager to talk over anything. Much of his
artistic energy had trickled away in elusive snatches of talk. "Come," he
exclaimed, enthusiastically, "I have it. I will begin a great work--a
modern Magdalen or something of that sort. We can use you in just that
posture, kneeling before a rock with outstretched hands, and head turned
away. We will make everything of the hands and arms!"

Miss Marston blushed her slow, unaccustomed blush. At first sight it
pleased her to think that she had become so much a part of this
interesting young man's plans, but in a moment she laughed calmly at the
frank desire he expressed to leave out her face, and the characteristic
indifference he had shown in suggesting negligently such a subject.

"All right. I am willing to be of any service. But you will have to make
use of the early hours. I teach the children at nine."

"Splendid!" he replied, as the vista of a new era of righteousness dawned
upon him. "We shall have the fresh morning light, and the cool and the
beauty of the day. And I shall have plenty of time to loaf, too."

"No, you mustn't loaf. You will find me a hard task-mistress!"



III

True to her word, Miss Marston rapped at the door of the studio promptly
at six the next morning. She smiled fearfully, and finding no response,
tried stones at the windows above. She kept saying to herself, to keep up
her courage: "He won't think about me, and I am too old to care, anyway."
Soon a head appeared, and Clayton called out, in a sleepy voice:

"I dreamt it was all a joke; but wait a bit, and we will talk it over."

Miss Marston entered the untidy studio, where the _dbris_ of a month's
fruitless efforts strewed the floor. Bits of clay and carving-tools,
canvases hurled face downward in disgust and covered with paint-rags, lay
scattered about. She tip-toed around, carefully raising her skirt, and
examined everything. Finally, discovering an alcohol-lamp and a coffee-
pot, she prepared some coffee, and when Clayton appeared--a somewhat
dishevelled god--he found her hunting for biscuit.

"You can't make an artist of me at six in the morning," he growled.

In sudden inspiration, Miss Marston threw open the upper half of the door
and admitted a straight pathway of warm sun that led across the water just
rippling at their feet. The hills behind the steep shore were dark with a
mysterious green and fresh with a heavy dew, and from the nooks in the
woods around them thrush was answering thrush. Miss Marston gave a sigh of
content. The warm, strong sunlight strengthened her and filled her wan
cheeks, as the sudden interest in the artist's life seemed to have
awakened once more the vigor of her feelings. She clasped her thin hands
and accepted both blessings. Clayton also revived. At first he leant
listlessly against the door-post, but as minute by minute he drank in the
air and the beauty and the hope, his weary frame dilated with incoming
sensations. "God, what beauty!" he murmured, and he accepted
unquestioningly the interference in his life brought by this woman just as
he accepted the gift of sunshine and desire.

"Come to work," said Miss Marston, at last.

"That's no go," he replied, "that subject we selected."

"I dare say you won't do much with it, but it will do as well as any other
for experiment and practice."

"I see that you want those arms preserved."

The little woman shrank into her shell for a moment: her lazy artist could
scatter insults as negligently as epigrams. Then she blazed out.

"Mr. Clayton, I didn't come here to be insulted."

Clayton, utterly surprised, opened his sleepy eyes in real alarm.

"Bless you, my dear Miss Marston, I can't insult anybody. I never mean
anything."

"Perhaps that's the trouble," replied Miss Marston, somewhat mollified.
But the sitting was hardly a success. Clayton wasted almost all his time
in improvising an easel and in preparing his brushes. Miss Marston had to
leave him just as he was ready to throw himself into his work. He was
discontented, and, instead of improving the good light and the long day,
he took a pipe and went away into the hills. The next morning he felt
curiously ashamed when Miss Marston, after examining the rough sketch on
the easel, said:

"Is that all?"

And this day he painted, but in a fit of gloomy disgust destroyed
everything. So it went on for a few weeks. Miss Marston was more regular
than an alarm-clock; sometimes she brought some work, but oftener she sat
vacantly watching the young man at work. Her only standard of
accomplishment was quantity. One day, when Clayton had industriously
employed a rainy afternoon in putting in the drapery for the figure, she
was so much pleased by the quantity of the work accomplished that she
praised him gleefully. Clayton, who was, as usual, in an ugly mood, cast
an utterly contemptuous look at her and then turned to his easel.

"You mustn't look at me like that," the woman said, almost frightened.

"Then don't jabber about my pictures."

Her lips quivered, but she was silent. She began to realize her position
of galley-slave, and welcomed with a dull joy the contempt and insults to
come.

One morning Clayton was not to be found. He did not appear during that
week, and at last Miss Marston determined to find him. She made an excuse
for a journey to Boston, and divining where Clayton could be found, she
sent him word at a certain favorite club that she wanted to see him. He
called at her modest hotel, dejected, listless, and somewhat shamefaced;
he found Miss Marston calm and commonplace as usual. But it was the calm
of a desperate resolve, won after painful hours, that he little
recognized. Her instinct to attach herself to this strange, unaccountable
creature, to make him effective to himself, had triumphed over her
prejudices. She humbled herself joyfully, recognizing a mission.

"Della said that I might presume on your escort home," she remarked dryly,
trembling for fear that she had exposed herself to some contemptuous
retort. One great attraction, however, in Clayton was that he never
expected the conventional. It did not occur to him as particularly absurd
that this woman, ten years his senior, should hunt him up in this fashion.
He took such eccentricities as a matter of course, and whatever the
circumstances or the conversation, found it all natural and reasonable.
Women did not fear him, but talked indiscreetly to him about all things.

"What's the use of keeping up this ridiculous farce about my work?" he
said, sadly. Then he sought for a conventional phrase. "Your unexpected
interest and enthusiasm in my poor attempts have been most kind, my dear
Miss Marston. But you must allow me to go to the dogs in my own fashion;
that's the inalienable right of every emancipated soul in these days." The
politeness and mockery of this little epigram stung the woman.

"Don't be brutal, as well as good for nothing," she said, bitterly.
"You're as low as if you took to drink or any other vice, and you know it.
I can't appreciate your fine ideas, perhaps, but I know you ought to do
something more than talk. You're terribly ambitious, but you're too weak
to do anything but talk. I don't care what you think about my
interference. I can make you work, and I will make you do something.
You know you need the whip, and if none of your pleasant friends will give
it to you, I can. Come!" she added, pleadingly.

"Jove!" exclaimed the young man, slowly, "I believe you're an awful trump.
I will go back."

On their return they scarcely spoke. Miss Marston divined that her
companion felt ashamed and awkward, and that his momentary enthusiasm had
evaporated under the influence of a long railroad ride. While they were
waiting for the steamer at the Mount Desert ferry, she said, as
negligently as she could, "I have telegraphed for a carriage, but you had
better walk up by yourself."

He nodded assent. "So you will supply the will for the machine, if I will
grind out the ideas. But it will never succeed," he added, gloomily. "Of
course I am greatly obliged and all that, and I will stick to it until
October for the sake of your interest." In answer she smiled with an air
of proprietorship.

One effect of this spree upon Clayton was that he took to landscape during
the hours that he had formerly loafed. He found some quiet bits of dell
with water, and planted his easel regularly every day. Sometimes he sat
dreaming or reading, but he felt an unaccustomed responsibility if, when
his mentor appeared with the children late in the afternoon, he hadn't
something to show for his day. She never attempted to criticise except as
to the amount performed, and she soon learned enough not to measure this
by the area of canvas. Although Clayton had abandoned the Magdalen in
utter disgust, Miss Marston persisted in the early morning sittings. She
made herself useful in preparing his coffee and in getting his canvas
ready. They rarely talked. Sometimes Clayton, in a spirit of deviltry,
would tease his mentor about their peculiar relationship, about herself,
or, worse than all, would run himself and say very true things about his
own imperfections. Then, on detecting the tears that would rise in the
tired, faded eyes of the woman he tortured, he would throw himself into
his work.

So the summer wore away and the brilliant September came. The unsanctified
crowds flitted to the mountains or the town, and the island and sea
resumed the air of free-hearted peace which was theirs by right. Clayton
worked still more out of doors on marines, attempting to grasp the
perplexing brilliancy that flooded everything.

"It's no use," he said, sadly, as he packed up his kit one evening in the
last of September. "I really don't know the first thing about color. I
couldn't exhibit a single thing I have done this entire summer."

"What's the real matter?" asked Miss Marston, with a desperate calm.

"Why, I have fooled about so much that I have lost a lot I learnt over
there in Paris."

"Why don't you get--get a teacher?"

Clayton laughed ironically. "I am pretty old to start in, especially as I
have just fifty dollars to my name, and a whole winter before me."

They returned silently. The next morning Miss Marston appeared at the
usual hour and made the coffee. After Clayton had finished his meagre
meal, she sat down shyly and looked at him.

"You've never interested yourself much in my plans, but I am going to tell
you some of them. I'm sick of living about like a neglected cat, and I am
going to New York to--to keep boarders." Her face grew very red. "They
will make a fuss, but I am ready to break with them all."

"So you, too, find dependence a burden?" commented Clayton, indifferently.

"You haven't taken much pains to know me," she replied. "And if I were a
man," she went on, with great scorn, "I would die before I would be
dependent!"

"Talking about insults--but an artist isn't a man," remarked Clayton,
philosophically smoking his pipe.

"I hate you when you're like that," Miss Marston remarked, with intense
bitterness.

"Then you must hate me pretty often! But continue with your plans. Don't
let our little differences in temperament disturb us."

"Well," she continued, "I have written to some friends who spend the
winters in New York, and out of them I think I shall find enough
boarders--enough to keep me from starving. And the house has a large upper
story with a north light." She stopped and peeped at him furtively.

"Oh," said Clayton, coolly, "and you're thinking that I would make a good
tenant."

"Exactly," assented Miss Marston, uncomfortably.

"And who will put up the tin: for you don't suppose that I am low enough
to live off you?"

"No," replied the woman, quietly. "I shouldn't allow that, though I was
not quite sure you would be unwilling. But you can borrow two or three
hundred dollars from your brother, and by the time that's gone you ought
to be earning something. You could join a class; the house isn't far from
those studios."

Clayton impulsively seized her arms and looked into her face. She was
startled and almost frightened.

"I believe," he began, but the words faded away.

"No, don't say it. You believe that I am in love with you, and do this to
keep you near me. Don't be quite such a brute, for you _are_ a brute, a
grasping, egotistical, intolerant brute." She smiled slightly. "But don't
think that I am such a fool as not to know how impossible _that_ is."

Clayton still held her in astonishment. "I think I was going to say that I
was in love with you."

"Oh, no," she laughed, sadly. "I am coffee and milk and bread and butter,
the 'stuff that dreams are made on.' You want some noble young woman--a
goddess, to make you over, to make you human. I only save you from the
poor-house."



IV

There followed a bitter two years for this strange couple. Clayton
borrowed a thousand dollars--a more convenient number to remember, he
said, than three hundred dollars--and induced a prominent artist "who
happens to know something," to take him into his crowded classes for a
year. He began with true grit to learn again what he had forgotten and
some things that he had never known. At the end of the year he felt that
he could go alone, and the artist agreed, adding, nonchalantly: "You may
get there; God knows; but you need loads of work."

Domestically, the life was monotonous. Clayton had abandoned his old
habits, finding it difficult to harmonize his present existence with his
clubs and his fashionable friends. Besides, he hoarded every cent and,
with Miss Marston's aid, wrung the utmost of existence out of the few
dollars he had left. Miss Marston's modest house was patronized by elderly
single ladies. It was situated on one of those uninteresting East Side
streets where you can walk a mile without remembering an individual stone.
The table, in food and conversation, was monotonous. In fact, Clayton
could not dream of a more inferior _milieu_ for the birth of the great
artist.

Miss Marston had fitted herself to suit his needs, and in submitting to
this difficult position felt that she was repaying a loan of a new life.
He was so curious, so free, so unusual, so fond of ideas, so entertaining,
even in his grim moods, that he made her stupid life over. She could enjoy
vicariously by feeling his intense interest in all living things. In
return, she learnt the exact time to bring him an attractive lunch, and
just where to place it so that it would catch his eye without calling out
a scowl of impatience. She made herself at home in his premises, so that
all friction was removed from the young artist's life. He made no
acknowledgment of her devotion, but he worked grimly, doggedly, with a
steadiness that he had never before known. Once, early in the first
winter, having to return to Boston on some slight business, he permitted
himself to be entrapped by old friends and lazed away a fortnight. On his
return Miss Marston noticed with a pang that this outing had done him
good; that he seemed to have more spirit, more vivaciousness, more ideas,
and more zest for his work. So, in a methodical fashion, she thought out
harmless dissipations for him. She induced him to take her to the opera,
even allowing him to think that it was done from pure charity to her.
Sunday walks in the picturesque nooks of New York--they both shunned the
Fifth Avenue promenade for different reasons--church music, interesting
novels, all the "fuel," as Clayton remarked, that she could find she piled
into his furnace. She made herself acquainted with the peculiar literature
that seemed to stimulate his imagination, and sometimes she read him
asleep in the evenings to save his overworked eyes. Her devotion he took
serenely, as a rule. During the second winter, however, after a slight
illness brought on by over-application, he seemed to have a thought upon
his mind that troubled him. One day he impatiently threw down his palette
and put his hands upon her shoulders.

"Little woman, why do you persist in using up your life on me?"

"I am gambling," she replied, evasively.

"What do you expect to get if you win?"

"A few contemptuous thanks; perhaps free tickets when you exhibit, or a
line in your biography. But seriously, Jack, don't you know women well
enough to understand how they enjoy drudging for someone who is powerful?"

"But even if I have any ability, which you can't tell, how do you enjoy
it? You can't appreciate a picture."

She smiled. "Don't bother yourself about me. I get my fun, as you say,
because you make me feel things I shouldn't otherwise. I suppose that's
the only pay you artists ever give those who slave for you?"

Such talks were rare. They experienced that physical and mental unity in
duality which comes to people who live and think and work together for a
common aim. They had not separated a day since that first visit to Boston.
The summer had been spent at a cheap boarding-house on Cape Ann, in order
that Clayton might sketch in company with the artist who had been teaching
him. Neither thought of conventionality; it was too late for that.

As the second year came to an end, the pressure of poverty began to be
felt. Clayton refused to make any efforts to sell his pictures. He eked
out his capital and went on. The end of his thousand came; he took to
feeding himself in his rooms. He sold his clothes, his watch, his books,
and at last the truck he had accumulated abroad. "More fuel for the fire,"
he said bitterly.

"I will lend you something," remarked Miss Marston.

"No, thanks," he said, shortly, and then added, with characteristic
brutality, "my body is worth a hundred. Stevens will give that for it,
which would cover the room-rent. And my brother will have to whistle for
his cash or take it out in paint and canvas."

She said nothing, for she had a scheme in reserve. She was content
meantime to see him pinched; it brought out the firmer qualities in the
man. Her own resources, moreover, were small, for the character of her
boarders had fallen. Unpleasant rumors had deprived her of the
unexceptionable set of middle-aged ladies with whom she had started, but
she had pursued her course unaltered. The reproach of her relatives, who
considered her disgraced, had been a sweet solace to her pride.

The rough struggle had told on them both. He had forgotten his delicate
habits, his nicety of dress. A cheap suit once in six months was all that
he could afford. His mind had become stolidly fixed, so that he did not
notice the gradual change. It was a grim fight! The elements were
relentless; day by day the pounding was harder, and the end of his
resistance seemed nearer. Although he was deeply discontented with his
work, he did not dare to think of ultimate failure, for it unnerved him
for several days. Miss Marston's quiet assumption, however, that it was
only a question of months, irritated him.

"God must have put the idea into your head that I am a genius," he would
mutter fiercely at her. "I never did, nor work of mine. You don't know
good from bad, anyway, and we may both be crazy." He buried his face in
his hands, overcome by the awfulness of failure. She put her arms about
his head.

"Well, we can stand it a little longer, and then----"

"And then?" he asked, grimly.

"Then," she looked at him significantly. They both understood. "Lieber
Gott," he murmured, "thou hast a soul." And he kissed her gently, as in
momentary love. She did not resist, but both were indifferent to passion,
so much their end absorbed them.

At last she insisted upon trying to sell some marines at the art stores.
She brought him back twenty-five dollars, and he did not suspect that she
was the patron. He looked at the money wistfully.

"I thought we should have a spree on the first money I earned. But it's
all fuel now."

Her eyes filled with tears at this sign of humanity. "Next time, perhaps."

"So you think that's the beginning of a fortune. I have failed--failed if
you get ten thousand dollars for every canvas in this shop. You will never
know why. Perhaps I don't myself." And then he went to work. Some weeks
later he came to her again. This time she tried to enlist the sympathy of
the one successful artist Clayton knew, and through his influence she
succeeded in selling a number of pictures and placed others upon sale. She
was so happy, so sure that the prophetic instinct in her soul was
justified, that she told Clayton of her previous fraud. He listened
carefully; his face twitched, as if his mind were adjusting itself to new
ideas. First he took twenty-five dollars from the money she had just
brought him and handed it to her. Then putting his arms about her, he
looked inquisitively down into her face, only a bit more tenderly than he
squinted at his canvases.

"Jane!" She allowed him to kiss her once or twice, and then she pushed him
away, making a pathetic bow.

"Thanks for your sense of gratitude. You're becoming more civilized. Only
I wish it had been something more than money you had been thankful for. Is
money the only sacrifice you understand?"

"You can take your dues in taunts if you like. I never pretended to be
anything but a huge, and possibly productive polypus. I am honest enough,
anyway, not to fool with lovers' wash. You ought to know how I feel toward
you--you're the best woman I ever knew."

"Kindest to you, you mean? No, Jack," she continued, tenderly; "you can
have me, body and soul. I am yours fast enough now, what there is left of
me. I have given you my reputation, and that sort of thing long ago--no,
you needn't protest. I know you despise people who talk like that, and I
don't reproach you. But don't deceive yourself. You feel a little moved
just now. If I had any charms, like a pretty model, you might acquire some
kind of attachment for me, but love--you never dreamed of it. And," she
continued, after a moment, "I begin to think, after watching you these two
years, never will. So I am safe in saying that I am yours to do with what
you will. I am fuel. Only, oh, Jack, if you break my heart, your last fuel
will be gone. You can't do without me!"

It seemed very absurd to talk about breaking hearts--a tired, silent man; a
woman unlovely from sordid surroundings, from age, and from care. Clayton
pulled back the heavy curtain to admit the morning light, for they had
talked for hours before coming to the money question. The terrible,
passionate glare of a summer sun in the city burst in from the neighboring
housetops.

"Why don't you curse _Him_?" muttered Clayton.

"Why?"

"Because He gave you a heart to love, and made you lonely, and then wasted
your love!"

"Jack, the worst hasn't come. It's not all wasted."



V

Clayton gradually became conscious of a new feeling about his work. He was
master of his tools, for one thing, and he derived exquisite pleasure from
the exercise of execution. The surety of his touch, the knowledge of the
exact effect he was after, made his working hours an absorbing pleasure
rather than an exasperating penance. And through his secluded life, with
its singleness of purpose, its absence of the social ambitions of his
youth, and the complexity of life in the world, the restlessness and
agitation of his earlier devotion to his art disappeared. He was content
to forget the expression of himself--that youthful longing--in
contemplating and enjoying the created matter. In other words, the art of
creation was attended with less friction. He worked unconsciously, and he
did not, hen-like, call the attention of the entire barnyard to each new-
laid egg. He felt also that human, comfortable weariness after labor when
self sinks out of sight in the universal wants of mankind--food and sleep.
Perhaps the fact that he could now earn enough to relieve him from actual
want, that to some extent he had wrestled with the world and wrung from it
the conditions of subsistence, relieved the strain under which he had been
laboring. He sold his pictures rarely, however, and only when absolutely
compelled to get money. Miss Marston could not comprehend his feeling
about the inadequacy of his work, and he gave up attempting to make her
understand where he failed.

