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Title: The Garotters

Author: William D. Howells

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BOOK 1.


I.

My name is Hugh Paret.

I was a corporation lawyer,
but by no means a typical one,
the choice of my profession being merely incidental,
and due,
as will be seen,
to the accident of environment.

The book I am about
to write might aptly be called The Autobiography of a Romanticist.

In that sense,
if in no other,
I have been a typical American,
regarding my country as the happy hunting-ground of enlightened self-interest,
as a function of my desires.

Whether or not I have completely got rid of this romantic virus I must leave
to those the aim of whose existence is
to eradicate it from our literature and our life.

A somewhat Augean task! I have been impelled therefore
to make an attempt at setting forth,
with what frankness and sincerity I may,
with those powers of selection of which I am capable,
the life I have lived in this modern America;
the passions I have known,
the evils I have done.

I endeavour
to write a biography of the inner life;
but in order
to do this I shall have
to relate those causal experiences of the outer existence that take place in the world of space and time,
in the four walls of the home,
in the school and university,
in the noisy streets,
in the realm of business and politics.

I shall try
to set down,
impartially,
the motives that have impelled my actions,
to reveal in some degree the amazing mixture of good and evil which has made me what I am to-day:

to avoid the tricks of memory and resist the inherent desire
to present myself other and better than I am.

Your American romanticist is a sentimental spoiled child who believes in miracles,
whose needs are mostly baubles,
whose desires are dreams. Expediency is his motto.

Innocent of a knowledge of the principles of the universe,
he lives in a state of ceaseless activity,
admitting no limitations,
impatient of all restrictions.

What he wants,
he wants very badly indeed.

This wanting things was the corner-stone of my character,
and I believe that the science of the future
ill bear me out when I say
that it might have been differently built upon.

Certain it is that the system
of education in vogue in the 70's and 80's
never contemplated the search
for natural corner-stones.

At all events,
when I look back upon the boy I was,
I see the beginnings of a real person
who fades little by little
as manhood arrives and advances,
until suddenly I am aware
that a stranger has taken his place....

I lived in a city
which is now some twelve hours distant
from the Atlantic seaboard.

A very different city,
too,
it was in youth,
in my grandfather's day
and my father's,
even in my own boyhood,
from what it has since become
in this most material of ages.

There is a book of my photographs,
preserved by my mother,
which I have been looking over lately.

First is presented a plump child of two,
gazing in smiling trustfulness
upon a world of sunshine;
later on a lean boy in plaided kilts,
whose wavy,
chestnut-brown hair
has been most carefully parted
on the side by Norah,
his nurse.

The face is still childish.

Then appears a youth of fourteen or thereabout
in long trousers
and the queerest of short jackets,
standing beside a marble table
against a classic background;
he is smiling still
in undiminished hope and trust,
despite increasing vexations and crossings,
meaningless lessons
which had to be learned,
disciplines
to rack an aspiring soul,
and long,
uncomfortable hours
in the stiff pew
of the First Presbyterian Church.

Associated with this torture
is a peculiar Sunday smell
and the faint rustling of silk dresses.

I can see the stern black figure
of Dr. Pound,
who made interminable statements
to the Lord.

"Oh,
Lord,"
I can hear him say,
"thou knowest..."

These pictures,
though yellowed and faded,
suggest vividly the being I once was,
the feelings that possessed and animated me,
love
for my playmates,
vague impulses struggling
for expression in a world
forever thwarting them.

I recall,
too,
innocent dreams of a future
unidentified,
dreams from which I emerged vibrating
with an energy that was lost
for lack of a definite objective:

yet it was constantly being renewed.

I often wonder
what I might have become
if it could have been harnessed,
directed! Speculations are vain.

Calvinism,
though it had begun
to make compromises,
was still a force in those days,
inimical
to spontaneity and human instincts.

And when I think of Calvinism I see,
not Dr. Pound,
who preached it,
but my father,
who practised and embodied it.

I loved him,
but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy,
but punishment,
the,
suppression rather than the expansion of aspirations.

His religion seemed woven all of austerity,
contained no shining threads
to catch my eye.

Dreams,
to him,
were matters
for suspicion and distrust.

I sometimes ask myself,
as I gaze upon his portrait now,
the duplicate of the one painted
for the Bar Association,
whether he ever could have felt the secret,
hot thrills I knew and did not identify
with religion.

His religion was real
to him,
though he failed utterly
to make it comprehensible
to me.

The apparent calmness,
evenness of his life awed me.

A successful lawyer,
a respected and trusted citizen,
was he lacking somewhat in virility,
vitality?

I cannot judge him,
even to-day.

I never knew him.

There were times in my youth when the curtain of his unfamiliar spirit was withdrawn a little:

and once,
after I had passed the crisis of some childhood disease,
I awoke
to find him bending over my bed
with a tender expression that surprised and puzzled me.

He was well educated,
and from his portrait a shrewd observer might divine in him a genteel taste
for literature.

The fine features bear witness
to the influence of an American environment,
yet suggest the intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold's time.

The face is distinguished,
ascetic,
the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my own;
the side whiskers are not too obtrusive,
the eyes blue-grey.

There is a large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin,
and the coat has odd,
narrow lapels.

His habits of mind were English,
although he harmonized well enough
with the manners and traditions of a city whose inheritance was Scotch-Irish;
and he invariably drank tea
for breakfast.

One of my earliest recollections is of the silver breakfast service and egg-cups which my great-grandfather brought
with him from Sheffield
to Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution.

His son,
Dr. Hugh Moreton Paret,
after whom I was named,
was the best known physician of the city in the decorous,
Second Bank days.

My mother was Sarah Breck.

Hers was my Scotch-Irish side.

Old Benjamin Breck,
her grandfather,
undaunted by sea or wilderness,
had come straight from Belfast
to the little log settlement by the great river that mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills.

So much
for chance.

He kept a store
with a side porch and square-paned windows,
where hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed paper hung beside ploughs and calico prints,
barrels of flour,
of molasses and rum,
all of which had been somehow marvellously transported over the passes of those forbidding mountains,--passes we blithely thread to-day in dining cars and compartment sleepers.

Behind the store were moored the barges that floated down on the swift current
to the Ohio,
carrying goods
to even remoter settlements in the western wilderness.

Benjamin,
in addition
to his emigrant's leather box,
brought
with him some of that pigment that was
to dye the locality
for generations a deep blue.

I refer,
of course,
to his Presbyterianism.

And in order the better
to ensure
to his progeny the fastness of this dye,
he married the granddaughter of a famous divine,
celebrated in the annals of New England,--no doubt
with some injustice,--as a staunch advocate on the doctrine of infant damnation.

My cousin Robert Breck had old Benjamin's portrait,
which has since gone
to the Kinley's.

Heaven knows who painted it,
though no great art were needed
to suggest on canvas the tough fabric of that sitter,
who was more Irish than Scotch.

The heavy stick he holds might,
with a slight stretch of the imagination,
be a blackthorn;
his head looks capable of withstanding many blows;
his hand of giving many.

And,
as I gazed the other day at this picture hanging in the shabby suburban parlour,
I could only contrast him
with his anaemic descendants who possessed the likeness.

Between the children of poor Mary Kinley,-- Cousin Robert's daughter,
and the hardy stock of the old country there is a gap indeed! Benjamin Breck made the foundation of a fortune.

It was his son who built on the Second Bank the wide,
corniced mansion in which
to house comfortably his eight children.

There,
two tiers above the river,
lived my paternal grandfather,
Dr. Paret,
the Breck's physician and friend;
the Durretts and the Hambletons,
iron-masters;
the Hollisters,
Sherwins,
the McAlerys and Ewanses,--Breck connections,--the Willetts and Ogilvys;
in short,
everyone of importance in the days between the
'thirties and the Civil War.

Theirs were generous houses surrounded by shade trees,
with glorious back yards--I have been told--where apricots and pears and peaches and even nectarines grew.

The business of Breck and Company,
wholesale grocers,
descended
to my mother's first cousin,
Robert Breck,
who lived at Claremore.

The very sound of that word once sufficed
to give me a shiver of delight;
but the Claremore I knew has disappeared as completely as Atlantis,
and the place is now a suburb
(hateful word!)
cut up into building lots and connected
with Boyne Street and the business section of the city by trolley lines.

Then it was
"the country,"
and fairly saturated
with romance.

Cousin Robert,
when he came into town
to spend his days at the store,
brought
with him some of this romance,
I had almost said of this aroma.

He was no suburbanite,
but rural
to the backbone,
professing a most proper contempt
for dwellers in towns.

Every summer day that dawned held Claremore as a possibility.

And such was my capacity
for joy that my appetite would depart completely when I heard my mother say,
questioningly and
with proper wifely respect
"If you're really going off on a business trip
for a day or two,
Mr. Paret"
(she generally addressed my father thus formally),
"I think I'll go
to Robert's and take Hugh."

"Shall I tell Norah
to pack,
mother,"
I would exclaim,
starting up.

"We'll see what your father thinks,
my dear."

"Remain at the table until you are excused,
Hugh,"
he would say.

Released at length,
I would rush
to Norah,
who always rejoiced
with me,
and then
to the wire fence which marked the boundary of the Peters domain next door,
eager,
with the refreshing lack of consideration characteristic of youth,
to announce
to the Peterses--who were
to remain at home the news of my good fortune.

There would be Tom and Alfred and Russell and Julia and little Myra
with her grass-stained knees,
faring forth
to seek the adventures of a new day in the shady western yard.

Myra was too young not
to look wistful at my news,
but the others pretended indifference,
seeking
to lessen my triumph.

And it was Julia who invariably retorted
"We can go out
to Uncle Jake's farm whenever we want to.

Can't we,
Tom?"
...

No journey ever taken since has equalled in ecstasy that leisurely trip of thirteen miles in the narrow-gauge railroad that wound through hot fields of nodding corn tassels and between delicious,
acrid-smelling woods
to Claremore.

No silent palace
"sleeping in the sun,"
no edifice decreed by Kubla Khan could have worn more glamour than the house of Cousin Robert Breck.

It stood half a mile from the drowsy village,
deep in its own grounds amidst lawns splashed
with shadows,
with gravel paths edged--in barbarous fashion,
if you please
with shells.

There were flower beds of equally barbarous design;
and two iron deer,
which,
like the figures on Keats's Grecian urn,
were ever ready poised
to flee,--and yet never fled.

For Cousin Robert was rich,
as riches went in those days:

not only rich,
but comfortable.

Stretching behind the house were sweet meadows of hay and red clover basking in the heat,
orchards where the cows cropped beneath the trees,
arbours where purple clusters of Concords hung beneath warm leaves:

there were woods beyond,
into which,
under the guidance of Willie Breck,
I made adventurous excursions,
and in the autumn gathered hickories and walnuts.

The house was a rambling,
wooden mansion painted grey,
with red scroll-work on its porches and horsehair furniture inside.

Oh,
the smell of its darkened interior on a midsummer day! Like the flavour of that choicest of tropical fruits,
the mangosteen,
it baffles analysis,
and the nearest I can come
to it is a mixture of matting and corn-bread,
with another element too subtle
to define.

The hospitality of that house! One would have thought we had arrived,
my mother and I,
from the ends of the earth,
such was the welcome we got from Cousin Jenny,
Cousin Robert's wife,
from Mary and Helen
with the flaxen pig-tails,
from Willie,
whom I recall as permanently without shoes or stockings.

Met and embraced by Cousin Jenny at the station and driven
to the house in the squeaky surrey,
the moment we arrived she and my mother would put on the dressing-sacks I associated
with hot weather,
and sit sewing all day long in rocking-chairs at the coolest end of the piazza.

The women of that day scorned lying down,
except at night,
and as evening came on they donned starched dresses;
I recall in particular one my mother wore,
with little vertical stripes of black and white,
and a full skirt.

And how they talked,
from the beginning of the visit until the end! I have often since wondered where the topics came from.

It was not until nearly seven o'clock that the train arrived which brought home my Cousin Robert.

He was a big man;
his features and even his ample moustache gave a disconcerting impression of rugged integrity,
and I remember him chiefly in an alpaca or seersucker coat.

Though much less formal,
more democratic--in a word--than my father,
I stood in awe of him
for a different reason,
and this I know now was because he possessed the penetration
to discern the flaws in my youthful character,
--flaws that persisted in manhood.

None so quick as Cousin Robert
to detect deceptions which were hidden from my mother.

His hobby was carpentering,
and he had a little shop beside the stable filled
with shining tools which Willie and I,
in spite of their attractions,
were forbidden
to touch.

Willie,
by dire experience,
had learned
to keep the law;
but on one occasion I stole in alone,
and promptly cut my finger
with a chisel.

My mother and Cousin Jenny accepted the fiction that the injury had been done
with a flint arrowhead that Willie had given me,
but when Cousin Robert came home and saw my bound hand and heard the story,
he gave me a certain look which sticks in my mind.

"Wonderful people,
those Indians were!"
he observed.

"They could make arrowheads as sharp as chisels."

I was most uncomfortable....

He had a strong voice,
and spoke
with a rising inflection and a marked accent that still remains peculiar
to our locality,
although it was much modified in my mother and not at all noticeable in my father;
with an odd nasal alteration of the burr our Scotch-Irish ancestors had brought
with them across the seas.

For instance,
he always called my father Mr. Par- r-ret.

He had an admiration and respect
for him that seemed
to forbid the informality of
"Matthew."

It was shared by others of my father's friends and relations.

"Sarah,"
Cousin Robert would say
to my mother,
"you're coddling that boy,
you ought
to lam him oftener.

Hand him over
to me
for a couple of months--I'll put him through his paces....

So you're going
to send him
to college,
are you?

He's too good
for old Benjamin's grocery business."

He was very fond of my mother,
though he lectured her soundly
for her weakness in indulging me.

I can see him as he sat at the head of the supper table,
carving liberal helpings which Mary and Helen and Willie devoured
with country appetites,
watching our plates.

"What's the matter,
Hugh?

You haven't eaten all your lamb."

"He doesn't like fat,
Robert,"
my mother explained.

"I'd teach him
to like it if he were my boy."

"Well,
Robert,
he isn't your boy,"
Cousin Jenny would remind him....

His bark was worse than his bite.

Like many kind people he made use of brusqueness
to hide an inner tenderness,
and on the train he was hail fellow well met
with every Tom,
Dick and Harry that commuted,--although the word was not invented in those days,--and the conductor and brakeman too.

But he had his standards,
and held
to them....

Mine was not a questioning childhood,
and I was willing
to accept the scheme of things as presented
to me entire.

In my tenderer years,
when I had broken one of the commandments on my father's tablet
(there were more than ten),
and had,
on his home-coming,
been sent
to bed,
my mother would come softly upstairs after supper
with a book in her hand;
a book of selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound had set the seal of his approval,
with a glazed picture cover,
representing Daniel in the lions'
den and an angel standing beside him.

On the somewhat specious plea that Holy Writ might have a chastening effect,
she was permitted
to minister
to me in my shame.

The amazing adventure of Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego particularly appealed
to an imagination needing little stimulation.

It never occurred
to me
to doubt that these gentlemen had triumphed over caloric laws.

But out of my window,
at the back of the second storey,
I often saw a sudden,
crimson glow in the sky
to the southward,
as though that part of the city had caught fire.

There were the big steel-works,
my mother told me,
belonging
to Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton,
the father of Ralph Hambleton and the grandfather of Hambleton Durrett,
my schoolmates at Miss Caroline's.

I invariably connected the glow,
not
with Hambleton and Ralph,
but
with Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego! Later on,
when my father took me
to the steel-works,
and I beheld
with awe a huge pot filled
with molten metal that ran out of it like water,
I asked him--if I leaped into that stream,
could God save me?

He was shocked.

Miracles,
he told me,
didn't happen any more.

"When did they stop?"
I demanded.

"About two thousand years ago,
my son,"
he replied gravely.

"Then,"
said I,
"no matter how much I believed in God,
he wouldn't save me if I jumped into the big kettle
for his sake?"
For this I was properly rebuked and silenced.

My boyhood was filled
with obsessing desires.

If God,
for example,
had cast down,
out of his abundant store,
manna and quail in the desert,
why couldn't he fling me a little pocket money?

A paltry quarter of a dollar,
let us say,
which
to me represented wealth.

To avoid the reproach of the Pharisees,
I went into the closet of my bed-chamber
to pray,
requesting that the quarter should be dropped on the north side of Lyme Street,
between Stamford and Tryon;
in short,
as conveniently near home as possible.

Then I issued forth,
not feeling overconfident,
but hoping.

Tom Peters,
leaning over the ornamental cast-iron fence which separated his front yard from the street,
presently spied me scanning the sidewalk.

"What are you looking for,
Hugh?"
he demanded
with interest.

"Oh,
something I dropped,"
I answered uneasily.

"What?"
Naturally,
I refused
to tell.

It was a broiling,
midsummer day;
Julia and Russell,
who had been warned
to stay in the shade,
but who were engaged in the experiment of throwing the yellow cat from the top of the lattice fence
to see if she would alight on her feet,
were presently attracted,
and joined in the search.

The mystery which I threw around it added
to its interest,
and I was not inconsiderably annoyed.

Suppose one of them were
to find the quarter which God had intended
for me?

Would that be justice?

"It's nothing,"
I said,
and pretended
to abandon the quest--to be renewed later.

But this ruse failed;
they continued obstinately
to search;
and after a few minutes Tom,
with a shout,
picked out of a hot crevice between the bricks--a nickel!
"It's mine!"
I cried fiercely.

"Did you lose it?"
demanded Julia,
the canny one,
as Tom was about
to give it up.

My lying was generally reserved
for my elders.

"N-no,"
I said hesitatingly,
"but it's mine all the same.

It was--sent
to me."

"Sent
to you!"
they exclaimed,
in a chorus of protest and derision.

And how,
indeed,
was I
to make good my claim?

The Peterses,
when assembled,
were a clan,
led by Julia and in matters of controversy,
moved as one.

How was I
to tell them that in answer
to my prayers
for twenty-five cents,
God had deemed five all that was good
for me?

"Some--somebody dropped it there
for me."

"Who?"
demanded the chorus.

"Say,
that's a good one!"
Tears suddenly blinded me.

Overcome by chagrin,
I turned and flew into the house and upstairs into my room,
locking the door behind me.

An interval ensued,
during which I nursed my sense of wrong,
and it pleased me
to think that the money would bring a curse on the Peters family.

At length there came a knock on the door,
and a voice calling my name.

"Hugh! Hugh!"
It was Tom.

"Hughie,
won't you let me in?

I want
to give you the nickel."

"Keep it!"
I shouted back.

"You found it."

Another interval,
and then more knocking.

"Open up,"
he said coaxingly.

"I--I want
to talk
to you."

I relented,
and let him in.

He pressed the coin into my hand.

I refused;
he pleaded.

"You found it,"
I said,
"it's yours."

"But--but you were looking
for it."

"That makes no difference,"
I declared magnanimously.

Curiosity overcame him.

"Say,
Hughie,
if you didn't drop it,
who on earth did?"
"Nobody on earth,"
I replied cryptically....

Naturally,
I declined
to reveal the secret.

Nor was this by any means the only secret I held over the Peters family,
who never quite knew what
to make of me.

They were not troubled
with imaginations.

Julia was a little older than Tom and had a sharp tongue,
but over him I exercised a distinct fascination,
and I knew it.

Literal himself,
good-natured and warm-hearted,
the gift I had of tingeing life
with romance
(to put the thing optimistically),
of creating kingdoms out of back yards--at which Julia and Russell sniffed--held his allegiance firm.

II.

I must have been about twelve years of age when I realized that I was possessed of the bard's inheritance.

A momentous journey I made
with my parents
to Boston about this time not only stimulated this gift,
but gave me the advantage of which other travellers before me have likewise availed themselves--of being able
to take certain poetic liberties
with a distant land that my friends at home had never seen.

Often during the heat of summer noons when we were assembled under the big maple beside the lattice fence in the Peters'
yard,
the spirit would move me
to relate the most amazing of adventures.

Our train,
for instance,
had been held up in the night by a band of robbers in black masks,
and rescued by a traveller who bore a striking resemblance
to my Cousin Robert Breck.

He had shot two of the robbers.

These fabrications,
once started,
flowed from me
with ridiculous ease.

I experienced an unwonted exhilaration,
exaltation;
I began
to believe that they had actually occurred.

In vain the astute Julia asserted that there were no train robbers in the east.

What had my father done?

Well,
he had been very brave,
but he had had no pistol.

Had I been frightened?

No,
not at all;
I,
too,
had wished
for a pistol.

Why hadn't I spoken of this before?

Well,
so many things had happened
to me I couldn't tell them all at once.

It was plain that Julia,
though often fascinated against her will,
deemed this sort of thing distinctly immoral.

I was a boy divided in two.

One part of me dwelt in a fanciful realm of his own weaving,
and the other part was a commonplace and protesting inhabitant of a world of lessons,
disappointments and discipline.

My instincts were not vicious.

Ideas bubbled up within me continually from an apparently inexhaustible spring,
and the very strength of the longings they set in motion puzzled and troubled my parents:

what I seem
to see most distinctly now is a young mind engaged in a ceaseless struggle
for self-expression,
for self-development,
against the inertia of a tradition of which my father was the embodiment.

He was an enigma
to me then.

He sincerely loved me,
he cherished ambitions concerning me,
yet thwarted every natural,
budding growth,
until I grew unconsciously
to regard him as my enemy,
although I had an affection
for him and a pride in him that flared up at times.

Instead of confiding
to him my aspirations,
vague though they were,
I became more and more secretive as I grew older.

I knew instinctively that he regarded these aspirations as evidences in my character of serious moral flaws.

And I would sooner have suffered many afternoons of his favourite punishment--solitary confinement in my room-- than reveal
to him those occasional fits of creative fancy which caused me
to neglect my lessons in order
to put them on paper.

Loving literature,
in his way,
he was characteristically incapable of recognizing the literary instinct,
and the symptoms of its early stages he mistook
for inherent frivolity,
for lack of respect
for the truth;
in brief,
for original sin.

At the age of fourteen I had begun secretly
(alas,
how many things I did secretly!)
to write stories of a sort,
stories that never were finished.

He regarded reading as duty,
not pleasure.

He laid out books
for me,
which I neglected.

He was part and parcel of that American environment in which literary ambition was regarded as sheer madness.

And no one who has not experienced that environment can have any conception of the pressure it exerted
to stifle originality,
to thrust the new generation into its religious and commercial moulds.

Shall we ever,
I wonder,
develop the enlightened education that will know how
to take advantage of such initiative as was mine?

that will be on the watch
for it,
sympathize
with it and guide it
to fruition?

I was conscious of still another creative need,
that of dramatizing my ideas,
of converting them into action.

And this need was
to lead me farther than ever afield from the path of righteousness.

The concrete realization of ideas,
as many geniuses will testify,
is an expensive undertaking,
requiring a little pocket money;
and I have already touched upon that subject.

My father did not believe in pocket money.

A sea story that my Cousin Donald Ewan gave me at Christmas inspired me
to compose one of a somewhat different nature;
incidentally,
I deemed it a vast improvement on Cousin Donald's book.

Now,
if I only had a boat,
with the assistance of Ham Durrett and Tom Peters,
Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and other friends,
this story of mine might be staged.

There were,
however,
as usual,
certain seemingly insuperable difficulties:

in the first place,
it was winter time;
in the second,
no facilities existed in the city
for operations of a nautical character;
and,
lastly,
my Christmas money amounted only
to five dollars.

It was my father who pointed out these and other objections.

For,
after a careful perusal of the price lists I had sent for,
I had been forced
to appeal
to him
to supply additional funds
with which
to purchase a row- boat.

Incidentally,
he read me a lecture on extravagance,
referred
to my last month's report at the Academy,
and finished by declaring that he would not permit me
to have a boat even in the highly improbable case of somebody's presenting me
with one.

Let it not be imagined that my ardour or my determination were extinguished.

Shortly after I had retired from his presence it occurred
to me that he had said nothing
to forbid my making a boat,
and the first thing I did after school that day was
to procure,
for twenty-five cents,
a second-hand book on boat construction.

The woodshed was chosen as a shipbuilding establishment.

It was convenient--and my father never went into the back yard in cold weather.

Inquiries of lumber-yards developing the disconcerting fact that four dollars and seventy-five cents was inadequate
to buy the material itself,
to say nothing of the cost of steaming and bending the ribs,
I reluctantly abandoned the ideal of the graceful craft I had sketched,
and compromised on a flat bottom.

Observe how the ways of deception lead
to transgression:

I recalled the cast-off lumber pile of Jarvis,
the carpenter,
a good-natured Englishman,
coarse and fat:

in our neighbourhood his reputation
for obscenity was so well known
to mothers that I had been forbidden
to go near him or his shop.

Grits Jarvis,
his son,
who had inherited the talent,
was also contraband.

I can see now the huge bulk of the elder Jarvis as he stood in the melting,
soot- powdered snow in front of his shop,
and hear his comments on my pertinacity.

"If you ever wants another man's missus when you grows up,
my lad,
Gawd
'elp
'im!"
"Why should I want another man's wife when I don't want one of my own?"
I demanded,
indignant.

He laughed
with his customary lack of moderation.

"You mind what old Jarvis says,"
he cried.

"What you wants,
you gets."

I did get his boards,
by sheer insistence.

No doubt they were not very valuable,
and without question he more than made up
for them in my mother's bill.

I also got something else of equal value
to me at the moment,--the assistance of Grits,
the contraband;
daily,
after school,
I smuggled him into the shed through the alley,
acquiring likewise the services of Tom Peters,
which was more of a triumph than it would seem.

Tom always had
to be
"worked up"
to participation in my ideas,
but in the end he almost invariably succumbed.

The notion of building a boat in the dead of winter,
and so far from her native element,
naturally struck him at first as ridiculous.

Where in Jehoshaphat was I going
to sail it if I ever got it made?

He much preferred
to throw snowballs at innocent wagon drivers.

All that Tom saw,
at first,
was a dirty,
coal-spattered shed
with dim recesses,
for it was lighted on one side only,
and its temperature was somewhere below freezing.

Surely he could not be blamed
for a tempered enthusiasm! But
for me,
all the dirt and cold and discomfort were blotted out,
and I beheld a gallant craft manned by sturdy seamen forging her way across blue water in the South Seas.

Treasure Island,
alas,
was as yet unwritten;
but among my father's books were two old volumes in which I had hitherto taken no interest,
with crude engravings of palms and coral reefs,
of naked savages and tropical mountains covered
with jungle,
the adventures,
in brief,
of one Captain Cook.

I also discovered a book by a later traveller.

Spurred on by a mysterious motive power,
and
to the great neglect of the pons asinorum and the staple products of the Southern States,
I gathered an amazing amount of information concerning a remote portion of the globe,
of head-hunters and poisoned stakes,
of typhoons,
of queer war-craft that crept up on you while you were dismantling galleons,
when desperate hand-to-hand encounters ensued.

Little by little as I wove all this into personal adventures soon
to be realized,
Tom forgot the snowballs and the maddened grocery-men who chased him around the block;
while Grits would occasionally stop sawing and cry out:--
"Ah,
s'y!"
frequently adding that he would be G--d--d.

The cold woodshed became a chantry on the New England coast,
the alley the wintry sea soon
to embrace our ship,
the saw-horses--which stood between a coal-bin on one side and unused stalls filled
with rubbish and kindling on the other--the ways;
the yard behind the lattice fence became a backwater,
the flapping clothes the sails of ships that took refuge there--on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Even my father was symbolized
with unparalleled audacity as a watchful government which had,
up
to the present,
no inkling of our semi-piratical intentions! The cook and the housemaid,
though remonstrating against the presence of Grits,
were friendly confederates;
likewise old Cephas,
the darkey who,
from my earliest memory,
carried coal and wood and blacked the shoes,
washed the windows and scrubbed the steps.

One afternoon Tom went
to work....

The history of the building of the good ship Petrel is similar
to that of all created things,
a story of trial and error and waste.

At last,
one March day she stood ready
for launching.

She had even been caulked;
for Grits,
from an unknown and unquestionably dubious source,
had procured a bucket of tar,
which we heated over afire in the alley and smeared into every crack.

It was natural that the news of such a feat as we were accomplishing should have leaked out,
that the
"yard"
should have been visited from time
to time by interested friends,
some of whom came
to admire,
some
to scoff,
and all
to speculate.

Among the scoffers,
of course,
was Ralph Hambleton,
who stood
with his hands in his pockets and cheerfully predicted all sorts of dire calamities.

Ralph was always a superior boy,
tall and a trifle saturnine and cynical,
with an amazing self-confidence not wholly due
to the wealth of his father,
the iron- master.

He was older than I.

"She won't float five minutes,
if you ever get her
to the water,"
was his comment,
and in this he was supported on general principles by Julia and Russell Peters.

Ralph would have none of the Petrel,
or of the South Seas either;
but he wanted,--so he said,--"to be in at the death."

The Hambletons were one of the few families who at that time went
to the sea
for the summer,
and from a practical knowledge of craft in general Ralph was not slow
to point out the defects of ours.

Tom and I defended her passionately.

Ralph was not a romanticist.

He was a born leader,
excelling at organized games,
exercising over boys the sort of fascination that comes from doing everything better and more easily than others.

It was only during the progress of such enterprises as this affair of the Petrel that I succeeded in winning their allegiance;
bit by bit,
as Tom's had been won,
fanning their enthusiasm by impersonating at once Achilles and Homer,
recruiting while relating the Odyssey of the expedition in glowing colours.

Ralph always scoffed,
and when I had no scheme on foot they went back
to him.

Having surveyed the boat and predicted calamity,
he departed,
leaving a circle of quaint and youthful figures around the Petrel in the shed:

Gene Hollister,
romantically inclined,
yet somewhat hampered by a strict parental supervision;
Ralph's cousin Ham Durrett,
who was even then a rather fat boy,
good-natured but selfish;
Don and Harry Ewan,
my second cousins;
Mac and Nancy Willett and Sam and Sophy McAlery.

Nancy was a tomboy,
not
to be denied,
and Sophy her shadow.

We held a council,
the all-important question of which was how
to get the Petrel
to the water,
and what water
to get her to.

The river was not
to be thought of,
and Blackstone Lake some six miles from town.

Finally,
Logan's mill-pond was decided on,--a muddy sheet on the outskirts of the city.

But how
to get her
to Logan's mill-pond?

Cephas was at length consulted.

It turned out that he had a coloured friend who went by the impressive name of Thomas Jefferson Taliaferro
(pronounced Tolliver),
who was in the express business;
and who,
after surveying the boat
with some misgivings,--for she was ten feet long,--finally consented
to transport her to
"tide-water"
for the sum of two dollars.

But it proved that our combined resources only amounted
to a dollar and seventy-five cents.

Ham Durrett never contributed
to anything.

On this sum Thomas Jefferson compromised.

Saturday dawned clear,
with a stiff March wind catching up the dust into eddies and whirling it down the street.

No sooner was my father safely on his way
to his office than Thomas Jefferson was reported
to be in the alley,
where we assembled,
surveying
with some misgivings Thomas Jefferson's steed,
whose ability
to haul the Petrel two miles seemed somewhat doubtful.

Other difficulties developed;
the door in the back of the shed proved
to be too narrow
for our ship's beam.

But men embarked on a desperate enterprise are not
to be stopped by such trifles,
and the problem was solved by sawing out two adjoining boards.

These were afterwards replaced
with skill by the ship's carpenter,
Able Seaman Grits Jarvis.

Then the Petrel by heroic efforts was got into the wagon,
the seat of which had been removed,
old Thomas Jefferson perched himself precariously in the bow and protestingly gathered up his rope-patched reins.

"Folks'll
'low I'se plum crazy,
drivin'
dis yere boat,"
he declared,
observing
with concern that some four feet of the stern projected over the tail-board.

"Ef she topples,
I'll git
to heaven quicker'n a bullet."

When one is shanghaied,
however,--in the hands of buccaneers,--it is too late
to withdraw.

Six shoulders upheld the rear end of the Petrel,
others shoved,
and Thomas Jefferson's rickety horse began
to move forward in spite of himself.

An expression of sheer terror might have been observed on the old negro's crinkled face,
but his voice was drowned,
and we swept out of the alley.

Scarcely had we travelled a block before we began
to be joined by all the boys along the line of march;
marbles,
tops,
and even incipient baseball games were abandoned that Saturday morning;
people ran out of their houses,
teamsters halted their carts.

The breathless excitement,
the exaltation I had felt on leaving the alley were now tinged
with other feelings,
unanticipated,
but not wholly lacking in delectable quality,--concern and awe at these unforeseen forces I had raised,
at this ever growing and enthusiastic body of volunteers springing up like dragon's teeth in our path.

