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The Descent of Man and Other Stories · The Descent of Man and Other Stories

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  Chapter one, The Descent of Man. When Professor Lynyard came back from his
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  holiday in the main Woods, the air of rejuvenation he brought with him redue
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  less to the influences of the climate than to the companionship he had enjoyed on
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  his travels. To Missus Lenyard's observant eye, he had appeared to set out
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  alone, but an invisible traveler had in fact accompanied him. That if his
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  heart beat high, it was simply at the pitch of his adventure. For
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  the Professor had eloped with an idea. No one who has not tried the
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  experiment can divine its exhilaration. Professor Lynyard would not have changed places with any
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  hero of romance pledged to a flesh and blood abduction. The most fascinating female
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  is apt to be encumbered with luggage and scruples to take up a good deal
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  of room in the present and overlap inconveniently into the future. Whereas an idea
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  can accommodate itself to a single molecule of the brain or expanded the circumference of
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  the horizon. The Professor's companion had to the utmost this quality of adaptability,
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  As the express train whirled him away from the somewhat inelastic circle of missus Lynyard's
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  affections. His ideas seemed to be sitting opposite him, and their eyes met
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  every moment or two in a glance of joyous complicity. Yet when a friend
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  of the family presently joined him and began to talk about college matters, the
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  idea slipped out of sight in a flash, and the professor would have had
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  no difficulty in proving that he was alone. But if from the outset he
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  found his idea the most agreeable of fellow travelers, it was only in the
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  aromatic solitude of the woods that he tasted the full savor of his adventure.
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  There, during those long, cool August days, lying full length on the
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  pine needles and gazing up into the sky, he would meet the eyes of
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  his companion, bending over him like a near or heaven. And what eyes
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  they were, clear, yet unfathomable, bubbling with inexhaustible laughter, yet drawing
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  their freshness and sparkle from the central depths of thought. To a man who
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  for twenty years had faced an eye reflecting the obvious with perfect accuracy, these
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  escapes into the inscrutable had always been peculiarly inviting, but hitherto the professor's mental
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  infidelities had been restricted by an unbroken and relentless domesticity. Now, for the
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  first time since his marriage, chance had given him six weeks to himself,
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  and he was coming home with his lungs full of liberty. It must not
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  be inferred that the Professor's domestic relations were defective. They were, in fact
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  so complete that it was almost impossible to get away from them. It is
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  the happy husbands who were really in bondage. The little rift within the lute
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  is often a passage to freedom. Marriage had given the Professor exactly what he
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  had sought in it, a comfortable lining to life. The impossibility of rising
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  to sentimental crises had made him scrupulously careful not to shirk the practical obligations of
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  the bond. He took, as it were, a sociological view of his
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  case, and modestly regarded himself as a brick in that foundation on which the
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  state is supposed to rest. Perhaps, if missus Lynion had cared about etymology,
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  or had taken sides in the war over the transmission of acquired characteristics,
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  he might have had a less impersonal notion of marriage, but he was unconscious
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  of any deficiency in their relation, and if consulted, would probably have declared
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  that he didn't want any woman bothering with his beetles. His real life had
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  always lain in the universe of thought, in that enchanted region which, to
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  those who have lingered there comes to have so much more color and substance than
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  the painted hanging before it. The Professor's particular veil of Maya was a narrow
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  strip of home spun woven in a monotonous pattern, But he had only to
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  lift it to step into an empire. This unseen universe was thronged with the
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  most seductive shapes. The Professor moved sultan like through a serlio of ideas.
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  But of all the lovely apparitions that wove their spells about him, none had
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  ever worn quite so persuasive an aspect as this latest favorite. For the others
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  were mostly rather grave companions, serious minded and elevating enough to have passed muster
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  in a lady's debating club. But this new fancy of the Professor's was simply
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  one embodied laugh. It was, in other words, the smile of relaxation
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  at the end of a long day's toil, the flash of irony that the
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  laborious mind projects irresistibly over labor conscientiously performed. The professor had always been a
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  hard worker. If he was an indulgent friend to his ideas, he was
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  also a stern taskmaster to them, for in addition to their other duties,
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  they have to support his family, to pay the butcher and baker, and
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  provide for Jack's schooling and medicine stresses. The professor's household was a modest one,
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  yet it tasked his ideas to keep it up to his wife's standards.
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  Missus Lynyard was not an exacting wife, and she took enough pride in her
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  husband's attainments to pay for her honors by turning Millicine's dresses and darning Jack's socks,
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  and going to the college receptions year after year in the same black silk
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  with its shiny seams. It consoled her to see an occasional mention of Professor
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  Lynnyon's remarkable monograph on the ethical reactions of the Infusoria, or an allusion to
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  his investigations into the unconscious cerebration of the Biba. Still, there were moments
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  when the healthy indifference of Jack and Millicent reacted on the maternal sympathies when missus
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  Lynnard would have made her husband a railway director, if by this transformation she
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  might have increased her boy's allowance and given her daughter a new hat or a
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  set of furs, such as the other girls were wearing. Of such moments
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  of rebellion. The Professor himself was not wholly unconscious. He could not indeed
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  understand why anyone should want a new hat, and as to an allowance,
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  he had had much less money at college than Jack, and had yet managed
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  to buy a microscope and collect a few specimens, while Jack was free from
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  such expensive tastes. But the Professor did not let his want of sympathy interfere
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  with the discharge of his paternal obligations. He worked hard to keep the wants
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  of his family gratified, and it was precisely in the endeavor to attain this
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  end that he at length broke down and had to cease from work altogether.
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  To cease from work was not to cease from thought of it, And in
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  the unwonted pause from effort, the Professor found himself taking a general survey of
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  the field he had traveled. At last, it was possible to lift his
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  nose from the loom to step a moment in front of the tapestry he had
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  been weaving. From this first inspection of the pattern so long wrought over from
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  behind, it was natural to glance a little farther and seek its reflection in
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  the public eye. It was not indeed, of his special task that he
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  thought in this connection. He was but one of the great army of weavers
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  at work among the threads of that cosmic woof, And what he sought was
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  the general impression their labor had produced. When Professor Lenyard first plied his microscope,
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  the audience of the man of science had been composed of a few fellow
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  students, sympathetic or hostile, as their habits of mind predetermined, but versed
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  in the jargon of the profession, and familiar with the point of departure.
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  In the intervening quarter of a century, however, this little group had been
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  swallowed up in a larger public. Every one now read scientific books and expressed
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  an opinion on them. The ladies and the clergy had taken them up first.
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  Now they had passed them to the school room of the kindergarten. Daily
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  life was regulated on scientific principles. The daily papers had their scientific jottings,
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  nurses passed examinations in hygienic science, and babies were fed and dandled according to
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  the new psychology. The very fact the scientific investigation still had, to some
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  minds a flavor of heterodoxy gave it a perennial interest. The mob had broken
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  down the walls of tradition to batten in the orchard of forbidden knowledge. The
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  inaccessible goddess, whom the professor had served in his youth, now offered her
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  charms in the market place. And yet it was not the same goddess after
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  all, but a pseudo science masquerading in the garb of the real divinity.
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  This false goddess had her ritual and her literature. She had her sacred books,
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  written by false priests and sold by millions to the faithful. In the
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  most successful of these works, ancient dogma and modern discovery were depicted in a
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  close embrace under the lime lights of a hazy transcendentalism, and the tableau never
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  failed of its effect. Some of the books designed on this popular model had
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  lately fallen into the Professor's hands, and they filled him with mingled rage and
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  hilarity. The rage soon died. He came to regard this mass of pseudo
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  literature as protecting the truth from desecration. But the hilarity remained and flowed into
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  the form of his idea. And the idea, the divine incomparable idea,
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  was simply that he should avenge his goddess by satirizing her false interpreters. He
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  would write a skit on the popular scientific book. He would so heap platitude
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  on platitude, fallacy on fallacy, false analogy on false analogy. So use
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  his superior knowledge to abound in the sense of the ignorant, that even the
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  gross crowd would join in the laugh against its augers. And the laugh should
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  be something more than the distension of metal muscles. It should be the trumpet
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  blast bringing down the walls of ignorance, or at least the little stone striking
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  the giant between the eyes. Section two. The professor, on presenting his
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  card, had imagined that it would command prompt access to the publisher's sanctuary.
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  But the young man who read his name was not moved to immediate action.
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  It was clear that Professor Lynyard of Hilbert's University was not a specific figure to
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  the purveyors of popular literature. But the publisher was an old friend, and
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  when the card had finally drifted to his office on the languid tide of routine,
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  he came forth at once to greet his visitor. The warmth of his
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  welcome convinced the professor that he had been right in bringing his manuscript to ned
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  Harvest. He and Harvest had been at Hillbridge together, and the future publisher
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  had been one of the wildest spirits in that band of college outlaws which yearly
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  turns out so many inoffensive citizens and kind husbands and fathers. The Professor knew
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  the taming qualities of life. He was aware that many of his most reckless
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  comrades had been transformed into prudent capitalists or cowed wage journers. But he was
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  almost sure that he could count on Harvest, so rare a sense of irony,
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  so keen a perception of relative values could hardly have been blunted, even
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  by twenty years intercourse with the obvious. The publisher's appearance was a little disconcerting.
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  He looked as if he had been fattened on popular fiction, and his
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  fact was full of optimistic creases. The professor seemed to see him bowing into
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  his office a long train of spotless hero ruins, laden with the maiden tribute
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  of the hundred thousand volume. Nevertheless, his welcome was reassuring. He did
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  not disown his early enormities, and capped his visitors tentative illusions by such flagrant
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  references to the past that the professor produced his manuscript without a scruple. What
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  you don't mean to say, you've been doing something in our line, the
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  professor smiled. You published scientific books sometimes, don't you. The publisher's optimistic
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  creases relaxed a little hum It all depends. I'm afraid you're a little too
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  scientific for us. We have a big sale for scientific breakfast foods, but
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  not for the concentrated essences in your case, of course, I should be
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  delighted to stretch your point, But in your own interest, I ought to
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  tell you that perhaps one of the educational houses would do you better. The
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  professor leaned back, still smiling luxuriously. Well, look it over, I
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  read. Think you'll take it. Oh, we'll take it, as I
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  say, But the terms might not no matter about the terms, The publisher
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  threw his head back with a laugh. I had no idea that science was
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  so profitable. We find our popular novelist to the hardest hands at a bargain.
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  Science is disinterested, the professor corrected him. And I have a fancy
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  to have you publish this thing. That's immensely good of you, my dear
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  fellow. Of course, your name goes with a certain public. And I
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  rather like the originality of our bringing out a work so out of our line.
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  I dare say it may boom us. Both his creases deepened at the
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  thought, and he shone encouragingly on the professor's leave, taking with it a
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  fortnight. A line from Harvest recalled the professor to town. He had been
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  looking forward with immense zest to this second meeting. Harvest's college roar within his
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  tympanum, and he pictured himself following up the protracted chuckle which should follow his
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  friend's progress through the manuscript. He was proud of the adroitness with which he
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  had kept his secret from Harvest. Had maintained to the last the pretense of
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  a serious work, in order to give the keener edge to his reader's enjoyment.
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  Not since undergraduate days had the professor tasted such a draft of pure fun
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  as his anticipations now poured for him. This time, his card brought instant
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  admission. He was bowed into the office like his successful novelist, and Harvest
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  grasped him with both hands. Well do you mean to take it, he
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  asked, with a lingering coquetry. Take it, Take it, my dear
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  fellow, which I press already? You'll excuse my not waiting to consult you.
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  There will be no difficultly about terms, I assure you. And we
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  had barely time to catch the autumn market. My dear Laniard, why didn't
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  you tell me? His voice sank to a reproachful solemnity, and he pushed
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  forward his own arm chair. The professor dropped into it with a chuckle,
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  and missed the joy of letting you find out? Well, it was a
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  joy. Harvis held out a box of his best cigars. I don't know
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  when I've had a bigger sensation. It was so deucedly unexpected. And my
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  dear fellow, you've brought it so exactly to the right shop. I'm glad
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  to hear you say so. Said the professor modestly. Harvest laughed in rich
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  appreciation. I don't suppose you had a doubt of it, But of course
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  I was quite unprepared, and it's so extraordinarily out of your line. The
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  professor took off his glasses and rubbed them with a slow smile. Would you
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  have thought it so at college? Harvest stared at college? Why you were
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  the most iconoclastic devil? There was a perceptible pause. The professor restored his
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  glasses and looked at his friend. Well, he said, simply, Well,
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  echoed the other, still staring, Ah, I see you mean that.
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  That's what explains it, the swing of the pendulum and so forth.
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  Well, I admit it's not an uncommon phenomenon. I've conform myself, for
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  example, most of our crowd have, I believe. But somehow I hadn't
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  expected it of you. The close observer might have detected a faint sadness under
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  the official congratulation of his tone, But the professor was too amazed to have
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  an ear for such fine shades. Expected it of me? Expected what of
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  me? He gasped, What in heaven do you think this thing is?
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  And he struck his fist on the manuscript which lay between them. Harvest had
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  recovered his optimistic creases. He rested a benevolent eye on the document. Why
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  your apologia, your confession of faith? I should call it. You surely
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  must have seen which way you were going. You can't have written it in
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  your sleep. Oh no, I was wide awake enough, said the professor
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  faintly. Well, then why are you staring look at me as if I
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  were not. Harvest leaned forward to lay a reassuring hand on his visit as
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  war and coat sleeve. Don't mistake me, my dear Lenyard. Don't fancy
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  there was the least unkindness in my allusion to your change in front. What
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  is growth but the shifting of the standpoint. Why should a man be expected
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  to look at life with the same eyes at twenty and at our age.
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  It never occurred to me that you could feel the least delicacy in admitting that
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  you would come round a little have fallen into line, so to speak.
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  But the professor had sprung up, as if to give his lungs more room
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  to expand, and from them there issued a laugh which shook the editorial rafters.
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  Oh lord, oh lord, is it really as good as that,
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  he gasped. Harvest had glanced instinctively toward the electric bell on his desk.
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  It was evident that he was prepared for an emergency. My dear fellow,
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  he began, in a soothing tone. Oh let me have my laugh out
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  new implored the professor. I'll I'll quiet down in a minute. You needn't
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  ring for the young man. He dropped into his chair again and grasped its
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  arms to steady his shaking. This is the best laugh I've had since college,
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  he brought out between his paroxysms, and then suddenly he sat up with
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  a groan. But if it's as good as that, it's a failure,
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  he exclaimed. Harvest, stiffening a little, examined the tip of his cigar.
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  My dear lanyard, he said, at length, I don't understand a
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  word you're saying. The professors had combed to a fresh access from the vortex,
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  of which he managed to fling out. But that's the very core of
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  the joke. Harvis looked at him, resignedly. What is why you're not
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  seeing, you're not understanding, not uncerstanding what why? What the book is
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  meant to be? His laughter subsided again, and he sat gazing thoughtfully at
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  the publisher. Unless it means he wound up, that I've overshot the mark.
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  If I am the mark, you certainly have, said Harvis, with
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  a glance at the clock. The professor caught the glance and interpreted it.
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  The book is a skit, he said, rising The other stared A skit.
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  It's not serious. You mean not to me, But it seems you've
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  taken it. So you never told me, began the publisher, in a
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  ruffled tone. No I never told you, said the professor. Harvis sat
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  staring at the manuscript between them. I don't pretend to be up in such
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  recondite forms of humor, he said, stiffly. Of course, you address
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  yourself to a very small class of readers. Oh infinitely small, admitted the
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  professor, extending his hand toward the manuscript. Harvis appeared to be pursuing his
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  own train of thought. That is, he continued, if you insist on
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  an ironical interpretation, if I insist on it, what do you mean?
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  The publisher smiled faintly. Well, isn't the book susceptible of another? If
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  I read it without seeing? Well, murmured the other. Fascinated. Why
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  shouldn't the rest of the world declared harvest boldly. I represent the average reader.
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  That's my business. That's what I've been training myself to do for the
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  last twenty years. It's a mission like another. The thing is to do
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  it thoroughly, not to cheat and compromise. I know fellows who are publishers
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  in business, ours and dilettants the rest of the time, well, they
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  never succeed. Convictions are just as necessary in business is in religion. But
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  that's not the point. I was going to say that, if you'll let
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  me handle this book is a genuine thing, I'll guarantee to make it go.
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  The professor stood motionless, his hands still on the manuscript. A genuine
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  thing, he echoed, A serious piece of work, the expression of your
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  convictions. I tell you, there's nothing the public life makes as much as
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  convictions. They'll always follow a man who believes in his own ideas. And
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  this book is just on the line of popular interest. You've got hold of
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  a big thing. It's full of hope and enthusiasm. It's written in the
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  religious key. There are passages in it that would do splendidly in a birthday
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  book. Things that popular preachers would quote in their sermons. If you'd wanted
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  to catch a big public, you couldn't have gone about it in a better
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  way. The thing's perfect for my purpose. I wouldn't let you alter a
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  word of it. It'll sell like a popular novel if you'll let me handle
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  it in the right way. Section three. When the professor left Harvest's office,
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  the manuscript remained behind him. He thought he had been taken by the
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  huge irony of the situation, by the enlarged circumference of the joke. In
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  its original form, as Harvest had said, the book would have addressed itself
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  to a very limited circle. Now it would include the world. The elect
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  would understand, the crowd would not, and his work would thus serve a
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  double purpose. And after all, nothing was changed in the situation. Not
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  a word of the book was to be altered. The change was merely in
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  the publisher's point of view, and in the tip he was to give the
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  reviewers. The professor had only to hold his tongue and look serious. These
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  arguments found a strong reinforcement at the large premium, which expressed Harvest's sense of
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  his opportunity as a satire. The book would have brought his author nothing.
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  In fact, its cost would have come out of his own pocket, since,
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  as Harvest assured him, no publisher would have risked taking it. But
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  as a profession of faith, as the recantation of an eminent biologist whose leanings
• 22:45
  had hitherto been supposed to be toward a cold determinism, it would bring in
• 22:51
  a steady income to author and publisher. The author found the professor in a
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  moment of financial perplexity. His illness, his unwant wanted holiday, the necessity
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  of postponing a course of well paid lectures had combined to diminish his resources,
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  and when Harvest offered him an advance of a thousand dollars, the esoteric savor
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  of the joke became irresistible. It was still as a joke that he persisted
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  in regarding the transaction. And though he had pledged himself not to betray the
• 23:21
  real intent of the book, he held in Peteau the notion of some day
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  being able to take the public into his confidence. As for the initiated,
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  they would know at once, and however long a face he pulled, his
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  colleagues could see the tongue in his cheek, Meanwhile, it fortunately happened that
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  even if the book should achieve the kind of triumph prophesied by Harvest, it
• 23:44
  would not appreciably injure its author's professional standing. Professor Lynyard was known chiefly as
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  a microscopist on the structure and habit of a certain class of coleoptera. He
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  was the most distinguished living authority. But none save his intimate frey friends,
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  knew what generalizations on the destiny of man he had drawn from these special studies.
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  He might have published a treatise on the filioque without disturbing the confidence of
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  those on whose approval his reputation rested. And moreover, he was sustained by
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  the thought that one glance at his book would let them into its secret.
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  In fact, so sure was he of this that he wondered the astute Harvest
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  had cared to risk such speedy exposure. But Harvest had probably reflected that even
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  in this reverberating age, the opinions of the laboratory do not easily reach the
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  street, and the professor, at any rate, was not bound to offer
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  advice on this point. The determining cause of his consent was the fact that
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  the book was already in press. The professor knew little about the workings of
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  the press, but the phrase gave him a sense of finality, of having
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  been caught himself in the toils of that mysterious engine. If he had had
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  time to think the matter over, his scruples might have dragged him back,
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  but his conscience was eased by the futility of resistance. Section four. Missus
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  Lynyard did not often read the papers, and there was therefore a special significance
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  in her approaching her husband one evening after dinner with a copy of The New
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  York Investigator in her hand. Her expression lent solemnity to the act. Missus
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  Lynnyard had a limited but distinctive set of expressions, and she now looked as
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  she did when the president of the university came to dine. You didn't tell
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  me of this, Samuel, she said, in a slightly tremulous voice.
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  Tell you of what, returned the professor, reddening to the margin of his
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  baldness, that you had published a book. I might never have heard of
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  it if missus Peas hadn't brought me the paper. Her husband rubbed his eye
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  glasses with a groan. Oh, you would have heard of it, he
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  said gloomily. Missus Lynniard stared, did you wish to keep it from me?
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  Samuel? And as he made no answer, she added, with irresistible
• 26:04
  pride, perhaps you don't know what beautiful things have been said about it.
• 26:10
  He took the paper with a reluctant hand. Has Pease been saying beautiful things
• 26:15
  about it? The professor, missus Peas, didn't say he had mentioned it.
• 26:19
  The author heaved a sigh of relief. His book, as Harvest had
• 26:23
  prophesied, had caught the autumn market, had caught and captured it. The
• 26:27
  publisher had conducted the campaign like an experienced strategist. He had completely surrounded the
• 26:34
  enemy. Every newspaper, every periodical held in ambush an advertisement of the vital
• 26:41
  thing. Weeks in advance, the great Commander had begun to form his lines
• 26:45
  of attack. Allusions to the remarkable significance of the coming work had appeared first
• 26:49
  in the scientific and literary reviews, spreading thence to the supplements of the daily
• 26:55
  journals. Not a moment passed without a quickening touched to the public consciousness.
• 27:00
  Seventy millions of people were forced to remember at least once a day that Professor
• 27:06
  Lenyard's book was on the verge of appearing. Slips emblazoned with the question have
• 27:11
  you read The Vital Thing, fell from the pages of popular novels and whitened
• 27:15
  the floors of crowded street cars. The query, in large lettering, assaulted
• 27:21
  the traveler at the railway book stall, confronted him on the walls of elevated
• 27:26
  stations, and seemed, in its ascending scale, about to supplant the interrogations
• 27:32
  as to soap and stove polish which animate our rural scenery. On the day
• 27:37
  of publication, the professor had withdrawn to his laboratory. The shriek of the
• 27:41
  advertisements was in his ears, and his one desire was to avoid all knowledge
• 27:47
  of the event they heralded. A reaction of self consciousness had set in,
• 27:52
  and if Harvest's check had sufficed to buy up the first edition of The Vital
• 27:56
  Thing, the professor would gladly have devoted it to that purpose. But the
• 28:00
  sense of inevitableness gradually subdued him, and he received his wife's copy of The
• 28:06
  Investigator with a kind of impersonal curiosity. The review was a long one,
• 28:11
  full of extracts. He saw as he glanced over them, how well they
• 28:15
  would look in a volume of selections. The reviewer began by thanking his author
• 28:21
  for sounding, with no uncertain voice, that note of bringing optimism, of
• 28:26
  faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good, which has too long been
• 28:30
  silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent nihilism. It is well, the
• 28:37
  writer continued, when such reminders come to us not from the moralist, but
• 28:41
  from the man of science, When from the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there
• 28:47
  rises this glorious cry of faith and reconstruction. The review was minute and exhaustive,
• 28:55
  thanks no doubt to Harvest's diplomacy. It had been given to the investigator's
• 28:59
  best man, and the professor was startled by the bold eye with which his
• 29:03
  emancipated fallacies confronted him. Under the reviewer's handling, they made up admirably as
• 29:10
  truths, and their author began to understand Harvest's regret that they should be used
• 29:15
  for any less profitable purpose. The Investigator, as Harves phrased it, set
• 29:21
  the pace, and the other journals followed, finding it easier to let their
• 29:26
  critical man of all work play a variation on the first reviewer's theme than to
• 29:30
  secure an expert to do the book afresh. But it was evident that the
• 29:36
  professor had captured his public. For all the resources of the profession could not,
• 29:41
  as Harvest gleefully pointed out, have carried the book so straight to the
• 29:45
  heart of the nation. There was something noble in the way in which Harvest
• 29:48
  belittled his own share in the achievement and insisted on the inutility of shoving a
• 29:55
  book which had started with such headway on all. I ask you to admit
• 30:00
  that I saw what would happen, he said, with a touch of professional
• 30:03
  pride. I knew you'd struck the right note. I knew they'd be quoting
• 30:07
  you from Maine to San Francisco. Good is fiction. It's better it'll keep
• 30:11
  going longer, will it? Said the professor with a slight shudder. He
• 30:17
  was resigned to an ephemeral triumph, but the thought of the book's persistency frightened
• 30:22
  him. I should say, so, why you fit in everywhere science,
• 30:26
  theology, natural history, and then the all for the best element which is
• 30:30
  so popular? Just now, why you come right in with the how To
• 30:33
  Relax series? And they sell way up in the millions. And then the
• 30:37
  books so full of tenderness. There were such lovely things in it, about
• 30:41
  flowers and children. I didn't know an old, dry as dust like you
• 30:45
  could have such a lot of sentiment in him. Why I actually caught myself
• 30:49
  sniveling over that passage about the snowdrops piercing the frozen earth. And my wife
• 30:56
  was saying the other day that since she's read the vital Thing, he begins
• 31:00
  to think you must write the wat cheer column in the Inglenook. He threw
• 31:04
  back his head with a laugh, which ended in the inspired cry and by
• 31:08
  George, Sir, when the thing begins to slow off, will start somebody
• 31:12
  writing against it, and that will run as straight into another hundred thousand,
• 31:18
  and as earnest of this belief, he drew the professor a supplementary check section
• 31:26
  five. Missus Lidiard's knock cut short the importunities of the lady, who had
• 31:30
  been trying to persuade the professor to be taken by flashlight at his study table
• 31:36
  for the Christmas number of the Inglenook. On this point the professor had fancied
• 31:41
  himself impregnable, but the unwonted smile with which he welcomed his wife's intrusion,
• 31:45
  showed that his defenses were weakening. The lady from Inglenook took the hint with
• 31:51
  professional promptness, but said brightly as she snapped the elastic around her note book,
• 31:56
  I shan't let you forget me, professor, with which he followed.
• 32:00
  Her retreat was interrupted by his wife's question, do they pay you for these
• 32:06
  interviews? Samuel? The professor looked at her with sudden attention. Not directly,
• 32:12
  he said, wondering at her expression. She sank down with a sigh.
• 32:16
  Indirectly, then, what is the matter, my dear. I gave
• 32:21
  you Harvist's second check the other day. Her tears arrested him. Don't be
• 32:25
  hard on the boy, Samuel. I really believe your success has turned his
• 32:30
  head. The boy, what boy? My success? Explain yourself, Susan.
• 32:37
  It's only that Jack has has borrowed some money which he can't prepay.
• 32:42
  But you mustn't think of altogether to blame Samuel. Since the success of your
• 32:45
  book, he has been asked about so much. It's given the children quite
• 32:50
  a different position. Millicent says that wherever they go, the first question asked,
• 32:54
  is are you any relation of the author of the Vital Thing. Of
• 32:59
  course, we're all very proud of the book, but it entails obligations which
• 33:02
  you may not have thought of in writing it. The professor sat gazing at
• 33:07
  the letters and newspaper clippings on the study table, which he had just successfully
• 33:12
  defended from the camera of the inglenook. He took up an envelope bearing the
• 33:16
  name of a popular weekly paper. I don't know that the inglenook would help
• 33:22
  much, he said, but I suppose this might. Missus Lynnyard's eyes glowed
• 33:27
  with maternal avidity. What is it, Samuel, a series of scientific sermons
• 33:34
  for the round the gas log column of the Woman's World. I believe that
• 33:38
  journal has a larger circulation than any other weekly, and they pay in proportion.
• 33:45
  He had not even asked the extent of Jack's indebtedness. It had been
• 33:49
  so easy to relieve recent domestic difficulties by the timely production of Harvest's two checks
• 33:54
  that it now seemed natural to get Missus Lynyard out of the room by promising
• 33:59
  for the reinforcements. The professor had indignantly rejected Harvest's suggestion that he should follow
• 34:06
  up his success by his second volume on the same lines. He had sworn
• 34:09
  not to lend more than a passive support to the fraud of the Vital Thing,
• 34:15
  but the temptation to free himself from missus Lynyard prevailed over his last scruples,
• 34:21
  and within an hour he was at work on the Scientific Sermons. The
• 34:27
  Professor was not an unkind man. He really enjoyed making his family happy,
• 34:31
  and it was his own business if his reward for doing so was that it
• 34:36
  kept them out of his way. But the success of the Vital Thing gave
• 34:39
  him more than this negative satisfaction. It enlarged his own existence and opened new
• 34:45
  doors into other lives. The Professor, during fifty virtuous years, had been
• 34:51
  cognizant of only two types of women, the fond and foolish, whom one
• 34:55
  married, and the earnest and intellectual, whom one did not. Of the
• 35:00
  two, he infinitely preferred the former, even for conversational purposes. But as
• 35:06
  a social instrument, woman was unknown to him, and it was not till
• 35:09
  he was drawn into the world on the tide of his literary success that he
• 35:14
  discovered the deficiencies in his classification of the sex. Then he learned, with
• 35:19
  astonishment of the existence of a third type, the woman who was fond without
• 35:23
  foolishness, and intellectual without earnestness. Not that the Professor inspired or sought to
• 35:30
  inspire sentimental emotions, but he expanded in the warm atmosphere of personal interest which
• 35:37
  some of his new acquaintances contrived to create about him. It was delightful to
• 35:40
  talk of serious things in a setting of frivolity, and to be personal without
• 35:45
  being domestic. Even in this new world, where all subjects were touched on
• 35:51
  likely and emphasis was the only indelicacy, the Professor found himself constrained to endure
• 35:57
  an occasional reference to his book. It was unpleasant at first, but gradually
• 36:01
  he slipped into the habit of hearing it talked of, and grew accustomed to
• 36:07
  telling pretty women just how it had first come to him. Meanwhile, the
• 36:12
  success of the scientific sermons was facilitating his family relations. His photograph in the
• 36:17
  Inglenook, to which the lady of the note book had succeeded in appending a
• 36:22
  vivid interview, carried his fame to circles inaccessible even to the vital thing,
• 36:28
  and the professor found himself the man of the hour. He soon grew used
• 36:31
  to the functions of the office and gave out hundred dollar interviews on every subject,
• 36:37
  from labor strikes to bobbism, with a frequency which reacted agreeably on the
• 36:42
  domestic exchequer. Presently, his head began to figure in the advertising pages of
• 36:46
  the magazine. Admiring readers learned the name of the only breakfast food in use
• 36:52
  at his table, of the ink with which the Vital Thing had been written,
• 36:57
  the soap with which the author's hands were washed, and the tissue builder
• 37:00
  which fortified him for further effort. These confidences endeared the professor of millions of
• 37:06
  readers, and his head passed in due course from the magazine and the newspaper
• 37:10
  to the biscuitin and the chocolate box Section six. The professor, all the
• 37:19
  while, was leading a double life. While the author of the Vital Thing
• 37:22
  reaped the fruits of popular approval. The distinguished microscopist continued his laboratory work unheeded
• 37:30
  save by the few who were engaged in the same line of investigations. His
• 37:36
  divided allegiance had not hitherto affected the quality of his work. It seemed to
• 37:39
  him that he returned to the laboratory with greater zest. After an afternoon in
• 37:45
  a drawing room where readings from the Vital Thing had alternated with plantation melodies and
• 37:51
  tea. He had long ceased to concern himself with what his colleagues thought of
• 37:55
  his literary career. Of the few whom he frequented, none had referred to
• 38:00
  the Vital Thing, and he knew enough of their lives to guess that their
• 38:04
  silence might as fairly be attributed to indifference as to disapproval. They were intensely
• 38:09
  interested in the Professor's views on beetles, but they really cared very little what
• 38:15
  he thought of the Almighty. The Professor entirely shared their feelings, and one
• 38:20
  of his chief reasons for cultivating the success which accident had bestowed on him was
• 38:24
  that it enabled him to command a greater range of appliances for his real work.
• 38:30
  He had known what it was to lack books and instruments, and the
• 38:34
  Vital Thing was the magic wand which summoned them to his aid. For some
• 38:38
  time he had been feeling his way along the edge of a discovery, balancing
• 38:43
  himself with professional skill on a plank of hypotheses flung across an abyss of uncertainty.
• 38:50
  The conjecture was the result of years of patient gathering of facts. Its
• 38:54
  corroboration would take months more of comparison and classification. But at the end of
• 39:00
  the vista victory loomed. The professor felt within himself that assurance of ultimate justification,
• 39:07
  which to the man of science makes a lifetime, seem the mere comma
• 39:12
  between premise and deduction. But he had reached the point where his conjectures required
• 39:16
  formulation. It was only by giving them expression, by exposing them to the
• 39:22
  comment and criticism of his associates, that he could test their final value.
• 39:27
  And this inner assurance was confirmed by the only friend whose confidence he invited,
• 39:35
  Professor Pease, the husband of the lady who had opened Missus Lynnard's eyes to
• 39:38
  the triumph of the Vital Thing, was the repository of her husband's scientific experiences.
• 39:45
  What he thought of the Vital Thing had never been divulged, and he
• 39:49
  was quite capable of such vast exclusions that it was quite possible that pervasive work
• 39:54
  had not yet reached him. In any case, it was not likely to
• 39:59
  affect his judgment of the author's professional capacity. You want to put that all
• 40:04
  in a book, Leneard, was Professor Pease's summing up. I'm sure you've
• 40:07
  got hold of something big, but to see it clearly yourself, you ought
• 40:12
  to outline it for others. Take my advice, chuck everything else and get
• 40:15
  to work tomorrow. It's time you wrote a book, anyhow. It's time
• 40:20
  you wrote a book. Anyhow. The words smote the Professor with mingled pain
• 40:24
  and ecstasy. He could have wept over their significance, but his friend's other
• 40:30
  phrase reminded him with a start of harvest. You have got hold of a
• 40:34
  big thing. It had been the publisher's first comment on The Vital Thing.
• 40:38
  But what a world of meaning lay between the two phrases. It was the
• 40:43
  world in which the powers who fought for the Professor were destined to wage their
• 40:47
  final battle, and for the moment he had no doubt of the outcome.
• 40:52
  The next day he went to town to see Harves. He wanted to ask
• 40:55
  for an advance on the new popular edition of The Vital Thing. He had
• 41:00
  determined to drop a course of supplementary lectures at the university and to give himself
• 41:05
  up for a year to his book, to do this. Additional funds were
• 41:08
  necessary, but thanks to the Vital Thing, they would be forthcoming. The
• 41:15
  publisher received him as cordially as usual, but the response to his demand was
• 41:19
  not as prompt as his previous experience had entitled him to expect. Of course,
• 41:24
  we'll be glad to do what we can for you, Lanyard, But
• 41:28
  the fact is we've decided to give up the idea of the new edition for
• 41:31
  the present. You've given up the new edition. Why, yes, we've
• 41:36
  done pretty well by the Vital Thing, and we're inclined to think it's your
• 41:38
  turn to do something for it now. The professor looked at him blankly.
• 41:45
  What can I do for it? He asked? What more? His accent
• 41:47
  added, why put a little new life in it by writing something else?
• 41:52
  The secret of perpetual motion hasn't yet been discovered, you know. And it's
• 41:57
  one of the laws of literature that books which start with the rush apt to
• 42:00
  slow down sooner than the crawlers. We've kept the Vital Thing going for eighteen
• 42:05
  months, but hang it, it ain't so vital any more. We simply
• 42:08
  couldn't see our way to a new edition. Oh I don't say it's dead.
• 42:13
  Yet. But it's maribund, and you're the only man who can resuscitate
• 42:16
  it. The professor continued to stare. I what can I do about it?
• 42:22
  He stammered, Do why write another like it? Go it one better?
• 42:27
  You know the trick. The public isn't tired of you by any means,
• 42:30
  But you want to make yourself hurd again before anybody else cuts in.
• 42:35
  Write another book, write too, and we'll sell them and sets in a
• 42:37
  box the Vital Thing series that will take tremendously in the holidays. Try and
• 42:44
  let us have a new volume by October. I'll be glad to give you
• 42:46
  a big advance if you'll sign a contract on that. The Professor sat silent.
• 42:52
  It was too cruel, an irony in the coincidence, Harvest looked up
• 42:57
  at him in surprise. Well, what's the matter with taking my advice?
• 43:00
  You're not going out of literature, are you? The professor rose from his
• 43:06
  chair. No, I'm going into it, he said, simply going into
• 43:10
  it. I'm going to write a real book, a serious one. Good
• 43:15
  lord. Most people think the Vital Thing serious. Yes, but I mean
• 43:20
  something different in your old line beetles and so forth. Yes, said the
• 43:27
  professor solemnly. Harvest looked at him with equal gravity. Well, I'm sorry
• 43:32
  for that, he said, because it takes you out of our bailiwick.
• 43:36
  But I suppose you made enough money out of the Vital Thing to permit yourself
• 43:39
  a little harmless amusement. When you want more cash, come back to us.
• 43:45
  Only don't put it off too long, or some other fellow will have
• 43:46
  stepped into your shoes. Popularity don't keep, you know, And the hotter
• 43:52
  the success, the quicker, the commodity perishes. He leaned back, cheerful
• 43:57
  and sententious, delivering his axioms with conscious kindliness. The professor, who had
• 44:02
  risen and moved to the door, turned back with a wavering step. When
• 44:07
  did you say another volume would have to be ready, he faltered, I
• 44:12
  said October, but call it a month later. You don't need any pushing
• 44:15
  nowadays, and you'd have no objection to letting me have a little advance.
• 44:22
  Now I need some new instruments for my real work. Harvest extended a cordial
• 44:27
  hand. My dear fellow, that's talking. I'll write the check while you
• 44:31
  wait, and I dare say we can start up the cheap edition of the
• 44:35
  Vital thing at the same time, if you'll pledge yourself to give us the
• 44:38
  book by November, how much, he asked, poised above his check book
• 44:44
  in the street. The professor stood staring about him, uncertain and a little
• 44:49
  dazed. After all, it's only putting it off for six months, he
• 44:52
  said to himself. And I can do better work when I get my new
• 44:57
  instruments. He and raised his hat to the passing victoria of a lady in
• 45:04
  whose copy of The Vital Thing he had recently written labor est etsiam ipsa voluptas
• 45:13
  end of The Descent of Man, Chapter two, the other two Waythorne.
• 45:20
  On the drawing room, Hearth waited for his wife to come down to dinner.
• 45:24
  It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprised
• 45:28
  at his thrill of boyish agitation. He was not so old, to be
• 45:31
  sure. His glass gave him little more than the five and thirty years to
• 45:36
  which his wife confessed. But he had fancied himself already in the temperate zone.
• 45:40
  Yet here he was listening for her step with a tender sense of all
• 45:45
  it symbolized with some old trail of verse about the garlanded nuptial door posts,
• 45:51
  floating through his enjoyment of the pleasant room and the good dinner just beyond it.
• 45:57
  They had been hastily recalled from their honeymoon by the illness of Lily Haskett,
• 46:01
  the child of Missus Waythorn's first marriage. The little girl at Waythorn's desire
• 46:07
  had been transferred to his house on the day of her mother's wedding, and
• 46:10
  the doctor on their arrival broke the news that she was ill with typhoid,
• 46:15
  but declared that all the symptoms were favorable. Lily could show twelve years of
• 46:21
  unblevished health, and the case promised to be a like one. The nurse
• 46:25
  spoke as reassuringly, and after a moment of alarm, Missus Waythorne had adjusted
• 46:30
  herself to the situation. She was very fond of Lily. Her affection for
• 46:36
  the child had perhaps been her decisive charm in Weythorne's eyes. But she had
• 46:40
  the perfectly balanced nerves which her little girl had inherited, and no woman ever
• 46:45
  wasted less tissue and unproductive worry. Waythorne was therefore quite prepared to see her
• 46:52
  come in presently a little late because of a last look at Lily, but
• 46:57
  as serene and well appointed, as if her good night kiss had been laid
• 47:00
  on the brow of health. Her composure was RESTful to him and acted as
• 47:05
  ballast to his somewhat unstable sensibilities. As he pictured her bending over the child's
• 47:10
  bed, he thought, how soothing her presence must be in illness. Her
• 47:15
  very step would prognosticate recovery. His own life had been a gray one from
• 47:22
  temperament rather than circumstance, and he had been drawn to her by the unperturbed
• 47:25
  gaiety which kept her fresh and elastic at an age when most women's activities are
• 47:31
  growing either slack or febrile. He knew what was said about her, For
• 47:37
  popular as she was, there had always been a faint undercurrent of detraction when
• 47:43
  she had appeared in New York nine or ten years earlier as the pretty missus
• 47:47
  Haskett, whom Gus Varrick had unearthed somewhere was it in Pittsburgh or Utica?
• 47:53
  Society, while promptly accepting her, had reserved the right to cast a doubt
• 47:58
  on its own. Discriminate inquiry, however, established her undoubted connection with the
• 48:04
  socially reigning family and explained her recent divorce as the natural result of a runaway
• 48:09
  match at seventeen, and as nothing was known of mister Haskett, it was
• 48:15
  easy to believe the worst of him. Alice Haskett's remarriage with Gus Varick was
• 48:20
  a passport to the set whose recognition she coveted, and for a few years
• 48:24
  the Varreks were the most popular couple in town. Unfortunately, the alliance was
• 48:30
  brief and stormy, and this time the husband had his champions. Still,
• 48:34
  even Varik's staunchest supporters admitted that he was not meant for matrimony, and Missus
• 48:39
  Varreck's grievances were of a nature to bear the inspection of the New York courts.
• 48:44
  A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue, and in
• 48:47
  the semi widowhood of this second separation, Missus Varick took on an air of
• 48:52
  sanctity and was allowed to confide her wrongs to some of the most scrupulous ears
• 48:58
  in town. But it is known that she was to marry Wythorne. There
• 49:01
  was a momentary reaction. Her best friends would have preferred to see her remain
• 49:06
  in the role of the injured wife, which was as becoming to her as
• 49:09
  crape to her rosy complexion. True, a decent time had elapsed, and
• 49:15
  it was not even suggested that Waythorne has applanted his predecessor. Still, people
• 49:20
  shook their heads over him, and one grudging friend to whom he affirmed that
• 49:23
  he took the step with his eyes open, replied oracularly, yes, and
• 49:29
  with your ears shut. Waythorn could afford to smile at these innuendoes in the
• 49:35
  Wall Street phrase he had discounted them. He knew that society had not yet
• 49:39
  adapted itself to the consequences of divorce, and that till the adaptation takes place,
• 49:45
  every woman who uses the freedom the law accords her must be her own
• 49:50
  social justification. Waythorne had an amused confidence in his wife's ability to justify herself.
• 49:57
  His expectations were fulfilled, and before the wedding took place, Alice Varick's
• 50:01
  group had rallied openly to her support. She took it all imperturbably. She
• 50:07
  had a way of surmounting obstacles without seeming to be aware of them, and
• 50:10
  Waythorne looked back with wonder the trivialities over which he had worn his nerves thin.
• 50:16
  He had the sense of having found refuge in a richer, warmer nature
• 50:21
  than his own, and his satisfaction at the moment was humorously summed up in
• 50:25
  the thought that his wife, when she had done all she could for Lily,
• 50:29
  would not be ashamed to come down and enjoy a good dinner. The
• 50:34
  anticipation of such enjoyment was not, however, the sentiment expressed by Missus Waythorne's
• 50:39
  charming face when she presently joined him. Though she had put on her most
• 50:45
  engaging tea gown, she had neglected to assume the smile that went with it,
• 50:49
  and Waythorne thought he had never seen her look so nearly worried. What
• 50:53
  is it? He asked, Is anything wrong with Lily? No, I've
• 50:58
  just been in and she still sleep Missus Waythorne hesitated, But something tiresome has
• 51:04
  happened. He had taken her two hands, and now perceived that he was
• 51:08
  crushing a paper between them. This letter. Yes, mister Haskett has written.
• 51:15
  I mean his lawyer has written. Waythorn felt himself flush uncomfortably. He
• 51:21
  dropped his wife's hands. What about about seeing Lily? You know the courts?
• 51:27
  Yes, yes, he interrupted, nervously. Nothing was known about Haskett
• 51:31
  in New York. He was vaguely supposed to have remained in the outer darkness
• 51:36
  for which his wife had been rescued, and Waythorne was one of the few
• 51:40
  who were aware that he had given up his business in Utica and followed her
• 51:45
  to New York in order to be near his little girl. In the days
• 51:49
  of his wooing, Waythorn had often met Lily on the doorstep, rosy and
• 51:52
  smiling, on her way to see Papa. I am so sorry, missus,
• 52:00
  Waythorn murmured. He roused himself. What does he want? He wants
• 52:06
  to see her. You know she goes to him once a week. Well,
• 52:08
  he doesn't expect her to go to him, now, does he.
• 52:13
  No, he has heard of her illness, but he expects to come here
• 52:17
  here, missus, Waythorn reddened under his gaze. They looked away from each
• 52:22
  other. I'm afraid he has the right, you'll see. She made a
• 52:27
  proffer of the letter. Waythorn moved away with a gesture of refusal. He
• 52:32
  stood staring about the softly lighted room, which a moment before had seemed so
• 52:37
  full of bridal intipacy. I'm so sorry, she repeated. If Lily could
• 52:43
  have been moved, that's out of the question, he returned, impatiently.
• 52:47
  I suppose so. Her lip was beginning to tremble, and he felt himself
• 52:52
  a brute. He must come, of course, he said. When is
• 52:57
  his day? I'm afraid tomorrow. Very well, send it out in the
• 53:01
  morning. The butler entered to announced dinner. Waythorn turned to his wife.
• 53:08
  Come, you must be tired. It's beastly, but try to forget about
• 53:13
  it, he said, drawing her hand to his arm. You're so good,
• 53:16
  dear, I'll try, she whispered back. Her face cleared at once,
• 53:22
  and as she looked at him across the flowers between the rosy candle shades,
• 53:25
  he saw her lips waver back into a smile. How pretty everything is,
• 53:31
  she sighed luxuriously. He turned to the butler the champagne at once,
• 53:37
  please missus, Waythorn is tired. In a moment or two, their eyes
• 53:40
  met above the spark and glasses. Her own were quite clear and untroubled.
• 53:45
  He saw that she had obade his injunction and forgotten Section two. Waythorn the
• 53:53
  next morning went down town earlier than usual, Hascott was not likely to come
• 53:59
  till the afternoon, but the instinct of flight drove him forth. He meant
• 54:02
  to stay away all day. He had thoughts of dining at his club.
• 54:06
  As his door closed behind him, he reflected that before he opened it again,
• 54:10
  it would have admitted another man who had as much right to utter it
• 54:14
  as himself, and the thought filled him with a physical repugnance. He caught
• 54:19
  the elevated at the employee's hour and found himself crushed between two layers of pendulous
• 54:24
  humanity. At eighth Street. The man facing him wriggled out, and another
• 54:29
  took his place. Waythorne glanced up and sore that it was Gus Varick.
• 54:34
  The men were so close together that it was impossible to ignore the smile of
• 54:38
  recognition on Varrak's handsome, overblown face, and after all, why not.
• 54:44
  They had always been on good terms, and Varric had been divorced before Waythorne's
• 54:49
  attentions to his wife began. The two exchanged a word on the perennial grievance
• 54:53
  of the congested trains, and when his seat at their side was miraculously left
• 54:58
  empty, the inn instinctive self preservation made Waythorn slip into it after Varrik the
• 55:05
  latter drew the stout man's breath of relief. Lord I was beginning to feel
• 55:09
  like a pressed flower. He leaned back, looking unconcernedly at Waythorne. Sorry
• 55:15
  to hear that Sellers is knocked out again. Sellers, echoed Waythorne, staring
• 55:21
  at his partner's name. Varrek looked surprised. You didn't know he was laid
• 55:27
  up with the gout. No, I've been away. I only got back
• 55:30
  last night. Waythorne felt himself reddening in anticipation of the other's smile. Ah,
• 55:36
  yes, to be sure, and Seller's attack came on two days ago.
• 55:39
  I'm afraid he's pretty bad, very awkward for me as it happens,
• 55:44
  because he was just putting through a rather important thing for me. Ah,
• 55:49
  Waythorne wondered vaguely, since when Varrek had been dealing in important things, hitherto,
• 55:54
  he had dabbled only in the shallow pools of speculation with which Waythorne's office
• 56:00
  did not usually concern itself. It occurred to him that Varrec might be talking
• 56:06
  at random to believe the strain of their propinquity. That strain was becoming momentarily
• 56:12
  more apparent to Waythorne, and when at Courtland Street he caught sight of an
• 56:15
  acquaintance and had a sudden vision of the picture he and Varrek must present to
• 56:21
  an initiated eye. He jumped up with a muttered excuse. I hope you'll
• 56:25
  find Cellars better, said Varreck civilly, and he stammered back, if I
• 56:30
  can be of any use to you, and let the departing crowd sweep him
• 56:34
  to the platform. At his office, he heard that Cellars was in fact
• 56:38
  ill with the gout and would probably not be able to leave the house for
• 56:43
  some weeks. I'm sorry it should have happened, so, mister Waythorne,
• 56:47
  the senior clerk, said, with affable significance. Mister Sellers was very much
• 56:52
  upset at the idea of giving you such a lot of extra work. Just
• 56:55
  now, Oh that's no matter, said Waythorne hastily. He secretly welcomed the
• 57:00
  pressure of additional business and was glad to think that when the day's work was
• 57:06
  over he would have to call at his partners. On the way home,
• 57:09
  he was late for luncheon and turned into the nearest restaurant instead of going to
• 57:14
  his club. The place was full, and the waiter hurried him to the
• 57:16
  back of the room to capture the only vacant table. In the cloud of
• 57:22
  cigar smoke, Waythorne did not at once distinguish his neighbors, but presently looking
• 57:27
  about him, he saw Varrek seated a few feet off. This time,
• 57:30
  luckily they were too far apart for conversation, and Varyck, who faced another
• 57:36
  way, had probably not even seen him. But there was an irony in
• 57:39
  their renewed nearness. Varick was said to be fond of good living, and
• 57:45
  as Waythorne sat dispatching his hurried luncheon, he looked across half enviously to the
• 57:50
  other's leisurely degestation of his meal. When Waythorne first saw him, he had
• 57:55
  been helping himself with critical deliberation to a bit of common bit at the ideal
• 58:00
  point of liquefaction, and now the cheese removed, he was just pouring his
• 58:06
  cafe double from its little two storied earthen pot. He poured slowly, his
• 58:12
  ruddy profile bent above the task, and one beringed white hand steadying the lid
• 58:16
  of the coffee pot. And then he stretched his other hand to the decanter
• 58:21
  of cognac. As his elbow filled a lee curR Glass, took a tentative
• 58:24
  sip, and poured the brandy into his coffee cup. Waythorn watched him in
• 58:30
  a kind of fascination. What was he thinking of? Only of the flavor
• 58:35
  of the coffee and the liqueur. Had the morning's meeting left no more trace
• 58:38
  in his thoughts than on his face? Had his wife so completely passed out
• 58:43
  of his life that even this ought encounter with her present husband within a week
• 58:47
  after her remarriage was no more than an incident in his day? And as
• 58:52
  Waythorn mused, another idea struck him. Had Haskett ever met Varick as Varyck
• 58:59
  and he had just met? The recollection of Haskett perturbed him, and he
• 59:04
  rose and left the restaurant, taking a securitous way out to escape the placid
• 59:08
  irony of Varick's nod. It was after seven when Waythorn reached home. He
• 59:15
  thought the footman who opened the door looked at him oddly. How is miss
• 59:19
  Lily? He asked, in haste, Doing very well, sir? A
• 59:22
  gentleman tell Barlow to put up dinner for half an hour, Waythorne cut him
• 59:28
  off. Hurrying upstairs. He went straight to his room and dressed without seeing
• 59:32
  his wife. When he reached the drawing room, she was there, fresh
• 59:37
  and radiant. Lily's day had been good. The doctor was not coming back
• 59:42
  that evening. At dinner, Waythorn told her of Seller's illness and of the
• 59:46
  resulting complications. She listened sympathetically, adjuring him not to let himself be overworked,
• 59:53
  and asking vague feminine questions about the routine of the office. Then she
• 59:59
  gave him the c tonicle of Lily's day, quoted the nurse and doctor,
• 1:00:02
  and told him who would call to inquire. He had never seen her more
• 1:00:07
  serene and unruffled. It struck him with a curious pang that she was very
• 1:00:12
  happy in being with him, so happy that she found a childish pleasure in
• 1:00:16
  rehearsing the trivial incidents of her day. After dinner, they went to the
• 1:00:22
  library, and the servant put the coffee and leaqueurs on a low table before
• 1:00:27
  her and left the room. She looked singularly soft and girlish in her rosy
• 1:00:31
  pale dress against the dark leather of one of his bachelor arm chairs. A
• 1:00:37
  day earlier, the contrast would have charmed him. He turned away, now,
• 1:00:42
  choosing a cigar with affected deliberation. Did hask it come, he asked,
• 1:00:46
  with his back to her. Oh, yes, he came. You
• 1:00:51
  didn't see him, of course, she hesitated a moment. I let the
• 1:00:55
  nurse see him. That was all. There was nothing more to ask.