The bond between them had become closer. This one woman filled many human
relationships for him--mother, sister, friend, lover, and wife in one. The
boarding-house had come to be an affair of transients and young clerks, so
that all her time that could be spared from the drudgery of housekeeping
was spent in the studio. Slowly he became amenable to her ever-present
devotion, and even, in his way, thoughtful for her. And she was almost
happy.

The end came in this way. One day Clayton was discovered on the street by
an intimate college friend. They had run upon each other abruptly, and
Clayton, finding that escape was decently impossible, submitted without
much urging to be taken to one of his old clubs for a quiet luncheon. As a
result he did not return that night, but sent a note to Miss Marston
saying that he had gone to Lenox with a college chum. That note chilled
her heart. She felt that this was the beginning of the end, and the
following week she spent in loneliness in the little studio, sleeping upon
the neglected lounge. And yet she divined that the movement and stimulus
of this vacation was what Clayton needed most. She feared he was becoming
stale, and she knew that in a week, or a fortnight, or perhaps a month, he
would return and plunge again into his work.

He came back. He hardly spoke to her; he seemed absorbed in the conception
of a new work. And when she brought him his usual luncheon she found the
door locked, the first time in many months. She sat down on the stairs and
waited--how long she did not know--waited, staring down the dreary hall
and at the faded carpet and at herself, faded to suit the surroundings. At
length she knocked, and Clayton came, only to take her lunch and say
absently that he was much absorbed by a new picture and should not be
disturbed. Would she bring his meals? He seemed to refuse tacitly an
entrance to the studio. So a week passed, and then one day Clayton
disappeared again, saying that he was going into the country for another
rest. He went out as he had come in, absorbed in some dream or plan of
great work. Pride kept her from entering his rooms during that week.

One day, however, he came back as before and plunged again into his work.
This time she found the door ajar and entered noiselessly, as she had
learned to move. He was hard at work; she admired his swift movements that
seemed premeditated, the ease with which the picture before him was
rowing. Surely he had a man's power, now, to execute what his spirit
conceived! And the mechanical effort gave him evidently great pleasure.
His complete absorption indicated the most intense though unconscious
pleasure.

The picture stunned her. She knew that she was totally ignorant of art,
but she knew that the picture before her was the greatest thing Clayton
had accomplished. It seemed to breathe power. And she saw without surprise
that the subject was a young woman. Clayton's form hid the face, but she
could see the outline of a woman beside a dory, on a beach, in the early
morning. So it had come.

When she was very close to Clayton, he felt her presence, and they both
stood still, looking at the picture. It was almost finished--all was
planned. Miss Marston saw only the woman. She was youthful, just between
girlhood and womanhood--unconscious, strong, and active as the first; with
the troubled mystery of the second. The artist had divined an exquisite
moment in life, and into the immature figure, the face of perfect repose,
the supple limbs, he had thrown the tender mystery that met the morning
light. It was the new birth--that ancient, solemn, joyous beginning of
things in woman and in day.

Clayton approached his picture as if lovingly to hide it. "Isn't it
immense?" he murmured. "It's come at last. I don't daub any more, but I
can see, I can paint! God, it's worth the hell I have been through--"

He paused, for he felt that his companion had left him.

"Jane," he said, curiously examining her face. "Jane, what's the matter?"

"Don't you know?" she replied, looking steadily at him. He looked first at
her and then at the picture, and then back again. Suddenly the facts in
the case seemed to get hold of him. "Jane," he cried, impetuously, "it's
all yours--you gave me the power, and made me human, too--or a little more
so than I was. But I am killing you by living in this fashion. Why don't
you end it?"

She smiled feebly at his earnestness. "There is only one end," she
whispered, and pointed to his picture. Clayton comprehended, and seizing a
paint-rag would have ruined it, but the woman caught his hand.

"Don't let us be melodramatic. Would you ruin what we have been living for
all these years? Don't be silly--you would always regret it."

"It's your life against a little fame."

"No, against your life." They stood, nervelessly eying the picture.

"Oh, Jack, Jack," she cried, at last, "why did God make men like you? You
take it all, everything that life gives, sunshine and love and hope and
opportunity. Your roots seem to suck out what you want from the whole
earth, and you leave the soil exhausted. My time has gone; I know it, I
know it, and I knew it would go. Now some other life will be sacrificed.
For you'll break her heart whether she's alive now or you're dreaming of
someone to come. You'll treat her as you have everything. It isn't any
fault--you don't understand." The words ended with a moan. Clayton sat
doggedly looking at his picture. But his heart refused to be sad.

LITTLE CRANBERRY, ME.,

August, 1893.



MARE MARTO

I

The narrow slant of water that could be seen between the posts of the
felza was rippling with little steely waves. The line of the heavy beak
cut the opening between the tapering point of the Lido and the misty
outline of Tre Porti. Inside the white lighthouse tower a burnished man-
of-war lay at anchor, a sluggish mass like a marble wharf placed squarely
in the water. From the lee came a slight swell of a harbor-boat puffing
its devious course to the Lido landing. The sea-breeze had touched the
locust groves of San Niccol da Lido, and caught up the fragrance of the
June blossoms, filling the air with the soft scent of a feminine city.

When the scrap of the island Sant' Elena came enough into the angle to
detach itself from the green mass of the Giardino Pubblico, the prow swung
softly about, flapping the little waves, and pointed in shore where a
bridge crossed an inlet into the locust trees.

"You can see the Italian Alps," Miss Barton remarked, pulling aside the
felza curtains and pointing lazily to the snow masses on the blue north
horizon. "That purplish other sea is the Trevisan plain, and back of it is
Castelfranco--Giorgione's Castelfranco--and higher up where the blue
begins to break into the first steps of the Alps is perched
Asolo--Browning's Asolo. Oh! It is so sweet! a little hill town! And
beyond are Bassano and Belluno, and somewhere in the mist before you get
to those snow-heads is Pieve da Cadore." Her voice dropped caressingly
over the last vowels. The mere, procession of names was a lyric sent
across sea to the main.

"They came over them, then, the curious ones," the younger man of the two
who lounged on cushions underneath the felza remarked, as if to prolong
the theme. "To the gates of Paradise," he continued, while his companion
motioned to the gondolier. "And they broke them open, but they could never
take the swag after all."

He laughed at her puzzled look. He seemed to mock her, and his face became
young in spite of the bald-looking temples and forehead, and the copperish
skin that indicated years of artificial heat.

"They got some things," the older man put in, "and they have been living
off 'em ever since."

"But they never got _it_," persisted his companion, argumentatively.
"Perhaps they were afraid."

The gondola was gliding under the stone bridge, skilfully following the
line of the key-stones in the arch. It passed out into a black pool at the
feet of the Church of San Niccol. The marble bishop propped up over the
pediment of the door lay silently above the pool. The grove of blossoming
locusts dropped white-laden branches over a decaying barca chained to the
shore.

"What is _'it'_?" the girl asked, slowly turning her face from the
northern mountains. She seemed to carry a suggestion of abundance, of
opulence; of beauty made of emphasis. "You," the young man laughed back,
enigmatically.

"They came again and again, and they longed for you, and would have
carried you away by force. But their greedy arms snatched only a few
jewels, a dress or two, and _you_ they left."

The girl caught at a cluster of locust blossoms that floated near.

"It is an allegory."

"I'll leave Niel to untie his riddles." Their companion lit his pipe and
strode ashore. "I am off for an hour with the Adriatic. Don't bother about
me if you get tired of waiting."

He disappeared in the direction of the Lido bathing stablimento. The two
gathered up cushions and rugs, and wandered into the grove. The shade was
dark and cool. Beyond were the empty acres of a great fort grown up in a
tangle of long grass like an abandoned pasture. Across the pool they could
see the mitred bishop sleeping aloft in the sun, and near him the lesser
folk in their graves beside the convent wall.

"No, I am not all that," Miss Barton said, thoughtfully, her face bending,
as if some rich, half-open rose were pondering.

"_He_ says that I am a fragment, a bit of detritus that has been washed
around the world--"

"And finally lodged and crystallized in Italy."

This mystified her again, as if she were compelled to use a medium of
expression that was unfamiliar.

"Papa was consul-general, you know, first at Madrid, then in the East, and
lastly merely a consul at Milan." She fell back in relief upon a statement
of fact.

"Yes, I know."

"And mamma--she was from the South but he married her in Paris. They
called me the polyglot bb at the convent." She confided this as lazily
interesting, like the clouds, or the locusts, or the faint chatter of the
Adriatic waves around the breakwater of the Lido.

"Nevertheless you are Venice, you are Italy, you are Pagan"--the young man
iterated almost solemnly, as if a Puritan ancestry demanded this reproach.
Then he rolled his body half over and straightened himself to look at her
rigidly. "How did you come about? How could Council Bluffs make it?" His
voice showed amusement at its own intensity. She shook her head.

"I don't know," she said, softly.

"It doesn't seem real. They tell me so, just as they say that the marble
over there comes from that blue mountain. But why bother about it? I am
here----"

They drifted on in personal chat until the sunlight came in parallel lines
between the leaves.

"Where is Caspar?" he said at last, reluctantly. "It's too late to get
back to the Britannia for dinner." He jumped up as if conscious of a
fault.

"Oh, we'll dine here. Caspar has found some one at the stablimento and has
gone off. Ask Bastian--there must be some place where we can get enough to
eat."

Lawrence hesitated as if not quite sure of the outcome of such
unpremeditation. But Miss Barton questioned the gondolier. "The
Buon Pesche--that will be lovely; Bastian will paddle over and order the
supper. We can walk around."

So Lawrence, as if yielding against his judgment, knelt down and picked up
her wrap. "Bastian will take care of the rest," she said, gleefully,
walking on ahead through the long grass of the abandoned fort. "Be a bit
of detritus, too, and enjoy the few half-hours," she added, coaxingly,
over her shoulder.

When they were seated at the table under the laurel-trees before the Buon
Pesche, Lawrence threw himself into the situation, with all the robustness
of a moral resolve to do the delightful and sinful thing. Just why it
should be sinful to dine there out-doors in an evening light of luminous
gold, with the scent of locusts eddying about, and the mirage-like show of
Venice sleeping softly over beyond--was not quite clear. Perhaps because
his companion seemed so careless and unfamiliar with the monitions of
strenuous living; perhaps because her face was brilliant and nave--some
spontaneous thing of nature, unmarked by any lines of consciousness.

Under a neighboring tree a couple were already eating, or quarrelling in
staccato phrases. Lawrence thought that the man was an artist.

Miss Barton smiled at his seriousness, crossing her hands placidly on the
table and leaning forward. To her companion she gleamed, as if a wood-
thing, a hamadryad, had slipped out from the laurel-tree and come to dine
with him in the dusk.

The woman of the inn brought a flask of thin yellow wine and placed it
between them. Lawrence mutely decanted it into the glasses.

"Well?" she said, questioningly.

Her companion turned his head away to the solemn, imperial mountains, that
were preparing with purple and gold for a night's oblivion.

"You are thinking of Nassau Street, New York, of the rooms divided by
glass partitions, and typewriters and the bundles of documents--bah!
Chained!" She sipped scornfully a drop or two from the glass.

The man flushed.

"No, not that exactly. I am thinking of the police courts, of the squalor,
of taking a deposition in a cell with the filthy breathing all about. The
daily jostle." He threw his head back.

"Don't try it again," she whispered.

"I am only over for six weeks, you know, health--"

"Yes? and there is a girl in Lowell,"--she read his mind impudently.

"Was," he emended, with an uneasy blush.

"Poor, starved one! Here is our fish and spaghetti. To-night is a night of
feast."

The dusk grew grayer, more powderish; the mountains faded away, and the
long Lido banks disappeared into lines pointed by the lights of Torcello
and Murano. Sant' Elena became sea, and the evening wind from the
Adriatic started in toward the city. A few sailors who had come for a
glass were sitting under the arbor of the Buon Pesche smoking, with an
occasional stinging word dropped nonchalantly into the dusk. Their hostess
was working in the garden patch behind the house. At last the artist moved
off with his companion through the grove of laurel between the great well-
heads. Bastian loitered suggestively near.

So they gathered their thoughts and followed the gondolier to the bank.
Miss Barton lingered by one of the well-heads to peer at the pitchy
bottom.

"Here they came for fresh water, the last gift of Venice before they took
sail. And sometimes a man never went farther--it was a safe kind of a
grave." She laughed unconcernedly.

"Perhaps you came out of the locusts and took a hand in pitching the
bodies in."

The woman shivered.

"No! no! I only brought them here."

Bastian turned the prow into the current, heading to weather Sant' Elena.
Lawrence took an oar silently. He liked the rush on the forward stroke,
the lingering recovery. The evening puffs were cool. They slid on past a
ghostly full-rigged ship from the north, abandoned at the point of Sant'
Elena, until the black mass of trees in the Giardino Pubblico loomed up. A
little off the other quarter the lights from the island of San Lazzaro
gleamed and faded. It was so very silent on the waste of waters!

"Come."

Lawrence looked back at his companion; she was holding her hat idly,
huddled limply on the cushions.

"Come," she said again, adding mockingly----

"If you are so ferocious, we shall get there too soon."

Lawrence gave up his oar and lay down at her feet. Bastian's sweep dipped
daintily in and out; the good current was doing his work. They drifted
silently on near Venice. The halo of light above the squares grew
brighter. San Giorgio Maggiore appeared suddenly off the quarter.

Miss Barton signed to the gondolier to wait. They were outside the city
wash; the notes of the band in San Marco came at intervals; the water
slipped noiselessly around the channels, and fire-fly lights from the
gondolas twinkled on the Grand Canal. San Giorgio was asleep.

Miss Barton's head was leaning forward, her eyes brooding over the black
outlines, her ears sensuously absorbing the gurgle of the currents. A big
market boat from Palestrina winged past them, sliding over the oily water.
Several silent figures were standing in the stern.

Lawrence looked up; her eyes seemed lit with little candles placed behind.
Her face gleamed, and one arm slipped from her wrap to the cushion by his
side.

"Bella Venezia," he murmured.

She smiled, enveloping him, mastering him, taking him as a child with her
ample powers.

"You will never go back to 'that'!"

Her arm by his side filled out the thought.

"Never," he heard himself say as on a stage, and the dusky lights from
that radiant face seemed very near.

"Because----"

"Because I am----"

"Sh," she laid her fingers lightly on his forehead. "There is no thine and
mine."

Bastian dipped his sweep once more. San Giorgio's austere faade went out
into the black night. One cold ripple of Adriatic wind stirred the felza
curtains.



II

The garden on the Giudecca was a long narrow strip on the seaward side,
blossoming profusely with flowers. A low vine-covered villino slanted
along the canal; beyond, there was a cow-house where a boy was feeding
some glossy cows. The garden was full of the morning sun.

Lawrence could see her from the open door, a white figure, loitering in a
bed of purple tulips. Her dark hair was loosely knotted up; stray wisps
fell about her ears.

Lawrence closed the door that opened from the canal and walked softly
through the plats of lilies and tulips. Miss Barton glanced up.

"Ecco! il cavaliere!"

"Didn't you expect me!" he asked, clumsily, revealing one potent reason
for his appearance.

She smiled for an answer.

"Last night," he began again, explanatorily. Her eyes followed his lips
and interrupted him.

"What do you think of our place?" She had turned away as if to direct his
speech into indifferent channels.

He looked about bewildered.

"I can't think anything; I _feel_ it; it's one mass of sense."

"Exactly. We found it, papa and I, one day two years ago when we were
paddling around the Giudecca. One is so much at home here. At night you
can see the lights along the Lido, and all the campaniles over there in
Venice. Then the Redentore sweeps up so grandly--"

Lawrence slapped a bending tulip.

"Yes, the world lies far away."

"And you are afraid to lose sight of it," she turned on him swiftly. And
she added, before he could find defence, "You have come to redeem your
words, to tell me that you love me desperately; that you want to make an
engagement; and some day marry me and go over there to live?"

She laughed.

"Well?"

"Caspar would do that."

"And Severance has something to offer," Lawrence remarked, bluntly.

"Half a million."

She began to walk slowly across the little grass-plot over to the Lido
side. Here the oily swell was gurgling in the stone embankment.

She was like a plant flowering in the garden--a plant, part lily, part
hyacinth.

"And you do not want me," she began, softly, less to him than to herself.
"I don't fit in. You cannot take me up and put me aside, at your will. You
would be _mine_."

"Good!"

"It should have been different. We should never have met. They should have
made you a saint, or a priest, or a pastor for the bleeding world. You are
a trifle late; half a century ago, you could have given your soul to God,
quite easily, and not bothered about one woman."

"Yes, I agree, but that was settled by the way the world has ground," the
young man sighed. "Why should it bother you, my fooling with the forlorn
and wretched--the others? Any more than I mind your dealings with men?"

They turned about and crossed the dozen paces to the Redentore wall where
lay a blade of dark shade.

"You could flirt with the multitude? Yes, I should object," she looked at
him slowly, "I couldn't understand it."

He threw his head back as if to look beyond Venice.

"The maimed in body and spirit," he muttered.

"They call you; I call you; you----"

"I was starved," he pleaded, "I love flesh and glory, too."

She laughed unconcernedly.

"Oh, no. I think not. You are trying to very hard. You think you are
enjoying your wine and your figs and the sun; but you say a prayer."

Her words taunted him. The vines on the villino swayed in the sun.

"Come, we will go out to the water, and I will master your doubt."

They stood silent, looking at each other, half curiously. At length she
uttered what was common to their minds.

"Marry the world; it woos you. Love me and leave me; love another and
leave her. The world, that is your mistress."

"And the world incarnate, that is you. The world, breathing, living,
loving, the world a passion of delight."

Their hands touched for a moment. Then she said, hastily:

"Too late! There is Caspar. I forgot we were to go to Burano. Will you
join us?"

A figure in white ducks was coming toward them. His cordial smile seemed
to include a comment--a mental note of some hint he must give. "In stalks
the world of time and place," the young man muttered. "No, I will not go
with you."

He helped her into the waiting gondola. She settled back upon the
cushions, stretched one languid arm in farewell. He could feel the smile
with which she swept Caspar Severance, the women at work in the rio over
their kettles, the sun-bright stretch of waters--all impartially.

He lay down in the shade of the Redentore wall. Eight weeks ago there had
been a dizzy hour, a fainting scene in a crowded court-room, a
consultation with a doctor, the conventional prescription, a fortnight of
movement--then _this_. He had cursed that combination of nerve and tissue;
equally he cursed this. One word to his gondolier and in two hours he
could be on the train for Milan, Paris, London--then indefinite years of
turning about in the crowd, of jostling and being jostled. But he lay
still while the sun crept over him.

She was so unreal, once apart from her presence, like an evanescent mirage
on the horizon of the mind. He told himself that he had seen her, heard
her voice; that her eyes had been close to his, that she had touched him;
that there had been moments when she stood with the flowers of the garden.

He shook the drowsy sun from his limbs and went away, closing the door
softly on the empty garden. Venice, too, was a shadow made between water
and sun. The boat slipped in across the Zattere, in and out of cool water
alleys, under church windows and palings of furtive gardens, until he came
to the plashings of the waves on the marble steps along the Grand Canal.
Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace faades,
the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into
silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous
world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice
that mocked the little goings up and down of men.