After all,
was not I the hero of this triumphal procession?

The thought was consoling,
exhilarating.

And here was Nancy marching at my side,
a little subdued,
perhaps,
but unquestionably admiring and realizing that it was I who had created all this.

Nancy,
who was the aptest of pupils,
the most loyal of followers,
though I did not yet value her devotion at its real worth,
because she was a girl.

Her imagination kindled at my touch.

And on this eventful occasion she carried in her arms a parcel,
the contents of which were unknown
to all but ourselves.

At length we reached the muddy shores of Logan's pond,
where two score eager hands volunteered
to assist the Petrel into her native element.

Alas! that the reality never attains
to the vision.

I had beheld,
in my dreams,
the Petrel about
to take the water,
and Nancy Willett standing very straight making a little speech and crashing a bottle of wine across the bows.

This was the content of the mysterious parcel;
she had stolen it from her father's cellar.

But the number of uninvited spectators,
which had not been foreseen,
considerably modified the programme,--as the newspapers would have said.

They pushed and crowded around the ship,
and made frank and even brutal remarks as
to her seaworthiness;
even Nancy,
inured though she was
to the masculine sex,
had fled
to the heights,
and it looked at this supreme moment as though we should have
to fight
for the Petrel.

An attempt
to muster her doughty buccaneers failed;
the gunner too had fled,--Gene Hollister;
Ham Durrett and the Ewanses were nowhere
to be seen,
and a muster revealed only Tom,
the fidus Achates,
and Grits Jarvis.

"Ah,
s'y!"
he exclaimed in the teeth of the menacing hordes.

"Stand back,
carn't yer?

I'll bash yer face in,
Johnny.

Whose boat is this?"
Shall it be whispered that I regretted his belligerency?

Here,
in truth,
was the drama staged,--my drama,
had I only been able
to realize it.

The good ship beached,
the headhunters hemming us in on all sides,
the scene prepared
for one of those struggles against frightful odds which I had so graphically related as an essential part of our adventures.

"Let's roll the cuss in the fancy collar,"
proposed one of the head- hunters,--meaning me.

"I'll stove yer slats if yer touch him,"
said Grits,
and then resorted
to appeal.

"I s'y,
carn't yer stand back and let a chap
'ave a charnst?"
The head-hunters only jeered.

And what shall be said of the Captain in this moment of peril?

Shall it be told that his heart was beating wildly?--bumping were a better word.

He was trying
to remember that he was the Captain.

Otherwise,
he must admit
with shame that he,
too,
should have fled.

So much
for romance when the test comes.

Will he remain
to fall fighting
for his ship?

Like Horatius,
he glanced up at the hill,
where,
instead of the porch of the home where he would fain have been,
he beheld a wisp of a girl standing alone,
her hat on the back of her head,
her hair flying in the wind,
gazing intently down at him in his danger.

The renegade crew was nowhere
to be seen.

There are those who demand the presence of a woman in order
to be heroes....

"Give us a chance,
can't you?"
he cried,
repeating Grits's appeal in not quite such a stentorian tone as he would have liked,
while his hand trembled on the gunwale.

Tom Peters,
it must be acknowledged,
was much more of a buccaneer when it was a question of deeds,
for he planted himself in the way of the belligerent chief of the head-hunters
(who spoke
with a decided brogue).

"Get out of the way!"
said Tom,
with a little squeak in his voice.

Yet there he was,
and he deserves a tribute.

An unlooked-for diversion saved us from annihilation,
in the shape of one who had a talent
for creating them.

We were bewilderingly aware of a girlish figure amongst us.

"You cowards!"
she cried.

"You cowards!"
Lithe,
and fairly quivering
with passion,
it was Nancy who showed us how
to face the head-hunters.

They gave back.

They would have been brave indeed if they had not retreated before such an intense little nucleus of energy and indignation!...

"Ah,
give
'em a chanst,"
said their chief,
after a moment....

He even helped
to push the boat towards the water.

But he did not volunteer
to be one of those
to man the Petrel on her maiden voyage.

Nor did Logan's pond,
that wild March day,
greatly resemble the South Seas.

Nevertheless,
my eye on Nancy,
I stepped proudly aboard and seized an
"oar."

Grits and Tom followed,--when suddenly the Petrel sank considerably below the water-line as her builders had estimated it.

Ere we fully realized this,
the now friendly head-hunters had given us a shove,
and we were off! The Captain,
who should have been waving good- bye
to his lady love from the poop,
sat down abruptly,--the crew likewise;
not,
however,
before she had heeled
to the scuppers,
and a half-bucket of iced water had run it.

Head-hunters were mere daily episodes in Grits's existence,
but water...

He muttered something in cockney that sounded like a prayer....

The wind was rapidly driving us toward the middle of the pond,
and something cold and ticklish was seeping through the seats of our trousers.

We sat like statues....

The bright scene etched itself in my memory--the bare brown slopes
with which the pond was bordered,
the Irish shanties,
the clothes-lines
with red flannel shirts snapping in the biting wind;
Nancy motionless on the bank;
the group behind her,
silent now,
impressed in spite of itself at the sight of our intrepidity.

The Petrel was sailing stern first....

Would any of us,
indeed,
ever see home again?

I thought of my father's wrath turned
to sorrow because he had refused
to gratify a son's natural wish and present him
with a real rowboat....

Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the water creeping around the gunwale,
and the very muddiness of it seemed
to enhance its coldness,
to make the horrors of its depths more mysterious and hideous.

The voice of Grits startled us.

"O Gawd,"
he was saying,
"we're a-going
to sink,
and I carn't swim! The blarsted tar's give way back here."

"Is she leaking?"
I cried.

"She's a-filling up like a bath tub,"
he lamented.

Slowly but perceptibly,
in truth,
the bow was rising,
and above the whistling of the wind I could hear his chattering as she settled....

Then several things happened simultaneously:

an agonized cry behind me,
distant shouts from the shore,
a sudden upward lunge of the bow,
and the torture of being submerged,
inch by inch,
in the icy,
yellow water.

Despite the splashing behind me,
I sat as though paralyzed until I was waist deep and the boards turned under me,
and then,
with a spasmodic contraction of my whole being I struck out--only
to find my feet on the muddy bottom.

Such was the inglorious end of the good ship Petrel!
for she went down,
with all hands,
in little more than half a fathom of water....

It was not until then I realized that we had been blown clear across the pond! Figures were running along the shore.

And as Tom and I emerged dragging Grits between us,--for he might have been drowned there abjectly in the shallows,--we were met by a stout and bare-armed Irishwoman whose scanty hair,
I remember,
was drawn into a tight knot behind her head;
and who seized us,
all three,
as though we were a bunch of carrots.

"Come along wid ye!"
she cried.

Shivering,
we followed her up the hill,
the spectators of the tragedy,
who by this time had come around the pond,
trailing after.

Nancy was not among them.

Inside the shanty into which we were thrust were two small children crawling about the floor,
and the place was filled
with steam from a wash-tub against the wall and a boiler on the stove.

With a vigorous injunction
to make themselves scarce,
the Irishwoman slammed the door in the faces of the curious and ordered us
to remove our clothes.

Grits was put
to bed in a corner,
while Tom and I,
provided
with various garments,
huddled over the stove.

There fell
to my lot the red flannel shirt which I had seen on the clothes-line.

She gave us hot coffee,
and was back at her wash-tub in no time at all,
her entire comment on a proceeding that seemed
to Tom and me
to have certain elements of gravity being,
"By's will be by's!"
The final ironical touch was given the anti- climax when our rescuer turned out
to be the mother of the chief of the head-hunters himself! He had lingered perforce
with his brothers and sister outside the cabin until dinner time,
and when he came in he was meek as Moses.

Thus the ready hospitality of the poor,
which passed over the heads of Tom and me as we ate bread and onions and potatoes
with a ravenous hunger.

It must have been about two o'clock in the afternoon when we bade good-bye
to our preserver and departed
for home....

At first we went at a dog-trot,
but presently slowed down
to discuss the future looming portentously ahead of us.

Since entire concealment was now impossible,
the question was,--how complete a confession would be necessary?

Our cases,
indeed,
were dissimilar,
and Tom's incentive
to hold back the facts was not nearly so great as mine.

It sometimes seemed
to me in those days unjust that the Peterses were able on the whole
to keep out of criminal difficulties,
in which I was more or less continuously involved:

for it did not strike me that their sins were not those of the imagination.

The method of Tom's father was the slipper.

He and Tom understood each other,
while between my father and myself was a great gulf fixed.

Not that Tom yearned
for the slipper;
but he regarded its occasional applications as being as inevitable as changes in the weather;
lying did not come easily
to him,
and left
to himself he much preferred
to confess and have the matter over with.

I have already suggested that I had cultivated lying,
that weapon of the weaker party,
in some degree,
at least,
in self-defence.

Tom was loyal.

Moreover,
my conviction would probably deprive him
for six whole afternoons of my company,
on which he was more or less dependent.

But the defence of this case presented unusual difficulties,
and we stopped several times
to thrash them out.

We had been absent from dinner,
and doubtless by this time Julia had informed Tom's mother of the expedition,
and anyone could see that our clothing had been wet.

So I lingered in no little anxiety behind the Peters stable while he made the investigation.

Our spirits rose considerably when he returned
to report that Julia had unexpectedly been a trump,
having quieted his mother by the surmise that he was spending the day
with his Aunt Fanny.

So far,
so good.

The problem now was
to decide upon what
to admit.

For we must both tell the same story.

It was agreed that we had fallen into Logan's Pond from a raft:

my suggestion.

Well,
said Tom,
the Petrel hadn't proved much better than a raft,
after all.

I was in no mood
to defend her.

This designation of the Petrel as a
"raft"
was my first legal quibble.

The question
to be decided by the court was,
What is a raft?

just as the supreme tribunal of the land has been required,
in later years,
to decide,
What is whiskey?

The thing
to be concealed if possible was the building of the
"raft,"
although this information was already in the possession of a number of persons,
whose fathers might at any moment see fit
to congratulate my own on being the parent of a genius.

It was a risk,
however,
that had
to be run.

And,
secondly,
since Grits Jarvis was contraband,
nothing was
to be said about him.

I have not said much about my mother,
who might have been likened on such occasions
to a grand jury compelled
to indict,
yet torn between loyalty
to an oath and sympathy
with the defendant.

I went through the Peters yard,
climbed the wire fence,
my object being
to discover first from Ella,
the housemaid,
or Hannah,
the cook,
how much was known in high quarters.

It was Hannah who,
as I opened the kitchen door,
turned at the sound,
and set down the saucepan she was scouring.

"Is it home ye are?

Mercy
to goodness!"
(this on beholding my shrunken costume)
"Glory be
to God you're not drownded! and your mother worritin'
her heart out! So it's into the wather ye were?"
I admitted it.

"Hannah?"
I said softly.

"What then?"
"Does mother know--about the boat?"
"Now don't ye be wheedlin'."

I managed
to discover,
however,
that my mother did not know,
and surmised that the best reason why she had not been told had
to do
with Hannah's criminal acquiescence concerning the operations in the shed.

I ran into the front hall and up the stairs,
and my mother heard me coming and met me on the landing.

"Hugh,
where have you been?"
As I emerged from the semi-darkness of the stairway she caught sight of my dwindled garments,
of the trousers well above my ankles.

Suddenly she had me in her arms and was kissing me passionately.

As she stood before me in her grey,
belted skirt,
the familiar red-and-white cameo at her throat,
her heavy hair parted in the middle,
in her eyes was an odd,
appealing look which I know now was a sign of mother love struggling
with a Presbyterian conscience.

Though she inherited that conscience,
I have often thought she might have succeeded in casting it off--or at least some of it--had it not been
for the fact that in spite of herself she worshipped its incarnation in the shape of my father.

Her voice trembled a little as she drew me
to the sofa beside the window.

"Tell me about what happened,
my son,"
she said.

It was a terrible moment
for me.

For my affections were still quiveringly alive in those days,
and I loved her.

I had
for an instant an instinctive impulse
to tell her the whole story,--South Sea Islands and all! And I could have done it had I not beheld looming behind her another figure which represented a stern and unsympathetic Authority,
and somehow made her,
suddenly,
of small account.

Not that she would have understood the romance,
but she would have comprehended me.

I knew that she was powerless
to save me from the wrath
to come.

I wept.

It was because I hated
to lie
to her,--yet I did so.

Fear gripped me,
and--like some respectable criminals I have since known--I understood that any confession I made would inexorably be used against me....

I wonder whether she knew I was lying?

At any rate,
the case appeared
to be a grave one,
and I was presently remanded
to my room
to be held over
for trial....

Vividly,
as I write,
I recall the misery of the hours I have spent,
while awaiting sentence,
in the little chamber
with the honeysuckle wall-paper and steel engravings of happy but dumpy children romping in the fields and groves.

On this particular March afternoon the weather had become morne,
as the French say;
and I looked down sadly into the grey back yard which the wind of the morning had strewn
with chips from the Petrel.

At last,
when shadows were gathering in the corners of the room,
I heard footsteps.

Ella appeared,
prim and virtuous,
yet a little commiserating.

My father wished
to see me,
downstairs.

It was not the first time she had brought that summons,
and always her manner was the same! The scene of my trials was always the sitting room,
lined
with grim books in their walnut cases.

And my father sat,
like a judge,
behind the big desk where he did his work when at home.

Oh,
the distance between us at such an hour! I entered as delicately as Agag,
and the expression in his eye seemed
to convict me before I could open my mouth.

"Hugh,"
he said,
"your mother tells me that you have confessed
to going,
without permission,
to Logan's Pond,
where you embarked on a raft and fell into the water."

The slight emphasis he contrived
to put on the word raft sent a colder shiver down my spine than the iced water had done.

What did he know?

or was this mere suspicion?

Too late,
now,
at any rate,
to plead guilty.

"It was a sort of a raft,
sir,"
I stammered.

"A sort of a raft,"
repeated my father.

"Where,
may I ask,
did you find it?"
"I--I didn't exactly find it,
sir."

"Ah!"
said my father.

(It was the moment
to glance meaningly at the jury.)
The prisoner gulped.

"You didn't exactly find it,
then.

Will you kindly explain how you came by it?"
"Well,
sir,
we--I--put it together."

"Have you any objection
to stating,
Hugh,
in plain English,
that you made it?"
"No,
sir,
I suppose you might say that I made it."

"Or that it was intended
for a row-boat?"
Here was the time
to appeal,
to force a decision as
to what constituted a row-boat.

"Perhaps it might be called a row-boat,
sir,"
I said abjectly.

"Or that,
in direct opposition
to my wishes and commands in forbidding you
to have a boat,
to spend your money foolishly and wickedly on a whim,
you constructed one secretly in the woodshed,
took out a part of the back partition,
thus destroying property that did,
not belong
to you,
and had the boat carted this morning
to Logan's Pond?"
I was silent,
utterly undone.

Evidently he had specific information....

There are certain expressions that are,
at times,
more than mere figures of speech,
and now my father's wrath seemed literally towering.

It added visibly
to his stature.

"Hugh,"
he said,
in a voice that penetrated
to the very corners of my soul,
"I utterly fail
to understand you.

I cannot imagine how a son of mine,
a son of your mother who is the very soul of truthfulness and honour--can be a liar."

(Oh,
the terrible emphasis he put on that word!)
"Nor is it as if this were a new tendency--I have punished you
for it before.

Your mother and I have tried
to do our duty by you,
to instil into you Christian teaching.

But it seems wholly useless.

I confess that I am at a less how
to proceed.

You seem
to have no conscience whatever,
no conception of what you owe
to your parents and your God.

You not only persistently disregard my wishes and commands,
but you have,
for many months,
been leading a double life,
facing me every day,
while you were secretly and continually disobeying me.

I shudder
to think where this determination of yours
to have what you desire at any price will lead you in the future.

It is just such a desire that distinguishes wicked men from good."

I will not linger upon a scene the very remembrance of which is painful
to this day....

I went from my father's presence in disgrace,
in an agony of spirit that was overwhelming,
to lock the door of my room and drop face downward on the bed,
to sob until my muscles twitched.

For he had,
indeed,
put into me an awful fear.

The greatest horror of my boyish imagination was a wicked man.

Was I,
as he had declared,
utterly depraved and doomed in spite of myself
to be one?

There came a knock at my door--Ella
with my supper.

I refused
to open,
and sent her away,
to fall on my knees in the darkness and pray wildly
to a God whose attributes and character were sufficiently confused in my mind.

On the one hand was the stern,
despotic Monarch of the Westminster Catechism,
whom I addressed out of habit,
the Father who condemned a portion of his children from the cradle.

Was I one of those who he had decreed before I was born must suffer the tortures of the flames of hell?

Putting two and two together,
what I had learned in Sunday school and gathered from parts of Dr. Pound's sermons,
and the intimation of my father that wickedness was within me,
like an incurable disease,--was not mine the logical conclusion?

What,
then,
was the use of praying?...

My supplications ceased abruptly.

And my ever ready imagination,
stirred
to its depths,
beheld that awful scene of the last day:

the darkness,
such as sometimes creeps over the city in winter,
when the jaundiced smoke falls down and we read at noonday by gas-light.

I beheld the tortured faces of the wicked gathered on the one side,
and my mother on the other amongst the blessed,
gazing across the gulf at me
with yearning and compassion.

Strange that it did not strike me that the sight of the condemned whom they had loved in life would have marred if not destroyed the happiness of the chosen,
about
to receive their crowns and harps! What a theology--that made the Creator and Preserver of all mankind thus illogical! III.

Although I was imaginative,
I was not morbidly introspective,
and by the end of the first day of my incarceration my interest in that solution had waned.

At times,
however,
I actually yearned
for someone in whom I could confide,
who could suggest a solution.

I repeat,
I would not
for worlds have asked my father or my mother or Dr. Pound,
of whom I had a wholesome fear,
or perhaps an unwholesome one.

Except at morning Bible reading and at church my parents never mentioned the name of the Deity,
save
to instruct me formally.

Intended or no,
the effect of my religious training was
to make me ashamed of discussing spiritual matters,
and naturally I failed
to perceive that this was because it laid its emphasis on personal salvation....

I did not,
however,
become an unbeliever,
for I was not of a nature
to contemplate
with equanimity a godless universe....

My sufferings during these series of afternoon confinements did not come from remorse,
but were the result of a vague sense of injury;
and their effect was
to generate within me a strange motive power,
a desire
to do something that would astound my father and eventually wring from him the confession that he had misjudged me.

To be sure,
I should have
to wait until early manhood,
at least,
for the accomplishment of such a coup.

Might it not be that I was an embryonic literary genius?

Many were the books I began in this ecstasy of self-vindication,
only
to abandon them when my confinement came
to an end.

It was about this time,
I think,
that I experienced one of those shocks which have a permanent effect upon character.

It was then the custom
for ladies
to spend the day
with one another,
bringing their sewing;
and sometimes,
when I unexpectedly entered the sitting-room,
the voices of my mother's visitors would drop
to a whisper.

One afternoon I returned from school
to pause at the head of the stairs.

Cousin Bertha Ewan and Mrs. McAlery were discussing
with my mother an affair that I judged from the awed tone in which they spoke might prove interesting.

"Poor Grace,"
Mrs. McAlery was saying,
"I imagine she's paid a heavy penalty.

No man alive will be faithful under those circumstances."

I stopped at the head of the stairs,
with a delicious,
guilty feeling.

"Have they ever heard of her?"
Cousin Bertha asked.

"It is thought they went
to Spain,"
replied Mrs. McAlery,
solemnly,
yet not without a certain zest.

"Mr. Jules Hollister will not have her name mentioned in his presence,
you know.

And Whitcomb chased them as far as New York
with a horse-pistol in his pocket.

The report is that he got
to the dock just as the ship sailed.

And then,
you know,
he went
to live somewhere out West,--in Iowa,
I believe."

"Did he ever get a divorce?"
Cousin Bertha inquired.

"He was too good a church member,
my dear,"
my mother reminded her.

"Well,
I'd have got one quick enough,
church member or no church member,"
declared Cousin Bertha,
who had in her elements of daring.

"Not that I mean
for a moment
to excuse her,"
Mrs. McAlery put in,
"but Edward Whitcomb did have a frightful temper,
and he was awfully strict
with her,
and he was old enough,
anyhow,
to be her father.

Grace Hollister was the last woman in the world I should have suspected of doing so hideous a thing.

She was so sweet and simple."

"Jennings was very attractive,"
said my Cousin Bertha.

"I don't think I ever saw a handsomer man.

Now,
if he had looked at me--"
The sentence was never finished,
for at this crucial moment I dropped a grammar....

I had heard enough,
however,
to excite my curiosity
to the highest pitch.

And that evening,
when I came in at five o'clock
to study,
I asked my mother what had become of Gene Hollister's aunt.

"She went away,
Hugh,"
replied my mother,
looking greatly troubled.

"Why?"
I persisted.

"It is something you are too young
to understand."

Of course I started an investigation,
and the next day at school I asked the question of Gene Hollister himself,
only
to discover that he believed his aunt
to be dead! And that night he asked his mother if his Aunt Grace were really alive,
after all?

Whereupon complications and explanations ensued between our parents,
of which we saw only the surface signs....

My father accused me of eavesdropping
(which I denied),
and sentenced me
to an afternoon of solitary confinement
for repeating something which I had heard in private.

I have reason
to believe that my mother was also reprimanded.

It must not be supposed that I permitted the matter
to rest.

In addition
to Grits Jarvis,
there was another contraband among my acquaintances,
namely,
Alec Pound,
the scrape-grace son of the Reverend Doctor Pound.

Alec had an encyclopaedic mind,
especially well stocked
with the kind of knowledge I now desired;
first and last he taught me much,
which I would better have got in another way.

To him I appealed and got the story,
my worst suspicions being confirmed.

Mrs. Whitcomb's house had been across the alley from that of Mr. Jennings,
but no one knew that anything was
"going on,"
though there had been signals from the windows--the neighbours afterwards remembered....

I listened shudderingly.

"But,"
I cried,
"they were both married!"
"What difference does that make when you love a woman?"
Alec replied grandly.

"I could tell you much worse things than that."

This he proceeded
to do.

Fascinated,
I listened
with a sickening sensation.

It was a mild afternoon in spring,
and we stood in the deep limestone gutter in front of the parsonage,
a little Gothic wooden house set in a gloomy yard.

"I thought,"
said I,
"that people couldn't love any more after they were married,
except each other."

Alec looked at me pityingly.

"You'll get over that notion,"
he assured me.

Thus another ingredient entered my character.

Denied its food at home,
good food,
my soul eagerly consumed and made part of itself the fermenting stuff that Alec Pound so willing distributed.

And it was fermenting stuff.

Let us see what it did
to me.

Working slowly but surely,
it changed
for me the dawning mystery of sex into an evil instead of a holy one.

The knowledge of the tragedy of Grace Hollister started me
to seeking restlessly,
on bookshelves and elsewhere,
for a secret that forever eluded me,
and forever led me on.

The word fermenting aptly describes the process begun,
suggesting as it does something closed up,
away from air and sunlight,
continually working in secret,
engendering forces that fascinated,
yet inspired me
with fear.

Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was due
to the pernicious dualism of their orthodox Christianity,
in which love was carnal and therefore evil,
and the flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit,
but something
to be deplored and condemned,
exorcised and transformed by the miracle of grace.

Now love had become a terrible power
(gripping me)
whose enchantment drove men and women from home and friends and kindred
to the uttermost parts of the earth....

It was long before I got
to sleep that night after my talk
with Alec Pound.

I alternated between the horror and the romance of the story I had heard,
supplying
for myself the details he had omitted:

I beheld the signals from the windows,
the clandestine meetings,
the sudden and desperate flight.

And
to think that all this could have happened in our city not five blocks from where I lay! My consternation and horror were concentrated on the man,--and yet I recall a curious bifurcation.

Instead of experiencing that automatic righteous indignation which my father and mother had felt,
which had animated old Mr. Jules Hollister when he had sternly forbidden his daughter's name
to be mentioned in his presence,
which had made these people outcasts,
there welled up within me an intense sympathy and pity.

By an instinctive process somehow linked
with other experiences,
I seemed
to be able
to enter into the feelings of these two outcasts,
to understand the fearful yet fascinating nature of the impulse that had led them
to elude the vigilance and probity of a world
with which I myself was at odds.

I pictured them in a remote land,
shunned by mankind.

Was there something within me that might eventually draw me
to do likewise?

The desire in me
to which my father had referred,
which would brook no opposition,
which twisted and squirmed until it found its way
to its object?

I recalled the words of Jarvis,
the carpenter,
that if I ever set my heart on another man's wife,
God help him.

God help me! A wicked man! I had never beheld the handsome and fascinating Mr. Jennings,
but I visualised him now;
dark,
like all villains,
with a black moustache and snapping black eyes.

He carried a cane.

I always associated canes
with villains.

Whereupon I arose,
groped
for the matches,
lighted the gas,
and gazing at myself in the mirror was a little reassured
to find nothing sinister in my countenance....

Next
to my father's faith in a Moral Governor of the Universe was his belief in the Tariff and the Republican Party.

And this belief,
among others,
he handed on
to me.

On the cinder playground of the Academy we Republicans used
to wage,
during campaigns,
pitched battles
for the Tariff.

It did not take a great deal of courage
to be a Republican in our city,
and I was brought up
to believe that Democrats were irrational,
inferior,
and--with certain exceptions like the Hollisters--dirty beings.

There was only one degree lower,
and that was
to be a mugwump.

It was no wonder that the Hollisters were Democrats,
for they had a queer streak in them;
owing,
no doubt,
to the fact that old Mr. Jules Hollister's mother had been a Frenchwoman.

He looked like a Frenchman,
by the way,
and always wore a skullcap.

I remember one autumn afternoon having a violent quarrel
with Gene Hollister that bade fair
to end in blows,
when he suddenly demanded:--
"I'll bet you anything you don't know why you're a Republican."

"It's because I'm
for the Tariff,"
I replied triumphantly.

But his next question floored me.

What,
for example,
was the Tariff?

I tried
to bluster it out,
but
with no success.

"Do you know?"
I cried finally,
with sudden inspiration.

It turned out that he did not.

"Aren't we darned idiots,"
he asked,
"to get fighting over something we don't know anything about?"
That was Gene's French blood,
of course.

But his question rankled.

And how was I
to know that he would have got as little satisfaction if he had hurled it into the marching ranks of those imposing torch-light processions which sometimes passed our house at night,
with drums beating and fifes screaming and torches waving,--thousands of citizens who were
for the Tariff
for the same reason as I:

to wit,
because they were Republicans.

Yet my father lived and died in the firm belief that the United States of America was a democracy! Resolved not
to be caught a second time in such a humiliating position by a Democrat,
I asked my father that night what the Tariff was.

But I was too young
to understand it,
he said.

I was
to take his word
for it that the country would go
to the dogs if the Democrats got in and the Tariff were taken away.

Here,
in a nutshell,
though neither he nor I realized it,
was the political instruction of the marching hordes.

Theirs not
to reason why.

I was too young,
they too ignorant.

Such is the method of Authority! The steel-mills of Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton,
he continued,
would be forced
to shut down,
and thousands of workmen would starve.

This was just a sample of what would happen.

Prosperity would cease,
he declared.

That word,
Prosperity,
made a deep impression on me,
and I recall the certain reverential emphasis he laid on it.

And while my solicitude
for the workmen was not so great as his and Mr. Durrett's,
I was concerned as
to what would happen
to us if those twin gods,
the Tariff and Prosperity,
should take their departure from the land.

Knowing my love
for the good things of the table,
my father intimated,
with a rare humour I failed
to appreciate,
that we should have
to live henceforth in spartan simplicity.

After that,
like the intelligent workman,
I was firmer than ever
for the Tariff.

Such was the idealistic plane on which--and from a good man--I received my first political instruction! And
for a long time I connected the dominance of the Republican Party
with the continuation of manna and quails,
in other words,
with nothing that had
to do
with the spiritual welfare of any citizen,
but
with clothing and food and material comforts.

My education was progressing....

Though my father revered Plato and Aristotle,
he did not,
apparently,
take very seriously the contention that that government alone is good
"which seeks
to attain the permanent interests of the governed by evolving the character of its citizens."

To put the matter brutally,
politics,
despite the lofty sentiments on the transparencies in torchlight processions,
had only
to do
with the belly,
not the soul.

Politics and government,
one perceives,
had nothing
to do
with religion,
nor education
with any of these.

A secularized and disjointed world! Our leading citizens,
learned in the classics though some of them might be,
paid no heed
to the dictum of the Greek idealist,
who was more practical than they would have supposed.

"The man who does not carry his city within his heart is a spiritual starveling."

One evening,
a year or two after that tariff campaign,
I was pretending
to study my lessons under the student lamp in the sitting-room while my mother sewed and my father wrote at his desk,
when there was a ring at the door-bell.

I welcomed any interruption,
even though the visitor proved
to be only the druggist's boy;
and there was always the possibility of a telegram announcing,
for instance,
the death of a relative.

Such had once been the case when my Uncle Avery Paret had died in New York,
and I was taken out of school
for a blissful four days
for the funeral.

I went tiptoeing into the hall and peeped over the banisters while Ella opened the door.

I heard a voice which I recognized as that of Perry Blackwood's father asking
for Mr. Paret;
and then
to my astonishment,
I saw filing after him into the parlour some ten or twelve persons.

With the exception of Mr. Ogilvy,
who belonged
to one of our old families,
and Mr. Watling,
a lawyer who had married the youngest of Gene Hollister's aunts,
the visitors entered stealthily,
after the manner of burglars;
some of these were heavy-jowled,
and all had an air of mystery that raised my curiosity and excitement
to the highest pitch.

I caught hold of Ella as she came up the stairs,
but she tore herself free,
and announced
to my father that Mr. Josiah Blackwood and other gentlemen had asked
to see him.

My father seemed puzzled as he went downstairs....

A long interval elapsed,
during which I did not make even a pretence of looking at my arithmetic.

At times the low hum of voices rose
to what was almost an uproar,
and on occasions I distinguished a marked Irish brogue.

"I wonder what they want?"
said my mother,
nervously.

At last we heard the front door shut behind them,
and my father came upstairs,
his usually serene face wearing a disturbed expression.

"Who in the world was it,
Mr. Paret?"
asked my mother.

My father sat down in the arm-chair.

He was clearly making an effort
for self-control.

"Blackwood and Ogilvy and Watling and some city politicians,"
he exclaimed.

"Politicians!"
she repeated.

"What did they want?

That is,
if it's anything you can tell me,"
she added apologetically.

"They wished me
to be the Republican candidate
for the mayor of this city."

This tremendous news took me off my feet.

My father mayor!
"Of course you didn't consider it,
Mr. Paret,"
my mother was saying.

"Consider it!"
he echoed reprovingly.

"I can't imagine what Ogilvy and Watling and Josiah Blackwood were thinking of! They are out of their heads.

I as much as told them so."

This was more than I could bear,
for I had already pictured myself telling the news
to envious schoolmates.

"Oh,
father,
why didn't you take it?"
I cried.

By this time,
when he turned
to me,
he had regained his usual expression.

"You don't know what you're talking about,
Hugh,"
he said.

"Accept a political office! That sort of thing is left
to politicians."

The tone in which he spoke warned me that a continuation of the conversation would be unwise,
and my mother also understood that the discussion was closed.

He went back
to his desk,
and began writing again as though nothing had happened.

As
for me,
I was left in a palpitating state of excitement which my father's self-control or sang-froid only served
to irritate and enhance,
and my head was fairly spinning as,
covertly,
I watched his pen steadily covering the paper.

How could he--how could any man of flesh and blood sit down calmly after having been offered the highest honour in the gift of his community! And he had spurned it as if Mr. Blackwood and the others had gratuitously insulted him! And how was it,
if my father so revered the Republican Party that he would not suffer it
to be mentioned slightingly in his presence,
that he had refused contemptuously
to be its mayor?...

The next day at school,
however,
I managed
to let it be known that the offer had been made and declined.

After all,
this seemed
to make my father a bigger man than if he had accepted it.

Naturally I was asked why he had declined it.

"He wouldn't take it,"
I replied scornfully.

"Office-holding should be left
to politicians."

Ralph Hambleton,
with his precocious and cynical knowledge of the world,
minimized my triumph by declaring that he would rather be his grandfather,
Nathaniel Durrett,
than the mayor of the biggest city in the country.

Politicians,
he said,
were bloodsuckers and thieves,
and the only reason
for holding office was that it enabled one
to steal the taxpayers'
money....