• 1:01:00
  He swung around toward her, applying a match to his cigar. Well,
• 1:01:04
  the thing was over for a week, at any rate, he would try
• 1:01:07
  not to think of it. She looked up at him, a trifle rosier
• 1:01:10
  than usual, with a smile in her eyes. Ready for your coffee,
• 1:01:15
  dear. He leaned against the mantelpiece, watching her as she lifted the coffee
• 1:01:21
  pot. The lamp light struck a gleam from her bracelets and tipped her soft
• 1:01:24
  air with brightness. How light and slender she was, and how each gesture
• 1:01:30
  flowed into the next. She seemed a creature, all compact of harmonies.
• 1:01:36
  As the thought of Haskett receded Waythorn felt himself yielding again to the joy of
• 1:01:42
  possessorship. They were his, those white hands with their flitting motions, his,
• 1:01:46
  the light haze of hair, the lips, the eyes. She set
• 1:01:52
  down the coffee pot, and reaching for the decanter of cognac, measured off
• 1:01:55
  a leekuurr glass and poured it into his cup. Waythorn uttered a sudden exclamation.
• 1:02:02
  What is the matter, she said, startled nothing, Only I don't
• 1:02:07
  take cognac in my coffee. Oh how stupid of me, she cried.
• 1:02:13
  Their eyes met, and she blushed a sudden agonized red section. Three ten
• 1:02:21
  days later, mister Sellers, still house bound, asked Waythorne to call on
• 1:02:24
  his way down town. The segior partner, with his swaddled foot propped up
• 1:02:29
  by the fire, greeted his associate with an air of embarrassment. I'm sorry,
• 1:02:35
  my dear fellow. I've got to ask you to do an awkward thing
• 1:02:37
  for me. Waythorne waited, and the other went on after a pause,
• 1:02:43
  apparently given to the arrangement of his phrases. The fact is, when I
• 1:02:46
  was knocked out, I had just gone into a rather complicated piece of business
• 1:02:51
  for Gus Varick, well, said Waythorn, with an attempt to put him
• 1:02:57
  at his ease. Well, it's this way Varrek came to be the day
• 1:03:00
  before my attack. He had evidently had an inside tip from somebody and had
• 1:03:06
  made about a hundred thousand. He came to me for advice and I suggested
• 1:03:10
  his going in with Vanderlin. Oh the deuce, Waythorn exclaimed, he saw
• 1:03:16
  in a flash what had happened. The investment was an alluring one, but
• 1:03:21
  required negotiation. He listened intently while sellers put the case before him, and
• 1:03:27
  the statement ended. He said, you think I owe to see Varick.
• 1:03:30
  I'm afraid I can't as yet. The doctor is obdurate and this thing can't
• 1:03:35
  wait. I hate to ask you, but no one else in the office
• 1:03:38
  knows the ins and outs of it. Waythorn stood silent. He did not
• 1:03:43
  care a farthing for the success of Varick's venture, but the honor of the
• 1:03:46
  office was to be considered, and he could hardly refuse to oblige his partner.
• 1:03:52
  Very well, he said, I'll do it. That afternoon, apprized
• 1:03:57
  by telephone, Varick called at the office. Wythorne, waiting in his private
• 1:04:01
  room, wondered what the others thought of it. The newspapers at the time
• 1:04:05
  of missus Waythorne's marriage had acquainted their readers with every detail of her previous matrimonial
• 1:04:12
  ventures, and Waythorn could fancy the clerk smiling behind Barreck's back as he was
• 1:04:17
  ushered in. Varick bore himself admirably. He was easy without being undignified,
• 1:04:25
  and Wythorne was conscious of cutting a much less impressive figure. Varrek had no
• 1:04:29
  head for business, and the talk prolonged itself for nearly an hour, while
• 1:04:32
  Waythorn set forth with scrupulous precision the details of the proposed transaction. I'm awfully
• 1:04:40
  obliged to you, Varrek said as he rose. The fact is, I'm
• 1:04:44
  not used to having much money to look after, and I don't want to
• 1:04:46
  make an ass of myself. He smiled, and Waythorn could not help noticing
• 1:04:51
  that there was something pleasant about his smile. It feels uncommonly queer to have
• 1:04:57
  enough cash to pay one's bills. I'd have sold my Sulford a few years
• 1:05:00
  ago. Waythorne winced at the illusion he had heard. It rumored that a
• 1:05:05
  lack of funds had been one of the determining causes of the Varrack separation,
• 1:05:11
  but it did not occur to him that Varrek's words were intentional. It seemed
• 1:05:15
  more likely that the desire to keep clear of embarrassing topics had fatally drawn him
• 1:05:20
  into one. Wythorn did not wish to be outdone in civility. We'll do
• 1:05:26
  the best we can for you, he said. I think this is a
• 1:05:29
  good thing you're in. Oh, I'm sure it's immense. It's awfully good
• 1:05:33
  of you. Warreck broke off, embarrassed. I suppose the thing's settled now,
• 1:05:38
  but if if anything happens before selis is about, I'll see you again,
• 1:05:43
  said Waythorne quietly. He was glad in the end to appear the more
• 1:05:47
  self possessed of the two. The course of Lily's illness ran smooth, and
• 1:05:54
  as the days passed, Waythorn grew used to the idea of Haskett's weekly visit.
• 1:05:59
  The first time the day came round, he stayed out late and questioned
• 1:06:02
  his wife as to the visit. On his return. She replied at once
• 1:06:06
  that Haskett had merely seen the nurse downstairs, as the doctor did not wish
• 1:06:11
  any one in the child's sick room till after the crisis. The following week,
• 1:06:15
  Waythorne was again conscious of the recurrence of the day, but had forgotten
• 1:06:19
  it by the time he came home to dinner. The crisis of the disease
• 1:06:24
  came a few days later with a rapid decline of fever, and the little
• 1:06:28
  girl was pronounced out of danger. In the rejoicing which ensued, the thought
• 1:06:32
  of Haskett passed out of Waythorne's mind, and one afternoon, letting himself into
• 1:06:36
  the house with a latch key, he went straight to his library without noticing
• 1:06:42
  a shabby hat an umbrella in the hall. In the library he found a
• 1:06:46
  small, effaced looking man with a thinish gray beard, sitting on the edge
• 1:06:50
  of a chair. The stranger might have been a piano tuner, or one
• 1:06:55
  of those mysteriously efficient persons who were summoned in emergencies to as some detail of
• 1:07:00
  the domestic machinery. He blinked at Wythorn through a pair of gold rimmed spectacles
• 1:07:06
  and said, mildly, mister Waythorn, I presume I am Lily's father.
• 1:07:13
  Waythorn flushed, Oh, he stammered uncomfortably. He broke off, disliking to
• 1:07:17
  appear rude. Inwardly, he was trying to adjust the actual hasket to the
• 1:07:23
  image of him projected by his wife's reminiscences. Wythorn had been allowed to infer
• 1:07:28
  that Alice's first husband was a brute. I am sorry to intrude, said
• 1:07:33
  Haskett with his over the counter politeness. Don't mention it, returned Waythorne,
• 1:07:39
  collecting himself. I suppose the nurse has been told. I presume, so
• 1:07:44
  I can wait, said Haskett. He had a resigned way of speaking,
• 1:07:47
  as though life had worn down his natural powers of resistance. Waythorn stood on
• 1:07:53
  the threshold, nervously, pulling off his gloves. I'm sorry you've been detained.
• 1:07:58
  I will send for the nurse, he said, and as he opened
• 1:08:00
  the door, he added with an effort, I'm glad we can give you
• 1:08:04
  a good report of Lily. He winced as the we slept out, but
• 1:08:09
  Haskett seemed not to notice it. Thank you, mister Waythorn. It's been
• 1:08:14
  an anxious time for me. Ah well, that's past. Soon shall be
• 1:08:18
  able to go to you. Waythorne nodded and passed out. In his own
• 1:08:24
  room, he flung himself down with a groan. He hated the womanish sensibility
• 1:08:29
  which made him suffer so acutely from the grotesque chances of life. He had
• 1:08:33
  known when he married that his wife's former husbands were both living and that,
• 1:08:38
  amid the multiplied contacts of modern existence, there were a thousand chances to one
• 1:08:44
  that he would run against one or the other. Yet he found himself as
• 1:08:46
  much disturbed by his brief encounter with Haskett, as though the law had not
• 1:08:51
  obligingly removed all difficulties in the way of their meeting. Waythorne sprang up and
• 1:08:58
  began to pace the room, Nervous he had not suffered half so much from
• 1:09:01
  his two meetings with Varrik. It was Haskett's presence in his own house that
• 1:09:06
  made the situation so intolerable. He stood still, hearing steps in the passage.
• 1:09:13
  This way, please, he heard the nurse say. Haskett was being
• 1:09:16
  taken upstairs, not a corner of the house, but was open to him.
• 1:09:20
  Waythorn dropped into another chair, staring vaguely ahead of him. On his
• 1:09:26
  dressing table stood a photograph of Alice, taken when he had first known her.
• 1:09:30
  She was Alice Varick, then, how fine and exquisite he had thought
• 1:09:35
  her. Those were Varik's pearls about her neck. At Waythorne's instance, they
• 1:09:40
  had been returned before her marriage, had Haskett having given her any trinkets,
• 1:09:45
  and what had become of them, Waythorne wondered. He realized suddenly that he
• 1:09:48
  knew very little of Haskett's past or present situation. But from the man's appearance
• 1:09:55
  and manner of speech, he could reconstruct with curious precision the surround found of
• 1:10:00
  Alice's first marriage, and it startled him to think that she had in the
• 1:10:04
  background of her life a phase of existence so different from anything with which he
• 1:10:10
  had connected her. Varrick, whatever is false, was a gentleman in the
• 1:10:14
  conventional traditional sense of the term, the sense which at that moment seemed oddly
• 1:10:19
  enough to have most meaning to Waythorn. He and Varyk had the same social
• 1:10:24
  habits, spoke the same language, understood the same illusions, but this other
• 1:10:29
  man. It was grotesquely uppermost in Weythorne's mind that Haskett had worn a made
• 1:10:33
  up tie attached with an elastic Why should that ridiculous detale symbolize the whole man?
• 1:10:41
  Waythorne was exasperated by his own paltrness, but the fact that the tie
• 1:10:45
  expanded forced itself on him became, as it were, the key to Alice's
• 1:10:50
  past. He could see her as missus Haskett sitting in a front parlor furnished
• 1:10:57
  in plush, with a pianola and a copy of Ben Hur on the center
• 1:11:01
  table. He could see her going to the theater with Haskett, or perhaps
• 1:11:05
  even to a church sociable. She in a picture hat, an hasket,
• 1:11:11
  and a black frock coat, a little creast with a made up tie on
• 1:11:15
  an elastic. On the way home, they would stop and look at the
• 1:11:18
  illuminated shop windows, lingering over the photographs of New York actresses. On Sunday
• 1:11:25
  afternoons, Haskett would take her for a walk, pushing Lily ahead of them
• 1:11:29
  in a white enameled perambulator and Waythorne had a vision of the people they would
• 1:11:33
  stop and talk to. He could fancy how pretty Alice must have looked in
• 1:11:39
  address adroitly constructed from the hints of a New York fashion paper. How she
• 1:11:44
  must have looked down on the other women, chafing at her life and secretly
• 1:11:47
  feeling that she belonged to a bigger place. For the moment, his foremost
• 1:11:53
  thought was one of wonder at the way in which he had shed the phase
• 1:11:56
  of existence which her marriage with Haskett implied. It was as if her whole
• 1:12:00
  aspect, every gesture, every inflection, every illusion were a studied negation of
• 1:12:06
  that period of her life. If she had denied being married to Haskett,
• 1:12:12
  she could hardly have stood more convicted of duplicity than in this obliteration of the
• 1:12:16
  self which had been his wife. Waythorn started up checking himself in the analysis
• 1:12:23
  of her motives. What right had he to create a fantastic effigy of her
• 1:12:29
  and then passed judgment on it. She had spoken vaguely of her first marriage's
• 1:12:32
  unhappy had hinted with becoming reticence that Haskett had wrought havoc among her young illusions.
• 1:12:41
  It was a pity for Waythorn's peace of mind that Haskett's very inoffensiveness shed
• 1:12:45
  a new light on the nature of those illusions. A man would rather think
• 1:12:49
  that his wife had been brutalized by her first husband than that the process had
• 1:12:54
  been reversed. Section four. Mister Waythorn, like that French governess of Lilies,
• 1:13:01
  Haskett, subdued and apologetic, stood before Waythorne in the library, revolving
• 1:13:06
  his shabby hat in his hand. Waythorne, surprised in his arm chair over
• 1:13:12
  the evening paper. Stared back perplexedly at his visitor. You'll excuse my asking
• 1:13:17
  to see you, Haskett continued, but this is my last visit, and
• 1:13:21
  I thought if I could have a word with you, it would be a
• 1:13:24
  better way than writing to missus Waythorne's lawyer. Waythorn rose uneasily. He did
• 1:13:30
  not like the French governess either, but that was irrelevant. I am not
• 1:13:34
  so sure of that, he returned stiffly. But since you wish it,
• 1:13:38
  I will give your message to my wife. He always hesitated over the possessive
• 1:13:44
  pronoun in addressing Haskett. The latter sighed, I don't know as that will
• 1:13:49
  help much. She didn't like it. When I spoke to her, Waythorn
• 1:13:54
  turned red. When did you see her, he asked, Not since the
• 1:13:58
  first day I came to see, right after she was taken sick. I
• 1:14:01
  remarked to her then that I didn't like the governess. Waythorn made no answer.
• 1:14:06
  He remembered distinctly that after that first visit he had asked his wife if
• 1:14:12
  she had seen Haskett. She had lied to him then, but she had
• 1:14:15
  respected his wishes since, and the incident cast a curious light on her character.
• 1:14:20
  He was sure she would not have seen Haskett that first day. If
• 1:14:25
  she had divined that Waythorne would object, and the fact that she did not
• 1:14:28
  divine it was almost as disagreeable to the latter as the discovery that she had
• 1:14:32
  lied to him. I don't like the woman, Haskett was repeating, with
• 1:14:38
  a mild persistency. She ain't straight, mister Waythorn. She'll teach the child
• 1:14:43
  to be underhand. I've noticed a change in Lily. She's too anxious to
• 1:14:46
  please, and she don't always tell the truth. She used to be the
• 1:14:50
  straightest child, mister Waythorn. He broke off, his voice, A little
• 1:14:56
  thick not but I want her to have a stylish aga, he added.
• 1:15:01
  Waythorn was touched. I'm sorry, mister Haskett, but frankly, I don't
• 1:15:05
  quite see what I can do. Haskett hesitated that he laid his hat on
• 1:15:11
  the table and advanced to the hearth rug on which Waythorn was standing. There
• 1:15:15
  was nothing aggressive in his manner, but he had the solemnity of a timid
• 1:15:18
  man resolved on a decisive measure. There's just one thing you can do,
• 1:15:24
  mister Waythorn. He said, you can remind missus Waythorn that by the decree
• 1:15:29
  of the courts, I am entitled to have a voice in Lily's bringing up.
• 1:15:33
  He paused and went on more deprecatingly. I'm not the kind to talk
• 1:15:38
  about enforcing my rights, mister Waythorn. I don't know, as I think
• 1:15:41
  a man is entitled to rights he hasn't known how to hold on to.
• 1:15:45
  But this business of the child is different. I've never let go there,
• 1:15:48
  and I never mean to. The scene left Wythorn deeply shaken, shamefacedly.
• 1:15:56
  In indirect ways. He had been finding out about Haskett, and all that
• 1:16:00
  he had learned was favorable the little man. In order to be near his
• 1:16:03
  daughter, had sold out his share in a profitable business in Utica and accepted
• 1:16:09
  a modest clerkship in the New York manufacturing house. He boarded in a shabby
• 1:16:14
  street and had few acquaintances. His passion for Lily filled his life. Waythorn
• 1:16:19
  felt that this exploration of Haskett was like groping about with a dark lantern in
• 1:16:25
  his wife's past. But he saw now that there were recesses his lantern had
• 1:16:30
  not explored. He had never inquired into the exact circumstances of his wife's first
• 1:16:35
  matrimonial rupture. On the surface, all had been fair. It was she
• 1:16:41
  who had obtained the divorce, and the court had given her the child.
• 1:16:44
  But Waythorne knew how many ambiguities such a verdict might cover. The mere fact
• 1:16:49
  that Haskett retained a right over his daughter implied an unsuspected compromise. Waythorn was
• 1:16:57
  an idealist. He always refused to wreckonize unpleasant contingencies till he found himself confronted
• 1:17:03
  with him, and then he saw them followed by a spectral train of consequences.
• 1:17:09
  His next days were thus haunted, and he determined to try to lay
• 1:17:12
  the ghosts by conjuring them up in his wife's presence. When he repeated Haskett's
• 1:17:17
  request, a flame of anger passed over her face, but she subdued it
• 1:17:23
  instantly and spoke with a slight quiver of outraged motherhood. It is very ungentlemanly
• 1:17:30
  of him, she said, The word grated on Waythorne. That is neither
• 1:17:34
  here nor there. It's a bare question of rights, she murmured. It's
• 1:17:40
  not as if he could ever be a help to Lily Waythorn flushed. This
• 1:17:45
  was even less to his taste. The question is, he repeated, what
• 1:17:48
  authority has he over her? She looked downward, twisting herself a little in
• 1:17:54
  her seat. I am willing to see him. I thought you objected,
• 1:17:59
  she faltered in a flash. He understood that she knew the extent of Haskett's
• 1:18:03
  claims. Perhaps it was not the first time she had resisted them. My
• 1:18:09
  objecting has nothing to do with it, he said, coldly. If Haskett
• 1:18:13
  has a right to be consulted, you must consult him. She burst into
• 1:18:17
  tears, and he saw that she expected him to regard her as a victim.
• 1:18:24
  Haskett did not abuse his rights. Wythorn had felt miserably sure that he
• 1:18:28
  would not, But the Governess was dismissed, and from time to time the
• 1:18:31
  little Man demanded an interview with Alice. After the first outburst, she accepted
• 1:18:36
  the situation with her usual adaptability. Haskett had once reminded Wythorne of the piano
• 1:18:43
  tuner, and Missus Wythorn, after a month or two, appeared to class
• 1:18:46
  him with that domestic familiar Waythorn could not but respect the father's tenacity. At
• 1:18:54
  first, He had tried to cultivate the suspicion that Haskett might be up to
• 1:18:58
  something, that he had an object in securing a foothold in the house.
• 1:19:01
  But in his heart, Waythorn was sure of Hasket's single mindedness. He even
• 1:19:06
  guessed in the latter a mild contempt for such advantages as his relation with the
• 1:19:12
  Waythorns might offer. Haskett's sincerity of purpose made him invulnerable, and his successor
• 1:19:17
  had to accept him as a lean on the property. Mister Sellis was sent
• 1:19:25
  to Europe to recover from his gout, and Barrack's affairs hung on Waythorn's hands.
• 1:19:30
  The negotiations were prolonged and complicated. They necessitated frequent conferences between the two
• 1:19:38
  men and the interests of the firm. For bad Waythorn suggesting that his client
• 1:19:43
  should transfer his business to another office. Varrick appeared well in the transaction.
• 1:19:49
  In moments of relaxation, his coarse streak appeared, and Waythorn dreaded his geniality.
• 1:19:56
  But in the office he was concise and clear headed, with a flat
• 1:20:00
  deference to Waythorne's judgment. Their business relations being so affably established, it would
• 1:20:05
  have been absurd for the two men to ignore each other in society. The
• 1:20:10
  first time they met in a drawing room, Varick took up their intercourse in
• 1:20:14
  the same easy key at his hostess's grateful glance obliged Weythorne to respond to it.
• 1:20:19
  After that, they ran across each other frequently, and one evening at
• 1:20:24
  a ball Waythorne, wandering through the remoter rooms, came upon Varick seated beside
• 1:20:29
  his wife. She colored a little and faltered in what she was saying,
• 1:20:33
  but Varick nodded to Waythorn without rising, and the latter strolled on in the
• 1:20:40
  carriage. On the way home, he broke out nervously. I didn't know
• 1:20:44
  you spoke to Varrick. Her voice trembled a little. It's the first time
• 1:20:48
  he happened to be standing near me. I didn't know what to do.
• 1:20:51
  It's so awkward meeting everywhere. And he said, you had been very kind
• 1:20:57
  about some business. That's difference. Waythorn. She paused a moment. I'll
• 1:21:02
  do just as you wish, she returned pliantly. I thought it would be
• 1:21:08
  less awkward to speak to him when we meet her. Pliancy was beginning to
• 1:21:12
  sicken him. Had she really, no will of her own, no theory
• 1:21:15
  about her relation to these men. She had accepted Haskett, did she mean
• 1:21:19
  to accept Varrick. It was less awkward as she had said, and her
• 1:21:25
  instinct was to evade difficulties or to circumvent them with sudden vividness. Waythorn saw
• 1:21:30
  how the instinct had developed. She was as easy as an old shoe,
• 1:21:35
  a shoe that too many feet had worn. Her elasticity was the result of
• 1:21:41
  tension in too many different directions. Alice Haskett, Alice Varrick, Alice Waythorne.
• 1:21:46
  She had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name,
• 1:21:50
  a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little
• 1:21:55
  of the inmost self where the unknown God abides. Yes, it's better to
• 1:22:00
  speak to Varrick, said Waythorne wearily. Section five. The widow wore on,
• 1:22:09
  and society took advantage of the Waythorn's acceptance of Varrick. Harassed hostesses were
• 1:22:15
  grateful to them for bridging over a social difficulty, and Missus Waythorn was held
• 1:22:19
  up as a miracle of good taste. Some experimental spirits could not resist the
• 1:22:26
  diversion of throwing Varick and his former wife together. And there were those who
• 1:22:30
  thought he found a zest in the propinquity. But missus Waythorn's conduct remained irreproachable.
• 1:22:35
  She neither avoided Varock nor sought him out. Even Waythorn could not but
• 1:22:41
  admit that she had discovered the solution of the newest social problem. He had
• 1:22:45
  married her without giving much thought to that problem. He had fancied that a
• 1:22:49
  woman can shut her past like a man. But now he saw that Alice
• 1:22:54
  was bound to hers, both by the circumstances which forced her into continued relation
• 1:23:00
  with it, and by the traces it had left on her nature. With
• 1:23:03
  grim irony, Waeythorn compared himself to a member of a syndicate. He held
• 1:23:09
  so many shares in his wife's personality, and his predecessors were his partners in
• 1:23:14
  the business. If there had been any element of passion in the transaction,
• 1:23:17
  he would have felt less deteriorated by it. The fact that Alice took her
• 1:23:21
  change of husbands like a change of weather reduced the situation to mediocrity. He
• 1:23:28
  could have forgiven her for blunders, for excesses, for resisting Hasket, for
• 1:23:32
  yielding to Barrick, for anything but her acquiescence and her tact. She reminded
• 1:23:38
  him of a juggler tossing knives, but the knives were blunt and she knew
• 1:23:43
  they would never cut her. And then gradually habit formed a protecting surface for
• 1:23:48
  his sensibilities. If he paid for each day's comfort with the small change of
• 1:23:53
  his illusions, he grew daily to value the comfort more and set less store
• 1:23:59
  upon the coin. He had drifted into a dulling propinquity with Haskett and Varick,
• 1:24:03
  and he took refuge in the cheap revenge of satirizing the situation. He
• 1:24:09
  even began to reckon up the advantages which accrued from it, to ask himself
• 1:24:13
  if it were not better to own a third of a wife who knew how
• 1:24:16
  to make a man happy than a whole one who would lacked opportunity to acquire
• 1:24:20
  the art, For it was an art, and made up like all others,
• 1:24:26
  of concessions, eliminations and embellishments, of lights judiciously thrown and shadows skillfully
• 1:24:32
  softened. His wife knew exactly how to manage the lights, and he knew
• 1:24:38
  exactly to what training she owed her skill. He even tried to trace the
• 1:24:42
  source of his obligations to discriminate between the influences which had combined to produce his
• 1:24:47
  domestic happiness. He perceived that Haskett's commonness had made Alice worship good breeding,
• 1:24:55
  while Varick's liberal construction of the marriage bond had taught her to value them conjugal
• 1:25:00
  virtues, so that he was directly indebted to his predecessors for the devotion which
• 1:25:05
  made his life easy, if not inspiring. From this phase he passed into
• 1:25:12
  that of complete acceptance. He ceased to satirize himself, because time dulled the
• 1:25:17
  irony of the situation, and the joke lost its humor with its sting.
• 1:25:23
  Even the sight of Haskett's hat on the hall table had ceased to touch the
• 1:25:27
  springs of epigram. The hat was often seen there now, for it had
• 1:25:31
  been decided that it was better for Lily's father to visit her than for the
• 1:25:35
  little girl to go to his boarding house. Waythorne, having acquiesced in this
• 1:25:41
  arrangement, had been surprised to find how little difference it made. Haskett was
• 1:25:45
  never obtrusive, and the few visitors who met him on the stairs were unaware
• 1:25:49
  of his identity. Waythorne did not know how often he saw Alice, but
• 1:25:55
  with himself Haskett was seldom in contact. One afternoon, however, he learned
• 1:26:00
  on entering that Lily's father was waiting to see him. In the library,
• 1:26:04
  he found Hasket occupying a chair in his usual provisional way. Waythorn always felt
• 1:26:11
  grateful to him for not leaning back. I hope you'll excuse me, mister
• 1:26:15
  Waythorn, he said, rising, I wanted to see missus Waythorn about Lily,
• 1:26:19
  and your man asked me to wait here till she came in. Of
• 1:26:24
  course, said Waythorne, remembering that a sudden leak had that morning given over
• 1:26:29
  the drawing room to the plumbers. He opened his cigar case and held it
• 1:26:33
  out to his visitor, and Haskett's acceptance seemed to mark a fresh stage in
• 1:26:38
  their intercourse. The spring evening was chilly, and Weythorne invited his guest to
• 1:26:44
  draw up his chair to the fire. He meant to find an excuse to
• 1:26:46
  leave Haskett in a moment, but he was tired and cold, and after
• 1:26:51
  all the little man no longer jarred on him. The two were enclosed in
• 1:26:56
  the intimacy of their blended cigar smoke. When the door opened and Varrek walked
• 1:27:00
  into the room, Waythorn rose abruptly. It was the first time that Varac
• 1:27:05
  had come to the house, and the surprise of seeing him, combined with
• 1:27:10
  the singular inopportuneness of his arrival, gave a new edge to Waythorne's blunted sensibilities.
• 1:27:15
  He stared at his visitor without speaking. Varrek seemed too preoccupied to notice
• 1:27:23
  his host's embarrassment. My dear fellow, he exclaimed, in his most expansive
• 1:27:28
  tone, I must apologize for tumbling in on you in this way, but
• 1:27:31
  I was too late to catch you downtown, and so I thought. He
• 1:27:35
  stopped short, catching sight of Haskett and his sanguine colored deep into a flush
• 1:27:41
  which spread vividly under his scant blonde hair, But in a moment he recovered
• 1:27:45
  himself and nodded slightly. Haskett returned the bow in silence, and Waythorn was
• 1:27:51
  still groping for speech when the footman came in carrying a tea table. The
• 1:27:57
  intrusion offered a welcome vent to wag Aithorne's nerves. What the deuce you bringing
• 1:28:02
  this here for? He said, sharply. I beg your pardon, sir,
• 1:28:05
  but the plumbags are still in the drawing room, and missus Waythorn said
• 1:28:10
  she would have tea in the library. The Footman's perfectly respectful tone implied a
• 1:28:15
  reflection on Waythorn's reasonableness. Oh very well, said the latter, resignedly,
• 1:28:20
  and the footman proceeded to open up the folding tea table and set out its
• 1:28:25
  complicated appointments. While this interminable process continued, the three men stood motionless,
• 1:28:31
  watching it with a fascinated stare, till Waythorn to break the sile and said
• 1:28:36
  to Varrick, won't you have a cigar? He held out the case he
• 1:28:41
  had just tended to Haskett, and Varrek helped himself with a smile. Waythorn
• 1:28:45
  looked about for a match, and, finding none, proffered a light from
• 1:28:49
  his own cigar. Haskett, in the background, held his ground mildly,
• 1:28:55
  examining his cigar tip now and then, and stepping forward at the right moment
• 1:28:59
  to Locket's ashes into the fire. The footman, at last withdrew and Varrek
• 1:29:04
  immediately began, if I could just say half a word to you about this
• 1:29:09
  business certainly, stammered Waythorn in the dining room, but as he placed his
• 1:29:15
  hand on the door, it opened from without, and his wife appeared on
• 1:29:18
  the threshold. She came in, fresh and smiling in her street dress and
• 1:29:23
  hat, shedding a fragrance from the bower, which he loosened, and advancing.
• 1:29:28
  Shall we have tea in here, dear? She began, and then
• 1:29:30
  she caught sight of Varrick. Her smile deepened, veiling a slight tremor of
• 1:29:35
  surprise. Why how do you do? She said, with a distinct doubt
• 1:29:40
  of pleasure. As she shook hands with Varrek, she saw Hasket standing behind
• 1:29:45
  him. Her smile faded for a moment, but she recalled it quickly with
• 1:29:48
  a scarcely perceptible side glance at Wythorn. How do you do, mister Haskott,
• 1:29:55
  she said, and shook hands with him, a shade less cordially.
• 1:30:00
  The three men stood awkwardly before her till Varrek, always the most self possessed,
• 1:30:04
  dashed into an explanatory phrase. We I had to see Waythorn a minute
• 1:30:11
  on business, he stammered. Brick read from chin to nape. Haskett stepped
• 1:30:15
  forward with his air of mild obstinacy. I'm sorry to intrude, but you
• 1:30:20
  appointed five o'clock, and he directed his resigned glance at the time piece on
• 1:30:26
  the mantel. She swept aside their embarrassment with a charming gesture of hospitality.
• 1:30:33
  I'm so sorry, I'm always late, but the afternoon was so lovely.
• 1:30:38
  She stood, drawing off her gloves, propitiatory and graceful, diffusing about her
• 1:30:43
  a sense of ease and familiarity in which the situation lost its grotesqueness. But
• 1:30:48
  before talking business, she added, brightly, I'm sure everyone wants a cup
• 1:30:53
  of tea. She dropped into her low chair by the tea table, and
• 1:30:58
  the two visitors, as if drawn by her smile, advanced to receive the
• 1:31:02
  cups she held out. She glanced about for Waythorn, and he took the
• 1:31:08
  third cup with a laugh. End of Chapter two, the other two Chapter
• 1:31:15
  three expiation, I can never said, missus featherell hear the bell ring without
• 1:31:20
  a shudder her unruffled aspect. She was the kind of woman whose emotions never
• 1:31:27
  communicate themselves to her clothes and the conventional background of the New York drawing room,
• 1:31:32
  with its pervading implication of an imminent tea tray, and of an atmosphere
• 1:31:36
  in which the social functions have become purely reflex lent to her declaration, a
• 1:31:42
  relief not lost on her cousin, Missus Clinch, who from the other side
• 1:31:46
  of the fireplace, agreed with a glance at the clock that it was the
• 1:31:50
  hour for boars bores, cried Missus Featherell impatiently. If I shud it at
• 1:31:57
  them, I should have a chronic egew. She leaned forward and laid a
• 1:32:00
  sparkling finger on her cousin's shabby black knee. I mean the newspaper clippings,
• 1:32:06
  she whispered. Missus Clinch returned a glance of intelligence. They've begun already,
• 1:32:14
  not yet, but they're sure to now at any minute, my publisher tells
• 1:32:16
  me. Missus Featherell's look of apprehension sat oddly on her small features, which
• 1:32:23
  had an air of neat symmetry, somehow suggestive of being set in order every
• 1:32:29
  morning by the housemaid some one. There were rumors that it was her cousin
• 1:32:33
  had once said that Paula Featherell would have been very pretty if she hadn't looked
• 1:32:38
  so like a moral axiom in a copy book hand. Missus Clinch received her
• 1:32:44
  confidence with a smile. Well, she said, I suppose you were prepared
• 1:32:48
  for the consequences of authorship. Missus Featherell blushed brightly. It isn't their coming,
• 1:32:56
  she owned, It's there coming now now, the bishops in town.
• 1:33:01
  Missus Clinch leaned back and shaped her lips to a whistle, which deflected in
• 1:33:06
  a laugh. Well, she said, you see, Missus Featherell triumphed.
• 1:33:13
  Well, weren't you prepared for the bishop? Not now? At least I
• 1:33:16
  hadn't thought of his seeing the clippings, and why should he see them?
• 1:33:21
  Bella, won't you understand? It's John, John who has taken the most
• 1:33:28
  unexpected tone, one might almost say, out of perversity. Oh perversity,
• 1:33:33
  Missus Clinch murmured, observing her cousin between lids wrinkled by amusement. What tone
• 1:33:40
  has John taken? Missus Featherell threw out her answer with the desperate gesture of
• 1:33:45
  a woman who lays bare the traces of a marital fist. The tone of
• 1:33:50
  being proud of my book. The measure of Missus Clinch's enjoyment overflowed in laughter.
• 1:33:58
  Oh you may laugh, Missus Feathers insisted, But it's no joke to
• 1:34:01
  me. In the first place. John's liking the book is so so,
• 1:34:05
  such a false note. It puts me in such a ridiculous position. And
• 1:34:10
  then it has set him watching for the reviews. Who would ever have suspected
• 1:34:15
  John of knowing that books were reviewed? Why he's actually found out about the
• 1:34:18
  clipping bureau. And whenever the postman rings, I hear John rush out of
• 1:34:24
  the library to see if there are any yellow envelopes. Of course, when
• 1:34:28
  they do come, he'll bring them into the drawing room and read them aloud
• 1:34:30
  to everybody who happens to be here, And the Bishop is sure to happen
• 1:34:35
  to be here. Missus Clinch repressed her amusement. The picture you draw is
• 1:34:42
  a lured one, she conceded. But your modesty strikes me as abnormal,
• 1:34:46
  especially in an author. The chances are that some of the clippings will be
• 1:34:50
  rather pleasant reading. The critics are not all union men, Missus Featherwell stared
• 1:34:57
  union men well, I mean, they don't all belonged to the well known
• 1:35:00
  Society for the Persecution of Rising Authors. Some of them have even been known
• 1:35:05
  to defy its regulations and say a good word for a new writer. Oh
• 1:35:11
  I dare say, said Missus Fetherel, with a laugh, her cousin's epigram
• 1:35:15
  exacted. But you don't quite see my point. I'm not at all nervous
• 1:35:18
  about the success of my book. My publisher tells me I have no need
• 1:35:23
  to be, but I am afraid of its being a succeed escondal mercy,
• 1:35:29
  said Missus Clinch, sitting up. The butler and footman at this moment appeared
• 1:35:33
  with the tea tray, and when they had withdrawn, Missus Fetherell, bending
• 1:35:39
  her brightly rippled head above the kettle, continued in a murmur of a vowal.
• 1:35:44
  The title even is a kind of challenge, fast and loose, Missus
• 1:35:49
  Clinch mused, yes, it ought to take. I didn't choose it for
• 1:35:54
  that reason, the author protested, I should have preferred something quieter, less
• 1:35:59
  pronounced, but I was determined not to shirk the responsibility of what I had
• 1:36:02
  written. I want people to know beforehand exactly what kind of a book they
• 1:36:08
  are buying. Well, said Missus Clinch. That's the degree of conscientiousness that
• 1:36:14
  I've never met with before. So few books fulfilled the promise of their titles
• 1:36:18
  that experienced readers never expect the fair to come up to the menu fast and
• 1:36:24
  loose. Will be no disappointment on that score. Her cousin significantly returned,
• 1:36:29
  I've handled the subject without gloves. I've called a spade a spade. Oh,
• 1:36:34
  you simply make my mouth water. And to think I haven't been able
• 1:36:38
  to read it yet because every spare minute of my time has been given to
• 1:36:42
  correcting the proofs of how the Birds Keep Christmas. There's an instance of the
• 1:36:46
  hardships of an author's life. Missus Featherwell's eye clouded. Don't choke Bella,
• 1:36:54
  please, I suppose to experienced authors there's always something absurd in the nervousness of
• 1:36:59
  a new writer. But in my case, so much is at stake.
• 1:37:02
  I put so much of myself into this book, and I'm so afraid of
• 1:37:06
  being misunderstood, of being, as it were, in advance of my time,
• 1:37:12
  like poor Flobeil. I know you'll think me ridiculous, And if only
• 1:37:16
  my own reputation were at stake, I should never give it a thought.
• 1:37:20
  But the idea of dragging John's name through the mire. Missus Clinch, who
• 1:37:26
  had risen and gathered her cloak about her, stood, surveying from her genial
• 1:37:30
  height her cousin's agitated countenance. Why did you use John's name? Then that's
• 1:37:38
  another of my difficulties I had to There would have been no merit in publishing
• 1:37:43
  such a book under an assumed name. It would have been an act of
• 1:37:46
  moral cowardice. Fast and Loose is not an ordinary novel. A writer who
• 1:37:53
  dares to show up the hollowness of social conventions must have the courage of her
• 1:37:57
  convictions and be willing to accept the consequences of defying society. Can you imagine
• 1:38:02
  ibsen or tall Story writing under a false name. Missus Featherell lifted a tragic
• 1:38:09
  eye to her cousin. You don't know, Bella, how often I've envied
• 1:38:13
  you since I began to write. I used to wonder sometimes you won't find
• 1:38:16
  my saying. So, why with all your cleverness you hadn't taken up some
• 1:38:21
  more exciting subject than natural history? But I see now how wise you were.
• 1:38:28
  Whatever happens, you will never be denounced by the press. Is that
• 1:38:32
  what you are afraid of? Asked Missus Clinch as she grasped the bulging umbrella,
• 1:38:38
  which rested against her chair. My dear, if I ever had the
• 1:38:42
  good luck to be denounced by the press, my broom would be waiting at
• 1:38:45
  the door for me at this very moment. And I shouldn't have to ruin
• 1:38:48
  this umbrella by using it in the rain? Why you innocent? If I'd
• 1:38:53
  ever felt the slightest aptitude for showing up social conventions, you suppose I should
• 1:38:59
  waste my time writing nests ajar and how to Smell the Flowers. There's a
• 1:39:04
  fairly steady demand for pseudo science and colloquial ornithology, but it's nothing, simply
• 1:39:11
  nothing to the ravenous call for attacks on social institutions, especially by those inside
• 1:39:17
  the institutions. There was often, to her cousin, a lack of taste
• 1:39:23
  in Missus Clinch's pleasantries, and on this occasion they seem more than usually irrelevant.
• 1:39:30
  Fast and Loose was not written with the idea of a large sale.
• 1:39:33
  Missus Clinch was unperturbed. Perhaps that's just as well. She returned with the
• 1:39:39
  philosophic shrug. The surprise will be all the pleasanter I mean, for of
• 1:39:44
  course it's going to sell tremendously especially if you can get the press to announce
• 1:39:48
  it. Bella, how can you? I sometimes think you say such things
• 1:39:53
  expressly to tease me, And yet I should think you, of all women,
• 1:39:58
  would understand my purpose in writing so book. It has always seemed to
• 1:40:01
  me that the message I had to deliver was not for myself alone, but
• 1:40:05
  for all the other women in the world who have felt the hollowness of our
• 1:40:10
  social shams, the ignominy of bowing down to the idols of the market,
• 1:40:15
  but have lacked either the courage or the power to proclaim their independence. And
• 1:40:19
  I have fancied, Beladeir, that, however severely society might punish me for
• 1:40:25
  revealing its weaknesses, I could count on the sympathy of those who like you.
• 1:40:30
  Missus Featherwell's voice sank have passed through the deep waters. Missus Clinch gave
• 1:40:36
  herself a kind of canine shake, as though to free her ample shoulders from
• 1:40:42
  any drop of the element she was supposed to have traversed. Oh cold of
• 1:40:47
  muddy rather than deep she returned. And you'll find, my dear, that
• 1:40:51
  women who've had any waiting to do are rather shy of stirring up mud.
• 1:40:56
  It sticks, especially on white clothes. Missus Featherell lifted an undaunted brow.
• 1:41:02
  I'm not afraid, she proclaimed, and at the same instant she dropped her
• 1:41:06
  tea spoon with a clatter and shrank back into her seat. There's the bell,
• 1:41:12
  she exclaimed, and I know it's the bishop. It was, in
• 1:41:15
  fact, the Bishop of Osening, who, impressively announced by Missus Featherell's butler,
• 1:41:21
  now made an entry that may best be described as not inadequate to the
• 1:41:26
  expectations the announcement raised. The bishop always entered a room well, but when
• 1:41:31
  unannounced or preceded by a low church butler who gave him his surname, his
• 1:41:38
  appearance lacked the impressiveness conferred on it by the due specification of his diosus and
• 1:41:44
  dignity. The bishop was very fond of his niece, Missus Featherell, and
• 1:41:48
  one of the traits he most valued in her was the possession of a butler
• 1:41:53
  who knew how to announce the bishop. Missus Clinch was also his niece,
• 1:41:59
  but aside from the fact that she possessed no butler at all, she had
• 1:42:02
  laid herself open to her uncle's criticism by writing insignificant little books which had a
• 1:42:09
  way of going into five or ten editions, while the fruits of his own
• 1:42:13
  episcopal leisure, The Wail of Jonah twenty cantos in blank verse and through a
• 1:42:18
  glass brightly, or how to raise funds for a memorial Window inexplicably languished on
• 1:42:26
  the back shelves of a publisher noted for his dexterity in pushing devotional goods.
• 1:42:32
  Even this indiscretion, the Bishop might, however, have condoned, had his
• 1:42:36
  niece thought fit to turn to him for support and advice at the painful juncture
• 1:42:42
  of her history, when, in her own words, it became necessary for
• 1:42:46
  her to invite mister Clinch to look out for another situation. Mister Clinch's misconduct
• 1:42:54
  was of the kind especially designed by Providence to test the fortitude of a crist
• 1:43:00
  wife and mother, and the Bishop was absolutely distended with seasonable advice and edification,
• 1:43:06
  so that when Bella met his tentative exhortations with the curt remark that she
• 1:43:12
  preferred to do her own house cleaning unassisted, her uncle's grief at her ingratitude
• 1:43:17
  was not untempered with sympathy for mister Clinch. It is not surprising therefore that
• 1:43:24
  the Bishop's warmest greetings were always reserved for Missus Featherell, And on this occasion
• 1:43:30
  Missus Clinch thought she detected in the salutation which fell to her share a pronounced
• 1:43:35
  suggestion that her own presence was superfluous, a hint which she took with her
• 1:43:41
  usual imperturbable good humor. Section two. Left alone with the Bishop, Missus
• 1:43:48
  Featherell sought the nearest refuge from conversation by offering him a cup of tea.
• 1:43:54
  The Bishop accepted, with the preoccupied air of a man to whom, for
• 1:43:58
  the moment tea is. But as a boarded an incident, Missus Featherell's nervousness
• 1:44:02
  increased, and, knowing that the surest way of distracting attention from one's own
• 1:44:08
  affairs is to an affect an interest in those of one's companion, she hastily
• 1:44:13
  asked if her uncle had come to town on business. On business, Yes,
• 1:44:16
  said the Bishop, in an impressive tone. I have to see my
• 1:44:20
  publisher, who has been behaving rather unsatisfactorily in regard to my last book.
• 1:44:27
  Ah, your last book, faltered Missus Featherell, with a sickening sense of
• 1:44:30
  her inability to recall the name or nature of the work in question, and
• 1:44:35
  a mental vow never again to be caught in such ignorance of a colleague's productions.
• 1:44:42
  Through a glass Brightly, the bishop explained, with an emphasis which revealed
• 1:44:46
  his detection of her predicament. You may remember that I sent you a copy
• 1:44:50
  last Christmas. Of course I do, Missus Featherell brightened. It was that
• 1:44:56
  delightful story of the poor consumptive girl who had no money and two little brothers
• 1:45:00
  to support sisters, idiot sisters, the bishop gloomily corrected, I mean sisters,
• 1:45:08
  and who managed to collect money enough to put up a beautiful memorial window
• 1:45:13
  to her grandfather, whom she had never seen, but whose sermons had been
• 1:45:17
  her chief consolation and support during her long struggle with poverty and disease. The
• 1:45:24
  Bishop gave the satisfied sigh of the workman who reviews his completed task. A
• 1:45:30
  touching subject, surely, and I believe I did a justice at least,
• 1:45:33
  so my friends assured me. Why, yes, I remember there was a
• 1:45:38
  splendid review of it in the rear doss cried Missus Fetherell, moved by the
• 1:45:43
  incipient instinct of reciprocity. Yes, by my dear friend, Missus Gollinger,
• 1:45:48
  whose husband, the late Dean Gollinger, was under very particular obligations to me.
• 1:45:55
  Missus Gollinger is a woman of rare literary acumen, and her praise of
• 1:45:59
  my book was unqualified. But the public once more highly seasoned fare, and
• 1:46:03
  the approval of a thoughtful churchwoman carries less weight than the sensational comments of an
• 1:46:10
  illiterate journalist. The bishop let a meditative eye on his spotless gaters. At
• 1:46:16
  the risk of horrifying you, my dear, he added, with a slight
• 1:46:19
  laugh, I will confide to you that my best chance of a popular success
• 1:46:24
  would be to have my book denounced by the press. Denounced, gasped Missus
• 1:46:30
  Featherell, on what ground, On the ground of immorality, the Bishop evaded
• 1:46:35
  her startled gaze. Such a thing is inconceivable to you, of course,
• 1:46:40
  But I am only repeating what my publisher tells me. If, for instance,
• 1:46:44
  a critic could be induced. I mean, if a critic were to
• 1:46:47
  be found who called in question the morality of my heroine in sacrificing her own
• 1:46:53
  health and that of her idiot sisters in order to put up a memorial window
• 1:46:57
  to her grandfather. It would probably raise a general controversy in the newspapers,
• 1:47:02
  and I might count on the sale of ten to fifteen thousand within the next
• 1:47:05
  year. If he described her as morbid or decadent, it might even run
• 1:47:11
  to twenty thousand. But that is more than I permit myself to hope.
• 1:47:15
  In fact, I should be satisfied with any general charge of immorality. The
• 1:47:19
  bishop sighed again, I need hardly tell you that I am actuated by no
• 1:47:25
  mere literary ambition. Those whose opinion I most value have assured me that the
• 1:47:30
  book is not without merit. But though it does not become me to dispute
• 1:47:33
  their verdict, I can truly say that my vanity as an author is not
• 1:47:39
  at stake. I have, however, a special reason for wishing to increase
• 1:47:43
  the circulation of through a glass. Brightly, it was written for a purpose,
• 1:47:48
  a purpose I have greatly at heart, I know, cried his niece
• 1:47:53
  sympathetically. The chantry window is still empty, alas, and I had great
• 1:47:59
  hopes that, under providence, my little book might be the means of filling
• 1:48:02
  it. All our wealthy parishioners have given lavishly to the cathedral. And it
• 1:48:08
  was for this reason that, in writing through a glass, I addressed my
• 1:48:12
  appeal more especially to the less well endowed, hoping by the example of my
• 1:48:16
  heroine, to stimulate the collection of small sums throughout the entire diocese, and
• 1:48:23
  perhaps beyond it. I am sure. The Bishop feelingly concluded the book would
• 1:48:28
  have a widespread influence if people could only be induced to read it. His
• 1:48:33
  conclusion touched a fresh thread of association in Missus Featherell's vibrating nerve centers. I
• 1:48:40
  never thought of that, she cried. The Bishop looked at her, inquiringly.
• 1:48:45
  That one's books may not be read at all, How dreadful, she
• 1:48:48
  exclaimed. He smiled faintly. I had not forgotten that I was addressing an
• 1:48:54
  authoress, he said. Indeed, I should not have dared to inflict my
• 1:48:58
  troubles on any one of the craft. Missus Featherell was quivering with the consciousness
• 1:49:03
  of her involuntary self betrayal. Oh, uncle, she murmured. In fact,
• 1:49:10
  the bishop continued with a gesture which seemed to brush away her scruples.
• 1:49:14
  I came here partly to speak to you about your novel, Fast and Loose
• 1:49:18
  I think you call it, Missus Featherell blushed assentingly. And is it out
• 1:49:24
  yet, the bishop continued, It came out about a week ago, but
• 1:49:28
  you haven't touched your tea, and it must be quite cold. Let me
• 1:49:30
  give you another cup. My reason for asking, the bishop went on,
• 1:49:36
  with the bland inexorableness with which in his younger days he had been known to
• 1:49:42
  continue a sermon after the senior warden had looked four times at his watch.
• 1:49:46
  My reason for asking is that I hoped I might not be too late to
• 1:49:50
  induce you to change the title. Missus Featherell set down the cup she had
• 1:49:57
  filled. The title she faltered. The Bishop raised a reassuring hand. Don't
• 1:50:02
  misunderstand me, dear child. Don't for a moment imagine that I take it
• 1:50:06
  to be in any way indicative of the contents of the book. I know
• 1:50:11
  you too well for that. My first idea was that it had probably been
• 1:50:15
  forced on you by an unscrupulous publisher. I know too well to what ignoble
• 1:50:20
  compromises one may be driven in such cases. He paused, as though to
• 1:50:26
  give her the opportunity of confirming this conjecture, but she preserved an apprehensive silence,
• 1:50:31
  and he went on, as though taking up the second point in his
• 1:50:34
  sermon. Or again, the name may have taken your fancy without your realizing
• 1:50:40
  all that it implies to minds more alive than yours, to offensive innuendos.
• 1:50:45
  It is ah excessively suggestive, and I hope I am not too late to
• 1:50:50
  warn you of the false impression it is likely to produce on the very readers
• 1:50:56
  whose approbation you would most value. My friend missus Asgollinger, for instance,
• 1:51:01
  Missus featherell, As, the publication of her novel testified, was in theory
• 1:51:06
  a woman of independent views, and if in practice she sometimes failed to live
• 1:51:11
  up to her standard, it was rather from an irresistible tendency to adapt herself
• 1:51:15
  to her environment than from any conscious lack of moral courage. The bishop's exordium
• 1:51:21
  had excited in her that sense of opposition which such admonitions are apt to provoke.
• 1:51:27
  But as he went on, she felt herself gradually enclosed in an atmosphere
• 1:51:31
  in which her theories vainly gasped for breath. The bishop had the immense dialectical
• 1:51:36
  advantage of invalidating any conclusions at variance with his own by always assuming that his
• 1:51:44
  premises were among the necessary laws of thought. This method, combined with the
• 1:51:49
  habit of ignoring any classifications but his own, created an element in which the
• 1:51:55
  first condition of existence was the immediate adoption of his standpoint, so that his
• 1:52:00
  niece, as she listened, seemed to feel Missus Gollinger's mechlin cap spreading its
• 1:52:05
  conventual shadow over her rebellious brow, and the ruvet de paris at her elbow
• 1:52:12
  turning into a copy of the rear Adoss. She had meant to assure her
• 1:52:15
  uncle that she was quite aware of the significance of the title she had chosen,
• 1:52:20
  that it had been deliberately selected as indicating the subject of her novel,
• 1:52:25
  and that the book itself had been written in direct defiance of the class of
• 1:52:29
  readers for whose susceptibility she was alarmed. The words were almost on her lips
• 1:52:34
  when the irresistible suggestion conveyed by the bishop's tone and language deflected them into the
• 1:52:41
  apologetic murmur, oh, uncle, you mustn't think. I never meant.