III

In the afternoon Lawrence and Severance were dawdling over coffee in the
Piazza. A strident band sent up voluminous notes that boomed back and
forth between the palace and the stone arches of the procurate.

"And Burano?" Lawrence suggested, idly. The older man nodded.

"We lunched there--convent--Miss Barton bought lace."

He broke the pause by adding, negligently:

"I think I shall marry her."

Lawrence smoked; he could see the blue water about San Giorgio.

"Marry her," he repeated, vaguely. "You are engaged?"

Severance nodded.

The young man reached out a bony hand. One had but to wait to still the
problems of life. They strolled across the piazza.

"When do you leave?" Severance inquired.

"To-night," almost slipped from the young man's lips. He was murmuring to
himself. "I have played with Venice and lost. I must return to my busy
village."

"I can't tell," he said.

Severance daintily stepped into a gondola. "La Giudecca."

Lawrence turned into the swarming alleys leading to the Rialto.

Streams of Venetians were eddying about the cul-de-sacs and enclosed
squares, hurrying over the bridges of the canals, turning in and out of
the calles, or coming to rest at the church doors. Lawrence drifted
tranquilly on. He had slipped a cable; he was free and ready for the open
sea. Following at random any turning that offered, he came out suddenly
upon Verocchio's black horseman against the black sky. The San Zanipolo
square was deserted; the cavernous San Zanipolo tenanted by tombs. Stone
figures, seated, a-horse, lying carved in death, started out from the
silent walls.

"Condottieri," the man muttered, "great robbers who saw and took!
Briseghella, Mocenigo, Leonardo Loredan, Vittore Capello." He rolled the
powerful names under his breath. "They are right--Take, enjoy; then die."
And he saw a hill sleeping sweetly in the mountains, where the sun rested
on its going down, and a villino with two old trees where the court seemed
ever silent. In the stealthy, passing hours she came and sat in the sun,
and _was_. And the two remembered, looking on the valley road, that
somewhere lay in the past a procession of storms and mornings and nights
which was called the world, and a procession of people which was called
life. But she looked at him and smiled.

Outside in the square the transparent dusk of Venice settled down. In the
broad canal of the Misericordia a faint plash and drip from a passing
gondola; then, in a moment, as the boat rounded into the rio, a resounding
"Stai"; again silence and the robber in bronze.



IV

He waited for a sign from the Giudecca. He told himself that Theodosia
Barton was not done with him yet, nor he with her.

The tourist-stream, turning northward from Rome and Florence, met in
Venice a new stream of Germans. The paved passage beside the hotel garden
was alive with a cosmopolitan picnic party. Lawrence lingered and watched;
perhaps when the current set strongly to the north again, it would carry
him along with it.

He had not seen Caspar Severance. Each day of delay made it more awkward
to meet him, made the confession of disappointment more obvious, he
reflected. Each day it was easier to put out to the lagoons for a still
dream, and return when the Adriatic breeze was winding into the heated
calles. Over there, in the heavy-scented garden on the Giudecca, lined
against a purplish sea, she was resting; she had given free warning for
him to go, but she was there----.

"She holds me here in the Mare Morto, where the sea-weeds wind about and
bind."

And he believed that he should meet her somewhere in the dead lagoon, out
yonder around the city, in the enveloping gloom of the waters which held
the pearl of Venice.

So each afternoon his gondola crept out from the Fondamenta del Zattere
into the ruffling waters of the Giudecca canal, and edged around the
deserted Campo di Marte. There the gondolier labored in the viscous sea-
grass.

One day, from far behind, came the plash of an oar in the channel. As the
narrow hull swept past, he saw a hand gather in the felza curtains, and a
woman kneel to his side.

"So Bastian takes you always to the dead sea," she tossed aboard.

"Bastian might convoy other forestieri," Lawrence defended.

"Really? here to the laguna morta?" and as his gondola slid into the
channel, she added:

"I knew you were in Venice; you could not go without--another time."

"What would that bring?" he questioned her with his eyes.

"How should I know?" she answered, evasively. "Come with me out to the San
Giorgio in Alga. It is the loneliest place in Venice!"

Lawrence sat at her feet. The gondola moved on between the sea-weed banks.
Away off by Chioggia, filmy gray clouds grew over the horizon.

"Rain."

She shook her head. "For the others, landward. Those opalescent clouds
streaking the sky are merely the undertone of Venice; they are always
_here_."

"The note of sadness," he suggested.

"You thought to have ended with _me_."

She rested her head on her hands and looked at him. He preferred to have
her mention Caspar Severance.

"Whenever I was beyond your eyes, you were not quite sure. You went back
to your hotel and wondered. The wine was over strong for your temperate
nerves, and there was so much to do elsewhere!" she mocked him.

"After all, I was a fragment. And you judged in your wise new-world
fashion that fragments were--useless."

Just ahead was a tiny patch of earth, rimmed close to the edge by ruined
walls. The current running landward drew them about the corner, under the
madonna's hand, and the gondola came to rest beside the lichens and
lizards of a crumbling wharf.

"No," she continued, "I shall not let you go so easily." One hand fell
beside his arm, figuratively indicating her thought.

"And I shall carry you off," he responded, slowly. "It lies between you--
and all, everything."

The gondolier had gone ashore. Silence had swallowed him up.

"All, myself and the others; effort, variety--for the man who loves _you_,
there is but one act in life."

"Splendid!" Her lips parted as if savoring his words.

His voice went on, low, strained to plunge his words into her heart.

"You are the woman, the curious thing that God made to stir life. You
would draw all activities to you, and through you nothing may pass. Like
the dead sea of grass you encompass the end of desire. You have been with
me from my manhood, the fata morgana that laughed at my love of other
creatures. I must meet you, I knew, face to face!"

His lips closed.

"Go on!"

"I have met you," he added, sullenly, "and should I turn away, I should
not forget you. You will go with me, and I shall hunger for you and hate
you, and you will make it over, my life, to fill the hollow of your hand."

"To fill the hollow of my hand," she repeated softly, as if not
understanding.

"You will mould it and pat it and caress it, until it fits. You will never
reason about it, nor doubt, nor talk; the tide flows underneath into the
laguna morta, and never wholly flows out. God has painted in man's mind
the possible; and he has painted the delusions, the impossible--and that
is woman?"

"Impossible," she murmured. "Oh, no, not that!"

Her eyes compelled him; her hand dropped to his hand. Venice sank into a
gray blot in the lagoon. The water was waveless like a deep night.

"Possible for a moment," he added, dreamily, "possible as the unsung
lyric. Possible as the light of worlds behind the sun and moon. Possible
as the mysteries of God that the angels whisper----"

"The only possible," again her eyes flamed; the dark hair gleamed black
above the white face.

"And that is enough for us forever!"



V

The heavy door of the Casa Lesca swung in, admitting Lawrence to a damp
stone-flagged room. At the farther end it opened on a little cortile,
where gnarled rose-bushes were in bloom. A broken Venus, presiding over a
dusty fountain, made the centre of the cortile, and there a strapping girl
from the campagna was busy trimming the stalks of a bunch of roses. The
signorina had not arrived; Lawrence lounged against the gunwale of a
gondola, which lay on one side of the court.

A pretentious iron gate led from the cortile to the farm, where the
running vines stretched from olive-stump to trellis, weaving a mat of
undulating green. It was so quiet, here in the rear of the palace, that
one could almost hear the hum of the air swimming over the broad vine
leaves.

Lawrence, at first alert, then drowsy, reclined in the shade, and watched
the girl. From time to time she threw him a soft word of Venetian. Then,
gathering her roses, she shook them in his face and tripped up the stairs
to the palace above.

He had made the appointment without intention, but he came to fulfil it in
a tumult of energy.

_She_ must choose and _he_ arrange--for that future which troubled his
mind. But the heated emptiness of the June afternoon soothed his will. He
saw that whatever she bade, that he would do. Still here, while he was
alone, before her presence came to rule, he plotted little things. When he
was left with himself he wondered about it; no, he did not want her, did
not want it! His life was over there, beyond her, and she must bend to
that conception. People, women, anyone, this piece of beauty and sense,
were merely episodic. The sum was made from all, and greater than all.

The door groaned, and he turned to meet her, shivering in the damp
passage. She gathered a wrap about her shoulders.

"Caspar would not go," she explained, appealingly.

"Which one is to go?" the young man began. She sank down on a bench and
turned her head wearily to the vineyard. Over the swaying tendrils of the
vine, a dark line, a blue slab of salt water, made the horizon.

"Should I know?" her face said, mutely.

"He thinks you should," she spoke, calmly. "He has been talking two hours
about you, your future, your brilliant performances----"

"That detained you!"

"He is plotting to make you a great man. You belong to the world, he said,
and, the world would have you. They need you to plan and exhort, I
believe."

"So you come to tell me--"

"Let us go out to the garden." She laid her hand reprovingly on his arm.
"We can see the pictures later."

She took his arm and directed him down the arched walk between the vines,
toward the purple sea.

"I did not realize that--that you were a little Ulysses. He warned me!"

"Indeed!"

"That you would love and worship at any wayside shrine; that the spirit of
devotion was not in you."

"And you believed?"

She nodded.

"It seemed so. I have thought so. Once a few feet away and you are
wondering!"

The young man was guiltily silent.

"And I am merely a wayside chapel, good for an idle prayer."

"Make it perpetual."

Her arm was heavy.

"Caspar wants you--away. He will try to arrange it. Perhaps you will
yield, and I shall lose."

"You mean he will make them recall me."

She said nothing.

"You can end it now." He stopped and raised her arm. They stood for a
moment, revolving the matter; a gardener came down the path. "You will get
the message tonight," she said, gloomily. "Go! The message will say
'come,' and you will obey."

Lawrence turned.

"Shall we see the pictures?"

The peasant girl admitted them to the hall, and opened, here and there, a
long shutter. The vast hall, in the form of a Latin cross, revealed a
dusky line of frescoes.

"Veronese," she murmured. Lawrence turned to the open window that looked
across the water to the piazza. Beneath, beside the quay, a green-painted
Greek ship was unloading grain. Some panting, half-naked men were
shovelling the oats.

"We might go," he said; "Caspar is probably waiting for his report. You
can tell him that he has won."

Suddenly he felt her very near him.

"No, not that way!"

"You are good to--love," she added deliberatively, placing her hands
lightly on his heart.

"You do not care enough; ah! that is sad, sad. Caspar, or denial, or God--
nothing would stand if you cared, more than you care for the little people
and things. See, I can take you now. I can say you are mine. I can make
you love--as another may again. But love me, now, as if no other minute
could ever follow."

She sighed the words.

"Here I am, to be loved. Let us settle nothing. Let us have this minute
for a few kisses."

The hall filled with dusk. The girl came back again. Suddenly a bell began
ringing.

"Caspar," she said. "Stay here; I will go."

"We will go together."

"No," she waved him back. "You will get the message. Caspar is right. You
are not for any woman for always."

"Go," he flung out, angrily.

The great doors of the hall had rattled to, leaving him alone half will-
less. He started and then returned to the balcony over the fondamenta.
In the half-light he could see her stepping into a waiting gondola, and
certain words came floating up clearly as if said to him----

"To-morrow evening, the Contessa Montelli, at nine." But she seemed to be
speaking to her companion. The gondola shot out into the broad canal.



VI

The long June day, Lawrence sat with the yellow cablegram before his eyes.
The message had come, indeed, and the way had been cleared. Eleven--the
train for Paris! passed; then, two, and now it was dusk again.

Had she meant those words for him? So carelessly flung back. That he would
prove.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The signorina awaits you." The man pointed to the garden, and turned back
with his smoking lamp up the broad staircase that clung to one side of the
court. Across the strip of garden lay a bar of moonlight on the grass.

She was standing over the open well-head at the farther end where the
grass grew in rank tufts. The gloomy wall of the palace cast a shadow that
reached to the well. Just as he entered, a church-clock across the rio
struck the hour on a cracked bell.

"My friend has gone in--she is afraid of the night air," Miss Barton
explained. "Perhaps she is afraid of ghosts," she added, as the young man
stood silent by her side. "An old doge killed his wife and her children
here, some centuries ago. They say the woman walks. Are you afraid?"

"Of only one ghost----"

"Not yet a ghost!" Indeed, her warm, breathing self threw a spirit of life
into the moonlight and gainsaid his idle words.

"I have come for you," he said, a little peremptorily. "To do it I have
lost my engagement with life."

"So the message came. You refused, and now you look for a reward. A man
must be paid!"

"I tried to keep the other engagement and could not!"

"I shall make you forget it, as if it were some silly boyish dream." She
began to walk over the moonlit grass. "I was waiting for that--sacrifice.
For if you desire _me_, you must leave the other engagements, always."

"I know it."

"I lie in the laguna morta, and the dead are under me, and the living are
caught in my sea-weed." She laughed.

"Now, we have several long hours of moonlight. Shall we stay here?"

The young man shivered.

"No, the Lady Dogessa might disturb us. Let us go out toward Murano."

"Are you really--alive and mine, not Severance's?" he threw out,
recklessly.

She stopped and smiled.

"First you tell me that I disturb your plans; then you want to know if I
am preoccupied. You would like to have me as an 'extra' in the
subscription."

As they came out on the flags by the gondola, another boat was pushing a
black prow into the rio from the Misericordia canal. It came up to the
water-steps where the two stood. Caspar Severance stepped out.

"Caspar!" Miss Barton laughed.

"They told me you were here for dinner," he explained. He was in evening
clothes, a Roman cloak hanging from his shoulders. He looked, standing on
the steps below the other two, like an impertinent intrusion.

"Lawrence! I thought you were on your way home."

Lawrence shook his head. All three were silent, wondering who would dare
to open the final theme.

"The Signora Contessa had a headache," Miss Barton began, nonchalantly.

Severance glanced skeptically at the young American by her side.

"So you fetched il dottore americano? Well, Giovanni is waiting to carry
us home."

Miss Barton stepped forward slowly, as if to enter the last gondola whose
prow was nuzzling by the steps.

Lawrence took her hand and motioned to his gondola.

"Miss Barton----"

Severance smiled, placidly.

"You will miss the midnight train."

The young man halted a moment, and Miss Barton's arm slipped into his
fingers.

"Perhaps," he muttered.

"The night will be cool for you," Severance turned to the woman. She
wavered a moment.

"You will miss more than the midnight train," Severance added to the young
fellow, in a low voice.

Lawrence knelt beside his gondola. He glanced up into the face of the
woman above him. "Will you come?" he murmured. She gathered up her dress
and stepped firmly into the boat. Severance, left alone on the fondamenta,
watched the two. Then he turned back to his gondola. The two boats floated
out silently into the Misericordia Canal.

"To the Cimeterio," Miss Barton said. "To the Canale Grande," Severance
motioned.

The two men raised their hats.

       *       *       *       *       *

For a few moments the man and the woman sat without words, until the
gondola cleared the Fondamenta Nuova, and they were well out in the sea of
moonlight. Ahead of them lay the stucco walls of the Cimeterio, glowing
softly in the white light. Some dark spots were moving out from the city
mass to their right, heading for the silent island.

"There goes the conclusion," Lawrence nodded to the funeral boats.

"But between us and them lies a space of years--life."

"Who decided?"

"You looked. It was decided."

The city detached itself insensibly from them, lying black behind. A light
wind came down from Treviso, touching the white waves.

"You are thinking that back there, up the Grand Canal, lie fame and
accomplishment. You are thinking that now you have your fata
morgana--nothing else. You are already preparing a grave for her in your
mind!"

Lawrence took her head in his hands. "Never," he shot out the word.
"Never--you are mine; I have come all these ocean miles to find you. I
have come for an accounting with the vision that troubles man." Her face
drew nearer.

"I am Venice, you said. I am set in the mare morto. I am built on the sea-
weed. But from me you shall not go. You came over the mountains for this."

The man sighed. Some ultimate conception of life seemed to outline itself
on the whitish walls of the Cimeterio--a question of sex. The man would go
questioning visions. The woman was held by one.

"Caspar Severance will find his way, and will play your game for you," she
went on coaxingly. "But this," her eyes were near him, "_this_ is a moment
of life. You have chosen. There is no mine and thine."

One by one the campaniles of Venice loomed, dark pillars in the white sky.
And all around toward Mestre and Treviso and Torcello; to San Pietro di
Castello and the grim walls of the arsenal, the mare morto heaved gently
and sighed.

CHICAGO, January, 1897.



THE PRICE OF ROMANCE

They were paying the price of their romance, and the question was whether
they would pay it cheerfully. They had been married a couple of years, and
the first flush of excitement over their passion and the stumbling-blocks
it had met was fading away. When he, an untried young lawyer and delicate
dilettante, had married her she was a Miss Benton, of St. Louis, "niece of
Oliphant, that queer old fellow who made his money in the Tobacco Trust,"
and hence with no end of prospects. Edwards had been a pleasant enough
fellow, and Oliphant had not objected to his loafing away a vacation about
the old house at Quogue. Marriage with his niece, the one remaining member
of his family who walked the path that pleased him, was another thing. She
had plenty of warning. Had he not sent his only son adrift as a beggar
because he had married a little country cousin? He could make nothing out
of Edwards except that he was not keen after business--loafed much, smoked
much, and fooled with music, possibly wrote songs at times.

Yet Miss Benton had not expected that cruel indifference when she
announced her engagement to the keen old man. For she was fond of him and
grateful.

"When do you think of marrying?" had been his single comment. She guessed
the unexpressed complement to that thought, "You can stay here until that
time. Then good-by."

She found in herself an admirable spirit, and her love added devotion and
faith in the future, her lover's future. So she tided over the months of
her engagement, when her uncle's displeasure settled down like a fog over
the pleasant house. Edwards would run down frequently, but Oliphant
managed to keep out of his way. It was none of his affair, and he let them
see plainly this aspect of it. Her spirit rose. She could do as other
women did, get on without candy and roses, and it hurt her to feel that
she had expected money from her uncle. She could show him that they were
above that.

So they were married and went to live in a little flat in Harlem, very
modest, to fit their income. Oliphant had bade her good-by with the
courtesy due to a tiresome Sunday visitor. "Oh, you're off, are you?" his
indifferent tones had said. "Well, good-by; I hope you will have a good
time." And that was all. Even the colored cook had said more; the servants
in general looked deplorable. Wealth goes so well with a pretty, bright
young woman!

Thus it all rested in the way they would accept the bed they had made.
Success would be ample justification. Their friends watched to see how
well they would solve the problem they had so jauntily set themselves.

Edwards was by no means a _fainant_--his record at the Columbia Law
School promised better than that, and he had found a place in a large
office that might answer for the stepping-stone. As yet he had not
individualized himself; he was simply charming, especially in correct
summer costume, luxuriating in indolent conversation. He had the well-
bred, fine-featured air of so many of the graduates from our Eastern
colleges. The suspicion of effeminacy which he suggested might be unjust,
but he certainly had not experienced what Oliphant would call "life." He
had enough interest in music to dissipate in it. Marriage was an excellent
settler, though, on a possible income of twelve hundred!

The two years had not the expected aspiring march, however; ten-dollar
cases, even, had not been plenty in Edwards's path, and he suspected that
he was not highly valued in his office. He had been compelled to tutor a
boy the second year, and the hot summers made him listless. In short, he
felt that he had missed his particular round in the ladder. He should have
studied music, or tried for the newspapers as a musical critic.
Sunday afternoons he would loll over the piano, picturing the other life--
that life which is always so alluring! His wife followed him heroically
into all his moods with that pitiful absorption such women give to the men
they love. She believed in him tremendously, if not as a lawyer, as a man
and an artist. Somehow she hadn't been an inspiration, and for that she
humbly blamed herself. How was it accomplished, this inspiration? A loving
wife inspired the ordinary man. Why not an artist?