As I have intimated,
my vision of a future literary career waxed and waned,
but a belief that I was going
to be Somebody rarely deserted me.

If not a literary lion,
what was that Somebody
to be?

Such an environment as mine was woefully lacking in heroic figures
to satisfy the romantic soul.

In view of the experience I have just related,
it is not surprising that the notion of becoming a statesman did not appeal
to me;
nor is it
to be wondered at,
despite the somewhat exaggerated respect and awe in which Ralph's grandfather was held by my father and other influential persons,
that I failed
to be stirred by the elements of greatness in the grim personality of our first citizen,
the iron-master.

For he possessed such elements.

He lived alone in Ingrain Street in an uncompromising mansion I always associated
with the Sabbath,
not only because I used
to be taken there on decorous Sunday visits by my father,
but because it was the very quintessence of Presbyterianism.

The moment I entered its
"portals"--as Mr. Hawthorne appropriately would have called them--my spirit was overwhelmed and suffocated by its formality and orderliness.

Within its stern walls Nathaniel Durrett had made a model universe of his own,
such as the Deity of the Westminster Confession had no doubt meant his greater one
to be if man had not rebelled and foiled him....

It was a world from which I was determined
to escape at any cost.

My father and I were always ushered into the gloomy library,
with its high ceiling,
with its long windows that reached almost
to the rococo cornice,
with its cold marble mantelpiece that reminded me of a tombstone,
with its interminable book shelves filled
with yellow bindings.

On the centre table,
in addition
to a ponderous Bible,
was one of those old-fashioned carafes of red glass tipped
with blue surmounted by a tumbler of blue tipped
with red.

Behind this table Mr. Durrett sat reading a volume of sermons,
a really handsome old man in his black tie and pleated shirt;
tall and spare,
straight as a ramrod,
with a finely moulded head and straight nose and sinewy hands the colour of mulberry stain.

He called my father by his first name,
an immense compliment,
considering how few dared
to do so.

"Well,
Matthew,"
the old man would remark,
after they had discussed Dr. Pound's latest flight on the nature of the Trinity or the depravity of man,
or horticulture,
or the Republican Party,
"do you have any better news of Hugh at school?"
"I regret
to say,
Mr. Durrett,"
my father would reply,
"that he does not yet seem
to be aroused
to a sense of his opportunities."

Whereupon Mr. Durrett would gimble me
with a blue eye that lurked beneath grizzled brows,
quite as painful a proceeding as if he used an iron tool.

I almost pity myself when I think of what a forlorn stranger I was in their company.

They two,
indeed,
were of one kind,
and I of another sort who could never understand them,--nor they me.

To what depths of despair they reduced me they never knew,
and yet they were doing it all
for my good! They only managed
to convince me that my love of folly was ineradicable,
and that I was on my way head first
for perdition.

I always looked,
during these excruciating and personal moments,
at the coloured glass bottle.

"It grieves me
to hear it,
Hugh,"
Mr. Durrett invariably declared.

"You'll never come
to any good without study.

Now when I was your age..."

I knew his history by heart,
a common one in this country,
although he made an honourable name instead of a dishonourable one.

And when I contrast him
with those of his successors whom I was
to know later...! But I shall not anticipate.

American genius had not then evolved the false entry method of overcapitalization.

A thrilling history,
Mr. Durrett's,
could I but have entered into it.

I did not reflect then that this stern old man must have throbbed once;
nay,
fire and energy still remained in his bowels,
else he could not have continued
to dominate a city.

Nor did it occur
to me that the great steel-works that lighted the southern sky were the result of a passion,
of dreams similar
to those possessing me,
but which I could not express.

He had founded a family whose position was virtually hereditary,
gained riches which
for those days were great,
compelled men
to speak his name
with a certain awe.

But of what use were such riches as his when his religion and morality compelled him
to banish from him all the joys in the power of riches
to bring?

No,
I didn't want
to be an iron-master.

But it may have been about this time that I began
to be impressed
with the power of wealth,
the adulation and reverence it commanded,
the importance in which it clothed all who shared in it....

The private school I attended in the company of other boys
with whom I was brought up was called Densmore Academy,
a large,
square building of a then hideous modernity,
built of smooth,
orange-red bricks
with threads of black mortar between them.

One reads of happy school days,
yet I fail
to recall any really happy hours spent there,
even in the yard,
which was covered
with black cinders that cut you when you fell.

I think of it as a penitentiary,
and the memory of the barred lower windows gives substance
to this impression.

I suppose I learned something during the seven years of my incarceration.

All of value,
had its teachers known anything of youthful psychology,
of natural bent,
could have been put into me in three.

At least four criminally wasted years,
to say nothing of the benumbing and desiccating effect of that old system of education! Chalk and chalk-dust! The Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map,
Italy a man's boot which I drew painfully,
with many yawns;
history no glorious epic revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things,
no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man,
but an endless marching and counter- marching up and down the map,
weary columns of figures
to be learned by rote instantly
to be forgotten again.

"On June the 7th General So-and-so proceeded
with his whole army--"
where?

What does it matter?

One little chapter of Carlyle,
illuminated by a teacher of understanding,
were worth a million such text-books.

Alas,
for the hatred of Virgil!
"Paret"
(a shiver),
"begin at the one hundred and thirtieth line and translate!"
I can hear myself droning out in detestable English a meaningless portion of that endless journey of the pious AEneas;
can see Gene Hollister,
with heart-rending glances of despair,
stumbling through Cornelius Nepos in an unventilated room
with chalk-rubbed blackboards and heavy odours of ink and stale lunch.

And I graduated from Densmore Academy,
the best school in our city,
in the 80's,
without having been taught even the rudiments of citizenship.

Knowledge was presented
to us as a corpse,
which bit by bit we painfully dissected.

We never glimpsed the living,
growing thing,
never experienced the Spirit,
the same spirit that was able magically
to waft me from a wintry Lyme Street
to the South Seas,
the energizing,
electrifying Spirit of true achievement,
of life,
of God himself.

Little by little its flames were smothered until in manhood there seemed no spark of it left alive.

Many years were
to pass ere it was
to revive again,
as by a miracle.

I travelled.

Awakening at dawn,
I saw,
framed in a port-hole,
rose-red Seriphos set in a living blue that paled the sapphire;
the seas Ulysses had sailed,
and the company of the Argonauts.

My soul was steeped in unimagined colour,
and in the memory of one rapturous instant is gathered what I was soon
to see of Greece,
is focussed the meaning of history,
poetry and art.

I was
to stand one evening in spring on the mound where heroes sleep and gaze upon the plain of Marathon between darkening mountains and the blue thread of the strait peaceful now,
flushed
with pink and white blossoms of fruit and almond trees;
to sit on the cliff-throne whence a Persian King had looked down upon a Salamis fought and lost....

In that port-hole glimpse a Themistocles was revealed,
a Socrates,
a Homer and a Phidias,
an AEschylus,
and a Pericles;
yes,
and a John brooding Revelations on his sea-girt rock as twilight falls over the waters....

I saw the Roman Empire,
that Scarlet Woman whose sands were dyed crimson
with blood
to appease her harlotry,
whose ships were laden
with treasures from the immutable East,
grain from the valley of the Nile,
spices from Arabia,
precious purple stuffs from Tyre,
tribute and spoil,
slaves and jewels from conquered nations she absorbed;
and yet whose very emperors were the unconscious instruments of a Progress they wot not of,
preserved
to the West by Marathon and Salamis.

With Caesar's legions its message went forth across Hispania
to the cliffs of the wild western ocean,
through Hercynian forests
to tribes that dwelt where great rivers roll up their bars by misty,
northern seas,
and even
to Celtic fastnesses beyond the Wall....

IV.

In and out of my early memories like a dancing ray of sunlight flits the spirit of Nancy.

I was always fond of her,
but in extreme youth I accepted her incense
with masculine complacency and took her allegiance
for granted,
never seeking
to fathom the nature of the spell I exercised over her.

Naturally other children teased me about her;
but what was worse,
with that charming lack of self-consciousness and consideration
for what in after life are called the finer feelings,
they teased her about me before me,
my presence deterring them not at all.

I can see them hopping around her in the Peters yard crying out:--
"Nancy's in love
with Hugh! Nancy's in love
with Hugh!"
A sufficiently thrilling pastime,
this,
for Nancy could take care of herself.

I was a bungler beside her when it came
to retaliation,
and not the least of her attractions
for me was her capacity
for anger:

fury would be a better term.

She would fly at them--even as she flew at the head-hunters when the Petrel was menaced;
and she could run like a deer.

Woe
to the unfortunate victim she overtook! Masculine strength,
exercised apologetically,
availed but little,
and I have seen Russell Peters and Gene Hollister retire from such encounters humiliated and weeping.

She never caught Ralph;
his methods of torture were more intelligent and subtle than Gene's and Russell's,
but she was his equal when it came
to a question of tongues.

"I know what's the matter
with you,
Ralph Hambleton,"
she would say.

"You're jealous."

An accusation that invariably put him on the defensive.

"You think all the girls are in love
with you,
don't you?"
These scenes I found somewhat embarrassing.

Not so Nancy.

After discomfiting her tormenters,
or wounding and scattering them,
she would return
to my side....

In spite of her frankly expressed preference
for me she had an elusiveness that made a continual appeal
to my imagination.

She was never obvious or commonplace,
and long before I began
to experience the discomforts and sufferings of youthful love I was fascinated by a nature eloquent
with contradictions and inconsistencies.

She was a tomboy,
yet her own sex was enhanced rather than overwhelmed by contact
with the other:

and no matter how many trees she climbed she never seemed
to lose her daintiness.

It was innate.

She could,
at times,
be surprisingly demure.

These impressions of her daintiness and demureness are particularly vivid in a picture my memory has retained of our walking together,
unattended,
to Susan Blackwood's birthday party.

She must have been about twelve years old.

It was the first time I had escorted her or any other girl
to a party;
Mrs. Willett had smiled over the proceeding,
but Nancy and I took it most seriously,
as symbolic of things
to come.

I can see Powell Street,
where Nancy lived,
at four o'clock on a mild and cloudy December afternoon,
the decorous,
retiring houses,
Nancy on one side of the pavement by the iron fences and I on the other by the tree boxes.

I can't remember her dress,
only the exquisite sense of her slimness and daintiness comes back
to me,
of her dark hair in a long braid tied
with a red ribbon,
of her slender legs clad in black stockings of shining silk.

We felt the occasion
to be somehow too significant,
too eloquent
for words....

In silence we climbed the flight of stone steps that led up
to the Blackwood mansion,
when suddenly the door was opened,
letting out sounds of music and revelry.

Mr. Blackwood's coloured butler,
Ned,
beamed at us hospitably,
inviting us
to enter the brightness within.

The shades were drawn,
the carpets were covered
with festal canvas,
the folding doors between the square rooms were flung back,
the prisms of the big chandeliers flung their light over animated groups of matrons and children.

Mrs. Watling,
the mother of the Watling twins--too young
to be present was directing
with vivacity the game of
"King William was King James's son,"
and Mrs. McAlery was playing the piano.

"Now choose you East,
now choose you West,
Now choose the one you love the best!"
Tom Peters,
in a velvet suit and consequently very miserable,
refused
to embrace Ethel Hollister;
while the scornful Julia lurked in a corner:

nothing would induce her
to enter such a foolish game.

I experienced a novel discomfiture when Ralph kissed Nancy....

Afterwards came the feast,
from which Ham Durrett,
in a pink paper cap
with streamers,
was at length forcibly removed by his mother.

Thus early did he betray his love
for the flesh pots....

It was not until I was sixteen that a player came and touched the keys of my soul,
and it awoke,
bewildered,
at these first tender notes.

The music quickened,
tripping in ecstasy,
to change by subtle phrases into themes of exquisite suffering hitherto unexperienced.

I knew that I loved Nancy.

With the advent of longer dresses that reached
to her shoe tops a change had come over her.

The tomboy,
the willing camp-follower who loved me and was unashamed,
were gone forever,
and a mysterious,
transfigured being,
neither girl nor woman,
had magically been evolved.

Could it be possible that she loved me still?

My complacency had vanished;
suddenly I had become the aggressor,
if only I had known how to
"aggress";
but in her presence I was seized by an accursed shyness that paralyzed my tongue,
and the things I had planned
to say were left unuttered.

It was something--though I did not realize it--to be able
to feel like that.

The time came when I could no longer keep this thing
to myself.

The need of an outlet,
of a confidant,
became imperative,
and I sought out Tom Peters.

It was in February;
I remember because I had ventured--with incredible daring--to send Nancy an elaborate,
rosy Valentine;
written on the back of it in a handwriting all too thinly disguised was the following verse,
the triumphant result of much hard thinking in school hours:-- Should you of this the sender guess Without another sign,
Would you repent,
and rest content
to be his Valentine I grew hot and cold by turns when I thought of its possible effects on my chances.

One of those useless,
slushy afternoons,
I took Tom
for a walk that led us,
as dusk came on,
past Nancy's house.

Only by painful degrees did I succeed in overcoming my bashfulness;
but Tom,
when at last I had blurted out the secret,
was most sympathetic,
although the ailment from which I suffered was as yet outside of the realm of his experience.

I have used the word
"ailment"
advisedly,
since he evidently put my trouble in the same category
with diphtheria or scarlet fever,
remarking that it was
"darned hard luck."

In vain I sought
to explain that I did not regard it as such in the least;
there was suffering,
I admitted,
but a degree of bliss none could comprehend who had not felt it.

He refused
to be envious,
or at least
to betray envy;
yet he was curious,
asking many questions,
and I had reason
to think before we parted that his admiration
for me was increased.

Was it possible that he,
too,
didn't love Nancy?

No,
it was funny,
but he didn't.

He failed
to see much in girls:

his tone remained commiserating,
yet he began
to take an interest in the progress of my suit.

For a time I had no progress
to report.

Out of consideration
for those members of our weekly dancing class whose parents were Episcopalians the meetings were discontinued during Lent,
and
to call would have demanded a courage not in me;
I should have become an object of ridicule among my friends and I would have died rather than face Nancy's mother and the members of her household.

I set about making ingenious plans
with a view
to encounters that might appear casual.

Nancy's school was dismissed at two,
so was mine.

By walking fast I could reach Salisbury Street,
near St. Mary's Seminary
for Young Ladies,
in time
to catch her,
but even then
for many days I was doomed
to disappointment.

She was either in company
with other girls,
or else she had taken another route;
this I surmised led past Sophy McAlery's house,
and I enlisted Tom as a confederate.

He was
to make straight
for the McAlery's on Elm while I followed Powell,
two short blocks away,
and if Nancy went
to Sophy's and left there alone he was
to announce the fact by a preconcerted signal.

Through long and persistent practice he had acquired a whistle shrill enough
to wake the dead,
accomplished by placing a finger of each hand between his teeth;--a gift that was the envy of his acquaintances,
and the subject of much discussion as
to whether his teeth were peculiar.

Tom insisted that they were;
it was an added distinction.

On this occasion he came up behind Nancy as she was leaving Sophy's gate and immediately sounded the alarm.

She leaped in the air,
dropped her school-books and whirled on him.

"Tom Peters! How dare you frighten me so!"
she cried.

Tom regarded her in sudden dismay.

"I--I didn't mean to,"
he said.

"I didn't think you were so near."

"But you must have seen me."

"I wasn't paying much attention,"
he equivocated,--a remark not calculated
to appease her anger.

"Why were you doing it?"
"I was just practising,"
said Tom.

"Practising!"
exclaimed Nancy,
scornfully.

"I shouldn't think you needed
to practise that any more."

"Oh,
I've done it louder,"
he declared,
"Listen!"
She seized his hands,
snatching them away from his lips.

At this critical moment I appeared around the corner considerably out of breath,
my heart beating like a watchman's rattle.

I tried
to feign nonchalance.

"Hello,
Tom,"
I said.

"Hello,
Nancy.

What's the matter?"
"It's Tom--he frightened me out of my senses."

Dropping his wrists,
she gave me a most disconcerting look;
there was in it the suspicion of a smile.

"What are you doing here,
Hugh?"
"I heard Tom,"
I explained.

"I should think you might have.

Where were you?"
"Over in another street,"
I answered,
with deliberate vagueness.

Nancy had suddenly become demure.

I did not dare look at her,
but I had a most uncomfortable notion that she suspected the plot.

Meanwhile we had begun
to walk along,
all three of us,
Tom,
obviously ill at ease and discomfited,
lagging a little behind.

Just before we reached the corner I managed
to kick him.

His departure was by no means graceful.

"I've got
to go;"
he announced abruptly,
and turned down the side street.

We watched his sturdy figure as it receded.

"Well,
of all queer boys!"
said Nancy,
and we walked on again.

"He's my best friend,"
I replied warmly.

"He doesn't seem
to care much
for your company,"
said Nancy.

"Oh,
they have dinner at half past two,"
I explained.

"Aren't you afraid of missing yours,
Hugh?"
she asked wickedly.

"I've got time.

I'd--I'd rather be
with you."

After making which audacious remark I was seized by a spasm of apprehension.

But nothing happened.

Nancy remained demure.

She didn't remind me that I had reflected upon Tom.

"That's nice of you,
Hugh."

"Oh,
I'm not saying it because it's nice,"
I faltered.

"I'd rather be
with you than--with anybody."

This was indeed the acme of daring.

I couldn't believe I had actually said it.

But again I received no rebuke;
instead came a remark that set me palpitating,
that I treasured
for many weeks
to come.

"I got a very nice valentine,"
she informed me.

"What was it like?"
I asked thickly.

"Oh,
beautiful! All pink lace and--and Cupids,
and the picture of a young man and a young woman in a garden."

"Was that all?"
"Oh,
no,
there was a verse,
in the oddest handwriting.

I wonder who sent it?"
"Perhaps Ralph,"
I hazarded ecstatically.

"Ralph couldn't write poetry,"
she replied disdainfully.

"Besides,
it was very good poetry."

I suggested other possible authors and admirers.

She rejected them all.

We reached her gate,
and I lingered.

As she looked down at me from the stone steps her eyes shone
with a soft light that filled me
with radiance,
and into her voice had come a questioning,
shy note that thrilled the more because it revealed a new Nancy of whom I had not dreamed.

"Perhaps I'll meet you again--coming from school,"
I said.

"Perhaps,"
she answered.

"You'll be late
to dinner,
Hugh,
if you don't go...."

I was late,
and unable
to eat much dinner,
somewhat
to my mother's alarm.

Love had taken away my appetite....

After dinner,
when I was wandering aimlessly about the yard,
Tom appeared on the other side of the fence.

"Don't ever ask me
to do that again,"
he said gloomily.

I did meet Nancy again coming from school,
not every day,
but nearly every day.

At first we pretended that there was no arrangement in this,
and we both feigned surprise when we encountered one another.

It was Nancy who possessed the courage that I lacked.

One afternoon she said:--
"I think I'd better walk
with the girls to-morrow,
Hugh."

I protested,
but she was firm.

And after that it was an understood thing that on certain days I should go directly home,
feeling like an exile.

Sophy McAlery had begun
to complain:

and I gathered that Sophy was Nancy's confidante.

The other girls had begun
to gossip.

It was Nancy who conceived the brilliant idea--the more delightful because she said nothing about it
to me--of making use of Sophy.

She would leave school
with Sophy,
and I waited on the corner near the McAlery house.

Poor Sophy! She was always of those who piped while others danced.

In those days she had two straw-coloured pigtails,
and her plain,
faithful face is before me as I write.

She never betrayed
to me the excitement that filled her at being the accomplice of our romance.

Gossip raged,
of course.

Far from being disturbed,
we used it,
so
to speak,
as a handle
for our love-making,
which was carried on in an inferential rather than a direct fashion.

Were they saying that we were lovers?

Delightful! We laughed at one another in the sunshine....

At last we achieved the great adventure of a clandestine meeting and went
for a walk in the afternoon,
avoiding the houses of our friends.

I've forgotten which of us had the boldness
to propose it.

The crocuses and tulips had broken the black mould,
the flower beds in the front yards were beginning
to blaze
with scarlet and yellow,
the lawns had turned a living green.

What did we talk about?

The substance has vanished,
only the flavour remains.

One awoke of a morning
to the twittering of birds,
to walk
to school amidst delicate,
lace-like shadows of great trees acloud
with old gold:

the buds lay curled like tiny feathers on the pavements.

Suddenly the shade was dense,
the sunlight white and glaring,
the odour of lilacs heavy in the air,
spring in all its fulness had come,--spring and Nancy.

Just so subtly,
yet
with the same seeming suddenness had budded and come
to leaf and flower a perfect understanding,
which nevertheless remained undefined.

This,
I had no doubt,
was my fault,
and due
to the incomprehensible shyness her presence continued
to inspire.

Although we did not altogether abandon our secret trysts,
we began
to meet in more natural ways;
there were garden parties and picnics where we strayed together through the woods and fields,
pausing
to tear off,
one by one,
the petals of a daisy,
"She loves me,
she loves me not."

I never ventured
to kiss her;
I always thought afterwards I might have done so,
she had seemed so willing,
her eyes had shone so expectantly as I sat beside her on the grass;
nor can I tell why I desired
to kiss her save that this was the traditional thing
to do
to the lady one loved.

To be sure,
the very touch of her hand was galvanic.

Paradoxically,
I saw the human side of her,
the yielding gentleness that always amazed me,
yet I never overcame my awe of the divine;
she was a being sacrosanct.

Whether this idealism were innate or the result of such romances as I had read I cannot say....

I got,
indeed,
an avowal of a sort.

The weekly dancing classes having begun again,
on one occasion when she had waltzed twice
with Gene Hollister I protested.

"Don't be silly,
Hugh,"
she whispered.

"Of course I like you better than anyone else--you ought
to know that."

We never got
to the word
"love,"
but we knew the feeling.

One cloud alone flung its shadow across these idyllic days.

Before I was fully aware of it I had drawn very near
to the first great junction-point of my life,
my graduation from Densmore Academy.

We were to
"change cars,"
in the language of Principal Haime.

Well enough
for the fortunate ones who were
to continue the academic journey,
which implied a postponement of the serious business of life;
but month after month of the last term had passed without a hint from my father that I was
to change cars.

Again and again I almost succeeded in screwing up my courage
to the point of mentioning college
to him,--never quite;
his manner,
though kind and calm,
somehow strengthened my suspicion that I had been judged and found wanting,
and doomed to
"business":

galley slavery,
I deemed it,
humdrum,
prosaic,
degrading! When I thought of it at night I experienced almost a frenzy of self-pity.

My father couldn't intend
to do that,
just because my monthly reports hadn't always been what he thought they ought
to be! Gene Hollister's were no better,
if as good,
and he was going
to Princeton.

Was I,
Hugh Paret,
to be denied the distinction of being a college man,
the delights of university existence,
cruelly separated and set apart from my friends whom I loved! held up
to the world and especially
to Nancy Willett as good
for nothing else! The thought was unbearable.

Characteristically,
I hoped against hope.

I have mentioned garden parties.

One of our annual institutions was Mrs. Willett's children's party in May;
for the Willett house had a garden that covered almost a quarter of a block.

Mrs. Willett loved children,
the greatest regret of her life being that providence had denied her a large family.

As far back as my memory goes she had been something of an invalid;
she had a sweet,
sad face,
and delicate hands so thin as
to seem almost transparent;
and she always sat in a chair under the great tree on the lawn,
smiling at us as we soared
to dizzy heights in the swing,
or played croquet,
or scurried through the paths,
and in and out of the latticed summer-house
with shrieks of laughter and terror.

It all ended
with a feast at a long table made of sawhorses and boards covered
with a white cloth,
and when the cake was cut there was wild excitement as
to who would get the ring and who the thimble.

We were more decorous,
or rather more awkward now,
and the party began
with a formal period when the boys gathered in a group and pretended indifference
to the girls.

The girls were cleverer at it,
and actually achieved the impression that they were indifferent.

We kept an eye on them,
uneasily,
while we talked.

To be in Nancy's presence and not alone
with Nancy was agonizing,
and I wondered at a sang-froid beyond my power
to achieve,
accused her of coldness,
my sufferings being the greater because she seemed more beautiful,
daintier,
more irreproachable than I had ever seen her.

Even at that early age she gave evidence of the social gift,
and it was due
to her efforts that we forgot our best clothes and our newly born self-consciousness.

When I begged her
to slip away
with me among the currant bushes she whispered:--
"I can't,
Hugh.

I'm the hostess,
you know."

I had gone there in a flutter of anticipation,
but nothing went right that day.

There was dancing in the big rooms that looked out on the garden;
the only girl
with whom I cared
to dance was Nancy,
and she was busy finding partners
for the backward members of both sexes;
though she was my partner,
to be sure,
when it all wound up
with a Virginia reel on the lawn.

Then,
at supper,
to cap the climax of untoward incidents,
an animated discussion was begun as
to the relative merits of the various colleges,
the girls,
too,
taking sides.

Mac Willett,
Nancy's cousin,
was going
to Yale,
Gene Hollister
to Princeton,
the Ewan boys
to our State University,
while Perry Blackwood and Ralph Hambleton and Ham Durrett were destined
for Harvard;
Tom Peters,
also,
though he was not
to graduate from the Academy
for another year.

I might have known that Ralph would have suspected my misery.

He sat triumphantly next
to Nancy herself,
while I had been told off
to entertain the faithful Sophy.

Noticing my silence,
he demanded wickedly:--
"Where are you going,
Hugh?"
"Harvard,
I think,"
I answered
with as bold a front as I could muster.

"I haven't talked it over
with my father yet."

It was intolerable
to admit that I of them all was
to be left behind.

Nancy looked at me in surprise.

She was always downright.

"Oh,
Hugh,
doesn't your father mean
to put you in business?"
she exclaimed.

A hot flush spread over my face.

Even
to her I had not betrayed my apprehensions on this painful subject.

Perhaps it was because of this very reason,
knowing me as she did,
that she had divined my fate.

Could my father have spoken of it
to anyone?

"Not that I know of,"
I said angrily.

I wondered if she knew how deeply she had hurt me.

The others laughed.

The colour rose in Nancy's cheeks,
and she gave me an appealing,
almost tearful look,
but my heart had hardened.

As soon as supper was over I left the table
to wander,
nursing my wrongs,
in a far corner of the garden,
gay shouts and laughter still echoing in my ears.

I was negligible,
even my pathetic subterfuge had been detected and cruelly ridiculed by these friends whom I had always loved and sought out,
and who now were so absorbed in their own prospects and happiness that they cared nothing
for mine.

And Nancy! I had been betrayed by Nancy!...

Twilight was coming on.

I remember glancing down miserably at the new blue suit I had put on so hopefully
for the first time that afternoon.

Separating the garden from the street was a high,
smooth board fence
with a little gate in it,
and I had my hand on the latch when I heard the sound of hurrying steps on the gravel path and a familiar voice calling my name.

"Hugh! Hugh!"
I turned.

Nancy stood before me.

"Hugh,
you're not going!"
"Yes,
I am."

"Why?"
"If you don't know,
there's no use telling you."

"Just because I said your father intended
to put you in business! Oh,
Hugh,
why are you so foolish and so proud?

Do you suppose that anyone-- that I--think any the worse of you?"
Yes,
she had read me,
she alone had entered into the source of that prevarication,
the complex feelings from which it sprang.

But at that moment I could not forgive her
for humiliating me.

I hugged my grievance.

"It was true,
what I said,"
I declared hotly.

"My father has not spoken.

It is true that I'm going
to college,
because I'll make it true.

I may not go this year."

She stood staring in sheer surprise at sight of my sudden,
quivering passion.

I think the very intensity of it frightened her.

And then,
without more ado,
I opened the gate and was gone....

That night,
though I did not realize it,
my journey into a Far Country was begun.

The misery that followed this incident had one compensating factor.

Although too late
to electrify Densmore and Principal Haime
with my scholarship,
I was determined
to go
to college now,
somehow,
sometime.

I would show my father,
these companions of mine,
and above all Nancy herself the stuff of which I was made,
compel them sooner or later
to admit that they had misjudged me.

I had been possessed by similar resolutions before,
though none so strong,
and they had a way of sinking below the surface of my consciousness,
only
to rise again and again until by sheer pressure they achieved realization.

Yet I might have returned
to Nancy if something had not occurred which I would have thought unbelievable:

she began
to show a marked preference
for Ralph Hambleton.

At first I regarded this affair as the most obvious of retaliations.

She,
likewise,
had pride.

Gradually,
however,
a feeling of uneasiness crept over me:

as pretence,
her performance was altogether too realistic;
she threw her whole soul into it,
danced
with Ralph as often as she had ever danced
with me,
took walks
with him,
deferred
to his opinions until,
in spite of myself,
I became convinced that the preference was genuine.

I was a curious mixture of self- confidence and self-depreciation,
and never had his superiority seemed more patent than now.

His air of satisfaction was maddening.

How well I remember his triumph on that hot,
June morning of our graduation from Densmore,
a triumph he had apparently achieved without labour,
and which he seemed
to despise.

A fitful breeze blew through the chapel at the top of the building;
we,
the graduates,
sat in two rows next
to the platform,
and behind us the wooden benches nicked by many knives--were filled
with sisters and mothers and fathers,
some anxious,
some proud and some sad.

So brief a span,
like that summer's day,
and youth was gone! Would the time come when we,
too,
should sit by the waters of Babylon and sigh
for it?

The world was upside down.

We read the one hundred and third psalm.

Then Principal Haime,
in his long
"Prince Albert"
and a ridiculously inadequate collar that emphasized his scrawny neck,
reminded us of the sacred associations we had formed,
of the peculiar responsibilities that rested on us,
who were the privileged of the city.

"We had crossed to-day,"
he said,
"an invisible threshold.

Some were
to go on
to higher institutions of learning.

Others..."

I gulped.

Quoting the Scriptures,
he complimented those who had made the most of their opportunities.

And it was then that he called out,
impressively,
the name of Ralph Forrester Hambleton.

Summa cum laude! Suddenly I was seized
with passionate,
vehement regrets at the sound of the applause.

I might have been the prize scholar,
instead of Ralph,
if I had only worked,
if I had only realized what this focussing day of graduation meant! I might have been a marked individual,
with people murmuring words of admiration,
of speculation concerning the brilliancy of my future!...

When at last my name was called and I rose
to receive my diploma it seemed as though my incompetency had been proclaimed
to the world...

That evening I stood in the narrow gallery of the flag-decked gymnasium and watched Nancy dancing
with Ralph.

I let her go without protest or reproach.

A mysterious lesion seemed
to have taken place,
I felt astonished and relieved,
yet I was heavy
with sadness.

My emancipation had been bought at a price.

Something hitherto spontaneous,
warm and living was withering within me.

V.

It was true
to my father's character that he should have waited until the day after graduation
to discuss my future,
if discussion be the proper word.

The next evening at supper he informed me that he wished
to talk
to me in the sitting-room,
whither I followed him
with a sinking heart.

He seated himself at his desk,
and sat
for a moment gazing at me
with a curious and benumbing expression,
and then the blow fell.

"Hugh,
I have spoken
to your Cousin Robert Breck about you,
and he has kindly consented
to give you a trial."

"To give me a trial,
sir!"
I exclaimed.

"To employ you at a small but reasonable salary."

I could find no words
to express my dismay.

My dreams had come
to this,
that I was
to be made a clerk in a grocery store! The fact that it was a wholesale grocery store was little consolation.

"But father,"
I faltered,
"I don't want
to go into business."

"Ah!"
The sharpness of the exclamation might have betrayed
to me the pain in which he was,
but he recovered himself instantly.

And I could see nothing but an inexorable justice closing in on me mechanically;
a blind justice,
in its inability
to read my soul.

"The time
to have decided that,"
he declared,
"was some years ago,
my son.

I have given you the best schooling a boy can have,
and you have not shown the least appreciation of your advantages.

I do not enjoy saying this,
Hugh,
but in spite of all my efforts and of those of your mother,
you have remained undeveloped and irresponsible.

My hope,
as you know,
was
to have made you a professional man,
a lawyer,
and
to take you into my office.

My father and grandfather were professional men before me.

But you are wholly lacking in ambition."

And I had burned
with it all my life!
"I have ambition,"
I cried,
the tears forcing themselves
to my eyes.

"Ambition--for what,
my son?"
I hesitated.

How could I tell him that my longings
to do something,
to be somebody in the world were never more keen than at that moment?

Matthew Arnold had not then written his definition of God as the stream of tendency by which we fulfil the laws of our being;
and my father,
at any rate,
would not have acquiesced in the definition.

Dimly but passionately I felt then,
as I had always felt,
that I had a mission
to perform,
a service
to do which ultimately would be revealed
to me.