• 1:52:45
  How much farther this current of reaction might have carried her, the historian is
• 1:52:49
  unable to compute, for at this point, the door opened and her husband
• 1:52:55
  entered the room. The first review of your book, he cried, flourishing
• 1:53:00
  yellow envelope, My dear bishop, how lucky you are here. Though the
• 1:53:04
  trials of married life have been classified and cataloged with exhaustive accuracy, there is
• 1:53:11
  one form of conjugal misery which has perhaps received inadequate attention, and that is
• 1:53:15
  the suffering of the versatile woman whose husband is not equally adapted to all her
• 1:53:20
  moods. Every woman feels for the sister who is compelled to wear a bonnet
• 1:53:26
  which does not go with her gown. But how much sympathy is given to
• 1:53:30
  her whose husband refuses to harmonize with the pose of the moment. Scant justice
• 1:53:35
  has for instance been done to the misunderstood wife whose husband persists in understanding her,
• 1:53:42
  to the submissive helpmate whose taskmaster shuns every opportunity of browbeating her, and
• 1:53:47
  to the generous and impulsive being whose bills are paid with philosophic calm. Missus
• 1:53:54
  featherell as wives go had been fairly exempt from trials of this nature. For
• 1:54:00
  her husband, if undistinguished by pronounced brutality or indifference, had at least the
• 1:54:04
  negative merit of being her intellectual inferior. Landscape gardeners who are aware of the
• 1:54:12
  usefulness of a valley in emphasizing the height of a hill can form an idea
• 1:54:15
  of the account to which an accomplished woman may turn such deficiencies, And it
• 1:54:20
  needs scarcely be said that missus Featherell had made the most of her opportunities.
• 1:54:26
  It was agreeably obvious to every one Featheral included that he was not the man
• 1:54:30
  to appreciate such a woman. But there are no limits to man's perversity,
• 1:54:35
  and he did his best to invalidate this advantage by admiring her without pretending to
• 1:54:41
  understand her. What she most suffered from was this fatuous approval, this maddening
• 1:54:46
  sense that, however she conducted herself, he would always admire her. Had
• 1:54:51
  he belonged to the class whose conversational supplies a drawn from the domestic circle,
• 1:54:58
  his wife's name would never have been off He his lips, and to Missus
• 1:55:00
  Featherwell's sensitive perceptions, his frequent silences were indicative of the fact that she was
• 1:55:06
  his one topic. It was in part the attempt to escape this persistent approbation
• 1:55:14
  that had driven Missus Featherwell to authorship. She had fancied that even the most
• 1:55:17
  infatuated husband might be counted on to resent, at least negatively an attack on
• 1:55:24
  the sanctity of the hearth, and her anticipations were heightened by a sense of
• 1:55:29
  the unpardonableness of her act. Missus Featherwell's relations with her husband were in fact
• 1:55:33
  complicated by an irrepressible tendency to be fond of him, and there was a
• 1:55:39
  certain pleasure in the prospect of a situation that justified the most explicit expiation these
• 1:55:45
  hopes. Featheral's attitude had already defeated. He read the book with enthusiasm,
• 1:55:50
  He pressed it on his friends, he sent a copy to his mother,
• 1:55:54
  and his very soul now hung on the verdict of the reviewers. It was
• 1:55:58
  perhaps this proof of his general ineptitude that made his wife doubly alive to his
• 1:56:02
  special defects, so that his inopportune entrance was aggravated by the very sound of
• 1:56:09
  his voice and the hopeless aberration of his smile. Nothing, to the observant
• 1:56:14
  is more indicative of a man's character and circumstances than his way of entering a
• 1:56:19
  room. The Bishop of Ostening, for instance, brought with him not only
• 1:56:24
  an atmosphere of episcopal authority, but an implied opinion on the verbal inspiration of
• 1:56:30
  the scriptures and on the attitude of the church toward divorce. While the appearance
• 1:56:34
  of Missus Featherwell's husband produced an immediate impression of domestic felicity, his mere aspect
• 1:56:42
  implied that there was a well filled nursery upstairs, that this wife, if
• 1:56:46
  she did not sow on his buttons, at least superintended the performance of that
• 1:56:51
  task. That they both went to church regularly, That they dined with his
• 1:56:56
  mother every Sunday evening punctually at seven a clock. All this and more was
• 1:57:01
  expressed in the affectionate gesture with which he now raised the yellow envelope above Missus
• 1:57:08
  Featherell's clutch, And, knowing the uselessness of begging him not to be silly,
• 1:57:12
  she said, with a dry despair, you're boring the bishop horribly.
• 1:57:16
  Featherwell turned a radiant eye on that dignitary. She bores us all horribly,
• 1:57:21
  doesn't she, sir? He exulted. Have you read it? Said his
• 1:57:26
  wife, uncontrollably read it? Of course not, It's just this minute.
• 1:57:30
  Come, I say, Bishop, you're not going not till I've read this,
• 1:57:33
  said the bishop, settling himself in his chair with an indulgent smile.
• 1:57:39
  His niece glanced at him despairingly. Don't let John's nonsense detain you, she
• 1:57:45
  entreated, detain him. That's good, guphored Featherell. It isn't as long
• 1:57:49
  as one of his sermons won't take me five minutes to read. Here,
• 1:57:53
  listen to this, ladies and gentlemen. In this age of festering pessimism and
• 1:57:58
  decadent depravity, it is no surprise to the nauseated reviewer to open one more
• 1:58:03
  volume saturated with the fetid emanations of the sewer. Featherell, who was not
• 1:58:10
  in the habit of reading aloud, paused with a gasp, and the bishop
• 1:58:14
  glanced sharply at his niece, who kept her gaze fixed on the tea cup
• 1:58:18
  she had not yet succeeded in transferring to his hand of the sewer. Her
• 1:58:24
  husband resumed. But his wonder is proportionately great when he lights on a novel
• 1:58:29
  as sweetly inoffensive as Paul of Featherell's Fast and Loose Missus Featherell, is we
• 1:58:34
  believe a new hand at fiction, and her work reveals frequent traces of inexperience,
• 1:58:41
  but these are more than atoned for by her pure, fresh view of
• 1:58:45
  life and her altogether unfashionable regard for the reader's moral susceptibilities. Let no one
• 1:58:51
  be induced by its distinctly misleading title to forego the enjoyment of this pleasant picture
• 1:58:59
  of domestic life, life, which, in spite of a total lack of
• 1:59:02
  force and character drawing, and of consecutiveness an incident, may be described as
• 1:59:08
  a distinctly pretty story. Section three. It was several weeks later that Missus
• 1:59:16
  Clinch once more brought the plebeian aroma of heated tram cars and muddy street crossings
• 1:59:23
  into the vile scented atmosphere of her cousin's drawing room. Well, she said,
• 1:59:29
  tossing a damp bundle of proof into the corner of a silk cushioned belgier.
• 1:59:33
  I've read it at last, and I'm not so awfully shocked. Missus
• 1:59:38
  Featherell, who sat near the fire with her head propped on the languid hand,
• 1:59:42
  looked up without speaking. Mercy Paula said her visitor, you're ill.
• 1:59:47
  Missus Featherell shook her head. I was never better, she said mournfully.
• 1:59:53
  Then may I help myself to tea? Thanks? Missus Clinch carefully removed her
• 1:59:58
  mended glove before taking a buttered tea cake. Then she glanced again at her
• 2:00:02
  cousin. It's not what I said just now, she ventured, just now
• 2:00:09
  about fast and loose. I came to talk it over. Missus Featherell sprang
• 2:00:14
  to her feet. I never, she cried, dramatically. Want to hear
• 2:00:17
  it mentioned again, Paula, exclaimed Missus Clinch. Setting down her cup.
• 2:00:24
  Missus Featherell slowly turned on her an eye brimming with the incommunicable. Then dropping
• 2:00:30
  into her seat again, she added, with a tragic laugh, there's nothing
• 2:00:34
  left to say. Nothing faltered Missus Clinch, longing for another tea cake,
• 2:00:41
  but feeling the inappropriateness of the impulse in an atmosphere so charged with the portettis
• 2:00:47
  Do you mean that everything has been said? She looked tentatively at her cousin.
• 2:00:51
  Haven't they been nice? They've been odious, odious, Missus Featherell burst
• 2:00:57
  out, with an ineffectual clutch at her hand handkerchief. It's been perfectly intolerable,
• 2:01:02
  Missus Clinch. Philosophically resigning herself to the propriety of taking no more Tea
• 2:01:09
  crossed over to her cousin and laid his sympathizing hand on that lady's agitated shoulder.
• 2:01:15
  It is a bore at first, she conceded, but you'll be surprised
• 2:01:18
  to see how soon one gets used to it. I shall never get used
• 2:01:24
  to it, Missus Featherell brokenly declared. Have they been so very nasty?
• 2:01:30
  All of them? Every one of them? The novelist sobbed. I'm so
• 2:01:35
  sorry, dear. It does hurt, I know, but hadn't you rather
• 2:01:39
  expected it? Expected it? Cried Missus Featherell. Sitting up. Missus Clinch
• 2:01:45
  felt her way wearily. I only mean, dear, that I fancied,
• 2:01:48
  from what you said before the book came out, that you rather expected that
• 2:01:53
  you'd rather discounted. They are recommending it to everybody as a perfectly harmless story.
• 2:02:00
  Gracious is that what they've done? Missus Featherell speechlessly nodded. Every one
• 2:02:05
  of them? Every one, whew, said Missus Clinch with an incipient whistle.
• 2:02:13
  Why you've just said it yourself. Her cousin suddenly reproached her, said,
• 2:02:17
  what that you weren't so awfully shocked. I oh, well, you
• 2:02:24
  see, you'd keep me up to such a pitch that it wasn't quite as
• 2:02:27
  bad as I expected. Missus Fetherell lifted a smile, stealed for the worst.
• 2:02:32
  Why not say at once? She suggested that it's a distinctly pretty story.
• 2:02:39
  They haven't said that. They've all said it, my poor Paula,
• 2:02:45
  even the bishop. The bishop called it a pretty story, he wrote me,
• 2:02:49
  I've his letter somewhere. The title rather scared him. He wanted me
• 2:02:54
  to change it. But when he'd read the book, he wrote that it
• 2:02:57
  was all right, and that he'd send several copies to his friends. The
• 2:03:00
  old hypocrite, cried Missus Clinch. That was nothing but professional jealousy. Do
• 2:03:06
  you think so, cried her cousin Brightening, Sure of it, my dear,
• 2:03:12
  His own books don't sell, and he knew the quickest way to kill
• 2:03:15
  yours was to distribute it through the diocese with his blessing. Then you don't
• 2:03:20
  really think it's a pretty story, dear me. No, not nearly as
• 2:03:25
  bad as that. You're so good, Bella. But the reviewers, oh,
• 2:03:30
  the reviewers, Missus Clinch jeered. She gazed meditatively at the cold remains
• 2:03:35
  of her tea cake. Let me see, she said, suddenly, do
• 2:03:39
  you happen to remember if the first review came out in an important paper.
• 2:03:44
  Yes, the Radiator, that's it, I thought so. Then the others
• 2:03:47
  simply followed suit. They often do it. If a big paper sets the
• 2:03:50
  pace, saves a lot of trouble. Now, if you could only have
• 2:03:55
  got the radiator to denounce you, that's what the bishop said, cried Missus
• 2:04:00
  Featherell. He did, He said. His only chance of selling through a
• 2:04:04
  glass brightly was to have it denounced on the ground of immorality. Hum said
• 2:04:11
  Missus Clinch. I thought he knew a trick or two. She turned an
• 2:04:15
  illuminated eye on her cousin. You ought to get him to denounce fast and
• 2:04:19
  loose, she cried. Missus Featherell looked at her suspiciously. I suppose every
• 2:04:25
  book must stand or fall on his own merits, she said, in an
• 2:04:29
  unconvinced tone. Bosh, that view is as extinct as the post chaise and
• 2:04:34
  the packet ship. It belongs to the time when people read books. Nobody
• 2:04:39
  does that now. The reviewer was the first to set the example, and
• 2:04:43
  the public were only too thankful to follow it. At first they read the
• 2:04:46
  reviews. Now they read only the publisher's extracts from them. Even these are
• 2:04:51
  being rapidly replaced by paragraphs borrowed from the vocabulary of commerce. I often have
• 2:04:58
  to look twice before I I am sure if I am reading a department store
• 2:05:01
  advertisement or the announcement of a new batch of literature. The publishers will soon
• 2:05:06
  be having their fall and spring openings, and their special importations for horse show
• 2:05:14
  week. But the bishop is right, of course, nothing helps a book
• 2:05:17
  like a rousing attack on his morrels. And as the publishers can't exactly proclaim
• 2:05:21
  the impropriety of their own wares, the task has to be left to the
• 2:05:26
  press or the pulpit. The pulpit, Missus Featherell mused, why yes,
• 2:05:31
  look at those two novels in England last year. Missus Featherell shook her head
• 2:05:36
  hopelessly. There is so much more interest in literature in England than here.
• 2:05:42
  Well, we've got to make the supply, create the demand. The bishop
• 2:05:45
  could run your novel up into the hundred thousands in no time. But if
• 2:05:50
  he can't make his own cell, my dear a man can't very well preach
• 2:05:55
  against his own writings. Missus Clinch rose and picked up her proofs. I'm
• 2:06:00
  awfully sorry for you, paul A, dear, she concluded, but I
• 2:06:04
  can't help being thankful that there's no demand for pessimism in the field of natural
• 2:06:10
  history. Fancy having to write the Fall of a sparrow or how Plants misbehave
• 2:06:17
  Section four. Missus Featherell, driving up to the Grand Central Station one morning
• 2:06:23
  about five months later, caught sight of the distinguished novelist Archer Hines, hurrying
• 2:06:29
  into the waiting room ahead of her. Hines on his side, recognizing her,
• 2:06:33
  broom, turned back to greet her as the footman opened the carriage door.
• 2:06:38
  My dear colleague, is it possible that we are traveling together? Missus
• 2:06:43
  Featherell blushed with pleasure. Hines had given her two columns of praise in the
• 2:06:47
  Sunday Meteor, and she had not yet learned to disguise her gratitude. I
• 2:06:53
  am going to ostening, she said, smilingly. So am I why,
• 2:06:58
  this is almost as good as an elopement, and it will end where elopements
• 2:07:02
  ought to in church. In church, you're not going to Austining to go
• 2:07:08
  to church. Why not? There's a special ceremony in the cathedral. The
• 2:07:13
  chantry window is to be unveiled. The chantry window, how picturesque? What
• 2:07:18
  is the chantry and why do you want to see it unveiled? Are you
• 2:07:23
  after copy doing something? In the response manner la catidral eh oh no,
• 2:07:29
  Missus Fetherell hesitated. I'm going simply to please my uncle, she said,
• 2:07:32
  At last, your uncle, the bishop. You know she smiled, the
• 2:07:39
  bishop, the Bishop of Austening. Why wasn't he the chap who made that
• 2:07:43
  ridiculous attack on your book? Is that prehistoric ass your uncle upon my soul.
• 2:07:48
  I think you're mighty forgiving to travel all the way to Austining for one
• 2:07:51
  of his stained glass sociables. Missus Fetherell's smile flowed into a gentle laugh.
• 2:07:59
  Oh, I've never allowed that to interfere with our friendship. My uncle felt
• 2:08:03
  dreadfully about having to speak publicly against my book. It was a great deal
• 2:08:07
  harder for him than for me, but he thought it his duty to do
• 2:08:11
  so. He has the very highest sense of duty. Well, said Hines
• 2:08:16
  with a shrug. I don't know that he didn't do you a good turn.
• 2:08:20
  Look at that. They were standing near the book stall, and he
• 2:08:24
  pointed to a placard surmounting the counter and emblazoned with the conspicuous announcement fast and
• 2:08:31
  Loose New Edition with author's portrait hundred and fifty a thousand. Missus Featherell frowned
• 2:08:37
  impatiently. How absurd They've no right to use my picture as a poster.
• 2:08:43
  There's our train, said Hines, and they began to push their way through
• 2:08:46
  the crowd, surging toward one of the inner doors. As they stood wedged
• 2:08:52
  between circumfer and shoulders, Missus Featherell became conscious with the fixed stare of a
• 2:08:58
  pretty girl who whishispered eagerly to her companion. Look, myrtle, that's Paula
• 2:09:03
  Featherwell right behind us. I knew her in a minute. Gracious where cried
• 2:09:07
  the other girl, giving her head a twist which swept her gains. Were
• 2:09:11
  plumes across Missus Featherell's face. The first speaker's words had carried beyond her companion's
• 2:09:18
  ear, and a lemon colored woman in spectacles who clutched a copy of the
• 2:09:22
  Journal of Psychology on one drab cotton gloved hand stretched her disengaged hand across the
• 2:09:30
  intervening barrier of humanity? Have I the privilege of addressing the distinguished author of
• 2:09:37
  Fast and Loose? If so, let me thank you in the name of
• 2:09:41
  the Woman's Psychological League of Peoria for your magnificent courage in raising the standard of
• 2:09:46
  revolt against you. Can tell us the rest in the car, said a
• 2:09:50
  fat man, pressing his good humored bulk against the speaker's arm. Missus Featherell,
• 2:09:56
  blushing, embarrassed and happy, slipped into the space ye used by this
• 2:10:00
  displacement, and a few moments later had taken her seat in the train.
• 2:10:05
  One of the ladies at Missus Featherell's approach uttered an exclamation of pleasure and advanced
• 2:10:09
  with outstretched hand. My dear Missus Featherell, I am so delighted to see
• 2:10:15
  you here. May I hope you were going to the unveiling of the chantry
• 2:10:18
  window. The dear Bishop so hoped that you would do so, But perhaps
• 2:10:22
  I ought to introduce myself. I am Missus Gollinger, She lowered her voice
• 2:10:28
  expressively, one of your uncle's oldest friends, who had stood close to her
• 2:10:33
  through all this sad business, and who knows what he suffered when he felt
• 2:10:37
  obliged to sacrifice family affection to the call of duty. Missus Featherell, who
• 2:10:43
  had smiled and colored slightly at the beginning of this speech, received its close
• 2:10:48
  with a deprecating gesture, Oh, pray, don't mention it. She murmured,
• 2:10:52
  I quite understood how my uncle was placed. I bore him no ill
• 2:10:56
  will for feeling obliged to preach against my book. Book. He understood that
• 2:11:01
  and was so touched by it. He has often told me that it was
• 2:11:05
  the hardest task he was ever called upon to perform. And you know,
• 2:11:09
  he quite feels that this unexpected gift of the chantry window is in some way
• 2:11:15
  a return for his courage in preaching that sermon. Missus Featherwell smiled faintly.
• 2:11:22
  Does he feel that, Yes, he really does. When the funds for
• 2:11:26
  the window were so mysteriously placed at his disposal, just as he had begun
• 2:11:30
  to despair embracing them, he assured me that he could not help connecting the
• 2:11:33
  fact with his denunciation of your book, dear uncle, sighed Missus Featherell.
• 2:11:39
  Did he say that? And now continued Missus Gollinger with cumulative rapture. Now
• 2:11:46
  that you were about to show by appearing at the ceremony to day, that
• 2:11:50
  there has been no break in your friendly relations, the dear Bishop's happiness will
• 2:11:54
  be complete. He was so longing to have you come to the unveiling.
• 2:12:00
  He might have counted on me, said Missus Featherell, still smiling. Ah,
• 2:12:03
  that is so beautifully forgiving of you, cried Missus Gollinger enthusiastically. But
• 2:12:09
  then the Bishop has always assured me that your real nature was very different from
• 2:12:13
  that which, if you will pardon my saying, so, seemed to be
• 2:12:18
  revealed by your brilliant but a rather subversive book. If you only knew my
• 2:12:24
  niece, dear Missus Gollinger, he always said you would see that her novel
• 2:12:28
  was written in all innocence of heart. And to tell you the truth,
• 2:12:31
  when I first read the book, I didn't think it so very, very
• 2:12:35
  shocking. It wasn't till the dear Bishop had explained to me. But dear
• 2:12:39
  me, I mustn't take up your time in this way when so many others
• 2:12:43
  are anxious to have a word with you. Missus Featherell glanced at her in
• 2:12:48
  surprise, and Missus Gollinger continued with a playful smile. You forget that your
• 2:12:54
  face is familiar to thousands whom you have never seen. We all recognized you
• 2:12:58
  the moment you had at the train, and my friends here were so eager
• 2:13:01
  to make your acquaintance, even those her smile deepened, who thought the dear
• 2:13:07
  Bishop not quite unjustified in his attack on your remarkable novel. Section five.
• 2:13:16
  A religious light filled the chantry of osten and cathedral, filtering through the linen
• 2:13:20
  curtain which veiled the central window, and mingling with the blaze of tapers on
• 2:13:26
  the richly adorned altar. In this devout atmosphere, agreeably laden with the incense
• 2:13:33
  like aroma of easter lilies and forced lilacs, Missus Featherwell knelt with a sense
• 2:13:37
  of luxurious satisfaction. Beside her sat archer Hindes, who had remembered that there
• 2:13:43
  was to be a church scene in his next novel and that his impressions of
• 2:13:48
  the devotional environment needed refreshing. Missus Featherwell was very happy. She was conscious
• 2:13:54
  that her entrance had sent a thrill through the female devitees who packed the chantry,
• 2:14:00
  and she had humor enough to enjoy the thought that but for the Good
• 2:14:03
  Bishop's denunciation of her book, the heads of his flock would not have been
• 2:14:07
  turned so eagerly in her direction. Moreover, as she had entered, she
• 2:14:13
  had caught sight of a society reporter, and she knew that her presence and
• 2:14:16
  the fact that she was accompanied by Hines would be conspicuously proclaimed in the morning
• 2:14:22
  papers. All these evidences of the success of her handiwork might have turned a
• 2:14:26
  calmer head than Missus Featherwell's, And though she had now learned to dissemble her
• 2:14:31
  gratification, it still filled her inwardly with a delightful glow. The Bishop was
• 2:14:37
  somewhat late in appearing, and she employed the interval in meditating on the plot
• 2:14:41
  of her next novel, which was already partly sketched out, but for which
• 2:14:46
  she had been unable to find a satisfactory denouement by a not uncommon process of
• 2:14:52
  ratiocination. Missus Featherell's success had convinced her of her vocation. She was sure
• 2:14:58
  now that it was her duty to lay bare the secret plague spots of society,
• 2:15:03
  and she was resolved that there should be no doubt as to the purpose
• 2:15:07
  of her new book. Experience had shown her that, where she had fancied
• 2:15:11
  she was calling a spade a spade, she had in fact been alluding in
• 2:15:15
  guarded terms to the drawing room shovel. She was determined not to repeat the
• 2:15:20
  same mistake, and she flattered herself that her coming novel would not need an
• 2:15:24
  episcopal denunciation to ensure its sale. However likely it was to receive this crowning
• 2:15:31
  evidence of success. She had reached this point in her meditations when the choir
• 2:15:37
  burst into song and the ceremony of unveiling began. The Bishop, almost always
• 2:15:43
  felicitous in his addresses to the fair Sex, was never more so than when
• 2:15:48
  he was celebrating the triumph of one of his cherished purposes. There was a
• 2:15:52
  peculiar mixture of Christian humility and Episcopal exultation in the manner with which he called
• 2:15:58
  a tenor to the creator's promptness in responding to his demand for funds, and
• 2:16:05
  he had never been more happily inspired than in eulogizing the mysterious gift of the
• 2:16:09
  chantry window. Though no hint of the donor's identity had been allowed to escape
• 2:16:16
  him, it was generally understood that the Bishop knew who had given the window,
• 2:16:20
  and the congregation awaited, in a flutter of suspense the possible announcement of
• 2:16:24
  an aim. None came. However, though the bishop deliciously titillated the curiosity
• 2:16:31
  of his flock by circling ever closer about the interesting secret, he would not
• 2:16:37
  disguise it from them. He said that the heart which had divined his inmost
• 2:16:41
  wish had been a woman's. Is it not to woman's intuitions that more than
• 2:16:46
  half the happiness of the earth is owing what man is obliged to learn by
• 2:16:52
  the laborious process of experience, woman's wondrous instinct tells her at a glance.
• 2:16:58
  And so it had been with this cherish scheme. This unhoped for completion of
• 2:17:03
  their beautiful chantry so much at least he was allowed to reveal. And indeed,
• 2:17:07
  had he not done so, the window itself would have spoken for him,
• 2:17:11
  since the first glanced at its touching subject, an exquisite design would show
• 2:17:16
  it to have originated in a woman's heart. This tribute to the sex was
• 2:17:22
  received with an audible sigh of contentment, and the bishop, always stimulated by
• 2:17:28
  such evidence of his sway over his hearers, took up his theme with gathering
• 2:17:33
  eloquence. Yes, a woman's heart had planned the gift, a woman's hand
• 2:17:37
  had executed it. And might he add, without too far withdrawing the veil
• 2:17:43
  in which Christian beneficence ever loved to drape its acts, might he add that
• 2:17:48
  under providence, a book, a simple book, a mere tale, in
• 2:17:52
  fact, had had its share in the good work for which they were assembled
• 2:17:56
  to give thanks. At this unexpected announcement, a ripple of excitement ran through
• 2:18:01
  the assemblage, and more than one head was abruptly turned in the direction of
• 2:18:05
  Missus Featherell, who sat listening in an agony of wonder and confusion. It
• 2:18:11
  did not escape the observant novelist at her side that she drew down her veil
• 2:18:16
  to conceal an uncontrollable blush, and this evidence of dismay caused him to fix
• 2:18:22
  an attentive gaze on her, while from her seat across the aisle, Missus
• 2:18:26
  Gollinger sent a smile of unctuous approval. A book, a simple book.
• 2:18:31
  The bishop's voice went on above this flutter of mingled emotions. What is the
• 2:18:37
  book? Only a few pages and a little ink, and yet one of
• 2:18:41
  the mightiest instruments which Providence has devised for shaping the destinies of man, one
• 2:18:46
  of the most powerful influences for good or evil, which the Creator has placed
• 2:18:50
  in the hands of his creatures. The air seemed intolerably close to Missus Featherell,
• 2:18:56
  and she drew out her scent bottle, and then trusted hurriedly away,
• 2:19:01
  conscious that she was still the center of an unenviable attention, and all the
• 2:19:05
  while the bishop's voice droned on. And of all forms of literature, fiction
• 2:19:11
  is doubtless that which has exercised the greatest sway for good or ill over the
• 2:19:16
  passions and imagination of the masses. Yes, my friends, I am the
• 2:19:22
  first to acknowledge it. No sermon, however eloquent, no theological treatise,
• 2:19:26
  however learned and convincing, has ever inflamed the heart and imagination like a novel.
• 2:19:33
  A simple novel, incalculable is the power exercised over humanity by the great
• 2:19:39
  magicians of the pen, a power ever enlarging its boundaries and increasing its responsibilities
• 2:19:46
  as popular education multiplies the number of readers. Yes, it is the novelist's
• 2:19:52
  hand which can pour balm on countless human sufferings or inoculate mankind with the festering
• 2:19:58
  poison of a corrupt imagination. Missus Featherell had turned white, and her eyes
• 2:20:05
  were fixed with a blind stare of anger on the large sleeved figure in the
• 2:20:11
  center of the chancel. And too often, alas it is the poison and
• 2:20:16
  not the balm, which the unscrupulous hand of Genius proffers to its unsuspecting readers.
• 2:20:22
  But my friends, why should I continue? None know better than an
• 2:20:26
  assemblage of Christian women, such as I am now addressing the beneficent or baleful
• 2:20:33
  influences of modern fiction. And so when I say that this beautiful chantry window
• 2:20:37
  of ours owes its existence in part to the romance's pen, the bishop paused,
• 2:20:43
  and, bending forward, seemed to seek a certain face among the countenances
• 2:20:48
  eagerly addressed to his. When I say that this pen which for personal reasons,
• 2:20:54
  it does not become me to celebrate unduly, Missus Featherell, at this
• 2:20:58
  point half rose, pushing back her chair, which scraped loudly over the marble
• 2:21:03
  floor. But Hines involuntarily laid a warning hand on her arm, and she
• 2:21:07
  sank down with a confused murmur about the heat. When I confess that this
• 2:21:13
  pen, which for once at least has proved itself so much mightier than the
• 2:21:16
  sword, is that which was inspired to trace the simple narrative of through a
• 2:21:22
  glass. Brightly, Missus Featherell looked up with a gasp of mingled relief and
• 2:21:26
  anger. When I tell you, my dear friends, that it was your
• 2:21:31
  bishop's own work which first roused the mind of one of his flock to the
• 2:21:35
  crying need of a chantry window, I think you will admit that I am
• 2:21:39
  justified in celebrating the triumphs of the pen, even though it be the modest
• 2:21:45
  instrument which your own bishop wields. The Bishop paused impressively, and a faint
• 2:21:50
  gasp of surprised and disappointment is audible throughout the chantry. Something very different from
• 2:21:56
  this conclusion had been expected, and even Missus Golling's lips curled with a slightly
• 2:22:03
  ironic smile. But Archie Hines's attention was chiefly reserved for Missus Featherell, whose
• 2:22:09
  face had changed with astonishing rapidity, from surprise to annoyance, from annoyance to
• 2:22:15
  relief, and then back again to something very like indignation. The address concluded
• 2:22:22
  the actual ceremony, the unveiling was about to take place, and the attention
• 2:22:26
  of the congregation soon reverted to the chancel, where the choir had grouped themselves
• 2:22:31
  beneath the veiled window, prepared to burst into a chant of praise as the
• 2:22:35
  Bishop drew back the hanging. The moment was an impressive one, and every
• 2:22:41
  eye was fixed on the curtain. Even Hines's gaze strayed to it for a
• 2:22:46
  moment, but soon returned to his neighbor's face. And then he perceived that
• 2:22:50
  Missus Featherell, alone of all the persons present, was not looking at the
• 2:22:54
  window. Her eyes were fixed in an indignant stare on the Bishop. A
• 2:23:00
  flush of anger burned becomingly under her veil, and her hands nervously crumpled the
• 2:23:05
  beautifully printed program of the ceremony. Hines broke into a smile of comprehension.
• 2:23:11
  He glanced at the Bishop and back at the Bishop's niece. Then, as
• 2:23:16
  the episcopal hand was solemnly raised to draw back the curtain, he bent and
• 2:23:20
  whispered in Missus Featherwell's ear, why you gave it yourself, you wonderful woman
• 2:23:26
  of course, you gave it yourself. Missus Featherwell raised her eyes to his
• 2:23:31
  with a start. Her blush deepened and her lips shaped to hasty no.
• 2:23:37
  But the denial was deflected into the indignant murmur It wasn't his silly book that
• 2:23:41
  did it, anyhow. End of Chapter three Expiation, Chapter four, The
• 2:23:50
  Lady's Maid's Bell. It was the autumn after I had the typhoid. I'd
• 2:23:56
  been three months in hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak
• 2:23:58
  and tottery that the two or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage
• 2:24:03
  me. Most of my money was gone, and after I'd board it for
• 2:24:07
  two months hanging about the employment agencies and answering any advertisement that looked any way
• 2:24:13
  respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart. For fretting hadn't made me fatter,
• 2:24:18
  and I didn't see why my luck should ever turn. It did, though,
• 2:24:22
  or I thought so at the time. A Missus Raylton, a friend
• 2:24:26
  of the lady that first brought me out of the States, met me one
• 2:24:30
  day and stopped to speak to me. She was one that had always a
• 2:24:33
  friendly way with her. She asked me what ailed me to look so white?
• 2:24:37
  And when I told her why, Hartly says she, I believe I've
• 2:24:41
  got the very place for you. Come in tomorrow and we'll talk about it.
• 2:24:46
  The next day, when I called, she told me the lady she'd
• 2:24:48
  in mind was a niece of hers, a Missus Brimpton, a youngish lady
• 2:24:52
  but something of an invalid, who lived all the year round at her country
• 2:24:56
  place on the Hudson, owing to not being able to stand the fatigue of
• 2:25:01
  town life. Now, Hartly, Missus Raylton said in that cheery way that
• 2:25:05
  always made me feel things must be going to take a turn for the better.
• 2:25:09
  Now understand me. It's not a cheerful place I'm sending you to.
• 2:25:15
  The house is big and gloomy. My niece is nervous, vaporish. Her
• 2:25:18
  husband well, he's generally away, and the two children are dead. A
• 2:25:22
  year ago I would as soon have thought of shutting a rosy, active girl
• 2:25:26
  like you into a vault. But you're not particularly brisk yourself just now,
• 2:25:31
  are you? And a quiet place with country air and wholesome food in early
• 2:25:35
  hours ought to be the very thing for you. Don't mistake me, she
• 2:25:39
  added, for I suppose I looked a trifle downcast. You may find it
• 2:25:43
  dull, but you won't be unhappy. My niece is an angel. Her
• 2:25:48
  former maid, who died last spring, had been with her twenty years and
• 2:25:52
  worshiped the ground she walked on. She's a kind mistress to all, and
• 2:25:56
  where the mistress's kind, as you know, the servants of Jenny really good
• 2:26:00
  humored, So you'll probably get on well enough with the rest of the household.
• 2:26:05
  And you're the very woman I want for my niece. Quiet, well
• 2:26:09
  mannered, and educated above your station. You read aloud, well, I
• 2:26:13
  think that's a good thing. My niece likes to be read to. She
• 2:26:16
  wants a maid that can be something of a companion. Her last was,
• 2:26:20
  and I can't say how she misses her. It's a lonely life. Well
• 2:26:26
  have you decided why, ma'am, I said, I'm not afraid of solitude.
• 2:26:31
  Well, then go. My niece will take you on my recommendation.
• 2:26:35
  I'll telegraph her at once and you can take the afternoon train. She has
• 2:26:39
  no one to wait on her at present, and I don't want you to
• 2:26:43
  lose any time. I was ready enough to start, yet something in me
• 2:26:46
  hung back, And to gain time, I asked and the gentleman, ma'am.
• 2:26:52
  The gentleman's almost always away, I tell you, said missus Ralston quick
• 2:26:56
  like, and when he's there, says she suddenly, you've only to keep
• 2:27:01
  out of his way. I took the afternoon train and got out at d
• 2:27:05
  station at about four o'clock. A groom and a dog court was waiting,
• 2:27:11
  and we drove off at a smart pace. It was a dull October day,
• 2:27:15
  with rain hanging close overhead, and by the time we turned into the
• 2:27:18
  Brimpton Place woods the daylight was almost gone. The drive wound through the woods
• 2:27:24
  for a mile or two and came out on a gravel court shut in with
• 2:27:26
  thickets of tall, black looking shrubs. There were no lights in the windows,
• 2:27:31
  and the house did look a bit gloomy. I had asked no questions
• 2:27:37
  of the groom, for I never was one to get my notion of new
• 2:27:39
  masters from their other servants. I preferred to wait and see for myself.
• 2:27:45
  But I could tell by the look of everything that I had got into the
• 2:27:48
  right kind of house, and that things were done handsomely. A pleasant faced
• 2:27:52
  cook met me at the back door and called the housemaid to show me up
• 2:27:56
  to my room. You'll see Madam later. She said, Missus Brimpton has
• 2:28:00
  a visitor. I hadn't fancied Missus Brimpton was a lady to have many visitors,
• 2:28:05
  and somehow the words cheered me. I followed the housemaid upstairs and saw
• 2:28:11
  through a door on the upper landing that the main part of the house seemed
• 2:28:15
  well furnished, with dark paneling and a number of old portraits. Another flight
• 2:28:20
  of stairs led us up to the servants swinging. It was almost dark now,
• 2:28:24
  and the housemaid excused herself for not having brought her light. But there's
• 2:28:28
  matches in your room, she said, and if you go careful, you'll
• 2:28:31
  be all right. Mind the step at the end of the passage. Your
• 2:28:35
  room is just beyond. I looked ahead as she spoke, and half way
• 2:28:39
  down the passage I saw a woman standing. She drew back into a doorway
• 2:28:43
  as we passed, and the housemaid didn't appear to notice her. She was
• 2:28:48
  a thin woman with a white face and the darkest stuff gown and apron I
• 2:28:52
  took her for the housekeeper, and thought it odd that she didn't speak,
• 2:28:56
  but just gave me a long look as she went by. My room opened
• 2:29:01
  into a square hall. At the end of the passage, facing my door
• 2:29:05
  was another which stood open. The housemaid exclaimed when she saw it there,
• 2:29:09
  Missus Blinders left that door open again, said she closing. It is Missus
• 2:29:16
  Blinda, the housekeeper. There's no housekeeper, Missus Blinder's the cook. And
• 2:29:22
  is that her room? Laws No, said the housemaid, cross like,
• 2:29:26
  that's nobody's room. It's empty, I mean, and the door hadn't ought
• 2:29:30
  to be open Missus Brimpton once had kept locked. She opened my door and
• 2:29:35
  led me into a neat room, nicely furnished, with a picture or two
• 2:29:39
  on the walls, and having lit a candle. She took leave, telling
• 2:29:43
  me that the servants Hall tea was at six and that Missus Brimpton would see
• 2:29:46
  me afterward. I've found them a pleasant spoken set in the servants hall,
• 2:29:52
  and by what they let fall, I gathered that, as Missus Raylton had
• 2:29:56
  said, Missus Brimpton was the kindest of ladies. But I didn't take much
• 2:30:00
  notice of their talk, for I was watching to see the pale woman and
• 2:30:03
  the dark gown come in. She didn't show herself, however, and I
• 2:30:07
  wondered if she ate apart, but if she wasn't the housekeeper, why should
• 2:30:11
  she? Suddenly it struck me that she might be a trained nurse, and
• 2:30:16
  in that case her meals would of course be served in her room. If
• 2:30:20
  Missus Brimpton was an invalid, it was likely enough she had a nurse.
• 2:30:24
  The idea annoyed me, I own, for they're not always the easiest to
• 2:30:26
  get on with. And if I'd known, I shouldn't have taken the place.
• 2:30:31
  But there I was, and there was no use pulling a long face
• 2:30:33
  over it, and not being one to ask questions, I waited to see
• 2:30:37
  what would turn up. When he was over. The housemaid said to the
• 2:30:41
  footman, has mister Ranford gone? And when he said yes, she told
• 2:30:46
  me to come up with her to missus Brimpton. Missus Brimpton was lying down
• 2:30:50
  in her bedroom. Her lounge stood near the fire, and beside it was
• 2:30:54
  a shaded lamp. She was the delicate looking lady, but when she smiled,
• 2:31:00
  I felt there was nothing I wouldn't do for her. She spoke very
• 2:31:03
  pleasantly in a low voice, asking me my name and age and so on,
• 2:31:07
  and if I had everything I wanted, and if I wasn't afraid of
• 2:31:11
  feeling lonely in the country, not with you. I wouldn't be, madam,
• 2:31:15
  I said, And the words surprised me when I've spoken them, for
• 2:31:18
  I'm not an impulsive person, but it was just as if I'd thought aloud.
• 2:31:24
  She seemed pleased at that, and said she hoped I'd continue in the
• 2:31:26
  same mind. Then she gave me a few directions about her toilet and said
• 2:31:31
  Agnes the housemaid, would show me next morning where things were kept. I
• 2:31:35
  am tired to night, and she'll dine upstairs. She said. Agnes will
• 2:31:39
  bring me my tray that you may have time to unpack and settle yourself,
• 2:31:45
  and later you may come and undress me. Very well, ma'am, I
• 2:31:48
  said, you'll ring I suppose, I thought. She looked odd. No,
• 2:31:54
  Agnes will fetch you, says she quickly, and took up her book
• 2:31:56
  again. Well, that was certainly strange, a lady's maid having to be
• 2:32:03
  fetched by the housemaid whenever her lady wanted her. I wondered if there were
• 2:32:07
  no bells in the house, But the next day I satisfied myself that there
• 2:32:11
  was one in every room, and a special one ringing from my mistress's room
• 2:32:15
  to mine. And after that it did strike me as queer that whenever Missus
• 2:32:18
  Brimpton wanted anything, she rang for Agnes, who had to walk the whole
• 2:32:24
  length of the servant's wing to call me. But that wasn't the only queer
• 2:32:28
  thing in the house. The very next day I found out that Missus Brimpton
• 2:32:31
  had no nurse. And then I asked Agnes about the woman I had seen
• 2:32:35
  in the passage the afternoon before. Agnes and she had seen no one,
• 2:32:41
  and I saw that she thought I was dreaming. To be sure, it
• 2:32:43
  was dusk when we went down the passage, and she had excused herself for
• 2:32:48
  not bringing a light. But I had seen the woman plain enough to know
• 2:32:52
  her again if we should meet. I decided that she must have been a
• 2:32:54
  friend of the cook's or one of the other women servants. Perhaps she come
• 2:33:00
  down from town for a night's visit, and the servants wanted it kept secret.
• 2:33:05
  Some ladies are very stiff about having their servants friends in the house over
• 2:33:09
  night. At any rate, I made up my mind to ask no more
• 2:33:11
  questions. In a day or two, another odd thing happened. I was
• 2:33:16
  chatting one afternoon with Missus Blinder, who was a friendly disposed woman, and
• 2:33:20
  had been longer in the house than the other servants. And she asked me
• 2:33:24
  if I was quite comfortable and had everything I needed. I said, I
• 2:33:28
  had no fault to find with my place or with my mistress. But I
• 2:33:31
  thought it odd that in so large a house there was no sewing room for
• 2:33:35
  the lady's maid. Why, says she, there is one. The room
• 2:33:39
  you're in is the old sewing room, oh, said I. And where
• 2:33:43
  did the other lady's maid sleep? At that she grew confused and said hurriedly
• 2:33:50
  that the servants rooms had all been changed about last year, and she didn't
• 2:33:54
  rightly remember. That struck me as peculiar, But I went on as if
• 2:33:58
  I hadn't noticed. Well, there's the vacant room opposite mine, and I
• 2:34:03
  mean to ask Missus Brimpton if I mayn't use that as the sewing room.
• 2:34:07
  To my astonishment, Missus Blinda went white and gave my hand a kind of
• 2:34:11
  squeeze. Don't do that, my dear, said she trembling, like to
• 2:34:16
  tell you the truth. That was Emma Saxon's room, and my mistress has
• 2:34:20
  kept it close to ever since her death. And who was Emma Saxon,
• 2:34:24
  Missus Brimpton's former maid, the one that was with her so many years,
• 2:34:28
  said, I remembering what Missus Raylton had told me. Missus Blinder nodded.
• 2:34:35
  What sort of a woman was she? No better walk the earth, said
• 2:34:39
  Missus Blinder. My mistress loved her like his sister. But I mean,
• 2:34:43
  what did she look like? Missus Blinder got up and gave me a kind
• 2:34:48
  of angry stare. I'm no great hand at describing, she said, And
• 2:34:52
  I believe my pastry's rising. And she walked off into the kitchen and shut
• 2:34:58
  the door after her. Section two. I had been near a week at
• 2:35:03
  Brimpton before I saw my master. Word came that he was arriving one afternoon,
• 2:35:07
  and a change passed over the whole household. It was plain that nobody
• 2:35:11
  loved him. Below stairs, Missus Blinder took uncommon care with the dinner that
• 2:35:16
  night, but she snapped at the kitchen maid in a way quite unusual with
• 2:35:20
  her and mister Waits. The butler, a serious, slow spoken man,
• 2:35:26
  went about his duties as if he'd been getting ready for a funeral. He
• 2:35:30
  was a great Bible reader. Mister Waste was and had a beautiful assortment of
• 2:35:33
  texts at his command. But that day he used such dreadful language that I
• 2:35:39
  was about to leave the table when he assured me it was all out of
• 2:35:41
  Isaiah. And I noticed that whenever the master came, mister Waste took to
• 2:35:46
  the prophets. About seven, Agnes called me to my mistress's room, and
• 2:35:52
  there I found mister Brimpton. He was standing on the hearth, a big,
• 2:35:56
  fair, bull necked man with a red face and little, bad tempered
• 2:36:00
  blue eyes, the kind of man a young simpleton might have thought handsome,
• 2:36:05
  and would have been like to pay dear for thinking it. He swung about
• 2:36:09
  when I came in and looked me over in a trice. I knew what
• 2:36:11
  the look meant, from having experienced it once or twice in my former places.
• 2:36:16
  Then he turned his back on me and went on talking to his wife,
• 2:36:20
  and I knew what that meant too. I was not the kind of
• 2:36:24
  morsel he was. After the typhoid had served me well enough in one way.
• 2:36:28
  It kept that kind of gentleman at arm's length. This is my new
• 2:36:33
  maid, hartly, says missus Brimpton in her kind voice, And he nodded
• 2:36:37
  and went on with what he was saying. In a minute or two,
• 2:36:41
  he went off and left my mistress to dress for dinner, and I noticed,
• 2:36:46
  as I waited on her that she was white and chilled to the touch.
• 2:36:50
  Mister Brimpton took himself off the next morning, and the whole house drew
• 2:36:54
  a long breath when he drove away. As for my mistress, she put
• 2:36:58
  on her hat and furs, for it was a fine winter morning, and
• 2:37:01
  went out for a walk in the gardens, coming back quite fresh and rosy,
• 2:37:05
  so that for a minute before her color faded, I could guess what
• 2:37:09
  a pretty young lady she must have been. And not so long ago either.
• 2:37:13
  She had met mister Ranford in the grounds, and the two came back
• 2:37:16
  together. I remember smiling and talking as they walked along the terrace under my
• 2:37:20
  window. That was the first time I saw mister Ranford, though I had
• 2:37:24
  often heard his name mentioned in the hall. He was the neighbor, it
• 2:37:28
  appeared, living a mile or two beyond Brimpton at the end of the village,
• 2:37:31
  and as he was in the habit of spending his winters in the country,
• 2:37:35
  he was almost the only company my mistress had at that season. He
• 2:37:39
  was a slight, tall gentleman of about thirty, and I thought him rather
• 2:37:43
  melancholy looking till I saw his smile, which had a kind of surprise in
• 2:37:48
  it, like the first warm day in spring. He was a great reader,
• 2:37:52
  I heard, like my mistress, and the two were forever borrowing books
• 2:37:56
  at one another, and sometimes mister Waste told me he would read aloud to
• 2:38:01
  Missus Brimpton by the hour in the big dark library where she sat in the
• 2:38:05
  winter afternoons. The servants all liked him, and perhaps that's more of a
• 2:38:09
  compliment than the master's suspect. He had a friendly word for every one of
• 2:38:13
  us, and we were all glad to think that Missus Brimpton had a pleasant,
• 2:38:16
  companionable gentleman like that to keep her company when the Master was away.
• 2:38:22
  Mister Ranford seemed on excellent terms with mister Brimpton, too, though I couldn't
• 2:38:26
  but wonder the two gentlemen so unlike each other should be so friendly. But
• 2:38:31
  then I knew how the real quality can keep their feelings to themselves. As
• 2:38:37
  for mister Brimpton, he came and went, never staying more than a day
• 2:38:41
  or two, cursing the dullness and the solitude, grumbling at everything, and
• 2:38:46
  as I soon found out, drinking a great deal more than was good for
• 2:38:48
  him. After missus Brimpton left the table, he would sit half the night
• 2:38:52
  over the old Brimpton Port and Madeira. And once, as I was leaving
• 2:38:58
  my mistress's room where the lady than usual, I met him coming up the
• 2:39:01
  stairs in such a state that I turned sick to think of what some ladies
• 2:39:05
  have to endure and hold their tongues about. The serpents said very little about
• 2:39:11
  their master, but from what they let drop I could see it had been
• 2:39:15
  an unhappy match from the beginning. Mister Brimpton was coarse, loud and pleasure
• 2:39:20
  loving. My mistress quiet, retiring, and perhaps a trifle cold, Not
• 2:39:26
  that she was not always pleasant. Spoken to him, I thought her wonderfully
• 2:39:30
  forbearing. But to her gentleman as free as mister Brimpton, I dare say
• 2:39:33
  she seemed a little offish. Well, things went on quietly for several weeks.
• 2:39:39
  My mistress was kind, my duties were light, and I got on
• 2:39:43
  well with the other servants. In short, I had nothing to complain of.
• 2:39:48
  Yet there was always a weight on me. I can't say why it
• 2:39:50
  was so, but I know it was not the loneliness that I felt.
• 2:39:54
  I soon got used to that, and, being still languid from the fever,
• 2:39:58
  I was thank for the quiet and the good country air. Nevertheless,
• 2:40:03
  I was never quite easy in my mind. My mistress, knowing I had
• 2:40:07
  been ill, insisted that I should take my walk regular and often invented errands
• 2:40:13
  for me. A yard of ribbon to be fetched from the village, a
• 2:40:16
  letter posted, or a book returned to mister Ranford. As soon as I
• 2:40:20
  was out of doors, my spirits rose, and I looked forward to my
• 2:40:22
  walks through the bare of moist smelling woods. But the moment I caught sight
• 2:40:28
  of the house again, my heart dropped down like a stone in a well.
• 2:40:33
  It was not a gloomy house exactly, yet I never edited it,
• 2:40:35
  but a feeling of gloom came over me. Missus Brimpton seldom went out in
• 2:40:41
  winter. Only on the finest days did she walk an hour at noon on
• 2:40:46
  the south terrace. Excepting mister Ranford, we had no visitors, but the
• 2:40:50
  doctor who drove over from d about once a week. He sent for me
• 2:40:54
  once or twice to give me some trifling direction about my mistress, And though
• 2:40:58
  he never told me what her illness was, I thought, from a waxy
• 2:41:01
  look she had now and then of a morning, that it might be the
• 2:41:05
  heart that ailed her. The season was soft and unwholesome, and in January
• 2:41:11
  we had a long spell of rain that was a sore trial to me,
• 2:41:15
  I own, for I couldn't go out, and sitting over my sewing all
• 2:41:18
  day listening to the drip drip of the eaves, I grew so nervous that
• 2:41:24
  the least sound made me jump. Somehow, the thought of that locked house
• 2:41:28
  across the passage began to weigh on me. Once or twice in the long
• 2:41:33
  rainy nights, I fancied I heard noises there, But that was nonsense,
• 2:41:37
  of course, and the daylight drove such notions out of my head. Well.
• 2:41:41
  One morning, missus Brimpton gave me quite a start of pleasure by telling
• 2:41:46
  me she wished me to go to town for some shopping. I hadn't known
• 2:41:50
  till then how low my spirits had fallen. I set off in high glee,
• 2:41:54
  and my first sight of the crowded streets and the cheerful looking shops quite
• 2:41:58
  took me up myself toward afternoon, However, the noise and confusion began to
• 2:42:03
  tire me, and I was actually looking forward to the quiet of Brimpton and
• 2:42:09
  thinking how I should enjoy the drive home through the dark woods, when I
• 2:42:13
  ran across an old acquaintance, a maid I had once been in service with.
• 2:42:18
  We had lost sight of each other for a number of years, and
• 2:42:20
  I had to stop and tell her what had happened to me in the interval.
• 2:42:24
  When I mentioned where I was living, she rolled up her eyes and
• 2:42:28
  pulled a long face. What so, missus Brimpton, that lives all the
• 2:42:33
  year at her place on the Hudson, My dear, you won't stay there
• 2:42:37
  three months? Oh but I don't mind the country, says I offended somehow
• 2:42:41
  at her tone. Since the fever, I'm glad to be quiet, She
• 2:42:46
  shook her head. It's not the country I'm thinking of. All I know
• 2:42:50
  is she's had four maids in the last six months, and the last one,
• 2:42:54
  who was a friend of mine, told me nobody could stay in the
• 2:42:56
  house. Did she's hate why? I asked, No. She wouldn't give
• 2:43:01
  me her reason, But she says to me, missus Ansey. She says,
• 2:43:05
  if ever a young woman as you know, thinks of going there.