They got into the habit of planning their life all differently--so that it
might not be limited and futile. _If_ they had a few thousand dollars!
That was a bad sign, and she knew it, and struggled against it. _If_ she
could only do something to keep the pot boiling while he worked at his
music for fame and success! But she could reduce expenses; so the one
servant went, and the house-bills grew tinier and tinier. However, they
didn't "make connections," and--something was wrong--she wondered what.

As the second summer came in they used to stroll out of their stuffy
street of an evening, up St. Nicholas Avenue, to the Park, or to the
Riverside Drive. There they would sit speechless, she in a faded blue
serge skirt with a crisp, washed-out shirtwaist, and an old sailor hat--
dark and pretty, in spite of her troubled face; he in a ready-made black
serge suit, yet very much the gentleman--pale and listless. Their eyes
would seek out any steamer in the river below, or anything else that
reminded them of other conditions. He would hum a bit from an opera. They
needed no words; their faces were evident, though mute, indications of the
tragedy. Then they would return at bed-time into the sultry streets, where
from the open windows of the flats came the hammered music of the city.
Such discordant efforts for harmony! Her heart would fill over him,
yearning like a mother to cherish him in all the pleasant ways of life,
but impotent, impotent!

She never suggested greater effort. Conditions were hard, she said over
and over; if there were only a little money to give him a start in another
direction. She admired his pride in never referring to old Oliphant. Her
uncle was often in her mind, but she felt that even if she could bring
herself to petition him, her husband would indignantly refuse to consider
the matter.

Still, she thought about it, and especially this summer, for she knew he
was then at Quogue. Moreover, she expected her first child. That worried
her daily; she saw how hopeless another complication would make their
fate. She cried over it at night when the room was too hot to sleep. And
then she reproached herself; God would punish her for not wanting her
baby.

One day she had gone down town to get some materials for the preparations
she must make. She liked to shop, for sometimes she met old friends; this
time in a large shop she happened upon a woman she had known at Quogue,
the efficient wife of a successful minister in Brooklyn. This Mrs.
Leicester invited her to lunch at the cafe at the top of the building, and
she had yielded, after a little urging, with real relief. They sat down at
a table near the window--it was so high up there was not much noise--and
the streets suddenly seemed interesting to Mrs. Edwards. The quiet table,
the pleasant lunch, and the energetic Mrs. Leicester were all refreshing.

"And how is your husband?" Mrs. Leicester inquired, keenly. As a
minister's wife she was compelled to interest herself in sentimental
complications that inwardly bored her. It was a part of her professional
duties. She had taken in this situation at once--she had seen that kind of
thing before; it made her impatient. But she liked the pretty little woman
before her, and was sorry she hadn't managed better.

"Pretty well," Mrs. Edwards replied, consciously. "The heat drags one down
so!"

Mrs. Leicester sent another quick glance across the table. "You haven't
been to Quogue much of late, have you? You know how poorly your uncle is."

"No! _You_ must know that Uncle James doesn't see us."

"Well," Mrs. Leicester went on, hastily, "he's been quite ill and feeble,
and they say he's growing queer. He never goes away now, and sees nobody.
Most of the servants have gone. I don't believe he will last long."

Then her worldliness struggled with her conventional position, and she
relapsed into innuendo. "He ought to have someone look after him, to see
him die decently, for he can't live beyond the autumn, and the only person
who can get in is that fat, greasy Dr. Shapless, who is after his money
for the Methodist missions. He goes down every week. I wonder where Mr.
Oliphant's son can be?"

Mrs. Edwards took in every word avidly while she ate. But she let the
conversation drift off to Quogue, their acquaintances, and the difficulty
of shopping in the summer. "Well, I must be going to get the train,"
exclaimed Mrs. Leicester at last. With a sigh the young wife rose, looked
regretfully down at the remains of their liberal luncheon, and then walked
silently to the elevator. They didn't mention Oliphant again, but there
was something understood between them. Mrs. Leicester hailed a cab; just
as she gathered her parcels to make a dive, she seemed illuminated with an
idea. "Why don't you come down some Sunday--visit us? Mr. Leicester would
be delighted."

Mrs. Edwards was taken unawares, but her instincts came to her rescue.

"Why, we don't go anywhere; it's awfully kind, and I should be delighted;
I am afraid Mr. Edwards can't."

"Well," sighed Mrs. Leicester, smiling back, unappeased, "come if you can;
come alone." The cab drove off, and the young wife felt her cheeks burn.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Edwardses had never talked over Oliphant or his money explicitly. They
shrank from it; it would be a confession of defeat. There was something
abhorrently vulgar in thus lowering the pitch of their life. They had come
pretty near it often this last summer. But each feared what the other
might think. Edwards especially was nervous about the impression it might
make on his wife, if he should discuss the matter. Mrs. Leicester's talk,
however, had opened possibilities for the imagination. So little of Uncle
James's money, she mused, would make them ideally happy--would put her
husband on the road to fame. She had almost made up her mind on a course
of action, and she debated the propriety of undertaking the affair without
her husband's knowledge. She knew that his pride would revolt from her
plan. She could pocket her own pride, but she was tender of his
conscience, of his comfort, of his sensibilities. It would be best to act
at once by herself--perhaps she would fail, anyway--and to shield him from
the disagreeable and useless knowledge and complicity. She couldn't resist
throwing out some feelers, however, at supper that night. He had come in
tired and soiled after a day's tramp collecting bills that wouldn't
collect this droughty season. She had fussed over him and coaxed a smile
out, and now they were at their simple tea.

She recounted the day's events as indifferently as possible, but her face
trembled as she described the luncheon, the talk, the news of her uncle,
and at last Mrs. Leicester's invitation. Edwards had started at the first
mention of Quogue.

"It's been in his mind," she thought, half-relieved, and his nervous
movements of assumed indifference made it easier for her to go on.

"It was kind of her, wasn't it?" she ended.

"Yes," Edwards replied, impressively. "Of course you declined."

"Oh, yes; but she seemed to expect us all the same." Edwards frowned, but
he kept an expectant silence. So she remarked, tentatively:

"It would be so pleasant to see dear old Quogue again." Her hypocrisy made
her flush. Edwards rose abruptly from the table and wandered about the
room. At length he said, in measured tones, his face averted from her:

"_Of course_, under the circumstances, we cannot visit Quogue while your
uncle lives--unless he should send for us." Thus he had put himself
plainly on record. His wife suddenly saw the folly and meanness of her
little plans.

It was hardly a disappointment; her mind felt suddenly relieved from an
unpleasant responsibility. She went to her husband, who was nervously
playing at the piano, and kissed him, almost reverently. It had been a
temptation from which he had saved her. They talked that evening a good
deal, planning what they would do if they could get over to Europe for a
year, calculating how cheaply they could go. It was an old subject.
Sometimes it kept off the blues; sometimes it indicated how blue they
were. Mrs. Edwards forgot the disturbance of the day until she was lying
wide awake in her hot bed. Then the old longings came in once more; she
saw the commonplace present growing each month more dreary; her husband
drudging away, with his hopes sinking. Suddenly he spoke:

"What made Mrs. Leicester ask us, do you suppose?" So he was thinking of
it again.

"I don't know!" she replied, vaguely. Soon his voice came again:

"You understand, Nell, that I distinctly disapprove of our making any
effort _that way_." She didn't think that her husband was a hypocrite. She
did not generalize when she felt deeply. But she knew that her husband
didn't want the responsibility of making any effort. Somehow she felt that
he would be glad if she should make the effort and take the responsibility
on her own shoulders.

Why had he lugged it into plain light again if he hadn't expected her to
do something? How could she accomplish it without making it unpleasant for
him? Before daylight she had it planned, and she turned once and kissed
her husband, protectingly.

       *       *       *       *       *

That August morning, as she walked up the dusty road, fringed with
blossoming golden-rod, toward the little cottage of the Leicesters, she
was content, in spite of her tumultuous mind. It was all so heavenly
quiet! the thin, drooping elms, with their pendent vines, like the
waterfalls of a maiden lady; the dusty snarls of blackberry bushes; the
midsummer contented repose of the air, and that distantly murmuring sea--
it was all as she remembered it in her childhood. A gap of disturbed years
closed up, and peace once more! The old man slowly dying up beyond in that
deserted, gambrel-roofed house would Forget and forgive.

Mrs. Leicester received her effusively, anxious now not to meddle
dangerously in what promised to be a ticklish business. Mrs. Edwards must
stay as long as she would. The Sundays were especially lonely, for Mr.
Leicester did not think she should bear the heat of the city so soon, and
left her alone when he returned to Brooklyn for his Sunday sermon. Of
course, stay as long as Mr. Edwards could spare her--a month; if possible.

At the mention of Mr. Edwards the young wife had a twinge of remorse for
the manner in which she had evaded him--her first deceit for his sake. She
had talked vaguely about visiting a friend at Moriches, and her husband
had fallen in with the idea. New York was like a finely divided furnace,
radiating heat from every tube-like street. So she was to go for a week or
ten days. Perhaps the matter would arrange itself before that time was up;
if not, she would write him what she had done. But ten days seemed so long
that she put uncomfortable thoughts out of her head.

Mrs. Leicester showed her to her room, a pretty little box, into which the
woodbine peeped and nodded, and where from one window she could get a
glimpse of the green marshes, with the sea beyond. After chatting awhile,
her hostess went out, protesting that her guest must be too tired to come
down. Mrs. Edwards gladly accepted the excuse, ate the luncheon the maid
brought, in two bites, and then prepared to sally forth.

She knew the path between the lush meadow-grass so well! Soon she was at
the entrance to the "Oliphant place." It was more run down than two years
ago; the lower rooms were shut up tight in massive green blinds that
reached to the warped boards of the veranda. It looked old, neglected,
sad, and weary; and she felt almost justified in her mission. She could
bring comfort and light to the dying man.

In a few minutes she was smothering the hysterical enthusiasm of her old
friend, Dinah. It was as she had expected: Oliphant had grown more
suspicious and difficult for the last two years, and had refused to see a
doctor, or, in fact, anyone but the Rev. Dr. Shapless and a country lawyer
whom he used when absolutely necessary. He hadn't left his room for a
month; Dinah had carried him the little he had seen fit to eat. She was
evidently relieved to see her old mistress once more at hand. She asked no
questions, and Mrs. Edwards knew that she would obey her absolutely.

They were sitting in Oliphant's office, a small closet off the more
pretentious library, and Mrs. Edwards could see the disorder into which
the old man's papers had fallen. The confusion preceding death had already
set in.

After laying aside her hat, she went up, unannounced, to her uncle's room,
determined not to give him an opportunity to dismiss her out of hand. He
was lying with his eyes closed, so she busied herself in putting the room
to rights, in order to quiet her nerves. The air was heavily languorous,
and soon in the quiet country afternoon her self-consciousness fell
asleep, and she went dreaming over the irresponsible past, the quiet
summers, and the strange, stern old man. Suddenly she knew that he was
awake and watching her closely. She started, but, as he said nothing, she
went on with her dusting, her hand shaking.

He made no comment while she brought him his supper and arranged the bed.
Evidently he would accept her services. Her spirit leapt up with the joy
of success. That was the first step. She deemed it best to send for her
meagre satchel, and to take possession of her old room. In that way she
could be more completely mistress of the situation and of him. She had had
no very definite ideas of action before that afternoon; her one desire had
been to be on the field of battle, to see what could be done, perhaps to
use a few tears to soften the implacable heart. But now her field opened
out. She must keep the old man to herself, within her own care--not that
she knew specifically what good that would do, but it was the tangible
nine points of the law.

The next morning Oliphant showed more life, and while she was helping him
into his dressing-gown, he vouchsafed a few grunts, followed by a piercing
inquiry:

"Is _he_ dead yet?"

The young wife flushed with indignant protest.

"Broke, perhaps?"

"Well, we haven't starved yet." But she was cowed by his cynical
examination. He relapsed into silence; his old, bristly face assumed a
sardonic peace whenever his eyes fell upon her. She speculated about that
wicked beatitude; it made her uncomfortable. He was still, however--never
a word from morning till night.

The routine of little duties about the sickroom she performed
punctiliously. In that way she thought to put her conscience to rights, to
regard herself in the kind rle of ministering angel. That illusion was
hard to attain in the presence of the sardonic comment the old man seemed
to add. After all, it was a vulgar grab after the candied fruits of this
life.

She had felt it necessary to explain her continued absence to her husband.
Mrs. Leicester, who did not appear to regard her actions as unexpected,
had undertaken that delicate business. Evidently, she had handled it
tactfully, for Mrs. Edwards soon received a hurried note. He felt that she
was performing her most obvious duty; he could not but be pleased that the
breach caused by him had been thus tardily healed. As long as her uncle
continued in his present extremity, she must remain. He would run down to
the Leicesters over Sundays, etc. Mrs. Edwards was relieved; it was nice
of him--more than that, delicate--not to be stuffy over her action.

The uppermost question these days of monotonous speculation was how long
would this ebb-tide of a tenacious life flow. She took a guilty interest
in her uncle's condition, and yet she more than half wished him to live.
Sometimes he would rally. Something unfulfilled troubled his mind, and
once he even crawled downstairs. She found him shakily puttering over the
papers in his huge davenport. He asked her to make a fire in the grate,
and then, gathering up an armful of papers, he knelt down on the brick
hearth, but suddenly drew back. His deep eyes gleamed hatefully at her.
Holding out several stiff papers, he motioned to her to burn them. Usually
she would have obeyed docilely enough, but this deviltry of merriment she
resented. While she delayed, standing erect before the smouldering sticks,
she noticed that a look of terror crept across the sick face. A spasm
shook him, and he fainted. After that his weakness kept him in bed. She
wondered what he had been so anxious to burn.

From this time her thoughts grew more specific. Just how should she attain
her ends? Had he made a will? Could he not now do something for them, or
would it be safer to bide their time? Indeed, for a few moments she
resolved to decide all by one straightforward prayer. She began, and the
old man seemed so contentedly prepared for the scene that she remained
dumb.

In this extremity of doubt she longed to get aid from her husband. Yet
under the circumstances she dared to admit so little. One Saturday
afternoon he called at the house; she was compelled to share some of her
perplexities.

"He seems so very feeble," she remarked. They were sitting on the veranda
some distance from Oliphant's room, yet their conversation was furtive.
"Perhaps he should see a doctor or a minister."

"No, I don't think so," Edwards replied, assuringly. "You see, he doesn't
believe in either, and such things should be left to the person himself,
as long as he's in his right mind."

"And a lawyer?" Mrs. Edwards continued, probingly.

"Has he asked for one?"

"No, but he seems to find it hard to talk."

"I guess it's best not to meddle. Who's that?"

A little, fat man in baggy black trousers and a seersucker coat was
panting up the gentle hill to the gate. He had a puggy nose and a heavy,
thinly bearded face incased about the eyes in broad steel spectacles.

"That must be Dr. Shapless," she said, in a flutter.

"What of it?" Edwards replied.

"He mustn't come in," she cried, with sudden energy. "You must see him,
and send him away! He wants to see Uncle Oliphant. Tell him he's too
sick--to come another day." Edwards went down the path to meet him.
Through the window she could hear a low conversation, and then crunched
gravel. Meantime Oliphant seemed restlessly alert, expectant of something,
and with suspicious eyes intent on her.

Her heart thumped with relief when the gate clicked. Edwards had been
effective that time. Oliphant was trying to say something, but the hot
August day had been too much for him--it all ended in a mumble. Then she
pulled in the blinds, settled the pillows nervously, and left the room in
sheer fright.

The fight had begun--and grimly.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I wonder what the old cove wanted?" Edwards said the next day; "he was
dead set on seeing your uncle; said he had an engagement with him, and
looked me up and down. I stood him off, but he'll be down again."

"Don't you know about that new fund the Methodists are raising? Uncle
Oliphant has always helped the Methodists, and I suppose Dr. Shapless
wanted to see him about some contributions." Edwards asked no more
questions, and, in fact, got back to town on a pretext of business that
afternoon. He was clearly of no use in Quogue. His wife sent for a
physician that week. It was tardy justice to propriety, but it was safe
then, for Oliphant had given up all attempts to talk.

The doctor came, looked at the old man, and uttered a few remarks. He
would come again. Mrs. Edwards did not need to be told that the end was
near. The question was, how soon?

That week had another scare. Somehow old Slocum, the local lawyer Oliphant
used, had been summoned, and one morning she ran across him in the hall.
She knew the man well of old. He was surprised and pleased to see her, and
it was not difficult to get him out of the house without arousing his
suspicions. But he would talk so boisterously; she felt her uncle's eyes
aflame in anger.

"Be sure and send for me when he rallies, quick," Slocum whispered loudly
in the hall. "Perhaps we can do a little something for some folks." And
with a wink he went out.

Had she done the clever thing, after all, in shooing old Slocum out? Her
mind went over the possibilities in tense anxiety. If there were no will,
James, Jr., would get the whole, she thought. If there was a will already
in the house, in that old davenport, what then? Would Shapless get the
money? She grew keen in speculation. To leave her in the lurch, to give it
all to that greasy Shapless, would be the most natural trick in the world
for an incisive old fellow like Oliphant.

It was too much! She cried a little, and she began to hate the helpless
man upstairs. It occurred to her to poke about in the papers in the
adjoining room. She must do it at once, for she expected Edwards every
moment.

First she ran upstairs to see if her uncle was all right. As soon as she
entered, he glared at her bitterly and would have spoken. She noted the
effort and failure, elated. He could not betray her now, unless he rallied
wonderfully. So leaving the door ajar, she walked firmly downstairs. Now
she could satisfy her desire.

If the money were _all_ left to Shapless? She might secure the will, and
bargain with the old parasite for a few thousands of dollars. Her mind was
full of wild schemes. If she only knew a little more about affairs! She
had heard of wills, and read many novels that turned upon wills lost or
stolen. They had always seemed to her improbable, mere novels. Necessity
was stranger than fiction.

It did not take long to find the very articles she was after; evidently
Oliphant had been overhauling them on that last excursion from his room.
The package lay where he had dropped it when he fainted. There were two
documents. She unfolded them on the top of the mussy desk. They were hard
reading in all their legal dress, and her head was filled with fears lest
her husband should walk in. She could make out, however, that Oliphant was
much richer than she had ever vaguely supposed, and that since her
departure he had relented toward his son. For by the first will in date
she was the principal heir, a lot of queer charities coming in besides. In
the second, James, Jr., received something. Her name did not appear.
Several clauses had been added from time to time, each one giving more
money and lands to the Methodists. Probably Shapless was after another
codicil when he called.

It had taken her into the twilight to gain even a meagre idea of all this.
She was preparing to fold the documents up in their common wrapper, when
she felt the door open behind her. All she could see in the terror of the
moment was the gaunt white arm of her uncle, and the two angry eyes in the
shaking head. She shrieked, from pure nervousness, and at her cry the old
man fell in a heap.

The accident steeled her nerves. Dinah came in in a panic, and as they
were lifting the bony frame from the floor Edwards arrived. With his
assistance they got the sick man to bed.

That was clearly the last gasp. Yet Mrs. Edwards shook in dread every time
she entered the room. The look seemed conscious still, intensified
malignity and despair creeping in. She was afraid and guilty and unstrung.
Perhaps, with some sudden revival of his forces, he would kill her. He was
lying there, too still for defeat. His life had been an expression of
hates; the last one might be dreadful.