But the hopelessness of explaining this took on,
now,
the proportions of a tragedy.

And I could only gaze at him.

"What kind of ambition,
Hugh?"
he repeated sadly.

"I--I have sometimes thought I could write,
sir,
if I had a chance.

I like it better than anything else.

I--I have tried it.

And if I could only go
to college--"
"Literature!"
There was in his voice a scandalized note.

"Why not,
father?"
I asked weakly.

And now it was he who,
for the first time,
seemed
to be at a loss
to express himself.

He turned in his chair,
and
with a sweep of the hand indicated the long rows of musty-backed volumes.

"Here,"
he said,
"you have had at your disposal as well-assorted a small library as the city contains,
and you have not availed yourself of it.

Yet you talk
to me of literature as a profession.

I am afraid,
Hugh,
that this is merely another indication of your desire
to shun hard work,
and I must tell you frankly that I fail
to see in you the least qualification
for such a career.

You have not even inherited my taste
for books.

I venture
to say,
for instance,
that you have never even read a paragraph of Plutarch,
and yet when I was your age I was completely familiar
with the Lives.

You will not read Scott or Dickens."

The impeachment was not
to be denied,
for the classics were hateful
to me.

Naturally I was afraid
to make such a damning admission.

My father had succeeded in presenting my ambition as the height of absurdity and presumption,
and
with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs,
Bohn's Standard Library! Nor did it occur
to him or
to me that one might be great in literature without having read so much as a gritty page of them....

He finished his argument by reminding me that worthless persons sought
to enter the arts in the search
for a fool's paradise,
and in order
to satisfy a reprehensible craving
for notoriety.

The implication was clear,
that imaginative production could not be classed as hard work.

And he assured me that literature was a profession in which no one could afford
to be second class.

A Longfellow,
a Harriet Beecher Stowe,
or nothing.

This was a practical age and a practical country.

We had indeed produced Irvings and Hawthornes,
but the future of American letters was,
to say the least,
problematical.

We were a utilitarian people who would never create a great literature,
and he reminded me that the days of the romantic and the picturesque had passed.

He gathered that I desired
to be a novelist.

Well,
novelists,
with certain exceptions,
were fantastic fellows who blew iridescent soap-bubbles and who had no morals.

In the face of such a philosophy as his I was mute.

The world appeared a dreary place of musty offices and smoky steel-works,
of coal dust,
of labour without a spark of inspiration.

And that other,
the world of my dreams,
simply did not exist.

Incidentally my father had condemned Cousin Robert's wholesale grocery business as a refuge of the lesser of intellect that could not achieve the professions,--an inference not calculated
to stir my ambition and liking
for it at the start.

I began my business career on the following Monday morning.

At breakfast,
held earlier than usual on my account,
my mother's sympathy was the more eloquent
for being unspoken,
while my father wore an air of unwonted cheerfulness;
charging me,
when I departed,
to give his kindest remembrances
to my Cousin Robert Breck.

With a sense of martyrdom somehow deepened by this attitude of my parents I boarded a horse-car and went down town.

Early though it was,
the narrow streets of the wholesale district reverberated
with the rattle of trucks and echoed
with the shouts of drivers.

The day promised
to be scorching.

At the door of the warehouse of Breck and Company I was greeted by the ineffable smell of groceries in which the suggestion of parched coffee prevailed.

This is the sharpest remembrance of all,
and even to-day that odour affects me somewhat in the manner that the interior of a ship affects a person prone
to seasickness.

My Cousin Robert,
in his well-worn alpaca coat,
was already seated at his desk behind the clouded glass partition next the alley at the back of the store,
and as I entered he gazed at me over his steel-rimmed spectacles
with that same disturbing look of clairvoyance I have already mentioned as one of his characteristics.

The grey eyes were quizzical,
and yet seemed
to express a little commiseration.

"Well,
Hugh,
you've decided
to honour us,
have you?"
he asked.

"I'm much obliged
for giving me the place,
Cousin Robert,"
I replied.

But he had no use
for that sort of politeness,
and he saw through me,
as always.

"So you're not too tony
for the grocery business,
eh?"
"Oh,
no,
sir."

"It was good enough
for old Benjamin Breck,"
he said.

"Well,
I'll give you a fair trial,
my boy,
and no favouritism on account of relationship,
any more than
to Willie."

His strong voice resounded through the store,
and presently my cousin Willie appeared in answer
to his summons,
the same Willie who used
to lead me,
on mischief bent,
through the barns and woods and fields of Claremore.

He was barefoot no longer,
though freckled still,
grown lanky and tall;
he wore a coarse blue apron that fell below his knees,
and a pencil was stuck behind his ear.

"Get an apron
for Hugh,"
said his father.

Willie's grin grew wider.

"I'll fit him out,"
he said.

"Start him in the shipping department,"
directed Cousin Robert,
and turned
to his letters.

I was forthwith provided
with an apron,
and introduced
to the slim and anaemic but cheerful Johnny Hedges,
the shipping clerk,
hard at work in the alley.

Secretly I looked down on my fellow-clerks,
as one destined
for a higher mission,
made out of better stuff,--finer stuff.

Despite my attempt
to hide this sense of superiority they were swift
to discover it;
and perhaps it is
to my credit as well as theirs that they did not resent it.

Curiously enough,
they seemed
to acknowledge it.

Before the week was out I had earned the nickname of Beau Brummel.

"Say,
Beau,"
Johnny Hedges would ask,
when I appeared of a morning,
"what happened in the great world last night?"
I had an affection
for them,
these fellow-clerks,
and I often wondered at their contentment
with the drab lives they led,
at their self- congratulation for
"having a job"
at Breck and Company's.

"You don't mean
to say you like this kind of work?"
I exclaimed one day
to Johnny Hedges,
as we sat on barrels of XXXX flour looking out at the hot sunlight in the alley.

"It ain't a question of liking it,
Beau,"
he rebuked me.

"It's all very well
for you
to talk,
since your father's a millionaire"
(a fiction so firmly embedded in their heads that no amount of denial affected it),
"but what do you think would happen
to me if I was fired?

I couldn't go home and take it easy--you bet not.

I just want
to shake hands
with myself when I think that I've got a home,
and a job like this.

I know a feller--a hard worker he was,
too who walked the pavements
for three months when the Colvers failed,
and couldn't get nothing,
and took
to drink,
and the last I heard of him he was sleeping in police stations and walking the ties,
and his wife's a waitress at a cheap hotel.

Don't you think it's easy
to get a job."

I was momentarily sobered by the earnestness
with which he brought home
to me the relentlessness of our civilization.

It seemed incredible.

I should have learned a lesson in that store.

Barring a few discordant days when the orders came in too fast or when we were short handed because of sickness,
it was a veritable hive of happiness;
morning after morning clerks and porters arrived,
pale,
yet smiling,
and laboured
with cheerfulness from eight o'clock until six,
and departed as cheerfully
for modest homes in obscure neighbourhoods that seemed
to me areas of exile.

They were troubled
with no visions of better things.

When the travelling men came in from the
"road"
there was great hilarity.

Important personages,
these,
looked up
to by the city clerks;
jolly,
reckless,
Elizabethan-like rovers,
who had tasted of the wine of liberty--and of other wines
with the ineradicable lust
for the road in their blood.

No more routine
for Jimmy Bowles,
who was king of them all.

I shudder
to think how much of my knowledge of life I owe
to this Jimmy,
whose stories would have filled a quarto volume,
but could on no account have been published;
for a self-respecting post-office would not have allowed them
to pass through the mails.

As it was,
Jimmy gave them circulation enough.

I can still see his round face,
with the nose just indicated,
his wicked,
twinkling little eyes,
and I can hear his husky voice fall
to a whisper when
"the boss"
passed through the store.

Jimmy,
when visiting us,
always had a group around him.

His audacity
with women amazed me,
for he never passed one of the
"lady clerks"
without some form of caress,
which they resented but invariably laughed at.

One day he imparted
to me his code of morality:

he never made love
to another man's wife,
so he assured me,
if he knew the man! The secret of life he had discovered in laughter,
and by laughter he sold quantities of Cousin Robert's groceries.

Mr. Bowles boasted of a catholic acquaintance in all the cities of his district,
but before venturing forth
to conquer these he had learned his own city by heart.

My Cousin Robert was not aware of the fact that Mr. Bowles
"showed"
the town
to certain customers.

He even desired
to show it
to me,
but an epicurean strain in my nature held me back.

Johnny Hedges went
with him occasionally,
and Henry Schneider,
the bill clerk,
and I listened eagerly
to their experiences,
afterwards confiding them
to Tom....

There were times when,
driven by an overwhelming curiosity,
I ventured into certain strange streets,
alone,
shivering
with cold and excitement,
gripped by a fascination I did not comprehend,
my eyes now averted,
now irresistibly raised toward the white streaks of light that outlined the windows of dark houses....

One winter evening as I was going home,
I encountered at the mail-box a young woman who shot at me a queer,
twisted smile.

I stood still,
as though stunned,
looking after her,
and when halfway across the slushy street she turned and smiled again.

Prodigiously excited,
I followed her,
fearful that I might be seen by someone who knew me,
nor was it until she reached an unfamiliar street that I ventured
to overtake her.

She confounded me by facing me.

"Get out!"
she cried fiercely.

I halted in my tracks,
overwhelmed
with shame.

But she continued
to regard me by the light of the street lamp.

"You didn't want
to be seen
with me on Second Street,
did you?

You're one of those sneaking swells."

The shock of this sudden onslaught was tremendous.

I stood frozen
to the spot,
trembling,
convicted,
for I knew that her accusation was just;
I had wounded her,
and I had a desire
to make amends.

"I'm sorry,"
I faltered.

"I didn't mean--to offend you.

And you smiled--"
I got no farther.

She began
to laugh,
and so loudly that I glanced anxiously about.

I would have fled,
but something still held me,
something that belied the harshness of her laugh.

"You're just a kid,"
she told me.

"Say,
you get along home,
and tell your mamma I sent you."

Whereupon I departed in a state of humiliation and self-reproach I had never before known,
wandering about aimlessly
for a long time.

When at length I arrived at home,
late
for supper,
my mother's solicitude only served
to deepen my pain.

She went
to the kitchen herself
to see if my mince-pie were hot,
and served me
with her own hands.

My father remained at his place at the head of the table while I tried
to eat,
smiling indulgently at her ministrations.

"Oh,
a little hard work won't hurt him,
Sarah,"
he said.

"When I was his age I often worked until eleven o'clock and never felt the worse
for it.

Business must be pretty good,
eh,
Hugh?"
I had never seen him in a more relaxing mood,
a more approving one.

My mother sat down beside me....

Words seem useless
to express the complicated nature of my suffering at that moment,--my remorse,
my sense of deception,
of hypocrisy,--yes,
and my terror.

I tried
to talk naturally,
to answer my father's questions about affairs at the store,
while all the time my eyes rested upon the objects of the room,
familiar since childhood.

Here were warmth,
love,
and safety.

Why could I not be content
with them,
thankful
for them?

What was it in me that drove me from these sheltering walls out into the dark places?

I glanced at my father.

Had he ever known these wild,
destroying desires?

Oh,
if I only could have confided in him! The very idea of it was preposterous.

Such placidity as theirs would never understand the nature of my temptations,
and I pictured
to myself their horror and despair at my revelation.

In imagination I beheld their figures receding while I drifted out
to sea,
alone.

Would the tide--which was somehow within me--carry me out and out,
in spite of all I could do?

"Give me that man That is not passion's slave,
and I will wear him In my heart's core...."

I did not shirk my tasks at the store,
although I never got over the feeling that a fine instrument was being employed where a coarser one would have done equally well.

There were moments when I was almost overcome by surges of self-commiseration and of impotent anger:

for instance,
I was once driven out of a shop by an incensed German grocer whom I had asked
to settle a long-standing account.

Yet the days passed,
the daily grind absorbed my energies,
and when I was not collecting,
or tediously going over the stock in the dim recesses of the store,
I was running errands in the wholesale district,
treading the burning brick of the pavements,
dodging heavy trucks and drays and perspiring clerks who flew about
with memorandum pads in their hands,
or awaiting the pleasure of bank tellers.

Save Harvey,
the venerable porter,
I was the last
to leave the store in the evening,
and I always came away
with the taste on my palate of Breck and Company's mail,
it being my final duty to
"lick"
the whole of it and deposit it in the box at the corner.

The gum on the envelopes tasted of winter-green.

My Cousin Robert was somewhat astonished at my application.

"We'll make a man of you yet,
Hugh,"
he said
to me once,
when I had performed a commission
with unexpected despatch....

Business was his all-in-all,
and he had an undisguised contempt
for higher education.

To send a boy
to college was,
in his opinion,
to run no inconsiderable risk of ruining him.

What did they amount
to when they came home,
strutting like peacocks,
full of fads and fancies,
and much too good
to associate
with decent,
hard-working citizens?

Nevertheless when autumn came and my friends departed
with eclat
for the East,
I was desperate indeed! Even the contemplation of Robert Breck did not console me,
and yet here,
in truth,
was a life which might have served me as a model.

His store was his castle;
and his reputation
for integrity and square dealing as wide as the city.

Often I used
to watch him
with a certain envy as he stood in the doorway,
his hands in his pockets,
and greeted fellow-merchant and banker
with his genuine and dignified directness.

This man was his own master.

They all called him
"Robert,"
and they made it clear by their manner that they knew they were addressing one who fulfilled his obligations and asked no favours.

Crusty old Nathaniel Durrett once declared that when you bought a bill of goods from Robert Breck you did not have
to check up the invoice or employ a chemist.

Here was a character
to mould upon.

If my ambition could but have been bounded by Breck and Company,
I,
too,
might have come
to stand in that doorway content
with a tribute that was greater than Caesar's.

I had been dreading the Christmas holidays,
which were indeed
to be no holidays
for me.

And when at length they arrived they brought
with them from the East certain heroes fashionably clad,
citizens now of a larger world than mine.

These former companions had become superior beings,
they could not help showing it,
and their presence destroyed the Balance of Things.

For alas,
I had not wholly abjured the feminine sex after all! And from being a somewhat important factor in the lives of Ruth Hollister and other young women I suddenly became of no account.

New interests,
new rivalries and loyalties had arisen in which I had no share;
I must perforce busy myself
with invoices of flour and coffee and canned fruits while sleigh rides and coasting and skating expeditions
to Blackstone Lake followed one another day after day,--for the irony of circumstances had decreed a winter uncommonly cold.

There were evening parties,
too,
where I felt like an alien,
though my friends were guilty of no conscious neglect;
and had I been able
to accept the situation simply,
I should not have suffered.

The principal event of those holidays was a play given in the old Hambleton house
(which later became the Boyne Club),
under the direction of the lively and talented Mrs. Watling.

I was invited,
indeed,
to participate;
but even if I had had the desire I could not have done so,
since the rehearsals were carried on in the daytime.

Nancy was the leading lady.

I have neglected
to mention that she too had been away almost continuously since our misunderstanding,
for the summer in the mountains,--a sojourn recommended
for her mother's health;
and in the autumn she had somewhat abruptly decided
to go East
to boarding-school at Farmington.

During the brief months of her absence she had marvellously acquired maturity and aplomb,
a worldliness of manner and a certain frivolity that seemed
to put those who surrounded her on a lower plane.

She was only seventeen,
yet she seemed the woman of thirty whose role she played.

First there were murmurs,
then sustained applause.

I scarcely recognized her:

she had taken wings and soared far above me,
suggesting a sphere of power and luxury hitherto unimagined and beyond the scope of the world
to which I belonged.

Her triumph was genuine.

When the play was over she was immediately surrounded by enthusiastic admirers eager
to congratulate her,
to dance
with her.

I too would have gone forward,
but a sense of inadequacy,
of unimportance,
of an inability
to cope
with her,
held me back,
and from a corner I watched her sweeping around the room,
holding up her train,
and leaning on the arm of Bob Lansing,
a classmate whom Ralph had brought home from Harvard.

Then it was Ralph's turn:

that affair seemed still
to be going on.

My feelings were a strange medley of despondency and stimulation....

Our eyes met.

Her partner now was Ham Durrett.

Capriciously releasing him,
she stood before me,
"Hugh,
you haven't asked me
to dance,
or even told me what you thought of the play."

"I thought it was splendid,"
I said lamely.

Because she refrained from replying I was farther than ever from understanding her.

How was I
to divine what she felt?

or whether any longer she felt at all?

Here,
in this costume of a woman of the world,
with the string of pearls at her neck
to give her the final touch of brilliancy,
was a strange,
new creature who baffled and silenced me....

We had not gone halfway across the room when she halted abruptly.

"I'm tired,"
she exclaimed.

"I don't feel like dancing just now,"
and led the way
to the big,
rose punch-bowl,
one of the Durretts'
most cherished possessions.

Glancing up at me over the glass of lemonade I had given her she went on:

"Why haven't you been
to see me since I came home?

I've wanted
to talk
to you,
to hear how you are getting along."

Was she trying
to make amends,
or reminding me in this subtle way of the cause of our quarrel?

What I was aware of as I looked at her was an attitude,
a vantage point apparently gained by contact
with that mysterious outer world which thus vicariously had laid its spell on me;
I was tremendously struck by the thought that
to achieve this attitude meant emancipation,
invulnerability against the aches and pains which otherwise our fellow-beings had the power
to give us;
mastery over life,
--the ability
to choose calmly,
as from a height,
what were best
for one's self,
untroubled by loves and hates.

Untroubled by loves and hates! At that very moment,
paradoxically,
I loved her madly,
but
with a love not of the old quality,
a love that demanded a vantage point of its own.

Even though she had made an advance--and some elusiveness in her manner led me
to doubt it I could not go
to her now.

I must go as a conqueror,
--a conqueror in the lists she herself had chosen,
where the prize is power.

"Oh,
I'm getting along pretty well,"
I said.

"At any rate,
they don't complain of me."

"Somehow,"
she ventured,
"somehow it's hard
to think of you as a business man."

I took this
for a reference
to the boast I had made that I would go
to college.

"Business isn't so bad as it might be,"
I assured her.

"I think a man ought
to go away
to college,"
she declared,
in what seemed another tone.

"He makes friends,
learns certain things,--it gives him finish.

We are very provincial here."

Provincial! I did not stop
to reflect how recently she must have acquired the word;
it summed up precisely the self-estimate at which I had arrived.

The sting went deep.

Before I could think of an effective reply Nancy was being carried off by the young man from the East,
who was clearly infatuated.

He was not provincial.

She smiled back at me brightly over his shoulder....

In that instant were fused in one resolution all the discordant elements within me of aspiration and discontent.

It was not so much that I would show Nancy what I intended
to do--I would show myself;
and I felt a sudden elation,
and accession of power that enabled me momentarily
to despise the puppets
with whom she danced....

From this mood I was awakened
with a start
to feel a hand on my shoulder,
and I turned
to confront her father,
McAlery Willett;
a gregarious,
easygoing,
pleasure-loving gentleman who made only a pretence of business,
having inherited an ample fortune from his father,
unique among his generation in our city in that he paid some attention
to fashion in his dress;
good living was already beginning
to affect his figure.

His mellow voice had a way of breaking an octave.

"Don't worry,
my boy,"
he said.

"You stick
to business.

These college fellows are cocks of the walk just now,
but some day you'll be able
to snap your fingers at all of
'em."

The next day was dark,
overcast,
smoky,
damp-the soft,
unwholesome dampness that follows a spell of hard frost.

I spent the morning and afternoon on the gloomy third floor of Breck and Company,
making a list of the stock.

I remember the place as though I had just stepped out of it,
the freight elevator at the back,
the dusty,
iron columns,
the continuous piles of cases and bags and barrels
with narrow aisles between them;
the dirty windows,
spotted and soot-streaked,
that looked down on Second Street.

I was determined now
to escape from all this,
and I had my plan in mind.

No sooner had I swallowed my supper that evening than I set out at a swift pace
for a modest residence district ten blocks away,
coming
to a little frame house set back in a yard,--one of those houses in which the ringing of the front door-bell produces the greatest commotion;
children's voices were excitedly raised and then hushed.

After a brief silence the door was opened by a pleasant-faced,
brown-bearded man,
who stood staring at me in surprise.

His hair was rumpled,
he wore an old house coat
with a hole in the elbow,
and
with one finger he kept his place in the book which he held in his hand.

"Hugh Paret!"
he exclaimed.

He ushered me into a little parlour lighted by two lamps,
that bore every evidence of having been recently vacated.

Its features somehow bespoke a struggle
for existence;
as though its occupants had worried much and loved much.

It was a room best described by the word
"home"--home made more precious by a certain precariousness.

Toys and school-books strewed the floor,
a sewing-bag and apron lay across the sofa,
and in one corner was a roll-topped desk of varnished oak.

The seats of the chairs were comfortably depressed.

So this was where Mr. Wood lived! Mr. Wood,
instructor in Latin and Greek at Densmore Academy.

It was now borne in on me
for the first time that he did live and have his ties like any other human being,
instead of just appearing magically from nowhere on a platform in a chalky room at nine every morning,
to vanish again in the afternoon.

I had formerly stood in awe of his presence.

But now I was suddenly possessed by an embarrassment,
and
(shall I say it?)
by a commiseration bordering on contempt
for a man who would consent
to live thus
for the sake of being a schoolteacher.

How strange that civilization should set such a high value on education and treat its functionaries
with such neglect! Mr. Wood's surprise at seeing me was genuine.

For I had never shown a particular interest in him,
nor in the knowledge which he strove
to impart.

"I thought you had forgotten me,
Hugh,"
he said,
and added whimsically:

"most boys do,
when they graduate."

I felt the reproach,
which made it the more difficult
for me
to state my errand.

"I knew you sometimes took pupils in the evening,
Mr. Wood."

"Pupils,--yes,"
he replied,
still eyeing me.

Suddenly his eyes twinkled.

He had indeed no reason
to suspect me of thirsting
for learning.

"But I was under the impression that you had gone into business,
Hugh."

"The fact is,
sir,"
I explained somewhat painfully,
"that I am not satisfied
with business.

I feel--as if I ought
to know more.

And I came
to see if you would give me lessons about three nights a week,
because I want
to take the Harvard examinations next summer."

Thus I made it appear,
and so persuaded myself,
that my ambition had been prompted by a craving
for knowledge.

As soon as he could recover himself he reminded me that he had on many occasions declared I had a brain.

"Your father must be very happy over this decision of yours,"
he said.

That was the point,
I told him.

It was
to be a surprise
for my father;
I was
to take the examinations first,
and inform him afterwards.

To my intense relief,
Mr. Wood found the scheme wholly laudable,
and entered into it
with zest.

He produced examinations of preceding years from a pigeonhole in his desk,
and inside of half an hour the arrangement was made,
the price of the lessons settled.

They were well within my salary,
which recently had been raised....

When I went down town,
or collecting bills
for Breck and Company,
I took a text-book along
with me in the street-cars.

Now at last I had behind my studies a driving force.

Algebra,
Latin,
Greek and history became worth while,
means
to an end.

I astonished Mr. Wood;
and sometimes he would tilt back his chair,
take off his spectacles and pull his beard.

"Why in the name of all the sages,"
he would demand,
"couldn't you have done this well at school?

You might have led your class,
instead of Ralph Hambleton."

I grew very fond of Mr. Wood,
and even of his thin little wife,
who occasionally flitted into the room after we had finished.

I fully intended
to keep up
with them in after life,
but I never did.

I forgot them completely....

My parents were not wholly easy in their minds concerning me;
they were bewildered by the new aspect I presented.

For my lately acquired motive was strong enough
to compel me
to restrict myself socially,
and the evenings I spent at home were given
to study,
usually in my own room.

Once I was caught
with a Latin grammar:

I was just
"looking over it,"
I said.

My mother sighed.

I knew what was in her mind;
she had always been secretly disappointed that I had not been sent
to college.

And presently,
when my father went out
to attend a trustee's meeting,
the impulse
to confide in her almost overcame me;
I loved her
with that affection which goes out
to those whom we feel understand us,
but I was learning
to restrain my feelings.

She looked at me wistfully....

I knew that she would insist on telling my father,
and thus possibly frustrate my plans.

That I was not discovered was due
to a certain quixotic twist in my father's character.

I was working now,
and though not actually earning my own living,
he no longer felt justified in prying into my affairs.

When June arrived,
however,
my tutor began
to show signs that his conscience was troubling him,
and one night he delivered his ultimatum.

The joke had gone far enough,
he implied.

My intentions,
indeed,
he found praiseworthy,
but in his opinion it was high time that my father were informed of them;
he was determined
to call at my father's office.

The next morning was blue
with the presage of showers;
blue,
too,
with the presage of fate.

An interminable morning.

My tasks had become utterly distasteful.

And in the afternoon,
so when I sat down
to make out invoices,
I wrote automatically the names of the familiar customers,
my mind now exalted by hope,
now depressed by anxiety.

The result of an interview perhaps even now going on would determine whether or no I should be immediately released from a slavery I detested.

Would Mr. Wood persuade my father?

If not,
I was prepared
to take more desperate measures;
remain in the grocery business I would not.

In the evening,
as I hurried homeward from the corner where the Boyne Street car had dropped me,
I halted suddenly in front of the Peters house,
absorbing the scene where my childhood had been spent:

each of these spreading maples was an old friend,
and in these yards I had played and dreamed.

An unaccountable sadness passed over me as I walked on toward our gate;
I entered it,
gained the doorway of the house and went upstairs,
glancing into the sitting room.

My mother sat by the window,
sewing.

She looked up at me
with an ineffable expression,
in which I read a trace of tears.

"Hugh!"
she exclaimed.

I felt very uncomfortable,
and stood looking down at her.

"Why didn't you tell us,
my son?"
In her voice was in truth reproach;
yet mingled
with that was another note,
which I think was pride.

"What has father said?"
I asked.

"Oh,
my dear,
he will tell you himself.

I--I don't know--he will talk
to you."

Suddenly she seized my hands and drew me down
to her,
and then held me away,
gazing into my face
with a passionate questioning,
her lips smiling,
her eyes wet.

What did she see?

Was there a subtler relationship between our natures than I guessed?

Did she understand by some instinctive power the riddle within me?

divine through love the force that was driving me on she knew not whither,
nor I?

At the sound of my father's step in the hall she released me.

He came in as though nothing had happened.

"Well,
Hugh,
are you home?"
he said....

Never had I been more impressed,
more bewildered by his self-command than at that time.

Save
for the fact that my mother talked less than usual,
supper passed as though nothing had happened.

Whether I had shaken him,
disappointed him,
or gained his reluctant approval I could not tell.

Gradually his outward calmness turned my suspense
to irritation....

But when at length we were alone together,
I gained a certain reassurance.

His manner was not severe.

He hesitated a little before beginning.

"I must confess,
Hugh;
that I scarcely know what
to say about this proceeding of yours.

The thing that strikes me most forcibly is that you might have confided in your mother and myself."

Hope flashed up within me,
like an explosion.

"I--I wanted
to surprise you,
father.

And then,
you see,
I thought it would be wiser
to find out first how well I was likely
to do at the examinations."

My father looked at me.

Unfortunately he possessed neither a sense of humour nor a sense of tragedy sufficient
to meet such a situation.

For the first time in my life I beheld him at a disadvantage;
for I had,
somehow,
managed at length
to force him out of position,
and he was puzzled.

I was quick
to play my trump card.

"I have been thinking it over carefully,"
I told him,
"and I have made up my mind that I want
to go into the law."

"The law!"
he exclaimed sharply.

"Why,
yes,
sir.

I know that you were disappointed because I did not do sufficiently well at school
to go
to college and study
for the bar."

I felt indeed a momentary pang,
but I remembered that I was fighting
for my freedom.

"You seemed satisfied where you were,"
he said in a puzzled voice,
"and your Cousin Robert gives a good account of you."

"I've tried
to do the work as well as I could,
sir,"
I replied.

"But I don't like the grocery business,
or any other business.

I have a feeling that I'm not made
for it."

"And you think,
now,
that you are made
for the law?"
he asked,
with the faint hint of a smile.

"Yes,
sir,
I believe I could succeed at it.

I'd like
to try,"
I replied modestly.

"You've given up the idiotic notion of wishing
to be an author?"
I implied that he himself had convinced me of the futility of such a wish.

I listened
to his next words as in a dream.

"I must confess
to you,
Hugh,
that there are times when I fail
to understand you.

I hope it is as you say,
that you have arrived at a settled conviction as
to your future,
and that this is not another of those caprices
to which you have been subject,
nor a desire
to shirk honest work.

Mr. Wood has made out a strong case
for you,
and I have therefore determined
to give you a trial.

If you pass the examinations
with credit,
you may go
to college,
but if at any time you fail
to make good progress,
you come home,
and go into business again.

Is that thoroughly understood?"
I said it was,
and thanked him effusively....

I had escaped,--the prison doors had flown open.

But it is written that every happiness has its sting;
and my joy,
intense though it was,
had in it a core of remorse....

I went downstairs
to my mother,
who was sitting in the hall by the open door.

"Father says I may go!"
I said.

She got up and took me in her arMs. "My dear,
I am so glad,
although we shall miss you dreadfully....

Hugh?"
"Yes,
mother."

"Oh,
Hugh,
I so want you
to be a good man!"
Her cry was a little incoherent,
but fraught
with a meaning that came home
to me,
in spite of myself....

A while later I ran over
to announce
to the amazed Tom Peters that I was actually going
to Harvard
with him.

He stood in the half-lighted hallway,
his hands in his pockets,
blinking at me.

"Hugh,
you're a wonder!"
he cried.

"How in Jehoshaphat did you work it?"
...

I lay long awake that night thinking over the momentous change so soon
to come into my life,
wondering exultantly what Nancy Willett would say now.

I was not one,
at any rate,
to be despised or neglected.

VI.

The following September Tom Peters and I went East together.

In the early morning Boston broke on us like a Mecca as we rolled out of the old Albany station,
joint lords of a
"herdic."

How sharply the smell of the salt-laden east wind and its penetrating coolness come back
to me! I seek in vain
for words
to express the exhilarating effect of that briny coolness on my imagination,
and of the visions it summoned up of the newer,
larger life into which I had marvellously been transported.

We alighted at the Parker House,
full-fledged men of the world,
and tried
to act as though the breakfast of which we partook were merely an incident,
not an Event;
as though we were Seniors,
and not freshmen,
assuming an indifference
to the beings by whom we were surrounded and who were breakfasting,
too,--although the nice-looking ones
with fresh faces and trim clothes were all undoubtedly Olympians.

The better
to proclaim our nonchalance,
we seated ourselves on a lounge of the marble-paved lobby and smoked cigarettes.

This was liberty indeed! At length we departed
for Cambridge,
in another herdic.

Boston! Could it be possible?

Everything was so different here as
to give the place the aspect of a dream:

the Bulfinch State House,
the decorous shops,
the still more decorous dwellings
with the purple-paned windows facing the Common;
Back Bay,
still boarded up,
ivy-spread,
suggestive of a mysterious and delectable existence.

We crossed the Charles River,
blue-grey and still that morning;
traversed a nondescript district,
and at last found ourselves gazing out of the windows at the mellowed,
plum-coloured bricks of the University buildings....

All at once our exhilaration evaporated as the herdic rumbled into a side street and backed up before the door of a not-too-inviting,
three-storied house
with a queer extension on top.

Its steps and vestibule were,
however,
immaculate.

The bell was answered by a plainly overworked servant girl,
of whom we inquired
for Mrs. Bolton,
our landlady.

There followed a period of waiting in a parlour from which the light had been almost wholly banished,
with slippery horsehair furniture and a marble-topped table;
and Mrs. Bolton,
when she appeared,
dressed in rusty black,
harmonized perfectly
with the funereal gloom.

She was a tall,
rawboned,
severe lady
with a peculiar red-mottled complexion that somehow reminded one of the outcropping rocks of her native New England soil.

"You want
to see your rooms,
I suppose,"
she remarked impassively when we had introduced ourselves,
and as we mounted the stairs behind her Tom,
in a whisper,
nicknamed her
"Granite Face."

Presently she left us.

"Hospitable soul!"
said Tom,
who,
with his hands in his pockets,
was gazing at the bare walls of our sitting-room.

"We'll have
to go into the house-furnishing business,
Hughie.

I vote we don't linger here to-day-- we'll get melancholia."

Outside,
however,
the sun was shining brightly,
and we departed immediately
to explore Cambridge and announce our important presences
to the proper authorities....

We went into Boston
to dine....

It was not until nine o'clock in the evening that we returned and the bottom suddenly dropped out of things.

He who has tasted that first,
acute homesickness of college will know what I mean.