• 2:43:09
  You tell her it's not worth while to unpack her boxes. Is she young
• 2:43:13
  and handsome? Said I, thinking of mister Brimpton, not her. She's
• 2:43:18
  the kind of mother's engage when they've gay young gentlemen at college. Well,
• 2:43:24
  though I knew the woman was an idle gossip, the words stuck in my
• 2:43:26
  head, and my heart sank lower than ever. As I drove up to
• 2:43:31
  Brimpton in the dusk. There was something about the house. I was sure
• 2:43:35
  of it now. When I went in to tea, I heard that mister
• 2:43:37
  Brimpton had arrived, and I saw at a glance that there had been a
• 2:43:41
  disturbance of some kind. Missus Blinder's hand shook so that she could hardly pour
• 2:43:46
  the tea, and mister Waste quoted the most dreadful texts full of Brimstone.
• 2:43:52
  Nobody said a word to me, But when I went up to my room,
• 2:43:56
  Missus Blinder followed me. Oh, my dear, says she, taking
• 2:44:01
  my hand. I'm so glad and thankful you've come back to us. That
• 2:44:05
  struck me, as you may imagine, Why, said I, Did you
• 2:44:09
  think I was leaving for good? No? No, to be sure,
• 2:44:11
  said she a little confused, But I can't a bear to have Madam left
• 2:44:16
  alone for a day. Even she pressed my hand hard, and oh,
• 2:44:20
  miss Hartley says she be good to your mistress, as you're a Christian woman.
• 2:44:24
  And with that she hurried away and left me staring. A moment later,
• 2:44:30
  Agnes called me to Missus Brimpton. Hearing mister Brimpton's voice in her room,
• 2:44:35
  I went round by the dressing room, thinking I would lay out her
• 2:44:37
  dinner gown before going in. The dressing room is a large room with the
• 2:44:41
  window over the portico that looks toward the gardens. Mister Brimpton's apartments are beyond.
• 2:44:48
  When I went in, the door into the bedroom was ajar, and
• 2:44:52
  I heard mister Brimpton saying angrily. One would suppose he was the only person
• 2:44:56
  fit for you to talk to. I don't have any visitors in winter.
• 2:45:01
  Missus Brimpton answered quietly, you have me. He flung at her, sneering
• 2:45:07
  you are here so seldom, said she, Well, whose fault is that
• 2:45:11
  you make the place about as lively as the family vault. With that,
• 2:45:16
  I rattled the toilet things to give my mistress warning, and she rose and
• 2:45:20
  called me in. The two dined alone as usual, and I knew by
• 2:45:24
  mister Wace's manner at supper that things must be going badly. He quoted the
• 2:45:28
  prophet something terrible and worked on the kitchen maid so that she declared she wouldn't
• 2:45:33
  go down alone to put the cold meat in the ice box. I felt
• 2:45:37
  nervous myself, and after I had put my mistress to bed, I was
• 2:45:41
  half tempted to go down again and persuade missus Blinder to sit up awhile over
• 2:45:46
  a game of cards. But I heard her door closing for the night,
• 2:45:50
  and so I went on to my own room. The rain had begun again,
• 2:45:56
  and the drip, drip, drip seemed to be dropping into my brain.
• 2:46:00
  I lay awake listening to it, and turned over what my friend in
• 2:46:03
  town had said. What puzzled me was that it was always the maids who
• 2:46:07
  left. After a while, I slept, but suddenly a loud noise awakened
• 2:46:13
  me. My bell had rung. I sat up, terrified by the unusual
• 2:46:16
  sound, which seemed to go on jangling through the darkness. My hand shook
• 2:46:22
  so that I couldn't find the matches. At length, I struck a light
• 2:46:24
  and jumped out of bed. I began to think I must have been dreaming,
• 2:46:28
  but I looked at the bell against the wall, and there was the
• 2:46:31
  little hammer still quivering. I was just beginning to huddle on my clothes when
• 2:46:37
  I heard another sound. This time it was the door of the locked room
• 2:46:39
  opposite mine, softly opening and closing. I heard the sound distinctly, and
• 2:46:46
  it frightened me so that I stood stock still. Then I heard a footstep
• 2:46:50
  hurrying down the passage toward the main house, the floor being carpeted. The
• 2:46:54
  sound was very faint, but I was quite sure it was a woman's step.
• 2:47:00
  I turned cold with the thought of it, and for a minute or
• 2:47:03
  two I durstn't breathe or move. Then I came to my senses. Alice
• 2:47:07
  hartly, says I to myself. Some one left that room just now and
• 2:47:11
  ran down the passage ahead of you. The idea isn't pleasant, but you
• 2:47:16
  may as well face it. Your mistress has rung for you, and to
• 2:47:18
  answer her bell, you've got to go the way that other woman has gone.
• 2:47:24
  Well, I did it. I never walked faster in my life,
• 2:47:28
  yet I thought I should never get to the end. Of the passage or
• 2:47:31
  reach Missus Brimpton's room. On the way, I heard nothing and saw nothing.
• 2:47:35
  All was dark and quiet as the grave. When I reached my mistress's
• 2:47:39
  door, the silence was so deep that I began to think I must be
• 2:47:43
  dreaming, and was half minded to turn back. Then a panic seized me,
• 2:47:48
  and I knocked. There was no answer, and I knocked again loudly.
• 2:47:52
  To my astonishment, the door was opened by mister Brimpton. He started
• 2:47:56
  back when he saw me, and in the light of my candle, his
• 2:48:00
  face looked red and savage. You, he said, in a queer voice,
• 2:48:05
  how many of you are there? In God's name? At that I
• 2:48:09
  felt the ground give under me. But I said to myself that he had
• 2:48:11
  been drinking, and answered as steadily as I could. May I go in,
• 2:48:16
  sir, Missus Brimpton has rung for me. You may all go in
• 2:48:20
  for what I care, says he, and, pushing by me, walked
• 2:48:24
  down the hall to his own bedroom. I looked after him as he went,
• 2:48:28
  and to my surprise I saw that he walked as straight as a sober
• 2:48:31
  man. I found my mistress lying very weak and still, but she forced
• 2:48:35
  a smile when she saw me and signed to me to pour out some drops
• 2:48:39
  for her. After that, she lay without speaking, her breath coming quickly
• 2:48:45
  and her eyes closed. Suddenly, she groped out with her hand, and
• 2:48:50
  Emma says, she faintly, it's Hartly, Madam, I said, do
• 2:48:54
  you want anything? She opened her eyes wide and gave me a startled look.
• 2:49:01
  I was dreaming. She said, you may go now, Hartly,
• 2:49:03
  and thank you kindly. I'm quite well again, you see, and she
• 2:49:09
  turned her face away from me. Section three. There was no more sleep
• 2:49:15
  for me that night, and I was thankful when daylight came. Soon afterwards,
• 2:49:20
  Agnes called me to missus Brimpton. I was afraid she was ill again,
• 2:49:24
  for she seldom sent for me before nine. But I found her sitting
• 2:49:28
  up in bed, pale and drawn, looking, but quite herself. Hartly,
• 2:49:33
  says she quickly. Will you put on your things at once and go
• 2:49:37
  down to the village for me. I want this prescription made up here.
• 2:49:41
  She hesitated a minute and blushed. And I should like you to be back
• 2:49:45
  again before mister Brimpton is up. Certainly, Madam, I said, and
• 2:49:50
  stay a moment. She called me back as if an idea had just struck
• 2:49:54
  her. While you're waiting for the mixture, you'll have time to go on
• 2:49:56
  to mister Ranford's with this note. It was a two while walk to the
• 2:50:01
  village, and on my way I had time to turn things over in my
• 2:50:05
  mind. It struck me as peculiar that my mistress should wish the prescription made
• 2:50:09
  up without mister Brimpton's knowledge. And putting this together with the scene of the
• 2:50:15
  night before, and with much else that I had noticed and suspected, I
• 2:50:18
  began to wonder if the poor lady was weary of her life and had come
• 2:50:22
  to the mad resolve of ending it. The idea took such hold on me
• 2:50:26
  that I reached the village on a run and dropped breathless into a chair before
• 2:50:31
  the chemist's counter. The good man, who was just taking down his shutters,
• 2:50:35
  stared at me so hard that it brought me to myself. Mister Limmle,
• 2:50:41
  I says, trying to speak indifferent. Will you run your eye over
• 2:50:43
  this and tell me if it's quite right? He put on his spectacles and
• 2:50:48
  studied the prescription. Why it's one of doctor Walton says he what should be
• 2:50:52
  wrong with it? Well? Is it dangerous to take dangerous. How do
• 2:50:58
  you mean I could have shaken the man for his stupidity. I mean if
• 2:51:03
  a person was to take too much of it by mistake, of course,
• 2:51:07
  says I, my heart in my throat. Lord, bless you know it's
• 2:51:11
  only lime water. You might feed it to a baby by the bottleful.
• 2:51:16
  I gave a great sigh of relief and hurried on to mister Ranford's. But
• 2:51:20
  on the way, another thought struck me. If there was nothing to conceal
• 2:51:24
  about my visit to the chemist's, was it my other errand that missus Brimpton
• 2:51:28
  wished me to keep private. Somehow that thought frightened me worse than the other.
• 2:51:33
  Yet the two gentlemen seemed fast friends, and I would have staked my
• 2:51:35
  head on my mistress's goodness. I felt ashamed of my suspicions, and concluded
• 2:51:41
  that I was still disturbed by the strange events of the night. I left
• 2:51:45
  the note at mister Ranford's, and, hurrying back to Brimpton, slipped in
• 2:51:48
  by a side door without being seen, as I thought. An hour later,
• 2:51:54
  however, as I was carrying in my mistress's breakfast, I was stopped
• 2:51:58
  in the hall by mister Brimpton. What are you doing out so early,
• 2:52:03
  he says, looking hard at me. Early me, sir, I said,
• 2:52:07
  in a tremble. Come come, he says, an angry red spot
• 2:52:11
  coming out on his forehead. Didn't I see you scuttling home through the shrubbery
• 2:52:16
  an hour or more ago. I'm a truthful woman by nature, but at
• 2:52:20
  that a lie popped out, ready made. No, sir, you didn't,
• 2:52:22
  said I, and looked straight back at him. He shrugged his shoulders
• 2:52:28
  and gave a sullen laugh. I suppose you think I was drunk last night,
• 2:52:31
  he asked suddenly. No, sir, I don't, I answered,
• 2:52:35
  this time truthfully enough. He turned away with another shrug. A pretty notion
• 2:52:41
  my servants have of me, I heard mutter as he walked off. Not
• 2:52:48
  till I had settled down to my afternoon's sewing did I realize how the events
• 2:52:52
  of the night had shaken me. I couldn't pass that locked door without a
• 2:52:56
  shiver. I knew I had heard some one come out of it and down
• 2:53:00
  the passage ahead of me. I thought of speaking to missus Blinder or to
• 2:53:03
  mister Waste, the only two in the house who appeared to have an inkling
• 2:53:07
  of what was going on, but I had a feeling that if I questioned
• 2:53:11
  them, they would deny everything, and that I might learn more by holding
• 2:53:15
  my tongue and keeping my eyes open. The idea of spending another night opposite
• 2:53:20
  the locked room sickened me, and once I was seized with the notion of
• 2:53:24
  packing my trunk and taking a first train to town. But it wasn't in
• 2:53:28
  me to throw over a kind mistress in that manner, and I tried to
• 2:53:31
  go on with my sewing as if nothing had happened. I hadn't worked ten
• 2:53:37
  minutes before the sewing machine broke down. It was one I had found in
• 2:53:39
  the house, a good machine, but a trifle out of order. Missus
• 2:53:43
  Blinder said it had never been used since M. Saxon's death. I stopped
• 2:53:48
  to see what was wrong, and as I was working at the machine,
• 2:53:50
  a drawer which I had never been able to open, slid forward and a
• 2:53:54
  photograph fell out. I picked it up and sat looking at it in a
• 2:53:58
  maze. It was a woman's likeness, and I knew I had seen the
• 2:54:01
  face somewhere. The eyes had an asking look that I had felt on me
• 2:54:05
  before, and suddenly I remembered the pale woman in the passage. I stood
• 2:54:11
  up cold all over and ran out of the room. My heart seemed to
• 2:54:16
  be thumping at the top of my head, and I felt as if I
• 2:54:18
  should never get away from the look in those eyes. I went straight to
• 2:54:22
  missus Blinder. She was taking her afternoon nap and sat up with a jump
• 2:54:26
  when I came in. Missus Blinder said, I who is that? And
• 2:54:31
  I held up the photograph. She rubbed her eyes and stared why. Amma
• 2:54:37
  Saxon says she, where did you find it? I looked hard at her
• 2:54:41
  for a minute, Missus Blinder, I said, I've seen that face before.
• 2:54:46
  Missus Blinder got up and walked over to the looking glass. Dear me,
• 2:54:50
  I must have been asleep, she says. My front is all over
• 2:54:54
  one ear. And now do run along, Miss Hartley, dear, for
• 2:54:58
  I hear the clo striking four, and I must go down this very minute
• 2:55:03
  and put on the Virginia hand for mister Brimpton's dinner Section four. To all
• 2:55:11
  appearances, things went on as usual for a week or two. The only
• 2:55:15
  difference was that mister Brimpton stayed on instead of going off as he usually did,
• 2:55:20
  and that mister Ranford never showed himself. I heard mister Brimpton remark on
• 2:55:24
  this one afternoon when he was sitting in my mistress's room before dinner. Where's
• 2:55:30
  Ranford? Says he? He hasn't been near the house for a week?
• 2:55:33
  Does he keep away? Because I'm here? Missus? Brimpton spoke so low
• 2:55:37
  that I couldn't catch her answer. Well, he went on two's company and
• 2:55:43
  three's trumpery. I'm sorry to be in Ranford's way, and I suppose I
• 2:55:46
  shall have to take myself off again in a day or two and give him
• 2:55:50
  a show. And he laughed at his own joke. The very next days
• 2:55:54
  that happened, mister Ranford called the footman, said the three were very merry
• 2:55:58
  over their tea in the library, and mister Brimpton strolled down to the gate
• 2:56:03
  with mister Ranford when he left. I have said that things went on as
• 2:56:07
  usual, and so they did with the rest of the household. But as
• 2:56:11
  for myself, I had never been the same since the night my bell had
• 2:56:13
  rung. Night after night I used to lie awake listening for it to ring
• 2:56:18
  again, and for the door of the locked room to open. Stealthily,
• 2:56:22
  but the bell never rang, and I heard no sound across the passage.
• 2:56:26
  At last, the silence began to be more dreadful to me than the most
• 2:56:30
  mysterious sounds. I felt that some one were cowering there behind the locked door,
• 2:56:35
  watching and listening as I watched and listened. And I could almost have
• 2:56:39
  cried out, whoever you are, come out and let me see you face
• 2:56:41
  to face, but don't lurk there and spy on me in the darkness,
• 2:56:46
  feeling as I did. You may wonder I didn't give warning once. I
• 2:56:50
  very nearly did so, but at the last moment something held me back.
• 2:56:54
  Whether it was compassion for my mistress who had grown more and more dependent on
• 2:56:58
  me, or unwillingness to try a new place, or some other feeling that
• 2:57:01
  I couldn't put it aim to. I lingered on as if spell bound,
• 2:57:05
  though every night was dreadful to me, and the days but little better.
• 2:57:11
  For one thing, I didn't like missus Brimpton's looks. She had never been
• 2:57:15
  the same since at night, no more than I had. I thought she
• 2:57:18
  would brighten up after mister Brimpton left, But though she seemed easier in her
• 2:57:22
  mind, her spirits didn't revive nor her strength either. She had grown attached
• 2:57:28
  to me and seemed to like to have me about. And Agnes told me
• 2:57:31
  one day that since Emma Saxon's death, I was the only maid her mistress
• 2:57:35
  had taken to. This gave me a warm feeling for the poor lady,
• 2:57:39
  though after all it was little I could do to help her. After mister
• 2:57:45
  Brimpton's departure, mister Ranford took to coming again, though less often than formerly.
• 2:57:50
  I met him once or twice in the grounds or in the village,
• 2:57:52
  and I couldn't but think there was a change in him too, but I
• 2:57:56
  set it down to my disordered fancy. The weeks passed and mister Brimpton had
• 2:58:01
  now been a month absent. We heard he was cruising with a friend in
• 2:58:05
  the West Indies, and mister Waite said that was a long way off,
• 2:58:09
  but though you had the wings of a dove and went to the uttermost parts
• 2:58:13
  of the earth, you couldn't get away from the Almighty. Agnes said that
• 2:58:16
  as long as he stayed away from Brimpton, the Almighty might have him and
• 2:58:20
  welcome, and this raised a laugh, though missus Blinda tried to look shocked,
• 2:58:24
  and mister Waite said the bears would eat us. We were all glad
• 2:58:28
  to hear that the West Indies were a long way off, and I remember
• 2:58:33
  that, in spite of mister Waye's solemn looks, we had a very merry
• 2:58:37
  dinner that day in the hall. I don't know if it was because of
• 2:58:39
  my being in better spirits, but I fancied missus Brimpton looked better too,
• 2:58:45
  and seemed more cheerful in her manner. She had been for a walk in
• 2:58:48
  the morning, and after luncheon she lay down in her room and I read
• 2:58:52
  aloud to her. When she dismissed me, I went to my own room,
• 2:58:56
  feeling quite bright and happy, and for the first time in weeks,
• 2:58:58
  walked past asked the locked door without thinking of it. As I sat down
• 2:59:03
  to my work, I looked out and saw a few snow flakes falling.
• 2:59:07
  The sight was pleasanter than the eternal rain, and I pictured to myself how
• 2:59:11
  pretty the bare gardens would look in their white mantle. It seemed to me
• 2:59:15
  as if the snow would cover up all the dreariness indoors as well as out.
• 2:59:20
  The fancy had hardly crossed my mind. When I heard a step at
• 2:59:24
  my side. I looked up, thinking it was Agnes. Well, Agnes,
• 2:59:30
  said I, and the words froze on my tongue. For there in
• 2:59:33
  the door stood Emma Saxon. I don't know how long she stood there.
• 2:59:39
  I only know I couldn't stir or take my eyes from her. Afterward,
• 2:59:45
  I was terribly frightened, but at the time it wasn't fear I felt,
• 2:59:48
  but something deeper and quieter. She looked at me long and long, and
• 2:59:52
  her face was just one dumb prayer to me. But how in the world
• 2:59:56
  was I to help her? Suddenly she turned and I heard her walk down
• 3:00:01
  the passage. This time I wasn't afraid to follow. I felt that I
• 3:00:05
  must know what she wanted. I sprang up and ran out. She was
• 3:00:09
  at the other end of the passage, and I expected her to take the
• 3:00:11
  turn toward my mistress's room, but instead of that, she pushed open the
• 3:00:16
  door that led to the back stairs. I followed her down the stairs and
• 3:00:20
  across the passage way to the back door. The kitchen and hall were empty
• 3:00:24
  at that hour, the servants being off duty, except for the footman who
• 3:00:28
  was in the pantry. At the door, she stood still a moment with
• 3:00:31
  another look at me. Then she turned the handle and stepped out. For
• 3:00:37
  a minute, I hesitated, where was she leading me to? The door
• 3:00:41
  had closed softly after her, and I opened it and looked out, half
• 3:00:45
  expecting to find that she had disappeared. But I saw her a few yards
• 3:00:50
  off, hurrying across the courtyard to the path through the woods. Her figure
• 3:00:54
  looked black and lonely in the snow, and for a second my heart failed
• 3:00:58
  me, and I thought of turning back, but all the while she was
• 3:01:03
  drawing me after her, and catching up an old shawl of missus blinders.
• 3:01:07
  I ran out into the open abba. Saxon was in the wood path.
• 3:01:11
  Now she walked on steadily, and I followed at the same pace till we
• 3:01:16
  passed out of the gates and reached the high road. Then she struck across
• 3:01:20
  the open fields to the village. By this time the ground was white,
• 3:01:24
  and as she climbed the slope of a bare hill ahead of me, I
• 3:01:28
  noticed that she left no footprints behind her. At sight of that, my
• 3:01:31
  heart shriveled up within me, and my knees were water. Somehow, it
• 3:01:37
  was worse here than indoors. She made the whole countryside seem lonely as the
• 3:01:41
  grave, with none but us two in it, and no help in the
• 3:01:45
  wide world. Once I tried to go back, but she turned and looked
• 3:01:50
  at me, and it was as if she had dragged me with ropes.
• 3:01:54
  After that I followed her like a dog. We came to the village,
• 3:01:56
  and she led me through it, past the church and the blacksmith's shop,
• 3:02:01
  and down the lane to mister Ranford's. Mister Ranford's house stands close to the
• 3:02:05
  border, a plain, old fashioned building with a flag path leading to the
• 3:02:11
  door between box boarders. The lane was deserted, and as I turned into
• 3:02:15
  it, I saw Emma Saxon pause under the old elm by the gate.
• 3:02:20
  And now another fear came over me. I saw that we had reached the
• 3:02:24
  end of our journey, and that it was my turn to act. All
• 3:02:28
  the way from Brimpton, I had been asking myself what she wanted of me,
• 3:02:31
  But I had followed in a trance, as it were, and not
• 3:02:35
  till I saw her stop at mister Ranford's gate did my brain begin to clear
• 3:02:39
  itself. It stood a little way off in the snow. My heart beating
• 3:02:43
  fit to strangle me, and my feet frozen to the ground, and she
• 3:02:48
  stood under the elm and watched me. I knew well enough that she hadn't
• 3:02:54
  led me there for nothing. I felt there was something I ought to say
• 3:02:56
  or do. But how was that? I guess what it was. I
• 3:03:00
  had never thought harm of my mistress and mister Ranford, but I was sure
• 3:03:05
  now that from one cause or another, some dreadful thing hung over them.
• 3:03:09
  She knew what it was. She would tell me if she could. Perhaps
• 3:03:13
  she would answer if I questioned her. It turned me faint to think of
• 3:03:18
  speaking to her, but I plucked up heart and dragged myself across the few
• 3:03:22
  yards between us. As I did so, I heard the house door open
• 3:03:26
  and saw mister Ranford approaching. He looked handsome and cheerful as my mistress had
• 3:03:33
  looked that morning, and at sight of him, the blood began to flow
• 3:03:35
  again in my veins. Why hartly, he said, what's the matter?
• 3:03:41
  I saw you coming down the lane just now and came out to see if
• 3:03:43
  you had taken root in the snow. He stopped and stared at me.
• 3:03:48
  What are you looking at? He says? I turned toward the elm as
• 3:03:52
  he spoke, and his eyes followed me, But there was no one there.
• 3:03:58
  The lane was empty as far as the eye could reach. A sense
• 3:04:03
  of helplessness came over me. She was gone, and I had not been
• 3:04:07
  able to guess what she wanted. Her last look had pierced me to the
• 3:04:09
  marrow, yet it had not told me all. At once, I felt
• 3:04:13
  more desolate than when she stood there watching me. It seemed as if she
• 3:04:18
  had left me all alone to carry the weight of the secret I couldn't guess.
• 3:04:22
  The snow went round me in great circles, and the ground fell away
• 3:04:26
  from me. A drop of brandy and the warmth of mister Ranford's fire soon
• 3:04:31
  brought me to and I insisted on being driven back at once to Brimpton.
• 3:04:35
  It was nearly dark, and I was afraid my mistress might be wanting me.
• 3:04:39
  I explained to mister Ranford that I had been out for a walk and
• 3:04:43
  had been taken with the fit of giddiness as I passed his gait. This
• 3:04:48
  was true enough, yet I never felt more like a liar than when I
• 3:04:52
  said it. When I dressed missus Brimpton for dinner, she remarked on my
• 3:04:56
  pale looks and asked what ailed me. I told her I had a headache,
• 3:05:01
  and she said she would not require me again that evening and advised me
• 3:05:05
  to go to bed. It was the fact that I could scarcely keep on
• 3:05:09
  my feet, yet I had no fancy to spend a solitary evening in my
• 3:05:11
  room. I sat downstairs in the hall as long as I could hold my
• 3:05:16
  head up, but by nine I crept upstairs, too weary to care what
• 3:05:20
  happened if I could get my head on a pillow. The rest of the
• 3:05:26
  household went to bed soon afterward. They kept early hours when the master was
• 3:05:30
  away, and before ten I heard missus Blinda's door close, and mister Wace's
• 3:05:35
  soon after. It was a very still night, earth and air, all
• 3:05:39
  muffled in snow. Once in bed, I felt easier and lay quiet,
• 3:05:43
  listening to the strange noises that come out of a house after dark. Once
• 3:05:48
  I thought I heard a door open and close again below. It might have
• 3:05:52
  been the glass door that led to the gardens. I got up and peered
• 3:05:56
  out of the window, but it was in the dark of the moon.
• 3:06:00
  Nothing visible outside but the streaking of snow against the panes. I went back
• 3:06:05
  to bed and must have dozed, for I jumped awake to the furious ringing
• 3:06:09
  of my bell. Before my head was clear, I had sprung out of
• 3:06:13
  bed and was dragging on my clothes. It is going to happen now,
• 3:06:16
  I heard myself saying, But what I meant? I had no notion.
• 3:06:20
  My hand seemed to be covered with glue. I thought I should never get
• 3:06:24
  into my clothes. At last, I opened my door and peered down the
• 3:06:28
  passage. As far as my candle flame carried, I could see nothing unusual
• 3:06:33
  ahead of me. I hurried on breathless, But as I pushed open the
• 3:06:37
  baise door leading to the main hall, my heart stood still, for there
• 3:06:43
  at the head of the stairs was Emma Saxon, peering dreadfully down into the
• 3:06:48
  darkness. For a second, I couldn't stir, but my hand slipped from
• 3:06:52
  the door, and as it swung shut, the figure vanished. At the
• 3:06:56
  same instant there came another sound from below stairs, a stealthy, mysterious sound,
• 3:07:03
  as of a latch key turning in the house door. I ran to
• 3:07:05
  missus Brimpton's room and knocked. There was no answer, and I knocked again.
• 3:07:11
  This time I heard some one moving in the room. The bolt slipped
• 3:07:15
  back, and my mistress stood before me. To my surprise, I saw
• 3:07:18
  that she had not undressed for the night. She gave me a startled look.
• 3:07:24
  What is this, hartly, she says, in a whisper. Are
• 3:07:26
  you ill? What are you doing here at this hour? I am not
• 3:07:31
  ill, Madam, but my bell rang at that. She turned pale and
• 3:07:35
  seemed about to fall. You are mistaken, she said harshly. I didn't
• 3:07:39
  ring. You must have been dreaming. I had never heard her speak in
• 3:07:43
  such a tone. Go back to bed, she said, closing the door
• 3:07:46
  on me. But as she spoke, I heard sounds again in the hall
• 3:07:50
  below, A man step this time, and the truth leaped out on me.
• 3:07:56
  Madam, I said, pushing past her. There was some one in
• 3:07:58
  the house, some one, mister Brimpton. I think I hear his step
• 3:08:03
  below. A dreadful look came over her, and without a word, she
• 3:08:09
  dropped flat at my feet. I fell on my knees and tried to lift
• 3:08:13
  her. By the way she breathed, I saw it was no common faint.
• 3:08:16
  But as I raised her head, there came quick steps on the stairs
• 3:08:20
  and across the hall. The door was flung open, and there stood mister
• 3:08:24
  Brimpton in his traveling clothes, the snow dripping from him. He drew back
• 3:08:30
  with a start as he saw me kneeling by my mistress. What the devil
• 3:08:33
  is this? He shouted. He was less high colored than usual, and
• 3:08:37
  the red spot came out on his forehead. Missus Brimpton has fainted, Sir
• 3:08:43
  said I. He laughed unsteadily and pushed by me. It's a pity she
• 3:08:48
  didn't choose a more convenient moment. I'm sorry to disturb her, but I
• 3:08:52
  raised myself up. Aghast at the man's action, Sir said, I are
• 3:08:58
  you mad? What are you doing? Going to meet a friend? Said
• 3:09:01
  he, and seemed to make for the dressing room. At that my heart
• 3:09:05
  turned over. I don't know what I thought her feared, but I sprang
• 3:09:09
  up and caught him by the sleeve, Sir, Sir said, I,
• 3:09:13
  for pity's sake, look at your wife. He shook me off furiously.
• 3:09:18
  It seems that's done for me, says he, and caught hold of the
• 3:09:22
  dressing room door. At that moment, I heard a slight noise inside slight
• 3:09:28
  as it was. He heard it too, and toward the door open,
• 3:09:31
  But as he did so, he dropped back. On the threshold stood Emma
• 3:09:37
  Saxon. All was dark behind her, but I saw her plainly, and
• 3:09:41
  so did he. He threw up his hands as if to hide his face
• 3:09:46
  from her, and when I looked again, she was gone. He stood
• 3:09:50
  motionless, as if the strength had run out of him. And in the
• 3:09:52
  stillness, my mistress suddenly raised herself, and opening her eyes, fixed a
• 3:09:58
  look on him. She fell back, and I saw the death flutter pass
• 3:10:03
  over her. We buried her on the third day in a driving snow storm.
• 3:10:09
  There were few people in church, for it was bad weather to come
• 3:10:11
  from town. And I've a notion my mistress was one that hadn't many near
• 3:10:16
  friends. Mister Ranford was among the last to come, just before they carried
• 3:10:22
  her up the aisle. He was in black, of course, being such
• 3:10:24
  a friend of the family, and I never saw a gentleman so pale.
• 3:10:30
  As he passed me, I noticed that he leaned a trifle on a stick
• 3:10:33
  he carried, and I fancy mister Brimpton noticed it too, for the red
• 3:10:37
  spot came out sharp on his forehead, and all through the service, he
• 3:10:41
  kept staring across the church at mister Ranford, instead of following the prayers as
• 3:10:46
  a mourner should. When it was over and we went out to the graveyard,
• 3:10:52
  mister Ranford had disappeared. And as soon as my poor mistress's body was
• 3:10:56
  underground, mister Brimpton jumped into the carriage nearest the gate and drove off without
• 3:11:01
  a word to any of us. I heard him call out to the station,
• 3:11:07
  and we servants went back alone to the house. End of Chapter four,
• 3:11:15
  Chapter five, the mission of Jane Lethbury, surveying his wife across the
• 3:11:20
  dinner table, found his transient conjugal glance arrested by an indefinable change in her
• 3:11:26
  appearance. How smart you look? Is that a new gown? He asked
• 3:11:31
  her. Answering look seemed to deprecate his charging her with the extravagance of wasting
• 3:11:37
  a new gown on him, and he now perceived that the change lay deeper
• 3:11:41
  than any accident of dress. At the same time, he noticed that she
• 3:11:45
  betrayed her consciousness of it by a delicate, almost frightened blush. It was
• 3:11:50
  one of the compensations of missus Lethbury's protracted childishness that she still blushed as prettily
• 3:11:56
  as at eighteen. Her body had been privileged not to outstrip her mind,
• 3:12:01
  and the two, as it seemed to Lethbury, were destined to travel together
• 3:12:05
  through an eternity of girlishness. I don't know what you mean, she said,
• 3:12:11
  since she never did. He always wondered at her bringing this out as
• 3:12:16
  a fresh grievance against him, But his wonder was unresentful, and he said,
• 3:12:20
  good humoredly, you sparkled so that I thought you had on your diamonds.
• 3:12:24
  She sighed and blushed again. It must be, he continued, that
• 3:12:30
  you've been to a dressmaker's opening. You're absolutely brimming with illicit enjoyment. She
• 3:12:35
  stared again, this time at the adjective. His adjectives always embarrassed her their
• 3:12:41
  unintelligibleness, savored of impropriety. In short, he summed up, you've been
• 3:12:46
  doing something that you're thoroughly ashamed of. To his surprise, she retorted,
• 3:12:52
  I don't see why I should be ashamed of it. Lethbury leaned back with
• 3:12:56
  a smile of enjoyment. When there was nothing better going, he always liked
• 3:13:01
  to listen to her explanations, well, he said, she was becoming breathless
• 3:13:05
  and ejaculatory. Of course you'll laugh. You'll laugh at everything. That rather
• 3:13:11
  blunts the point of my derision, doesn't it, he interjected, But she
• 3:13:15
  rushed on without noticing. It's so easy to laugh at things, Ah,
• 3:13:20
  murmured Lethbury with relish. That's Aunt Sophronia's, isn't it. Most of his
• 3:13:26
  wife's opinions were heirlooms, and he took a quaint pleasure in tracing their descent.
• 3:13:31
  She was proud of their age and saw no reason for discarding them while
• 3:13:35
  they were still serviceable. Some, of course, was so fine that she
• 3:13:37
  kept them for state occasions, like her great grandmother's crown Derby. But from
• 3:13:43
  the lady known as Aunt Sophronia, she had inherited a stout set of every
• 3:13:48
  day prejudices that were practically as good as new, whereas her husband's, as
• 3:13:52
  she noticed, were always having to be replaced. In the early day,
• 3:13:56
  she had fancied there might be a certain satisfaction and taxing him with the fact,
• 3:14:01
  But she had long since been silenced by the reply, My dear,
• 3:14:05
  I'm not a rich man, but I never use an opinion twice if I
• 3:14:09
  can help it. She was reduced therefore to dwelling on his moral deficiencies,
• 3:14:15
  and one of the most obvious of these was his refusal to take things seriously.
• 3:14:20
  On this occasion, however, some ulterior purpose kept her from taking up
• 3:14:24
  his taunt. I'm not in the least ashamed, she repeated, with the
• 3:14:28
  air of shaking a banner to the wind, but the domestic atmosphere being calm,
• 3:14:33
  the banner dropped unheroically. That said, Lethbury judicially encourages me to infer
• 3:14:39
  that you ought to be and that consequently you've been giving yourself the unusual pleasure
• 3:14:45
  of doing something I shouldn't approve of. She met this with an almost solemn
• 3:14:50
  directness. No, she said, you won't approve of it. I've allowed
• 3:14:54
  for that, ah, he exclaimed, setting down his liqueur glass. You've
• 3:15:00
  worked out the whole problem, eh, I believe. So that's uncommonly interesting.
• 3:15:05
  And what is it? She looked at him quietly. A baby,
• 3:15:11
  if it were seldom given her to surprise him, she had attained the distinction
• 3:15:15
  for once a baby. Yes, a human baby, of course, she
• 3:15:22
  cried, with a virtuous resentment of the woman who has never allowed dogs in
• 3:15:26
  the house. Lethbury's puzzled stare broke into a fresh smile. A baby I
• 3:15:31
  shan't approve of well in the abstract. I don't think much of them,
• 3:15:35
  I admit, Is this an abstract baby? Again? She frowned at the
• 3:15:41
  adjective, but she had reached a pitch of exultation at which such obstacles could
• 3:15:46
  not deter her. It's the loveliest baby, she murmured. Ah, then
• 3:15:50
  it's concrete. It exists in this harsh world. It draws its breath and
• 3:15:56
  pain. It's the healthiest child I ever saw. She indignant corrected, you've
• 3:16:01
  seen it? Then again, the accusing blush suffused her. Yes, I've
• 3:16:05
  seen it. And to whom does the paragon belong? And here indeed she
• 3:16:11
  confounded him to me, I hope, she declared. He pushed back his
• 3:16:16
  chair with an inarticulate murmur to you, to us, she corrected, Good
• 3:16:22
  lord, he said, if there had been the least head of hallucination in
• 3:16:26
  her transparent gaze. But no, it was as clear as shallow, as
• 3:16:31
  easily fathomable as when he had first suffered the sharp surprise of striking bottom in
• 3:16:37
  it. It occurred to him that perhaps she was trying to be funny.
• 3:16:41
  He knew there was nothing more cryptic than the humor of the unhumorous. Is
• 3:16:46
  it a joke, he faltered, Oh, I hope not. I wanted
• 3:16:50
  so much to be a reality. He paused to smile at the limitations of
• 3:16:56
  a world in which jokes were not realities, and continued gently. But since
• 3:17:01
  it is one already to us, I mean to you and me, I
• 3:17:05
  want her voice wavered and her eyes with it. I have always wanted so
• 3:17:09
  dreadfully. It has been such a disappointment not to I see, said Lethbury
• 3:17:16
  slowly. But he had not seen before. It seemed curious now that he
• 3:17:22
  had never thought of her taking it in that way, had never surmised any
• 3:17:24
  hidden depths beneath her outspread obviousness. He felt as though he had touched a
• 3:17:30
  secret spring in her mind. There was a moment's silence, moist and tremulous
• 3:17:35
  on her part, awkward and slightly irritated on his. You've been lonely,
• 3:17:39
  I suppose, he began. It was odd, having suddenly to reckoned with
• 3:17:43
  the stranger who gazed at him out of her trivial eyes. At times,
• 3:17:50
  she said, I'm sorry, it was not your fault. A man has
• 3:17:54
  so many occupations, and women who were clever or very handsome. I suppose
• 3:17:58
  that's an occupation too. Sometimes I've felt that when dinner was ordered, I
• 3:18:03
  had nothing to do till the next day. Oh, he groaned. It
• 3:18:07
  wasn't your fault, she insisted. I never told you. But when I
• 3:18:11
  chose that rosebud paper for the front room upstairs, I always thought, well,
• 3:18:18
  it would be such a pretty paper for a baby to wake up in.
• 3:18:22
  That was years ago, of course, but it was rather an expensive
• 3:18:24
  paper. And it hasn't faded in the least. She broke off incoherently.
• 3:18:31
  It hasn't faded. No, And so I thought, as we don't use
• 3:18:35
  that room for anything now that Aunt Sophronia is dead, I thought I might.
• 3:18:39
  You might, Oh, Julian, if you could only have seen it
• 3:18:43
  just waking up in its crib. Seen what where? You haven't got a
• 3:18:48
  baby upstairs? Oh no, not yet, she said, with her rare
• 3:18:52
  laugh, that girlish bubbling of merriment that had seemed one of her chief graces
• 3:18:58
  in the early days. It occurred to him that he had not given her
• 3:19:01
  enough things to laugh about lately, but then she needed very elementary things.
• 3:19:07
  It was as difficult to amuse her as a savage. He concluded that he
• 3:19:11
  was not sufficiently simple. Alice, he said, almost solemnly, what do
• 3:19:16
  you mean? She hesitated a moment, he saw her gather her courage for
• 3:19:22
  a supreme effort. Then she said, slowly, gravely, as though she
• 3:19:26
  were pronouncing a sacramental phrase. I'm so lonely without a little child, and
• 3:19:33
  I thought perhaps you'd let me adopt one. It's at the hospital, its
• 3:19:37
  mother is dead, and I could pet it and dress it and do things
• 3:19:41
  for it. And it's such a good baby. You can ask any of
• 3:19:43
  the nurses. It would never never bother you by crying. Section two.
• 3:19:52
  Lethbury accompanied his wife to the hospital in a mood of chastened wonder. It
• 3:19:58
  did not occur to him to oppose her wish. He knew, of course,
• 3:20:01
  that he would have to bear the brunt of the situation, the jokes
• 3:20:03
  at the club, the inquiries, the explanations. He saw himself in the
• 3:20:09
  comic role of the adopted father, and welcomed it as an expiation for in
• 3:20:13
  his rapid reconstruction of the past, he found himself cutting a shabbier figure than
• 3:20:18
  he cared to admit. He had always been intolerant of stupid people, and
• 3:20:24
  it was his punishment to be convicted of stupidity. As his mind traversed the
• 3:20:28
  years between his marriage and this unexpected assumption of paternity, he saw, in
• 3:20:35
  the light of an overheated imagination, many signs of unwonted crassness. It was
• 3:20:41
  not that he had ceased to think his wife stupid. She was stupid,
• 3:20:45
  limited, and flexible, but there was a pathos in the struggles of her
• 3:20:48
  swaddled mind, in its blind reachings toward the primal emotions. He had always
• 3:20:54
  thought she would have been happier with the child, But he had thought it
• 3:20:58
  mechanically because it had so often been thought before, because it was in the
• 3:21:01
  nature of things to think it of every woman. Because his wife was so
• 3:21:05
  eminently one of his species that she fitted into all the generalizations on the sex.
• 3:21:11
  But he had regarded this generalization as merely typical of the triumph of tradition
• 3:21:16
  over experience. Maternity was, no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman,
• 3:21:22
  the one end to which her whole organism tended, but the law of increasing
• 3:21:26
  complexity had operated in both sexes that he had not seriously supposed that outside the
• 3:21:33
  world of Christmas fiction and anecdotic art, such truisms had any special hold on
• 3:21:39
  the feminine imagination. Now he saw that the arts in question were kept alive
• 3:21:45
  by the vitality of the sentiments they appealed to Usbury was in fact going through
• 3:21:52
  a rapid process of readjustment. His marriage had been a failure, but he
• 3:21:56
  had preserved toward his wife the exact fidelity of act that is sometimes supposed to
• 3:22:01
  excuse any divigation of feeling, so that for years the tie between them had
• 3:22:05
  consisted mainly in his abstaining from making love to other women. The abstention had
• 3:22:11
  not always been easy, for the world is surprisingly well stocked with the kind
• 3:22:16
  of woman one ought to have married but did not, and Lethbury had not
• 3:22:20
  escaped the solicitation of such alternatives. His immunity had been purchased at the cost
• 3:22:26
  of taking refuge in the somewhat rarefied atmosphere of his perceptions, and his world
• 3:22:31
  of being thus limited, he had given unusual care to its details, compensating
• 3:22:37
  himself for the narrowness of his horizon by the minute finish of his foreground.
• 3:22:41
  It was a world of fine shadings and the nicest proportions, where impulse seldom
• 3:22:46
  set a blundering foot, and the feast of reason was undisturbed by an intemperate
• 3:22:52
  flow of soul. To such a banquet, his wife naturally remained uninvited.
• 3:22:58
  The diet would have disagreed with her, and she would probably have objected to
• 3:23:01
  the other guests. But Lethbury, miscalculating her needs, had hitherto supposed that
• 3:23:07
  he had made ample provision for them, and was consequently at liberty to enjoy
• 3:23:11
  his own fare without any reproach of mendicancy. At his gates, now he
• 3:23:16
  beheld her pressing a starved face against the windows of his life, and in
• 3:23:22
  his imaginative reaction he invested her with a pathos borrowed from the sense of his
• 3:23:28
  own shortcomings in the hospital. The imaginative process continued with increasing force. He
• 3:23:33
  looked at his wife with new eyes. Formerly she had been to a mere
• 3:23:39
  bundle of negations, a labyrinth of dead walls and bolted doors. There was
• 3:23:43
  nothing behind the walls, and the doors led no whither. He had sounded
• 3:23:48
  and listened often enough to her to be sure of that. Now he felt
• 3:23:52
  like a traveler who exploring some ancient ruin, comes on an inner cell intact
• 3:23:58
  amid the general dilapidation, and painted with images which reveal the forgotten uses of
• 3:24:03
  the building. His wife stood by a white crib in one of the wards.
• 3:24:09
  In the crib lay a child, a year old, the nurse affirmed,
• 3:24:11
  but to Lethbury's eye, a mere, dateless fragment of humanity projected against
• 3:24:16
  a background of conjecture over this anonymous particle of life. Missus Lethbury leaned such
• 3:24:24
  ecstasy reflected in her face as strikes up in Correggio's night piece. From the
• 3:24:30
  child's body to the mother's countenance, it was a light that irradiated and dazzled
• 3:24:35
  her. She looked up at an inquiry of Lethbury's, but as their glances
• 3:24:39
  met, he perceived that she no longer saw him, that he had become
• 3:24:43
  as invisible to her as she had long been to him. He had to
• 3:24:48
  transfer his question to the nurse. What is the child's name? He asked,
• 3:24:54
  We call her Jane, said the nurse. Section three Lethbrey, He
• 3:25:00
  at first had resisted the idea of a legal adoption. But when he found
• 3:25:03
  that his wife's curiously limited imagination prevented her regarding the child as hers till it
• 3:25:09
  had been made so by process of law, he promptly withdrew his objection.
• 3:25:15
  On one point only he remained inflexible, and that was the changing of the
• 3:25:18
  waife's name. Missus Lethbury almost at once had expressed a wish to re christen
• 3:25:24
  it. She fluctuated between Muriel and Gladys, deferring the moment of decision like
• 3:25:30
  a lady wavering between two bonnets. But Lethbury was unyielding in the general surrender
• 3:25:35
  of his prejudices. This one alone held out. But Jane is so dreadful,
• 3:25:41
  Missus Lethbury protested. Well, we don't know that she won't be dreadful.
• 3:25:46
  She may grow up at Jane, his wife exclaimed, reproachfully. The
• 3:25:50
  nurse says she's the loveliest, don't they always say that? Asked Lethbury patiently.
• 3:25:56
  He was prepared to be inexhaustibly patient now that he had reached a firm
• 3:26:00
  foothold of opposition. It's cruel to call her Jane, Missus Lethbury pleaded,
• 3:26:05
  it's ridiculous to call her Muriel. The nurse is sure she must be a
• 3:26:11
  lady's child. Lethby winced he had tried all along to keep his mind off
• 3:26:16
  the question of antecedents. Well let her prove it, he said, with
• 3:26:20
  a rising sense of exasperation. He wondered how he could ever have allowed himself
• 3:26:26
  to be drawn into such a ridiculous business. For the first time he felt
• 3:26:30
  the full irony of it. He had visions of coming home in the afternoon
• 3:26:33
  to a house smelling of linseed and paregoric, and of being greeted by a
• 3:26:39
  chronic howl as he went upstairs to dress for dinner. He had never been
• 3:26:43
  a club man, but he saw himself becoming one now. The worst of
• 3:26:46
  his anticipations were unfulfilled. The baby was surprisingly well and surprisingly quiet. Such
• 3:26:54
  infantile remedies, as she absorbed, were not potent enough to be perceived beyond
• 3:26:58
  the nursery, and when Lethbury could be induced to enter that sanctuary, there
• 3:27:03
  was nothing to jar his nerves in the mild, pink presence of his adopted
• 3:27:07
  daughter. Jars that were, indeed they were probably inevitable in the disturbed routine
• 3:27:13
  of the household. But they occurred between missus Lethbury and the nurses, and
• 3:27:18
  Jane contributed to them only a placid stare, which might have served as a
• 3:27:22
  rebuke to the combatants. In the reaction from his first impulse of atonement,
• 3:27:28
  Lethbury noted with sharpened perceptions the effect of the change on his wife's character.
• 3:27:33
  He saw already the error of supposing that it could work any transformation in her.
• 3:27:37
  It simply magnified her existing qualities. She was like a dried sponge put
• 3:27:43
  in water. She expanded, but she did not change her shape. From
• 3:27:48
  the standpoint of scientific observation, it was curious to see how her stored instincts
• 3:27:54
  responded to the pseudo maternal call. She overflowed with the petty maxims of the
• 3:27:58
  occasion. One felt at her the epitome the consummation of centuries of animal eternity,
• 3:28:05
  So that this little woman who screamed at a mouse and was nervous about
• 3:28:09
  burglars, came to typify the cave mother rending her prey for her young.
• 3:28:16
  It was less easy to regard philosophically the practical effects of her borrowed motherhood.
• 3:28:22
  Lethbury found with surprise that she was becoming assertive and definite. She no longer
• 3:28:26
  represented the negative side of his life. She showed, indeed a tendency to
• 3:28:31
  inconvenient affirmations. She had gradually expanded her assumption of motherhood till it included his
• 3:28:37
  own share of the relation, and he suddenly found himself regarded as the father
• 3:28:43
  of Jane. This was a contingency he had not foreseen, and it took
• 3:28:46
  all his philosophy to accept it. But there were moments of compensation for missus.
• 3:28:52
  Lethbury was undoubtedly happy for the first time in years, and the thought
• 3:28:56
  that he had tardily contributed to this end reconciseiled him to the irony of the
• 3:29:01
  means. At first, he was inclined to reproach himself for still viewing the
• 3:29:05
  situation from the outside, for remaining a spectator instead of a participant. He
• 3:29:11
  had been allured for a moment by the vision of severed hands meeting over a
• 3:29:16
  cradle, as the whole body of domestic fiction bears witness to their doing,
• 3:29:20
  and the fact that no such conjunction took place, he could explain only on
• 3:29:24
  the ground that it was a borrowed cradle. He did not dislike the little
• 3:29:28
  girl. She still remained to him a hypothetical presence, a query rather than
• 3:29:33
  a fact. But her nearness was not unpleasant, and there were moments when
• 3:29:39
  her tentative utterances, her groping steps, seemed to loosen the dry accretions enveloping
• 3:29:46
  his inner self. But even at such moments, moments which he invited and
• 3:29:50
  caressed, she did not bring him nearer to his wife. He now perceived
• 3:29:54
  that he had made a certain place in his life for Missus Lethbury, and
• 3:29:58
  that she no longer fitted into it. It was too late to enlarge the
• 3:30:03
  space, as so she overflowed and encroached. Lethbury struggled against the senses submergence.
• 3:30:09
  He let down barrier after barrier, yielded privacy after privacy, but his
• 3:30:15
  wife's personality continued to dilate. She was no longer herself alone. She was
• 3:30:20
  herself and Jane. Gradually, in a monstrous fusion of identity, she became
• 3:30:26
  herself himself and Jane, And instead of trying to adapt her to a spare
• 3:30:31
  crevice of his character, he found himself carelessly squeezed into the smallest compartment of
• 3:30:37
  the domestic economy. Section four. He continued to tell himself that he was
• 3:30:43
  satisfied if his wife was happy, and it was not till the child's tenth
• 3:30:48
  year that he felt a doubt of her happiness. Jane had been a preternaturally
• 3:30:54
  good child during the eight years of her adoption. She had caused her foster
• 3:30:58
  pearance no anxiety diety beyond those connected with the usual succession of youthful diseases.
• 3:31:05
  But her unknown progenitors had given her a robust constitution, and she passed unperturbed
• 3:31:11
  through measles, chicken pox, and hooping cough. If there was any suffering,
• 3:31:15
  it was endured vicariously by missus Lethbury, whose temperature rose and fell with
• 3:31:20
  the patience, and who could not hear Jane sneeze without visions of a marble
• 3:31:26
  angel weeping over a broken column. But though Jane's prompt recoveries continued to belie
• 3:31:31
  such premonitions, though her existence continued to move forward on an even keel of
• 3:31:37
  good health and good conduct, Missus Lethbury's satisfaction showed no corresponding advance. Lethbury
• 3:31:43
  at first was disposed to add her disappointment to the long list of feminine inconsistencies
• 3:31:50
  with which the sententious observer of life builds up his favorite induction. But circumstances
• 3:31:56
  presently led him to take a kindlier view of the case. Hitherto, his
• 3:32:01
  wife had regarded him as a negligible factor in Jane's evolution. Beyond providing for
• 3:32:07
  his adopted daughter and effacing himself before her, he was not expected to contribute
• 3:32:13
  to her well being. But as time passed he appeared to his wife in
• 3:32:16
  a new light. It was he who was to educate Jane in matters of
• 3:32:22
  the intellect. Missus Lethbury was the first to declare her deficiencies, to proclaim
• 3:32:26
  them even with a certain virtuous superiority, She said, she did not pretend
• 3:32:31
  to be clever, and there was no denying the truth of the assertion.
• 3:32:35
  Now, however, she seemed less ready not to own her limitations, but
• 3:32:39
  to glory in them. Confronted with the problem of Jane's instruction, she stood
• 3:32:45
  in awe of the child. I have always been stupid, you know,
• 3:32:48
  she said to Lethbury, with the new humility, And I am afraid I
• 3:32:52
  shan't know what is best for Jane. I'm sure she has a wonderfully good
• 3:32:56
  mind, and I should reproach myself if I didn't give her every opportunity.