Yet she stood to her post in the sick-room, afraid, as she knew, to trust
herself with her husband. Her mind was soiled with seething thoughts, and,
in contrast, his seemed so fresh and pure! If she could keep him
unsuspicious of her, all would be well in the end. But the task she had
set herself for him was hard, so hard!

That night when all was still she crept downstairs and groped about in the
davenport for the papers. They had been lying there unopened where they
had fallen earlier in the evening. She struck a match, caught up the
fresher document, and hugged it to her as she toiled upstairs. When she
had tucked it away in her satchel the end seemed near. They must wait now.

She put her husband out of her mind. Outside, the warm summer days died
away over the sea, one by one, and the grass beyond the gates grew heavier
with dust. Life was tense in its monotony.

       *       *       *       *       *

That had happened on a Saturday; Monday Dr. Shapless came again, his shoes
dusty from his long walk from the station. He looked oiled as ever, but
more determined. Mrs. Edwards daringly permitted him to see the dying
man--he had been lying in a stupor--for she was afraid that the reverend
doctor's loud tones in the hall might exasperate Oliphant to some wild
act. Dr. Shapless shut her from the room when he went in, but he did not
stay long. A restless despair had settled down on her uncle's face, there
to remain for the last few hours.

Her heart sank; she longed to cry out to the poor old man on the bed that
_she_ did not want his money. She remained with him all night, yet she did
not dare to approach his bed. She would disturb him.

He died the next afternoon, and at the last he looked out on the world and
at her with his final note of intelligence. It was pathetic, a suggestion
of past tenderness defeated, and of defeat in hate, too. She shuddered as
she closed his sad eyes; it was awful to meddle with a man's last
purposes.

The funeral was almost surreptitious; old Dinah, the Leicesters, and the
Edwardses occupied the one carriage that followed him to the graveyard
across the village. They met a hay-cart or two on their way, but no
curious neighbors. Old Oliphant's death aroused no interest in this
village, ridden with summer strangers.

The day was impersonally suave and tender, with its gentle haze and autumn
premonitions. Mr. Leicester said a few equivocal words, while Mrs. Edwards
gazed helplessly into the grave. The others fell back behind the minister.
Between her and her uncle down there something remained unexplained, and
her heart ached.

       *       *       *       *       *

They spent that night at the Leicesters', for Mrs. Edwards wearily refused
to return to the Oliphant place. Edwards carried the keys over to Slocum,
and told him to take the necessary steps toward settling the old man's
affairs. The next day they returned to the little flat in Harlem. The
Leicesters found their presence awkward, now that there was nothing to do,
and Mrs. Edwards was craving to be alone with her husband, to shut out the
past month from their lives as soon as possible.

These September days, while they both waited in secret anxiety, she clung
to him as she had never before. He was pure, the ideal she had voluntarily
given up, given up for his sake in order that he might have complete
perfection. His delicate sensitiveness kept him from referring to that
painful month, or to possible expectations. She worshipped him the more,
and was thankful for his complete ignorance. Their common life could go on
untainted and noble.

Yet Edwards betrayed his nervous anxiety. His eagerness for the mail every
morning, his early return from business, indicated his troubled mind.

The news came at breakfast-time. Mrs. Edwards handed Slocum's letter
across the table and waited, her face wanly eager. The letter was long; it
took some half-dozen large letter-sheets for the country lawyer to tell
his news, but in the end it came. He had found the will and was happy to
say that Mrs. Edwards was a large, a very large, beneficiary. Edwards read
these closing sentences aloud. He threw down the letter and tried to take
her in his arms. But she tearfully pushed him away, and then, repenting,
clasped his knees.

"Oh, Will! it's so much, so very much," she almost sobbed.

Edwards looked as if that were not an irremediable fault in their good
luck. He said nothing. Already he was planning their future movements.
Under the circumstances neither cared to discuss their happiness, and so
they got little fun from the first bloom.

In spite of Mrs. Edwards's delicate health and her expected confinement
they decided to go abroad. She was feverishly anxious for him to begin his
real work at once, to prove himself; and it might be easier to forget her
one vicious month when the Atlantic had been crossed. They put their
affairs to rights hurriedly, and early in November sailed for France.

The Leicesters were at the dock to bid them God-speed and to chirrup over
their good fortune.

"It's all like a good, old-fashioned story," beamed Mrs. Leicester,
content with romance for once, now that it had arranged itself so
decorously.

"Very satisfactory; quite right," the clergyman added. "We'll see you soon
in Paris. We're thinking of a gay vacation, and will let you know."

Edwards looked fatuous; his wife had an orderly smile. She was glad when
Sandy Hook sank into the mist. She had only herself to avoid now.

They took some pleasant apartments just off the Rue de Rivoli, and then
their life subsided into the complacent commonplace of possession. She was
outwardly content to enjoy with her husband, to go to the galleries, the
opera, to try the restaurants, and to drive.

Yet her life went into one idea, a very fixed idea, such as often takes
hold of women in her condition. She was eager to see him at work. If he
accomplished something--even content!--she would feel justified and
perhaps happy. As to the child, the idea grew strange to her. Why should
she have a third in the problem? For she saw that the child must take its
part in her act, must grow up and share their life and inherit the
Oliphant money. In brief, she feared the yet unborn stranger, to whom she
would be responsible in this queer way. And the child could not repair the
wrong as could her husband. Certainly the child was an alien.

She tried to be tender of her husband in his boyish glee and loafing. She
could understand that he needed to accustom himself to his new freedom, to
have his vacation first. She held herself in, tensely, refraining from
criticism lest she might mar his joy. But she counted the days, and when
her child had come, she said to herself, _then_ he must work.

This morbid life was very different from what she had fancied the rich
future would be, as she looked into the grave, the end of her struggle,
that September afternoon. But she had grown to demand so much more from
_him_; she had grown so grave! His bright, boyish face, the gentle curls,
had been dear enough, and now she looked for the lines a man's face should
have. Why was he so terribly at ease? The world was bitter and hard in its
conditions, and a man should not play.

Late in December the Leicesters called; they were like gleeful sparrows,
twittering about. Mrs. Edwards shuddered to see them again, and when they
were gone she gave up and became ill.

Her tense mind relieved itself in hysterics, which frightened her to
further repression. Then one night she heard herself moaning: "Why did I
have to take all? It was so little, so very little, I wanted, and I had to
take all. Oh, Will, Will, you should have done for yourself! Why did you
need this? Why couldn't you do as other men do? It's no harder for you
than for them." Then she recollected herself. Edwards was holding her hand
and soothing her.

Some weeks later, when she was very ill, she remembered those words, and
wondered if he had suspected anything. Her child came and died, and she
forgot this matter, with others. She lay nerveless for a long time,
without thought; Edwards and the doctor feared melancholia. So she was
taken to Italy for the cold months. Edwards cared for her tenderly, but
his caressing presence was irritating, instead of soothing, to her. She
was hungry for a justification that she could not bring about.

At last it wore on into late spring. She began to force herself back into
the old activities, in order to leave no excuse for further dawdling. Her
attitude became terribly judicial and suspicious.

An absorbing idleness had settled down over Edwards, partly excused to
himself by his wife's long illness. When he noticed that his desultory
days made her restless, he took to loafing about galleries or making
little excursions, generally in company with some forlorn artist he had
picked up. He had nothing, after all, so very definite that demanded his
time; he had not yet made up his mind for any attempts. And something in
the domestic atmosphere unsettled him. His wife held herself aloof, with
alien sympathies, he felt.

So they drifted on to discontent and unhappiness until she could bear it
no longer without expression.

"Aren't we to return to Paris soon?" she remarked one morning as they
idled over a late breakfast. "I am strong now, and I should like to settle
down."

Edwards took the cue, idly welcoming any change.

"Why, yes, in the fall. It's too near the summer now, and there's no
hurry."

"Yes, there _is_ hurry," his wife replied, hastily. "We have lost almost
eight months."

"Out of a lifetime," Edwards put in, indulgently.

She paused, bewildered by the insinuation of his remark. But her mood was
too incendiary to avoid taking offence. "Do you mean that that would be a
_life_, loafing around all day, enjoying this, that, and the other fine
pleasure? That wasn't what we planned."

"No, but I don't see why people who are not driven should drive
themselves. I want to get the taste of Harlem out of my mouth." He was a
bit sullen. A year ago her strict inquiry into his life would have been
absurd. Perhaps the money, her money, gave her the right.

"If people don't drive themselves," she went on, passionately, "they ought
to be driven. It's cowardly to take advantage of having money to do
nothing. You wanted the--the opportunity to do something. Now you have
it."

Edwards twisted his wicker chair into uncomfortable places. "Well, are you
sorry you happen to have given me the chance?" He looked at her coldly, so
that a suspicious thought shot into her mind.

"Yes," she faltered, "if it means throwing it away, I _am_ sorry."

She dared no more. Her mind was so close on the great sore in her gentle
soul. He lit a cigarette, and sauntered down the hotel garden. But the
look he had given her--a queer glance of disagreeable intelligence--
illumined her dormant thoughts.

What if he had known all along? She remembered his meaning words that hot
night when they talked over Oliphant's illness for the first time. And why
had he been so yielding, so utterly passive, during the sordid drama over
the dying man? What kept him from alluding to the matter in any way? Yes,
he must have encouraged her to go on. _She_ had been his tool, and he the
passive spectator. The blind certainty of a woman made the thing assured,
settled. She picked up the faint yellow rose he had laid by her plate, and
tore it slowly into fine bits. On the whole, he was worse than she.

But before he returned she stubbornly refused to believe herself.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the autumn they were again in Paris, in soberer quarters, which were
conducive to effort. Edwards was working fitfully with several teachers,
goaded on, as he must confess to himself, by a pitiless wife. Not much was
discussed between them, but he knew that the price of the _statu quo_ was
continued labor.

She was watching him; he felt it and resented it, but he would not
understand. All the idealism, the worship of the first sweet months in
marriage, had gone. Of course that incense had been foolish, but it was
sweet. Instead, he felt these suspicious, intolerant eyes following his
soul in and out on its feeble errands. He comforted himself with the trite
consolation that he was suffering from the natural readjustment in a
woman's mind. It was too drastic for that, however.

He was in the habit of leaving her in the evenings of the opera. The light
was too much for her eyes, and she was often tired. One wet April night,
when he returned late, he found her up, sitting by the window that
overlooked the steaming boulevard. Somehow his soul was rebellious, and
when she asked him about the opera he did not take the pains to lie.

"Oh, I haven't been there," he muttered, "I am beastly tired of it all.
Let's get out of it; to St. Petersburg or Norway--for the summer," he
added, guiltily.

Now that the understanding impended she trembled, for hitherto she had
never actually known. In suspicion there was hope. So she almost
entreated.

"We go to Vienna next winter anyway, and I thought we had decided on
Switzerland for the summer."

"You decided! But what's the use of keeping up the mill night and day?
There's plenty of opportunity over there for an educated gentleman with
money, if what you are after is a 'sphere' for me."

"You want to--to go back now?"

"No, I want to be let alone."

"Don't you care to pay for all you have had? Haven't you any sense of
justice to Uncle Oliphant, to your opportunities?"

"Oliphant!" Edwards laughed, disagreeably. "Wouldn't he be pleased to have
an operetta, a Gilbert and Sullivan affair, dedicated to him! No. I have
tried to humor your idea of making myself famous. But what's the use of
being wretched?" The topic seemed fruitless. Mrs. Edwards looked over to
the slight, careless figure. He was sitting dejectedly on a large
fauteuil, smoking. He seemed fagged and spiritless. She almost pitied him
and gave in, but suddenly she rose and crossed the room.

"We've made ourselves pretty unhappy," she said, apologetically, resting
her hand on the lapel of his coat. "I guess it's mostly my fault, Will. I
have wanted so much that you should do something fine with Uncle
Oliphant's money, with _yourself_. But we can make it up in other ways."

"What are you so full of that idea for?" Edwards asked, curiously. "Why
can't you be happy, even as happy as you were in Harlem?" His voice was
hypocritical.

"Don't you know?" she flashed back. "You _do_ know, I believe. Tell me,
did you look over those papers on the davenport that night Uncle James
fainted?"

The unexpected rush of her mind bewildered him. A calm lie would have set
matters to rights, but he was not master of it.

"So you were willing--you knew?"

"It wasn't my affair," he muttered, weakly, but she had left him.

He wandered about alone for a few days until the suspense became
intolerable. When he turned up one afternoon in their apartments he found
preparations on foot for their departure.

"We're going away?" he asked.

"Yes, to New York."

"Not so fast," he interrupted, bitterly. "We might as well face the matter
openly. What's the use of going back there?"

"We can't live here, and besides I shall be wanted there."

"You can't do anything now. Talk sensibly about it. I will not go back."

She looked at him coldly, critically. "I cabled Slocum yesterday, and we
must live somehow."

"You--" but she laid her hand on his arm. "It makes no difference now, you
know, and it can't be changed. I've done everything."

CHICAGO, August, 1895.



A REJECTED TITIAN


"John," my wife remarked in horrified tones, "he's coming to Rome!"

"Who is coming to Rome--the Emperor?"

"Uncle Ezra--see," she handed me the telegram. "Shall arrive in Rome
Wednesday morning; have Watkins at the Grand Hotel."

I handed the despatch to Watkins.

"Poor uncle!" my wife remarked.

"He will get it in the neck," I added, profanely.

"They ought to put nice old gentlemen like your uncle in bond when they
reach Italy," Watkins mused, as if bored in advance. "The _antichits_ get
after them, like--like confidence-men in an American city, and the same
old story is the result; they find, in some mysterious fashion, a
wonderful Titian, a forgotten Giorgione, cheap at _cinque mille lire_.
Then it's all up with them. His pictures are probably decalcomanias, you
know, just colored prints pasted over board. Why, we _know_ every picture
in Venice; it's simply _impossible_--"

Watkins was a connoisseur; he had bought his knowledge in the dearest
school of experience.

"What are you going to do, Mr. Watkins?" my wife put in. "Tell him the
truth?"

"There's nothing else to do. I used up all my ambiguous terms over that
daub he bought in the Piazza di Spagna--'reminiscential' of half a dozen
worthless things, 'suggestive,' etc. I can't work them over again."
Watkins was lugubrious.

"Tell him the truth as straight as you can; it's the best medicine." I was
Uncle Ezra's heir; naturally, I felt for the inheritance.

"Well," my wife was invariably cheerful, "perhaps he has found something
valuable; at least, one of them may be; isn't it possible?"

Watkins looked at my wife indulgently.

"He's been writing me about them for a month, suggesting that, as I was
about to go on to Venice, he would like to have me see them; such
treasures as I should find them. I have been waiting until he should get
out. It isn't a nice job, and your uncle--"

"There are three of them, Aunt Mary writes: Cousin Maud has bought one,
with the advice of Uncle Ezra and Professor Augustus Painter, and Painter
himself is the last one to succumb."

"They have all gone mad," Watkins murmured.

"Where did Maudie get the cash?" I asked.

"She had a special gift on coming of age, and she has been looking about
for an opportunity for throwing it away"--my wife had never sympathized
with my cousin, Maud Vantweekle. "She had better save it for her
trousseau, if she goes on much more with that young professor. Aunt Mary
should look after her."

Watkins rose to go.

"Hold on a minute," I said. "Just listen to this delicious epistle from
Uncle Ezra."

"'... We have hoped that you would arrive in Venice before we break up our
charming home here. Mary has written you that Professor Painter has joined
us at the Palazzo Palladio, complementing our needs and completing our
circle. He has an excellent influence for seriousness upon Maud; his fine,
manly qualities have come out. Venice, after two years of Berlin, has
opened his soul in a really remarkable manner. All the beauty lying loose
around here has been a revelation to him--'"

"Maud's beauty," my wife interpreted.

"'And our treasures you will enjoy so much--such dashes of color, such
great slaps of light! I was the first to buy--they call it a Savoldo, but
I think no third-rate man could be capable of so much--such reaching out
after infinity. However, that makes little difference. I would not part
with it, now that I have lived these weeks with so fine a thing. Maud won
a prize in her Bonifazio, which she bought under my advice. Then Augustus
secured the third one, a Bissola, and it has had the greatest influence
upon him already; it has given him his education in art. He sits with it
by the hour while he is at work, and its charm has gradually produced a
revolution in his character. We had always found him too Germanic, and he
had immured himself in that barbarous country for so long over his Semitic
books that his nature was stunted on one side. His picture has opened a
new world for him. Your Aunt Mary and I already see the difference in his
character; he is gentler, less narrowly interested in the world. This
precious bit of fine art has been worth its price many times, but I don't
think Augustus would part with it for any consideration now that he has
lived with it and learned to know its power.'"

"I can't see why he is coming to Rome," Watkins commented at the end. "If
they are confident that they know all about their pictures, and don't care
anyway who did them, and are having all this spiritual love-feast, what in
the world do they want any expert criticism of their text for? Now for
such people to buy pictures, when they haven't a mint of money! Why don't
they buy something within their means really fine--a coin, a Van Dyck
print? I could get your uncle a Whistler etching for twenty-five pounds; a
really fine thing, you know--"

This was Watkins's hobby.

"Oh, well, it won't be bad in the end of the hall at New York; it's as
dark as pitch there; and then Uncle Ezra can leave it to the Metropolitan
as a Giorgione. It will give the critics something to do. And I suppose
that in coming on here he has in mind to get an indorsement for his
picture that will give it a commercial value. He's canny, is my Uncle
Ezra, and he likes to gamble too, like the rest of us. If he should draw a
prize, it wouldn't be a bad thing to brag of."

Watkins called again the next morning.

"Have you seen Uncle Ezra?" my wife asked, anxiously.

"No. Three telegrams. Train was delayed--I suppose by the importance of
the works of art it's bringing on."

"When do you expect him?"

"About noon."

"Mr. Watkins," my wife flamed out, "I believe you are just shirking it, to
meet that poor old man with his pictures. You ought to have been at the
station, or at least at the hotel. Why, it's twelve now!"

Watkins hung his head.

"I believe you are a coward," my wife went on. "Just think of his arriving
there, all excitement over his pictures, and finding you gone!"

"Well, well," I said, soothingly, "it's no use to trot off now, Watkins;
stay to breakfast. He will be in shortly. When he finds you are out at the
hotel he will come straight on here, I am willing to bet."

Watkins looked relieved at my suggestion.

"I believe you meant to run away all along," my wife continued, severely,
"and to come here for refuge."

Watkins sulked.

We waited in suspense, straining our ears to hear the sound of a cab
stopping in the street. At last one did pull up. My wife made no pretence
of indifference, but hurried to the window.

"It's Uncle Ezra, with a big, black bundle. John, run down--No! there's a
facchino."

We looked at each other and laughed.

"The three!"

Our patron of art came in, with a warm, gentle smile, his tall, thin
figure a little bent with the fatigue of the journey, his beard a little
grayer and dustier than usual, and his hands all a-tremble with nervous
impatience and excitement. He had never been as tremulous before an
opinion from the Supreme Court. My wife began to purr over him soothingly;
Watkins looked sheepish; I hurried them all off to breakfast.

The omelette was not half eaten before Uncle Ezra jumped up, and began
unstrapping the oil-cloth covering to the pictures. There was
consternation at the table. My wife endeavored soothingly to bring Uncle
Ezra's interest back to breakfast, but he was not to be fooled. My Uncle
Ezra was a courageous man.

"Of course you fellows," he said, smiling at Watkins, in his suave
fashion, "are just whetting your knives for me, I know. That's right. I
want to know the worst, the hardest things you can say. You can't destroy
the intrinsic _worth_ of the pictures for us; I have lived with mine too
long, and know how precious it is!"