It usually comes at the opening of one's trunk.

The sight of the top tray gave me a pang I shall never forget.

I would not have believed that I loved my mother so much! These articles had been packed by her hands;
and in one corner,
among the underclothes on which she had neatly sewed my initials,
lay the new Bible she had bought.

"Hugh Moreton Paret,
from his Mother.

September,
1881."

I took it up
(Tom was not looking)
and tried
to read a passage,
but my eyes were blurred.

What was it within me that pressed and pressed until I thought I could bear the pain of it no longer?

I pictured the sitting- room at home,
and my father and mother there,
thinking of me.

Yes,
I must acknowledge it;
in the bitterness of that moment I longed
to be back once more in the railed-off space on the floor of Breck and Company,
writing invoices....

Presently,
as we went on silently
with our unpacking,
we became aware of someone in the doorway.

"Hello,
you fellows!"
he cried.

"We're classmates,
I guess."

We turned
to behold an ungainly young man in an ill-fitting blue suit.

His face was pimply,
his eyes a Teutonic blue,
his yellow hair rumpled,
his naturally large mouth was made larger by a friendly grin.

"I'm Hermann Krebs,"
he announced simply.

"Who are you?"
We replied,
I regret
to say,
with a distinct coolness that did not seem
to bother him in the least.

He advanced into the room,
holding out a large,
red,
and serviceable hand,
evidently it had never dawned on him that there was such a thing in the world as snobbery.

But Tom and I had been
"coached"
by Ralph Hambleton and Perry Blackwood,
warned
to be careful of our friendships.

There was a Reason! In any case Mr. Krebs would not have appealed
to us.

In answer
to a second question he was informed what city we hailed from,
and he proclaimed himself likewise a native of our state.

"Why,
I'm from Elkington!"
he exclaimed,
as though the fact sealed our future relationships.

He seated himself on Tom's trunk and added:

"Welcome
to old Harvard!"
We felt that he was scarcely qualified
to speak for
"old Harvard,"
but we did not say so.

"You look as if you'd been pall-bearers
for somebody,"
was his next observation.

To this there seemed no possible reply.

"You fellows are pretty well fixed here,"
he went on,
undismayed,
gazing about a room which had seemed
to us the abomination of desolation.

"Your folks must be rich.

I'm up under the skylight."

Even this failed
to touch us.

His father--he told us
with undiminished candour--had been a German emigrant who had come over in
'49,
after the cause of liberty had been lost in the old country,
and made eye-glasses and opera glasses.

There hadn't been a fortune in it.

He,
Hermann,
had worked at various occupations in the summer time,
from peddling
to farming,
until he had saved enough
to start him at Harvard.

Tom,
who had been bending over his bureau drawer,
straightened up.

"What did you want
to come here for?"
he demanded.

"Say,
what did you?"
Mr. Krebs retorted genially.

"To get an education,
of course."

"An education!"
echoed Tom.

"Isn't Harvard the oldest and best seat of learning in America?"
There was an exaltation in Krebs's voice that arrested my attention,
and made me look at him again.

A troubled chord had been struck within me.

"Sure,"
said Tom.

"What did you come for?"
Mr. Krebs persisted.

"To sow my wild oats,"
said Tom.

"I expect
to have something of a crop,
too."

For some reason I could not fathom,
it suddenly seemed
to dawn on Mr. Krebs,
as a result of this statement,
that he wasn't wanted.

"Well,
so long,"
he said,
with a new dignity that curiously belied the informality of his farewell.

An interval of silence followed his departure.

"Well,
he's got a crust!"
said Tom,
at last.

My own feeling about Mr. Krebs had become more complicated;
but I took my cue from Tom,
who dealt
with situations simply.

"He'll come in
for a few knockouts,"
he declared.

"Here's
to old Harvard,
the greatest institution of learning in America! Oh,
gee!"
Our visitor,
at least,
made us temporarily forget our homesickness,
but it returned
with redoubled intensity when we had put out the lights and gone
to bed.

Before we had left home it had been mildly hinted
to us by Ralph and Perry Blackwood that scholarly eminence was not absolutely necessary
to one's welfare and happiness at Cambridge.

The hint had been somewhat superfluous;
but the question remained,
what was necessary?

With a view of getting some light on this delicate subject we paid a visit the next evening
to our former friends and schoolmates,
whose advice was conveyed
with a masterly circumlocution that impressed us both.

There are some things that may not be discussed directly,
and the conduct of life at a modern university--which is a reflection of life in the greater world--is one of these.

Perry Blackwood and Ham did most of the talking,
while Ralph,
characteristically,
lay at full length on the window-seat,
interrupting
with an occasional terse and cynical remark very much
to the point.

As a sophomore,
he in particular seemed lifted immeasurably above us,
for he was--as might have been expected already a marked man in his class.

The rooms which he shared
with his cousin made a tremendous impression on Tom and me,
and seemed palatial in comparison
to our quarters at Mrs. Bolton's,
eloquent of the freedom and luxury of undergraduate existence;
their note,
perhaps,
was struck by the profusion of gay sofa pillows,
then something of an innovation.

The heavy,
expensive furniture was of a pattern new
to me;
and on the mantel were three or four photographs of ladies in the alluring costume of the musical stage,
in which Tom evinced a particular interest.

"Did grandfather send
'em?"
he inquired.

"They're Ham's,"
said Ralph,
and he contrived somehow
to get into those two words an epitome of his cousin's character.

Ham was stouter,
and his clothes were more striking,
more obviously expensive than ever....

On our way homeward,
after we had walked a block or two in silence,
Tom exclaimed:--
"Don't make friends
with the friendless!--eh,
Hughie?

We knew enough
to begin all right,
didn't we?"
...

Have I made us out a pair of deliberate,
calculating snobs?

Well,
after all it must be remembered that our bringing up had not been of sufficient liberality
to include the Krebses of this world.

We did not,
indeed,
spend much time in choosing and weighing those whom we should know and those whom we should avoid;
and before the first term of that Freshman year was over Tom had become a favourite.

He had the gift of making men feel that he delighted in their society,
that he wished
for nothing better than
to sit
for hours in their company,
content
to listen
to the arguments that raged about him.

Once in a while he would make a droll observation that was greeted
with fits of laughter.

He was always referred
to as
"old Tom,"
or
"good old Tom";
presently,
when he began
to pick out chords on the banjo,
it was discovered that he had a good tenor voice,
though he could not always be induced
to sing....

Somewhat
to the jeopardy of the academic standard that my father expected me
to sustain,
our rooms became a rendezvous
for many clubable souls whose maudlin,
midnight attempts at harmony often set the cocks crowing.

"Free from care and despair,
What care we?

'Tis wine,
'tis wine That makes the jollity."

As a matter of truth,
on these occasions it was more often beer;
beer transported thither in Tom's new valise,--given him by his mother,--and stuffed
with snow
to keep the bottles cold.

Sometimes Granite Face,
adorned in a sky-blue wrapper,
would suddenly appear in the doorway
to declare that we were a disgrace
to her respectable house:

the university authorities should be informed,
etc.,
etc.

Poor woman,
we were outrageously inconsiderate of her....

One evening as we came through the hall we caught a glimpse in the dimly lighted parlour of a young man holding a shy and pale little girl on his lap,
Annie,
Mrs. Bolton's daughter:

on the face of our landlady was an expression I had never seen there,
like a light.

I should scarcely have known her.

Tom and I paused at the foot of the stairs.

He clutched my arm.

"Darned if it wasn't our friend Krebs!"
he whispered.

While I was by no means so popular as Tom,
I got along fairly well.

I had escaped from provincialism,
from the obscure purgatory of the wholesale grocery business;
new vistas,
exciting and stimulating,
had been opened up;
nor did I offend the sensibilities and prejudices of the new friends I made,
but gave a hearty consent
to a code I found congenial.

I recognized in the social system of undergraduate life at Harvard a reflection of that of a greater world where I hoped some day
to shine;
yet my ambition did not prey upon me.

Mere conformity,
however,
would not have taken me very far in a sphere from which I,
in common
with many others,
desired not
to be excluded....

One day,
in an idle but inspired moment,
I paraphrased a song from
"Pinafore,"
applying it
to a college embroglio,
and the brief and lively vogue it enjoyed was sufficient
to indicate a future usefulness.

I had
"found myself."

This was in the last part of the freshman year,
and later on I became a sort of amateur,
class poet-laureate.

Many were the skits I composed,
and Tom sang them....

During that freshman year we often encountered Hermann Krebs,
whistling merrily,
on the stairs.

"Got your themes done?"
he would inquire cheerfully.

And Tom would always mutter,
when he was out of earshot:

"He has got a crust!"
When I thought about Krebs at all,--and this was seldom indeed,--his manifest happiness puzzled me.

Our cool politeness did not seem
to bother him in the least;
on the contrary,
I got the impression that it amused him.

He seemed
to have made no friends.

And after that first evening,
memorable
for its homesickness,
he never ventured
to repeat his visit
to us.

One windy November day I spied his somewhat ludicrous figure striding ahead of me,
his trousers above his ankles.

I was bundled up in a new ulster,--of which I was secretly quite proud,--but he wore no overcoat at all.

"Well,
how are you getting along?"
I asked,
as I overtook him.

He made clear,
as he turned,
his surprise that I should have addressed him at all,
but immediately recovered himself.

"Oh,
fine,"
he responded.

"I've had better luck than I expected.

I'm correspondent
for two or three newspapers.

I began by washing windows,
and doing odd jobs
for the professors'
wives."

He laughed.

"I guess that doesn't strike you as good luck."

He showed no resentment at my patronage,
but a self-sufficiency that made my sympathy seem superfluous,
giving the impression of an inner harmony and content that surprised me.

"I needn't ask how you're getting along,"
he said....

At the end of the freshman year we abandoned Mrs. Bolton's
for more desirable quarters.

I shall not go deeply into my college career,
recalling only such incidents as,
seen in the retrospect,
appear
to have had significance.

I have mentioned my knack
for song-writing;
but it was not,
I think,
until my junior year there was startlingly renewed in me my youthful desire
to write,
to create something worth while,
that had so long been dormant.

The inspiration came from Alonzo Cheyne,
instructor in English;
a remarkable teacher,
in spite of the finicky mannerisms which Tom imitated.

And when,
in reading aloud certain magnificent passages,
he forgot his affectations,
he managed
to arouse cravings I thought
to have deserted me forever.

Was it possible,
after all,
that I had been right and my father wrong?

that I might yet be great in literature?

A mere hint from Alonzo Cheyne was more highly prized by the grinds than fulsome praise from another teacher.

And
to his credit it should be recorded that the grinds were the only ones he treated
with any seriousness;
he took pains
to answer their questions;
but towards the rest of us,
the Chosen,
he showed a thinly veiled contempt.

None so quick as he
to detect a simulated interest,
or a wily effort
to make him ridiculous;
and few tried this a second time,
for he had a rapier-like gift of repartee that transfixed the offender like a moth on a pin.

He had a way of eyeing me at times,
his glasses in his hand,
a queer smile on his lips,
as much as
to imply that there was one at least among the lost who was made
for better things.

Not that my work was poor,
but I knew that it might have been better.

Out of his classes,
however,
beyond the immediate,
disturbing influence of his personality I would relapse into indifference....

Returning one evening
to our quarters,
which were now in the
"Yard,"
I found Tom seated
with a blank sheet before him,
thrusting his hand through his hair and biting the end of his penholder
to a pulp.

In his muttering,
which was mixed
with the curious,
stingless profanity of which he was master,
I caught the name of Cheyne,
and I knew that he was facing the crisis of a fortnightly theme.

The subject assigned was a narrative of some personal experience,
and it was
to be handed in on the morrow.

My own theme was already,
written.

"I've been holding down this chair
for an hour,
and I can't seem
to think of a thing."

He rose
to fling himself down on the lounge.

"I wish I was in Canada."

"Why Canada?"
"Trout fishing
with Uncle Jake at that club of his where he took me last summer."

Tom gazed dreamily at the ceiling.

"Whenever I have some darned foolish theme like this
to write I want
to go fishing,
and I want
to go like the devil.

I'll get Uncle Jake
to take you,
too,
next summer."

"I wish you would."

"Say,
that's living all right,
Hughie,
up there among the tamaracks and balsams!"
And he began,
for something like the thirtieth time,
to relate the adventures of the trip.

As he talked,
the idea presented itself
to me
with sudden fascination
to use this incident as the subject of Tom's theme;
to write it
for him,
from his point of view,
imitating the droll style he would have had if he had been able
to write;
for,
when he was interested in any matter,
his oral narrative did not lack vividness.

I began
to ask him questions:

what were the trees like,
for instance?

How did the French-Canadian guides talk?

He had the gift of mimicry:

aided by a partial knowledge of French I wrote down a few sentences as they sounded.

The canoe had upset and he had come near drowning.

I made him describe his sensations.

"I'll write your theme
for you,"
I exclaimed,
when he had finished.

"Gee,
not about that!"
"Why not?

It's a personal experience."

His gratitude was pathetic....

By this time I was so full of the subject that it fairly clamoured
for expression,
and as I wrote the hours flew.

Once in a while I paused
to ask him a question as he sat
with his chair tilted back and his feet on the table,
reading a detective story.

I sketched in the scene
with bold strokes;
the desolate bois brule on the mountain side,
the polished crystal surface of the pool broken here and there
with the circles left by rising fish;
I pictured Armand,
the guide,
his pipe between his teeth,
holding the canoe against the current;
and I seemed
to smell the sharp tang of the balsams,
to hear the roar of the rapids below.

Then came the sudden hooking of the big trout,
habitant oaths from Armand,
bouleversement,
wetness,
darkness,
confusion;
a half- strangled feeling,
a brief glimpse of green things and sunlight,
and then strangulation,
or what seemed like it;
strangulation,
the sense of being picked up and hurled by a terrific force whither?

a blinding whiteness,
in which it was impossible
to breathe,
one sharp,
almost unbearable pain,
then another,
then oblivion....

Finally,
awakening,
to be confronted by a much worried Uncle Jake.

By this time the detective story had fallen
to the floor,
and Tom was huddled up in his chair,
asleep.

He arose obediently and wrapped a wet towel around his head,
and began
to write.

Once he paused long enough
to mutter:--
"Yes,
that's about it,--that's the way I felt!"
and set
to work again,
mechanically,--all the praise I got
for what I deemed a literary achievement of the highest order! At three o'clock,
a.m.,
he finished,
pulled off his clothes automatically and tumbled into bed.

I had no desire
for sleep.

My brain was racing madly,
like an engine without a governor.

I could write! I could write! I repeated the words over and over
to myself.

All the complexities of my present life were blotted out,
and I beheld only the long,
sweet vista of the career
for which I was now convinced that nature had intended me.

My immediate fortunes became unimportant,
immaterial.

No juice of the grape I had ever tasted made me half so drunk....

With the morning,
of course,
came the reaction,
and I suffered the after sensations of an orgie,
awaking
to a world of necessity,
cold and grey and slushy,
and necessity alone made me rise from my bed.

My experience of the night before might have taught me that happiness lies in the trick of transforming necessity,
but it did not.

The vision had faded,--temporarily,
at least;
and such was the distraction of the succeeding days that the subject of the theme passed from my mind....

One morning Tom was later than usual in getting home.

I was writing a letter when he came in,
and did not notice him,
yet I was vaguely aware of his standing over me.

When at last I looked up I gathered from his expression that something serious had happened,
so mournful was his face,
and yet so utterly ludicrous.

"Say,
Hugh,
I'm in the deuce of a mess,"
he announced.

"What's the matter?"
I inquired.

He sank down on the table
with a groan.

"It's Alonzo,"
he said.

Then I remembered the theme.

"What--what's he done?"
I demanded.

"He says I must become a writer.

Think of it,
me a writer! He says I'm a young Shakespeare,
that I've been lazy and hid my light under a bushel! He says he knows now what I can do,
and if I don't keep up the quality,
he'll know the reason why,
and write a personal letter
to my father.

Oh,
hell!"
In spite of his evident anguish,
I was seized
with a convulsive laughter.

Tom stood staring at me moodily.

"You think it's funny,--don't you?

I guess it is,
but what's going
to become of me?

That's what I want
to know.

I've been in trouble before,
but never in any like this.

And who got me into it?

You!"
Here was gratitude!
"You've got
to go on writing
'em,
now."

His voice became desperately pleading.

"Say,
Hugh,
old man,
you can temper
'em down--temper
'em down gradually.

And by the end of the year,
let's say,
they'll be about normal again."

He seemed actually shivering.

"The end of the year!"
I cried,
the predicament striking me
for the first time in its fulness.

"Say,
you've got a crust!"
"You'll do it,
if I have
to hold a gun over you,"
he announced grimly.

Mingled
with my anxiety,
which was real,
was an exultation that would not down.

Nevertheless,
the idea of developing Tom into a Shakespeare,--Tom,
who had not the slightest desire
to be one I was appalling,
besides having in it an element of useless self-sacrifice from which I recoiled.

On the other hand,
if Alonzo should discover that I had written his theme,
there were penalties I did not care
to dwell upon ....

With such a cloud hanging over me I passed a restless night.

As luck would have it the very next evening in the level light under the elms of the Square I beheld sauntering towards me a dapper figure which I recognized as that of Mr. Cheyne himself.

As I saluted him he gave me an amused and most disconcerting glance;
and when I was congratulating myself that he had passed me he stopped.

"Fine weather
for March,
Paret,"
he observed.

"Yes,
sir,"
I agreed in a strange voice.

"By the way,"
he remarked,
contemplating the bare branches above our heads,
"that was an excellent theme your roommate handed in.

I had no idea that he possessed such--such genius.

Did you,
by any chance,
happen
to read it?"
"Yes,
sir,--I read it."

"Weren't you surprised?"
inquired Mr. Cheyne.

"Well,
yes,
sir--that is--I mean
to say he talks just like that,
sometimes--that is,
when it's anything he cares about."

"Indeed!"
said Mr. Cheyne.

"That's interesting,
most interesting.

In all my experience,
I do not remember a case in which a gift has been developed so rapidly.

I don't want
to give the impression--ah that there is no room
for improvement,
but the thing was very well done,
for an undergraduate.

I must confess I never should have suspected it in Peters,
and it's most interesting what you say about his cleverness in conversation."

He twirled the head of his stick,
apparently lost in reflection.

"I may be wrong,"
he went on presently,
"I have an idea it is you--"
I must literally have jumped away from him.

He paused a moment,
without apparently noticing my panic,
"that it is you who have influenced Peters."

"Sir?"
"I am wrong,
then.

Or is this merely commendable modesty on your part?"
"Oh,
no,
sir."

"Then my hypothesis falls
to the ground.

I had greatly hoped,"
he added meaningly,
"that you might be able
to throw some light on this mystery."

I was dumb.

"Paret,"
he asked,
"have you time
to come over
to my rooms
for a few minutes this evening?"
"Certainly,
sir."

He gave me his number in Brattle Street....

Like one running in a nightmare and making no progress I made my way home,
only
to learn from Hallam,--who lived on the same floor,--that Tom had inconsiderately gone
to Boston
for the evening,
with four other weary spirits in search of relaxation! Avoiding our club table,
I took what little nourishment I could at a modest restaurant,
and restlessly paced the moonlit streets until eight o'clock,
when I found myself in front of one of those low-gabled colonial houses which,
on less soul-shaking occasions,
had exercised a great charm on my imagination.

My hand hung
for an instant over the bell....

I must have rung it violently,
for there appeared almost immediately an old lady in a lace cap,
who greeted me
with gentle courtesy,
and knocked at a little door
with glistening panels.

The latch was lifted by Mr. Cheyne himself.

"Come in,
Paret,"
he said,
in a tone that was unexpectedly hospitable.

I have rarely seen a more inviting room.

A wood fire burned brightly on the brass andirons,
flinging its glare on the big,
white beam that crossed the ceiling,
and reddening the square panes of the windows in their panelled recesses.

Between these were rows of books,--attractive books in chased bindings,
red and blue;
books that appealed
to be taken down and read.

There was a table covered
with reviews and magazines in neat piles,
and a lamp so shaded as
to throw its light only on the white blotter of the pad.

Two easy chairs,
covered
with flowered chintz,
were ranged before the fire,
in one of which I sank,
much bewildered,
upon being urged
to do so.

I utterly failed
to recognize
"Alonzo"
in this new atmosphere.

And he had,
moreover,
dropped the subtly sarcastic manner I was wont
to associate
with him.

"Jolly old house,
isn't it?"
he observed,
as though I had casually dropped in on him
for a chat;
and he stood,
with his hands behind him stretched
to the blaze,
looking down at me.

"It was built by a certain Colonel Draper,
who fought at Louisburg,
and afterwards fled
to England at the time of the Revolution.

He couldn't stand the patriots,
I'm not so sure that I blame him,
either.

Are you interested in colonial things,
Mr. Paret?"
I said I was.

If the question had concerned Aztec relics my answer would undoubtedly have been the same.

And I watched him,
dazedly,
while he took down a silver porringer from the shallow mantel shelf.

"It's not a Revere,"
he said,
in a slightly apologetic tone as though
to forestall a comment,
"but it's rather good,
I think.

I picked it up at a sale in Dorchester.

But I have never been able
to identify the coat of arMs. "

He showed me a ladle,
with the names of
"Patience and William Simpson"
engraved quaintly thereon,
and took down other articles in which I managed
to feign an interest.

Finally he seated himself in the chair opposite,
crossed his feet,
putting the tips of his fingers together and gazing into the fire.

"So you thought you could fool me,"
he said,
at length.

I became aware of the ticking of a great clock in the corner.

My mouth was dry.

"I am going
to forgive you,"
he went on,
more gravely,
"for several reasons.

I don't flatter,
as you know.

It's because you carried out the thing so perfectly that I am led
to think you have a gift that may be cultivated,
Paret.

You wrote that theme in the way Peters would have written it if he had not been--what shall I say?--scripturally inarticulate.

And I trust it may do you some good if I say it was something of a literary achievement,
if not a moral one."

"Thank you,
sir,"
I faltered.

"Have you ever,"
he inquired,
lapsing a little into his lecture-room manner,
"seriously thought of literature as a career?

Have you ever thought of any career seriously?"
"I once wished
to be a writer,
sir,"
I replied tremulously,
but refrained from telling him of my father's opinion of the profession.

Ambition--a purer ambition than I had known
for years--leaped within me at his words.

He,
Alonzo Cheyne,
had detected in me the Promethean fire! I sat there until ten o'clock talking
to the real Mr. Cheyne,
a human Mr. Cheyne unknown in the lecture-room.

Nor had I suspected one in whom cynicism and distrust of undergraduates
(of my sort)
seemed so ingrained,
of such idealism.

He did not pour it out in preaching;
delicately,
unobtrusively and on the whole rather humorously he managed
to present
to me in a most disillusionizing light that conception of the university held by me and my intimate associates.

After I had left him I walked the quiet streets
to behold as through dissolving mists another Harvard,
and there trembled in my soul like the birth-struggle of a flame something of the vision later
to be immortalized by St. Gaudens,
the spirit of Harvard responding
to the spirit of the Republic--to the call of Lincoln,
who voiced it.

The place of that bronze at the corner of Boston Common was as yet empty,
but I have since stood before it
to gaze in wonder at the light shining in darkness on mute,
uplifted faces,
black faces! at Harvard's son leading them on that the light might live and prevail.

I,
too,
longed
for a Cause into which I might fling myself,
in which I might lose myself...

I halted on the sidewalk
to find myself staring from the opposite side of the street at a familiar house,
my old landlady's,
Mrs. Bolton's,
and summoned up before me was the tired,
smiling face of Hermann Krebs.

Was it because when he had once spoken so crudely of the University I had seen the reflection of her spirit in his eyes?

A light still burned in the extension roof--Krebs's light;
another shone dimly through the ground glass of the front door.

Obeying a sudden impulse,
I crossed the street.

Mrs. Bolton,
in the sky-blue wrapper,
and looking more forbidding than ever,
answered the bell.

Life had taught her
to be indifferent
to surprises,
and it was I who became abruptly embarrassed.

"Oh,
it's you,
Mr. Paret,"
she said,
as though I had been a frequent caller.

I had never once darkened her threshold since I had left her house.

"Yes,"
I answered,
and hesitated....

"Is Mr. Krebs in?"
"Well,"
she replied in a lifeless tone,
which nevertheless had in it a touch of bitterness,
"I guess there's no reason why you and your friends should have known he was sick."

"Sick!"
I repeated.

"Is he very sick?"
"I calculate he'll pull through,"
she said.

"Sunday the doctor gave him up.

And no wonder! He hasn't had any proper food since he's be'n here!"
She paused,
eyeing me.

"If you'll excuse me,
Mr. Paret,
I was just going up
to him when you rang."

"Certainly,"
I replied awkwardly.

"Would you be so kind as
to tell him-- when he's well enough--that I came
to see him,
and that I'm sorry?"
There was another pause,
and she stood
with a hand defensively clutching the knob.

"Yes,
I'll tell him,"
she said.

With a sense of having been baffled,
I turned away.

Walking back toward the Yard my attention was attracted by a slowly approaching cab whose occupants were disturbing the quiet of the night
with song.

"Shollity--'tis wine,
'tis wine,
that makesh--shollity."

The vehicle drew up in front of a new and commodious building,--I believe the first of those designed
to house undergraduates who were willing
to pay
for private bathrooms and other modern luxuries;
out of one window of the cab protruded a pair of shoeless feet,
out of the other a hatless head I recognized as belonging
to Tom Peters;
hence I surmised that the feet were his also.

The driver got down from the box,
and a lively argument was begun inside--for there were other occupants--as
to how Mr. Peters was
to be disembarked;
and I gathered from his frequent references
to the
"Shgyptian obelisk"
that the engineering problem presented struck him as similar
to the unloading of Cleopatra's Needle.

"Careful,
careful!"
he cautioned,
as certain expelling movements began from within,
"Easy,
Ham,
you jam-fool,
keep the door shut,
y'll break me."

"Now,
Jerry,
all heave sh'gether!"
exclaimed a voice from the blackness of the interior.

"Will ye wait a minute,
Mr. Durrett,
sir?"
implored the cabdriver.

"You'll be after ruining me cab entirely."

(Loud roars and vigorous resistance from the obelisk,
the cab rocking violently.)
"This gintleman"
(meaning me)
"will have him by the head,
and I'll get hold of his feet,
sir."

Which he did,
after a severe kick in the stomach.

"Head'sh all right,
Martin."

"To be sure it is,
Mr. Peters.

Now will ye rest aisy awhile,
sir?"
"I'm axphyxiated,"
cried another voice from the darkness,
the mined voice of Jerome Kyme,
our classmate.

"Get the tackles under him!"
came forth in commanding tones from Conybear.

In the meantime many windows had been raised and much gratuitous advice was being given.

The three occupants of the cab's seat who had previously clamoured
for Mr. Peters'
removal,
now inconsistently resisted it;
suddenly he came out
with a jerk,
and we had him fairly upright on the pavement minus a collar and tie and the buttons of his evening waistcoat.

Those who remained in the cab engaged in a riotous game of hunt the slipper,
while Tom peered into the dark interior,
observing gravely the progress of the sport.

First flew out an overcoat and a much-battered hat,
finally the pumps,
all of which in due time were adjusted
to his person,
and I started home
with him,
with much parting counsel from the other three.

"Whereinell were you,
Hughie?"
he inquired.

"Hunted all over
for you.

Had a sousin'
good time.

Went
to Babcock's--had champagne--then
to see Babesh in--th'--Woods.

Ham knows one of the Babesh had supper
with four of
'em.

Nice Babesh!"
"For heaven's sake don't step on me again!"
I cried.

"Sh'poloshize,
old man.

But y'know I'm William Shakespheare.

C'n do what I damplease."

He halted in the middle of the street and recited dramatically:--
"'Not marble,
nor th'
gilded monuments Of prinches sh'll outlive m'
powerful rhyme.'
"
"How's that,
Alonzho,
b'gosh?"
"Where did you learn it?"
I demanded,
momentarily forgetting his condition.

"Fr'm Ralph,"
he replied,
"says I wrote it.

Can't remember...."

After I had got him
to bed,--a service I had learned
to perform
with more or less proficiency,--I sat down
to consider the events of the evening,
to attempt
to get a proportional view.

The intensity of my disgust was not hypocritical as I gazed through the open door into the bedroom and recalled the times when I,
too,
had been in that condition.

Tom Peters drunk,
and sleeping it off,
was deplorable,
without doubt;
but Hugh Paret drunk was detestable,
and had no excuse whatever.

Nor did I mean by this
to set myself on a higher ethical plane,
for I felt nothing but despair and humility.

In my state of clairvoyance I perceived that he was a better man,
than I,
and that his lapses proceeded from a love of liquor and the transcendent sense of good-fellowship that liquor brings.

VII.

The crisis through which I passed at Cambridge,
inaugurated by the events I have just related,
I find very difficult
to portray.

It was a religious crisis,
of course,
and my most pathetic memory concerning it is of the vain attempts
to connect my yearnings and discontents
with the theology I had been taught;
I began in secret
to read my Bible,
yet nothing I hit upon seemed
to point a way out of my present predicament,
to give any definite clew
to the solution of my life.

I was not mature enough
to reflect that orthodoxy was a Sunday religion unrelated
to a world whose wheels were turned by the motives of self-interest;
that it consisted of ideals not deemed practical,
since no attempt was made
to put them into practice in the only logical manner,--by reorganizing civilization
to conform
with them.

The implication was that the Christ who had preached these ideals was not practical....

There were undoubtedly men in the faculty of the University who might have helped me had I known of them;
who might have given me,
even at that time,
a clew
to the modern,
logical explanation of the Bible as an immortal record of the thoughts and acts of men who had sought
to do just what I was seeking
to do,--connect the religious impulse
to life and make it fruitful in life:

an explanation,
by the way,
a thousand-fold more spiritual than the old.

But I was hopelessly entangled in the meshes of the mystic,
the miraculous and supernatural.

If I had analyzed my yearnings,
I might have realized that I wanted
to renounce the life I had been leading,
not because it was sinful,
but because it was aimless.

I had not learned that the Greek word
for sin is
"a missing of the mark."

Just aimlessness! I had been stirred
with the desire
to perform some service
for which the world would be grateful:

to write great literature,
perchance.

But it had never been suggested
to me that such swellings of the soul are religious,
that religion is that kind of feeling,
of motive power that drives the writer and the scientist,
the statesman and the sculptor as well as the priest and the Prophet
to serve mankind
for the joy of serving:

that religion is creative,
or it is nothing:

not mechanical,
not a force imposed from without,
but a driving power within.

The
"religion"
I had learned was salvation from sin by miracle:

sin a deliberate rebellion,
not a pathetic missing of the mark of life;
useful service of man,
not the wandering of untutored souls who had not been shown the way.

I felt religious.

I wanted
to go
to church,
I wanted
to maintain,
when it was on me,
that exaltation I dimly felt as communion
with a higher power,
with God,
and which also was identical
with my desire
to write,
to create....

I bought books,
sets of Wordsworth and Keats,
of Milton and Shelley and Shakespeare,
and hid them away in my bureau drawers lest Tom and my friends should see them.

These too I read secretly,
making excuses
for not joining in the usual amusements.

Once I walked
to Mrs. Bolton's and inquired rather shamefacedly
for Hermann Krebs,
only
to be informed that he had gone out....

There were lapses,
of course,
when I went off on the old excursions,--for the most part the usual undergraduate follies,
though some were of a more serious nature;
on these I do not care
to dwell.

Sex was still a mystery....

Always I awoke afterwards
to bitter self-hatred and despair....

But my work in English improved,
and I earned the commendation and friendship of Mr. Cheyne.

With a wisdom
for which I was grateful he was careful not
to give much sign of it in classes,
but the fact that he was
"getting soft on me"
was evident enough
to be regarded
with suspicion.

Indeed the state into which I had fallen became a matter of increasing concern
to my companions,
who tried every means from ridicule
to sympathy,
to discover its cause and shake me out of it.

The theory most accepted was that I was in love.

"Come on now,
Hughie--tell me who she is.

I won't give you away,"
Tom would beg.

Once or twice,
indeed,
I had imagined I was in love
with the sisters of Boston classmates whose dances I attended;
to these parties Tom,
not having overcome his diffidence in respect
to what he called
"social life,"
never could be induced
to go.

It was Ralph who detected the true cause of my discontent.

Typical as no other man I can recall of the code
to which we had dedicated ourselves,
the code that moulded the important part of the undergraduate world and defied authority,
he regarded any defection from it in the light of treason.