• 3:33:01
  She looked at him helplessly. You must tell me what ought to be done,
• 3:33:05
  Lethbury was not unwilling to oblige her. Somewhere in his metal lumber room
• 3:33:11
  there rusted a theory of education, such as usually lingers among the impedimenta of
• 3:33:16
  the childless. He brought this out, refurbished it, and applied it to
• 3:33:22
  Jane. At first, he thought his wife had not overrated the quality of
• 3:33:26
  the child's mind. Jane seemed extraordinarily intelligent. Her precocious definiteness of mind was
• 3:33:33
  encouraging to her inexperienced preceptor. She had no difficulty in fixing her attention,
• 3:33:39
  and he felt that every fact he imparted was being etched and metal. He
• 3:33:43
  helped his wife to engage the best teachers, and for a while continued to
• 3:33:46
  take an ex official interest in his adopted daughter's studies, But gradually his interest
• 3:33:52
  waned. Jane's ideas did not increase with her acquisitions. Her young mind remained
• 3:33:58
  a mere recept for facts, a kind of a cold storage from which anything
• 3:34:03
  that had been put there could be taken out at a moment's notice, intact
• 3:34:07
  but congealed. She developed moreover an inordinate pride in the capacity of her mental
• 3:34:13
  storehouse, and a tendency to pelt her public with its contents. She was
• 3:34:18
  overheard to jeer at a nurse for not knowing when the Saxon heptarchy had fallen,
• 3:34:24
  and she alternately dazzled and depressed Missus Lethbury by the wealth of her chronological
• 3:34:28
  illusions. She showed no interest in the significance of the fact she amassed.
• 3:34:33
  She simply collected dates as another child might have collected stamps or marbles. To
• 3:34:39
  her foster mother, she seemed a prodigy of wisdom. But Lethbury saw,
• 3:34:45
  with a secret movement of sympathy, how the aptitudes in which Missus Lethbury gloried
• 3:34:50
  were slowly estranging her from their possessor. She is getting too clever for me,
• 3:34:56
  his wife said to him, after one of Jane's historical lif lights.
• 3:35:00
  But I am so glad that you will be a companion to you, Lethbury
• 3:35:05
  groaned in spirit. He did not look forward to Jane's companionship. She was
• 3:35:09
  still a good little girl, but there was something automatic and formal in her
• 3:35:13
  goodness, as though it were a kind of moral calisthenics that she went through
• 3:35:18
  for the sake of showing her agility. An early consciousness of virtue had moreover
• 3:35:22
  constituted her the natural guardian, an adviser of her elders. Before she was
• 3:35:28
  fifteen, she had set about reforming the household. She took Missus Lethbury in
• 3:35:33
  hand. First, then she extended her efforts to the servants, with consequences
• 3:35:39
  more disastrous to the domestic harmony. And lastly she applied herself to Lethbury.
• 3:35:45
  She proved to him by statistics that he smoked too much, and that it
• 3:35:48
  was injurious to the optic nerve to read in bed. She took him to
• 3:35:52
  task for not going to church more regularly, and pointed out to him the
• 3:35:56
  evils of desultory reading. She suggested that a regular course of study encourages metal
• 3:36:03
  concentration, and hinted that inconsecutiveness of thought is a sign of approaching age.
• 3:36:11
  To her adopted mother, whose aggestions were equally pertinent, she instructed Missus Lethbury
• 3:36:16
  in an improved way of making beef stock, and called her attention to the
• 3:36:20
  unhygienic qualities of carpets. She poured out distracting facts about vasilli and vegetable mold,
• 3:36:28
  and demonstrated that curtains and picture frames are a hotbed of animal organisms.
• 3:36:33
  She learned by heart the nutritive ingredients of the principal articles of diet, and
• 3:36:39
  revolutionized the cuisine by an attempt to establish a scientific average between starch and phosphates.
• 3:36:46
  Four cooks left during this experiment, and Lethbury fell into the habit of
• 3:36:52
  dining at his club. Once or twice at the outset. He had tried
• 3:36:56
  to check Jane's ardor, but his efforts resulted only in her hurting his wife's
• 3:37:00
  feelings. Jane remained impervious, and missus Lethbury resented any attempt to protect her
• 3:37:05
  from her daughter. Lethbury saw that she was consoled for the sense of her
• 3:37:11
  own inferiority by the thought of what Jane's intellectual companionship must be to him,
• 3:37:16
  and he tried to keep up the illusion by enduring with what grace he might
• 3:37:20
  the blighting edification of Jane's discourse Section five. As Jane grew up, he
• 3:37:28
  sometimes avenged himself by wondering if his wife was still sorry that they had not
• 3:37:33
  called her Muriel. Jane was not ugly. She developed, indeed, a
• 3:37:37
  kind of categorical prettiness that might have been a projection of her mind. She
• 3:37:43
  had a creditable collection of features, but one had to take an inventory of
• 3:37:46
  them to find out that she was good looking. The fusing grace had been
• 3:37:52
  omitted. Missus Lethbury took a touching pride in her daughter's first steps in the
• 3:37:56
  world. She expected Jane to take by her complexion those whom she did not
• 3:38:01
  capture by her learning. But Jane's rosy freshness did not work any perceptible ravages.
• 3:38:09
  Whether the young men guessed the axioms on her lips and detected the encyclopedia
• 3:38:13
  in her eye, or whether they simply found no intrinsic interest in these features,
• 3:38:18
  certain it is that, in spite of her mother's heroic efforts and of
• 3:38:22
  incessant calls on Lethbury's purse, Jane, at the end of her first season
• 3:38:26
  had dropped hopelessly out of the running. A few duller girls found her interesting,
• 3:38:33
  and one or two young men came to the house with the object of
• 3:38:35
  meeting other young women, but she was rapidly becoming one of the social supernumeries
• 3:38:41
  who were asked out only because they are on people's lists. The blow was
• 3:38:46
  bitter to Missus Lethbury, but she consoled herself with the idea that Jane had
• 3:38:50
  failed because she was too clever. Jane probably shared this conviction. At all
• 3:38:56
  events, she betrayed no consciousness of failure she had developed. He pronounced taste
• 3:39:01
  for society and went out unweariedly and obstinately winter after winter, while Missus Lethbury
• 3:39:07
  toiled in her wake, showering attentions on oblivious hostesses. To Lethbury, there
• 3:39:13
  was something at once tragic and exasperating in the sight of their two figures,
• 3:39:18
  the one conciliatory, the other dogged, both pursuing with unabated zeal the elusive
• 3:39:24
  prize of popularity. He even began to feel a personal mistake in the pursuit,
• 3:39:31
  not as it concerned Jane, but as it affected his wife. He
• 3:39:35
  saw that the latter was the victim of Jane's disappointment, that Jane was not
• 3:39:39
  above the crude satisfaction of taking it out of her mother. Experience checked the
• 3:39:45
  impulse to come to his wife's defense, and when his resentment was at its
• 3:39:48
  height, Jane disarmed him by giving up the struggle. Nothing was said to
• 3:39:54
  mark a capitulation, but Lethbury noticed that the visiting ceased and that the Dressmaiaker's
• 3:40:00
  bills diminished. At the same time, Missus Lethbury made it known that Jane
• 3:40:03
  had taken up charities, and before long Jane's conversation confirmed this announcement. At
• 3:40:09
  first, Lethbury congratulated himself on the change, but Jane's domesticity soon began to
• 3:40:16
  weigh on him. During the day, she was sometimes absent on errands of
• 3:40:20
  mercy, but in the evening she was always there. At first, she
• 3:40:24
  and Missus Lethbury sat in the drawing room together, and Lethbury smoked in the
• 3:40:28
  library, But presently Jane formed the habit of joining him there, and he
• 3:40:33
  began to suspect that he was included among the objects of her philanthropy. Missus
• 3:40:39
  Lethbury confirmed the suspicion. Jane has grown very serious minded lately, she said.
• 3:40:45
  She imagines that she used to neglect you, and she is trying to
• 3:40:48
  make up for it. Don't discourage her, she added, innocently. Such
• 3:40:52
  a plea delivered Lethbury helpless to his daughter's ministrations, and he found himself measuring
• 3:40:58
  the hours he spent with her by the amount of relief they must be affording
• 3:41:03
  her mother. There were even moments when he read a furtive gratitude in Missus
• 3:41:07
  Lethbury's eye. But Lethbury was no hero, and he had quite nearly reached
• 3:41:11
  the limit of vicarious endurance. When something wonderful happened, they never quite knew
• 3:41:18
  afterward how it had come about, or who first perceived it. But Missus
• 3:41:20
  Lethbury one day gave tremulous voice to their inferences. Of course, she said,
• 3:41:26
  he comes here because of a Lee's. The young lady in question,
• 3:41:31
  a friend of James's, was possessed of attractions which had already been found to
• 3:41:35
  explain the presence of masculine visitors. Lethbury risked a denial. I don't think
• 3:41:41
  he does, he declared. But Ailee's is thought very pretty. Missus Lethbury
• 3:41:48
  insisted, I can't help that, said Lethbury doggedly. He saw a faint
• 3:41:52
  light in his wife's eyes. But she remarked carelessly, mister Bud would be
• 3:41:58
  a very good match for a Lee's. Lethbury could hardly repress a chuckle.
• 3:42:03
  He was so exquisitely aware that she was trying to propitiate the gods. For
• 3:42:07
  a few weeks neither said a word. Then missus Lethbury once more reverted to
• 3:42:13
  the subject. It is of months since Elise went abroad, she said,
• 3:42:18
  is it? And mister Bud seems to come here just as often, Ah,
• 3:42:22
  said Lethbury with heroic indifference, and his wife hastily changed the subject.
• 3:42:30
  Mister Winstanley Budd was a young man who suffered from an excessive manner. Politeness
• 3:42:35
  gushed from him in the driest seasons. He was always performing feats of drawing
• 3:42:39
  room chivalry, and the approach of the most unobtrusive female threw him into attitudes
• 3:42:45
  which endangered the furniture. His features, being of the cherubic order, did
• 3:42:50
  not lend themselves to this role, but there were moments when he appeared to
• 3:42:54
  dominate them, to force them into compliance with an aquiline ideal. The range
• 3:43:00
  Mister Bud's social benevolence made its object hard to distinguish. He spread his cloak
• 3:43:05
  so indiscriminately that one could not always interpret the gesture, and Jane's impassive manner
• 3:43:11
  had the effect of increasing his demonstrations. She threw him into paroxysms of politeness.
• 3:43:16
  At first he filled the house with his amenities, but gradually it became
• 3:43:20
  apparent that his most dazzling effects were directed exclusively to Jane. Lethbury and his
• 3:43:26
  wife held their breath and looked away from each other. They pretended not to
• 3:43:31
  notice the frequency of mister Bud's visits. They struggled against an imprudent inclination to
• 3:43:37
  leave the young people too much alone. Their conclusions were the result of indirect
• 3:43:43
  observation, for neither of them dared to be caught watching mister Budd. They
• 3:43:48
  behaved like naturalists on the trail of a rare butterfly. In his efforts not
• 3:43:52
  to notice mister Bud, Lethbury centered his attentions on Jane, and Jane at
• 3:43:58
  this crucial moment, wrung from him a reluctant admiration. While her parents went
• 3:44:03
  about dissembling their emotions, she seemed to have none to conceal. She betrayed
• 3:44:09
  neither eagerness nor surprise. So complete was her unconcern that there were moments when
• 3:44:13
  Lethbury feared it was obtuseness when he could hardly help whispering to her that now
• 3:44:20
  was the moment to lower the net. Meanwhile, the velocity of mister Bud's
• 3:44:24
  gyrations increased with the ardor of courtship. His politeness became incandescent, and Jane
• 3:44:31
  found herself the center of a pyrotechnical display culminating in the set piece of an
• 3:44:37
  offer of marriage. Missus Lethbury imparted the news to a husband one evening after
• 3:44:43
  their daughter had gone to bed. The announcement was made and received with an
• 3:44:46
  air of detachment, as though both feared to be betrayed into unseemly exultation.
• 3:44:52
  But Lethbury, as his wife ended, could not repress the inquiry have they
• 3:44:58
  decided on a day? Missus Lethbury's superior command of her features enabled her to
• 3:45:03
  look shocked. What can you be thinking of? He only offered himself at
• 3:45:07
  five? Of course, of course, stammered Lethbury. But nowadays people marry
• 3:45:13
  after such short engagements. Engagement, said his wife solemnly. There is no
• 3:45:20
  engagement. Lethbury dropped his cigar. What on earth do you mean? Jane
• 3:45:26
  is thinking it over, thinking it over. She has asked for a month
• 3:45:31
  before deciding, Lethbury sat back with a gasp. Was it genius or is
• 3:45:35
  it madness? He felt incompetent to decide, and Missus Lethbury's next words showed
• 3:45:41
  that she shared his difficulty. Of course, I don't want to hurry Jane.
• 3:45:46
  Of course not, he acquiesced. But I pointed out to her that
• 3:45:50
  a young man of mister Budd's impulsive temperament might might be easily discouraged. Yes,
• 3:45:56
  and what did she say? She said that if she was worth winning,
• 3:46:01
  she was worth waiting for section six. The period of mister Bud's probation
• 3:46:07
  could scarcely have cost him as much mental anguish as it caused as would be
• 3:46:11
  parents in law. Missus Lethbury, by various ruses, tried to shorten the
• 3:46:16
  ordeal, but Jane remained inexorable, and each morning Lethbury came down to breakfast
• 3:46:22
  with a certainty of finding a letter of withdrawal from her discouraged suitor. When
• 3:46:28
  at length the decisive day came, and Missus Lethbury, at its close,
• 3:46:31
  stole into the library with an air of chasten joy. They stood for a
• 3:46:37
  moment without speaking, Then Missus Lethbury paid a fitting tribute to the proprieties by
• 3:46:41
  faltering out, it will be dreadful to have to give her up. Lethbury
• 3:46:48
  could not repress a warning gesture, but even as it escaped him, he
• 3:46:52
  realized that his wife's grief was genuine. Of course, of course, he
• 3:46:56
  said, vainly, sounding his own emotional shallow for an answering regret. And
• 3:47:01
  yet it was his wife who had suffered most from Jane. He had fancied
• 3:47:07
  that these sufferings would be effaced by the milder atmosphere of their last weeks together.
• 3:47:13
  But felicity did not soften Jane. Not for a moment did she relax
• 3:47:16
  her dominion. She simply widened it to include a new subject. Mister Budd
• 3:47:22
  found himself under orders with the others, and a new fear assailed Lethbury as
• 3:47:28
  he saw Jane assumed prenuptial control of her betrothed. Lethbrey had never felt any
• 3:47:33
  strong personal interest in mister Budd, but as Jane's prospective husband, the young
• 3:47:39
  man excited his sympathy. To his surprise, he found that missus Lethbury shared
• 3:47:43
  the feeling. I am afraid he may find Jane a little exacting, she
• 3:47:48
  said, after an evening dedicated to a stormy discussion of the wedding arrangements,
• 3:47:54
  she really ought to make some concessions if he wants to be married in a
• 3:47:58
  black frock coat instead of a dark gray one. She paused and looked doubtfully
• 3:48:03
  at Lethbury. What can I do about it? He said, You might
• 3:48:07
  explain to him, tell him that Jane isn't always. Lesbury made an impatient
• 3:48:13
  gesture. What are you afraid of? Is finding her out? Or is
• 3:48:16
  not finding her out? Missus Lethbury flushed. You put it so dreadfully,
• 3:48:22
  her husband mused for a moment, then he said, with an air of
• 3:48:26
  cheerful hypocrisy. After all, Bud is old enough to take care of himself.
• 3:48:31
  But the next day, Missus Lesbury surprised him. Late in the afternoon.
• 3:48:35
  She entered the library so breathless and inarticulate that he scented a catastrophe.
• 3:48:41
  I've done it, she cried, done. What told him? She nodded
• 3:48:48
  toward the door. He's just gone, Jane is out and I had a
• 3:48:50
  chance to talk to him alone. Lesbury pushed a chair forward and she sank
• 3:48:56
  into it. What did you tell him that she is not always missus.
• 3:49:01
  Lethbury lifted a tragic eye. No, I told him that she always is,
• 3:49:07
  always is. Yes, there was a pause. Lethbury made a call
• 3:49:11
  on his hoarded philosophy. He saw Jane suddenly reinstated in her evening seat by
• 3:49:18
  the library fire, but an answering chord in him thrilled at his wife's heroism.
• 3:49:24
  Well, what did he say, missus? Lethbury's agitation deepened. It
• 3:49:28
  was clear that the blow had fallen. He he said that we had never
• 3:49:33
  understood Jane or appreciated her. The final syllables were lost in her handkerchief,
• 3:49:41
  and she left him marveling at the mechanism of a woman. After that,
• 3:49:45
  Lethbury faced the future with an undaughted eye. They had done their duty,
• 3:49:48
  at least his wife had done hers, and they were reaping the usual harvest
• 3:49:52
  of ingratitude with a zest seldom accorded to such reaping. There was a marked
• 3:49:58
  change in mister Bud's manner, and his increasing coldness sent a genial glow through
• 3:50:03
  Lethbury's system. It was easy to bear with Jane in the light of mister
• 3:50:09
  Budd's disapproval. There was a good deal to be borne in the last days,
• 3:50:13
  and the brunt of it fell on Missus Lethbury. Jane marked a transition
• 3:50:18
  to the married state by an appropriate but incongruous display of nerves. She became
• 3:50:22
  sentimental, hysterical, and reluctant. She quarreled with her betrothed and threatened to
• 3:50:28
  return the ring. Missus Lesbury had to intervene, and Lethbury felt the hovering
• 3:50:33
  sword of destiny, but the blow was suspended. Mister Bud's chivalry was proof
• 3:50:39
  against all his bride's caprices, and his devotion throve on her cruelty. Lethbury
• 3:50:45
  feared that he was too faithful, too enduring, and longed to urge him
• 3:50:48
  to vary his tactics. Jane presently reappeared with the ring on her finger and
• 3:50:54
  consented to try on the wedding dress, but her uncertainties her reactions were pro
• 3:51:00
  long till the final day. When it dawned. Lethbury was still in an
• 3:51:03
  ecstasy of apprehension. Feeling reasonably sure of the principal actors, he had scented
• 3:51:09
  his fears on incidental possibilities. The clergyman might have a stroke, or the
• 3:51:15
  church might burn down. Or there might be something wrong with the license.
• 3:51:18
  He did all that was humanly possible to avert such contingencies, but there remained
• 3:51:24
  that incalculable factor known as the hand of God. Lethbury seemed to feel it
• 3:51:30
  groping for him in the church. It almost had him by the nape.
• 3:51:35
  Mister Bud was late, and for five immeasurable minutes Lethbury and Jane faced a
• 3:51:39
  church full of conjecture. Then the bridegroom appeared, flushed with chivalrous and explained
• 3:51:46
  to his father in law under cover of the ritual that he had torn his
• 3:51:50
  glove and had to go back for another. You'll be losing the ring,
• 3:51:54
  next, muttered Lethbury. But mister Bud produced this article punctually, and a
• 3:51:58
  moment to who later was bearing its wear a captive down the aisle. At
• 3:52:03
  the wedding breakfast, Lethbury caught his wife's eye fixed on him in mild disapproval,
• 3:52:09
  and understood that his hilarity was exceeding the bounds of fitness. He pulled
• 3:52:13
  himself together and tried to subdue his tone, but his jubilation bubbled over like
• 3:52:18
  a champagne glass perpetually refilled the deeper his drafts, the higher it rose.
• 3:52:24
  It was at the brim when, in the wake of the dispersing guests,
• 3:52:28
  Jane came down in her traveling dress and fell on her mother's neck. I
• 3:52:33
  can't leave you, she wailed, and Lethbury felt as suddenly sobered as a
• 3:52:39
  man under a douche. But if the bride was reluctant, her captor was
• 3:52:43
  relentless. Never had mister Budd been more dominant, more aquiline. Lethbury's last
• 3:52:48
  fears were dissipated as the young man snatched Jane from her mother's bosom and bore
• 3:52:54
  her off to the broom. The brougham rolled away, the last Milliner's girl
• 3:53:00
  forsook her post. By the awning, the red carpet was folded up and
• 3:53:03
  the house door closed. Lethbury stood alone in the hall with his wife.
• 3:53:09
  As he turned toward her, he noticed the look of tired heroism in her
• 3:53:11
  eyes and the deepened lines of her face. They reflected his own symptoms,
• 3:53:16
  too accurately not to appeal to him. The nervous tension had been horrible.
• 3:53:22
  He went up to her, and an answering impulse made her lay a hand
• 3:53:26
  on his arm. He held it there a moment. Let us go off
• 3:53:31
  and have a jolly little dinner at a restaurant, he proposed. There had
• 3:53:35
  been a time when such a suggestion would have surprised her to the verge of
• 3:53:39
  disapproval, But now she agreed to it at once. Oh, that would
• 3:53:45
  be so nice, she murmured, with a great sigh of relief and assuagement.
• 3:53:52
  Jane had fulfilled her mission, after all, she had drawn them together.
• 3:53:56
  At last end of chapter five, Chapter six, the reckoning the marriage
• 3:54:07
  law of the new dispensation will be thou shalt not be unfaithful to thyself.
• 3:54:13
  A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the haze of cigarette
• 3:54:18
  smoke, missus Clement Westall, as her husband descended from his improvised platform,
• 3:54:22
  saw him merged in a congratulatory group of ladies. Westall's informal talks on the
• 3:54:30
  new ethics had drawn about him an eager following of the mentally unemployed, those
• 3:54:35
  who, as he had once phraised it, liked to have their brain food
• 3:54:39
  cut up for them. The talks had begun by accident. Westall's ideas were
• 3:54:43
  known to be advanced, but hitherto their advance had not been in the direction
• 3:54:48
  of publicity. He had been, in his wife's opinion, almost pusillanimously careful
• 3:54:54
  not to let his personal views in danger his professional standing. Of late,
• 3:55:00
  however, he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down the
• 3:55:03
  gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society, and the
• 3:55:09
  relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, A few
• 3:55:13
  admiring friends had persuaded him to give his aft and inner opinions a larger circulation
• 3:55:18
  by summing them up in a series of talks at the Van Sideren's studio.
• 3:55:24
  The Herbert van Siderens were a couple who subsisted socially on the fact that they
• 3:55:28
  had a studio. Van Sideren's pictures were chiefly valuable as successories to the Mesonceinne,
• 3:55:35
  which differentiated his wife's afternoons from the blighting functions held in long New York
• 3:55:41
  drawing rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends whiskey and soda instead of
• 3:55:46
  tea. Missus van Sideren, for her part, was skilled in making the
• 3:55:50
  most of the kind of atmosphere which a lay figure and an easel create,
• 3:55:56
  and if at time she found the illusion hard to maintain and lost courage to
• 3:56:00
  the extent of almost wishing that Herbert could paint, she promptly overcame such moments
• 3:56:05
  of weakness by calling in some fresh talent, some extraneous reinforcement of the artistic
• 3:56:11
  impression. It was in quest of such aid that she had seized on Westall,
• 3:56:16
  coaxing him, somewhat to his wife's surprise, into a flattered participation in
• 3:56:22
  her fraud. It was vaguely felt in the Van Sideren circle that all the
• 3:56:26
  audacities were artistic, and that a teacher who pronounced marriage immoral was somehow as
• 3:56:33
  distinguished as a painter who depicted purple grass and a green sky. The Van
• 3:56:39
  Sideren set retired of the conventional color scheme in art and conduct. Julia Westall
• 3:56:45
  had long had her own views on the immorality of marriage. She might indeed
• 3:56:50
  have claimed her husband as a disciple in the early days of their union.
• 3:56:54
  She had secretly resented his disinclination to proclaim himself a follower of the New had
• 3:57:00
  been inclined to tax him with moral cowardice with a failure to live up to
• 3:57:05
  the convictions for which their marriage was supposed to stand. That was in the
• 3:57:09
  first burst of propagandism, when womanlike she wanted to turn her disobedience into a
• 3:57:16
  law. Now she felt differently. She could hardly account for the change,
• 3:57:20
  Yet, being a woman who never allowed her impulses to remain unaccounted for,
• 3:57:26
  she tried to do so by saying that she did not care to have the
• 3:57:28
  articles of her faith misinterpreted by the vulgar. In this connection, she was
• 3:57:33
  beginning to think that almost every one was vulgar. Certainly, there were few
• 3:57:39
  to whom she would have cared to entrust the defense of so esoteric a doctrine.
• 3:57:43
  And it was precisely at this point that Westall, discarding his unspoken principles,
• 3:57:50
  had chosen to descend from the heights of privacy and stand hawking his convictions
• 3:57:56
  at the street corner. It was uni ansiderine who, on this occasion unconsciously
• 3:58:01
  focused upon herself Missus Westall's wandering resentment. In the first place, the girl
• 3:58:07
  had no business to be there. It was horrid Missus Westall found herself slipping
• 3:58:13
  back into the old feminine vocabulary. Simply horrid to think of a young girl's
• 3:58:18
  being allowed to listen to such talk. The fact that Juna smoked cigarettes and
• 3:58:22
  sipped an occasional cocktail did not, in the least tarnish a certain radiant innocency
• 3:58:28
  which made her appear the victim rather than the accomplice of her parents vulgarities.
• 3:58:33
  Julia Westall felt in a hot, helpless way that something ought to be done,
• 3:58:37
  that someone ought to speak to the girl's mother, And just then Euna
• 3:58:41
  glided up. Oh, Missus Westall, how beautiful it was. Una fixed
• 3:58:48
  her with large, limpid eyes. You believe it all, I suppose,
• 3:58:52
  she asked, with seraphic gravity. All what my dear child, the girl
• 3:58:58
  shone on her about the higher life, the freer expansion of the individual,
• 3:59:03
  the law of fidelity to oneself. She glibly recited, Missus Westall to her
• 3:59:09
  own wonder, blushed a deep and burning blush. My dear Euna, she
• 3:59:13
  said, you don't at the least understand what it's all about. Miss van
• 3:59:18
  Sideren stared with a slowly answering blush. Don't you? Then, she murmured,
• 3:59:22
  Missus Westall laughed, not always or altogether, but I should like some
• 3:59:28
  tea please. Yuna led her to the corner where innocent beverages were dispensed.
• 3:59:33
  As Julia received her cup, she scrutinized the girl more carefully. It was
• 3:59:37
  not such a girlish face, after all, definite lines were forming under the
• 3:59:43
  rosy haze of youth. She reflected that Euna must be six and twenty,
• 3:59:46
  and wondered why she had not married a nice stock of ideas she would have
• 3:59:52
  as heard hour if they were to be part of the modern girl's trousseau.
• 3:59:56
  Missus Westall caught herself up with a start. It was a as though some
• 4:00:00
  one else had been speaking, a stranger who had borrowed her own voice.
• 4:00:05
  She felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental ventriloquism. Concluding suddenly that the
• 4:00:09
  room was stifling and Euna's tea too sweet, She set down her cup and
• 4:00:15
  looked about for Westall to meet. His eyes had long been her refuge from
• 4:00:18
  every uncertainty. She met them now, but only as she felt entransit.
• 4:00:24
  They included her parenthetically in a larger flight. She followed the flight, and
• 4:00:28
  it carried her to a corner to which Yuna had withdrawn one of the palmy
• 4:00:33
  nooks, to which Missus van sideren attributed the success of her saturdays. Westall,
• 4:00:39
  a moment later, had overtaken his look and found a place at the
• 4:00:43
  girl's side. She bent forward, speaking eagerly. He leaned back, listening
• 4:00:48
  with a depreciatory smile, which acted as the filter to flattery, enabling him
• 4:00:54
  to swallow the strongest doses without apparent grossness of appetite. Julia winced at her
• 4:01:00
  own definition of the smile. On the way home, in the deserted winter
• 4:01:03
  dusk, Westall surprised his wife by a sudden, boyish pressure of her arm.
• 4:01:09
  Did I open their eyes a bit? Did I tell them what you
• 4:01:13
  wanted me to? He asked gaily, Almost unconsciously, she let her arms
• 4:01:18
  slip from his What I wanted? Why haven't you all this time? She
• 4:01:24
  caught the honest wonder of his tone. I somehow fancied you'd rather blame me
• 4:01:28
  for not talking more openly before. You've made me feel at times that I
• 4:01:33
  was sacrificing principles to expediency. She paused a moment over her reply, Then
• 4:01:39
  she asked, quietly, what made you decide not to any longer? She
• 4:01:46
  felt again the vibration of a faint surprise. Why the wish to please you,
• 4:01:50
  he answered, almost too simply, I wish you would not go on,
• 4:01:54
  then, she said, abruptly. He stopped in his quick walk,
• 4:02:00
  and she felt his stare through the darkness. Not go on, call a
• 4:02:05
  handsome please, untired broke from her with a sudden rush of physical weariness.
• 4:02:11
  Instantly his solicitude enveloped her. The room had been infernally hot, and then
• 4:02:16
  that confounded cigarette smoke. He had noticed once or twice that she looked pale.
• 4:02:20
  She mustn't come to another Saturday. She felt herself yielding, as she
• 4:02:24
  always did, to the warm influence of his concern for her, the feminine
• 4:02:28
  in her, leaning on the man and him with a conscious intensity of abandonment.
• 4:02:35
  He put her in the hansom, and her hands stole into his.
• 4:02:39
  In the darkness, a tear or two rose, and she let them fall.
• 4:02:43
  It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles that evening, after dinner
• 4:02:48
  he surprised her by reverting to the subject of his talk. He combined a
• 4:02:52
  man's dislike of uncomfortable questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding them, and
• 4:02:58
  she knew that if he returned to the subject. He must have some special
• 4:03:03
  reason for doing so. You seem not to have cared for what I said
• 4:03:07
  this afternoon. Did I put the case badly? No, you put it
• 4:03:11
  very well. Then? What did you mean by saying that you would rather
• 4:03:15
  not have me go on with it? She glanced at him nervously, her
• 4:03:18
  ignorance of his intention deepening her sense of helplessness. I don't think I care
• 4:03:24
  to hear such things. Disgusted and public. I don't understand you, he
• 4:03:30
  exclaimed again. The feeling that his surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity
• 4:03:35
  to her own attitude. She was not sure that she understood herself. Won't
• 4:03:41
  you explain, he said, with a tinge of impatience. Her eyes wandered
• 4:03:45
  about the familiar drawing room, which had been the scene of so many of
• 4:03:48
  their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the quiet colored walls hung with meso
• 4:03:54
  tents, the pale spring flowers scattered here and there in venice glasses and bold
• 4:04:00
  of Oldsayevre recalled. She hardly knew why the apartment in which the evenings of
• 4:04:05
  her first marriage had been passed a wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a
• 4:04:11
  picture of a Roman peasant above the mantelpiece, and a Greek slave in statuary
• 4:04:16
  marble between the folding doors of the back drawing room. It was a room
• 4:04:20
  with which she had never been able to establish any closer relation than that between
• 4:04:26
  a traveler and a railway station. And now as she looked about at the
• 4:04:30
  surroundings which stood for her deepest affinities the room for which she had left that
• 4:04:35
  other room, she was startled by the same sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity.
• 4:04:41
  The prince, the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains seemed to
• 4:04:46
  typify a superficial refinement that had no relation to the deeper significances of life.
• 4:04:52
  Suddenly she heard her husband repeating the question, I don't know that I can
• 4:04:58
  explain. She faltered. He drew his arm chair forward so that he faced
• 4:05:01
  her across the hearth. The light of a reading lamp fell on his finely
• 4:05:05
  drawn face, which had a kind of surface sensitiveness akin to the surface refinement
• 4:05:11
  of its setting. Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?
• 4:05:16
  He asked? In our ideas? The ideas I am trying to teach the
• 4:05:22
  ideas you and I are supposed to stand for. He paused a moment,
• 4:05:28
  the ideas on which our marriage was founded. The blood rushed to her face.
• 4:05:33
  He had his reasons, then, she was sure now that he had
• 4:05:37
  his reasons. In the ten years of their marriage, how often had either
• 4:05:41
  of them stopped to consider the ideas on which it was founded. How often
• 4:05:46
  does a man dig about in the basement of his house to examine its foundation.
• 4:05:50
  The foundation is there, of course, the house rests on it.
• 4:05:52
  But one lives above stairs and not in the cellar. It was she,
• 4:05:58
  indeed, who, in the beginning, had insisted on reviewing the situation now
• 4:06:01
  and then on recapitulating the reasons which justified her course, on proclaiming from time
• 4:06:07
  to time her adherents to the religion of personal independence. But she had long
• 4:06:13
  ceased to feel the need of any such ideal standards, and had accepted her
• 4:06:18
  marriage as frankly and naturally, as though it had been based on the primitive
• 4:06:22
  needs of the heart and needed no special sanction to explain or justify it.
• 4:06:28
  Of course, I still believe in our ideas, she exclaimed. Then I
• 4:06:33
  repeat that I don't understand. It was a part of your theory that the
• 4:06:37
  greatest possible publicity should be given to our view of marriage. Have you changed
• 4:06:43
  your mind in that respect? She hesitated. It depends on circumstances. On
• 4:06:48
  the public. One is addressing the set of people that the Vansiderans get about
• 4:06:52
  them. Don't care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine. They are
• 4:06:56
  attracted simply by its novelty. And yet it was in just such a set
• 4:07:01
  of people that you and I met and learned the truth from each other.
• 4:07:07
  That was different. I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs
• 4:07:11
  that such things had never discussed before young girls. But that is beside the
• 4:07:16
  point, for I don't remember seeing any young girl in my audience to day,
• 4:07:20
  except Euna van Sideren. He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at
• 4:07:26
  his elbow. Oh, Miss van Sideren, naturally, Why naturally the daughter
• 4:07:33
  of the house, would you have had her sent out with her governess?
• 4:07:37
  If I had a daughter, I should not allow such things to go on
• 4:07:39
  in my house. Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint
• 4:07:45
  smile. I fancy Miss van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of herself.
• 4:07:50
  No girl knows how to take care of herself till it's too late,
• 4:07:54
  And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of self defense. What
• 4:08:00
  do you call the surest means of self defense? Some preliminary knowledge of human
• 4:08:05
  nature in its relation to the marriage tie? She made an impatient gesture,
• 4:08:11
  how should you like to marry that kind of a girl? Immensely if she
• 4:08:15
  were my kind of girl? In other respects, She took up the argument
• 4:08:18
  at another point, you are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not
• 4:08:24
  affect young girls. Una was in a state of the most absurd exultation.
• 4:08:28
  She broke off, wondering why she had spoken. Westall reopened a magazine which
• 4:08:35
  he had laid aside at the beginning of their discussion. What you tell me
• 4:08:39
  is immensely flattering to my oratorical talent, but I fear you overrate its effect.
• 4:08:45
  I can assure you that miss van Sideren doesn't have to have her thinking
• 4:08:48
  done for her. She's quite capable of doing it herself. You seem very
• 4:08:54
  familiar with her mental processes, flashed unguardedly from his wife. He looked up
• 4:09:00
  quietly from the pages He was cutting. I should like to be, he
• 4:09:05
  answered, she interests me Section two. If there be a distinction in being
• 4:09:11
  misunderstood, it was one denied to Julia Westall when she left her first husband.
• 4:09:18
  Everyone was ready to excuse and even to defend her. The world she
• 4:09:22
  adorned agreed that John armittt was impossible, and hostesses gave a sigh of relief
• 4:09:28
  at the thought that it would no longer be necessary to ask him to dine.
• 4:09:31
  There had been no scandal connected with the divorce. Neither side had accused
• 4:09:37
  the other of the offense euphemistically described as statutory. The arments had been obliged
• 4:09:43
  to transfer their allegiance to a state which recognized desertion as the cause for divorce
• 4:09:48
  and construed the term so liberally that the seeds of desertion were shown to exist
• 4:09:54
  in every union. Even missus Armand's second marriage did not make traditional moraleny stir
• 4:10:00
  in its sleep. It was known that she had not met her second husband
• 4:10:03
  till after she had parted from the first, and she had moreover replaced a
• 4:10:09
  rich man by a poor one. Though Clement Westall was acknowledged to be a
• 4:10:13
  rising lawyer, it was generally felt that his fortunes would not rise as rapidly
• 4:10:18
  as his reputation. The Westalls would probably always have to live quietly and go
• 4:10:24
  out to dinner in cabs. Could there be better evidence of missus Armand's complete
• 4:10:28
  disinterestedness If the reasoning by which her friends justified her course was somewhat cruder and
• 4:10:35
  less complex than her own elucidation of the matter. Both explanations led to the
• 4:10:41
  same conclusion. John armittt was impossible. The only difference was that to his
• 4:10:46
  wife, his impossibility was something deeper than a social disqualification. She had once
• 4:10:52
  said, in the ironical defense of her marriage that it had at least preserved
• 4:10:58
  her from the necessity of sitting next to him at dinner, which he had
• 4:11:01
  not then realized at what cost the immunity was purchased. John Armand was impossible.
• 4:11:07
  But the sting of his impossibility lay in the fact that he made it
• 4:11:11
  impossible for those about him to be other than himself. By an unconscious process
• 4:11:16
  of elimination, he had excluded from the world everything of which he did not
• 4:11:22
  feel a personal need. Had become, as it were, a climate in
• 4:11:26
  which only his requirement survived. This might seem to imply a deliberate selfishness.
• 4:11:33
  But there was nothing deliberate about arment. He was as instinctive as an animal
• 4:11:37
  or a child. It was this childish element in his nature which sometimes,
• 4:11:43
  for a moment unsettled his wife's estimate of him. Was it possible that he
• 4:11:46
  was simply undeveloped, that he had delayed somewhat longer than his usual the laborious
• 4:11:52
  process of growing up. He had the kind of sporadic shrewdness which causes it
• 4:11:58
  to be said of a dull man that he is no fool. And it
• 4:12:01
  was this quality that his wife found most trying. Even to the naturalist.
• 4:12:05
  It is annoying to have his deductions disturbed by some unforeseen obarrency of form or
• 4:12:11
  function, And how much more so to the wife, whose estimate of herself
• 4:12:16
  is inevitably bound up with her judgment of her husband. Armand's shrewdness did not
• 4:12:22
  indeed imply any latent intellectual power. It suggested rather potentialities of feeling, of
• 4:12:28
  suffering, perhaps in a blind, rudimentary way, on which Julia's sensibilities naturally
• 4:12:33
  declined to linger. She so fully understood her own reasons for leaving him that
• 4:12:39
  she disliked to think they were not as comprehensible to her husband. She was
• 4:12:43
  haunted in her analytic moments by the look of perplexity, too inarticulate for words
• 4:12:50
  with which he had acquiesced to her explanations. These moments were rare with her,
• 4:12:54
  However, her marriage had been too concrete a misery to be surveyed maid
• 4:13:00
  philosophically. If she had been unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as
• 4:13:05
  real as though it had been uncomplicated. Soul is more bruisibal than flesh,
• 4:13:09
  and Julia was wounded in every fiber of her spirit. Her husband's personality seemed
• 4:13:15
  to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off the
• 4:13:20
  air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved
• 4:13:24
  hopes. A sense of having been decoyed by some world old conspiracy into this
• 4:13:30
  bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow,
• 4:13:35
  life long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a
• 4:13:39
  crime against human nature. She, for one, would have no share in
• 4:13:43
  maintaining the pretense of which she had been a victim. The pretense that a
• 4:13:48
  man and a woman forced into the narrowest of personal relations must remain near till
• 4:13:52
  the end, though they may have outgrown the span of each other's natures.
• 4:13:56
  As the mature tree outgrows the iron brace about the sapling. It was in
• 4:14:03
  the first heat of her moral indignation that she had met Clement Westall. She
• 4:14:07
  had seen at once that he was interested, and had fought off the discovery,
• 4:14:11
  dreading any influence that should draw her back into the bondage of conventional relations.
• 4:14:18
  To ward off the peril, she had, with an almost crude precipitancy,
• 4:14:22
  revealed her opinions to him. To her surprise, she found that he
• 4:14:26
  shared them. She was attracted by the frankness of a suitor who, while
• 4:14:30
  pressing his suit, admitted that he did not believe in marriage. Her worst
• 4:14:35
  audacities did not seem to surprise him. He had thought out all that she
• 4:14:39
  had felt, and they had reached the same conclusion. People grew at varying
• 4:14:43
  rates, and the yoke that was an easy fit for the one might soon
• 4:14:48
  become galling to the other. That was what divorce was for the readjustment of
• 4:14:52
  personal relations. As soon as they are necessarily transited nature was recognized, they
• 4:14:58
  would gain and dignitity as well as in harmony. There would be no far
• 4:15:03
  the need of the ignoble concessions and connivances, the perpetual sacrifice of personal delicacy
• 4:15:09
  and moral pride by means of which imperfect marriages were now held together. Each
• 4:15:15
  partner to the contract would be on his mettle, forced to live up to
• 4:15:18
  the highest standard of self development on pain of losing the other's respect and affection.
• 4:15:24
  The low nature could no longer drag the higher down, but must struggle
• 4:15:28
  to rise or remain alone on its inferior level. The only necessary condition to
• 4:15:33
  a harmonious marriage was a frank recognition of this truth and a solemn agreement between
• 4:15:39
  the contracting parties to keep faith with themselves and not to live together for a
• 4:15:45
  moment after complete accord had ceased to exist between them. The new adultery was
• 4:15:50
  unfaithfulness to self. It was, as Westall had just reminded her on this
• 4:15:56
  understanding that they had married the ceremon and he was an unimportant concession to social
• 4:16:02
  prejudice. Now that the door of divorce stood open, no marriage need be
• 4:16:06
  an imprisonment, and the contract therefore no longer involved any diminution of self respect.
• 4:16:12
  The nature of their attachment placed them so far beyond the reach of such
• 4:16:17
  contingencies that it was easy to discuss them with an open mind, and Julia's
• 4:16:22
  sense of security made her dwell with a tender insistence on Westall's promise to claim
• 4:16:27
  his release when he should cease to lover. The exchange of these vows seemed
• 4:16:32
  to make them, in a sense, champions of the new law pioneers in
• 4:16:37
  the forbidden realm of individual freedom. They felt that they had somehow achieved the
• 4:16:41
  attitude without martyrdom. This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived
• 4:16:48
  to have been her theoretical attitude toward marriage. It was unconsciously insidiously that her
• 4:16:53
  ten years of happiness with Westall had developed another conception of the tie, a
• 4:16:59
  reverse rare that to the old instinct of passionate dependency and possessorship that now made
• 4:17:04
  her blood revolted. The mere hint of change, change renewal was that what
• 4:17:10
  they had called it in their foolish jargon destruction extermination, Rather, this rending
• 4:17:15
  of a myriad fibers interwoven with another's being another, but he was not other.
• 4:17:22
  He and she were one one in the mystic sense, which alone gave
• 4:17:26
  marriage its significance. The new law was not for them, but for the
• 4:17:30
  disunited creatures forced into a mockery of union. The gospel she had felt called
• 4:17:36
  on to proclaim had no bearing on her own case. She sent for the
• 4:17:40
  doctor and told him she was sure she needed a nerve tonic. She took
• 4:17:45
  the nerve tonic diligently, but it failed to act as a sedative to her
• 4:17:48
  fears. She did not know what she feared, but that made her anxiety
• 4:17:53
  the more pervasive. Her husband had not perverted to the subject of his Saturday
• 4:17:57
  talks. He was unus usually kind and considerate, with a softening of his
• 4:18:03
  quick manner, a touch of shyness in his consideration that sickened her with new
• 4:18:07
  fears. She told herself that it was because she looked badly, because he
• 4:18:11
  knew about the doctor and the nerve tonic, that he showed this deference to
• 4:18:15
  her wishes, this eagerness to screen her from moral drafts. But the explanation
• 4:18:21
  simply cleared the way of fresh inferences. The week passed slowly, vacantly,
• 4:18:26
  like a prolonged Sunday. On Saturday, the morning post brought a note from
• 4:18:32
  missus van Sideren, would dear Julia ask mister Westall to come half an hour
• 4:18:37
  earlier than usual, as there was to be some music after his talk.
• 4:18:41
  Westall was just leaving for his office when his wife read the note. She
• 4:18:45
  opened the drawing room door and called him back to deliver the message. He
• 4:18:51
  glanced at the note and tossed it aside. What a bore, I shall
• 4:18:55
  have to cut my game of rackets. Well, I suppose it can't be
• 4:18:57
  helped. Will you write in say it's all right? Julia hesitated a moment,
• 4:19:03
  her hands stiffening on the chair back against which she leaned. You mean
• 4:19:07
  to go on with these talks, she asked, I Why not? He
• 4:19:11
  returned, and this time it struck her that his surprise was not quite unfeigned.
• 4:19:18
  The discovery helped her to find words. You said you had started them
• 4:19:22
  with the idea of pleasing me. Well, I told you last week that
• 4:19:26
  they didn't please me last week. Oh, he seemed to make an effort
• 4:19:32
  of memory. I thought you were nervous. Then you sent for the doctor
• 4:19:36
  the next day. It was not the doctor I needed. It was your
• 4:19:38
  assurance, my assurance. Suddenly she felt the floor fail under her. She
• 4:19:45
  sank into the chair with a choking throat, her words, her reasons slipping
• 4:19:49
  away from her like straws down a whirling flood clement. She cried, isn't
• 4:19:56
  it enough for you to know that I hate it? He turned to close
• 4:20:00
  the door behind him. Then he walked toward her and sat down. What
• 4:20:03
  is it that you hate? He asked gently. She had made a desperate
• 4:20:07
  effort to rally her routed argument. I can't bear to have you speak as
• 4:20:12
  if, as if our marriage were like the other kind, the wrong kind.
• 4:20:18
  When I heard you there the other afternoon, before all those inquisitive,
• 4:20:22
  gossiping people proclaiming that husbands and wives had a right to leave each other whenever
• 4:20:26
  they were tired or had seen some one else, westall sat motionless, his
• 4:20:32
  eyes fixed on a pattern of the carpet. You have ceased to take this
• 4:20:36
  view, then, he said, as she broke off. You no longer
• 4:20:40
  believe that husbands and wives are justified in separating under such conditions. Under such
• 4:20:45
  conditions, she stammered, Yes, I still believe that, But how can
• 4:20:49
  we judge for others. What can we know of the circumstances? He interrupted
• 4:20:55
  her. I thought it was a fundamental article of our creed that the special
• 4:21:00
  circumstances produced by marriage were not to interfere with the full assertion of individual liberty.
• 4:21:06
  He paused a moment. I thought that was your reason for leaving armand
• 4:21:11
  she flushed to the forehead. It was not like him to give a personal
• 4:21:15
  turn to the argument. It was my reason, she said, simply,
• 4:21:19
  Well, then why do you refuse to recognize its validity? Now? I
• 4:21:25
  don't. I don't. I only say that one can't judge for others.
• 4:21:29
  He made an impatient movement. This is mere hair splitting. What you mean
• 4:21:33
  is that the doctrine, having served your purpose when you needed it, you
• 4:21:37
  now repudiate it well, she exclaimed, flushing again, What if I do?
• 4:21:41
  What does it matter to us? Westwall rose from his chair. He
• 4:21:47
  was excessively pale, and stood before his wife with something of the formality of
• 4:21:52
  a stranger. It matters to me, he said, in a low voice,
• 4:21:56
  because I do not repudiate it well, and because I had intended to
• 4:22:03
  invoke it. As he paused and drew his breath, deeply. She sat
• 4:22:07
  silent, almost deafened by her heart beats. As a complete justification of the
• 4:22:11
  course I am about to take, Julia remained motionless. What course is that?
• 4:22:18
  She asked. He cleared his throat. I mean to claim the fulfillment
• 4:22:23
  of your promise. For an instant the room wavered and darkened. Then she
• 4:22:29
  recovered a torturing acuteness of vision. Every detail of her surroundings pressed upon her.
• 4:22:34
  The tick of the clock, the slant of sunlight on the wall,
• 4:22:37
  the hardness of the chair arms that she grasped were a separate wound to each
• 4:22:42
  sense. My promise, she faltered, You're part of our mutual agreement to
• 4:22:48
  set each other free if one or the other should wish to be released.
• 4:22:53
  She was silent again. He waited a moment, shifting his position nervously.
• 4:22:59
  Then he said, with a touch of irritability, you acknowledge the agreement.
• 4:23:03
  The question went through her like a shock. She lifted her head to it
• 4:23:07
  proudly. I acknowledge the agreement, she said, and you don't mean to
• 4:23:14
  repudiate it. A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced
• 4:23:18
  and pushed it back. No, she answered, slowly. I don't mean
• 4:23:25
  to repudiate it. There was a pause. He remained near the hearth,
• 4:23:29
  his elbow resting on the mantel shelf. Close to his hands stood a little
• 4:23:33
  cup of jade that he had given her on one of their wedding anniversaries.
• 4:23:37
  She wondered vaguely if he noticed it. You intend to leave me, then,
• 4:23:42
  she said at length. His gesture seemed to deprecate the crudeness of the
• 4:23:47
  illusion to marry some one else. Again, his eye and hand protested.
• 4:23:53
  She rose and stood before him. Why should you be afraid to tell me?
• 4:23:59
  Is it you of van Siderin? He was silent. I wish you
• 4:24:03
  good luck, she said Section three. She looked up, finding herself alone.
• 4:24:11
  She did not remember when or how he had left the room, or
• 4:24:15
  how long afterwards she had sat there. The fire still smolded on the hearth,
• 4:24:19
  but the slant of sunlight had left the wall. Her first conscious thought
• 4:24:25
  was that she had not broken her word, that she had fulfilled the very
• 4:24:29
  letter of their bargain. There had been no crying out, no vain appeal
• 4:24:32
  to the past, no attempt at temporizing her evasion. She had marched straight
• 4:24:37
  up to the guns. Now that it was over, she sickened to find
• 4:24:41
  herself alive. She looked about her, trying to recover her hold on reality.
• 4:24:45
  Her identity seemed to be slipping from her as it disappears in a physical
• 4:24:51
  swoon. This is my room, This is my house, she heard herself
• 4:24:56
  saying, her room, her house. She could almost here the walls laughed
• 4:25:00
  back at her. She stood up, a dull ache in every bone.
• 4:25:04
  The silence of the room frightened her. She remembered, now having heard the
• 4:25:10
  front door close a long time ago. The sounds suddenly re echoed through her
• 4:25:14
  brain. Her husband must have left the house. Then, her husband,
• 4:25:18
  she no longer knew in what terms to think. The simplest phrases had a
• 4:25:22
  poisoned edge. She sank back into her chair, overcome by a strange weakness.
• 4:25:29
  The clock struck ten. It was only ten o'clock. Suddenly, she
• 4:25:33
  remembered that she had not hoarded dinner, or were they dining out that evening
• 4:25:37
  dinner? Dining out? The old meaningless phraseology pursued her. She must try
• 4:25:42
  to think of herself as she would think of some one else, as someone
• 4:25:45
  dissociated from all the familiar routine of the past, whose wants and habits must
• 4:25:51
  gradually be learned, as one might spy out the ways of a strange animal.
• 4:25:57
  The clock struck another hour eleven. She stood up again and walked to
• 4:26:02
  the door. She thought she would go upstairs to her room, her room.
• 4:26:07
  Again, the word derided her. She opened the door, crossed the
• 4:26:11
  narrow hall, and walked up the stairs. As she passed, she noticed
• 4:26:15
  Westall's sticks and umbrellas, a pair of his gloves lay on the hall table.
• 4:26:19
  The same stair carpet mounted between the same walls. The same old French
• 4:26:23
  print in its narrow black frame, faced her on the landing. This visual
• 4:26:29
  continuity was intolerable within a gaping chasm without the same untroubled and familiar surface.