At last the three pictures were tipped up against the wall, and the
Madonnas and saints in gold, red, and blue were beaming out insipidly at
us. Uncle Ezra affected indifference. Watkins continued with the omelette.
"We'll look them over after breakfast," he said, severely, thus getting us
out of the hole temporarily.

After breakfast my wife cooked up some engagement, and hurried me off. We
left Uncle Ezra in the hands of the physician. Two hours later, when we
entered, the operation had been performed--we could see at a glance--and
in a bloody fashion. The pictures were lying about the vast room as if
they had been spat at. Uncle Ezra smiled wanly at us, with the courage of
the patient who is a sceptic about physicians.

"Just what I expected," he said, briskly, to relieve Watkins, who was
smoking, with the air of a man who has finished his job and is now cooling
off. "Mr. Watkins thinks Painter's picture and Maud's are copies,
Painter's done a few years ago and Maud's a little older, the last
century. My Savoldo he finds older, but repainted. You said cinque cento,
Mr. Watkins?"

"Perhaps, Mr. Williams," Watkins answered, and added, much as a dog would
give a final shake to the bird, "_Much_ repainted, hardly anything left of
the original. There may be a Savoldo underneath, but you don't see it."
Watkins smiled at us knowingly. My wife snubbed him.

"Of course, Uncle Ezra, _that's_ one man's opinion. I certainly should not
put much faith in one critic, no matter how eminent he may be. Just look
at the guide-books and see how the 'authorities' swear at one another.
Ruskin says every man is a fool who can't appreciate his particular love,
and Burckhardt calls it a daub, and Eastlake insipid. Now, there are a set
of young fellows who think they know all about paint and who painted what.
They're renaming all the great masterpieces. Pretty soon they will
discover that some tenth-rate fellow painted the Sistine Chapel."

Watkins put on an aggrieved and expostulatory manner. Uncle Ezra cut in.

"Oh! my dear! Mr. Watkins may be right, quite right. It's his business to
know, I am sure, and I anticipated all that he would say; indeed, I have
come off rather better than I expected. There is old paint in it
somewhere."

"Pretty far down," Watkins muttered. My wife bristled up, but Uncle Ezra
assumed his most superb calm.

"It makes no difference to me, of course, as far as the _worth_ of the
work of art is concerned. I made up my mind before I came here that my
picture was worth a great deal to me, much more than I paid for it." There
was a heroic gasp. Watkins interposed mercilessly, "And may I ask, Mr.
Williams, what you did give for it?"

Uncle Ezra was an honest man. "Twenty-five hundred lire," he replied,
sullenly.

"Excuse me" (Watkins was behaving like a pitiless cad), "but you paid a
great deal too much for it, I assure you. I could have got it for----"

"Mr. Watkins," my wife was hardly civil to him, "it doesn't matter much
what you could have got it for."

"No," Uncle Ezra went on bravely, "I am a little troubled as to what this
may mean to Maud and Professor Painter, for you see their pictures are
copies."

"Undoubted modern copies," the unquenchable Watkins emended.

"Maud has learned a great deal from her picture. And as for Painter, it
has been an education in art, an education in life. He said to me the
night before I came away, 'Mr. Williams, I wouldn't take two thousand for
that picture; it's been the greatest influence in my life.'"

I thought Watkins would have convulsions.

"And it has brought those two young souls together in a marvellous way,
this common interest in fine art. You will find Maud a much more serious
person, Jane. No, if I were Painter I certainly should not care a fig
whether it proves to be a copy or not. I shouldn't let that influence me
in my love for such an educational wonder."

The bluff was really sublime, but painful. My wife gave a decided hint to
Watkins that his presence in such a family scene was awkward. He took his
hat and cane. Uncle Ezra rose and grasped him cordially by the hand.

"You have been very generous, Mr. Watkins," he said, in his own sweet way,
"to do such an unpleasant job. It's a large draft to make on the kindness
of a friend."

"Oh, don't mention it, Mr. Williams; and if you want to buy something
really fine, a Van Dyck print--a----"

Uncle Ezra was shooing him toward the door. From the stairs we could still
hear his voice. "Or a Whistler etching for twenty-five pounds, I could get
you, now, a very fine----"

"No, thank you, Mr. Watkins," Uncle Ezra said, firmly. "I don't believe I
have any money just now for such an investment."

My wife tiptoed about the room, making faces at the exposed masterpieces.
"What shall we do?" Uncle Ezra came back into the room, his face a trifle
grayer and more worn. "Capital fellow, that Watkins," he said; "so firm
and frank."

"Uncle," I ventured at random, "I met Flgel the other day in the street.
You know Flgel's new book on the Renaissance. He's the coming young
critic in art, has made a wonderful reputation the last three years, is on
the _Beaux Arts_ staff, and really _knows_. He is living out at Frascati.
I could telegraph and have him here this afternoon, perhaps."

"Well, I don't know;" his tone, however, said "Yes." "I don't care much
for expert advice--for specialists. But it wouldn't do any harm to hear
what he has to say. And Maud and Painter have made up their minds that
Maud's is a Titian."

So I ran out and sent off the despatch. My wife took Uncle Ezra down to
the Forum and attempted to console him with the ugliness of genuine
antiquity, while I waited for Flgel. He came in a tremendous hurry, his
little, muddy eyes winking hard behind gold spectacles.

"Ah, yes," he began to paw the pictures over as if they were live stock,
"that was bought for a Bonifazio," he had picked up Maud's ruby-colored
prize. "Of course, of course, it's a copy, an old copy, of Titian's
picture, No. 3,405, in the National Gallery at London. There is a replica
in the Villa Ludovisi here at Rome. It's a stupid copy, some alterations,
all for the bad--worthless--well, not to the _antichit_, for it must be
1590, I should say. But worthless for us and in bad condition. I wouldn't
give cinque lire for it."

"And the Bissola?" I said. "Oh, that was done in the seventeenth
century--it would make good kindling. But this," he turned away from
Painter's picture with a gesture of contempt, "this is Domenico Tintoretto
fast enough, at least what hasn't been stippled over and painted out. St.
Agnes's leg here is entire, and that tree in the background is original. A
damn bad man, but there are traces of his slop work. Perhaps the hair is
by him, too. Well, good-by, old fellow; I must be off to dinner."

That was slight consolation; a leg, a tree, and some wisps of hair in a
picture three feet six by four feet eight. Our dinner that evening was
labored. The next morning Uncle Ezra packed his three treasures tenderly,
putting in cotton-wool at the edges, my wife helping him to make them
comfortable. We urged him to stay over with us for a few days; we would
all go on later to Venice. But Uncle Ezra seemed moved by some hidden
cause. Back he would trot at once. "Painter will want his picture," he
said, "he has been waiting on in Venice just for this, and I must not keep
him." Watkins turned up as we were getting into the cab to see Uncle Ezra
off, and insisted upon accompanying us to the station. My wife took the
opportunity to rub into him Flgel's remarks, which, at least, made
Watkins out shady in chronology. At the station we encountered a new
difficulty. The ticket collector would not let the pictures through the
gate. My uncle expostulated in pure Tuscan. Watkins swore in Roman.

"Give him five lire, Mr. Williams."

Poor Uncle Ezra fumbled in his pocket-book for the piece of money. He had
never bribed in his life. It was a terrible moral fall, to see him
tremblingly offer the piece of scrip. The man refused, "positive orders,
_permesso_ necessary," etc., etc. The bell rang; there was a rush. Uncle
Ezra looked unhappy.

"Here," Watkins shouted, grabbing the precious pictures in a manner far
from reverent, "I'll send these on, Mr. Williams; run for your train."
Uncle Ezra gave one undecided glance, and then yielded. "You will look
after them," he pleaded, "carefully."

"You shall have them safe enough," my wife promised.

"Blast the pasteboards," Watkins put in under his breath, "the best thing
to do with them is to chop 'em up." He was swinging them back and forth
under his arm. My wife took them firmly from him. "He shall have his
pictures, and not from your ribald hands."

A week later Rome became suddenly oppressively warm. We started off for
Venice, Watkins tagging on incorrigibly. "I want to see 'Maud,'" he
explained. The pictures had been packed and sent ahead by express. "The
storm must have burst, tears shed, tempers cooled, mortification set in,"
I remarked, as we were being shoved up the Grand Canal toward the Palazzo
Palladio. "There they are in the balcony," my wife exclaimed, "waving to
us. Something is up; Maudie is hanging back, with Aunt Mary, and Professor
Painter is at the other end, with Uncle Ezra."

The first thing that caught the eye after the flurry of greetings was the
impudent blue and red of Uncle Ezra's "Sancta Conversazione," Domenico
Tintoretto, Savoldo, or what not; St. Agnes's leg and all, beaming at us
from the wall. The other two were not there. My wife looked at me. Maudie
was making herself very gracious with little Watkins. Painter's solemn
face began to lower more and more. Aunt Mary and Uncle Ezra industriously
poured oil by the bucket upon the social sea.

At last Maud rose: "You _must_ take me over there at once, Mr. Watkins. It
will be such an enjoyment to have someone who really knows about pictures
and has taste." This shot at poor Painter; then to my wife, "Come, Jane,
you will like to see your room."

Painter crossed to me and suggested, lugubriously, a cigar on the balcony.
He smoked a few minutes in gloomy silence.

"Does that fellow know anything?" he emitted at last, jerking his head at
Watkins, who was pouring out information at Uncle Ezra. I began gently to
give Charles Henderson Watkins a fair reputation for intelligence. "I mean
anything about art? Of course it doesn't matter what he says about my
picture, whether it is a copy or not, but Miss Vantweekle takes it very
hard about hers. She blames me for having been with her when she bought
it, and having advised her and encouraged her to put six hundred dollars
into it."

"Six hundred," I gasped.

"Cheap for a Bonifazio, or a _Titian_, as we thought it."

"Too cheap," I murmured.

"Well, I got bitten for about the same on my own account. I sha'n't get
that Rachel's library at Berlin, that's all. The next time you catch me
fooling in a subject where I don't know my bearings--like fine art--You
see Mr. Williams found my picture one day when he was nosing about at an
_antichita's_, and thought it very fine. I admire Mr. Williams
tremendously, and I valued his opinion about art subjects much more then
than I do now. He and Mrs. Williams were wild over it. They had just
bought their picture, and they wanted us each to have one. They have lots
of sentiment, you know."

"Lots," I assented.

"Mrs. Williams got at me, and well, she made me feel that it would bring
me nearer to Miss Vantweekle. You know she goes in for art, and she used
to be impatient with me because I couldn't appreciate. I was dumb when she
walked me up to some old Madonna, and the others would go on at a great
rate. Well, in a word, I bought it for my education, and I guess I have
got it!

"Then the man, he's an old Jew on the Grand Canal--Raffman, you know him?
He got out another picture, the Bonifazio. The Williamses began to get up
steam over that, too. They hung over that thing Mr. Williams bought, that
Savoldo or Domenico Tintoretto, and prowled about the churches and the
galleries finding traces of it here in the style of this picture and that;
in short, we all got into a fever about pictures, and Miss Vantweekle
invested all the money an aunt had given her before coming abroad, in that
Bonifazio.

"I must say that Miss Vantweekle held off some time, was doubtful about
the picture; didn't feel that she wanted to put all her money into it. But
she caught fire in the general excitement, and I may say"--here a sad sort
of conscious smile crept over the young professor's face--"at that time I
had a good deal of influence with her. She bought the picture, we brought
it home, and put it up at the other end of the hall. We spent hours over
that picture, studying out every line, placing every color. We made up our
minds soon enough that it wasn't a Bonifazio, but we began to think--now
don't laugh, or I'll pitch you over the balcony--it was an early work by
Titian. There was an attempt in it for great things, as Mr. Williams said:
no small man could have planned it. One night we had been talking for
hours about them, and we were all pretty well excited. Mr. Williams
suggested getting Watkins's opinion. Maud--Miss Vantweekle said, loftily,
'Oh! it does not make any difference what the critics say about it, the
picture means everything to me'; and I, like a fool, felt happier than
ever before in my life. The next morning Mr. Williams telegraphed you and
set off."

He waited.

"And when he returned?"

"It's been hell ever since."

He was in no condition to see the comic side of the affair. Nor was Miss
Vantweekle. She was on my wife's bed in tears.

"All poor Aunt Higgins's present gone into that horrid thing," she moaned,
"and all the dresses I was planning to get in Paris. I shall have to go
home looking like a perfect dowd!"

"But think of the influence it has been in your life--the education you
have received from that picture. How can you call all that color, those
noble faces, 'that horrid thing?'" I said, reprovingly. She sat upright.

"See here, Jerome Parker, if you ever say anything like that again, I will
never speak to you any more, or to Jane, though you are my cousins."

"They have tried to return the picture," my wife explained. "Professor
Painter and Uncle Ezra took it over yesterday; but, of course, the Jew
laughed at them."

"'A copy!' he said." Maud explained, "Why, it's no more a copy than
Titian's 'Assumption.' He could show us the very place in a palace on the
Grand Canal where it had hung for four hundred years. Of course, all the
old masters used the same models, and grouped their pictures alike. Very
probably Titian had a picture something like it. What of that? He defied
us to find the exact original."

"Well," I remarked, soothingly, "that ought to comfort you, I am sure.
Call your picture a new Titian, and sell it when you get home."

"Mr. Watkins says that's an old trick," moaned Maud, "that story about the
palace. He says old Raffman has a pal among the Italian nobility, and
works off copies through him all the time. I won't say anything about
Uncle Ezra; he has been as kind and good as he can be, only a little too
enthusiastic. But Professor Painter!"

She tossed her head.

The atmosphere in the Palazzo Palladio for the next few days was highly
charged.

At dinner Uncle Ezra placidly made remarks about the Domenico Tintoretto,
almost vaingloriously, I thought. "Such a piece of Venice to carry away.
We missed it so much, those days you had it in Rome. It is so precious
that I cannot bear to pack it up and lose sight of it for five months.
Mary, just see that glorious piece of color over there."

Meantime some kind of conspiracy was on foot. Maud went off whole mornings
with Watkins and Uncle Ezra. We were left out as unsympathetic. Painter
wandered about like a sick ghost. He would sit glowering at Maud and
Watkins while they held whispered conversations at the other end of the
hall. Watkins was the hero. He had accepted Flgel's judgment with
impudent grace.

"A copy of Titian, of course," he said to me; "really, it is quite hard on
poor Miss Vantweekle. People, even learned people, who don't know about
such things, had better not advise. I have had the photographs of all
Titian's pictures sent on, and we have found the original of your cousin's
picture. Isn't it very like?"

It was very like; a figure was left out in the copy, the light was
changed, but still it was a happy guess of Flgel.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?" I said to Maud, who had just
joined us.

"Oh, Mr. Watkins has kindly consented to manage the matter for me; I
believe he has a friend here, an artist, Mr. Hare, who will give expert
judgment on it. Then the American vice-consul is a personal friend of Mr.
Watkins, and also Count Corner, the adviser at the Academy. We shall
frighten the old Jew, sha'n't we, Mr. Watkins?"

I walked over to the despised Madonna that was tipped up on its side,
ready to be walked off on another expedition of defamation.

"Poor Bonifazio," I sighed, "Maud, how can you part with a work of fine
art that has meant so much to you?"

"Do you think, Jerome, I would go home and have Uncle Higgins, with his
authentic Rembrandt and all his other pictures, laugh at me and my Titian?
I'd burn it first."

I turned to Uncle Ezra. "Uncle, what strange metamorphosis has happened to
this picture? The spiritual light from that color must shine as brightly
as ever; the intrinsic value remains forever fixed in Maud's soul; it is
desecration to reject such a precious message. Why, it's like sending back
the girl you married because her pedigree proved defective, or because she
had lost her fortune. It's positively brutal!"

Maud darted a venomous glance at me; however, I had put the judge in a
hole.

"I cannot agree with you, Jerome." Uncle Ezra could never be put in a
hole. "Maud's case is a very different one from Mr. Painter's or mine. We
can carry back what we like personally, but for Maud to carry home a
doubtful picture into the atmosphere she has to live in--why, it would be
intolerable--with her uncle a connoisseur, all her friends owners of
masterpieces." Uncle Ezra had a flowing style. "It would expose her to
annoyance, to mortification--constant, daily. Above all, to have taken a
special gift, a fund of her aunt's, and to apply it in this mistaken
fashion is cruel."

Painter remarked bitterly to me afterward, "He wants to crawl on his share
of the responsibility. I'd buy the picture if I could raise the cash, and
end the whole miserable business."

Indeed, Watkins seemed the only one blissfully in his element. As my wife
remarked, Watkins had exchanged his interest in pictures for an interest
in woman. Certainly he had planned his battle well. It came off the next
day. They all left in a gondola at an early hour. Painter and I watched
them from the balcony. After they were seated, Watkins tossed in
carelessly the suspected picture. What went on at the _antichit's_ no one
of the boat-load ever gave away. Watkins had a hold on the man somehow,
and the evidence of the fraud was overwhelming. About noon they came back,
Maud holding an enormous envelope in her hand.

"I can never, never thank you enough, Mr. Watkins," she beamed at him.
"You have saved me from such mortification and unhappiness, and you were
so _clever_."

That night at dinner Uncle Ezra was more than usually genial, and beamed
upon Maud and Watkins perpetually. Watkins was quite the hero and did his
best to look humble.

"How much rent did the spiritual influence cost, Maud?" I asked. She was
too happy to be offended. "Oh, we bought an old ring to make him feel
pleased, five pounds, and Mr. Hare's services were worth five pounds, and
Mr. Watkins thinks we should give the vice-consul a box of cigars.

"Let's see; ten pounds and a box of cigars, that's three hundred lire at
the price of exchange. You had the picture just three weeks, a hundred
lire a week for the use of all that education in art, all that spiritual
influence. Quite cheap, I should say."

"And Mr. Watkins's services, Maud!" my wife asked, viciously. There was a
slight commotion at the table.

"May I, Maud?" Watkins murmured.

"As you please, Charles," Maud replied, with her eyes lowered to the
table.

"Maud has given herself," Uncle Ezra said, gleefully.

Painter rose from the table and disappeared into his room. Pretty soon he
came out bearing a tray with a dozen champagne glasses, of modern-antique
Venetian glass.

"Let me present this to you, Miss Vantweekle," he pronounced, solemnly,
"as an engagement token. I, I exchanged my picture for them this morning."

"Some Asti Spumante, Ricci."

"To the rejected Titian--" I suggested for the first toast.

VENICE, May, 1896.



PAYMENT IN FULL

The two black horses attached to the light buggy were chafing in the crisp
October air. Their groom was holding them stiffly, as if bolted to the
ground, in the approved fashion insisted upon by the mistress of the
house. Old Stuart eyed them impatiently from the tower window of the
breakfast-room where he was smoking his first cigar; Mrs. Stuart held him
in a vise of astounding words.

"They will need not only the lease of a house in London for two years, but
a great deal of money besides," she continued in even tones, ignoring his
impatience.

"I've done enough for 'em already," the old fellow protested, drawing on
his driving gloves over knotted hands stained by age.

Mrs. Stuart rustled the letter that lay, with its envelope, beside her
untouched plate. It bore the flourishes of a foreign hotel and a foreign-
looking stamp.

"My mother writes that their summer in Wiesbaden has made it surer that
Lord Raincroft is interested in Helen. It is evidently a matter of time. I
say two years--it may be less."

"Well," her husband broke in. "Haven't they enough to live on?"