An instructor,
in a fit of impatience,
had once referred
to him as the Mephistopheles of his class;
he had fatal attractions,
and a remarkable influence.

His favourite pastime was the capricious exercise of his will on weaker characters,
such as his cousin,
Ham Durrett;
if they
"swore off,"
Ralph made it his business
to get them drunk again,
and having accomplished this would proceed himself
to administer a new oath and see that it was kept.

Alcohol seemed
to have no effect whatever on him.

Though he was in the class above me,
I met him frequently at a club
to which I had the honour
to belong,
then a suite of rooms over a shop furnished
with a pool and a billiard table,
easy-chairs and a bar.

It has since achieved the dignity of a house of its own.

We were having,
one evening,
a
"religious"
argument,
Cinibar,
Laurens and myself and some others.

I can't recall how it began;
I think Cinibar had attacked the institution of compulsory chapel,
which nobody defended;
there was something inherently wrong,
he maintained,
with a religion
to which men had
to be driven against their wills.

Somewhat
to my surprise I found myself defending a Christianity out of which I had been able
to extract but little comfort and solace.

Neither Laurens nor Conybear,
however,
were
for annihilating it:

although they took the other side of the discussion of a subject of which none of us knew anything,
their attacks were but half-hearted;
like me,
they were still under the spell exerted by a youthful training.

We were all of us aware of Ralph,
who sat at some distance looking over the pages of an English sporting weekly.

Presently he flung it down.

"Haven't you found out yet that man created God,
Hughie?"
he inquired.

"And even if there were a personal God,
what reason have you
to think that man would be his especial concern,
or any concern of his whatever?

The discovery of evolution has knocked your Christianity into a cocked hat."

I don't remember how I answered him.

In spite of the superficiality of his own arguments,
which I was not learned enough
to detect,
I was ingloriously routed.

Darwin had kicked over the bucket,
and that was all there was
to it....

After we had left the club both Conybear and Laurens admitted they were somewhat disturbed,
declaring that Ralph had gone too far.

I spent a miserable night,
recalling the naturalistic assertions he had made so glibly,
asking myself again and again how it was that the religion
to which I so vainly clung had no greater effect on my actions and on my will,
had not prevented me from lapses into degradation.

And I hated myself
for having argued upon a subject that was still sacred.

I believed in Christ,
which is
to say that I believed that in some inscrutable manner he existed,
continued
to dominate the world and had suffered on my account.

To whom should I go now
for a confirmation of my wavering beliefs?

One of the results--it will be remembered of religion as I was taught it was a pernicious shyness,
and even though I had found a mentor and confessor,
I might have hesitated
to unburden myself.

This would be different from arguing
with Ralph Hambleton.

In my predicament,
as I was wandering through the yard,
I came across a notice of an evening talk
to students in Holder Chapel,
by a clergyman named Phillips Brooks.

This was before the time,
let me say in passing,
when his sermons at Harvard were attended by crowds of undergraduates.

Well,
I stood staring at the notice,
debating whether I should go,
trying
to screw up my courage;
for I recognized clearly that such a step,
if it were
to be of any value,
must mean a distinct departure from my present mode of life;
and I recall thinking
with a certain revulsion that I should have to
"turn good."

My presence at the meeting would be known the next day
to all my friends,
for the idea of attending a religious gathering when one was not forced
to do so by the authorities was unheard of in our set.

I should be classed
with the despised
"pious ones"
who did such things regularly.

I shrank from the ridicule.

I had,
however,
heard of Mr. Brooks from Ned Symonds,
who was by no means of the pious type,
and whose parents attended Mr. Brooks's church in Boston....

I left my decision in abeyance.

But when evening came I stole away from the club table,
on the plea of an engagement,
and made my way rapidly toward Holder Chapel.

I had almost reached it--when I caught a glimpse of Symonds and of some others approaching,--and I went on,
to turn again.

By this time the meeting,
which was in a room on the second floor,
had already begun.

Palpitating,
I climbed the steps;
the door of the room was slightly ajar;
I looked in;
I recall a distinct sensation of surprise,--the atmosphere of that meeting was so different from what I had expected.

Not a
"pious"
atmosphere at all! I saw a very tall and heavy gentleman,
dressed in black,
who sat,
wholly at ease,
on the table! One hand was in his pocket,
one foot swung clear of the ground;
and he was not preaching,
but talking in an easy,
conversational tone
to some forty young men who sat intent on his words.

I was too excited
to listen
to what he was saying,
I was making a vain attempt
to classify him.

But I remember the thought,
for it struck me
with force,--that if Christianity were so thoroughly discredited by evolution,
as Ralph Hambleton and other agnostics would have one believe,
why should this remarkably sane and able-looking person be standing up
for it as though it were still an established and incontrovertible fact?

He had not,
certainly,
the air of a dupe or a sentimentalist,
but inspired confidence by his very personality.

Youthlike,
I watched him narrowly
for flaws,
for oratorical tricks,
for all kinds of histrionic symptoMs. Again I was near the secret;
again it escaped me.

The argument
for Christianity lay not in assertions about it,
but in being it.

This man was Christianity....

I must have felt something of this,
even though I failed
to formulate it.

And unconsciously I contrasted his strength,
which reinforced the atmosphere of the room,
with that of Ralph Hambleton,
who was,
a greater influence over me than I have recorded,
and had come
to sway me more and more,
as he had swayed others.

The strength of each was impressive,
yet this Mr. Brooks seemed
to me the bodily presentment of a set of values which I would have kept constantly before my eyes....

I felt him drawing me,
overcoming my hesitation,
belittling my fear of ridicule.

I began gently
to open the door--when something happened,--one of those little things that may change the course of a life.

The door made little noise,
yet one of the men sitting in the back of the room chanced
to look around,
and I recognized Hermann Krebs.

His face was still sunken from his recent illness.

Into his eyes seemed
to leap a sudden appeal,
an appeal
to which my soul responded yet I hurried down the stairs and into the street.

Instantly I regretted my retreat,
I would have gone back,
but lacked the courage;
and I strayed unhappily
for hours,
now haunted by that look of Krebs,
now wondering what the remarkably sane-looking and informal clergyman whose presence dominated the little room had been talking about.

I never learned,
but I did live
to read his biography,
to discover what he might have talked about,--for he if any man believed that life and religion are one,
and preached consecration
to life's task.

Of little use
to speculate whether the message,
had I learned it then,
would have fortified and transformed me! In spite of the fact that I was unable
to relate
to a satisfying conception of religion my new-born determination,
I made up my mind,
at least,
to renounce my tortuous ways.

I had promised my father
to be a lawyer;
I would keep my promise,
I would give the law a fair trial;
later on,
perhaps,
I might demonstrate an ability
to write.

All very praiseworthy! The season was Lent,
a fitting time
for renunciations and resolves.

Although I had more than once fallen from grace,
I believed myself at last
to have settled down on my true course--when something happened.

The devil interfered subtly,
as usual--now in the person of Jerry Kyme.

It should be said in justice
to Jerry that he did not look the part.

He had sunny-red,
curly hair,
mischievous blue eyes
with long lashes,
and he harboured no respect whatever
for any individual or institution,
sacred or profane;
he possessed,
however,
a shrewd sense of his own value,
as many innocent and unsuspecting souls discovered as early as our freshman year,
and his method of putting down the presumptuous was both effective and unique.

If he liked you,
there could be no mistake about it.

One evening when I was engaged in composing a theme
for Mr. Cheyne on no less a subject than the interpretation of the work of William Wordsworth,
I found myself unexpectedly sprawling on the floor,
in my descent kicking the table so vigorously as
to send the ink-well a foot or two toward the ceiling.

This,
be it known,
was a typical proof of Jerry's esteem.

For he had entered noiselessly,
jerking the back of my chair,
which chanced
to be tilted,
and stood
with his hands in his pockets,
surveying the ruin he had wrought,
watching the ink as it trickled on the carpet.

Then he picked up the book.

"Poetry,
you darned old grind!"
he exclaimed disgustedly.

"Say,
Parry,
I don't know what's got into you,
but I want you
to come home
with me
for the Easter holidays.

It'll do you good.

We'll be on the Hudson,
you know,
and we'll manage
to make life bearable somehow."

I forgot my irritation,
in sheer surprise.

"Why,
that's mighty good of you,
Jerry--"
I began,
struggling
to my feet.

"Oh,
rot!"
he exclaimed.

"I shouldn't ask you if I didn't want you."

There was no denying the truth of this,
and after he had gone I sat
for a long time
with my pen in my mouth,
reflecting as
to whether or not I should go.

For I had the instinct that here was another cross-roads,
that more depended on my decision than I cared
to admit.

But even then I knew what I should do.

Ridiculous not to--I told myself.

How could a week or ten days
with Jerry possibly affect my newborn,
resolve?

Yet the prospect,
now,
of a visit
to the Kymes'
was by no means so glowing as it once would have been.

For I had seen visions,
I had dreamed dreams,
beheld a delectable country of my very own.

A year ago-- nay,
even a month ago--how such an invitation would have glittered!...

I returned at length
to my theme,
over which,
before Jerry's arrival,
I had been working feverishly.

But now the glamour had gone from it.

Presently Tom came in.

"Anyone been here?"
he demanded.

"Jerry,"
I told him.

"What did he want?"
"He wanted me
to go home
with him at Easter."

"You're going,
of course."

"I don't know.

I haven't decided."

"You'd be a fool not to,"
was Tom's comment.

It voiced,
succinctly,
a prevailing opinion.

It was the conclusion I arrived at in my own mind.

But just why I had been chosen
for the honour,
especially at such a time,
was a riddle.

Jerry's invitations were charily given,
and valued accordingly;
and more than once,
at our table,
I had felt a twinge of envy when Conybear or someone else had remarked,
with the proper nonchalance,
in answer
to a question,
that they were going
to Weathersfield.

Such was the name of the Kyme place....

I shall never forget the impression made on me by the decorous luxury of that big house,
standing amidst its old trees,
halfway up the gentle slope that rose steadily from the historic highway where poor Andre was captured.

I can see now the heavy stone pillars of its portico vignetted in a flush of tenderest green,
the tulips just beginning
to flame forth their Easter colours in the well-kept beds,
the stately,
well-groomed evergreens,
the vivid lawns,
the clipped hedges.

And like an overwhelming wave of emotion that swept all before it,
the impressiveness of wealth took possession of me.

For here was a kind of wealth I had never known,
that did not exist in the West,
nor even in the still Puritan environs of Boston where I had visited.

It took itself
for granted,
proclaimed itself complacently
to have solved all probleMs. By ignoring them,
perhaps.

But I was too young
to guess this.

It was order personified,
gaining effect at every turn by a multitude of details too trivial
to mention were it not
for the fact that they entered deeply into my consciousness,
until they came
to represent,
collectively,
the very flower of achievement.

It was a wealth that accepted tribute calmly,
as of inherent right.

Law and tradition defended its sanctity more effectively than troops.

Literature descended from her high altar
to lend it dignity;
and the long,
silent library displayed row upon row of the masters,
appropriately clad in morocco or calf,--Smollett,
Macaulay,
Gibbon,
Richardson,
Fielding,
Scott,
Dickens,
Irving and Thackeray,
as though each had striven
for a tablet here.

Art had denied herself that her canvases might be hung on these walls;
and even the Church,
on that first Sunday of my visit,
forgot the blood of her martyrs that she might adorn an appropriate niche in the setting.

The clergyman,
at one of the dinner parties,
gravely asked a blessing as upon an Institution that included and absorbed all other institutions in its being....

The note of that house was a tempered gaiety.

Guests arrived from New York,
spent the night and departed again without disturbing the even tenor of its ways.

Unobtrusive servants ministered
to their wants,--and
to mine....

Conybear was there,
and two classmates from Boston,
and we were treated
with the amiable tolerance accorded
to college youths and intimates of the son of the house.

One night there was a dance in our honour.

Nor have I forgotten Jerry's sister,
Nathalie,
whom I had met at Class Days,
a slim and willowy,
exotic young lady of the Botticelli type,
with a crown of burnished hair,
yet more suggestive of a hothouse than of spring.

She spoke English
with a French accent.

Capricious,
impulsive,
she captured my interest because she put a high value on her favour;
she drove me over the hills,
informing me at length that I was sympathique-- different from the rest;
in short,
she emphasized and intensified what I may call the Weathersfield environment,
stirred up in me new and vague aspirations that troubled yet excited me.

Then there was Mrs. Kyme,
a pretty,
light-hearted lady,
still young,
who seemed
to have no intention of growing older,
who romped and played songs
for us on the piano.

The daughter of an old but now impecunious Westchester family,
she had been born
to adorn the position she held,
she was adapted by nature
to wring from it the utmost of the joys it offered.

From her,
rather than from her husband,
both of the children seemed
to have inherited.

I used
to watch Mr. Grosvenor Kyme as he sat at the end of the dinner-table,
dark,
preoccupied,
taciturn,
symbolical of a wealth new
to my experience,
and which had about it a certain fabulous quality.

It toiled not,
neither did it spin,
but grew as if by magic,
day and night,
until the very conception of it was overpowering.

What must it be
to have had ancestors who had been clever enough
to sit still until a congested and discontented Europe had begun
to pour its thousands and hundreds of thousands into the gateway of the western world,
until that gateway had become a metropolis?

ancestors,
of course,
possessing what now suddenly appeared
to me as the most desirable of gifts--since it reaped so dazzling a harvest-business foresight.

From time
to time these ancestors had continued
to buy desirable corners,
which no amount of persuasion had availed
to make them relinquish.

Lease them,
yes;
sell them,
never! By virtue of such a system wealth was as inevitable as human necessity;
and the thought of human necessity did not greatly bother me.

Mr. Kyme's problem of life was not one of making money,
but of investing it.

One became automatically a personage....

It was due
to one of those singular coincidences--so interesting a subject
for speculation--that the man who revealed
to me this golden romance of the Kyme family was none other than a resident of my own city,
Mr. Theodore Watling,
now become one of our most important and influential citizens;
a corporation lawyer,
new and stimulating qualification,
suggesting as it did,
a deus ex machina of great affairs.

That he,
of all men,
should come
to Weathersfield astonished me,
since I was as yet
to make the connection between that finished,
decorous,
secluded existence and the source of its being.

The evening before my departure he arrived in company
with two other gentlemen,
a Mr. Talbot and a Mr. Saxes,
whose names were spoken
with respect in a sphere of which I had hitherto taken but little cognizance-Wall Street.

Conybear informed me that they were
"magnates,"...

We were sitting in the drawing-room at tea,
when they entered
with Mr. Watling,
and no sooner had he spoken
to Mrs. Kyme than his quick eye singled me out of the group.

"Why,
Hugh!"
he exclaimed,
taking my hand.

"I had no idea I should meet you here--I saw your father only last week,
the day I left home."

And he added,
turning
to Mrs. Kyme,
"Hugh is the son of Mr. Matthew Paret,
who has been the leader of our bar
for many years."

The recognition and the tribute
to my father were so graciously given that I warmed
with gratitude and pride,
while Mr. Kyme smiled a little,
remarking that I was a friend of Jerry's.

Theodore Watling,
for being here,
had suddenly assumed in my eyes a considerable consequence,
though the note he struck in that house was a strange one.

It was,
however,
his own note,
and had a certain distinction,
a ring of independence,
of the knowledge of self-worth.

Dinner at Weathersfield we youngsters had usually found rather an oppressive ceremony,
with its shaded lights and precise ritual over which Mr. Kyme presided like a high priest;
conversation had been restrained.

That night,
as Johnnie Laurens afterwards expressed it,
"things loosened up,"
and Mr. Watling was responsible
for the loosening.

Taking command of the Kyme dinner table appeared
to me
to be no mean achievement,
but this is just what he did,
without being vulgar or noisy or assertive.

Suavitar in modo,
forbiter in re.

If,
as I watched him there
with a newborn pride and loyalty,
I had paused
to reconstruct the idea that the mention of his name would formerly have evoked,
I suppose I should have found him falling short of my notion of a gentleman;
it had been my father's opinion;
but Mr. Watling's marriage
to Gene Hollister's aunt had given him a standing
with us at home.

He possessed virility,
vitality in a remarkable degree,
yet some elusive quality that was neither tact nor delicacy--though related
to these differentiated him from the commonplace,
self-made man of ability.

He was just off the type.

To liken him
to a clothing store model of a well-built,
broad-shouldered man
with a firm neck,
a handsome,
rather square face not lacking in colour and a conventional,
drooping moustache would be slanderous;
yet he did suggest it.

Suggesting it,
he redeemed it:

and the middle western burr in his voice was rather attractive than otherwise.

He had not so much the air of belonging there,
as of belonging anywhere--one of those anomalistic American citizens of the world who go abroad and make intimates of princes.

Before the meal was over he had inspired me
with loyalty and pride,
enlisted the admiration of Jerry and Conybear and Johnnie Laurens;
we followed him into the smoking-room,
sitting down in a row on a leather lounge behind our elders.

Here,
now that the gentlemen were alone,
there was an inspiring largeness in their talk that fired the imagination.

The subject was investments,
at first those of coal and iron in my own state,
for Mr. Watling,
it appeared,
was counsel
for the Boyne Iron Works.

"It will pay you
to keep an eye on that company,
Mr. Kyme,"
he said,
knocking the ashes from his cigar.

"Now that old Mr. Durrett's gone--"
"You don't mean
to say Nathaniel Durrett's dead!"
said Mr. Kyme.

The lawyer nodded.

"The old regime passed
with him.

Adolf Scherer succeeds him,
and you may take my word
for it,
he's a coming man.

Mr. Durrett,
who was a judge of men,
recognized that.

Scherer was an emigrant,
he had ideas,
and rose
to be a foreman.

For the last few years Mr. Durrett threw everything on his shoulders...."

Little by little the scope of the discussion was enlarged until it ranged over a continent,
touching lightly upon lines of railroad,
built or projected,
across the great west our pioneers had so lately succeeded in wresting from the savages,
upon mines of copper and gold hidden away among the mountains,
and millions of acres of forest and grazing lands which a complacent government would relinquish provided certain technicalities were met:

touching lightly,
too,
very lightly,--upon senators and congressmen at Washington.

And
for the first time I learned that not the least of the functions of these representatives of the people was
to act as the medium between capital and investment,
to facilitate the handing over of the Republic's resources
to those in a position
to develop them.

The emphasis was laid on development,
or rather on the resulting prosperity
for the country:

that was the justification,
and it was taken
for granted as supreme.

Nor was it new
to me;
this cult of prosperity.

I recalled the torch-light processions of the tariff enthusiasts of my childhood days,
my father's championship of the Republican Party.

He had not idealized politicians,
either.

For the American,
politics and ethics were strangers.

Thus I listened
with increasing fascination
to these gentlemen in evening clothes calmly treating the United States as a melon patch that existed largely
for the purpose of being divided up amongst a limited and favored number of persons.

I had a feeling of being among the initiated.

Where,
it may be asked,
were my ideals?

Let it not be supposed that I believed myself
to have lost them.

If so,
the impression I have given of myself has been wholly inadequate.

No,
they had been transmuted,
that is all,
transmuted by the alchemy of Weathersfield,
by the personality of Theodore Watling into brighter visions.

My eyes rarely left his face;
I hung on his talk,
which was interspersed
with native humour,
though he did not always join in the laughter,
sometimes gazing at the fire,
as though his keen mind were grappling
with a problem suggested.

I noted the respect in which his opinions were held,
and my imagination was fired by an impression of the power
to be achieved by successful men of his profession,
by the evidence of their indispensability
to capital itself....

At last when the gentlemen rose and were leaving the room,
Mr. Watling lingered,
with his hand on my arm.

"Of course you're going through the Law School,
Hugh,"
he said.

"Yes,
sir,"
I replied.

"Good!"
he exclaimed emphatically.

"The law,
to-day,
is more of a career than ever,
especially
for a young man
with your antecedents and advantages,
and I know of no city in the United States where I would rather start practice,
if I were a young man,
than ours.

In the next twenty years we shall see a tremendous growth.

Of course you'll be going into your father's office.

You couldn't do better.

But I'll keep an eye on you,
and perhaps I'll be able
to help you a little,
too."

I thanked him gratefully.

A famous artist,
who started out in youth
to embrace a military career and who failed
to pass an examination at West Point,
is said
to have remarked that if silicon had been a gas he would have been a soldier.

I am afraid I may have given the impression that if I had not gone
to Weathersfield and encountered Mr. Watling I might not have been a lawyer.

This impression would be misleading.

And while it is certain that I have not exaggerated the intensity of the spiritual experience I went through at Cambridge,
a somewhat belated consideration
for the truth compels me
to register my belief that the mood would in any case have been ephemeral.

The poison generated by the struggle of my nature
with its environment had sunk too deep,
and the very education that was supposed
to make a practical man of me had turned me into a sentimentalist.

I became,
as will be seen,
anything but a practical man in the true sense,
though the world in which I had been brought up and continued
to live deemed me such.

My father was greatly pleased when I wrote him that I was now more than ever convinced of the wisdom of choosing the law as my profession,
and was satisfied that I had come
to my senses at last.

He had still been prepared
to see me
"go off at a tangent,"
as he expressed it.

On the other hand,
the powerful effect of the appeal made by Weathersfield and Mr. Watling must not be underestimated.

Here in one object lesson was emphasized a host of suggestions each of which had made its impression.

And when I returned
to Cambridge Alonzo Cheyne knew that he had lost me....

I pass over the rest of my college course,
and the years I spent at the Harvard Law School,
where were instilled into me without difficulty the dictums that the law was the most important of all professions,
that those who entered it were a priestly class set aside
to guard from profanation that Ark of the Covenant,
the Constitution of the United States.

In short,
I was taught law precisely as I had been taught religion,--scriptural infallibility over again,--a static law and a static theology,--a set of concepts that were supposed
to be equal
to any problems civilization would have
to meet until the millennium.

What we are wont
to call wisdom is often naively innocent of impending change.

It has no barometric properties.

I shall content myself
with relating one incident only of this period.

In the January of my last year I went
with a party of young men and girls
to stay over Sunday at Beverly Farms,
where Mrs. Fremantle--a young Boston matron had opened her cottage
for the occasion.

This
"cottage,"
a roomy,
gabled structure,
stood on a cliff,
at the foot of which roared the wintry Atlantic,
while we danced and popped corn before the open fires.

During the daylight hours we drove about the country in sleighs,
or made ridiculous attempts
to walk on snow-shoes.

On Sunday afternoon,
left temporarily
to my own devices,
I wandered along the cliff,
crossing into the adjoining property.

The wind had fallen;
the waves,
much subdued,
broke rhythmically against the rocks;
during the night a new mantle of snow had been spread,
and the clouds were still low and menacing.

As I strolled I became aware of a motionless figure ahead of me,--one that seemed oddly familiar;
the set of the shabby overcoat on the stooping shoulders,
the unconscious pose contributed
to a certain sharpness of individuality;
in the act of challenging my memory,
I halted.

The man was gazing at the seascape,
and his very absorption gave me a sudden and unfamiliar thrill.

The word absorption precisely expresses my meaning,
for he seemed indeed
to have become a part of his surroundings,--an harmonious part.

Presently he swung about and looked at me as though he had expected
to find me there--and greeted me by name.

"Krebs!"
I exclaimed.

He smiled,
and flung out his arm,
indicating the scene.

His eyes at that moment seemed
to reflect the sea,--they made the gaunt face suddenly beautiful.

"This reminds me of a Japanese print,"
he said.

The words,
or the tone in which he spoke,
curiously transformed the picture.

It was as if I now beheld it,
anew,
through his vision:

the grey water stretching eastward
to melt into the grey sky,
the massed,
black trees on the hillside,
powdered
with white,
the snow in rounded,
fantastic patches on the huge boulders at the foot of the cliff.

Krebs did not seem like a stranger,
but like one whom I had known always,--one who stood in a peculiar relationship between me and something greater I could not define.

The impression was fleeting,
but real....

I remember wondering how he could have known anything about Japanese prints.

"I didn't think you were still in this part of the country,"
I remarked awkwardly.

"I'm a reporter on a Boston newspaper,
and I've been sent up here
to interview old Mr. Dome,
who lives in that house,"
and he pointed
to a roof above the trees.

"There is a rumour,
which I hope
to verify,
that he has just given a hundred thousand dollars
to the University."

"And--won't he see you?"
"At present he's taking a nap,"
said Krebs.

"He comes here occasionally
for a rest."

"Do you like interviewing?"
I asked.

He smiled again.

"Well,
I see a good many different kinds of people,
and that's interesting."

"But--being a reporter?"
I persisted.

This continued patronage was not a conscious expression of superiority on my part,
but he did not seem
to resent it.

He had aroused my curiosity.

"I'm going into the law,"
he said.

The quiet confidence
with which he spoke aroused,
suddenly,
a twinge of antagonism.

He had every right
to go into the law,
of course,
and yet!...

my query would have made it evident
to me,
had I been introspective in those days,
that the germ of the ideal of the profession,
implanted by Mr. Watling,
was expanding.

Were not influential friends necessary
for the proper kind of career?

and where were Krebs's?

In spite of the history of Daniel Webster and a long line of American tradition,
I felt an incongruity in my classmate's aspiration.

And as he stood there,
gaunt and undoubtedly hungry,
his eyes kindling,
I must vaguely have classed him
with the revolutionaries of all the ages;
must have felt in him,
instinctively,
a menace
to the stability of that Order
with which I had thrown my fortunes.

And yet there were comparatively poor men in the Law School itself who had not made me feel this way! He had impressed me against my will,
taken me by surprise,
commiseration had been mingled
with other feelings that sprang out of the memory of the night I had called on him,
when he had been sick.

Now I resented something in him which Tom Peters had called
"crust."

"The law!"
I repeated.

"Why?"
"Well,"
he said,
"even when I was a boy,
working at odd jobs,
I used
to think if I could ever be a lawyer I should have reached the top notch of human dignity."

Once more his smile disarmed me.

"And now"
I asked curiously.

"You see,
it was an ideal
with me,
I suppose.

My father was responsible
for that.

He had the German temperament of
'48,
and when he fled
to this country,
he expected
to find Utopia."

The smile emerged again,
like the sun shining through clouds,
while fascination and antagonism again struggled within me.

"And then came frightful troubles.

For years he could get only enough work
to keep him and my mother alive,
but he never lost his faith in America.

`It is man,'
he would say,
`man has
to grow up
to it--to liberty.'

Without the struggle,
liberty would be worth nothing.

And he used
to tell me that we must all do our part,
we who had come here,
and not expect everything
to be done
for us.

He had made that mistake.

If things were bad,
why,
put a shoulder
to the wheel and help
to make them better.

"That helped me,"
he continued,
after a moment's pause.

"For I've seen a good many things,
especially since I've been working
for a newspaper.

I've seen,
again and again,
the power of the law turned against those whom it was intended
to protect,
I've seen lawyers who care a great deal more about winning cases than they do about justice,
who prostitute their profession
to profit making,--profit making
for themselves and others.

And they are often the respectable lawyers,
too,
men of high standing,
whom you would not think would do such things.

They are on the side of the powerful,
and the best of them are all retained by rich men and corporations.

And what is the result?

One of the worst evils,
I think,
that can befall a country.

The poor man goes less and less
to the courts.

He is getting bitter,
which is bad,
which is dangerous.

But men won't see it."

It was on my tongue
to refute this,
to say that everybody had a chance.

I could indeed recall many arguments that had been drilled into me;
quotations,
even,
from court decisions.

But something prevented me from doing this,--something in his manner,
which was neither argumentative nor combative.

"That's why I am going into the law,"
he added.

"And I intend
to stay in it if I can keep alive.

It's a great chance
for me--for all of us.

Aren't you at the Law School?"
I nodded.

Once more,
as his earnest glance fell upon me,
came that suggestion of a subtle,
inexplicable link between us;
but before I could reply,
steps were heard behind us,
and an elderly servant,
bareheaded,
was seen coming down the path.

"Are you the reporter?"
he demanded somewhat impatiently of Krebs.

"If you want
to see Mr. Dome,
you'd better come right away.

He's going out
for a drive."

For a while,
after he had shaken my hand and departed,
I stood in the snow,
looking after him....

VIII On the Wednesday of that same week the news of my father's sudden and serious illness came
to me in a telegram,
and by the time I arrived at home it was too late
to see him again alive.

It was my first experience
with death,
and what perplexed me continually during the following days was an inability
to feel the loss more deeply.

When a child,
I had been easily shaken by the spectacle of sorrow.

Had I,
during recent years,
as a result of a discovery that emotions arising from human relationships lead
to discomfort and suffering,
deliberately been forming a shell,
until now I was incapable of natural feelings?

Of late I had seemed closer
to my father,
and his letters,
though formal,
had given evidence of his affection;
in his repressed fashion he had made it clear that he looked forward
to the time when I was
to practise
with him.

Why was it then,
as I gazed upon his fine features in death,
that I experienced no intensity of sorrow?

What was it in me that would not break down?

He seemed worn and tired,
yet I had never thought of him as weary,
never attributed
to him any yearning.

And now he was released.

I wondered what had been his private thoughts about himself,
his private opinions about life;
and when I reflect now upon my lack of real knowledge at five and twenty,
I am amazed at the futility of an expensive education which had failed
to impress upon me the simple,
basic fact that life was struggle;
that either development or retrogression is the fate of all men,
that characters are never completely made,
but always in the making.

I had merely a disconcerting glimpse of this truth,
with no powers of formulation,
as I sat beside my mother in the bedroom,
where every article evoked some childhood scene.

Here was the dent in the walnut foot-board of the bed made,
one wintry day,
by the impact of my box of blocks;
the big arm-chair,
covered
with I know not what stiff embroidery,
which had served on countless occasions as a chariot driven
to victory.

I even remembered how every Wednesday morning I had been banished from the room,
which had been so large a part of my childhood universe,
when Ella,
the housemaid,
had flung open all its windows and crowded its furniture into the hall.

The thought of my wanderings since then became poignant,
almost terrifying.

The room,
with all its memories,
was unchanged.

How safe I had been within its walls! Why could I not have been,
content
with what it represented?

of tradition,
of custom,--of religion?

And what was it within me that had lured me away from these?

I was miserable,
indeed,
but my misery was not of the kind I thought it ought
to be.

At moments,
when my mother relapsed into weeping,
I glanced at her almost in wonder.

Such sorrow as hers was incomprehensible.

Once she surprised and discomfited me by lifting her head and gazing fixedly at me through her tears.

I recall certain impressions of the funeral.

There,
among the pall- bearers,
was my Cousin Robert Breck,
tears in the furrows of his cheeks.

Had he loved my father more than I?

The sight of his grief moved me suddenly and strongly....

It seemed an age since I had worked in his store,
and yet here he was still,
coming
to town every morning and returning every evening
to Claremore,
loving his friends,
and mourning them one by one.

Was this,
the spectacle presented by my Cousin Robert,
the reward of earthly existence?

Were there no other prizes save those known as greatness of character and depth of human affections?

Cousin Robert looked worn and old.

The other pall-bearers,
men of weight,
of long standing in the community,
were aged,
too;
Mr. Blackwood,
and Mr. Jules Hollister;
and out of place,
somehow,
in this new church building.

It came
to me abruptly that the old order was gone,--had slipped away during my absence.

The church I had known in boyhood had been torn down
to make room
for a business building on Boyne Street;
the edifice in which I sat was expensive,
gave forth no distinctive note;
seemingly transitory
with its hybrid interior,
its shiny oak and blue and red organ-pipes,
betokening a compromised and weakened faith.

Nondescript,
likewise,
seemed the new minister,
Mr. Randlett,
as he prayed unctuously in front of the flowers massed on the platform.

I vaguely resented his laudatory references
to my father.

The old church,
with its severity,
had actually stood
for something.

It was the Westminster Catechism in wood and stone,
and Dr. Pound had been the human incarnation of that catechism,
the fit representative of a wrathful God,
a militant shepherd who had guarded
with vigilance his respectable flock,
who had protested vehemently against the sins of the world by which they were surrounded,
against the
"dogs,
and sorcerers,
and whoremongers,
and murderers and idolaters,
and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie."

How Dr. Pound would have put the emphasis of the Everlasting into those words! Against what was Mr. Randlett protesting?

My glance wandered
to the pews which held the committees from various organizations,
such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Bar Association,
which had come
to do honour
to my father.

And there,
differentiated from the others,
I saw the spruce,
alert figure of Theodore Watling.

He,
too,
represented a new type and a new note,--this time a forceful note,
a secular note that had not belonged
to the old church,
and seemed likewise anomalistic in the new....

During the long,
slow journey in the carriage
to the cemetery my mother did not raise her veil.