• 4:26:37
  She must get away from it before she could attempt to think. But once
• 4:26:41
  in her room, she sat down on the lounge, a stupor creeping over
• 4:26:45
  her. Gradually her vision cleared. A great deal had happened at the interval,
• 4:26:51
  a wild marching and countermarching of emotions, arguments, ideas, a fury
• 4:26:56
  of insurgent impulses that fell back spent upon themselves. She had tried at first
• 4:27:00
  to rally to organize these chaotic forces. There must be help somewhere, if
• 4:27:06
  only she could master the inner tumult. Life could not be broken off short
• 4:27:11
  like this for a whim, a fancy the law itself would side with it
• 4:27:15
  would defend her. The law, what claim had she upon it? She
• 4:27:19
  was the prisoner of her own choice. She had been her own legislator,
• 4:27:23
  and she was the predestined victim of the code she had devised. But this
• 4:27:27
  was grotesque and tolerable, a mad mistake for which she could not be held
• 4:27:33
  accountable. The law she had despised was still there, might still be invoked,
• 4:27:37
  invoked, But to what end could she ask it to chain west all
• 4:27:41
  to her side? She had been allowed to go free when she claimed her
• 4:27:45
  freedom. Should she show less magnanimity than she had exacted magnanimity? The word
• 4:27:52
  lashed her with its irony. What does not strike an attitude when one is
• 4:27:56
  fighting for life? She would threaten, gruvel, cajole, She would yield
• 4:28:02
  anything to keep her hold on happiness. Ah, But the difficulty lay deeper.
• 4:28:07
  The law could not help her. Her own apostasy could not help her.
• 4:28:11
  She was the victim of the theory. She renounced it was as though
• 4:28:15
  some giant machine of her own making had caught her up in its wheels and
• 4:28:19
  was grinding her to atoms. It was afternoon when she found herself out of
• 4:28:25
  doors. She walked with an aimless haste, fearing to meet familiar faces.
• 4:28:30
  The day was radiant, metallic, one of those searching American days, so
• 4:28:34
  calculated to reveal the shortcomings of our street cleaning and the excesses of our architecture.
• 4:28:41
  The streets looked bare and hideous. Everything stared and glittered. She called
• 4:28:47
  her passing handsome and gave Missus Van Siderin's address. She did not know what
• 4:28:52
  had led up to the act, but she found herself suddenly resolved to speak,
• 4:28:56
  to cry out a warning. It was too late to say save herself,
• 4:29:00
  but the girl might still be told. The handsome rattled up Fifth Avenue.
• 4:29:04
  She sat with her eyes fixed, avoiding recognition. At the Van Citaran's
• 4:29:10
  door, she sprang out and rang the bell. Action had cleared her brain,
• 4:29:14
  and she felt calm and self possessed. She knew now exactly what she
• 4:29:18
  meant to say. The ladies were both out. The parlor maid stood waiting
• 4:29:23
  for her card. Julia with a vague murmur, turned away from the door
• 4:29:27
  and lingered a moment on the sidewalk. Then she remembered that she had not
• 4:29:32
  paid the cab driver. She drew a dollar from her purse and handed it
• 4:29:37
  to him. He touched his hat and drove off, leaving her alone in
• 4:29:41
  the long empty street. She wandered away westward towards strange thoroughfares, where she
• 4:29:47
  was not likely to beat acquaintances. The feeling of aimlessness had returned when she
• 4:29:52
  found herself in the afternoon torrent of Broadway, swept past tawdry shops and flaming
• 4:29:59
  theat posters, with a succession of meaningless faces gliding by in the opposite direction.
• 4:30:07
  A feeling of faintness reminded her that she had not eaten since morning.
• 4:30:11
  She turned into a side street of shabby houses with rows of ash barrels behind
• 4:30:15
  bent area railings. In a basement window, she saw the sign Ladies restaurant.
• 4:30:22
  A pie and a dish of doughnuts lay against the dusty pane like petrified
• 4:30:26
  food. In an ethnological museum, she entered, and a young woman with
• 4:30:30
  a weak mouth and a brazen eye cleared a table for her near the window.
• 4:30:36
  The table was covered with a red and white cotton cloth and adorned with
• 4:30:40
  a bunch of celery in a thick tumbler, and a salt cellar full of
• 4:30:44
  grayish, lumpy salt. Julia ordered tea and sat a long time waiting for
• 4:30:49
  it. She was glad to be away from the noise and confusion of the
• 4:30:52
  streets. The low ceilinged room was empty, and two or three waitresses with
• 4:30:57
  thin pert faces lounged in the background, staring at her and whispering together.
• 4:31:03
  At last, the tea was brought in a discolored metal teapot. Julia poured
• 4:31:08
  a cup and drank it hastily. It was black and bitter, but it
• 4:31:12
  flowed through her veins like an elixir. She was almost dizzy with exhilaration.
• 4:31:18
  Oh, how tired, how unutterably tired she had been. She drank a
• 4:31:22
  second cup, blacker and bitterer, and now her mind was once more working
• 4:31:26
  clearly. She felt as vigorous, as decisive as when she had stood on
• 4:31:32
  the van Sideren's doorstep. But the wish to return there had subsided. She
• 4:31:37
  saw now the futility of such an attempt, the humiliation to which it might
• 4:31:41
  have exposed her. The pity of it was that she did not know what
• 4:31:45
  to do next. The short winter day was fading, and she realized that
• 4:31:49
  she could not remain much longer in the restaurant without attracting notice. She paid
• 4:31:55
  for her tea and went out into the street. The lamps were alight,
• 4:31:59
  and here and there a basement shop cast an oblong of gas light across the
• 4:32:03
  fissured pavement in the dusk. There was something sinister about the aspect of the
• 4:32:07
  street, and she hastened back toward Fifth Avenue. She was not used to
• 4:32:12
  being out alone at that hour. At the corner of Fifth Avenue, she
• 4:32:18
  paused and stood, watching the stream of carriages. At last, a policeman
• 4:32:22
  caught sight of her and signed to her that he would take her across.
• 4:32:26
  She had not meant to cross the street, but she obeyed automatically and presently
• 4:32:30
  found herself on the farther corner. There she paused again for a moment,
• 4:32:34
  but she fancied the policeman was watching her, and this set her hastening down
• 4:32:40
  the nearest side street. After that she walked a long time. Vaguely night
• 4:32:45
  had fallen, and now and then through the windows of a passing carriage.
• 4:32:49
  She caught the expanse of an evening waistcote, where the shimmer of an opera
• 4:32:53
  cloak. Suddenly she found herself in a familiar street. She stood still a
• 4:33:00
  moment, breathing quickly. She had turned the corner without noticing whither it led,
• 4:33:04
  But now a few yards ahead of her she saw the house in which
• 4:33:07
  she had once lived, her first husband's house. The blinds were drawn,
• 4:33:11
  and only a faint translucent marked the windows and the transom above the door.
• 4:33:18
  As she stood there, she heard a step behind her, and a man
• 4:33:21
  walked by in the direction of the house. He walked slowly with a heavy,
• 4:33:25
  middle aged gait, his head sunk a little between the shoulders, the
• 4:33:30
  red crease of his neck visible above the fur collar of his overcoat. He
• 4:33:33
  crossed the street, went up the steps of the house, drew forth a
• 4:33:37
  latch key, and let himself in. There was no one else in sight.
• 4:33:42
  Julia leaned for a long time against the area rail at the corner,
• 4:33:48
  her eyes fixed on the front of the house. The feeling of physical weariness
• 4:33:52
  had returned, but the strong tea still throbbed in her veins and lit her
• 4:33:56
  brain with an unnatural clearness. Presently she heard another step draw near and moving
• 4:34:03
  quickly away. She too crossed the street and mounted the steps of the house.
• 4:34:07
  The impulse which had carried her there prolonged itself in a quick pressure of
• 4:34:11
  the electric bell. Then she felt suddenly weak and tremulous, and grasped the
• 4:34:18
  balustrade for support. The door opened, and a young footman with a fresh,
• 4:34:22
  inexperienced face stood on the threshold. Julia knew in an instant that he
• 4:34:27
  would admit her. I saw mister Armond going in just now, she said,
• 4:34:33
  Will you ask him to see me for a moment. The footman hesitated,
• 4:34:37
  I think mister Armond has gone up to dress for dinner, Madam.
• 4:34:41
  Julia advanced into the hall. I am sure he will see me. I
• 4:34:45
  will not detain him long, she said. She spoke quietly, authoritatively,
• 4:34:51
  in the tone which a good servant does not mistake. The footman had his
• 4:34:55
  hand on the drawing room door. I will tell him, Madam, what
• 4:35:00
  name please? Julia trembled. She had not thought of that, merely say
• 4:35:04
  a lady. She returned carelessly. The footman wavered, and she fancied herself
• 4:35:10
  lost. But at that instant. The door opened from within, and John
• 4:35:15
  Armoce stepped into the hall. He drew back sharply as he saw her,
• 4:35:18
  his florid face turning sallow with the shock. Then the blood poured back into
• 4:35:23
  it, swelling the veins on his temples and reddening the lobes of his thick
• 4:35:29
  ears. It was long since Julia had seen him, and she was startled
• 4:35:33
  at the change in his appearance. He had thickened, coarsened, settled down
• 4:35:38
  into the enclosing flesh, but she noted this insensibly. Her one conscious thought
• 4:35:45
  was that now she was face to face with him, she must not let
• 4:35:48
  him escape till he had heard her. Every pulse in her body throbbed with
• 4:35:52
  the urgency of her message. She went up to him. As he drew
• 4:35:56
  back. I must speak to you, she said, armand hesitated, red
• 4:36:02
  and stammering. Julia glanced at the footman, and her look acted as a
• 4:36:06
  warning. The instinctive shrinking from a scene predominated over every other impulse, and
• 4:36:12
  armand said, slowly, will you come this way? He followed her into
• 4:36:18
  the drawing room and closed the door. Julia, as she advanced, was
• 4:36:22
  vaguely aware that the room at least was unchanged. Time had not mitigated its
• 4:36:27
  horrors. The contadina still lurched from the chimney breast, and the Greek slave
• 4:36:33
  obstructed the threshold of the inner room. The place was alive with memories.
• 4:36:37
  They started out from every fold of the yellow satin curtains and glided between the
• 4:36:42
  angles of the rosewood furniture. But while some subordinate agency was carrying these impressions
• 4:36:51
  to her brain, her whole conscious effort was seted in the act of dominating
• 4:36:56
  Armand's will. The fear that he would refuse to hear her mount like fever
• 4:37:00
  to her brain. She felt her purpose melt before it, words and arguments
• 4:37:04
  running into each other in the heat of her longing for a moment. Her
• 4:37:08
  voice failed her, and she imagined herself thrust out before she could speak.
• 4:37:14
  But as she was struggling for a word, Armand pushed a chair forward and
• 4:37:18
  said, quietly, you are not well. The sound of his voice steadied
• 4:37:23
  her. It was neither kind nor unkind, a voice that suspended judgment rather
• 4:37:29
  awaiting unforeseen developments. She supported herself against the back of the chair and drew
• 4:37:34
  a deep breath. Shall I send for something? He continued with a cold,
• 4:37:40
  embarrassed politeness. Julia raised an entreating hand. No, no, thank
• 4:37:47
  you, I am quite well. He paused midway toward the bell and turned
• 4:37:51
  on her. Then may I ask, yes, She interrupted him. I
• 4:37:56
  came here because I wanted to see you. There was something I must tell
• 4:38:00
  you. Armand continued to scrutinize her. I am surprised at that, he
• 4:38:04
  said. I should have supposed that any communication you may wish to make could
• 4:38:10
  have been made through our lawyers. Our lawyers, she burst into a little
• 4:38:15
  laugh. I don't think they could help me this time. Armand's face took
• 4:38:19
  on a barricaded look. If there is any question of help. Of course,
• 4:38:26
  it struck her whimsically that she had seen that look when some shabby devil
• 4:38:30
  called with a subscription book. Perhaps she thought she wanted him to put his
• 4:38:33
  name down for so much in sympathy or even in money. The thought made
• 4:38:38
  her laugh again. She saw his look change slowly to perplexity. All his
• 4:38:45
  facial changes were slow, and she remembered suddenly how it had once diverted her
• 4:38:49
  to shift that lumbering scene me with a word. For the first time,
• 4:38:53
  it struck her that she had been cruel. There is a question of help,
• 4:38:59
  she said in assault key. You can help me, but only by
• 4:39:03
  listening. I want to tell you something. Armand's resistance was not yielding.
• 4:39:10
  Would it not be easier to write, he suggested. She shook her head.
• 4:39:15
  There is no time to write, and it won't take long. She
• 4:39:18
  raised her head and their eyes met. My husband has left me, she
• 4:39:22
  said, Westall, he stammered, reddening again. Yes, this morning,
• 4:39:30
  just as I left you, because he was tired of me. The words,
• 4:39:33
  uttered scarcely above a whisper, seemed to dilate to the limit of the
• 4:39:37
  room. Armett looked toward the door, then his embarrassed glance returned to Julia.
• 4:39:45
  I am very sorry, he said, awkwardly. Thank you, She
• 4:39:48
  murmured, but I don't see no, but you will in a moment.
• 4:39:53
  Won't you listen to me? Please? Instinctively, she had shifted her position,
• 4:39:57
  putting herself between him at the door. It happened this morning, she
• 4:40:03
  went on, in short, breathless phrases. I never suspected anything. I
• 4:40:07
  thought we were perfectly happy. Suddenly he told me he was tired of me.
• 4:40:11
  There is a girl he likes better. He has gone to her.
• 4:40:15
  As she spoke, the lurking anguish rose upon her, possessing her once more
• 4:40:19
  to the exclusion of every other emotion. Her eyes ached, her throat swelled
• 4:40:25
  with it, and two painful tears burnt away down her face. Armand's constraint
• 4:40:30
  was increasing visibly. This this is very unfortunate, he began. But I
• 4:40:36
  should say the law, the law, she echoed ironically. When he asks
• 4:40:41
  for his freedom, you are not obliged to give it. You were not
• 4:40:45
  obliged to give me mine, but you did. He made a protesting gesture.
• 4:40:52
  You saw that the law couldn't help you, didn't you, She went
• 4:40:55
  on, That is what I see now. The law represents material rights.
• 4:41:00
  It can't go beyond if we don't recognize an inner law, the obligation that
• 4:41:03
  love creates being loved as well as loving. There is nothing to prevent our
• 4:41:08
  spreading ruin unhindered, is there? She raised her head plaintively, with the
• 4:41:14
  look of a bewildered child. That is what I see now, what I
• 4:41:18
  wanted to tell you. He leaves me because he's tired, But I was
• 4:41:22
  not tired, and I don't understand why he is. That's the dreadful part
• 4:41:26
  of it, the not understanding. I hadn't realized what it meant. But
• 4:41:30
  I've been thinking of it all day, and things have come back to me,
• 4:41:33
  things I hadn't noticed when you and I. She moved closer to him
• 4:41:37
  and fixed her eyes on his with the gaze that tries to reach beyond words.
• 4:41:44
  I see now that you didn't understand, did you. Their eyes met
• 4:41:48
  in a sudden shock of comprehension. A veil seemed to be lifted between them.
• 4:41:53
  Armat's lip trembled. No, he said, I didn't understand. She
• 4:42:00
  gave a little cry, almost of triumph. I knew it. I knew
• 4:42:03
  it, you wondered. You tried to tell me, but no words came.
• 4:42:07
  You saw your life falling in ruins, the world slipping from you,
• 4:42:11
  and you wouldn't speak or move. She sank down on the chair against which
• 4:42:15
  she had been leaning. Now I know, now, I know, she
• 4:42:19
  repeated, I am very sorry for you. She heard armand stammer. She
• 4:42:26
  looked up quickly. That's not what I came for. I don't want you
• 4:42:30
  to be sorry. I came to ask you to forgive me for not understanding
• 4:42:34
  that you didn't understand. That's all I wanted to say. She rose,
• 4:42:40
  with a vague sense that the end had come, and put out a groping
• 4:42:44
  hand toward the door. Armand stood motionless. She turned to him with a
• 4:42:49
  faint smile. You forgive me, there is nothing to forgive. Then will
• 4:42:56
  you shake hands for good bye? She felt his hand in hers. It
• 4:43:00
  was nerveless, reluctant. Good bye, she repeated, I understand now.
• 4:43:07
  She opened the door and passed out into the hall. As she did so,
• 4:43:11
  armand took an impulsive step forward. But just then the footman, who
• 4:43:15
  was evidently alive to his obligations, advanced from the background to let her out.
• 4:43:21
  She heard armand fall back. The footman threw open the door, and
• 4:43:26
  she found herself outside in the darkness. End of Chapter six, Chapter seven
• 4:43:33
  the Letter. For many years he had lived withdrawn from the world in which
• 4:43:40
  he had once played so active and even turbulent a part. The study of
• 4:43:45
  tuscan Art was his only pursuit, and it was to help him in his
• 4:43:48
  classification of his notes and documents that I was first called to his villa.
• 4:43:52
  Colonel Allendon had then the look of a very old man, though his age
• 4:43:56
  can hardly have exceeded seventy. He was small and bent, with a finely
• 4:44:00
  wrinkled face which still wore the tan of youthful exposure. But for this dusky
• 4:44:07
  redness, it would have been hard to reconstruct from the shrunken recluse with his
• 4:44:11
  low, fastidious voice and carefully tended hands, an image of that young knight
• 4:44:17
  of adventure, whose sword had been at the service of every uprising which stirred
• 4:44:22
  the uneasy soil of Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century. Though
• 4:44:26
  I was more of a proficient in Colonel allingdance later than his earlier pursuits,
• 4:44:32
  the thought of his soldiering days was always coming between me and the pacific work
• 4:44:37
  of his old age. As we sat collating papers and comparing photographs, I
• 4:44:41
  had the feeling that this dry and quiet old man had seen even stranger things
• 4:44:47
  than people said, that he knew more of the inner history of Europe than
• 4:44:52
  half the diplomatist of his day. I was not alone in this conviction,
• 4:44:56
  and the friend who had engaged me for Colonel Allingdon had appended to his instructions
• 4:45:02
  the injunction to get him to talk. But this was what no one could
• 4:45:06
  do Colonel Allington was ready to discuss by the hour the date of a grotesque
• 4:45:11
  triptych, or the attribution of a disputed master, But on the history of
• 4:45:15
  his early life he was habitually silent. It was perhaps because I recognized the
• 4:45:22
  silence, had respected it, that it afterward came to be broken for me.
• 4:45:26
  Or it was perhaps merely because, as the failure of Colonel Allington's sight
• 4:45:30
  cut him off from his work, he felt the natural inclination of age to
• 4:45:36
  revert from the empty present to the crowded past. For one corse or another.
• 4:45:40
  He did talk to me in the last year of his life, and
• 4:45:42
  I felt myself mingled to an extent inconceivable to the mere reader of history.
• 4:45:48
  With the passionate scenes of the Italian struggle for liberty. Colonel Allingdon had been
• 4:45:55
  mixed with it in all its phases. He had known the last Carbonardi and
• 4:46:00
  the young Italy of Mazzini. He had been in Perugia when the mercenaries of
• 4:46:03
  a liberal pope slaughtered women and children in the streets. He had been in
• 4:46:08
  Sicily with the thousand, and in Milan during the chinquij Ornati. They say
• 4:46:15
  the Italians don't know how to fight, he said one day, musingly,
• 4:46:18
  that the French had to come down and do their work for them. People
• 4:46:22
  forget how long it was since they had had any fighting to do, but
• 4:46:25
  they hadn't forgotten how to suffer and hold their tongues, how to die and
• 4:46:30
  take their secrets with them. The Italian War of Independence was really carried on
• 4:46:34
  underground. It was one of those awful, silent struggles which are so much
• 4:46:38
  more terrible than the roar of a battle. It's a deuced sight. Easier
• 4:46:42
  to charge with your regiment than to lie rotting in an Austrian prison and know
• 4:46:48
  that if you give up the name of a friend or two, you can
• 4:46:51
  go back scot free to your wife and children. And thousands and thousands of
• 4:46:56
  Italians had the choice given them, and hardly one went back. He sat
• 4:47:00
  silent, his meditative finger tips laid together, his eyes fixed on the past,
• 4:47:06
  which was the now only thing clearly visible to them. And the women,
• 4:47:11
  I said, were they as brave as the men? I had not
• 4:47:14
  spoken quite at random. I had always heard that there had been as much
• 4:47:18
  of love as of war in Colonel Allingdon's early career, and I hoped that
• 4:47:22
  my question might give a personal turn to his reminiscences. The women, he
• 4:47:27
  repeated, they were braver, for they had more to bear and less to
• 4:47:32
  do. Italy could never have been saved without them. His eye had kindled,
• 4:47:37
  and I detected in it the reflection of some vivid memory. It was
• 4:47:41
  then that I asked him what was the bravest thing he had ever known of
• 4:47:45
  a woman's doing. The question was such a vague one that I hardly knew
• 4:47:49
  why I had put it, But to my surprise, he answered almost at
• 4:47:53
  once, as though I had touched on a subject of frequent meditation. The
• 4:48:00
  bravest thing I have saw none by a woman, he said, was brought
• 4:48:03
  about by an act of my own, and one of which I am not
• 4:48:07
  particularly proud. For that reason, I have never spoken of it before.
• 4:48:11
  There was a time when I didn't even care to think of it. But
• 4:48:15
  all that has passed now. She died years ago, and so did the
• 4:48:18
  Jack Allington. She knew, and in telling you the story, I am
• 4:48:22
  no more than the mouthpiece of an old tradition which some ancestor might have handed
• 4:48:27
  down to me. He leaned back, his clear, blind gaze fixed smilingly
• 4:48:33
  on me, and I had the feeling that, in groping through the labyrinth
• 4:48:36
  of his young adventures, I had come unawares upon their central point Section two.
• 4:48:45
  When I was in Milan and forty seven, an unlucky thing happened to
• 4:48:48
  me. I had been sent there to look over the ground by some of
• 4:48:52
  my Italian friends in England. As an English officer, I had no difficulty
• 4:48:56
  in getting into Milanese society, for England had years been the refuge of the
• 4:49:00
  Italian fugitives, and I was known to be working in their interests. It
• 4:49:06
  was just the kind of job I liked, and I never enjoyed life more
• 4:49:10
  than I did in those days. There was a great deal going on,
• 4:49:14
  good music, balls and theaters. Milan kept up her gaiety to the last.
• 4:49:18
  The English were shocked by the insoussions of a race who could dance under
• 4:49:22
  the very nose of the usurper. But those who understood the situation knew that
• 4:49:27
  Milan was playing brutus, and played it uncommonly well. I was in the
• 4:49:33
  thick of it all. It was just the atmosphere to suit a young fellow
• 4:49:37
  of nine and twenty with a healthy passion for waltzing and fighting. But as
• 4:49:41
  I said, an unlucky thing happened to me. I was fool enough to
• 4:49:45
  fall in love with Donocandi da Falco. You have heard of her, of
• 4:49:49
  course, you know the share she had in the great work. In a
• 4:49:53
  different way, she was what the terrible Princess Belgooso had been to an earlier
• 4:49:59
  generation. But Dona Candida was not terrible. She was quiet, discreet and
• 4:50:03
  charming when I knew her. She was a widow of thirty, her husband
• 4:50:07
  Andrea Falco, having died ten years previously soon after their marriage. The marriage
• 4:50:14
  had been notoriously unhappy, and his death was a release to Donna Candida her
• 4:50:19
  family of Modina, but they had come to live in Milan soon after the
• 4:50:23
  execution of Chiro Menotti and his companions. You remember the details of that business.
• 4:50:30
  The Duke of Modina, one of the most adroit villains in Europe,
• 4:50:33
  had been bitten with the hope of uniting the Italian states under his rule.
• 4:50:37
  It was a vision of Italian liberation of a sort. A few madmen were
• 4:50:41
  dazzled by it, and Chiro Menotti was one of them. You know the
• 4:50:45
  end, the Duke of Modina, who had counted on Louis Philippe's backing found
• 4:50:51
  that that astute sovereign had betrayed him to Austria. Instantly he saw that his
• 4:50:56
  first business was to get rid of the conspirators he had created. There was
• 4:51:00
  nothing easier than for a habsburg Este to turn on a friend. Tchiro Menotti
• 4:51:06
  had staked his life for the Duke, and the Duke took it. You
• 4:51:10
  may remember that on the night when seven hundred men at a cannon attacked Menotti's
• 4:51:14
  house, the Duke was seen looking on at the slaughter from an arcade across
• 4:51:19
  the square. Well. Among the lesser fry taken that night was a lad
• 4:51:25
  of eighteen, Emilio Verna, who was the only brother of Dona Candida.
• 4:51:30
  Verna family was one of the most respected in Moderna. It consisted at that
• 4:51:33
  time of the mother, Countesz Verna, of young Emilio and his sister.
• 4:51:38
  Count Verna had been in Spielberg in the twenties. He had never recovered from
• 4:51:44
  his sufferings there and died in exile without seeing his wife and children again.
• 4:51:48
  Countes Verna had been an ardent patriot in her youth, but the failure of
• 4:51:53
  the first attempts against Austria had discouraged her. She thought that in losing her
• 4:51:57
  husband, she had sacrificed enough for her country, and her one idea was
• 4:52:02
  to keep Emilio on good terms with the government. But veron of blood was
• 4:52:07
  not tractable, and his father's death was not likely to make Emilio a good
• 4:52:11
  subject of the Estes, not that he had yet taken any active share in
• 4:52:15
  the work of the conspirator. He simply hadn't had the time. At his
• 4:52:19
  trial, there was nothing to show that he'd been in Minotti's confidence. But
• 4:52:23
  he had been seen once or twice coming out of what the ducal police called
• 4:52:27
  suspicious houses, and in his desk were found some verses to Italy. That
• 4:52:33
  was enough to hang a man in Morina, and Emilio Verna was hanged.
• 4:52:38
  The countess never recovered from the blow. The circumstances of her son's death were
• 4:52:42
  too abominable, too unendurable. If he had risked his life in the conspiracy,
• 4:52:48
  she might have been reconciled to his losing it. But he was a
• 4:52:51
  mere child who had sat at home, chafing but powerless, while his seniors
• 4:52:56
  plotted and fought. He had been sacrificed to the Duke insane fear to his
• 4:53:02
  savage greed for victims, and the Countess Verna was not to be consoled.
• 4:53:07
  As soon as possible, the mother and daughter left the Modena for Milan.
• 4:53:11
  There they lived in seclusion till Candida's marriage. During her girlhood, she had
• 4:53:17
  had to accept her mother's view of life to shut herself up in the tomb
• 4:53:21
  in which the poor woman brooded over her martyrs, but that was not the
• 4:53:26
  girl's way of honoring the dead. At the moment when the first shot was
• 4:53:30
  fired on Menotti's house, she had been reading Petrarch's Owed to the Lords of
• 4:53:33
  Italy, and the lines Lantico Valori, Nelitailchi quod None ancor Morto had lodged
• 4:53:41
  like a bullet in her brain. From the day of her marriage, she
• 4:53:45
  began to take a share in the silent work which was going on throughout Italy.
• 4:53:49
  Milan was at that time the center of the movement, and Candida Falco
• 4:53:53
  threw herself into it with all the passion which her unhappy marriage left unsadd At
• 4:54:00
  first, she had to act with great reserve, for her husband was a
• 4:54:03
  prudent man who did not care to have his habits disturbed by political complications.
• 4:54:10
  But after his death there was nothing to restrain her except the Exquisite Tact,
• 4:54:15
  which enabled her to work night and day in the Italian cause without giving the
• 4:54:19
  Austrian authorities a pretext for interference. When I first knew Dona Candida, her
• 4:54:26
  mother was still living, a tragic woman prematurely bowed like an image of death
• 4:54:32
  in the background of her daughter's brilliant life. The Countess, since her son's
• 4:54:37
  death, had become a patriot again, though in a narrower sense than Candida.
• 4:54:41
  The mother's first thought was that her dead must be avenged, the daughters
• 4:54:45
  that Italy must be saved, but from different motives, they worked for the
• 4:54:48
  same end. Candida felt for the Countess that protecting tenderness with which Italian children
• 4:54:56
  so often regard their parents, a feeling heightened by the reverence which the mother's
• 4:55:00
  sufferings inspired. Countess Verna, as the wife and mother of Martyr's, had
• 4:55:06
  done what Condida longed to do. She had given her utmost to Italy.
• 4:55:11
  There must have been moments when the self absorption of her grief chilled her daughter's
• 4:55:15
  ardent spirit, but Condida revered in her mother the image of their afflicted country.
• 4:55:22
  It was too terrible, she said, speaking of what the countess had
• 4:55:26
  suffered after Emilio's death. All the circumstances were too unmerciful. It seemed as
• 4:55:32
  if God had turned his face from my mother, as if she had been
• 4:55:34
  singled out to suffer more than any of the others. All the other families
• 4:55:40
  received some message or token of farewell from the prisoners. One of the bribe
• 4:55:44
  the jailer to carry a letter, another sent a lock of hair by the
• 4:55:48
  chaplain. But Emilio made no sign, sent no word. My mother felt
• 4:55:52
  as though he had turned his back on us. She used to sit for
• 4:55:56
  hours, saying again and again, why was he the only one to forget
• 4:56:00
  his mother? I tried to comfort her, but it was useless. She
• 4:56:04
  had suffered too much. No, I never reason with her. I listen
• 4:56:10
  and let her ease her poor heart. Do you know she still asked me
• 4:56:14
  sometimes if I think he may have left a letter, if there is no
• 4:56:17
  way of finding out if he left one. She forgets that I have tried
• 4:56:21
  again and again, that I have sent bribes and messages to the jailer,
• 4:56:26
  the chaplain, to every one who came near him. The answer is always
• 4:56:30
  the same. No one has ever heard of a letter. I suppose the
• 4:56:33
  poor boy was stunned and did not think of writing. Who knows what was
• 4:56:37
  passing through his poor, bewildered brain. But it would have been a great
• 4:56:42
  help to my mother to have a word from him. If I had known
• 4:56:45
  how to imitate his writing, I should have forged a letter. I knew
• 4:56:51
  enough of the Italians to understand how her boy's silence must have aggravated the countess's
• 4:56:56
  grief. Precious as a message from a dying so un would be to any
• 4:57:00
  mother, such signs of tenderness have to the Italians a peculiar significance. The
• 4:57:06
  Latin race is rhetorical. It possesses the gift of deathbed eloquence, the knack
• 4:57:11
  of saying the effective thing on momentous occasions. The letters which the Italian patriots
• 4:57:17
  sent home from their prisons or from the scaffold are not the halting farewells that
• 4:57:22
  anguish would have wrung from a less expressive race. They are veritable compositions,
• 4:57:27
  saved from affectation only by the fact that fluency and sonority are a part of
• 4:57:33
  the Latin inheritance. Such letters, passed from hand to hand among the bereaved
• 4:57:37
  families, were not only a comfort to the survivors, but incentive to fresh
• 4:57:42
  sacrifices. They were the seed of the martyrs with which Italy was being sown.
• 4:57:48
  And I know what it meant to the Countess Verna to have no such
• 4:57:52
  treasure in her bosom, to sit silent while other mothers quoted their son's last
• 4:57:57
  words. I said just now that it was an unlucky day for me when
• 4:58:03
  I fell in love with Donacandida. And no doubt you have guessed the reason
• 4:58:07
  she was in love with some one else. It was the old situation of
• 4:58:11
  Heine's song, that other loved another loved Italy and with an undivided passion.
• 4:58:18
  His name was Fernando Briga, and at that time he was one of the
• 4:58:22
  foremost liberals in Italy. He came of a middle class Modernese family. His
• 4:58:27
  father was a doctor, a prudent man, engrossed in his profession and willing
• 4:58:32
  to compromise it by meddling in politics. His irreproachable attitude won the confidence of
• 4:58:37
  the government, and the Duke conferred on him the sinister office of physician to
• 4:58:42
  the prisons of Modina. It was this Briga who attended Emilio Falco and several
• 4:58:48
  of the other prisoners who were executed at the same time. Under shelter of
• 4:58:53
  his father's loyalty, young Fernando conspired in safety. He was studying medicine,
• 4:59:00
  and every one supposed him to be absorbed in his work. But as a
• 4:59:03
  matter of fact, he was fast ripening into one of Mazzini's ablest lieutenants.
• 4:59:08
  His career belongs to history, so I need not enlarge on it here.
• 4:59:12
  In eighteen forty seven he was in Milan and had become one of the leading
• 4:59:17
  figures in the Liberal group, which was working for a coalition with Piedmont.
• 4:59:22
  Like all the ablest men of his day, he had cast off Mazsiniism and
• 4:59:26
  pinned his faith to the House of Savoy. The Austrian government had an eye
• 4:59:30
  on him, but he had inherited his father's prudence, though he used it
• 4:59:34
  for nobler ends, and his discretion enabled him to do far more for the
• 4:59:40
  cause than a dozen enthusiasts could have accomplished. No one understood this better than
• 4:59:45
  Donacandida. She had a share of his caution, and he trusted her with
• 4:59:49
  secrets which he would not have confided to many men. Her drawing room was
• 4:59:55
  the center of the Piedmontese party. Yet so clever was she in averting societ
• 5:00:00
  vision that more than one hunting conspirator hid in her house and was helped across
• 5:00:04
  the Alps by her agents. Briga relied on her as he did on no
• 5:00:08
  one else. But he did not love her, and she knew it.
• 5:00:12
  Still, she was young, she was handsome, and he loved no one
• 5:00:15
  else. How could she give up hoping from her intimate friends. She made
• 5:00:19
  no secret of her feelings. Italian women are not reticent in such matters,
• 5:00:25
  and Dona Candida was proud of loving a hero. You will see at once
• 5:00:29
  that I had no chance. But if she could not give up hope,
• 5:00:32
  neither could I. Perhaps, in her desire to secure my services for the
• 5:00:37
  cause, she may have shown herself overkind, Or perhaps I was still young
• 5:00:41
  enough to set down to my own charms a success due to quite different causes.
• 5:00:47
  At any rate, I persuaded myself that if I could manage to do
• 5:00:51
  something conspicuous for Italy, I might yet make her care for me. With
• 5:00:56
  such an incentive, you will not wonder that I worked hard, But though
• 5:00:59
  don Ncandida was full of gratitude, she continued to adore my rival. One
• 5:01:04
  day we had a hot scene. I began, I believed, by reproaching
• 5:01:08
  her with having led me on, and when she defended herself, I retaliated
• 5:01:12
  by taunting her with Briga's indifference. She grew pale at that and said it
• 5:01:18
  was enough to love a hero, even without hope of return. And as
• 5:01:22
  she said it, she herself looked so heroic, so radiant, so unattainably
• 5:01:27
  the woman I wanted that a sneer may have escaped me. Was she so
• 5:01:33
  sure then that Briga was a hero? I remember her proud silence and our
• 5:01:37
  wretched parting. I went away feeling that at last I had really lost her,
• 5:01:41
  and the thought made me savage and vindictive. Soon after that, as
• 5:01:47
  it happened, came the five days, and Milan was free. I caught
• 5:01:52
  a distant glimpse of Donacandida in the hospital to which I was carried after the
• 5:01:56
  fight. But my wound was the slight one, and in twenty five four
• 5:02:00
  hours I was about again on crutches. I hoped she might send for me,
• 5:02:03
  but she did not, and I was too sulky to make the first
• 5:02:07
  advance. A day or two later I heard there had been a commotion in
• 5:02:11
  Moderna, and, not being in fighting trim, I got leave to go
• 5:02:15
  there with one or two men whom the Modernes liberals had called in to help
• 5:02:19
  them. When we arrived, the precious Duke had been swept out and a
• 5:02:23
  provisional government set up. One of my companions, who was a Modernese,
• 5:02:29
  was made a member, and knowing that I wanted something to do, he
• 5:02:32
  commissioned me to look up some papers in the ducal archives. It was fascinating
• 5:02:37
  work, for in the pursuit of my documents, I uncovered the hidden springs
• 5:02:41
  of His Late Highness's paternal administration. The principal papers relative to the civil and
• 5:02:48
  criminal administration of Modina have since been published, and the world knows how that
• 5:02:52
  estimable sovereign cared for the material and spiritual welfare of his subjects well. In
• 5:03:00
  the course of my search, I came across a file of old papers marked
• 5:03:03
  taken from political prisoners a d. Eighteen thirty one. It was the year
• 5:03:10
  of Benotti's conspiracy, and everything connected with that date was thrilling. I loosened
• 5:03:15
  the band and ran over the letters. Suddenly I came across one which was
• 5:03:19
  docketed given by Doctor Briga's son to the warder of his Highness's prison. Doctor
• 5:03:26
  Briga's son, that could be no other than Fernando. I knew he was
• 5:03:30
  an only child, But how came such a paper into his hands? And
• 5:03:34
  how had it passed from them into those of the Duke's warder. My own
• 5:03:38
  hands shook as I opened the letter. I felt the man suddenly in my
• 5:03:44
  power. Then I began to read, My adored mother. Even in the
• 5:03:48
  slowest circle of hell, all hearts are not close to pity, and I
• 5:03:53
  have been given the hope that these last words of farewell may reach you.
• 5:03:57
  My eyes ran on over pages of plaintive rhetoric. Embrace for me, my
• 5:04:03
  adored Candida. Let her never forget the cause for which her father and brother
• 5:04:07
  perished. Let her keep alive in her breast the thought of Spielberg and Reggio.
• 5:04:12
  Do not grieve that I die so young, though not with those heroes.
• 5:04:17
  Indeed I was with them in spirit, and am worthy to be enrolled
• 5:04:21
  in the sacred phalanx. And so on. Before I reached the signature.
• 5:04:26
  I knew the letter was from Emilio Verna. I put it in my pocket,
• 5:04:30
  finished my work and started immediately from Milan. I didn't quite know what
• 5:04:36
  I meant to do. My head was in a whirl. I saw at
• 5:04:38
  once what must have happened. Fernando Briga, then a lad of fifteen or
• 5:04:42
  sixteen, had attended his father in prison during Emilio Verna's last hours, and
• 5:04:48
  the latter, perhaps aware of the Lad's liberal sympathies, had found an opportunity
• 5:04:55
  of giving him the letter. But why had Briga given it up to the
• 5:04:59
  warder? That was the puzzling question. The doc had said given by doctor
• 5:05:03
  Briga's son, But it might mean taken from Ferrando might have been seen to
• 5:05:08
  receive the letter, and might have been searched on leaving the prison, But
• 5:05:12
  that would not account for his silence afterward. How was it that, if
• 5:05:18
  he knew of the letter, he had never told Emilio's family of it.
• 5:05:22
  There was only one explanation. If the letter had been taken from him by
• 5:05:26
  force, he would have had no reason for concealing its existence, and his
• 5:05:30
  silence was clear proof that he had given it up voluntarily. No doubt in
• 5:05:36
  the hope of standing well with the authorities. But then he was a traitor
• 5:05:40
  and a coward. The Patriot of forty eight had begun life as an informer.
• 5:05:45
  But this innate character ever changed so radically that the lad who has committed
• 5:05:51
  a base act in fifteen may grow up into an honorable man. A good
• 5:05:55
  man may be corrupted by life, but can the year's turn of born into
• 5:06:00
  a hero. You may fancy how I answered my own questions. If Briga
• 5:06:06
  had been false and cowardly, then was he not sure to be false and
• 5:06:10
  cowardly? Still in those days there were traitors under every coat, and more
• 5:06:15
  than one brave fellow had been sold to the police by his best friend.
• 5:06:18
  You will say that Briga's record was unblemished, that he had exposed himself to
• 5:06:23
  danger too frequently, had stood by his friends too steadfastly to permit of a
• 5:06:29
  rational doubt of his good faith. So reason might have told me in a
• 5:06:33
  calmer moment, But she was not allowed to make herself heard. Just then,
• 5:06:37
  I was young, I was angry. I chose to think I had
• 5:06:41
  been unfairly treated, And perhaps at my rival's instigation, it was not unlikely
• 5:06:47
  that Briga knew of my love for Dora Candida, and had encouraged her to
• 5:06:52
  use it in the good cause. Was she not always at his bidding?
• 5:06:56
  My blood boiled at the thought, and, reaching Milan in a rage,
• 5:07:00
  I went straight to Dona Candida. I had measured the exact force of the
• 5:07:03
  blow I was going to deal. The triumph of the liberals in Moderna had
• 5:07:08
  revived public interest in the unsuccessful struggle of their predecessors, the men who sixteen
• 5:07:15
  years earlier had paid for the same attempt with their lives. The victors of
• 5:07:19
  forty eight wished to honor the vanquished of thirty two. All the families exiled
• 5:07:25
  by the ducal government were hastening back to recover possession of their confiscated property and
• 5:07:30
  of the graves of their dead. Already it had been decided to raise a
• 5:07:34
  monument to Menotti and his companions. There were to be speeches, garlands,
• 5:07:40
  a public holiday. The thrill of the commemoration would run through Europe. You
• 5:07:45
  see what it would have meant to the poor countess to appear on the scene
• 5:07:48
  with her boy's letter and her hand. And you see also what the memorandum
• 5:07:52
  on the back of the letter would have meant to Donra Candida. Poor Emilio's
• 5:07:57
  farewell would be published all the journals of Europe, The finding of the letter
• 5:08:03
  would be on every one's lips, and how conceal those fatal words on the
• 5:08:07
  back. At the moment, it seemed to me that fortune could not have
• 5:08:11
  given me a handsomer chance of destroying my rival than in letting me find the
• 5:08:17
  letter which he stood convicted of having suppressed. My sentiment was perhaps not a
• 5:08:22
  strictly honorable one. Yet what could I do but give the letter to Donac
• 5:08:26
  Candida. To keep it back was out of the question, and with the
• 5:08:30
  best will in the world, I could not have erased Riga's name from the
• 5:08:33
  back. The mistake I made was in thinking it lucky that the paper had
• 5:08:37
  fallen into my hands. Donac Candida was alone when I entered. We had
• 5:08:44
  parted in anger, but she held out her hand with a smile of pardon,
• 5:08:48
  and asked what news I brought from Modina. The smile exasperated me.
• 5:08:52
  I felt as though she were trying to get me into her power again.
• 5:08:56
  I bring you a letter from your brother, I said, and handed it
• 5:09:00
  to her. I had purposely turned the superscription downward so that she should not
• 5:09:06
  see it. She uttered an incredulous cry and tore the letter open. A
• 5:09:11
  light struck up from it into her face as she read, a radiance that
• 5:09:15
  smote me to the soul. For a moment I long to snatched the paper
• 5:09:18
  from her and efface the name on the back. It hurt me to think
• 5:09:22
  how short lived her happiness must be. Then she did a fatal thing.
• 5:09:27
  She came up to me, caught my two hands and kissed them. Oh,
• 5:09:32
  thank you, bless you a thousand times. He died thinking of us,
• 5:09:37
  He died loving Italy. I put her from me gently. It was
• 5:09:41
  not the kiss I wanted, and the touch of her lips hardened me.
• 5:09:45
  She shone on me through her happy tears. What happiness, what consolation you
• 5:09:51
  have brought my poor mother. This will take the bitterness from her grief,
• 5:09:55
  and that it should come to her now? Do you know she had a
• 5:09:57
  presentiment of it. When we heard of the duke's flight, Her first word
• 5:10:02
  was, now we may find Emilio's letter. At heart, she was always
• 5:10:07
  sure that he had written. I suppose some blessed instinct told her so.
• 5:10:11
  She dropped her face on her hands, and I saw her tears fall on
• 5:10:15
  the wretched letter. In a moment, she looked up again with eyes that
• 5:10:19
  blessed and trusted me. Tell me where you found it, she said,
• 5:10:23
  I told her, Oh, the savages. They took it from him.
• 5:10:29
  My opportunity had come. No, I said, it appears they did not
• 5:10:33
  take it from him, then, how I waited a moment. The letter,
• 5:10:38
  I said, looking full at her, was given up to the warder
• 5:10:41
  of the prison by the son of doctor Briga. She stared, repeating the
• 5:10:47
  words slowly, the son of doctor Briga. But that is Fernando, she
• 5:10:52
  said, I have always understood. I replied that your friend was an only
• 5:10:57
  son. I had expected an outcry of horror. If she had uttered it,
• 5:11:03
  I could have forgiven her anything, But I heard instead an incredulous exclamation.
• 5:11:08
  My statement was really too preposterous. I saw that her mind had flashed
• 5:11:12
  back to our last talk, and that she charged me with something too nearly
• 5:11:18
  true to be endurable. My brother's letter given to the prison ward of by
• 5:11:22
  Fernando Briga. My dear Captain Allingdon, on what authority do you expect me
• 5:11:29
  to believe such a tale. Her incredulity had in it an evident implication of
• 5:11:33
  bad faith, and I was stung to a quick reply. If you will
• 5:11:38
  turn over the letter, you will see. She continued to gaze at me
• 5:11:44
  a moment, then she obeyed. I don't think I ever admired her more
• 5:11:48
  than I did. Then, as she read the name, a tremor crossed
• 5:11:52
  her face, and that was all Her mind must have reached out instantly to
• 5:11:56
  the farthest consequences of the discovery. But the long habit of self command enabled
• 5:12:03
  her to steady her muscles at once. If I had not been on the
• 5:12:07
  alert, I should have seen no hint of emotion. For a while,
• 5:12:11
  she looked fixedly at the back of the letter. Then she raised her eyes
• 5:12:15
  to mine. Can you tell me who wrote this? She asked. Her
• 5:12:21
  composure irritated me. She had rallied all her forces to Riga's defense, and
• 5:12:26
  I felt as though my triumph were slipping from me. Probably one of the
• 5:12:30
  clerks of the archives, I answered. It is written in the same hand
• 5:12:33
  as all the other memoranda relating to the political prisoners of that year. But
• 5:12:40
  it is a lie, she exclaimed, He was never admitted to the prisons.
• 5:12:44
  Are you sure how should he have been, he might have gone as
• 5:12:48
  his father's assistant. But if he had seen my poor brother, he would
• 5:12:52
  have told me long ago. Not if he had really given up this letter,
• 5:12:57
  I retorted. I supposed her quick intelligence had seized this from the first,
• 5:13:03
  But I saw now that it came to her as a shock. She
• 5:13:07
  stood motionless, clenching the letter in her hands, and I could guess the
• 5:13:11
  rapid travel of her thoughts. Suddenly she came up to me, Colonel Allingdon.
• 5:13:17
  She said, you have been a good friend of mine, though I
• 5:13:19
  think you have not liked me lately. But whether you like me or not,
• 5:13:23
  I know you will not deceive me. On your honor. Do you
• 5:13:27
  think this memorandum may have been written later than the letter? I hesitated.
• 5:13:33
  If she had cried out once against Pliga, I should have wished myself out
• 5:13:37
  of the business, but she was too sure of him. On my honor,
• 5:13:42
  I said, I think it hardly possible. The ink has faded to
• 5:13:45
  the same degree. She made a rapid comparison and folded the letter with a
• 5:13:51
  gesture of assent. It may have been written by an enemy. I went
• 5:13:56
  on, wishing to clear myself of any appearance of malice. She shook her
• 5:14:00
  head. He was barely fifteen, and his father was on the side of
• 5:14:04
  the government. Besides, this would have served him with the government, and
• 5:14:08
  the liberals would never have known of it. This was unanswerable, and still
• 5:14:14
  not a word of revolt against the man whose condemnation she was pronouncing. Then
• 5:14:19
  I said, with a vague gesture. She caught me up. Then you
• 5:14:26
  have answered my objections. I returned your objections to thinking that Signor Briga could
• 5:14:32
  have begun his career as a patriot by betraying a friend. I had brought
• 5:14:37
  her to the test at last. But my eyes shrank from her face as
• 5:14:41
  I spoke. It was a dead silence, which I broke by adding lamely,
• 5:14:47
  but no doubt Signor Briga could explain. She lifted her head, and
• 5:14:51
  I saw that my triumph was to be short. She stood erect a few
• 5:14:55
  paces from me, resting her hand on a table. But not for support.
• 5:15:00
  Of course, she can explain, she said, Do you suppose I
• 5:15:03
  ever doubted it? But she paused a moment, fronting me nobly he need
• 5:15:08
  not, for I understand it all now, ah, I murmured, with
• 5:15:12
  the last flicker of irony. I understand, she repeated. It was she
• 5:15:18
  now who sought my eyes and held them. It is quite simple. He
• 5:15:22
  could not have done otherwise. This was a little too oracular to be received
• 5:15:27
  with equanimity. I suppose, I smiled. He could not have done otherwise,
• 5:15:33
  she repeated, with tranquil emphasis. He merely did what his every Italian's
• 5:15:37
  duty. He put Italy before himself and his friends. She waited a moment,
• 5:15:44
  and then went on with growing passion. Surely you must see what I
• 5:15:48
  mean. He was evidently in the prison with his father at the time of
• 5:15:51
  my poor brother's death. Emmilio perhaps guessed that he was a friend, or
• 5:15:56
  perhaps appealed to him because he was young and looked calm. And but don't
• 5:16:00
  you see how dangerous it would have been for Briga to bring this letter to
• 5:16:04
  us, or even to hide it in his father's house. It is true
• 5:16:08
  that he was not yet suspected of liberalism, but he was already connected with
• 5:16:14
  young Italy. And it is just because he managed to keep himself so free
• 5:16:18
  of suspicion that he was able to do such good work for the cause.
• 5:16:22
  She paused, and then went on with the firmer voice. You don't know
• 5:16:26
  the danger we all lived in the government. Spies were everywhere, the laws
• 5:16:32
  were set aside as the Duke pleased, was not a medio hanged for having
• 5:16:36
  an owe to Italy in his desk. After Minotti's conspiracy, the Duke grew
• 5:16:41
  mad with fear. He was haunted by the dread of assassination. The police
• 5:16:45
  to prove their zeal at the trump of false charges and arrest innocent persons.
• 5:16:51
  You remember the case of Porici incriminating papers who smuggled into people's houses. They
• 5:16:56
  were condemned to death on the paid evidence of brigands and galley slaves. The
• 5:17:02
  families of the revolutionists were under the closest observation and were shunned by all who
• 5:17:07
  wished to stand well with the government. If Briga had been seen going into
• 5:17:11
  our house, he would have at once been suspected. If he had hidden
• 5:17:15
  Emilio's letter at home, its discovery might have ruined his family as well as
• 5:17:21
  himself. It was his duty to consider all these things. In those days,
• 5:17:26
  no man could serve two masters. That he had to choose between endangering
• 5:17:30
  the cause and failing to serve a friend. He chose the latter, and
• 5:17:36
  he was right. I stood listening, fascinated by the rapidity and skill with
• 5:17:41
  which he had built up the hypothesis of Briga's defense. But before she ended,
• 5:17:47
  a strange thing happened. Her argument had convinced me. It seemed to
• 5:17:52
  me quite likely that Briga had in fact been actuated by the motives. She
• 5:17:56
  suggested. I suppose she read the admission in my face, for hers lit
• 5:18:02
  up victoriously. You see, she exclaimed, Ah, it takes one brave
• 5:18:07
  man to understand another. Perhaps I winced a little at being thus coupled with
• 5:18:14
  her hero. At any rate, some last impulse of resistance made me say,
• 5:18:18
  I should be quite convinced if Briga had only spoken of the letter afterward.
• 5:18:22
  If brave people understand each other, I cannot see why he should have
• 5:18:27
  been afraid of telling you the truth. She colored deeply, and perhaps not
• 5:18:33
  quite resentfully. You are right, she said, He need not have been
• 5:18:37
  afraid. But he does not know me as I know him. I was
• 5:18:41
  useful to Italy, and he may have feared to risk my friendship. You
• 5:18:47
  are the most generous woman I ever knew, I exclaimed. She looked at
• 5:18:52
  me intently. You also are generous, she said, I stiffened instantly,
• 5:18:57
  suspecting a purpose behind her praise. I have given you small proof of it,
• 5:19:03
  I said. She seemed surprised in bringing me this letter. What else
• 5:19:07
  could you do? She sighed deeply. You can give me proof enough.
• 5:19:12
  Now She had dropped into a chair, and I saw that we had reached
• 5:19:17
  the most difficult point in our interview, Captain Allingdon, She said, does
• 5:19:22
  any one else know of this letter? No? I was alone in the
• 5:19:26
  archives when I found it, and you spoke of it to no one,
• 5:19:30
  to no one, then no one must know. I bowed. It is
• 5:19:37
  for you to decide, She paused. Not even my mother, she continued,
• 5:19:41
  with a painful blush. I looked at her in amazement. Not even
• 5:19:47
  She shook her head, sadly. You think me a cruel daughter, Well,
• 5:19:52
  he was a cruel friend. What he did was done for Italy?