"At my marriage," elucidated Mrs. Stuart, imperturbably, "you settled on
them securities which yield about five thousand a year. That does not give
them the means to take the position which I expect for my family in such a
crisis. They must have a large house, must entertain lavishly," she swept
an impassive hand toward him in royal emphasis, "and do all that that set
expects--to meet them as equals. You could not imagine that Lord Raincroft
would marry Helen out of a pension?"

"I don't care a damn how he marries her, or if he marries her at all." He
rose, testily. "I guess my family would have thought five thousand a year
enough to marry the gals on, and to spare, and it was more'n you ever had
in your best days."

"Naturally," her voice showed scorn at his perverse lack of intelligence.
"Out contract was made with that understanding."

"Let Helen marry a feller who is willing to go half way for her without a
palace. Why didn't you encourage her marrying Blake, as smart a young man
as I ever had? She was taken enough with him."

"Because I did not think it fit for my sister to marry your junior
partner, who, five years ago, was your best floor-walker."

"Well, Blake is a college-educated man and a hustler. He's bound to get on
if I back him. If Blake weren't likely enough, there's plenty more in
Chicago like me--smart business men who want a handsome young wife."

"Perhaps we have had enough of Stuart, Hodgson, and Blake. There are other
careers in the world outside Chicago."

"Tut, tut! I ain't going to fight here all day. What's the figure? What's
the figure?" He slapped his breeches with the morning paper.

"You will have to take the house in London (the Duke of Waminster's is to
let, mamma writes), and give them two hundred thousand dollars in addition
to their present income for the two years." She let her eyes fall on his
toast and coffee. The old man turned about galvanically and peered at her.

"You're crazy! two hundred thousand these times, so's your sister can get
married?"

"She's the last," interposed Mrs. Stuart, deftly.

"I tell you I've done more than most men. I've paid your old bills, your
whole family's, your brothers' in college, to the tune of five thousand a
year (worthless scamps!) and put 'em in business. You've had all of 'em at
Newport and Paris, let alone their living here off and on nearly twenty
years. Now you think I can shell out two hundred thousand and a London
house as easily as I'd buy pop-corn."

"It was our understanding." Mrs. Stuart began on her breakfast.

"Not much. I've done better by you than I agreed to, because you've been a
good wife to me. I settled a nice little fortune on you independent of
your widder's rights or your folks."

"Your daughter will benefit by that," Mrs. Stuart corrected.

"Well, what's that to do with it?" He seemed to lose the scent.

"What was our understanding when I agreed to marry you?"

"I've done more'n I promised, I tell you."

"As you very well know, I married you because my family were in desperate
circumstances. Our understanding was that I should be a good wife, and you
were to make my family comfortable according to my views. Isn't that
right?"

The old man blanched at this businesslike presentation; his voice grew
feebler.

"And I have, Beatty. I have! I've done everything by you I promised. And I
built this great house and another at Newport, and you ain't never
satisfied."

"That was our agreement, then," she continued, without mercy. "I was just
nineteen, and wise, for a girl, and you had forty-seven pretty wicked
years. There wasn't any nonsense between us. I was a stunning girl, the
most talked about in New York at that time. I was to be a good wife, and
we weren't to have any words. Have I kept my promise?"

"Yes, you've been a good woman, Beatty, better'n I deserved. But won't you
take less, say fifty thousand?" He advanced conciliatorily. "That's an
awful figure!"

His wife rose, composed as ever and stately in her well-sustained forty
years.

"Do you think _any_ price is too great in payment for these twenty-one
years?" Contempt crept in. "Not one dollar less, two hundred thousand,
and I cable mamma to-day."

Stuart shrivelled up.

"Do you refuse?" she remarked, lightly, for he stood irresolutely near the
door.

"I won't stand that!" and he went out.

When he had left Mrs. Stuart went on with her breakfast; a young woman
Came in hastily from the hall, where she had bade her father good-by.
She stood in the window watching the coachman surrender the horses to
the old man. The groom moved aside quickly, and in a moment the two
horses shot nervously through the ponderous iron gateway. The delicate
wheels just grazed the stanchions, lifting the light buggy in the air
to a ticklish angle. It righted itself and plunged down the boulevard.
Fast horses and cigars were two of the few pleasures still left the old
store-keeper. There was another--a costly one--which was not always
forthcoming.

Miss Stuart watched the groom close the ornate iron gates, and then turned
inquiringly to her mother.

"What's up with papa?"

Mrs. Stuart went on with her breakfast in silence. She was superbly
preserved, and queenly for an American woman. It seemed as if something
had stayed the natural decay of her powers, of her person, and had put
her always at this impassive best. Something had stopped her heart to
render her passionless, and thus to embalm her for long years of
mechanical activity. She would not decay, but when her time should come
she would merely stop--the spring would snap.

The daughter had her mother's height and her dark coloring. But her large,
almost animal eyes, and her roughly moulded hands spoke of some homely,
prairie inheritance. Her voice was timid and hesitating.

At last Mrs. Stuart, her mail and breakfast exhausted at the same moment,
Rose to leave the room.

"Oh, Edith," she remarked, authoritatively, "if you happen to drive down
town this morning, will you tell your father that we are going to Winetka
for a few weeks? Or telephone him, if you find it more convenient. And
send the boys to me. Miss Bates will make all arrangements. I think there
is a train about three."

"Why, mamma, you don't mean to stay there! I thought we were to be here
all winter. And my lessons at the Art Institute?"

Mrs. Stuart smiled contemptuously. "Lessons at the Art Institute are not
the most pressing matter for my daughter, who is about to come out. You
can amuse yourself with golf and tennis as long as they last. Then,
perhaps, you will have a chance to continue your lessons in Paris."

"And papa!" protested the daughter, "I thought he couldn't leave this
winter?"

Mrs. Stuart smiled again provokingly. "Yes?"

"Oh, I can't understand!" Her pleading was almost passionate, but still
low and sweet. "I want so much to go on with my lessons with the other
girls. And I want to go out here with all the girls I know."

"We will have them at Winetka. And Stuyvesant Wheelright--you liked him
last summer."

The girl colored deeply. "I don't want him in the house. I had rather go
away. I'll go to Vassar with Mary Archer. You needn't hunt up any man for
me."

"Pray, do you think I would tolerate a college woman in my house? It's
well enough for school-teachers. And what does your painting amount to?
You will paint sufficiently well, I dare say, to sell a few daubs, and so
take the bread and butter from some poor girl. But I am afraid, my dear,
we couldn't admit your pictures to the gallery."

The girl's eyes grew tearful at this tart disdain. "I love it, and papa
has money enough to let me paint 'daubs' as long as I like. Please, please
let me go on with it!"

       *       *       *       *       *

That afternoon the little caravan started for the deserted summer home at
Winetka, on a high bluff above the sandy lake-shore. It had been bought
years before, when not even the richest citizens dreamed of going East for
the summer. Of late it had been used only rarely, in the autumn or late
spring, or as a retreat in which to rusticate the boys with their tutor.
When filled with a large house-party, it made a jolly place, though not
magnificent enough for the developed hospitalities of Mrs. Stuart.

Old Stuart came home to an empty palace. He had not believed that his
reserved wife would take such high measures, and he felt miserably lonely
after the usual round of elaborate dinners to which he had grown
grumblingly accustomed. His one senile passion was his pride in her, and
he was avaricious of the lost days while she was absent from her usual
victorious post as the mistress of that great house. The next day his
heart sank still lower, for he saw in the Sunday papers a little paragraph
to the effect that Mrs. Stuart had invited a brilliant house-party to her
autumn home in Winetka, and that it was rumored she and her lovely young
daughter would spend the winter in London with their relatives. It made
the old man angry, for he could see with what deliberation she had planned
for a long campaign. Even the comforts of his club were denied him;
everyone knew him and everyone smiled at the little domestic disturbance.
So he asked his secretary, young Spencer, to make his home for the present
in the sprawling, brand-new "palace" that frowned out on the South
Boulevard. Young Spencer accepted, out of pity for the old man; for he
wasn't a toady and he knew his own worth.

People did talk in the clubs and elsewhere about the divided
establishments. It would have been worse had the division come earlier, as
had been predicted often enough, or had Mrs. Stuart ever given in her
younger days a handle for any gossip. But her conduct had been so frigidly
correct that it stood in good service at this crisis. She would not have
permitted a scandal. That also was in the contract.

Of course there was communication between the two camps, the gay polo-
playing, dinner-giving household on the bluff, and the forlorn, tottering
old man with his one aide-de-camp, the blithe young secretary. Now and
then the sons would turn up at the offices down-town, amiably expectant of
large checks. Stuart grimly referred them to their mother. He had some
vague idea of starving the opposition out, but his wife's funds were large
and her credit, as long as there should be no recognized rupture, perfect.

The daughter, Edith, frequently established connections. In some way she
had got permission to take her lessons at the Art Institute. Her mother's
open contempt for her aesthetic impulses had ruined her illusion about her
ability, for Mrs. Stuart knew her ground in painting. But she still loved
the atmosphere of the great studio-room at the Art Institute. She liked
the poor girls and the Western bohemianism and the queer dresses, and
above all she liked to linger over her own little easel, undisturbed by
the creative flurry around, dreaming of woods and soft English gardens and
happy hours along a river where the water went gently, tenderly, on to the
sea. And her sweet eyes, large and black like her mother's, but softer and
gentler, to go with her low voice, would moisten a bit from the dream. "So
nice," he would murmur to her picture, "to sit here and think of the quiet
and rest, such as good pictures always paint. I'd like not to go back with
Thomas to the train--to Winetka where they play polo and dress up and
dance and flirt, but to sail away over the sea----"

Then her eyes would see in the purplish light of her picture a certain
face that meant another life. She would blush to herself, and her voice
would stop. For she couldn't think aloud about him.

Some days, when the murky twilight came on early, she would steal away
altogether from the gay party in Winetka and spend the night with her
lonely father. They would have a queer, stately dinner for three served in
the grand dining-room by the English butler and footman. Stuart never had
much to say to her; she wasn't his "smart," queenly wife who brought all
people to her feet. When he came to his cigar and his whiskey, she would
take young Spencer to the gallery, where they discussed the new French
pictures, very knowingly, Spencer thought. She would describe for him the
intricacies of a color-scheme of some tender Diaz, and that would lead
them into the leafy woods about Barbizon and other realms of sentiment.

When they returned to the library she would feel that there were
compensations for this dreary separation at Winetka and that her enormous
home had never been so nice and comfortable before. As she bade the two
men good-night, her father would come to the door, rubbing his eyes and
forlorn over his great loss, and to her murmured "Good-night" he would
sigh, "so like her mother." "Quite the softest voice in the world,"
thought Spencer.

Once in her old little tower room that she still preferred to keep,
covered with her various attempts at sea, and sky, and forest, she was
blissfully conscious of independence, so far from Stuyvesant Wheelright
and his mother--quite an ugly old dame with no better manners than the
plain Chicago people (who despised them all as "pork-packers" and "shop-
keepers," nevertheless).

On one of these visits late in October, Edith had found her father ailing
from a cold. He asked her, shamefacedly, to tell her mother that "he was
very bad." Mrs. Stuart, leaving the house-party in full go, started at
once for the town-house. Old Stuart had purposely stayed at home on the
chances that his wife would relent. When she came in, she found him lying
in the same morning-room, where hostilities had begun three months before.
He grew confused, like an erring school-boy, as his wife kissed him and
asked after his health in a neutral sort of way. He made out that he was
threatened with a complication of diseases that might finally end him.

"Well, what can I do for you now," Mrs. Stuart said, with business-like
directness.

"Spencer's looking after things pretty much. He's honest and faithful, but
he ain't got any head like yours, Beatty, and times are awful hard. People
won't pay rents, and I don't dare to throw 'em out. Stores and houses
would lie empty these days. Then there's the North Shore Electric--I was a
fool to go in so heavy the Fair year and tie up all my money. I s'pose you
know the bonds ain't reached fifty this fall. I'm not so tremendously
wealthy as folks think."

Mrs. Stuart exactly comprehended this sly speech; she knew also that there
was some truth in it.

"Say, Beatty, it's so nice to have you here!" The old man raised himself
and capered about like a gouty old house-dog.

He made the most of his illness, for he suspected that it was a condition
of truce, not a bond of peace. While he was in bed Mrs. Stuart drove to
the city each day and, with Spencer's help, conducted business for long
hours. She had had experience in managing large charities; she knew
people, and when a tenant could pay, with a little effort, he found Madam
more pitiless than the old shop-keeper. Every afternoon she would take her
stenographer to Stuart's room and consult with him.

"Ain't she a wonder?" the old man would exclaim to Spencer, in new
admiration for his wife. And Spencer, watching the stately, authoritative
woman day after day as she worked quickly, exactly, with the repose and
dignity of a perfect machine, shivered back an unwilling assent.

"She's marvellous!"

All accidents played into the hands of this masterful woman. Her own
presence in town kept her daughter at Winetka _en evidence_ for Stuyvesant
Wheelright and Mrs. Wheelright. For Mrs. Stuart had determined upon him
as, on the whole, the most likely arrangement that she could make. He was
American, but of the best, and Mrs. Stuart was wise enough to prefer the
domestic aristocracy. So to her mind affairs were not going badly. The
truce would conclude ultimately in a senile capitulation; meantime, she
could advance money for the household in London.

When Stuart had been nursed back into comparative activity, the grand
dinners began once more--a convenient rebuttal for all gossip. The usual
lists of distinguished strangers, wandering English story-tellers in
search of material for a new "shilling shocker," artists suing to paint
her or "Mademoiselle l'Inconnue," crept from time to time into the genial
social column of the newspaper.

Stuart spent the evenings in state on a couch at the head of the drawing-
room, where he usually remained until the guests departed. In this way he
got a few words with his wife before she sent him to bed. One night his
enthusiasm over her bubbled out.

"You're a great woman, Beatty!" She looked a little pale, but otherwise
unworn by her laborious month. It was not blood that fed those even
pulses.

"You will not need my help now. You can see to your business yourself,"
she remarked.

"Say, Beatty, you won't leave me again, will you!" he quavered,
beseechingly. "I need you these last years; 'twon't be for long."

"Oh, you are strong and quite well again," she asserted, not unkindly.

"Will a hundred thousand do?" he pleaded. "Times are bad and ready money
is scarce, as you know."

"Sell the electric bonds," she replied, sitting down, as if to settle the
matter.

"Sell them bonds at fifty?" The old shop-keeper grew red in the face.

"What's that!" she remarked, disdainfully. "What have I given?" Her
husband said nothing. "As I told you when we first talked the matter over,
I have done my part to the exact letter of the law. You admit I have been
a good and faithful wife, don't you? You know," a note of passion crept
into her colorless voice, "You know that there hasn't been a suggestion of
scandal with our home. I married you, young, beautiful, admired; I am
handsome now." She drew herself up disdainfully. "I have not wanted for
opportunity, I think you might know; but not one man in all the world can
boast I have dropped an eyelash for his words. Not one syllable of favor
have I given any man but you. Am I not right?"

Stuart nodded.

"Then what do you haggle for over a few dollars? Have I ever given you
reason to repent our arrangement? Have I not helped you in business, in
social matters put you where you never could go by yourself? And do you
think my price is high?"

"Money is so scarce," Stuart protested, feebly.

"Suppose it left you only half a million, all told! What's that, in
comparison to what I have given? Think of that. I don't complain, but you
know we women estimate things differently. And when we sell ourselves, we
name the price; and it matters little how big it is,"

Her scorn pierced the old man's somewhat leathery sensibilities.

"Well, if it's a question of price, when is it going to end--when shall I
have paid up? Next year you'll want half a million hard cash."

"There is no end."

The next morning, Mrs. Stuart returned to Winetka; the rupture threatened
to prolong itself indefinitely. Stuart found it hard to give in
completely, and it made him sore to think that their marriage had remained
a business matter for over twenty years. And yet it was hard to face death
without all the satisfaction money could buy him. The crisis came,
however, in an unexpected manner.

One morning Stuart found his daughter waiting for him at his office. She
had slipped away from Winetka, and taken an early train.

"What's up, Ede?"

"Oh, papa!" the young girl gasped "They make me so unhappy, every day, and
I can't stand it. Mamma wants me to marry Stuyvesant Wheelright, and he's
there all the time."

"Who's he?" Stuart asked, sharply. His daughter explained briefly.

"He is what mamma calls 'eligible'; he is a great swell in New York, and I
don't like him. Oh, papa, I can't be a _grande dame_, like mamma, can I?
Won't you tell her so, papa? Make up with her; pay her the money she wants
for Aunt Helen, and then perhaps she'll let me paint."

"No, you're not the figure your mother is, and never will be," Stuart
said, almost slightingly. "I don't think, Ede, you'll ever make a great
lady like her."

"I don't think she is very happy," the girl bridled, in her own defence.

"Well, perhaps not, perhaps not. But who do you want to marry, anyway? You
had better marry someone, Ede, 'fore I die."

"I don't know--that is, it doesn't matter much just now. I should like to
go to California, perhaps, with the Stearns girls. I want to paint, just
daubs, you know--I can't do any better. But you tell mamma I can't be a
great swell. I shouldn't be happy, either."'

The old man resolved to yield. That very afternoon he drove out to Winetka
along the lake shore. He had himself gotten up in his stiffest best. He
held the reins high and tight, his body erect in the approved form; while
now and then he glanced back to see if the footmen were as rigid as my
lady demanded. For Mrs. Stuart loved good form, and he felt nervously
apprehensive, as if he were again suing for her maiden favors. He was
conscious, too, that he had little enough to offer her--the last months
had brought humility. Beside him young Spencer lolled, enjoying, with a
free heart, his day off in the gentle, spring-like air. Perhaps he divined
that his lady would not need so much propitiation.

They surprised a party just setting forth from the Winetka house as they
drove up with a final flourish. Their unexpected arrival scattered the
guests into little, curious groups; everyone anticipated immediate
dissolution. They speculated on the terms, and the opinion prevailed that
Stuart's expedition from town indicated complete surrender. Meanwhile
Stuart asked for an immediate audience, and husband and wife went up at
once to Mrs. Stuart's little library facing out over the bluff that
descended to the lake.

"Well, Beatty," old Stuart cried, without preliminary effort, "I just
can't live without you--that's the whole of it." She smiled. "I ain't much
longer to live, and then you're to have it all. So why shouldn't you take
what you want now?" He drew out several checks from his pocket-book.

"You can cable your folks at once and go ahead. You've been the best sort
of wife, as you said, and--I guess I owe you more'n I've paid for your
puttin' up with an old fellow like me all these years."

Mrs. Stuart had a new sensation of pity for his pathetic surrender.

"There's one thing, Beatty," he continued, "so long as I live you'll own I
oughter rule in my own house, manage the boys, and that." Mrs. Stuart
nodded. "Now I want you to come back with me and break up this party."

Mrs. Stuart took the checks.

"You've made it a bargain, Beatty. You said I was to pay your family what
you wanted, and you were to obey me at that price?"

"Well," replied Mrs. Stuart, good-humoredly. "We'll all go up to-morrow.
Isn't that early enough?"

"That ain't all, Beatty. You can't make everybody over; you couldn't brush
me up much; you can't make a grand lady out of Edith."

Mrs. Stuart looked up inquiringly.

"Now you've had your way about your family, and I want you to let Ede
alone."

"Why?"

"She doesn't want that Wheelright fellow, and if you think it over you'll
see that she couldn't do as you have. She ain't the sort."

Mrs. Stuart twitched at the checks nervously.

"I sort of think Spencer wants her; in fact, he said so coming out here."

"Impertinent puppy!"

"And I told him he could have her, if she wanted him. I don't think I
should like to see another woman of mine live the sort of life you have
with me. It's hard on 'em." His voice quivered.