It was not until she reached out and seized my hand,
convulsively,
that I realized she was still a part of my existence.

In the days that followed I became aware that my father's death had removed a restrictive element,
that I was free now
to take without criticism or opposition whatever course in life I might desire.

It may be that I had apprehended even then that his professional ideals would not have coincided
with my own.

Mingled
with this sense of emancipation was a curious feeling of regret,
of mourning
for something I had never valued,
something fixed and dependable
for which he had stood,
a rock and a refuge of which I had never availed myself!...

When his will was opened it was found that the property had been left
to my mother during her lifetime.

It was larger than I had thought,
four hundred thousand dollars,
shrewdly invested,
for the most part,
in city real estate.

My father had been very secretive as
to money matters,
and my mother had no interest in them.

Three or four days later I received in the mail a typewritten letter signed by Theodore Watling,
expressing sympathy
for my bereavement,
and asking me
to drop in on him,
down town,
before I should leave the city.

In contrast
to the somewhat dingy offices where my father had practised in the Blackwood Block,
the quarters of Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon on the eighth floor of the new Durrett Building were modern
to a degree,
finished in oak and floored
with marble,
with a railed-off space where young women
with nimble fingers played ceaselessly on typewriters.

One of them informed me that Mr. Watling was busy,
but on reading my card added that she would take it in.

Meanwhile,
in company
with two others who may have been clients,
I waited.

This,
then,
was what it meant
to be a lawyer of importance,
to have,
like a Chesterfield,
an ante-room where clients cooled their heels and awaited one's pleasure...

The young woman returned,
and led me through a corridor
to a door on which was painted Mr. Wailing.

I recall him tilted back in his chair in a debonnair manner beside his polished desk,
the hint of a smile on his lips;
and leaning close
to him was a yellow,
owl-like person whose eyes,
as they turned
to me,
gave the impression of having stared
for years into hard,
artificial lights.

Mr. Watling rose briskly.

"How are you,
Hugh?"
he said,
the warmth of his greeting tempered by just the note of condolence suitable
to my black clothes.

"I'm glad you came.

I wanted
to see you before you went back
to Cambridge.

I must introduce you
to Judge Bering,
of our State Supreme Court.

Judge,
this is Mr. Paret's boy."

The judge looked me over
with a certain slow impressiveness,
and gave me a soft and fleshy hand.

"Glad
to know you,
Mr. Paret.

Your father was a great loss
to our bar,"
he declared.

I detected in his tone and manner a slight reservation that could not be called precisely judicial dignity;
it was as though,
in these few words,
he had gone
to the limit of self-commitment
with a stranger--a striking contrast
to the confidential attitude towards Mr. Watling in which I had surprised him.

"Judge,"
said Mr. Watling,
sitting down again,
"do you recall that time we all went up
to Mr. Paret's house and tried
to induce him
to run
for mayor?

That was before you went on the lower bench."

The judge nodded gloomily,
caressing his watch chain,
and suddenly rose
to go.

"That will be all right,
then?"
Mr. Watling inquired cryptically,
with a smile.

The other made a barely perceptible inclination of the head and departed.

Mr. Watling looked at me.

"He's one of the best men we have on the bench to-day,"
he added.

There was a trace of apology in his tone.

He talked a while of my father,
to whom,
so he said,
he had looked up ever since he had been admitted
to the bar.

"It would be a pleasure
to me,
Hugh,
as well as a matter of pride,"
he said cordially,
but
with dignity,
"to have Matthew Paret's son in my office.

I suppose you will be wishing
to take your mother somewhere this summer,
but if you care
to come here in the autumn,
you will be welcome.

You will begin,
of course,
as other young men begin,--as I began.

But I am a believer in blood,
and I'll be glad
to have you.

Mr. Fowndes and Mr. Ripon feel the same way."

He escorted me
to the door himself.

Everywhere I went during that brief visit home I was struck by change,
by the crumbling and decay of institutions that once had held me in thrall,
by the superimposition of a new order that as yet had assumed no definite character.

Some of the old landmarks had disappeared;
there were new and aggressive office buildings,
new and aggressive residences,
new and aggressive citizens who lived in them,
and of whom my mother spoke
with gentle deprecation.

Even Claremore,
that paradise of my childhood,
had grown shrivelled and shabby,
even tawdry,
I thought,
when we went out there one Sunday afternoon;
all that once represented the magic word
"country"
had vanished.

The old flat piano,
made in Philadelphia ages ago,
the horsehair chairs and sofa had been replaced by a nondescript furniture of the sort displayed behind plate-glass windows of the city's stores:

rocking-chairs on stands,
upholstered in clashing colours,
their coiled springs only half hidden by tassels,
and
"ornamental"
electric fixtures,
instead of the polished coal-oil lamps.

Cousin Jenny had grown white,
Willie was a staid bachelor,
Helen an old maid,
while Mary had married a tall,
anaemic young man
with glasses,
Walter Kinley,
whom Cousin Robert had taken into the store.

As I contemplated the Brecks odd questions suggested themselves:

did honesty and warm-heartedness necessarily accompany a lack of artistic taste?

and was virtue its own reward,
after all?

They drew my mother into the house,
took off her wraps,
set her down in the most comfortable rocker,
and insisted on making her a cup of tea.

I was touched.

I loved them still,
and yet I was conscious of reservations concerning them.

They,
too,
seemed a little on the defensive
with me,
and once in a while Mary was caustic in her remarks.

"I guess nothing but New York will be good enough
for Hugh now.

He'll be taking Cousin Sarah away from us."

"Not at all,
my dear,"
said my mother,
gently,
"he's going into Mr. Watling's office next autumn."

"Theodore Watling?"
demanded Cousin Robert,
pausing in his carving.

"Yes,
Robert.

Mr. Watling has been good enough
to say that he would like
to have Hugh.

Is there anything--?"
"Oh,
I'm out of date,
Sarah,"
Cousin Robert replied,
vigorously severing the leg of the turkey.

"These modern lawyers are too smart
for me.

Watling's no worse than the others,
I suppose,--only he's got more ability."

"I've never heard anything against him,"
said my mother in a pained voice.

"Only the other day McAlery Willett congratulated me that Hugh was going
to be
with him."

"You mustn't mind Robert,
Sarah,"
put in Cousin Jenny,--a remark reminiscent of other days.

"Dad has a notion that his generation is the only honest one,"
said Helen,
laughingly,
as she passed a plate.

I had gained a sense of superiority,
and I was quite indifferent
to Cousin Robert's opinion of Mr. Watling,
of modern lawyers in general.

More than once a wave of self-congratulation surged through me that I had possessed the foresight and initiative
to get out of the wholesale grocery business while there was yet time.

I looked at Willie,
still freckled,
still literal,
still a plodder,
at Walter Kinley,
and I thought of the drabness of their lives;
at Cousin Robert himself as he sat smoking his cigar in the bay-window on that dark February day,
and suddenly I pitied him.

The suspicion struck me that he had not prospered of late,
and this deepened
to a conviction as he talked.

"The Republican Party is going
to the dogs,"
he asserted.

"It used
to be an honourable party,
but now it is no better than the other.

Politics are only conducted,
now,
for the purpose of making unscrupulous men rich,
sir.

For years I furnished this city
with good groceries,
if I do say it myself.

I took a pride in the fact that the inmates of the hospitals,
yes,
and the dependent poor in the city's institutions,
should have honest food.

You can get anything out of the city if you are willing
to pay the politicians
for it.

I lost my city contracts.

Why?

Because I refused
to deal
with scoundrels.

Weill and Company and other unscrupulous upstarts are willing
to do so,
and poison the poor and the sick
with adulterated groceries! The first thing I knew was that the city auditor was holding back my bills
for supplies,
and paying Weill's.

That's what politics and business,
yes,
sir,
and the law,
have come
to in these days.

If a man wants
to succeed,
he must turn into a rascal."

I was not shocked,
but I was silent,
uncomfortable,
wishing that it were time
to take the train back
to the city.

Cousin Robert's face was more worn than I had thought,
and I contrasted him inevitably
with the forceful person who used
to stand,
in his worn alpaca coat,
on the pavement in front of his store,
greeting
with clear-eyed content his fellow merchants of the city.

Willie Breck,
too,
was silent,
and Walter Kinley took off his glasses and wiped them.

In the meanwhile Helen had left the group in which my mother sat,
and,
approaching us,
laid her hands on her father's shoulders.

"Now,
dad,"
she said,
in affectionate remonstrance,
"you're excited about politics again,
and you know it isn't good
for you.

And besides,
they're not worth it."

"You're right,
Helen,"
he replied.

Under the pressure of her hands he made a strong effort
to control himself,
and turned
to address my mother across the room.

"I'm getting
to be a crotchety old man,"
he said.

"It's a good thing I have a daughter
to remind me of it."

"It is a good thing,
Robert,"
said my mother.

During the rest of our visit he seemed
to have recovered something of his former spirits and poise,
taking refuge in the past.

They talked of their own youth,
of families whose houses had been landmarks on the Second Bank.

"I'm worried about your Cousin Robert,
Hugh,"
my mother confided
to me,
when we were at length seated in the train.

"I've heard rumours that things are not so well at the store as they might be."

We looked out at the winter landscape,
so different from that one which had thrilled every fibre of my being in the days when the railroad on which we travelled had been a winding narrow gauge.

The orchards--those that remained--were bare;
stubble pricked the frozen ground where tassels had once waved in the hot,
summer wind.

We flew by row after row of ginger-bread,
suburban houses built on
"villa plots,"
and I read in large letters on a hideous sign-board,
"Woodbine Park."

"Hugh,
have you ever heard anything against--Mr. Watling?"
"No,
mother,"
I said.

"So far as I knew,
he is very much looked up
to by lawyers and business men.

He is counsel,
I believe,
for Mr. Blackwood's street car line on Boyne Street.

And I told you,
I believe,
that I met him once at Mr. Kyme's."

"Poor Robert!"
she sighed.

"I suppose business trouble does make one bitter,--I've seen it so often.

But I never imagined that it would overtake Robert,
and at his time of life! It is an old and respected firm,
and we have always had a pride in it."

...

That night,
when I was going
to bed,
it was evident that the subject was still in her mind.

She clung
to my hand a moment.

"I,
too,
am afraid of the new,
Hugh,"
she said,
a little tremulously.

"We all grow so,
as age comes on."

"But you are not old,
mother,"
I protested.

"I have a feeling,
since your father has gone,
that I have lived my life,
my dear,
though I'd like
to stay long enough
to see you happily married--
to have grandchildren.

I was not young when you were born."

And she added,
after a little while,
"I know nothing about business affairs,
and now--now that your father is no longer here,
sometimes I'm afraid--"
"Afraid of what,
mother?"
She tried
to smile at me through her tears.

We were in the old sitting- room,
surrounded by the books.

"I know it's foolish,
and it isn't that I don't trust you.

I know that the son of your father couldn't do anything that was not honourable.

And yet I am afraid of what the world is becoming.

The city is growing so fast,
and so many new people are coming in.

Things are not the same.

Robert is right,
there.

And I have heard your father say the same thing.

Hugh,
promise me that you will try
to remember always what he was,
and what he would wish you
to be!"
"I will,
mother,"
I answered.

"But I think you would find that Cousin Robert exaggerates a little,
makes things seem worse than they really are.

Customs change,
you know.

And politics were never well--Sunday schools."

I,
too,
smiled a little.

"Father knew that.

And he would never take an active part in them."

"He was too fine!"
she exclaimed.

"And now,"
I continued,
"Cousin Robert has happened
to come in contact
with them through business.

That is what has made the difference in him.

Before,
he always knew they were corrupt,
but he rarely thought about them."

"Hugh,"
she said suddenly,
after a pause,
"you must remember one thing,-- that you can afford
to be independent.

I thank God that your father has provided
for that!"
I was duly admitted,
the next autumn,
to the bar of my own state,
and was assigned
to a desk in the offices of Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon.

Larry Weed was my immediate senior among the apprentices,
and Larry was a hero- worshipper.

I can see him now.

He suggested a bullfrog as he sat in the little room we shared in common,
his arms akimbo over a law book,
his little legs doubled under him,
his round,
eyes fixed expectantly on the doorway.

And even if I had not been aware of my good fortune in being connected
with such a firm as Theodore Watling's,
Larry would shortly have brought it home
to me.

During those weeks when I was making my first desperate attempts at briefing up the law I was sometimes interrupted by his exclamations when certain figures went by in the corridor.

"Say,
Hugh,
do you know who that was?"
"No."

"Miller Gorse."

"Who's he?"
"Do you mean
to say you never heard of Miller Gorse?"
"I've been away a long time,"
I would answer apologetically.

A person of some importance among my contemporaries at Harvard,
I had looked forward
to a residence in my native city
with the complacency of one who has seen something of the world,--only
to find that I was the least in the new kingdom.

And it was a kingdom.

Larry opened up
to me something of the significance and extent of it,
something of the identity of the men who controlled it.

"Miller Gorse,"
he said impressively,
"is the counsel
for the railroad."

"What railroad?

You mean the--"
I was adding,
when he interrupted me pityingly.

"After you've been here a while you'll find out there's only one railroad in this state,
so far as politics are concerned.

The Ashuela and Northern,
the Lake Shore and the others don't count."

I refrained from asking any more questions at that time,
but afterwards I always thought of the Railroad as spelled
with a capital.

"Miller Gorse isn't forty yet,"
Larry told me on another occasion.

"That's doing pretty well
for a man who comes near running this state."

For the sake of acquiring knowledge,
I endured Mr. Weed's patronage.

I inquired how Mr. Gorse ran the state.

"Oh,
you'll find out soon enough,"
he assured me,
"But Mr. Barbour's president of the Railroad."

"Sure.

Once in a while they take something up
to him,
but as a rule he leaves things
to Gorse."

Whereupon I resolved
to have a good look at Mr. Gorse at the first opportunity.

One day Mr. Watling sent out
for some papers.

"He's in there now;"
said Larry.

"You take
'em."

"In there"
meant Mr. Watling's sanctum.

And in there he was.

I had only a glance at the great man,
for,
with a kindly but preoccupied
"Thank you,
Hugh,"
Mr. Watling took the papers and dismissed me.

Heaviness,
blackness and impassivity,--these were the impressions of Mr. Gorse which I carried away from that first meeting.

The very solidity of his flesh seemed
to suggest the solidity of his position.

Such,
say the psychologists,
is the effect of prestige.

I remember well an old-fashioned picture puzzle in one of my boyhood books.

The scene depicted was
to all appearances a sylvan,
peaceful one,
with two happy lovers seated on a log beside a brook;
but presently,
as one gazed at the picture,
the head of an animal stood forth among the branches,
and then the body;
more animals began
to appear,
bit by bit;
a tiger,
a bear,
a lion,
a jackal,
a fox,
until at last,
whenever I looked at the page,
I did not see the sylvan scene at all,
but only the predatory beasts of the forest.

So,
one by one,
the figures of the real rulers of the city superimposed themselves
for me upon the simple and democratic design of Mayor,
Council,
Board of Aldermen,
Police Force,
etc.,
that filled the eye of a naive and trusting electorate which fondly imagined that it had something
to say in government.

Miller Gorse was one of these rulers behind the screen,
and Adolf Scherer,
of the Boyne Iron Works,
another;
there was Leonard Dickinson of the Corn National Bank;
Frederick Grierson,
becoming wealthy in city real estate;
Judah B.

Tallant,
who,
though outlawed socially,
was deferred
to as the owner of the Morning Era;
and even Ralph Hambleton,
rapidly superseding the elderly and conservative Mr. Lord,
who had hitherto managed the great Hambleton estate.

Ralph seemed
to have become,
in a somewhat gnostic manner,
a full-fledged financier.

Not having studied law,
he had been home
for four years when I became a legal fledgling,
and during the early days of my apprenticeship I was beholden
to him
for many
"eye openers"
concerning the conduct of great affairs.

I remember him sauntering into my room one morning when Larry Weed had gone out on an errand.

"Hello,
Hughie,"
he said,
with his air of having nothing
to do.

"Grinding it out?

Where's Watling?"
"Isn't he in his office?"
"No."

"Well,
what can we do
for you?"
I asked.

Ralph grinned.

"Perhaps I'll tell you when you're a little older.

You're too young."

And he sank down into Larry Weed's chair,
his long legs protruding on the other side of the table.

"It's a matter of taxes.

Some time ago I found out that Dickinson and Tallant and others I could mention were paying a good deal less on their city property than we are.

We don't propose
to do it any more--that's all."

"How can Mr. Watling help you?"
I inquired.

"Well,
I don't mind giving you a few tips about your profession,
Hughie.

I'm going
to get Watling
to fix it up
with the City Hall gang.

Old Lord doesn't like it,
I'll admit,
and when I told him we had been contributing
to the city long enough,
that I proposed swinging into line
with other property holders,
he began
to blubber about disgrace and what my grandfather would say if he were alive.

Well,
he isn't alive.

A good deal of water has flowed under the bridges since his day.

It's a mere matter of business,
of getting your respectable firm
to retain a City Hall attorney
to fix it up
with the assessor."

"How about the penitentiary?"
I ventured,
not too seriously.

"I shan't go
to the penitentiary,
neither will Watling.

What I do is
to pay a lawyer's fee.

There isn't anything criminal in that,
is there?"
For some time after Ralph had departed I sat reflecting upon this new knowledge,
and there came into my mind the bitterness of Cousin Robert Breck against this City Hall gang,
and his remarks about lawyers.

I recalled the tone in which he had referred
to Mr. Watling.

But Ralph's philosophy easily triumphed.

Why not be practical,
and become master of a situation which one had not made,
and could not alter,
instead of being overwhelmed by it?

Needless
to say,
I did not mention the conversation
to Mr. Watling,
nor did he dwindle in my estimation.

These necessary transactions did not interfere in any way
with his personal relationships,
and his days were filled
with kindnesses.

And was not Mr. Ripon,
the junior partner,
one of the evangelical lights of the community,
conducting advanced Bible classes every week in the Church of the Redemption?...

The unfolding of mysteries kept me alert.

And I understood that,
if I was
to succeed,
certain esoteric knowledge must be acquired,
as it were,
unofficially.

I kept my eyes and ears open,
and applied myself,
with all industry,
to the routine tasks
with which every young man in a large legal firm is familiar.

I recall distinctly my pride when,
the Board of Aldermen having passed an ordinance lowering the water rates,
I was intrusted
with the responsibility of going before the court in behalf of Mr. Ogilvy's water company,
obtaining a temporary restricting order preventing the ordinance from going at once into effect.

Here was an affair in point.

Were it not
for lawyers of the calibre of Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon,
hard-earned private property would soon be confiscated by the rapacious horde.

Once in a while I was made aware that Mr. Watling had his eye on me.

"Well,
Hugh,"
he would say,
"how are you getting along?

That's right,
stick
to it,
and after a while we'll hand the drudgery over
to somebody else."

He possessed the supreme quality of a leader of men in that he took pains
to inform himself concerning the work of the least of his subordinates;
and he had the gift of putting fire into a young man by a word or a touch of the hand on the shoulder.

It was not difficult
for me,
therefore,
to comprehend Larry Weed's hero-worship,
the loyalty of other members of the firm or of those occupants of the office whom I have not mentioned.

My first impression of him,
which I had got at Jerry Kyme's,
deepened as time went on,
and I readily shared the belief of those around me that his legal talents easily surpassed those of any of his contemporaries.

I can recall,
at this time,
several noted cases in the city when I sat in court listening
to his arguments
with thrills of pride.

He made us all feel-- no matter how humble may have been our contributions
to the preparation-- that we had a share in his triumphs.

We remembered his manner
with judges and juries,
and strove
to emulate it.

He spoke as if there could be no question as
to his being right as
to the law and the facts,
and yet,
in some subtle way that bated analysis,
managed not
to antagonize the court.

Victory was in the air in that office.

I do not mean
to say there were not defeats;
but frequently these defeats,
by resourcefulness,
by a never-say-die spirit,
by a consummate knowledge,
not only of the law,
but of other things at which I have hinted,
were turned into ultimate victories.

We fought cases from one court
to another,
until our opponents were worn out or the decision was reversed.

We won,
and that spirit of winning got into the blood.

What was most impressed on me in those early years,
I think,
was the discovery that there was always a path--if one were clever enough
to find it--from one terrace
to the next higher.

Staying power was the most prized of all the virtues.

One could always,
by adroitness,
compel a legal opponent
to fight the matter out all over again on new ground,
or at least on ground partially new.

If the Court of Appeals should fail one,
there was the Supreme Court;
there was the opportunity,
also,
to shift from the state
to the federal courts;
and likewise the much-prized device known as a change of venue,
when a judge was supposed
to be
"prejudiced."

IX.

As my apprenticeship advanced I grew more and more
to the inhabitants of our city into two kinds,
the who were served,
and the inefficient,
who were separate efficient,
neglected;
but the mental process of which the classification was the result was not so deliberate as may be supposed.

Sometimes,
when an important client would get into trouble,
the affair took me into the police court,
where I saw the riff-raff of the city penned up,
waiting
to have justice doled out
to them:

weary women who had spent the night in cells,
indifferent now as
to the front they presented
to the world,
the finery rued that they had tended so carefully
to catch the eyes of men on the darkened streets;
brazen young girls,
who blazed forth defiance
to all order;
derelict men,
sodden and hopeless,
with scrubby beards;
shifty looking burglars and pickpockets.

All these I beheld,
at first
with twinges of pity,
later
to mass them
with the ugly and inevitable
with whom society had
to deal somehow.

Lawyers,
after all,
must be practical men.

I came
to know the justices of these police courts,
as well as other judges.

And underlying my acquaintance
with all of them was the knowledge--though not on the threshold of my consciousness--that they depended
for their living,
every man of them,
those who were appointed and those who were elected,
upon a political organization which derived its sustenance from the element whence came our clients.

Thus by degrees the sense of belonging
to a special priesthood had grown on me.

I recall an experience
with that same Mr. Nathan.

Weill,
the wholesale grocer of whose commerce
with the City Hall my Cousin Robert Breck had so bitterly complained.

Late one afternoon Mr. Weill's carriage ran over a child on its way up-town through one of the poorer districts.

The parents,
naturally,
were frantic,
and the coachman was arrested.

This was late in the afternoon,
and I was alone in the office when the telephone rang.

Hurrying
to the police station,
I found Mr. Weill in a state of excitement and abject fear,
for an ugly crowd had gathered outside.

"Could not Mr. Watling or Mr. Fowndes come?"
demanded the grocer.

With an inner contempt
for the layman's state of mind on such occasions I assured him of my competency
to handle the case.

He was impressed,
I think,
by the sergeant's deference,
who knew what it meant
to have such an office as ours interfere
with the affair.

I called up the prosecuting attorney,
who sent
to Monahan's saloon,
close by,
and procured a release
for the coachman on his own recognizance,
one of many signed in blank and left there by the justice
for privileged cases.

The coachman was hustled out by a back door,
and the crowd dispersed.

The next morning,
while a score or more of delinquents sat in the anxious seats,
Justice Garry recognized me and gave me precedence.

And Mr. Weill,
with a sigh of relief,
paid his fine.

"Mr. Paret,
is it?"
he asked,
as we stood together
for a moment on the sidewalk outside the court.

"You have managed this well.

I will remember."

He was sued,
of course.

When he came
to the office he insisted on discussing the case
with Mr. Watling,
who sent
for me.

"That is a bright young man,"
Mr. Weill declared,
shaking my hand.

"He will get on."

"Some day,"
said Mr. Watling,
"he may save you a lot of money,
Weill."

"When my friend Mr. Watling is United States Senator,--eh?"
Mr. Watling laughed.

"Before that,
I hope.

I advise you
to compromise this suit,
Weill,"
he added.

"How would a thousand dollars strike you?

I've had Paret look up the case,
and he tells me the little girl has had
to have an operation."

"A thousand dollars!"
cried the grocer.

"What right have these people
to let their children play on the streets?

It's an outrage."

"Where else have the children
to play?"
Mr. Watling touched his arm.

"Weill,"
he said gently,
"suppose it had been your little girl?"
The grocer pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his bald forehead.

But he rallied a little.

"You fight these damage cases
for the street railroads all through the courts."

"Yes,"
Mr. Watling agreed,
"but there a principle is involved.

If the railroads once got into the way of paying damages
for every careless employee,
they would soon be bankrupt through blackmail.

But here you have a child whose father is a poor janitor and can't afford sickness.

And your coachman,
I imagine,
will be more particular in the future."

In the end Mr. Weill made out a cheque and departed in a good humour,
convinced that he was well out of the matter.

Here was one of many instances I could cite of Mr. Watling's tenderness of heart.

I felt,
moreover,
as if he had done me a personal favour,
since it was I who had recommended the compromise.

For I had been
to the hospital and had seen the child on the cot,--a dark little thing,
lying still in her pain,
with the bewildered look of a wounded animal....

Not long after this incident of Mr. Weill's damage suit I obtained a more or less definite promotion by the departure of Larry Weed.

He had suddenly developed a weakness of the lungs.

Mr. Watling got him a place in Denver,
and paid his expenses west.

The first six or seven years I spent in the office of Wading,
Fowndes and Ripon were of importance
to my future career,
but there is little
to relate of them.

I was absorbed not only in learning law,
but in acquiring that esoteric knowledge at which I have hinted--not
to be had from my seniors and which I was convinced was indispensable
to a successful and lucrative practice.

My former comparison of the organization of our city
to a picture puzzle wherein the dominating figures become visible only after long study is rather inadequate.

A better analogy would be the human anatomy:

we lawyers,
of course,
were the brains;
the financial and industrial interests the body,
helpless without us;
the City Hall politicians,
the stomach that must continually be fed.

All three,
law,
politics and business,
were interdependent,
united by a nervous system too complex
to be developed here.

In these years,
though I worked hard and often late,
I still found time
for convivialities,
for social gaieties,
yet little by little without realizing the fact,
I was losing zest
for the companionship of my former intimates.

My mind was becoming polarized by the contemplation of one object,
success,
and
to it human ties were unconsciously being sacrificed.

Tom Peters began
to feel this,
even at a time when I believed myself still
to be genuinely fond of him.

Considering our respective temperaments in youth,
it is curious that he should have been the first
to fall in love and marry.

One day he astonished me by announcing his engagement
to Susan Blackwood.

"That ends the liquor,
Hughie,"
he told me,
beamingly.

"I promised her I'd eliminate it."

He did eliminate it,
save
for mild relapses on festive occasions.

A more seemingly incongruous marriage could scarcely be imagined,
and yet it was a success from the start.

From a slim,
silent,
self-willed girl Susan had grown up into a tall,
rather rawboned and energetic young woman.

She was what we called in those days
"intellectual,"
and had gone in
for kindergartens,
and after her marriage she turned out
to be excessively domestic;
practising her theories,
with entire success,
upon a family that showed a tendency
to increase at an alarming rate.

Tom,
needless
to say,
did not become intellectual.

He settled down--prematurely,
I thought--into what is known as a family man,
curiously content
with the income he derived from the commission business and
with life in general;
and he developed a somewhat critical view of the tendencies of the civilization by which he was surrounded.

Susan held it also,
but she said less about it.

In the comfortable but unpretentious house they rented on Cedar Street we had many discussions,
after the babies had been put
to bed and the door of the living-room closed,
in order that our voices might not reach the nursery.

Perry Blackwood,
now Tom's brother- in-law,
was often there.

He,
too,
had lapsed into what I thought was an odd conservatism.

Old Josiah,
his father,
being dead,
he occupied himself mainly
with looking after certain family interests,
among which was the Boyne Street car line.

Among
"business men"
he was already getting the reputation of being a little difficult
to deal with.

I was often the subject of their banter,
and presently I began
to suspect that they regarded my career and beliefs
with some concern.

This gave me no uneasiness,
though at limes I lost my temper.

I realized their affection
for me;
but privately I regarded them as lacking in ambition,
in force,
in the fighting qualities necessary
for achievement in this modern age.

Perhaps,
unconsciously,
I pitied them a little.

"How is Judah B.

to-day,
Hughie?"
Tom would inquire.

"I hear you've put him up
for the Boyne Club,
now that Mr. Watling has got him out of that libel suit."

"Carter Ives is dead,"
Perry would add,
sarcastically,
"let bygones be bygones."

It was well known that Mr. Tallant,
in the early days of his newspaper,
had blackmailed Mr. Ives out of some hundred thousand dollars.

And that this,
more than any other act,
stood in the way,
with certain recalcitrant gentlemen,
of his highest ambition,
membership in the Boyne.

"The trouble
with you fellows is that you refuse
to deal
with conditions as you find them,"
I retorted.

"We didn't make them,
and we can't change them.

Tallant's a factor in the business life of this city,
and he has
to be counted with."

Tom would shake his head exasperatingly.

"Why don't you get after Ralph?"
I demanded.

"He doesn't antagonize Tallant,
either."

"Ralph's hopeless,"
said Tom.

"He was born a pirate,
you weren't,
Hughie.

We think there's a chance
for his salvation,
don't we,
Perry?"
I refused
to accept the remark as flattering.

Another object of their assaults was Frederick Grierson,
who by this time had emerged from obscurity as a small dealer in real estate into a manipulator of blocks and corners.

"I suppose you think it's a lawyer's business
to demand an ethical bill of health of every client,"
I said.

"I won't stand up
for all of Tallant's career,
of course,
but Mr. Wading has a clear right
to take his cases.

As
for Grierson,
it seems
to me that's a matter of giving a dog a bad name.

Just because his people weren't known here,
and because he has worked up from small beginnings.

To get down
to hard-pan,
you fellows don't believe in democracy,--in giving every man a chance
to show what's in him."

"Democracy is good!"
exclaimed Perry.

"If the kind of thing we're coming
to is democracy,
God save the state!"
...

On the other hand I found myself drawing closer
to Ralph Hambleton,
sometimes present at these debates,
as the only one of my boyhood friends who seemed
to be able to
"deal
with conditions as he found them."

Indeed,
he gave one the impression that,
if he had had the making of them,
he would not have changed them.

"What the deuce do you expect?"
I once heard him inquire
with good- natured contempt.

"Business isn't charity,
it's war.

"There are certain things,"
maintained Perry,
stoutly,
"that gentlemen won't do."

"Gentlemen!"
exclaimed Ralph,
stretching his slim six feet two:

We were sitting in the Boyne Club.

"It's ungentlemanly
to kill,
or burn a town or sink a ship,
but we keep armies and navies
for the purpose.

For a man
with a good mind,
Perry,
you show a surprising inability
to think things,
out
to a logical conclusion.

What the deuce is competition,
when you come down
to it?

Christianity?

Not by a long shot! If our nations are slaughtering men and starving populations in other countries,--are carried on,
in fact,
for the sake of business,
if our churches are filled
with business men and our sky pilots pray
for the government,
you can't expect heathen individuals like me
to do business on a Christian basis,-- if there is such a thing.

You can make rules
for croquet,
but not
for a game that is based on the natural law of the survival of the fittest.

The darned fools in the legislatures try it occasionally,
but we all know it's a sop
to the `common people.'

Ask Hughie here if there ever was a law put on the statute books that his friend Watling couldn't get
'round'?

Why,
you've got competition even among the churches.

Yours,
where I believe you teach in the Sunday school,
would go bankrupt if it proclaimed real Christianity.

And you'll go bankrupt if you practise it,
Perry,
my boy.

Some early,
wide-awake,
competitive,
red-blooded bird will relieve you of the Boyne Street car line."

It was one of this same new and
"fittest"
species who had already relieved poor Mr. McAlery Willett of his fortune.

Mr. Willett was a trusting soul who had never known how
to take care of himself or his money,
people said,
and now that he had lost it they blamed him.

Some had been saved enough
for him and Nancy
to live on in the old house,
with careful economy.

It was Nancy who managed the economy,
who accomplished remarkable things
with a sum they would have deemed poverty in former days.

Her mother had died while I was at Cambridge.

Reverses did not subdue Mr. Willett's spirits,
and the fascination modern
"business"
had
for him seemed
to grow in proportion
to the misfortunes it had caused him.

He moved into a tiny office in the Durrett Building,
where he appeared every morning about half-past ten
to occupy himself
with heaven knows what short cuts
to wealth,
with prospectuses of companies in Mexico or Central America or some other distant place:

once,
I remember,
it was a tea,
company in which he tried
to interest his friends,
to raise in the South a product he maintained would surpass Orange Pekoe.

In the afternoon between three and four he would turn up at the Boyne Club,
as well groomed,
as spruce as ever,
generally
with a flower in his buttonhole.

He never forgot that he was a gentleman,
and he had a gentleman's notions of the fitness of things,
and it was against his principles
to use,
a gentleman's club
for the furtherance of his various enterprises.