• 5:19:56
  Shall I allow myself to be surpassed? Felt a pang of commiseration for the
• 5:20:00
  mother. But you will at least tell the Countess, her eyes filled with
• 5:20:06
  tears, My poor mother. Don't make it more difficult for me. But
• 5:20:11
  I don't understand. Don't you see that she might find it impossible to forgive
• 5:20:15
  him. She has suffered so much, and I can't risk that, for
• 5:20:19
  in her anger she might speak, and even if she forgave him, she
• 5:20:23
  might be tempted to show the letter. Don't you see that, even now
• 5:20:27
  a word of this might ruin him. I will trust his fate to no
• 5:20:30
  one. If Italy needed him, then she needs him far more. To
• 5:20:36
  day she stood before me magnificently in the splendor of her great refusal. Then
• 5:20:41
  she turned to the writing table at which she had been seated when I came
• 5:20:45
  in. Her sealing taper was still alight, and she held her brother's letter
• 5:20:52
  to the flame. I watched her in silence while it burned. But one
• 5:20:56
  more question rose to my lips. I will tell him then what you have
• 5:21:00
  done for him? I cried, and at that the heroine turned woman melted
• 5:21:07
  and pressed unhappy hands in mine. Don't you see that I can never tell
• 5:21:11
  him what I do for him? This is my gift to Italy, she
• 5:21:15
  said, end of chapter seven, Chapter eight, The Dilettante. It was
• 5:21:23
  an impulse. Hardly needing the arguments, he found himself advancing in its favor.
• 5:21:30
  The Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned as usual into
• 5:21:33
  Missus Vervane Street. The as usual was his own qualification of the act,
• 5:21:38
  a convenient way of bridging the interval in days and other sequences that lay between
• 5:21:44
  this visit and the last. It was characteristic of him that he instinctively excluded
• 5:21:49
  his call two days earlier with Ruth Gayner from the list of his visits to
• 5:21:53
  Missus Vervaine. The special conditions attending it had made it no more like a
• 5:21:59
  visit to Missus Vervain than an engraved dinner invitation is like a personal letter.
• 5:22:03
  Yet it was to talk over his call with miss Gaynor that he was now
• 5:22:07
  returning to the scene of that episode, And it was because Missus Vervain could
• 5:22:11
  be trusted to handle the talking over as skillfully as the interview itself, that
• 5:22:18
  at her corner he had felt the dilettante's irresistible craving to take a last look
• 5:22:22
  at a work of art that was passing out of his possession. On the
• 5:22:27
  whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected than Missus
• 5:22:32
  Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking things for granted, and
• 5:22:37
  Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she owed her excellence to his
• 5:22:41
  training. Early in his career, Thursdale had made a mistake at the outset
• 5:22:45
  of his acquaintance with the lady, of telling her that he loved her and
• 5:22:49
  exacting the same avowal in return. The latter part of that episode had been
• 5:22:55
  like the long walk back from a picnic, when one has to carry all
• 5:22:59
  the crockery on his finished using. It was the last time Thursday ever allowed
• 5:23:03
  himself to be encumbered with the debris of a feast. He thus incidentally learned
• 5:23:08
  that the privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming
• 5:23:12
  woman can accord, And in seeking to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment, he
• 5:23:17
  had developed a science of evasion in which the woman of the moment became a
• 5:23:22
  mere implement of the game. He owed a great deal of delicate enjoyment to
• 5:23:26
  the cultivation of this art. The perils from which it had been his refuge
• 5:23:30
  became naively harmless. Was it possible that he who now took his easy way
• 5:23:36
  along the levels, had once preferred to grasp on the raw heights of emotion.
• 5:23:41
  Youth is a high colored season. But he had the satisfaction of feeling
• 5:23:45
  that he had entered earlier than most into that caroscuro of sensation, where every
• 5:23:49
  half tone has its value as a promoter of this pleasure. No one he
• 5:23:55
  had known was comparable to missus Vervaine. He had taught a good many women
• 5:24:00
  not to betray their feelings, but he had never before had such fine material
• 5:24:03
  to work in. She had been surprisingly crude when he first knew her,
• 5:24:08
  capable of making the most awkward inferences, of plunging through thin ice, of
• 5:24:14
  recklessly undressing her emotions. But she had acquired, under the discipline of his
• 5:24:18
  reticence and evasions, a skill almost equal to his own, and perhaps more
• 5:24:23
  remarkable in that it involved keeping time with any tune he played, and reading
• 5:24:29
  at sight some uncommonly difficult passages. It had taken Thursdale seven years to form
• 5:24:36
  this fine talent, but the result had justified the effort. At the crucial
• 5:24:40
  moment, she had been perfect. Her way of greeting Miss Gayner had made
• 5:24:44
  him regret that he had announced his engagement by letter. It was an evasion
• 5:24:48
  that confessed a difficulty, a deviation, implying an obstacle, whereby common consent
• 5:24:55
  it was agreed to see none. It betrayed, in short, a lack
• 5:24:57
  of confidence in the completeness of his method. It had been his pride never
• 5:25:03
  to put himself in a position which had to be quitted, as it were,
• 5:25:06
  by the back door. But here, as he perceived, the main
• 5:25:10
  portals would have opened for him of their own accord. All this and much
• 5:25:15
  more he read in the finished naturalness with which missus Vravane had met Miss Gaynor.
• 5:25:21
  He had never seen a better piece of work. There was no overeagerness,
• 5:25:25
  no suspicious warmth above all, and this gave her art the grace of
• 5:25:30
  a natural quality that when none of those damnable implications whereby a woman in welcoming
• 5:25:34
  her friend's betrothed may keep him on pins and needles while she lapsed the lady
• 5:25:40
  in complacency. So masterly a performance indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss
• 5:25:47
  Gaynor's doorstep words. To be so kind to me, how she must have
• 5:25:52
  liked you, Though he caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness
• 5:25:56
  to transmit them as a final tribute to the one woman he who was unfailingly
• 5:26:00
  certain to enjoy a good thing. It was perhaps the one drawback to his
• 5:26:06
  new situation, that it might develop good things which it would be impossible to
• 5:26:11
  hand on to Margaret Vravaine. The fact that he had made the mistake of
• 5:26:15
  underrating his friend's powers, the consciousness that his writings must have betrayed his distrust
• 5:26:21
  of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning down her street instead of
• 5:26:26
  going on to the club. He would show her that he knew how to
• 5:26:29
  value her. He would ask her to achieve with him a feat infinitely rarer
• 5:26:33
  and more delicate than the one he had appeared to avoid. Incidentally, he
• 5:26:37
  would also dispose of the interval of time before dinner. Ever since he had
• 5:26:42
  seen Miss Gayner off an hour earlier on her return journey to Buffalo, he
• 5:26:48
  had been wondering how he should put in the rest of the afternoon. It
• 5:26:52
  was absurd how he missed the girl, if that was it. The desire
• 5:26:56
  to talk about her was, after all, at the bottom of his impulse
• 5:27:00
  to call on missus Vervaine. It was absurd, if you like, but
• 5:27:03
  it was delightfully rejuvenating. He could recall the time when he had been afraid
• 5:27:08
  of being obvious. Now he felt that this return to the primitive emotions might
• 5:27:14
  be as restorative as a holiday in the Canadian woods. That it was precisely
• 5:27:19
  by the girl's candor, her directness, her lack of complications, that he
• 5:27:25
  was taken the sense that she might say something rash at any moment was positively
• 5:27:29
  exhilarating. If she had thrown her arms about him at the station, he
• 5:27:33
  would not have given a thought to his crumpled dignity. A surprised Thursday o
• 5:27:37
  to find what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure, And though his
• 5:27:42
  sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to any conscious purpose, he could
• 5:27:48
  not but rejoice in the fact that his sentimental economies had left him such a
• 5:27:52
  large surplus to draw upon. Missus Vervaine was at home, as usual when
• 5:27:59
  what visit the cemetery, one expects to find the angel on the tombstone,
• 5:28:03
  and it struck Thursdale as another proof of his friend's good taste, that she
• 5:28:07
  had been in no undue haste to change her habits. The whole house appeared
• 5:28:12
  to count on his coming. The footman took his hat and overcoat as naturally
• 5:28:17
  as though there had been no lapse in his visits, and the drawing room
• 5:28:21
  at once enveloped him in that atmosphere of tacit intelligence which Missus Vervaine imparted to
• 5:28:26
  her very furniture. It was a surprise that, in this general harmony of
• 5:28:32
  circumstances, Missus Vervain should herself sound the first false note you, she exclaimed,
• 5:28:40
  and the book she held slipped from her hand. It was crude,
• 5:28:44
  certainly, unless it were a touch of the finest art. The difficulty of
• 5:28:48
  classifying it disturbed Thursdale's balance. Why not, he said, restoring the book?
• 5:28:55
  Isn't it my hour? And as she made no answer, he added
• 5:28:59
  gently, unlessed some one else's. She laid the book aside and sank back
• 5:29:03
  into her chair. Mine merely, she said. I hope that doesn't mean
• 5:29:08
  that you are unwilling to share it with you, By no means you're welcome
• 5:29:12
  for my last crust. He looked at her reproachfully. Do you call this
• 5:29:18
  the last? She smiled, as he dropped into the seat across the hearth.
• 5:29:22
  It's a way of giving it more flavor, he returned the smile.
• 5:29:26
  A visit to you doesn't need such condiments. She took this with just the
• 5:29:32
  right measure of retrospective amusement. Ah, but I want to put into this
• 5:29:37
  one a very special taste, she confessed. Her smile was so confident,
• 5:29:41
  so reassuring, that it lulled him into the imprudence of saying, why should
• 5:29:47
  you want it to be different from what was always so perfectly right? She
• 5:29:52
  hesitated. Doesn't the fact that it's the last constitute a difference? The last,
• 5:29:57
  my last visit to you? Oh? Metaphorically, I mean there's a
• 5:30:02
  break in the continuity. Decidedly she was pressing too hard, unlearning his arts
• 5:30:08
  already. I don't recognize it, he said, unless you make me,
• 5:30:12
  he added, with a note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid attention.
• 5:30:18
  She turned to him with grave eyes. You recognize no difference whatever, none
• 5:30:25
  except an added link in the chain, an added link, and having one
• 5:30:30
  more thing to like you for. You're letting miss Gaynor see why I had
• 5:30:34
  already so many. He flattered himself that this turn had taken the least hint
• 5:30:40
  of fatuity from the phrase. Missus Ravane sank into her former easy pose.
• 5:30:47
  Was it that you came for? She asked, almost gaily, if it
• 5:30:51
  is necessary to have a reason. That was one to talk to me about
• 5:30:56
  miss gaynor to tell you how she talks about you. That will be very
• 5:31:00
  interesting, especially if you have seen her since her second visit to me.
• 5:31:06
  Her second visit, Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start and moved to
• 5:31:11
  another. She came to see you again this morning, Yes, by appointment.
• 5:31:17
  He continued to look at her blankly. You sent for her. I
• 5:31:21
  didn't have to, she wrote and asked me last night. But no doubt
• 5:31:25
  you have seen her since. Thursdale sat silent. He was trying to separate
• 5:31:30
  his words from his thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably. I saw
• 5:31:34
  her off just now at the station, and she didn't tell you that she
• 5:31:38
  had been here again. There was hardly time. I suppose there were people
• 5:31:42
  about, He floundered. Ah, she'll write, then, he regained his
• 5:31:48
  composure. Of course, she'll write very often. I hope you know I'm
• 5:31:52
  absurdly in love, he cried ordaciously. She tilted her head back, looking
• 5:31:57
  up at him as he leaned against the chimney piece. He had leaned there
• 5:32:02
  so often that the attitude touched a pulse, which set up a throbbing in
• 5:32:06
  her throat. Oh my poor Thursdale, she murmured. I suppose it's rather
• 5:32:11
  ridiculous, he owned, and as she remained silent, he added, with
• 5:32:15
  a sudden break, or have you another reason for pitying me? Her answer
• 5:32:19
  was another question? Have you been back to your room since you left her?
• 5:32:25
  Since I left her at the station? I came straight here. Ah,
• 5:32:29
  yes you could, There was no reason. Her words passed into a
• 5:32:33
  silent musing Thursdale moved nervously nearer. You said you had something to tell me.
• 5:32:41
  Perhaps I had better let her do so. There may be a letter
• 5:32:44
  at your brooms, a letter what you mean? A letter from her?
• 5:32:48
  What has happened? His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of
• 5:32:52
  reassurance. Nothing has happened. Perhaps that is just the worst of it.
• 5:32:57
  You always hated, you know, she added, incoherently, to have things
• 5:33:02
  happen, you never would let them. And now, well that was what
• 5:33:07
  she came here for. I supposed you had guessed to know if anything had
• 5:33:11
  happened, had happened? He gazed at her slowly, Between you and me,
• 5:33:17
  he said, with a rush of light. The words were so much
• 5:33:21
  cruder than any that had ever passed between them that the color rose to her
• 5:33:25
  face, but she held his startled gaze. You know, girls are not
• 5:33:30
  quite as unsophisticated as they used to be. Are you surprised that such an
• 5:33:34
  idea should occur to her? His own color, answered hers. It was
• 5:33:40
  the only reply that came to him. Missus Ravane went on smoothly. I
• 5:33:45
  suppose it might have struck you that there were times when we presented that appearance.
• 5:33:51
  He made an impatient gesture. A man's past is his own. Perhaps
• 5:33:56
  it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared it. But earn such
• 5:34:00
  truths only by experience, and miss Gayner is naturally inexperienced, of course,
• 5:34:06
  But supposing her act a natural one, he floundered lamentably among his innuendoes.
• 5:34:11
  I still don't see how there was anything anything to take hold of? There
• 5:34:17
  wasn't well, then escaped him in crude satisfaction, But as she did not
• 5:34:22
  complete the sentence, he went on with a faltering laugh. She can hardly
• 5:34:26
  object to the existence of a mere friendship between us, but she does,
• 5:34:32
  said missus. Vervain. Thursdale stood perplexed. He had seen on the previous
• 5:34:37
  day no trace of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed. He could still hear
• 5:34:42
  the candid ring of the girl's praise of Missus Vervaine. If she was such
• 5:34:48
  an abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness, she must at
• 5:34:52
  least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival for solution.
• 5:34:57
  The situation seemed one through which one could no longer move in the penumber,
• 5:35:02
  and he let in a burst of light with the direct query, won't you
• 5:35:07
  explain what you mean? Missus Ravane sat silent, not provokingly as though to
• 5:35:12
  prolong his distress, but as if in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her.
• 5:35:18
  It was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It
• 5:35:22
  was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything, and she
• 5:35:26
  had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted, that
• 5:35:30
  she seemed unable to produce one on the spot. At last, she said,
• 5:35:36
  slowly, she came to find out if you were really free? Thursdale
• 5:35:41
  colored again. Free, he stammered, with a sense of physical disgust at
• 5:35:47
  contact with such crassness. Yes, if I had quite done with you,
• 5:35:52
  she smiled and recovered security. It seems she likes clear outlines. She has
• 5:35:59
  a passion for deafene Yes, well, he said, wincing at the echo
• 5:36:03
  of his own subtlety. Well, and when I had told her that you
• 5:36:07
  had never belonged to me, she wanted me to define my status, to
• 5:36:11
  know exactly where I had stood all along. Thursdale sat gazing at her intently.
• 5:36:18
  His hand was not yet on the clue. And even when you had
• 5:36:22
  told her that, even when I had told her that I had had no
• 5:36:25
  status, that I had never stood anywhere in any sense, she meant,
• 5:36:29
  said missus Ravane slowly. Even then she wasn't satisfied, it seems, he
• 5:36:36
  uttered an uneasy exclamation. She didn't believe you. You mean, I mean
• 5:36:41
  that She did believe me too, thoroughly. Well, then, in God's
• 5:36:45
  name, what did she want? Something more those of the words she used,
• 5:36:52
  something more between you would be Is it a conundrum? He laughed awkwardly.
• 5:36:59
  Girls are not what they were in my day. They are no longer
• 5:37:02
  forbidden to contemplate the relation of the sexes, so it seems, she commented.
• 5:37:07
  But since in this case there wasn't any He broke off, catching the
• 5:37:11
  dawn of a revelation in her gaze. That's just it. The unpardonable offense
• 5:37:18
  has been in our not offending. He flung himself down despairingly. I give
• 5:37:23
  it up. What did you tell her? He burst out, with sudden
• 5:37:26
  crudeness, the exact truth. If I had only known, She broke off
• 5:37:32
  with a beseeching tenderness. Won't you believe that I would still have lied for
• 5:37:36
  you, lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either
• 5:37:40
  of us? To save you, to hide you from her to the last,
• 5:37:45
  as I've hidden you from myself all these years. She stood up with
• 5:37:48
  a sudden, tragic import in her movement. You believe me capable of that,
• 5:37:52
  don't you? If I had only guessed? But I have never known
• 5:37:56
  a girl like her. She had the truth out of me with a bring,
• 5:38:00
  the truth that you and I had never had, never, never in
• 5:38:04
  all these years. Oh, she knew why. She measured us both in
• 5:38:08
  a flash. She didn't suspect me of having haggled with you. Her words
• 5:38:14
  pelted me like hail. He just took what he wanted, sifted and shorted
• 5:38:18
  you to suit his taste, burnt out the gold and left a heap of
• 5:38:22
  cinders. And you let him, You let yourself be cut in bits.
• 5:38:26
  She mixed her metaphors, A little be cut in bits and used or discarded,
• 5:38:30
  while all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to him.
• 5:38:33
  But he's shy lock, and you have bled to death of the pound of
• 5:38:37
  flesh. He is cut out of you. But she despises me the most,
• 5:38:41
  you know, far the most, Missus, Ravaine ended. The words
• 5:38:47
  fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room. They seemed out of harmony
• 5:38:51
  with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which at any
• 5:38:56
  moment a visitor might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though
• 5:39:02
  a grand opera singer had strained the acoustics of a private music room. Thursdale
• 5:39:07
  stood up facing his hostess. Half the room was between them, but they
• 5:39:11
  seemed to stare close at each other. Now that the veils of reticence and
• 5:39:15
  ambiguity had fallen, His first words were characteristic, She does despise me,
• 5:39:22
  then, he exclaimed, she thinks the pound of flesh you took with a
• 5:39:27
  little tuney of the heart. He was excessively pale. Please tell me exactly
• 5:39:33
  what she said of me. She did not speak much of you. She
• 5:39:37
  is proud, but I gather that while she understands love or indifference, her
• 5:39:42
  eyes have never been opened to the many intermediate shades of feeling. At any
• 5:39:47
  rate, she expressed an unwillingness to be taken with reservations. She thinks she
• 5:39:52
  would have loved her better if you had loved some one else. First,
• 5:39:56
  the point of view is original, she insists on a man with a pat
• 5:40:00
  oh a past. If she's serious, I could rake up a past,
• 5:40:03
  he said, with a laugh. So I suggested, But she has her
• 5:40:07
  eyes on his particular portion of it. She insists on making it a test
• 5:40:12
  case. She wanted to know what you had done to me, and before
• 5:40:17
  I could guess her drift, I blundered into telling her. Thursdale drew a
• 5:40:22
  difficult breath. I never supposed your revenge is complete, he said slowly.
• 5:40:29
  He heard a little gasp in her throat my revenge when I sent for you
• 5:40:33
  to warn you, to save you from being surprised, as I was surprised.
• 5:40:38
  You're very good, but it's rather late to talk of saving me.
• 5:40:41
  He held out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave taking. How you
• 5:40:47
  must care for I never saw you so dull? Was her answer. Don't
• 5:40:51
  you see that it's not too late for me to help you. And as
• 5:40:55
  he continued to stare, she brought out, sublimely, take the rest in
• 5:40:59
  imagination. Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell
• 5:41:03
  her I lied to her. She's too ready to believe it, and so,
• 5:41:07
  after all, in a sense, I shan't have been wasted. His
• 5:41:11
  stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the
• 5:41:15
  look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to need
• 5:41:19
  oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an
• 5:41:25
  atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls. It was
• 5:41:32
  not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate, but something in him
• 5:41:36
  cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went up
• 5:41:40
  to his friend and took her hand. You would do it, You would
• 5:41:44
  do it. She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook good
• 5:41:48
  bye. He said, kissing it good bye. You are going to get
• 5:41:52
  my letter, your letter. The letter won't matter if you will only do
• 5:41:56
  what I ask. He returned her gaze. I might, I suppose,
• 5:42:02
  without being out of character. Only don't you see that if your plan helped
• 5:42:06
  me, it could only harm her. Harm her to sacrifice, you wouldn't
• 5:42:11
  make me different. I shall go on being what I have always been,
• 5:42:15
  sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want my punishment to
• 5:42:18
  fall on her? She looked at him long and deeply. Ah, if
• 5:42:23
  I had to choose between you, you would let her take her chance.
• 5:42:27
  But I can't. You see, I must take my punishment alone. She
• 5:42:32
  drew her hand away, sighing, Oh, there will be no punishment for
• 5:42:37
  either of you, for either of us. There will be the reading of
• 5:42:41
  her letter. For me, she shook her head with a slight laugh.
• 5:42:45
  There will be no letter. Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life
• 5:42:49
  in his look. No letter, you don't mean. I mean that she's
• 5:42:53
  been with you since I saw her. She's seen you and heard your voice.
• 5:42:59
  If there is a letter, she has recalled it from the first station
• 5:43:02
  by telegraph. He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her
• 5:43:07
  smile. But in the meanwhile, I shall have to read it, he
• 5:43:11
  said. The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the
• 5:43:15
  dreadful emptiness of the room. End of Chapter eight, Chapter nine, The
• 5:43:22
  Quicksand. As missus Quinton's Victoria, driving homeward, turned from the park into
• 5:43:29
  Fifth Avenue, she divined her son's tall figure walking ahead of her in the
• 5:43:33
  twilight. His long stride covered the ground more rapidly than usual, and she
• 5:43:38
  had a premonition that if he were going home at that hour, it was
• 5:43:42
  because he wanted to see her. Missus Quinton, though not a fanciful woman,
• 5:43:48
  was sometimes aware of his sixth sense, enabling her to detect the faintest
• 5:43:52
  vibrations of her son's impulses. She was too shrewd to fancy herself the one
• 5:43:57
  mother in possession of this faculty, but she permitted herself to think that few
• 5:44:03
  could exercise it more discreetly. If she could not help overhearing Allan's thoughts,
• 5:44:07
  she had the courage to keep her discoveries to herself, the tact to take
• 5:44:12
  for granted nothing that lay below the surface of their spoken intercourse. She knew
• 5:44:18
  that most people would rather have their letters read than their thoughts. For this
• 5:44:22
  super feminine discretion, Allan repaid her. By being Allan, there could have
• 5:44:26
  been no completed reward. He was the key to the meaning of life,
• 5:44:32
  the justification of what must have seemed as incomprehensible as it was odious, had
• 5:44:37
  it not all sufficingly ended in himself. He was a perfect son, and
• 5:44:41
  missus Quinton had always hungered for perfection. Her house, in a minor way,
• 5:44:47
  bore witness to the craving one felt it to be the result of a
• 5:44:51
  series of eliminations. There was nothing fortuitous in its blending of line and color.
• 5:44:56
  The almost morbid finish of every material detail of her life suggested the possibility
• 5:45:03
  that a diversity of energies had, by some pressure of circumstance, been forced
• 5:45:07
  into the channel of a narrow dilettuntism. Missus Quentin's fastidiousness had indeed the flow
• 5:45:15
  of being two one sided. Her friends were not always worthy of the chairs
• 5:45:19
  they sat in, and she overlooked in her associate's defects that she would not
• 5:45:25
  have tolerated in her bric a brac. Her house was in fact never so
• 5:45:29
  distinguished as when it was empty, and it was at its best in the
• 5:45:33
  warm, fire lit silence that now received her. Her son, who had
• 5:45:37
  overtaken her on the doorstep, followed her into the drawing room and threw himself
• 5:45:42
  into an arm chair near the fire, while she laid off her furs and
• 5:45:47
  busied herself about the tea table. For a while, neither spoke, but
• 5:45:51
  glancing across the kettle, his mother noticed that he sat staring at the embers
• 5:45:56
  with the look she had never seen on his face. Though it arrogant,
• 5:46:00
  young outline was as familiar to her as her own thoughts. The look extended
• 5:46:06
  itself to his negligent attitude, to the droop of his long, fine hands,
• 5:46:11
  the dejected tilt of his head against the cushions. It was like the
• 5:46:15
  moral equivalent of physical fatigue. He looked, as he himself would have phrased
• 5:46:18
  it, dead beat played out. Such an air was so farign to his
• 5:46:23
  usual bright, indomitableness that missus Quinton had the sense of an unfamiliar presence in
• 5:46:30
  which she must observe herself, must raise hurried barriers against an alien approach.
• 5:46:36
  It was one of the drawbacks of their excessive intimacy that any break in it
• 5:46:40
  seemed a chasm. She was accustomed to let his thoughts circle about her before
• 5:46:45
  they settled it a speech, and she now sat in motionless expectancy, as
• 5:46:48
  though a sound might frighten them away. At length, without turning his eyes
• 5:46:53
  from the fire, he said, I'm so glad you're a nice, old
• 5:46:57
  fashioned, intuitive woman. It's painful to see them think. Her apprehension had
• 5:47:03
  already preceded him, Hope fennow. She faltered. He nodded, She's been
• 5:47:10
  thinking hard. It was very painful to me at least, and I don't
• 5:47:14
  believe she enjoyed it. She said, she didn't. He stretched his feet
• 5:47:18
  to the fire. The result of her cogitations is that you won't have me.
• 5:47:22
  She arrived at this by pure ratioscination. It's not a question of feeling.
• 5:47:26
  You understand. I'm the only man she's ever loved. But you won't
• 5:47:30
  have me. What novels did you read when you were young, dear?
• 5:47:33
  I'm convinced at all turns on that if she'd been brought up on Trollop and
• 5:47:38
  white Mailville instead of Tolstoy and missus Ward, we should now have been vulgarly
• 5:47:44
  sitting on a sofa trying on the engagement ring. Missus Quinton at first was
• 5:47:49
  kept silent by the mother's instinctive anger that the girl she has not wanted for
• 5:47:53
  her son should have dared to refuse him. Then she said, tell me,
• 5:48:00
  dear, my good woman, she has scruples, scruples against the paper.
• 5:48:06
  She objects me in my official capacity as owner of the Radiator. His
• 5:48:11
  mother did not echo his laugh. She had found a solution. Of course,
• 5:48:17
  she overflows with expedients. I wish to chuck the paper and we were
• 5:48:21
  to live happily ever afterward, on canned food and virtue. She even had
• 5:48:26
  an alternative. Ready, women are so full of her sources. I wish
• 5:48:30
  to turn the Radiator into an independent organ and run it at a loss,
• 5:48:33
  to show the public what a model newspaper ought to be. On the whole,
• 5:48:38
  I think she fancied this plan more than the other. It commended itself
• 5:48:41
  to her as being more uncomfortable and aggressive. It's not the fashion nowadays to
• 5:48:48
  be good by stealth, missus Quinton said to herself. I didn't know how
• 5:48:52
  much he cared aloud, she murmured, you must give her time time to
• 5:48:59
  move out. The old prejudices and make room for new ones. My dear
• 5:49:03
  mother, though she has a brand new that's the trouble with them. She's
• 5:49:07
  tremendously up to date. She takes in all the moral fashion papers and wears
• 5:49:11
  the newest thing in ethics. Her resentment lost its way in the intricacies of
• 5:49:18
  his metaphor. Is she so very religious, you, dear archaic woman.
• 5:49:23
  She's hopelessly irreligious. That's the difficulty. You can make a religious woman believe
• 5:49:29
  almost anything. There's the habit of credulity to work on. But when a
• 5:49:33
  girl's faith in the deluge has been shaken, it's very hard to inspire her
• 5:49:37
  with confidence. She makes you feel that before believing in you, is her
• 5:49:41
  duty as a conscientious agnostic to find out whether you're not obsolete, or whether
• 5:49:48
  the text isn't corrupt, or somebody hasn't proved conclusively that you've never existed.
• 5:49:52
  Anyhow, missus Quentin was again silent. The two moved in that atmosphere of
• 5:49:57
  implications and a asumptions, where the lightest word may shake down the dust of
• 5:50:03
  countless stored impressions, and speech was sometimes more difficult between them than had their
• 5:50:08
  union been less close. Presently, she ventured, it's impossible, impossible.
• 5:50:17
  She seemed to use her words cautiously, like weapons that might slip and inflict
• 5:50:21
  a cut. What she suggests? Her son, raising himself, turned to
• 5:50:26
  look at her for the first time. Their glance met in a shock of
• 5:50:30
  comprehension. He was with her, against the girl. Then her satisfaction overflowed
• 5:50:36
  in the murmur of tenderness. Of course, not, dear. One can't
• 5:50:41
  change change one's life, one's self, he amended. That's what I tell
• 5:50:47
  her. What's the use of my giving up the paper if I keep my
• 5:50:49
  point of view? The psychological distinction attracted her. Which is it? She
• 5:50:55
  minds most? Oh the paper for the present, she undertakes to modify the
• 5:51:00
  point of view. Afterward, all she asks is that I shall renounce my
• 5:51:03
  heresy. The gift of grace will come later. Missus Quinton sat gazing into
• 5:51:10
  her untouched cup. Her son's first words had produced in her the hallucinated sense
• 5:51:15
  of struggling in the thick of a crowd that he could not see. It
• 5:51:19
  was horrible to feel herself hemmed in by influences imperceptible to him. Yet,
• 5:51:25
  if anything could have increased her misery. It would have been the discovery that
• 5:51:29
  her ghost had become visible. As though to divert his attention, she precipitately
• 5:51:33
  asked, and you. His answer carried the shock of an evocation. I
• 5:51:40
  merely asked her what she thought of you? Of me? She admires you
• 5:51:45
  immensely, you know. For a moment missus Quinton's cheek showed the lingering light
• 5:51:49
  of girlhood. Praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the transmitter's merit.
• 5:51:56
  Well, she smiled, Well, you didn't make my father give up the
• 5:52:02
  radiator, did you. His mother, stiffening, made a secuitous return.
• 5:52:07
  She never comes here. How can she know me? She's so poor,
• 5:52:11
  she goes out so little. He rose and leaned against the mantelpiece, dislodging
• 5:52:17
  with impatient fingers. A slender bronze wrestler poised on a porphyry base between two
• 5:52:22
  warm toned Spanish ivories. And that her mother, he added, as if
• 5:52:29
  involuntarily, Her mother has never visited me, missus Quinton finished for him.
• 5:52:34
  He shrugged his shoulders. Missus Fennow has the scope of a wax doll.
• 5:52:40
  Her rule of conduct has taken from her grandmother's sampler. But the daughter is
• 5:52:45
  so modern, and yet the result is the same, not exactly. She
• 5:52:49
  admires you, oh, immensely. He replaced the bronze and turned to his
• 5:52:53
  mother with a smile. Aren't you on some hospital committee together? But especially
• 5:53:00
  strikes her as your way of doing good. She says, philanthropy is not
• 5:53:03
  a line of conduct, but a state of mind. And it appears that
• 5:53:07
  you are one of the elect. As in the vague diffusion of physical pain,
• 5:53:12
  relief seems to come with the acuter pang of a single nerve, missus
• 5:53:17
  Quentin felt herself suddenly eased by a rush of anger against the girl. If
• 5:53:22
  she loved you, she began, His gesture checked her, I'm not asking
• 5:53:27
  you to get her to do that. The two were again silent, facing
• 5:53:32
  each other in the disarray of a common catastrophe, as though their thoughts of
• 5:53:37
  the summons of danger had rushed naked into action. Missus Quinton, at this
• 5:53:41
  revealing moment, saw for the first time how many elements of her son's character
• 5:53:47
  had seemed comprehensible simply because they were familiar. As in reading a foreign language,
• 5:53:52
  we take the meaning of certain words for granted till the context corrects us
• 5:53:56
  Often, as in a given case, her maternal music had figured his conduct,
• 5:54:00
  she now found herself at a loss to forecast it. And with this
• 5:54:04
  failure of intuition came a sense of the subserviency which had hitherto made her counsels,
• 5:54:11
  but the anticipation of his wish her despair escaped in the moan, What
• 5:54:15
  is it you ask me to talk to her? Talk to her, show
• 5:54:22
  her, tell her, make her understand that the paper has always been a
• 5:54:26
  thing outside your life, that it hasn't touched you, that needn't touch her.
• 5:54:30
  Only let her hear you, watch you, be with you. She'll
• 5:54:34
  see she can't help seeing his mother faltered. But if she's given you her
• 5:54:40
  reasons, let her give them to you if she can. When she sees
• 5:54:45
  you, his impatient hand again displaced the wrestler. I care abominably, he
• 5:54:51
  confessed Section two on the Fennow threshold. A sudden sense of the futility of
• 5:54:57
  the attempt had almost driven missus Quinton back to her carriage, but the door
• 5:55:03
  was already opening, and a parlormaid, who believed that miss Fennow was in
• 5:55:07
  led the way to the depressing drawing room. It was the kind of room
• 5:55:11
  in which no member of the family is likely to be found except after dinner
• 5:55:17
  or after death. The chairs and tables looked like poor relations who had repaid
• 5:55:22
  their keep by a long career of grudging usefulness. They seemed banded together against
• 5:55:27
  intruders in a sullen conspiracy of discomfort. Missus Quenton keenly susceptible to such influences
• 5:55:36
  read failure in every angle of the upholstery. She was incapable of the vulgar
• 5:55:41
  error of thinking that Hope Fennow might be induced to marry Allan for his money.
• 5:55:45
  But between this assumption and the inference that the girl's imagination might be touched
• 5:55:51
  by the finer possibilities of wealth, good taste admitted a distinction. The Fennow
• 5:55:56
  furniture, however, presented to some reasoning the abtuseness of its black walnut chamferings,
• 5:56:03
  and something in its attitude suggested that its owners would be as uncompromising.
• 5:56:10
  The room showed none of the modern attempts at palliation, no apologetic draping of
• 5:56:15
  facts, and Missus Quenton provisionally perched on a green reps gothic sofa, with
• 5:56:21
  which it was clearly impossible to establish any closer relations. Concluded that had missus
• 5:56:26
  Fennow needed another seat of the same size, she would have set out placidly
• 5:56:32
  to match the one on which her visitor now languished. To missus Quinton's fancy
• 5:56:37
  hope, Fennow's opinions, presently imparted in a clear, young voice from the
• 5:56:41
  opposite angle of the gothic sofa, partook of the character of their surroundings.
• 5:56:48
  The girl's mind was like a large light empty place, scantily furnished with a
• 5:56:52
  few massive prejudices, not designed to add to any one's comfort, but too
• 5:56:57
  ponderous to be easily moved. Missus Quinton's own intelligence, in which its owner,
• 5:57:03
  in an artistically shaded half light, had so long moved amid a delicate
• 5:57:07
  complexity of sensations, seemed in comparison, suddenly close and crowded, and in
• 5:57:14
  taking refuge there from the glare of the young girl's candor, the older woman
• 5:57:18
  found herself stumbling in an unwonted obscurity. Her uneasiness resolved itself into a sense
• 5:57:25
  of irritation against her listener. Missus Quinton knew that the momentary value of any
• 5:57:30
  argument lies in the capacity of the mind to which it is addressed, And
• 5:57:34
  as her shafts of persuasion spent themselves against Miss Fennow's obduracy, she said to
• 5:57:41
  herself that, since conduct is governed by emotions rather than ideas, the really
• 5:57:47
  strong people are those who mistake their sensations for opinions. Viewed in this light,
• 5:57:52
  miss Fennow was certainly very strong. There was an unmistakable ring of finality
• 5:57:59
  in the tone with which she declared it's impossible. Missus Quinton's answer veiled the
• 5:58:04
  least shade of feminine resentment. I told Allan that where he had failed,
• 5:58:10
  there was no chance of my making an impression, hope, Fennow laid on
• 5:58:14
  her visitor's an almost reverential hand. Dear missus Quinton, it's the impression you
• 5:58:21
  make that confirms the impossibility. Missus Quinton waited a moment. She was perfectly
• 5:58:26
  aware that where her feelings were concerned, her sense of humor was not to
• 5:58:30
  be relied on. Do I make such an odious impression? She asked at
• 5:58:36
  length, with a smile that seemed to give the girl her choice of two
• 5:58:40
  meanings. You make such a beautiful one. It's too beautiful. It obscures
• 5:58:45
  my judgment. Missus Quinton looked at her thoughtfully. Would it be permissible?
• 5:58:52
  I wonder for an older woman to suggest that, at your age it isn't
• 5:58:56
  always a misfortune to have what one calls one's judgment and temporarily obscured. Miss
• 5:59:03
  Fennow flushed. I try not to judge others. You judge Allan, Ah,
• 5:59:08
  he is not others, she murmured, with an accent that touched the
• 5:59:11
  older woman. You judge his mother. I don't. I don't, missus
• 5:59:18
  Quinton pressed her point. You judge yourself then, as you would be in
• 5:59:22
  my position, and your verdict condemns me. How can you think it?
• 5:59:26
  It's because I appreciate the difference in our point of view that I find it
• 5:59:30
  so difficult to defend myself against what the temptation to imagine that I might be
• 5:59:37
  as you are feeling as I do. Missus Quinton rose with a sigh.
• 5:59:42
  My child, in my day, love was less subtle, she added,
• 5:59:48
  after a moment. Allan is a perfect son. Ah. That again,
• 5:59:52
  that makes it worse, worse, just as your goodness does your sweetness,
• 5:59:59
  your immense indulgence in letting me discuss things with you in a way that must
• 6:00:03
  seem almost an impertinence. Missus Quinton's smile was not without irony. You must
• 6:00:10
  remember that I do it for Allan. That's what I love you for.
• 6:00:14
  The girl instantly returned, and again her tone touched her listener. And yet
• 6:00:18
  you're sacrificing him and to an idea, isn't it the ideas that all the
• 6:00:23
  sacrifices that were worth while have been made, one may sacrifice one's self.
• 6:00:30
  Miss Fennow's color rose. That's what I'm doing, she said gently. Missus
• 6:00:37
  Quinton took her hand. I believe you are, she answered, And it
• 6:00:41
  isn't true that I speak only for Allan. Perhaps I did when I began,
• 6:00:45
  but now I want to plead for you too, against yourself. She
• 6:00:49
  paused, and then went on with a deeper note. I have let you,
• 6:00:53
  as you say, speak your mind to me in terms that some women
• 6:00:56
  might have presented, because I wanted to show you how little as the years
• 6:01:00
  go on, theories, ideas, abstract conceptions of life weigh against the actual,
• 6:01:07
  against the particular way in which life presents itself to us to women,
• 6:01:11
  especially, to decide beforehand exactly how one ought to behave in given circumstances is
• 6:01:18
  like deciding that one will follow a certain direction in crossing an unexplored country.
• 6:01:22
  Afterward, we find that we must turn out for the obstacles, cross the
• 6:01:26
  rivers where their shallowest take up the tracks that others have beaten, make all
• 6:01:32
  sorts of unexpected concessions. Life is made up of compromises. That is what
• 6:01:37
  youth refuses to understand. I lived long enough to doubt whether any real good
• 6:01:44
  ever came of sacrificing beautiful facts to even more beautiful theories. Do I seem
• 6:01:49
  casualistical? I don't know. There may be losses either way. But the
• 6:01:53
  love of the man one loves, of the child one loves, that makes
• 6:01:59
  up for everything. She had spoken with the thrill which seemed to communicate itself
• 6:02:04
  to the hand her listener had left in hers. Her eyes filled suddenly,
• 6:02:10
  but through their dimness she saw the girl's lips shape a last desperate denial.
• 6:02:15
  Don't you see? It's because I feel all this that I mustn't that I
• 6:02:21
  can't. Section three. Missus Quentin, in the late spring afternoon, had
• 6:02:27
  turned in at the doors of the Metropolitan Museum. She had been walking in
• 6:02:32
  the park in a solitude, oppressed by the ever present sense of her son's
• 6:02:36
  trouble, and had suddenly remembered that some one had added a bell trofio to
• 6:02:40
  the collection. It was an old habit of missus Quenton's to seek in the
• 6:02:45
  enjoyment of the beautiful the distraction that most of her acquaintances appeared to find in
• 6:02:49
  each other's company. She had few friends, and their society was welcome to
• 6:02:55
  her only in her more superficial moods. But she could drug anxiety with the
• 6:03:00
  picture, as some women can soothe it with a bonnet. During the six
• 6:03:03
  months that had elapsed since her visit to Miss Fennow, she had been conscious
• 6:03:08
  of a pain of which she had supposed herself no longer capable, as a
• 6:03:12
  man will continue to feel the ache of an amputated arm. She had fancied
• 6:03:18
  that all her centers of feeling had been transferred to Allan, But she now
• 6:03:22
  found herself subject to a kind of duwel suffering in which her individual pang was
• 6:03:26
  the keener in that it divided her from her son's. Allan had surprised her
• 6:03:33
  She had not foreseen that he would take his sentimental rebuff so hard. His
• 6:03:37
  disappointment took the uncommunicative form of a sterner application to work. He threw himself
• 6:03:44
  into the concerns of the Radiator with an aggressiveness that almost betrayed itself in the
• 6:03:48
  paper. Missus Quinton never read the Radiator, but from the glimpses of it
• 6:03:53
  reflected in the other journals, she gathered that it was at least not being
• 6:03:59
  subjected to the moral reconstruction, which had been one of miss Fellow's alternatives.
• 6:04:04
  Missus Quinton never spoke to her son of what had happened. She was superior
• 6:04:08
  to the cheap satisfaction of avenging his injury by depreciating its cause. She knew
• 6:04:15
  that in sentimental sorrow, such consolations are as sought in the wound. The
• 6:04:19
  avoidance of a subject so vividly present to both could not but affect the closeness
• 6:04:25
  of their relation. An invisible presence hampered their liberty of speech and thought.
• 6:04:30
  The girl was always between them, and to hide the sense of her intrusion,
• 6:04:34
  they began to be less frequently together. It was then that missus Quinton
• 6:04:38
  measured the extent of her isolation. Had she ever dared to forecast such a
• 6:04:44
  situation, she would have proceeded on the conventional theory that her son's sufferings must
• 6:04:48
  draw her nearer to him. And this was precisely the relief that was denied
• 6:04:52
  her. Allan's uncommunicativeness extended below the level of speech, and his mother,
• 6:05:00
  reduced to the helplessness of dead reckoning, had not even the solace of adapting
• 6:05:03
  her sympathy to his needs. She did not know what he felt. His
• 6:05:07
  course was incalculable to her. She sometimes wondered if she had become as incomprehensible
• 6:05:14
  to him. And it was to find a moment's refuge from the dogging misery
• 6:05:18
  of such conjectures that she had now turned in at the museum. The long
• 6:05:23
  line of mellow canvases seemed to receive her into the rich calm of an autumn
• 6:05:27
  twilight. She might have been walking in an enchanted wood, where the footfall
• 6:05:33
  of care never sounded. So deep was the sense of seclusion that, as
• 6:05:37
  she turned from her prolonged communion with the new Beltrafio, it was a surprise
• 6:05:42
  to find she was not alone. A young lady who had risen from the
• 6:05:47
  central ottoman stood in suspended flight as missus Quinton faced her. The older woman
• 6:05:52
  was the first to regain her self possession, Miss Fennow, she said.
• 6:05:57
  The girl advanced with a blush. As it faded, missus Quinton noticed a
• 6:06:02
  change in her. There had always been something bright and bannerlike in her aspect,
• 6:06:07
  but now her look drooped and she hung it half mast as it were.
• 6:06:11
  Missus Quinton, in the embarrassment of surprising a secret that its possessor was
• 6:06:15
  doubtless unconscious of betraying, reverted hurriedly to the bell Trafio. I came to
• 6:06:22
  see this, she said, It's very beautiful. Miss Fellow's eyes traveled incuriously
• 6:06:26
  over the mystic blue breaches of the landscape. I suppose so, she assented,
• 6:06:33
  adding, after another tentative pause. You come here often, don't you?
• 6:06:37
  Very often? Missus Quinton answered, I find pictures of great help,
• 6:06:42
  A help a rest, I mean, if one is tired or out of
• 6:06:45
  sorts. Ah, miss Fellow murmured, looking down. This bel trofio is
• 6:06:52
  new, you know, missus Quinton continued, What a wonderful background, isn't
• 6:06:56
  it? Is he a painter who interests you. The girl glanced again at
• 6:07:00
  the dusky canvas, as though in the final endeavor to extract from it a
• 6:07:06
  clew to the consolations of art. I don't know, she said at length.
• 6:07:11
  I'm afraid I don't understand pictures. She moved nearer to missus Quinton and
• 6:07:15
  held out her hand. You're going, yes, missus Quinton looked at her.
• 6:07:22
  Let me drive you home, she said impulsively. She was feeling with
• 6:07:26
  a shock of surprise that it gave her, after all, no pleasure to
• 6:07:29
  see how much the girl had suffered. Miss Fennow stiffened perceptibly. Thank you,
• 6:07:34
  I shall like the walk. Missus Quinton dropped her hand with a corresponding
• 6:07:40
  movement of withdrawal, and a momentary wave of antagonism seemed to sweep the two
• 6:07:44
  women apart. Then, as missus Quinton, bowing slightly, again, addressed
• 6:07:48
  herself to the picture, she felt his sudden touch on her arm. Missus
• 6:07:53
  Quinton. The girl faltered, I really came here because I saw your carriage.
• 6:07:59
  Her eyes sank and then fluttered back to her hearer's face. I've been
• 6:08:03
  horribly unhappy, she exclaimed. Missus Quinton was silent, If Hope Fellow had
• 6:08:10
  expected an immediate response to her appeal, she was disappointed. The older woman's
• 6:08:15
  face was like a veil dropped before her thoughts. I've thought so often,
• 6:08:19
  the girl went on, precipitately, of what you said that day you came
• 6:08:23
  to see me last autumn. I think I understand now what you meant,
• 6:08:27
  what you tried to make me see. Oh, missus Quinton, she broke
• 6:08:32
  out. I didn't mean to tell you this. I never dreamed of it
• 6:08:34
  till this moment. But you do remember what you said, don't you.
• 6:08:38
  You must remember it, And now that I've met you in this way,
• 6:08:41
  I can't help telling you that I believe I begin to believe that you were
• 6:08:45
  right. After all, missus Quinton had listened without moving, But now she
• 6:08:52
  raised her eyes with a slight smile. Do you wish me to say this
• 6:08:56
  to Allan, she asked. The girl flushed, but her glance brayed the
• 6:09:00
  smile. Would he still care to hear it? She said? Fearlessly.
• 6:09:06
  Missus Quinton took momentary refuge in a renewed inspection of the beltrafio. Then turning,
• 6:09:11
  she said, with a kind of reluctance, he would still care Ah
• 6:09:18
  broke from the girl. During this exchange of words, the two speakers had
• 6:09:22
  drifted unconsciously toward one of the benches. Missus Quinton glanced about her. A
• 6:09:27
  custodian, who had been hovering in the doorway, saunted into the adjoining gallery,
• 6:09:33
  and they remained alone among the silvery van Dykes. And flushed by tuminous
• 6:09:37
  Hals's, missus Quinton sank down on the bench and reached a hand to the
• 6:09:41
  girl. Sit by me, she said. Miss Fennow dropped beside her,
• 6:09:48
  and both women the stress of emotion was too strong for speech. The girl
• 6:09:52
  was still trembling, and missus Quinton was the first to regain her composure.
• 6:09:56
  You say you've suffered, she began, at last, Do you suppose I
• 6:10:00
  haven't? I knew you had. That made it so much worse for me
• 6:10:06
  that I should have been the cause of your suffering for allan, missus Quinton
• 6:10:11
  drew a deep breath. Not for allan only, she said. Miss Fennow
• 6:10:15
  turned on her a wondering glance. Not for allan only. The pain every
• 6:10:21
  woman expects and knows how to bear. We all know our children must have
• 6:10:26
  such disappointments, and to suffer with them is not the deepest pain. It's
• 6:10:30
  the suffering apart in ways they don't understand. She breathed deeply. I want
• 6:10:36
  you to know what I mean. You were right that day and I was
• 6:10:41
  wrong. Oh, the girl faltered. Missus Quinton went on in a voice
• 6:10:47
  of passionate lucidity. I knew it then, I knew it even while I
• 6:10:51
  was trying to argue with you. I've always known it. I didn't want
• 6:10:55
  my son to marry you till I heard your reasons for refusing him, and
• 6:10:59
  then then I longed to see you his wife. Oh, missus Quinton,
• 6:11:04
  I longed for it, but I knew it mustn't be, mustn't be.
• 6:11:10
  Missus Quinton shook her head sadly, and the girl, gaining courage from this
• 6:11:14
  mute negation, cried with an uncontrollable escape of feeling. It's because you thought
• 6:11:19
  me hard, obstinate, narrow minded. Oh, I understand that so well.
• 6:11:25
  My self righteousness must have seemed so patty, a girl who could sacrifice
• 6:11:29
  a man's future to her own moral vanity, For it was a form of
• 6:11:33
  vanity. You showed me that plainly enough. How you must have despised me.
• 6:11:38
  But I am not that girl now, indeed, I'm not. I'm
• 6:11:41
  not impulsive. I think things out. I thought this out. I know
• 6:11:47
  Alan loves me, I know how he loves me, and I believe I
• 6:11:51
  can help him. Oh not in the ways I had fancied before, but
• 6:11:55
  just merely by loving him. She paused, but missus Quinton made no sign.
• 6:12:00
  I see it all so differently now. I see what an influence love
• 6:12:03
  itself may be. How my believing in him, loving him, accepting him
• 6:12:08
  just as he is, might help him more than any theories, any arguments.
• 6:12:14
  I might have seen this long ago in looking at you, as he
• 6:12:17
  often told me, and seeing how you'd kept yourself apart from from mister Quenton's
• 6:12:22
  work, and his been always the beautiful side of life to them, keeping
• 6:12:26
  their faith alive in spite of themselves, not by interfering, preaching, reforming,
• 6:12:33
  but by just loving them and being there. She looked at missus Quinton
• 6:12:37
  with a simple nobleness. It isn't as if I cared for the money,
• 6:12:41
  you know. If I cared for that, I should be afraid you will
• 6:12:45
  care for it in time, missus Quinton said suddenly. Miss Fennow drew back
• 6:12:51
  releasing her hand in time. Yes, when there's nothing else left. She
• 6:12:56
  stared a moment at the pictures. My poor child, she broke out,
• 6:13:00
  I've heard all you say so often before, You've heard yes for myself.
• 6:13:07
  I felt as you do. I argued as you do. I acted as
• 6:13:11
  I mean to prevent your doing. When I married Alan's father, the long
• 6:13:15
  empty gallery seemed to reverberate with the girl's startled exclamation, Oh, missus,
• 6:13:22
  Quinton, hush, let me speak. Do you suppose i'd do this if
• 6:13:26
  you were the kind of pink and white idiot he ought to have married.
• 6:13:30
  It's because I see you alive, as I was, tingling with beliefs,
• 6:13:33
  ambition's energies as I was that I can't see you walled up alive as I
• 6:13:40
  was, without stretching out a hand to save you. She sat gazing rigidly
• 6:13:45
  forward, her eyes on the pictures, speaking in the low, precipitate tone
• 6:13:49
  of one who tries to press the meaning of a lifetime into a few breathless
• 6:13:53
  words. When I met Alan's father, she went on, I knew nothing
• 6:14:00
  of his work. We met abroad, where I had been living with my
• 6:14:03
  mother. That was twenty six years ago, when the Radiator was less less
• 6:14:08
  notorious than it is now. I knew my husband owned a newspaper, a
• 6:14:12
  great newspaper, and nothing more. I had never seen a copy of The
• 6:14:18
  Radiator. I had no notion what had stood for in politics or in other
• 6:14:22
  ways. We were married in Europe, and a few months afterward we came
• 6:14:26
  to live here. People were already beginning to talk about the Radiator. My
• 6:14:32
  husband, on leaving college, had bought it with some money an old uncle
• 6:14:36
  had left him, and the public at first was merely curious to see what
• 6:14:40
  an ambitious, stirring young man without any experience of journalism was going to make
• 6:14:45
  out of his experiment. They found, first of all, that he was
• 6:14:48
  going to make a great deal of money out of it. I found that
• 6:14:52
  out too. I was so happy in other ways that it didn't make much
• 6:14:56
  difference at first. Though. It was pleasant to be able to help my
• 6:14:59
  mother, to be generous and charitable, to live in a nice house,
• 6:15:03
  and wear the handsome gowns he liked to see me in. But still it
• 6:15:07
  didn't really count. It counted so little that when one day I learned what
• 6:15:11
  the Radiator was, I would have gone out into the streets barefooted, rather
• 6:15:17
  than to live another hour on the money it brought in. Her voice sank,
• 6:15:22
  and she paused to steady it. The girl at her side did not
• 6:15:25
  speak or move. I shall never forget that day, she began again.