Beatrice, Lady Stuart of Winetka, as they called her, stood silently
looking out to the lake, reviewing "the sort of life she had lived" from
the time she had made up her mind to take the shop-keeper's millions to
this moment of concession. It was a grim panorama, and she realized now
that it had not meant complete satisfaction to either party. Her twenty or
more frozen years made her uncomfortable. While they waited, young Spencer
and Miss Stuart came slowly up the terraced bluff.

"Well, John," Mrs. Stuart smiled kindly. "I think this is the last
payment,--in full. Let's go down to congratulate them."

CHICAGO, March, 1895.



A PROTHALAMION

_The best man has gone for a game of billiards with the host. The maid of
honor is inditing an epistle to one who must fall. The bridesmaids have
withdrawn themselves, each with some endurable usher, to an appropriate
retreat upon the other coasts of the veranda. The night is full of
starlight in May. The lovers discover themselves at last alone._

_He._ What was that flame-colored book Maud was reading to young Bishop?

_She. The Dolly Dialogues_; you remember we read them in London when they
came out.

_He._ What irreverent literature we tolerate nowadays! I suppose it's the
aftermath of agnosticism.

_She._ It didn't occur to me that it was irreligious.

_He._ Irreverent, I said--the tone of our world.

_She._ But how I love that world of ours--even the _Dolly Dialogues_!

_He_. Because you love it, this world you feel, you are reverent toward
it. I have hated it so many years; it carried so much pain with it that I
thought every expression of life was pain, and now, now, if it were not
for Maud and the _Dolly Dialogues_, these last days would seem to launch
us afresh upon quite another world.

_She_. Yes, another world, where there is a new terror, a strange, inhuman
terror that I never thought of before, the terror of death.

_He_. Why, what a perversity! You think of immortality as so real, so
sure! Relief from that terror of death is the proper fruit of your firm
belief.

_She_. But I never cared before about the shape, the form, the kind of
that other life. I was content to believe it quite different from this,
for I knew this so well, enjoyed it so much. When the jam-pot should be
empty, I did not want another one just like it. But now....

_He_. I know. And I lived so much a stranger to the experiences I could
have about me that I was indifferent to what came after. Now, what I am,
what I have, is so precious that I cannot believe in any change which
should let me know of this life as past and impossible. That would be "the
supreme grief of remembering in misery the happy days that have been."

_She._ It makes me shiver; it is so blasphemous to hate the state of being
of a spirit. That would seem to degrade love, if through love we dread to
lose our bodies.

_He._ Strange! You have come to this confession out of a trusting religion
and I from doubt--at the best indifference. You are ashamed to confess
what seems to you wholly blasphemous against that noble faith and prayer
of a Christian; and I find an invigorating pleasure in your blasphemy.
There is no conceivable life of a spirit to compare with the pain, even,
of the human body; it is better to suffer than to know no difference.

_She._ But "the resurrection of the body": perhaps the creed, word for
word without interpretation, would not mean that empty life which we
moderns have grown to consider the supreme and liberal conception of
existence.

_He._ Resurrection in a purified form fit for the bliss, whatever one of
all the many shapes men have dreamed it may vision itself in!

_She._ But this love of life, this excessive joy, must fade away. The
record of the world is not that we keep that. Think of the old people who
dream peacefully of death, after knowing all the fulness of this life.
Think of the wretches who pray for it. That vision of the life of spirits
which is so dreadful to us has been the comfort of the ages. There must be
some inner necessity for it. Perhaps with our bodies our wills become worn
out.

_He_. That, I think, is the mystery--the wearing out, which is death. For
death occurs oftener in life than we think; I know so many dead people who
are walking about. As for sick people, physicians say that in a long
illness they never have to warn a patient of the coming end. He knows it,
subtly, from some dim, underground intimation. Without acknowledging it,
he arranges himself, so to speak, for the grave, and comforts himself with
those visions that religion holds out. Or does he comfort himself?

But apart from the dying, there are so many out of whose bodies and
spirits life is ebbing. It may have been a little flood-tide, but they
know it is going. You see it on their faces. They become dull. That
leprosy of death attacks their life, joint by joint. They lay aside one
pleasure, one function, one employment of their minds after another.
The machine may run on, but the soul is dying. That is what I call _death
in life_.



THE EPISODE OF LIFE.

Jack Lynton is becoming stone like that. His is a case in point, and a
good one, because the atrophy is coming about not from physical disease,
or from any dissipation. You would call him sane and full of fire. He was.
He married three years ago. Their life was full, too, like ours, and
precious. They did not throw it away; they were wise guardians of all its
possibilities. The second summer--I was with them, and Jack has told me
much besides--Mary began talking, almost in joke, of these matters, of
what one must prepare for; of second marriages, and all that. We chatted
in as idle fashion as do most people over the utterly useless topics of
life. One exquisite September day, all steeped in the essence of
sunshine--misty everywhere over the fields--how well I remember it!--she
spoke again in jest about something that might happen after her death. I
saw a trace of pain on Jack's face. She saw it, and was sad for a moment.
Now I know that all through that late summer and autumn those two were
fighting death in innuendoes. They were not morbid people, but death went
to bed with them each night.

Of course, this apprehension, this miasma, came in slowly, like those
autumn sea-mists; appearing once a month, twice this week--a little
oftener each time.

Jack is a sensible man; he does not shy at a shadow. His nerves are
tranquil, and respond as they ought. They went about the business of life
as joyfully as you or I, and in October we were all back in town. Now,
Mary is dying; the doctor sees it now. I do not mean that he should have
known it before. _She_ knew it, and _she_ noted how the life was fading
away until the time came when what was so full of action, of feeling, of
desire, was merely a shell--impervious to sensation.

And Jack is dying, too--his health is good enough, but pain which he
cannot master is killing him into numbness. He watches each joy, each
experience with which they were both tremulous, depart. And do you suppose
it is any comfort for those two honest souls to believe that their spirits
will recognize each other in some curious state that has dispensed with
sense? Do you suppose that a million of years of a divine communion would
make up for one spoken word, for even a shade of agony that passes across
Mary's face?

_She_. If God should change their souls in that other world, then perhaps
their longings would be quite different; so that what we think of with
chill they would accept as a privilege.

_He_. In other words, those two, who have learned to know each other in
human terms, who have loved and suffered in the body, will have ended
their page? Some strange transformation into another two? Why not simply
an end to the book? Would that not be easier?

_She_. If one had the courage to accept these few years of life and ask
for no more.

_He_. I think that it is cowardice which makes one accept the ghostly
satisfaction of a surviving spirit.



WHEN THE BODY IN LIFE FEELS THE SPIRIT.

_She_. But have you never forgotten the body, dreamed what it would be to
feel God? You have known those moments when your soul, losing the sense of
contact with men or women, groped alone, in an enveloping calm, and knew
content. I have had it in times of intoxication from music--not the
personal, passionate music of to-day, but some one or two notes that sink
the mazy present into darkness. I knew that my senses were gone for the
time, and in their place I held a comfortable consciousness of power.
There have been other times--in Lent, at the close of the drama of
Christ--beside the sea--after a long dance--illusory moments when one
forgot the body and wondered.

_He._ I know. One night in the Sierras we camped high up above the summits
of the range. The altitude, perhaps, or the long ride through the forest,
kept me awake. Our fires died down; a chalky mist rose from the valleys,
and, filtering through the ravines, at last capped the granite heads. The
smouldering tree-trunks we had lit for fires and the little patch of rock
where we lay, made an island in that white sea. Between us and the black
spaces among the stars there was nothing. How eternally quiet it was! I
can feel that isolation now coming over my soul like the stealthy fog,
until I lay there, unconscious of my body, in a wondering placidity,
watching the stars burn and fade. I could seem to feel them whirl in their
way through the heavens. And then a thought detached itself from me, the
conception of an eternity passed in placidity like that without the pains
of sense, the obligations of action; I loved it then--that cold residence
of thought!

_She._ You have known it, too. Those moments when the body in life feels
the state of spirit come rarely and awe one. Dear heart, perhaps if our
spirits were purified and experienced we should welcome that perpetual
contemplation. We cannot be Janus-faced, but the truth may lie with the
monks, who killed this life in order to obtain a grander one.



TWO SOULS IN HEAVEN REMEMBER THE LIFE LIVED ON EARTH.

_He._ Can you conceive of any heaven for which you would change this
shameful world? Any heaven, I mean, of spirits, not merely an Italian
palace of delights?

_She._ There is the heaven of the Pagans, the heaven of glorified earth,
but----

_He._ Would you like to dine without tasting the fruit and the wine? What
attainment would it be to walk in fields of asphodel, when all the colors
of all the empyrean were equally dazzling, and perceived by the mind
alone? For my part, I should prefer to hold one human violet.

_She_. The heaven of the Christian to-day?

_He_. That may be interpreted in two ways: the heaven where we know
nothing but God, and the heaven where we remember our former life. Let us
pass the first, for the second is the heaven passionately desired by those
who have suffered here, who have lost their friends.

Suppose that we two had finished with the episode of death, and had come
out beyond into that tranquillity of spirit where sorrows change to
harmony. You and I would go together, or, perhaps, less fortunate, one
should wait the other, but finally both would experience this
transformation from body into spirit. Should you like it? Would it fill
your heart with content--if you remembered the past? I think not. Suppose
we should walk out some fresh morning, as we love to do now, and look at
that earth we had been compelled to abandon. Where would be that fierce
joy of inrushing life? for, I fancy, we should ever have a level of
contentment and repose. Indeed, there would be no evening with its
comforting calm, no especially still nights, no mornings: nothing is
precious when nothing changes, and where all can be had for eternity.

We should talk, as of old, but the conversation of old men and women would
be dramatic and passionate to ours. For everything must needs be known,
and there could be no distinctions in feeling. Should you see your sister
dying in agony at sea, you would smile tranquilly at her temporary and
childish sorrow. All the affairs of this life would not strike you, pierce
your heart, or move your pulse. They would repeat themselves in your eyes
with a monotonous precision, and they would be done almost before the
actors had begun. Indeed, if you should not be incapable of blasphemy, you
would rebel at this blind game, played out with such fever.

We must not forget that our creative force would be spent: planning,
building, executing, toiling patiently for some end that is mirrored only
in our minds--how much of our joy comes from these!--would be laid aside.
We should have shaken the world as much as we could: now, _peace_....
Again, I say, peace is felt only after a storm. Like Ulysses, we should
look wistfully out from the isolation of heaven to the resounding waves of
this unconquered world.

Of course, one may say that the mind might fashion cures for all this;
that a greater architect would build a saner heaven. But, remember, that
we must not change the personal sense; in heaven, however you plan it, no
mortal must lose that "I" so painfully built from the human ages. If you
destroy his sense of the past life, his treasures acquired in this earth,
you break the rules of the game: you begin again and we have nothing to do
with it.

_She._ You have not yet touched upon the cruellest condition of the life
of the spirit.

_He._ Ah, dearest, I know that. You mean the love of the person. Indeed,
so quick it hurts me that I doubt if you would be walking that morning in
heaven with me alone. Perhaps, however, the memories of our common life on
earth would make you single me out. Let us think so. We should walk on to
some secluded spot, apart from the other spirits, and with our eyes cast
down so that we might not see that earth we were remembering. You would
look up at last with a touch of that defiance I love so now, as if a young
goddess were tossing away divine cares to shine out again in smiles. Ah,
how sad!

I should have some stir about the heart, some desire to kiss you, to
embrace you, to possess you, as the inalienable joy of my life. My hand
could not even touch you! Would our eyes look love? Could we have any
individual longing for one-another, any affection kept apart to ourselves,
not swallowed up in that general loving-kindness and universal
beatification proper to spirits?

I know upon earth to-day some women, great souls, too, who are incapable
of an individual love. They may be married, they may have children; they
are good wives and good mothers; but their souls are too large for a
single passion. Their world blesses them, worships them, makes saints of
them, but no man has ever touched the bottom of their hearts. I suppose
their husbands are happy in the general happiness, yet they must be sad
some days, over this barren love. Hours come when they must long, even for
the little heart of a coquette that has dedicated itself to one other and
with that other would trustingly venture into hell.

Well, that universal love is the only kind such spirits as you and I
should be, could know. Would that content you?

We should sit mournfully silent, two impotent hearts, and remember,
remember. I should worship your exquisite body as I had known it on earth.
I should see that head as it bends to-night; I should hear again your
voice in those words you were singing when I passed your way that first
time; and your eyes would burn with the fire of our relinquished love. It
would all come faintly out of the past, deadened by a thin film of
recollection; now it strikes with a fierce joy, almost like a physical
blow, and wakes me to life, to desire.

_She._ Yes. We women say we love the spirit of the man we have chosen, but
it is a spirit that acts and expresses itself in the body. To that body,
with all its habits, so unconscious! its sure force and power, we are
bound--more than the man is bound to the loveliness of the woman he
adores. We--I, it is safer so, perhaps--understand what I see, what I
feel, what I touch, what I have kissed and loved. That is mine and becomes
mine more each day I live with it and possess it. That love of the
concrete is our limitation, so we are told, but it is our joy.

_He_. So we should sit, without words, for we would shrink from speech as
too sad, and we should know swiftly the thought of the other. And when the
sense of our loss became quite intolerable, we should walk on silently, in
a growing horror of the eternity ahead. At last one of us, moved by some
acute remembrance of our deadened selves, would go to the Master of the
Spirits and, standing before him in rebellion, would say: "Cast us out as
unfit for this heaven, and if Thou canst not restore us into that past
state at least give us Hell, where we may suffer a common pain, instead of
this passive calm and contemplation."



THE MEASURE OF JOY IN LIFE.

_She._ Yet, how short it will be! How awful to have the days and weeks and
months slip by, and know that at the best there is only a reprieve of a
few years. I think from this night I shall have my shadow of death. I
shall always be doing things for the last time; a sad life that! And
perhaps we change; as you say, we may become dead in life, prepared for a
different state; and in that change we may find a new joy--a longing for
perfection and peace.

_He_. That would be an acknowledgment of defeat, indeed, and that is the
sad result of so much living. The world has been too hard, we cry--there
is so much heartbreaking, so much misery, so few arrive! We look to
another world where all that will be made right, and where we shall suffer
no more.

Let the others have their opiate. You, at least, I think, are too brave
for that kind of comfort. Does it not seem a little grasping to ask for
eternity, because we have fifty years of action? And an eternity of
passivity, because we have not done well with action? No, the world has
had too much of that coddling, that kind of shuffle through, as if it were
a way station where we must spend the night and make the best of sorry
accommodations. Our benevolence, our warmheartedness, goes overmuch to
making the beds a bit better, especially for the feeble and the sick and
old, and those who come badly fitted out. We help the unfortunate to slide
through: I think it would be more sensible to make it worth their while to
stay. The great philanthropists are those who ennoble life, and make it a
valuable possession. It would be well to poison the forlorn, hurry them
post haste to some other world where they may find the conditions better
suited. Then give their lot of misery and opportunity to another who can
find joy in his burden.

_She._ A world without mercy would be hard--it would be full of a strident
clamor like a city street.

_He._ Mercy for all; no favoritism for a few. Whoever could find a new
joy, a lasting activity; whoever could keep his body and mind in full
health and could show what a tremendous reality it is to live--would be
the merciful man. There would be less of that leprosy, death in life, and
the last problem of death itself would not be insurmountable.

So I think the common men who know things, concrete things,--the price of
grain, if you will; the men of affairs who have their minds on the
struggle; the artists who in paint or words explore new possibilities--all
these are the merciful men, the true comforters whom we should honor. They
make life precious--aside from its physical value.

You know the keen movement that runs through your whole being when you
come face to face with some great Rembrandt portrait. How much the man
knew who made it, who saw it unmade! Or that Bellini's Pope we used to
watch, whose penetrating smile taught us about life. And the greater
Titian, the man with a glove, that looks at you like a live soul, one whom
a man created to live for the joy of other men. In another form, I feel
the same gift of life in a new enterprise: a railroad carried through; a
corrupt government cleaned for the day. And, again, that Giorgione at
Paris, where the men and women are doing nothing in particular, but living
in the sunlight, a joyful, pagan band.

And then think of the simpler, deeper notes of the symphony, the elements
of light and warmth and color in our world, the very seeds of existence. I
count that day the richest when we floated into the Cape harbor in the
little rowboat, bathed in the afternoon sun. The fishermen were lazily
winging in, knowing, like birds, the storm that would soon be on them. We
drank the sun in all our pores. It rained down on you, and glorified your
face and the flesh of your arms and your hands. We landed, and walked
across the evening fields to that little hut. Then nature lived and glowed
with the fervor of actual experience. You and the air and the sun-washed
ocean, all were some great throbs of actualities.

_She._ You remember how I liked to ride with you and sail, the stormy
days. How I loved to feel your body battling even feebly with the wind and
rain. I loved to see your face grow crimson under the lash of the waves,
and then to _feel_ you, alive and mine!

_He._ It would not be bad, a heaven like that, of perpetual physical
presentiment, of storms and sun, and rich fields, and long waves rolling
up the beaches. For nerves ever alive and strung healthily all along the
gamut of sensation! Days with terrific gloom, like the German forests of
the Middle Ages; days with small nights spent on the sea; September days
with a concealed meaning in the air. One would ride and battle and sail
and eat. Then long kisses of love in bodies that spoke.

_She._ And yet, how strange to life as it is is that picture--like some
medival song with the real people left out; strange to the dirty streets,
the breakfasts in sordid rooms, the ignoble faces, the houses with failure
written across the door-posts; strange to the life of papa and mamma; to
the comfortable home; the chatter of the day; the horses; the summer
trips--everything we have lived, you and I.

_He._ Incomplete, and hence merely a literary paradise. It is well, too,
as it is, for until we can go to bed with the commonplace, and dine with
sorrow, we are but children,--brilliant children, but with the unpleasant
mark of the child. Not sorrow accepted, my love, and bemoaned; but sorrow
fought and dislodged. He is great who feels the pain and sorrow and
absorbs it and survives--he who can remain calm in it and believe in it.
It is a fight; only the strong hold their own. That fight we call duty.

And duty makes the only conceivable world given the human spirit and the
human frame: even should we believe that the world is a revolving
palstrinum without betterment. And the next world--the next? It must be
like ours, too, in its action; it must call upon the same activities, the
same range of desires and loves and hates. Grander, perhaps, more adorned,
with greater freedom, with more swing, with a less troubled song as it
rushes on its course. But a world like unto ours, with effort, with the
keen jangle of persons in effort, with sorrow, aye, and despair: for there
must be forfeits!

Is that not better than to slink away to death with the forlorn comfort of
a

"_Requiescat in pace?_"

PARIS, December, 1895.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories
by Robert Herrick

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY LOVE-LETTERS ***

This file should be named 8lovl10.txt or 8lovl10.zip
Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 8lovl11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 8lovl10a.txt

Produced by Eric Eldred, Charles Bidwell, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.

Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our Web sites at:
http://gutenberg.net or
http://promo.net/pg

These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).


Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03

Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):

eBooks Year Month

    1  1971 July
   10  1991 January
  100  1994 January
 1000  1997 August
 1500  1998 October
 2000  1999 December
 2500  2000 December
 3000  2001 November
 4000  2001 October/November
 6000  2002 December*
 9000  2003 November*
10000  2004 January*


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.

We need your donations more than ever!

As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.

As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
donate.

International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
ways.

Donations by check or money order may be sent to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
method other than by check or money order.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information online at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.

We would prefer to send you information by email.


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.

The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
they hardware or software or any other related product without
express permission.]

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*