• 6:15:30
  The paper had stripped bare, some family scandal, some miserable, bleeding secret
• 6:15:36
  that a dozen unhappy people had been struggling to keep out of print that would
• 6:15:41
  have been kept out if my husband had not. Oh, you must guess
• 6:15:45
  the rest. I can't go on, She felt a hand on hers.
• 6:15:49
  You mustn't go on, missus Quinton. The girl whispered, Yes, I
• 6:15:55
  must, I must. You must be made to understand. She drew a
• 6:15:59
  deep breath. My husband was not like Allan. When he found out how
• 6:16:03
  I felt about it. He was surprised at first, but gradually he began
• 6:16:07
  to see, or at least I fancied he saw the hatefulness of it.
• 6:16:11
  At any rate, he saw how I suffered, and he offered to give
• 6:16:15
  up the whole thing to sell the paper. It couldn't be done all of
• 6:16:18
  a sudden, of course. He made me see that, for he had
• 6:16:21
  put all his money in it, and he had no special aptitude for any
• 6:16:25
  other kind of work. He was a born journalist, like Allan. It
• 6:16:30
  was a great sacrifice for him to give up the paper, but he promised
• 6:16:33
  to do it in time when a good opportunity offered. Meanwhile, of course,
• 6:16:38
  he wanted to build it up to increase the circulation, and to do
• 6:16:42
  that he had to keep on in the same way. He made that clear
• 6:16:45
  to me. I saw that we were in a vicious circle. The paper
• 6:16:49
  to sell well had to be made more and more detestable and disgraceful. At
• 6:16:56
  first I rebelled, but somehow, I can't tell you how it was.
• 6:17:00
  After that first concession, the ground seemed to give under me. With every
• 6:17:03
  struggle I sank deeper. And then then Alan was born. He was such
• 6:17:08
  a delicate baby that there was very little hope of saving him. But money
• 6:17:14
  did it. The money from the paper. I took him abroad to see
• 6:17:18
  the best physicians. I took him to a warm climate. Every winter.
• 6:17:22
  In hot weather, the doctors recommended sea air, and we had a yacht
• 6:17:26
  and cruised every summer. I owed his life to the radiator, and when
• 6:17:30
  he began to grow stronger, the habit was formed, the habit of luxury.
• 6:17:34
  He could not get on without the things he had always been used to.
• 6:17:38
  He pined in bad air, He drooped under monotony and discomfort. He
• 6:17:44
  throve on variety, amusement, travel, every kind of novelty and excitement,
• 6:17:49
  and all I wanted for him. His inexhaustible foster mother was there to give.
• 6:17:56
  My husband said nothing, but he must have seen how things were going.
• 6:18:00
  There was no more talk of giving up the radiator. He never reproached
• 6:18:03
  me with my inconsistency, but I thought he must despise me, and the
• 6:18:07
  thought may be reckless. I determined to ignore the paper altogether, to take
• 6:18:12
  what it gave as though I didn't know where it came from. And to
• 6:18:15
  excuse this, I invented a theory that one may, so to speak,
• 6:18:21
  purify money by putting it to good uses. I gave away a great deal
• 6:18:25
  in charity. I indulged myself very little at first. All the money that
• 6:18:30
  was not spent on Alan I tried to do good with. But gradually,
• 6:18:34
  as my boy grew up, the problem became more complicated. How was I
• 6:18:40
  to protect Allan from the contamination I had let him live in. I couldn't
• 6:18:44
  preach by example, couldn't hold up his father as a warning, or denounce
• 6:18:48
  the money we were living on. All I could do was to disguise the
• 6:18:52
  inner ugliness of life by making it beautiful outside, to build a wall of
• 6:18:57
  beauty between him and the fact of life. Turn his tastes and interest another
• 6:19:03
  way, hide the Radiator from him, as a smiling woman at a ball
• 6:19:07
  may hide a cancer in her breast. Just as Allan was entering college,
• 6:19:11
  his father died. Then I saw my way clear. I had loved my
• 6:19:17
  husband, and yet I drew my first free breath in years. For the
• 6:19:22
  Radiator had been left to Allan outright. There was nothing on earth to prevent
• 6:19:26
  his selling it when he came of age, and there was no excuse for
• 6:19:30
  his not selling it. I had brought him up to depend on money,
• 6:19:33
  but the paper had given us enough money to gratify all his tastes. At
• 6:19:37
  last, we could turn on the monster that had nourished us. I felt
• 6:19:41
  his savage joy in the thought. I could hardly bear to wait till Allan
• 6:19:45
  came of age. But I had never spoken to him of the paper,
• 6:19:49
  and I didn't dare speak of it now. Some false shame kept me back,
• 6:19:56
  some vague belief in his ignorance. I would wait till he was twenty
• 6:19:59
  one, and then we should be free. I waited. The day came
• 6:20:04
  and I spoke. You can guess his answer. I suppose he had no
• 6:20:08
  idea of selling the Radiator. It wasn't the money he cared for. It
• 6:20:12
  was the career that tempted him. He was a born journalist, and his
• 6:20:17
  ambition, ever since he could remember, had been to carry on his father's
• 6:20:21
  work, to develop, to surpass it. There was nothing in the world
• 6:20:25
  as interesting as modern journalism. He couldn't imagine any other kind of life that
• 6:20:29
  wouldn't bore him to death. A newspaper like the Radiator might be made one
• 6:20:33
  of the biggest powers on earth, and he loved power and meant to have
• 6:20:37
  all he could get. I listened to him in a kind of trance.
• 6:20:41
  I couldn't find a word to say. His father had had scruples. He
• 6:20:47
  had none. I seemed to realize at once that argument would be useless.
• 6:20:52
  I don't know that I even tried to plead with him. He was so
• 6:20:55
  bright and hard and inaccessible. Then I saw that he was, after all
• 6:21:00
  what I had made him, the creature of my concessions, my connivances,
• 6:21:04
  my evasions. That was the price I had paid for him. I had
• 6:21:10
  kept him at that cost. Well, I had kept him at any rate.
• 6:21:15
  That was the feeling that survived. He was my boy, my son,
• 6:21:18
  my very own, till some other woman took him. Meanwhile, the
• 6:21:22
  old life must go on as it could. I gave up the struggle if
• 6:21:26
  at that point he was inaccessible. At others he was close to me.
• 6:21:30
  He has always been a perfect son. Our tastes grew together. We enjoyed
• 6:21:34
  the same books, the same pictures, the same people. All I had
• 6:21:38
  to do was to look at him in profile, to see the side of
• 6:21:41
  him that was really mine. At first, I kept thinking of the dreadful
• 6:21:45
  other side, But gradually the impression faded, and I kept my mind turned
• 6:21:49
  from it, as one does from a deformity in a face one loves.
• 6:21:55
  I thought I had made my last compromise with life, had hit on a
• 6:21:57
  modus vivendi that would last my time. And then he met you. I
• 6:22:03
  had always been prepared for his marrying, but not a girl like you.
• 6:22:07
  I thought he would choose a sweet thing who would never pry into his closets.
• 6:22:11
  He hated women with ideas but as soon as I saw you, I
• 6:22:15
  knew the struggle would have to begin again. He is so much stronger than
• 6:22:19
  his father. He is full of the most monstrous convictions, and he has
• 6:22:25
  the courage of them too. You saw last year that his love for you
• 6:22:29
  never made him waver. He believes in his work, He adores it.
• 6:22:32
  It is the kind of hideous idol to which he would make human sacrifices.
• 6:22:37
  He loves you still. I've been honest with you, But his love wouldn't
• 6:22:41
  change him. It is you who would have to change, to die gradually
• 6:22:45
  as I have died, till there is only one live point left in me.
• 6:22:49
  Ah. If one died completely, that's simple enough. But something persists.
• 6:22:55
  Remember that, a single point, an aching nerve of truth. Now
• 6:23:00
  and then you may drug it, but a touch wakes it again. As
• 6:23:03
  your face has waited in me, There's always enough of one's old self left
• 6:23:07
  to suffer with. She stood up and faced the girl abruptly. What shall
• 6:23:14
  I tell Allan, she said. Miss Fennow sat motionless, her eyes on
• 6:23:18
  the ground. Twilight was falling on the gallery, a twilight which seemed to
• 6:23:22
  emanate not so much from the glass dome overhead, as from the crepuscular depths
• 6:23:27
  into which the faces of the pictures were receding. The custodian step sounded warningly
• 6:23:33
  down the corridor. When the girl looked up, she was alone. End
• 6:23:40
  of Chapter nine, Chapter ten A Venetian Knight's Entertainment. This is the story
• 6:23:45
  that in the dining room of the old Beacon Street House now the Aldebaran Club,
• 6:23:51
  Judge Anthony Bracknell of the famous East India firm of Bracknell and Shalsby,
• 6:23:56
  when the ladies had withdrawn to the Oval parlor and Mariah Harp was throwing its
• 6:24:00
  gauzy web of sound across the common used to relate to his grandson's about the
• 6:24:06
  year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow. Him Venice said, the lascar with the
• 6:24:11
  big ear rings, and Tony Bracknell, leaning on the high guttal of his
• 6:24:15
  father's East Indiaman the hepzibah b saw far off across the morning sea, a
• 6:24:21
  faint vision of towers and domes dissolved in golden air. It was a rare
• 6:24:26
  February day of the year seventeen sixty, and a young Tony, newly of
• 6:24:30
  age and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantmen of Old Bracknell's fleet,
• 6:24:37
  felt his heart leap up as the distant city trembled into shape. Venice,
• 6:24:42
  the name since childhood had been a magician's wand to him. In the
• 6:24:47
  hall of the Old Bracknell House at Salem, there hung a series of yellowing
• 6:24:51
  prints which Uncle Richard Salsby had brought home from one of his long voyages.
• 6:24:56
  Views of heathen mosques and palaces of the Grand Turk Serralio of Saint Peter's Church
• 6:25:03
  in Rome, and in a corner, the corner nearest the rack where the
• 6:25:07
  old flintlocks hung a busy, merry, populous scene entitled Saint Mark's Square in
• 6:25:12
  Venice. This picture from the first had singularly taken Little Tony's fancy. His
• 6:25:18
  unformulated criticism on the others was that they lacked action. True in the view
• 6:25:23
  of Saint Peter's an experienced looking gentleman in a full bottomed wig was pointing out
• 6:25:30
  the fairly obvious monument to a bashful companion who had presumably not ventured to raise
• 6:25:34
  his eyes to it. While at the doors of the Serralio, a group
• 6:25:38
  of turban infidels observed with less hesitancy the approach of a veiled lady on a
• 6:25:45
  camel. But in Venice, so many things were happening at once, more
• 6:25:49
  Tony was sure than had ever happened in Boston in a twelvemonth, or in
• 6:25:53
  Salem in a long lifetime. For here by their garb were people of every
• 6:25:59
  nation on earth, Chinamen, Turks, Spaniards, and many more, mixed
• 6:26:03
  with a parti colored throng of gentry lackeys, chapmen, hucksters, and tall
• 6:26:08
  personages and parsons gowns, who stalked through the crowd with an air of mastery,
• 6:26:14
  a string of parasites at their heels. And all these people seemed to
• 6:26:18
  be diverting themselves hugely, chaffering with the hucksters, watching the antics of trained
• 6:26:23
  dogs and monkeys, distributing doles to maimed beggars, or having their pockets picked
• 6:26:29
  by slippery looking fellows in black, the whole with such an air of ease
• 6:26:33
  and good humor that one felt the cut purse is to be as much a
• 6:26:37
  part of the show as the tumbling acrobats and animals. As Tony advanced in
• 6:26:42
  years and experience, this childish mumming lost its magic, but not so the
• 6:26:48
  early imaginings it had excited. For the old picture had been but the spring
• 6:26:52
  board of fancy, the first step of a cloud ladder leading to a land
• 6:26:56
  of dreams. With these dreams, the aim of Venice remained associated and all
• 6:27:02
  that observation. A report subsequently brought him concerning the place seemed on a sober,
• 6:27:07
  warty effect to confirm its claim to stand midway between reality and illusion.
• 6:27:14
  There was, for instance, a slender venice glass gold powdered as with lily
• 6:27:18
  pollen or the dust of sunbeams, that, standing in the corner cabinet betwixt
• 6:27:23
  two lowestoft caddies, seemed among its lifeless neighbors to palpitate like an impaled butterfly.
• 6:27:30
  There was farther a gold chain of his mother's spun of that same sun
• 6:27:36
  pollen, so threadlike impalpable that it slipped through the fingers like light, yet
• 6:27:41
  so strong that it carried a heavy pendant, which seemed held in the air
• 6:27:45
  as if by magic. Magic. That was the word which the thought of
• 6:27:49
  Venice evoked. It was the kind of place Tony felt in which things elsewhere
• 6:27:56
  impossible might naturally happen, in which two and two might make five. A
• 6:28:00
  paradox elope with a syllogism and a conclusion give the lie to its own premise.
• 6:28:06
  Was there every young heart that did not once and again long to get
• 6:28:10
  away into such a world as that Tony at least had felt the longing from
• 6:28:15
  the first hour, when the axioms in his horn book had brought home to
• 6:28:18
  him his heavy responsibilities as a Christian and a sinner. And now here was
• 6:28:25
  his wish taking shape before him, as the distant haze of gold shaped itself
• 6:28:30
  into towers and domes across the morning sea. The Reverend Ozias Mounts, Tony's
• 6:28:37
  governor and bear leader, was just putting a hand to the third clause of
• 6:28:41
  the fourth part of a sermon on free will and predestination, as the hepzibah
• 6:28:45
  B's anchor rattled overboard. Tony, in his haste to be ashore, would
• 6:28:51
  have made one plunge with the anchor, But the Reverend Ozias, on being
• 6:28:56
  roused from his lucubrations, earnestly protested against leaving him his argument in suspense.
• 6:29:00
  What was the trifle of an arrival at some papistocle foreign city, where the
• 6:29:06
  very churches wore turbans like so many moslem idolaties. To the important fact of
• 6:29:11
  mister Mountse's summing up his conclusions before the muse of Theology took flight. He
• 6:29:17
  should be happy, he said, if the tide served to visit Venice with
• 6:29:21
  mister Bracknell the next morning. The next morning, ha Tony murmured a submissive
• 6:29:26
  yes, Sir, winked at the subjugated captain, buckled on his sword,
• 6:29:30
  pressed his hat down with a flourish and before the Reverend Ozias had arrived at
• 6:29:36
  his next deduction, were skimming merrily shoreward in the Hepzibah's gig a moment more,
• 6:29:42
  and he was in the thick of it. Here was the very world
• 6:29:45
  of the old print, only suffused with sunlight and color and bubbling with merry
• 6:29:51
  noises. What a scene it was, a square enclosed and fantastic painted buildings,
• 6:29:56
  and peopled with a throng as fantastic, a bawling, laughing, jostling,
• 6:30:02
  sweating mob PARTI colored party, speeched, crackling and sputtering under the hot
• 6:30:07
  sun like a dish of fritters over a kitchen fire. Tony Agape shouldered his
• 6:30:12
  way through the press, aware at once that spite of the tumult, the
• 6:30:17
  shrillness, the gesticulation, there was no undercurrent of clownishness, no tendency to
• 6:30:22
  horse play as in such crowds on market day at home, but a kind
• 6:30:26
  of facetious suavity which seemed to include everybody in the circumference of one huge joke.
• 6:30:33
  In such an air, the sense of strangeness soon wore off, and
• 6:30:37
  Tony was beginning to feel himself vastly at home when a lift of the tide
• 6:30:41
  bore him against a droll looking bell ringing fellow who carried above his head a
• 6:30:45
  tall metal tree hung with sherbet glasses. The encounters at the glasses spinning,
• 6:30:52
  and three or four spun off and clattered to the stones. The sherbet cellar
• 6:30:56
  called on all the saints, and Tony, clapping a lordly head to his
• 6:31:00
  pocket, tossed him a ducat by mistake for a sequin. The fellow's eyes
• 6:31:04
  shot out of their orbits, and just then a personable looking young man who
• 6:31:08
  had observed the transaction stepped up to Tony and said pleasantly in English. I
• 6:31:14
  perceive, sir, that you are not familiar with our currency. Does she
• 6:31:18
  want more? Says Tony, very lordly whereat The other laughed and replied,
• 6:31:23
  you have given him enough to retire from his business and opened a gaming house
• 6:31:27
  over the arcade. Tony joined in the laugh. In this instant bridging the
• 6:31:33
  preliminaries, the two young men were presently hobnobbing over a glass of canary in
• 6:31:38
  front of one of the coffee houses about the square. Tony counted himself lucky
• 6:31:42
  to have run across an English speaking companion who was good natured enough to give
• 6:31:47
  him a clue to the labyrinth, and when he had paid for the canary
• 6:31:51
  in the coin his friends selected, they set out again to view the town.
• 6:31:56
  The Italian gentleman, who called himself Count Rialto, appeared to have a
• 6:32:00
  very numerous acquaintance and was able to point out to Tony all the chief dignitaries
• 6:32:04
  of the state, the men of taunt and ladies of fashion, as well
• 6:32:10
  as the number of other characters of a kind not openly mentioned. In taking
• 6:32:14
  a sensus of Salem, Tony, who was not a verse from reading,
• 6:32:18
  were nothing better offered, had perused the Merchant of Venice and mister Otway's Fine
• 6:32:22
  Tragedy. But though these pieces had given him a notion that the social usages
• 6:32:27
  of Venice differed from those at home, he was unprepared for the surprising appearance
• 6:32:33
  and manners of the great people his friend named to him. The gravest senators
• 6:32:37
  of the Republic went in prodigious striped trousers, short cloaks, and feathered hats.
• 6:32:44
  One nobleman wore a rough and a doctor's gown, another a black velvet
• 6:32:48
  tunic slashed with rose color, while the President of the dreaded Council of ten
• 6:32:53
  was a terrible strutting fellow, with a rapier like nose, a buff leather
• 6:32:59
  jerkin, and a trailing scarlet cloak that the crowd was careful not to step
• 6:33:03
  on. It was all vastly diverting, and Tony would gladly have gone on
• 6:33:07
  forever. But he had given his word to the Captain to be at the
• 6:33:11
  landing place at sunset, and here was dusk already creeping over the skies.
• 6:33:17
  Tony was a man of honor, and having pressed on the count a handsome
• 6:33:21
  damascene dagger selected from one of the goldsmith's shops in a narrow street lined with
• 6:33:26
  such wares. He insisted on turning his face towards the Hepzibah's gig. The
• 6:33:33
  count yielded reluctantly, but as they came out again on the square, they
• 6:33:37
  were caught in a great throng pouring toward the doors of the cathedral they go
• 6:33:41
  to Benediction, said the count A beautiful sight, with many lights and flowers.
• 6:33:47
  It is a pity you cannot take a peep at it. Tony thought
• 6:33:49
  so too, and in another minute a legless beggar had pulled back the leathern
• 6:33:55
  flap of the cathedral door, and they stood in a haze of gold and
• 6:33:59
  perfume that seemed to rise and fall on the mighty undulations of the organ.
• 6:34:03
  Here the press was as thick as without, and as Tony flattened himself against
• 6:34:08
  a pillar, he heard a pretty voice at his elbow. Oh sir,
• 6:34:12
  Oh sir, your sword. He turned at the sound of the broken English,
• 6:34:18
  and saw a girl who matched the voice, trying to disengage her dress
• 6:34:22
  from the tip of his scabbard. She wore one of the voluminous black hoods
• 6:34:26
  which the Venetian ladies affected and under its projecting eaves, her face spied out
• 6:34:33
  at him, as sweet as a nesting bird in the dusk. Their hands
• 6:34:37
  met over the scabbard, and as she freed herself, the shred of her
• 6:34:41
  lace flounce clung to Tony's enchanted fingers. Looking after her, he saw she
• 6:34:45
  was on the arm of a pompous looking gray beard and a long black gown
• 6:34:51
  and scarlet stockings, who, on perceiving the exchange of glances between the young
• 6:34:55
  people, drew the lady away with a threatening look. The Count met Tony's
• 6:35:00
  eye with a smile. One of our Venetian beauties, said he, the
• 6:35:03
  lovely Polyxena Cador. She is thought to have the finest eyes in Venice.
• 6:35:10
  She spoke English, stammered Tony. Oh ah, precisely. She learned the
• 6:35:15
  language at the court of Saint James's, where her father, the Senator,
• 6:35:18
  was formerly accredited as ambassador. She played as an infant with the royal Princes
• 6:35:23
  of England, and that was her father assuredly. Young ladies of Donopolyxena's rank
• 6:35:30
  do not go abroad, save with their parents or a duenna. Just then,
• 6:35:34
  a soft hand slid into Tony's his heart gave a foolish bound, and
• 6:35:40
  he turned about, half expecting to meet again the merry eyes under the hood,
• 6:35:44
  but saw instead a slender brown boy in some kind of fanciful page's dress,
• 6:35:48
  who thust a folded paper between his fingers and vanished in the throng.
• 6:35:53
  Tony, in a tingle, glanced surreptitiously at the Count, who appeared absorbed
• 6:35:59
  in his prayers. The crowd at the ringing of a bell had in fact
• 6:36:03
  been overswept by a sudden wave of devotion, and Tony seized the moment to
• 6:36:07
  step beneath a lighted shrine with his letter, I am in dreadful trouble and
• 6:36:12
  implore your help Polyxena. He read, but hardly had he seized the sense
• 6:36:18
  of the words, when a hand fell on his shoulder, and a stern
• 6:36:21
  looking man in a cocked hat and bearing a kind of rod or mace,
• 6:36:25
  pronounced a few words in Venetian. Tony, with a start, thrust the
• 6:36:30
  letter in his breast and tried to jerk himself free. But the harder he
• 6:36:33
  jerked, the tighter grew the other's grip, and the count, presently perceiving
• 6:36:37
  what had happened, pushed his way through the crowd and whispered hastily to his
• 6:36:41
  companion. For God's sake, make no struggle. This is serious. Keep
• 6:36:45
  quiet and do as I do. Tony was no chicken heart. He had
• 6:36:51
  something of a name for bugnacity among the lads of his own age at home,
• 6:36:55
  and was not the man to stand in Venice. What he would have
• 6:36:57
  resented in Salem. The devil of it was that this black fellow seemed to
• 6:37:02
  be pointing to the letter in his breast, And this suspicion was confirmed by
• 6:37:06
  the count's agitated whisper. This is one of the agents of the ten.
• 6:37:11
  For God's sake, no outcry. He exchanged a word or two with the
• 6:37:15
  mace bearer, and again turned to Tony. You have been seen concealing a
• 6:37:18
  letter about your person. And what of that, says Tony furiously, gently,
• 6:37:25
  gently, my master, A letter handed to you by the page of
• 6:37:29
  DONOPOLZENA cador. A black business, oh, a very black business. This
• 6:37:33
  cador is one of the most powerful nobles in Venice. I beseech you not
• 6:37:37
  a word, sir, Let me think deliberate. His hand on Tony's shoulder,
• 6:37:42
  he carried on a rapid dialog with the potentate in the cocked hat.
• 6:37:48
  I am sorry, sir, but our young ladies of rank are as jealously
• 6:37:52
  guarded as the Grand Turk's wives, and you must be answerable for this scandal.
• 6:37:56
  The best I can do is to have you taken privately to the Palazzo
• 6:38:00
  Cador instead of being brought before the council. I have pleaded your youth and
• 6:38:04
  inexperience. Tony winced at this, and I think the business may still be
• 6:38:10
  arranged. Meanwhile, the agent of the ten had yielded his place to a
• 6:38:15
  sharp featured, shabby looking fellow in black, dressed somewhat like a lawyer's clerk,
• 6:38:19
  who laid a grimy hand on Tony's arm, and with many apologetic gestures,
• 6:38:25
  steered him through the crowd to the doors of the church. The count
• 6:38:29
  held him by the other arm, and in this fashion they emerged on the
• 6:38:32
  square, which now lay in darkness save for the many lights twinkling under the
• 6:38:37
  arcade and in the windows of the gaming rooms above it. Tony, by
• 6:38:41
  this time had regained voice enough to declare that he would go where they pleased,
• 6:38:45
  but that he must first say a word to the mate of the Hepzibah,
• 6:38:48
  who had now been awaiting him some two hours or more at the landing
• 6:38:52
  place. The Count repeated this to Tony's custodian, but the latter shook his
• 6:38:57
  head and rattled off his sharp denial. Impossible, Sir, said the Count.
• 6:39:03
  I entreat you not to insist. Any resistance will tell against you.
• 6:39:07
  In the end, Tony fell silent. With a rapid eye. He was
• 6:39:11
  measuring his chances of escape in wind and limb. He was more than a
• 6:39:15
  mate for his captors, and Boyhood's ruses were not so far behind him.
• 6:39:21
  But he felt himself equal to outwitting a dozen grown men. But he had
• 6:39:25
  the sense to see that at a cry, the crowd would close in on
• 6:39:29
  him. Space was what he wanted, the clear ten yards, and he
• 6:39:32
  would have laughed at doge in council. But the throng was thick as glue,
• 6:39:37
  and he walked on submissively, keeping his eye alert for an opening.
• 6:39:41
  Suddenly the mob swerved aside after some new show. Tony's fist shot out at
• 6:39:45
  the blackfellow's chest, and before the latter could right himself, the young new
• 6:39:49
  Englander was showing a clean pair of heels to his escort. On he sped,
• 6:39:56
  cleaving the crowd like a flood tide in Gloucester Bay, diving on to
• 6:40:00
  the first arch that caught his eye, dashing down a lane to an unlit
• 6:40:03
  waterway, and plunging across a narrow humpback bridge, which landed him in a
• 6:40:08
  black pocket between walls. But now his pursuers were at his back, reinforced
• 6:40:14
  by the yelping mob. The walls were too high to scale, and for
• 6:40:18
  all his courage, Tony's breath came short as he paced the masonry cage in
• 6:40:22
  which ill luck had landed him. Suddenly a gate opened in one of the
• 6:40:26
  walls, and a slip of a servant, when looked out and beckoned him.
• 6:40:32
  There was no time to weigh chances. Tony dashed through the gate,
• 6:40:36
  His rescuer slammed and bolted it, and the two stood in a narrow paved
• 6:40:41
  well between high houses. Section two. The servant picked up a lantern and
• 6:40:48
  signed to Tony to follow her. They climbed a squalid stairway of stone,
• 6:40:52
  felt their way along a corridor, and entered a tall, vaulted room,
• 6:40:56
  feebly lit by an oil lamp hung from the ain't in sealing. Tony discerned
• 6:41:02
  traces of former splendor in his surroundings, but he had no time to examine
• 6:41:06
  them, for a figure started up at his approach, and in the dim
• 6:41:10
  light, he recognized the girl who was the cause of all his troubles.
• 6:41:15
  She sprang toward him with outstretched hands, but as he advanced, her face
• 6:41:18
  changed and she shrank back, abashed. This is a misunderstanding, a dreadful
• 6:41:23
  misunderstanding, she cried out in her pretty broken English. Oh how does it
• 6:41:29
  happen that you were here through no choice of my own? Madam, I
• 6:41:33
  assure you, retorted Tony, not overpleased by his reception. But why,
• 6:41:38
  how, how did you make this unfortunate mistake? Why, madam, if
• 6:41:44
  you'll excuse my candor, I think the mistake was yours mine in sending me
• 6:41:48
  a letter, you a letter by a simpleton of a lad who must needs
• 6:41:53
  handed to be under your father's very nose. The girl broke in on him
• 6:41:59
  with a cry, what it was you who received my letter? She swept
• 6:42:03
  round on the little maid servant and submerged her under a flood of Venetian The
• 6:42:07
  latter volleyed back in the same jargon, and as she did so, Tony's
• 6:42:11
  astonished eye detected in her the doubleted page who had handed him the letter in
• 6:42:18
  Saint Mark's What he cried, the lad was this girl in disguise? Polixena
• 6:42:25
  broke off with an irrepressible smile, but her face clouded instantly, and she
• 6:42:30
  returned to the charge, this wicked, careless girl. She has ruined me.
• 6:42:33
  She will be my undoing. Oh sir, how can I make you
• 6:42:37
  understand? The letter was not intended for you. It was meant for the
• 6:42:41
  English ambassador, an old friend of my mother's from whom I hoped to obtain
• 6:42:45
  assistance. Oh how can I ever excuse myself to you? No excuses are
• 6:42:51
  needed, madam, said Tony, bowing, though I am surprised, I
• 6:42:55
  own that any one should mistake me for an ambassador here away from mirth again
• 6:43:02
  overran Polykshya's face. Oh, sir, you must pardon my poor girl's mistake.
• 6:43:07
  She heard you speaking English, and and I had told her to hand
• 6:43:11
  the letter to the handsomest foreigner in the church. Tony bowed again more profoundly.
• 6:43:17
  The English ambassador, Polyxena added, simply, is a very handsome man.
• 6:43:22
  I wish, Madam, I were a better proxy. She echoed his
• 6:43:26
  laugh, and then clapped her hands together with a look of anguish fool that
• 6:43:30
  I am. How could I jest at such a moment. I am in
• 6:43:33
  dreadful trouble, and now perhaps I have brought trouble on you also, Oh,
• 6:43:37
  my father, I hear my father coming. She turned pale and leaned
• 6:43:42
  tremblingly upon the little servant. Footsteps and loud voices were in fact heard outside,
• 6:43:48
  and a moment later the red stocking Senator stalked into the room, attended
• 6:43:52
  by half a dozen of the magnificos whom Tony had seen abroad in the square.
• 6:43:59
  At sight of him, all clapped hands to their swords and burst into
• 6:44:03
  furious outcries. And though their jargon was unintelligible to the young man, their
• 6:44:07
  tones and gestures made their meaning unpleasantly plain. The Senator, with a start
• 6:44:12
  of anger, first flung himself on the intruder, then, snatched back by
• 6:44:18
  his companions, turned wrathfully on his daughter, who, at his feet,
• 6:44:22
  with outstretched arms and streaming face, pleaded her cause with all the eloquence of
• 6:44:27
  young distress. Meanwhile, the other nobles gesticulated vehemently among themselves, and one,
• 6:44:33
  a truculent looking personage in rough and Spanish cape, stalked apart, keeping
• 6:44:38
  a jealous eye on Tony. The latter was that his wits end how to
• 6:44:42
  comport himself for the lovely Polyxena's tears had quite drowned her few words of English,
• 6:44:48
  and beyond guessing that the magnificos met him a mischief, he had no
• 6:44:52
  notion of what they would be at at this point. Luckily, his friend,
• 6:44:57
  Count Rialto suddenly broken on the scene, and was at once assailed by
• 6:45:03
  all the tongues in the room. He pulled a long face at sight of
• 6:45:06
  Tony, but signed to the young man to be silent, and addressed himself
• 6:45:11
  earnestly to the Senator. The latter at first would not draw breath to hear
• 6:45:15
  him, but presently sobering, he walked apart with the Count, and the
• 6:45:18
  two conversed together out of earshot. My dear sir, said the Count at
• 6:45:23
  length, turning to Tony with a perturbed countenance. It is as I feared,
• 6:45:29
  and you were fallen into a great misfortune, A great misfortune, a
• 6:45:33
  great trap I call it, shouted Tony, whose blood by this time was
• 6:45:37
  boiling. But as he uttered the word, the beautiful Polyxena cast such a
• 6:45:42
  stricken look on him that he blushed up to the forehead. Be careful,
• 6:45:47
  said the Count, in a low tone. Though his illustriousness does not speak
• 6:45:52
  your language, he understands a few words of it, and so much the
• 6:45:56
  better broke in, Tony, I hope you will understand me if I I
• 6:46:00
  ask him in plain English, what is his grievance against me? The Senator,
• 6:46:04
  at this would have burst forth again, but the Count, stepping between,
• 6:46:07
  answered quickly. His grievance against you is that you have been detected in
• 6:46:11
  secret correspondence with his daughter, the most noble Polyxena Cador, the betrothed bride
• 6:46:18
  of this gentleman, the most illustrious mark with anipolo, and he waved a
• 6:46:22
  deferential hand at the frowning Hidalgo of the cape and roth. Sir said,
• 6:46:29
  Tony, if that is the extent of my offense, it lies with the
• 6:46:33
  young lady to set me free, since by her own avowal. But here
• 6:46:37
  he stopped short, for to his surprise, Polyxaya shot a terrified glance at
• 6:46:41
  him. Sir, interposed the Count. We are not accustomed in venice to
• 6:46:47
  take shelter behind a lady's reputation. No more are we in Salem, retorted
• 6:46:52
  Tony in a white heat I was merely about to remark that, by the
• 6:46:56
  young lady's avowal she has never seen me before. Polixena's eyes signaled her gratitude,
• 6:47:03
  and he felt he would have died to defend her. The Count translated
• 6:47:07
  his statement and presently pursued his illustriousness observes that in that case his daughter's misconduct
• 6:47:15
  has been all the more reprehensible. Her misconduct of what does he accuse her
• 6:47:21
  of sending you just now in the churches and marks a letter which you were
• 6:47:25
  seen to read openly and thrust in your bosom. The incident was witnessed by
• 6:47:30
  his illustriousness, the Marquis, anipolo, who, in consequence, has already
• 6:47:34
  repudiated his unhappy bride. Tony stared contemptuously at the black Marquis. If his
• 6:47:41
  illustriousness is so lacking in gallantry as to repudiate a lady on so trivial a
• 6:47:47
  pretext, it is he and not I who should be the object of her
• 6:47:52
  father's resentment that my dear young gentleman, is hardly for you to decide,
• 6:47:57
  your only excuse being or ignorance of our customs. It is scarcely for you
• 6:48:02
  to advise us how to behave in matters of punctilio. It seemed to Tony
• 6:48:07
  as though the Count were going over to his enemies, and the thought sharpened
• 6:48:11
  his retort. I had supposed, said he that men of sense had much
• 6:48:15
  the same behavior in all countries, and that here, as elsewhere, a
• 6:48:19
  gentleman would be taken at his word. I solemnly affirmed that the letter I
• 6:48:23
  was seen to read reflects in no way on the honor of this young lady,
• 6:48:29
  and has in fact nothing to do with what you suppose. As he
• 6:48:33
  had himself no notion of what the letter was about, this was as far
• 6:48:36
  as he dared commit himself. There was another brief consultation in the opposing camp,
• 6:48:41
  and the Count then said, we all know, sir, that a
• 6:48:45
  gentleman is obliged to meet certain enquiries by a denial. But you have at
• 6:48:49
  your command the means of immediately clearing the lady. Will you show the letter
• 6:48:53
  to her father? There was a perceptible pause, during which Tony, while
• 6:48:59
  appearing to look straight before him, managed to deflect an interrogatory glance toward Polyxena.
• 6:49:06
  Her reply was a faint negative motion, accompanied by unmistakable signs of apprehension.
• 6:49:11
  Poor girl, He thought, she is in a worse case than I
• 6:49:15
  imagined, and whatever happens, I must keep her secret. He turned to
• 6:49:19
  the Senator with a deep bow. I am not, said he in the
• 6:49:23
  habit of showing my private correspondence to strangers. The Count interpreted these words and
• 6:49:30
  Donopolyxena's father, dashing his hand on his hilt, broke in the furious invective.
• 6:49:36
  While the Marquis continued to nurse his outraged feelings. Aloof the Count shook
• 6:49:41
  his head funereally, alas sir, it is as I feared. This is
• 6:49:45
  not the first time that youth and propinquity have led to fatal imprudence. But
• 6:49:51
  I need hardly I suppose point out the obligation incumbent upon you as a man
• 6:49:56
  of honor. Tony stared at him haughtily with a look which was meant for
• 6:50:00
  the Marquess. And what obligation is that to repair the wrong you have done?
• 6:50:07
  In other words, to marry the lady Polixena. At this burst into
• 6:50:11
  tears, and Tony said to himself, why in heaven does she not bid
• 6:50:15
  me show the letter? Then he remembered that it had no superscription, and
• 6:50:21
  that the words had contained, supposing them to have been addressed to himself,
• 6:50:23
  were hardly of a nature to disarm suspicion. The sense of the girl's grave
• 6:50:29
  plight effaced all thought of his own risk. But the Count's last words struck
• 6:50:33
  him as so preposterous that he could not repress a smile. I cannot flatter
• 6:50:38
  myself, said he that the lady would welcome this solution. The Count's manner
• 6:50:45
  became increasingly ceremonious. Such modesty, he said, becomes your youth and inexperience.
• 6:50:52
  But even if it were justified, it would scarcely alter the case,
• 6:50:56
  as it is always assumed in this country that a young lady wishes to marry
• 6:51:00
  the man whom her father has selected. But I understood just now Tony interposed
• 6:51:07
  that the gentleman yond who was in that enviable position, so he was till
• 6:51:11
  circumstances obliged him to waive the privilege in your favor. He does me too
• 6:51:17
  much honor. But if a deep sense of my unworthiness obliges me to decline,
• 6:51:22
  you are still interrupted. The Count laboring under a misapprehension your choice in
• 6:51:27
  the matter is no more to be consultant than the ladies. Not to put
• 6:51:32
  too fine a point on it, it is necessary that you should marry her
• 6:51:34
  within the hour. Tony, at this, for all his spirit, felt
• 6:51:38
  the blood run thin in his veins. He looked in silence at the threatening
• 6:51:44
  visages between himself and the door, stole a side glance at the high barred
• 6:51:48
  windows of the apartment, and then turned to Polyxena, who had fallen sobbing
• 6:51:53
  at her father's feet. And if I refuse, said he. The Count
• 6:51:59
  made a signal, nificant gesture. I am not so foolish its to threaten
• 6:52:03
  a man of your metal, but perhaps you are unaware what the consequences would
• 6:52:07
  be to the lady. Polyxena, at this, struggling to her feet,
• 6:52:12
  addressed a few impassioned words to the Count and her father, but the latter
• 6:52:17
  put her aside with an obdurate gesture. The Count turned to Tony. The
• 6:52:22
  lady herself pleads for you, at what cost you do not guess, but
• 6:52:26
  as you see, it is vain. In an hour, his illustriousness,
• 6:52:30
  as chaplain, will be here. Meanwhile, his illustriousness consents to leave you
• 6:52:34
  in the custody of your betrothed. He stepped back, and the other gentleman,
• 6:52:40
  bowing with deep ceremony to Tony, stalked out one by one from the
• 6:52:45
  room. Tony heard the key turn in the lock and found himself alone with
• 6:52:49
  Polyxena. Section three. The girl had sunk into a chair, her face
• 6:52:56
  hidden a picture of shame and agony. So movingly the sight that Tony once
• 6:53:00
  again forgot his own extremity in the view of her distress, He went and
• 6:53:04
  kneeled beside her, drawing her hands from her face. Oh don't make me
• 6:53:11
  look at you, she sobbed. But it was on his bosom that she
• 6:53:14
  hid from his gaze. He held her there a breathing space, as he
• 6:53:18
  might have clasped a weeping child. Then she drew back and put him gently
• 6:53:22
  from her. What humiliation, she lamented? Do you think I blame you
• 6:53:27
  for what has happened? Alas was it not my foolish letter that brought you
• 6:53:32
  to this plight? And how nobly you defended me. How generous it was
• 6:53:36
  of you not to show the letter. If my father knew I had written
• 6:53:40
  to the ambassador to save me from this dreadful marriage, his anger against me
• 6:53:44
  would be even greater. Ah, it was that you wrote for, cried
• 6:53:48
  Tony with unaccountable relief. Of course, what else did you think? But
• 6:53:53
  is it too late for the ambassador to save you from you? A smile
• 6:53:59
  flashed through her tears. Alas, yes, She withdrew back and hid her
• 6:54:03
  face again, as though overcome by a fresh wave of shame. Tony glanced
• 6:54:08
  about him. If I could wrench a bar out of that window, he
• 6:54:12
  muttered, impossible, The court is guarded. You are a prisoner. Alas,
• 6:54:18
  oh, I must speak. She sprang up and paced the room.
• 6:54:22
  But indeed, you can, scarce think worse of me than you do already
• 6:54:26
  I think ill of you, Alas, you must to be unwilling to marry
• 6:54:30
  the man my father has chosen for me, such a beetle browed lout.
• 6:54:36
  It would be a burning shame if you married him. Ah, you come
• 6:54:40
  from a free country. Here a girl is allowed no choice. It is
• 6:54:45
  infamous, I say, infamous. No, No, I ought to have
• 6:54:48
  resigned myself like so many others, resigned yourself to that brute impossible. He
• 6:54:55
  has a dreadful name for violence, his gondolier has told my little man made
• 6:55:00
  such tales of him. But why do I talk of myself when it is
• 6:55:03
  of you? I should be thinking of me, poor child, cried Tony,
• 6:55:07
  losing his head. Yes, and how to save you? For I
• 6:55:11
  can save you? But every moment counts, And yet what I have to
• 6:55:15
  say is so dreadful. Nothing from your lips could seem dreadful. Ah,
• 6:55:21
  if he had had your way of speaking. Well, now at least you
• 6:55:25
  are free of him, said Tony a little wildly. But at this she
• 6:55:27
  stood up and bent a grave look on him. No I am not free,
• 6:55:33
  she said, but you are if you will do as I tell you.
• 6:55:37
  Tony at this felt a sudden dizziness, as though from a mad flight
• 6:55:41
  through clouds and darkness, he had dropped his safety again and the fall had
• 6:55:45
  stunned him. What am I to do, he said, Look away from
• 6:55:51
  me, or I can never tell you. He thought at first that this
• 6:55:53
  was a jest, but her eyes commanded him, and reluctantly he walked away
• 6:55:59
  and leaned in the rasure of the window. She stood in the middle of
• 6:56:02
  the room, and as soon as his back was turned, she began to
• 6:56:04
  speak in a quick, monotonous voice, as though she were reciting a lesson.
• 6:56:11
  You must know that the marquis an ipolo, though a great noble,
• 6:56:14
  is not a rich man. True, he has large estates, but he
• 6:56:18
  is a desperate spendthrift and gambler, and would sell his soul for a round
• 6:56:22
  sum of ready money. If you turn round, I shall not go on.
• 6:56:26
  He wrangled horribly with my father over my dowry. He wanted me to
• 6:56:30
  have more than either of my sisters, though one married a procurator and the
• 6:56:34
  other a grandee of Spain. But my father is a gambler too. Oh,
• 6:56:40
  such fortunes as are squandered over the arcade, yonder and so and so.
• 6:56:45
  Don't turn, I implore you. Oh, do you begin to see
• 6:56:48
  my meaning? She broke off sobbing, and it took all his strength to
• 6:56:53
  keep his eyes from her. Go on, he said, will you not
• 6:56:57
  understand? Oh, I would say anything to save you. You don't know
• 6:57:02
  us Venetians. We're all to be bought for a price. It is not
• 6:57:06
  only the brides who are marketable. Sometimes the husbands sell themselves too, and
• 6:57:11
  they think you rich. My father does, and the others. I don't
• 6:57:14
  know why unless you have shown your money too freely. And the English are
• 6:57:18
  all rich, are they not? And oh, oh do you understand?
• 6:57:22
  Oh, I can't bear your eyes. She dropped into a chair, her
• 6:57:26
  head on her arms, and Tony, in a flash, was at her
• 6:57:30
  side. My poor child, my poor Polyxena. He cried and wept and
• 6:57:34
  clasped her. You are richer, you not. You would promise them a
• 6:57:38
  ransom, she persisted, to enable you to marry the marquess, to enable
• 6:57:45
  you to escape from this place. Oh, I hope I may never see
• 6:57:48
  your face again. She fell to weeping once more, and he drew away
• 6:57:52
  and paced the floor in the fever. Presently, she sprang up with a
• 6:57:56
  fresh air of resolution and pointed to a clocking against the wall. The hour
• 6:58:02
  is nearly over. It is quite true that my father has gone to fetch's
• 6:58:04
  chaplain. Oh, I implore you be warned by me. There is no
• 6:58:10
  other way of escape. And if I do as you say, you are
• 6:58:14
  safe, you are free. I stake my life on it. And you
• 6:58:18
  you are married to that villain, but I shall have saved. You tell
• 6:58:22
  me your name that I may say it to myself when I am alone.
• 6:58:26
  My name is Anthony. But you must not marry that fellow. You forgive
• 6:58:30
  me Anthony. You don't think too badly of me. I say, you
• 6:58:34
  must not marry that fellow. She laid a trembling hand on his arm.
• 6:58:40
  Time presses, she adjured him, And I warn you there is no other
• 6:58:44
  way. For a moment, he had a vision of his mother sitting very
• 6:58:48
  upright on the Sunday evening, reading Doctor Tillot's and sermons in the best parlor
• 6:58:52
  at Salem. Then he swung round on the girl and caught both her hands
• 6:58:56
  in his Yes, there is, he cried, if you are willing,
• 6:59:00
  Polyxena, let the priest come. She shrank back from him, white and
• 6:59:06
  radiant. Oh hush, be silent, she said, I am no noble
• 6:59:11
  marquess, and I have no great estates. He cried, my father is
• 6:59:15
  a plain India merchant in the colony of Massachusetts. But if you, oh
• 6:59:19
  hush, I say, I don't know what your long words mean. But
• 6:59:22
  I bless you, bless you, bless you on my knees. And she
• 6:59:26
  knelt before him and fell to kissing his hands. He drew her up to
• 6:59:32
  his breast and held her. There. You are willing, Polyxena, he
• 6:59:36
  said, no, no, She broke from him with outstretched hands. I
• 6:59:41
  am not willing you mistake me. I must marry the marquess. I tell
• 6:59:45
  you, on my money, he taunted her, and her burning blush rebuked
• 6:59:49
  him. Yes, on your money, she said, sadly, why bec
• 6:59:55
  as much as you hate him, you hate me still more? She was
• 6:59:57
  silent. If you hate me, why do you sacrifice yourself for me,
• 7:00:03
  he persisted. You torture me, and I tell you the hours passed,
• 7:00:07
  let it pass. I'll not accept your sacrifice. I will not lift a
• 7:00:11
  finger to help another man to burry you, Oh madman, madman, she
• 7:00:15
  murmured. Tony with crossed arms, faced her squarely, and she leaned against
• 7:00:22
  the wall a few feet off from him. Her breast throbbed under its lace
• 7:00:26
  and fabolas, and her eyes swam with terror and entreaty. Polyxena, I
• 7:00:32
  love you, he cried. A blush swept over her throat and bosom,
• 7:00:37
  bathing her in light to the verge of her troubled brows. I love you,
• 7:00:41
  I love you, he repeated, And now she was on his breast
• 7:00:45
  again, and all their youth was in their lips. But her embrace was
• 7:00:48
  as fleeting as the bird's poise, and before he knew it, he clasped
• 7:00:52
  empty air, and half the room was between them. She was holding up
• 7:00:56
  a little coral charm and laughing. I took it from your fob, she
• 7:01:00
  said. It is of no value, is it? And I shall not
• 7:01:03
  get any of the money, you know. She continued to laugh strangely,
• 7:01:08
  and the rouge burned like fire in her ashen face. What are you talking
• 7:01:15
  of? He said? They never give me anything but the clothes I wear,
• 7:01:18
  and I shall never see you again, Anthony. She gave him a
• 7:01:22
  dreadful look. Oh my poor boy, my poor love. I love you.
• 7:01:26
  I love you, Polyxena. He thought she had turned light headed,
• 7:01:30
  and advanced to her with soothing words, but she held him quietly at arm's
• 7:01:36
  length, and as he gazed, he read the truth in her face.
• 7:01:40
  He fell back from her, and a sob broke from him as he bowed
• 7:01:42
  his head on his hands. Only for God's sake, have the money ready,
• 7:01:48
  or there may be foul play here, she said, as she spoke.
• 7:01:52
  There was a great tramping of steps outside, and a burst of voices
• 7:01:56
  on the threshold. It is all a lie, she ga gasped out,
• 7:02:00
  about my marriage, and the marquess, and the ambassador and the Senator.
• 7:02:03
  But not, oh, not about your danger in this place, or about
• 7:02:07
  my love, she breathed to him, And as the key rattled in the
• 7:02:11
  door, she laid her lips on his brow. The key rattled, and
• 7:02:15
  the door swung open. But the black cassk gentleman who stepped in, though
• 7:02:19
  a priest, indeed was no votary of Idolater's rites, but that sound orthodox
• 7:02:26
  divine. The Reverend Ozias mounts, looking very much perturbed at his surroundings,
• 7:02:32
  and very much on the alert for the scarlet woman. He was supported to
• 7:02:36
  his evident relief by the captain of the hepzibah B, and the procession was
• 7:02:41
  closed by an escort of stern looking fellows in cocked hats and small swords,
• 7:02:45
  who led between them Tony's late friends, the Magnificos, now as sorry a
• 7:02:52
  looking company as the law of a landed in her net. The captain strode
• 7:02:56
  briskly into the room, uttering a grunt of satisfaction as he clapped eyes on
• 7:03:00
  Tony. So, mister Bracknell said he. You have been seeing the carnival
• 7:03:06
  with this pack of mummers, have you, And this is where your pleasureing
• 7:03:10
  has landed you hum a pretty establishment and a pretty lady at the head of
• 7:03:14
  it. He glanced about the apartment and doffed his hat with mock ceremony to
• 7:03:18
  Polyxena, who faced him like a princess. Why, my girl, said
• 7:03:23
  he amicably. I think I saw you this morning in the square on the
• 7:03:29
  arm of the pantaloon Yonder. And as for that Captain Spavin, and he
• 7:03:33
  pointed a derisive finger at the marquess. I watched him drive his bully's trade
• 7:03:37
  under the arcade ever since I first dropped anchor in these waters. Well well,
• 7:03:41
  he continued his indignation, subsiding all's fair and carnival, I suppose,
• 7:03:47
  But this gentleman here as under sailing orders, and I fear we must break
• 7:03:51
  up your little party. At this, Tony saw Count Rialto step forward,
• 7:03:56
  looking very small and explanatory and uncovering obsequiously to the Captain. I can assure
• 7:04:03
  you, sir, said the Count, in his best English, that this
• 7:04:07
  incident is the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding, and if you will oblige us
• 7:04:11
  by dismissing these mermidons, any of my friends here will be happy to offer
• 7:04:15
  satisfaction to mister Bracknell and his companions. Mister Mount shrank visibly at this,
• 7:04:22
  and the captain burst into a loud guffaw satisfaction, says he, Why,
• 7:04:27
  my cock, that's very handsome of you, considering the ropes at your throats,
• 7:04:33
  but will not take advantage of your generosity, for I fear mister Bracknell
• 7:04:37
  has already trespassed on it too long, you pack of galley slaves you,
• 7:04:42
  he spluttered, suddenly, decoying young innocence with that devil's bait of yours.
• 7:04:48
  His eye fell on Polyxena, and his voice softened unaccountably. Ah, well,
• 7:04:52
  we must all see the carnival once, I suppose, he said.
• 7:04:56
  All's well, that ends well, as the fellow says in the play.
• 7:05:00
  And now, if you please, mister Bracknell, if you'll take the reverend
• 7:05:03
  Gentleman's arm there, we'll bid adieu to our hospitable entertainers, and right about
• 7:05:08
  face for the Hepzibah. End of Chapter ten,