"Drop into my office some day,
Dickinson,"
he would say.

"I think I've got something there that might interest you!"
He reminded me,
when I met him,
that he had always predicted I would get along in life....

The portrait of Nancy at this period is not so easily drawn.

The decline of the family fortunes seemed
to have had as little effect upon her as upon her father,
although their characters differed sharply.

Something of that spontaneity,
of that love of life and joy in it she had possessed in youth she must have inherited from McAlery Willett,
but these qualities had disappeared in her long before the coming of financial reverses.

She was nearing thirty,
and in spite of her beauty and the rarer distinction that can best be described as breeding,
she had never married.

Men admired her,
but from a distance;
she kept them at arm's length,
they said:

strangers who visited the city invariably picked her out of an assembly and asked who she was;
one man from New York who came
to visit Ralph and who had been madly in love
with her,
she had amazed many people by refusing,
spurning all he might have given her.

This incident seemed a refutation of the charge that she was calculating.

As might have been foretold,
she had the social gift in a remarkable degree,
and in spite of the limitations of her purse the knack of dressing better than other women,
though at that time the organization of our social life still remained comparatively simple,
the custom of luxurious and expensive entertainment not having yet set in.

The more I reflect upon those days,
the more surprising does it seem that I was not in love
with her.

It may be that I was,
unconsciously,
for she troubled my thoughts occasionally,
and she represented all the qualities I admired in her sex.

The situation that had existed at the time of our first and only quarrel had been reversed,
I was on the highroad
to the worldly success I had then resolved upon,
Nancy was poor,
and
for that reason,
perhaps,
prouder than ever.

If she was inaccessible
to others,
she had the air of being peculiarly inaccessible
to me--the more so because some of the superficial relics of our intimacy remained,
or rather had been restored.

Her very manner of camaraderie seemed paradoxically
to increase the distance between us.

It piqued me.

Had she given me the least encouragement,
I am sure I should have responded;
and I remember that I used occasionally
to speculate as
to whether she still cared
for me,
and took this method of hiding her real feelings.

Yet,
on the whole,
I felt a certain complacency about it all;
I knew that suffering was disagreeable,
I had learned how
to avoid it,
and I may have had,
deep within me,
a feeling that I might marry her after all.

Meanwhile my life was full,
and gave promise of becoming even fuller,
more absorbing and exciting in the immediate future.

One of the most fascinating figures,
to me,
of that Order being woven,
like a cloth of gold,
out of our hitherto drab civilization,--an Order into which I was ready and eager
to be initiated,--was that of Adolf Scherer,
the giant German immigrant at the head of the Boyne Iron Works.

His life would easily lend itself
to riotous romance.

In the old country,
in a valley below the castle perched on the rack above,
he had begun life by tending his father's geese.

What a contrast to
"Steeltown"
with its smells and sickening summer heat,
to the shanty where Mrs. Scherer took boarders and bent over the wash-tub! She,
too,
was an immigrant,
but lived
to hear her native Wagner from her own box at Covent Garden;
and he
to explain,
on the deck of an imperial yacht,
to the man who might have been his sovereign certain processes in the manufacture of steel hitherto untried on that side of the Atlantic.

In comparison
with Adolf Scherer,
citizen of a once despised democracy,
the minor prince in whose dominions he had once tended geese was of small account indeed! The Adolf Scherer of that day--though it is not so long ago as time flies --was even more solid and impressive than the man he afterwards became,
when he reached the dizzier heights from which he delivered
to an eager press opinions on politics and war,
eugenics and woman's suffrage and other subjects that are the despair of specialists.

Had he stuck
to steel,
he would have remained invulnerable.

But even then he was beginning
to abandon the field of production
for that of exploitation:

figuratively speaking,
he had taken
to soap,
which
with the aid of water may be blown into beautiful,
iridescent bubbles
to charm the eye.

Much good soap,
apparently,
has gone that way,
never
to be recovered.

Everybody who was anybody began
to blow bubbles about that time,
and the bigger the bubble the greater its attraction
for investors of hard-earned savings.

Outside of this love
for financial iridescence,
let it be called,
Mr. Scherer seemed
to care little then
for glitter of any sort.

Shortly after his elevation
to the presidency of the Boyne Iron Works he had been elected a member of the Boyne Club,--an honour of which,
some thought,
he should have been more sensible;
but generally,
when in town,
he preferred
to lunch at a little German restaurant annexed
to a saloon,
where I used often
to find him literally towering above the cloth,--for he was a giant
with short legs,--his napkin tucked into his shirt front,
engaged in lively conversation
with the ministering Heinrich.

The chef at the club,
Mr. Scherer insisted,
could produce nothing equal
to Heinrich's sauer-kraut and sausage.

My earliest relationship
with Mr. Scherer was that of an errand boy,
of bringing
to him
for his approval papers which might not be intrusted
to a common messenger.

His gruffness and brevity disturbed me more than I cared
to confess.

I was pretty sure that he eyed me
with the disposition of the self-made
to believe that college educations and good tailors were the heaviest handicaps
with which a young man could be burdened:

and I suspected him of an inimical attitude toward the older families of the city.

Certain men possessed his confidence;
and he had built,
as it were,
a stockade about them,
sternly keeping the rest of the world outside.

In Theodore Watling he had a childlike faith.

Thus I studied him,
with a deliberation which it is the purpose of these chapters
to confess,
though he little knew that he was being made the subject of analysis.

Nor did I ever venture
to talk
with him,
but held strictly
to my role of errand boy,--even after the conviction came over me that he was no longer indifferent
to my presence.

The day arrived,
after some years,
when he suddenly thrust toward me a big,
hairy hand that held the document he was examining.

"Who drew this,
Mr. Paret!"
he demanded.

Mr. Ripon,
I told him.

The Boyne Works were buying up coal-mines,
and this was a contract looking
to the purchase of one in Putman County,
provided,
after a certain period of working,
the yield and quality should come up
to specifications.

Mr. Scherer requested me
to read one of the sections,
which puzzled him.

And in explaining it an idea flashed over me.

"Do you mind my making a suggestion,
Mr. Scherer?"
I ventured.

"What is it?"
he asked brusquely.

I showed him how,
by the alteration of a few words,
the difficulty
to which he had referred could not only be eliminated,
but that certain possible penalties might be evaded,
while the apparent meaning of the section remained unchanged.

In other words,
it gave the Boyne Iron Works an advantage that was not contemplated.

He seized the paper,
stared at what I had written in pencil on the margin,
and then stared at me.

Abruptly,
he began
to laugh.

"Ask Mr. Wading what he thinks of it?"
"I intended to,
provided it had your approval,
sir,"
I replied.

"You have my approval,
Mr. Paret,"
he declared,
rather cryptically,
and
with the slight German hardening of the v's into which he relapsed at times.

"Bring it
to the Works this afternoon."

Mr. Wading agreed
to the alteration.

He looked at me amusedly.

"Yes,
I think that's an improvement,
Hugh,"
he said.

I had a feeling that I had gained ground,
and from this time on I thought I detected a change in his attitude toward me;
there could be no doubt about the new attitude of Mr. Scherer,
who would often greet me now
with a smile and a joke,
and sometimes went so far as
to ask my opinions....

Then,
about six months later,
came the famous Ribblevale case that aroused the moral indignation of so many persons,
among whom was Perry Blackwood.

"You know as well as I do,
Hugh,
how this thing is being manipulated,"
he declared at Tom's one Sunday evening;
"there was nothing the matter
with the Ribblevale Steel Company--it was as right as rain before Leonard Dickinson and Grierson and Scherer and that crowd you train
with began
to talk it down at the Club.

Oh,
they're very compassionate.

I've heard
'em.

Dickinson,
privately,
doesn't think much of Ribblevale paper,
and Pugh"
(the president of the Ribblevale)
"seems worried and looks badly.

It's all very clever,
but I'd hate
to tell you in plain words what I'd call it."

"Go ahead,"
I challenged him audaciously.

"You haven't any proof that the Ribblevale wasn't in trouble."

"I heard Mr. Pugh tell my father the other day it was a d--d outrage.

He couldn't catch up
with these rumours,
and some of his stockholders were liquidating."

"You,
don't suppose Pugh would want
to admit his situation,
do you?"
I asked.

"Pugh's a straight man,"
retorted Perry.

"That's more than I can say
for any of the other gang,
saving your presence.

The unpleasant truth is that Scherer and the Boyne people want the Ribblevale,
and you ought
to know it if you don't."

He looked at me very hard through the glasses he had lately taken
to wearing.

Tom,
who was lounging by the fire,
shifted his position uneasily.

I smiled,
and took another cigar.

"I believe Ralph is right,
Perry,
when he calls you a sentimentalist.

For you there's a tragedy behind every ordinary business transaction.

The Ribblevale people are having a hard time
to keep their heads above water,
and immediately you smell conspiracy.

Dickinson and Scherer have been talking it down.

How about it,
Tom?"
But Tom,
in these debates,
was inclined
to be noncommittal,
although it was clear they troubled him.

"Oh,
don't ask me,
Hughie,"
he said.

"I suppose I ought
to cultivate the scientific point of view,
and look
with impartial interest at this industrial cannibalism,"
returned Perry,
sarcastically.

"Eat or be eaten that's what enlightened self-interest has come to.

After all,
Ralph would say,
it is nature,
the insect world over again,
the victim duped and crippled before he is devoured,
and the lawyer--how shall I put it?--facilitating the processes of swallowing and digesting...."

There was no use arguing
with Perry when he was in this vein....

Since I am not writing a technical treatise,
I need not go into the details of the Ribblevale suit.

Since it
to say that the affair,
after a while,
came apparently
to a deadlock,
owing
to the impossibility of getting certain definite information from the Ribblevale books,
which had been taken out of the state.

The treasurer,
for reasons of his own,
remained out of the state also;
the ordinary course of summoning him before a magistrate in another state had naturally been resorted to,
but the desired evidence was not forthcoming.

"The trouble is,"
Mr. Wading explained
to Mr. Scherer,
"that there is no law in the various states
with a sufficient penalty attached that will compel the witness
to divulge facts he wishes
to conceal."

It was the middle of a February afternoon,
and they were seated in deep,
leather chairs in one corner of the reading room of the Boyne Club.

They had the place
to themselves.

Fowndes was there also,
one leg twisted around the other in familiar fashion,
a bored look on his long and sallow face.

Mr. Wading had telephoned
to the office
for me
to bring them some papers bearing on the case.

"Sit down,
Hugh,"
he said kindly.

"Now we have present a genuine legal mind,"
said Mr. Scherer,
in the playful manner he had adopted of late,
while I grinned appreciatively and took a chair.

Mr. Watling presently suggested kidnapping the Ribblevale treasurer until he should promise
to produce the books as the only way out of what seemed an impasse.

But Mr. Scherer brought down a huge fist on his knee.

"I tell you it is no joke,
Watling,
we've got
to win that suit,"
he asserted.

"That's all very well,"
replied Mr. Watling.

"But we're a respectable firm,
you know.

We haven't had
to resort
to safe-blowing,
as yet."

Mr. Scherer shrugged his shoulders,
as much as
to say it were a matter of indifference
to him what methods were resorted to.

Mr. Watling's eyes met mine;
his glance was amused,
yet I thought I read in it a query as
to the advisability,
in my presence,
of going too deeply into the question of ways and means.

I may have been wrong.

At any rate,
its sudden effect was
to embolden me
to give voice
to an idea that had begun
to simmer in my mind,
that excited me,
and yet I had feared
to utter it.

This look of my chief's,
and the lighter tone the conversation had taken decided me.

"Why wouldn't it be possible
to draw up a bill
to fit the situation?"
I inquired.

Mr. Wading started.

"What do you mean?"
he asked quickly.

All three looked at me.

I felt the blood come into my face,
but it was too late
to draw back.

"Well--the legislature is in session.

And since,
as Mr. Watling says,
there is no sufficient penalty in other states
to compel the witness
to produce the information desired,
why not draw up a bill and--and have it passed--"
I paused
for breath--"imposing a sufficient penalty on home corporations in the event of such evasions.

The Ribblevale Steel Company is a home corporation."

I had shot my bolt....

There followed what was
for me an anxious silence,
while the three of them continued
to stare at me.

Mr. Watling put the tips of his fingers together,
and I became aware that he was not offended,
that he was thinking rapidly.

"By George,
why not,
Fowndes?"
he demanded.

"Well,"
said Fowndes,
"there's an element of risk in such a proceeding I need not dwell upon."

"Risk!"
cried the senior partner vigorously.

"There's risk in everything.

They'll howl,
of course.

But they howl anyway,
and nobody ever listens
to them.

They'll say it's special legislation,
and the Pilot will print sensational editorials
for a few days.

But what of it?

All of that has happened before.

I tell you,
if we can't see those books,
we'll lose the suit.

That's in black and white.

And,
as a matter of justice,
we're entitled
to know what we want
to know."

"There might be two opinions as
to that,"
observed Fowndes,
with his sardonic smile.

Mr. Watling paid no attention
to this remark.

He was already deep in thought.

It was characteristic of his mind
to leap forward,
seize a suggestion that often appeared chimerical
to a man like Fowndes and turn it into an accomplished Fact.

"I believe you've hit it,
Hugh,"
he said.

"We needn't bother about the powers of the courts in other states.

We'll put into this bill an appeal
to our court
for an order on the clerk
to compel the witness
to come before the court and testify,
and we'll provide
for a special commissioner
to take depositions in the state where the witness is.

If the officers of a home corporation who are outside of the state refuse
to testify,
the penalty will be that the ration goes into the hands of a receiver."

Fowndes whistled.

"That's going some!"
he said.

"Well,
we've got
to go some.

How about it,
Scherer?"
Even Mr. Scherer's brown eyes were snapping.

"We have got
to win that suit,
Watling."

We were all excited,
even Fowndes,
I think,
though he remained expressionless.

Ours was the tense excitement of primitive man in chase:

the quarry which had threatened
to elude us was again in view,
and not unlikely
to fall into our hands.

Add
to this feeling,
on my part,
the thrill that it was I who had put them on the scent.

I had all the sensations of an aspiring young brave who
for the first time is admitted
to the councils of the tribe!
"It ought
to be a popular bill,
too,"
Mr. Schemer was saying,
with a smile of ironic appreciation at the thought of demagogues advocating it.

"We should have one of Lawler's friends introduce it."

"Oh,
we shall have it properly introduced,"
replied Mr. Wading.

"It may come back at us,"
suggested Fowndes pessimistically.

"The Boyne Iron Works is a home corporation too,
if I am not mistaken."

"The Boyne Iron Works has the firm of Wading,
Fowndes and Ripon behind it,"
asserted Mr. Scherer,
with what struck me as a magnificent faith.

"You mustn't forget Paret,"
Mr. Watling reminded him,
with a wink at me.

We had risen.

Mr. Scherer laid a hand on my arm.

"No,
no,
I do not forget him.

He will not permit me
to forget him."

A remark,
I thought,
that betrayed some insight into my character...

Mr. Watling called
for pen and paper and made then and there a draft of the proposed bill,
for no time was
to be lost.

It was dark when we left the Club,
and I recall the elation I felt and strove
to conceal as I accompanied my chief back
to the office.

The stenographers and clerks were gone;
alone in the library we got down the statutes and set
to work.

to perfect the bill from the rough draft,
on which Mr. Fowndes had written his suggestions.

I felt that a complete yet subtle change had come over my relationship
with Mr. Watling.

In the midst of our labours he asked me
to call up the attorney
for the Railroad.

Mr. Gorse was still at his office.

"Hello! Is that you,
Miller?"
Mr. Watling said.

"This is Wading.

When can I see you
for a few minutes this evening?

Yes,
I am leaving
for Washington at nine thirty.

Eight o'clock.

All right,
I'll be there."

It was almost eight before he got the draft finished
to his satisfaction,
and I had picked it out on the typewriter.

As I handed it
to him,
my chief held it a moment,
gazing at me
with an odd smile.

"You seem
to have acquired a good deal of useful knowledge,
here and there,
Hugh,"
he observed.

"I've tried
to keep my eyes open,
Mr. Watling,"
I said.

"Well,"
he said,
"there are a great many things a young man practising law in these days has
to learn
for himself.

And if I hadn't given you credit
for some cleverness,
I shouldn't have wanted you here.

There's only one way
to look at--at these matters we have been discussing,
my boy,
that's the common-sense way,
and if a man doesn't get that point of view by himself,
nobody can teach it
to him.

I needn't enlarge upon it"
"No,
sir,"
I said.

He smiled again,
but immediately became serious.

"If Mr. Gorse should approve of this bill,
I'm going
to send you down
to the capital--to-night.

Can you go?"
I nodded.

"I want you
to look out
for the bill in the legislature.

Of course there won't be much
to do,
except
to stand by,
but you will get a better idea of what goes on down there."

I thanked him,
and told him I would do my best.

"I'm sure of that,"
he replied.

"Now it's time
to go
to see Gorse."

The legal department of the Railroad occupied an entire floor of the Corn Bank building.

I had often been there on various errands,
having on occasions delivered sealed envelopes
to Mr. Gorse himself,
approaching him in the ordinary way through a series of offices.

But now,
following Mr. Watling through the dimly lighted corridor,
we came
to a door on which no name was painted,
and which was presently opened by a stenographer.

There was in the proceeding a touch of mystery that revived keenly my boyish love
for romance;
brought back the days when I had been,
in turn,
Captain Kidd and Ali Baba.

I have never realized more strongly than in that moment the psychological force of prestige.

Little by little,
for five years,
an estimate of the extent of Miller Gorse's power had been coming home
to me,
and his features stood in my mind
for his particular kind of power.

He was a tremendous worker,
and often remained in his office until ten and eleven at night.

He dismissed the stenographer by the wave of a hand which seemed
to thrust her bodily out of the room.

"Hello,
Miller,"
said Mr. Watling.

"Hello,
Theodore,"
replied Mr. Gorse.

"This is Paret,
of my office."

"I know,"
said Mr. Gorse,
and nodded toward me.

I was impressed by the felicity
with which a cartoonist of the Pilot had once caricatured him by the use of curved lines.

The circle of the heavy eyebrows ended at the wide nostrils;
the mouth was a crescent,
but bowed downwards;
the heavy shoulders were rounded.

Indeed,
the only straight line
to be discerned about him was that of his hair,
black as bitumen,
banged across his forehead;
even his polished porphyry eyes were constructed on some curvilinear principle,
and never seemed
to focus.

It might be said of Mr. Gorse that he had an overwhelming impersonality.

One could never be quite sure that one's words reached the mark.

In spite of the intimacy which I knew existed between them,
in my presence at least Mr. Gorse's manner was little different
with Mr. Watling than it was
with other men.

Mr. Wading did not seem
to mind.

He pulled up a chair close
to the desk and began,
without any preliminaries,
to explain his errand.

"It's about the Ribblevale affair,"
he said.

"You know we have a suit."

Gorse nodded.

"We've got
to get at the books,
Miller,--that's all there is
to it.

I told you so the other day.

Well,
we've found out a way,
I think."

He thrust his hand in his pocket,
while the railroad attorney remained impassive,
and drew out the draft of the bill.

Mr. Gorse read it,
then read it over again,
and laid it down in front of him.

"Well,"
he said.

"I want
to put that through both houses and have the governor's signature
to it by the end of the week."

"It seems a little raw,
at first sight,
Theodore,"
said Mr. Gorse,
with the suspicion of a smile.

My chief laughed a little.

"It's not half so raw as some things I might mention,
that went through like greased lightning,"
he replied.

"What can they do?

I believe it will hold water.

Tallant's,
and most of the other newspapers in the state,
won't print a line about it,
and only Socialists and Populists read the Pilot.

They're disgruntled anyway.

The point is,
there's no other way out
for us.

Just think a moment,
bearing in mind what I've told you about the case,
and you'll see it."

Mr. Gorse took up the paper again,
and read the draft over.

"You know as well as I do,
Miller,
how dangerous it is
to leave this Ribblevale business at loose ends.

The Carlisle steel people and the Lake Shore road are after the Ribblevale Company,
and we can't afford
to run any risk of their getting it.

It's logically a part of the Boyne interests,
as Scherer says,
and Dickinson is ready
with the money
for the reorganization.

If the Carlisle people and the Lake Shore get it,
the product will be shipped out by the L and G,
and the Railroad will lose.

What would Barbour say?"
Mr. Barbour,
as I have perhaps mentioned,
was the president of the Railroad,
and had his residence in the other great city of the state.

He was then,
I knew,
in the West.

"We've got
to act now,"
insisted Mr. Watling.

"That's open and shut.

If you have any other plan,
I wish you'd trot it out.

If not,
I want a letter
to Paul Varney and the governor.

I'm going
to send Paret down
with them on the night train."

It was clear
to me then,
in the discussion following,
that Mr. Watling's gift of persuasion,
though great,
was not the determining factor in Mr. Gorse's decision.

He,
too,
possessed boldness,
though he preferred caution.

Nor did the friendship between the two enter into the transaction.

I was impressed more strongly than ever
with the fact that a lawsuit was seldom a mere private affair between two persons or corporations,
but involved a chain of relationships and nine times out of ten that chain led up
to the Railroad,
which nearly always was vitally interested in these legal contests.

Half an hour of masterly presentation of the situation was necessary before Mr. Gorse became convinced that the introduction of the bill was the only way out
for all concerned.

"Well,
I guess you're right,
Theodore,"
he said at length.

Whereupon he seized his pen and wrote off two notes
with great rapidity.

These he showed
to Mr. Watling,
who nodded and returned them.

They were folded and sealed,
and handed
to me.

One was addressed
to Colonel Paul Varney,
and the other
to the Hon.

W.

W.

Trulease,
governor of the state.

"You can trust this young man?"
demanded Mr. Gorse.

"I think so,"
replied Mr. Watling,
smiling at me.

"The bill was his own idea."

The railroad attorney wheeled about in his chair and looked at me;
looked around me,
would better express it,
with his indefinite,
encompassing yet inclusive glance.

I had riveted his attention.

And from henceforth,
I knew,
I should enter into his calculations.

He had made
for me a compartment in his mind.

"His own idea!"
he repeated.

"I merely suggested it,"
I was putting in,
when he cut me short.

"Aren't you the son of Matthew Paret?"
"Yes,"
I said.

He gave me a queer glance,
the significance of which I left untranslated.

My excitement was too great
to analyze what he meant by this mention of my father....

When we reached the sidewalk my chief gave me a few parting instructions.

"I need scarcely say,
Hugh,"
he added,
"that your presence in the capital should not be advertised as connected
with this--legislation.

They will probably attribute it
to us in the end,
but if you're reasonably careful,
they'll never be able
to prove it.

And there's no use in putting our cards on the table at the beginning."

"No indeed,
sir!"
I agreed.

He took my hand and pressed it.

"Good luck,"
he said.

"I know you'll get along all right."

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Benumbing and desiccating effect of that old system of education I hated
to lie
to her,--yet I did so Knowledge was presented
to us as a corpse Meaningless lessons which had
to be learned Righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy,
but punishment Staunch advocate on the doctrine of infant damnation What you wants,
you gets Your American romanticist is a sentimental spoiled child End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Far Country,
V1 by Winston Churchill A FAR COUNTRY By Winston Churchill BOOK 2.

X.

This was not my first visit
to the state capital.

Indeed,
some of that recondite knowledge,
in which I took a pride,
had been gained on the occasions of my previous visits.

Rising and dressing early,
I beheld out of the car window the broad,
shallow river glinting in the morning sunlight,
the dome of the state house against the blue of the sky.

Even at that early hour groups of the gentlemen who made our laws were scattered about the lobby of the Potts House,
standing or seated within easy reach of the gaily coloured cuspidors that protected the marble floor:

heavy-jawed workers from the cities mingled
with moon-faced but astute countrymen who manipulated votes amongst farms and villages;
fat or cadaverous,
Irish,
German or American,
all bore in common a certain indefinable stamp.

Having eaten my breakfast in a large dining-room that resounded
with the clatter of dishes,
I directed my steps
to the apartment occupied from year
to year by Colonel Paul Barney,
generalissimo of the Railroad on the legislative battlefield,--a position that demanded a certain uniqueness of genius.

"How do you do,
sir,"
he said,
in a guarded but courteous tone as he opened the door.

I entered
to confront a group of three or four figures,
silent and rather hostile,
seated in a haze of tobacco smoke around a marble-topped table.

On it reposed a Bible,
attached
to a chain.

"You probably don't remember me,
Colonel,"
I said.

"My name is Pared,
and I'm associated
with the firm of Watling,
Fowndes,
and Ripon."

His air of marginality,--heightened by a grey moustache and goatee a la Napoleon Third,--vanished instantly;
he became hospitable,
ingratiating.

"Why--why certainly,
you were down heah
with Mr. Fowndes two years ago."

The Colonel spoke
with a slight Southern accent.

"To be sure,
sir.

I've had the honour of meeting your father.

Mr. Norris,
of North Haven,
meet Mr. Paret--one of our rising lawyers..."

I shook hands
with them all and sat down.

Opening his long coat,
Colonel Varney revealed two rows of cigars,
suggesting cartridges in a belt.

These he proceeded
to hand out as he talked.

"I'm glad
to see you here,
Mr. Paret.

You must stay awhile,
and become acquainted
with the men who--ahem--are shaping the destinies of a great state.

It would give me pleasure
to escort you about."

I thanked him.

I had learned enough
to realize how important are the amenities in politics and business.

The Colonel did most of the conversing;
he could not have filled
with efficiency and ease the important post that was his had it not been
for the endless fund of humorous anecdotes at his disposal.

One by one the visitors left,
each assuring me of his personal regard:

the Colonel closed the door,
softly,
turning the key in the lock;
there was a sly look in his black eyes as he took a chair in proximity
to mine.

"Well,
Mr. Paret,"
he asked softly,
"what's up?"
Without further ado I handed him Mr. Gorse's letter,
and another Mr. Watling had given me
for him,
which contained a copy of the bill.

He read these,
laid them on the table,
glancing at me again,
stroking his goatee the while.

He chuckled.

"By gum!"
he exclaimed.

"I take off my hat
to Theodore Watling,
always did."

He became contemplative.

"It can be done,
Mr. Paret,
but it's going
to take some careful driving,
sir,
some reaching out and flicking
'em when they r'ar and buck.

Paul Varney's never been stumped yet.

Just as soon as this is introduced we'll have Gates and Armstrong down here-- they're the Ribblevale attorneys,
aren't they?

I thought so,--and the best legal talent they can hire.

And they'll round up all the disgruntled fellows,
you know,--that ain't friendly
to the Railroad.

We've got
to do it quick,
Mr. Paret.

Gorse gave you a letter
to the Governor,
didn't he?"
"Yes,"
I said.

"Well,
come along.

I'll pass the word around among the boys,
just
to let
'em know what
to expect."

His eyes glittered again.

"I've been following this Ribblevale business,"
he added,
"and I understand Leonard Dickinson's all ready
to reorganize that company,
when the time comes.

He ought
to let me in
for a little,
on the ground floor."

I did not venture
to make any promises
for Mr. Dickinson.

"I reckon it's just as well if you were
to meet me at the Governor's office,"
the Colonel added reflectively,
and the hint was not lost on me.

"It's better not
to let
'em find out any sooner than they have
to where this thing comes from,--you understand."

He looked at his watch.

"How would nine o'clock do?

I'll be there,
with Trulease,
when you come,--by accident,
you understand.

Of course he'll be reasonable,
but when they get
to be governors they have little notions,
you know,
and you've got
to indulge
'em,
flatter
'em a little.

It doesn't hurt,
for when they get their backs up it only makes more trouble."

He put on a soft,
black felt hat,
and departed noiselessly...

At nine o'clock I arrived at the State House and was ushered into a great square room overlooking the park.

The Governor was seated at a desk under an elaborate chandelier,
and sure enough,
Colonel Varney was there beside him;
making barely perceptible signals.

"It is a pleasure
to make your acquaintance,
Mr. Paret,"
said Mr. Trulease.

"Your name is a familiar one in your city,
sir.

And I gather from your card that you are associated
with my good friend,
Theodore Watling."

I acknowledged it.

I was not a little impressed by the perfect blend of cordiality,
democratic simplicity and impressiveness Mr. Trulease had achieved.

For he had managed,
in the course of a long political career,
to combine in exact proportions these elements which,
in the public mind,
should up the personality of a chief executive.

Momentarily he overcame the feeling of superiority
with which I had entered his presence;
neutralized the sense I had of being associated now
with the higher powers which had put him where he was.

For I knew all about his
"record."

"You're acquainted
with Colonel Varney?"
he inquired.

"Yes,
Governor,
I've met the Colonel,"
I said.

"Well,
I suppose your firm is getting its share of business these days,"
Mr. Trulease observed.

I acknowledged it was,
and after discussing
for a few moments the remarkable growth of my native city the Governor tapped on his desk and inquired what he could do
for me.

I produced the letter from the attorney
for the Railroad.

The Governor read it gravely.

"Ah,"
he said,
"from Mr. Gorse."

A copy of the proposed bill was enclosed,
and the Governor read that also,
hemmed and hawed a little,
turned and handed it
to Colonel Varney,
who was sitting
with a detached air,
smoking contemplatively,
a vacant expression on his face.

"What do you think of this,
Colonel?"
Whereupon the Colonel tore himself away from his reflections.

"What's that,
Governor?"
"Mr. Gorse has called my attention
to what seems
to him a flaw in our statutes,
an inability
to obtain testimony from corporations whose books are elsewhere,
and who may thus evade,
he says,
to a certain extent,
the sovereign will of our state."

The Colonel took the paper
with an admirable air of surprise,
adjusted his glasses,
and became absorbed in reading,
clearing his throat once or twice and emitting an exclamation.

"Well,
if you ask me,
Governor,"
he said,
at length,
"all I can say is that I am astonished somebody didn't think of this simple remedy before now.

Many times,
sir,
have I seen justice defeated because we had no such legislation as this."

He handed it back.

The Governor studied it once more,
and coughed.

"Does the penalty,"
he inquired,
"seem
to you a little severe?"
"No,
sir,"
replied the Colonel,
emphatically.

"Perhaps it is because I am anxious,
as a citizen,
to see an evil abated.

I have had an intimate knowledge of legislation,
sir,
for more than twenty years in this state,
and in all that time I do not remember
to have seen a bill more concisely drawn,
or better calculated
to accomplish the ends of justice.

Indeed,
I often wondered why this very penalty was not imposed.

Foreign magistrates are notoriously indifferent as
to affairs in another state than their own.

Rather than go into the hands of a receiver I venture
to say that hereafter,
if this bill is made a law,
the necessary testimony will be forthcoming."

The Governor read the bill through again.

"If it is introduced,
Colonel,"
he said,
"the legislature and the people of the state ought
to have it made clear
to them that its aim is
to remedy an injustice.

A misunderstanding on this point would be unfortunate."

"Most unfortunate,
Governor."

"And of course,"
added the Governor,
now addressing me,
"it would be improper
for me
to indicate what course I shall pursue in regard
to it if it should come
to me
for my signature.

Yet I may go so far as
to say that the defect it seeks
to remedy seems
to me a real one.

Come in and see me,
Mr. Paret,
when you are in town,
and give my cordial regards
to Mr. Watling."

So gravely had the farce been carried on that I almost laughed,
despite the fact that the matter in question was a serious one
for me.

The Governor held out his hand,
and I accepted my dismissal.

I had not gone fifty steps in the corridor before I heard the Colonel's voice in my ear.

"We had
to give him a little rope
to go through
with his act,"
he whispered confidentially.

"But he'll sign it all right.

And now,
if you'll excuse me,
Mr. Paret,
I'll lay a few mines.

See you at the hotel,
sir."

Thus he indicated,
delicately,
that it would be better
for me
to keep out of sight.

On my way
to the Potts House the bizarre elements in the situation struck me again
with considerable force.

It seemed so ridiculous,
so puerile
to have
to go through
with this political farce in order that a natural economic evolution might be achieved.

Without doubt the development of certain industries had reached a stage where the units in competition had become too small,
when a greater concentration of capital was necessary.

Curiously enough,
in this mental argument of justification,
I left out all consideration of the size of the probable profits
to Mr. Scherer and his friends.

Profits and brains went together.

And,
since the Almighty did not limit the latter,
why should man attempt
to limit the former?

We were playing
for high but justifiable stakes;
and I resented the comedy which an hypocritical insistence on the forms of democracy compelled us
to go through.

It seemed unworthy of men who controlled the destinies of state and nation.

The point of view,
however,
was consoling.

As the day wore on I sat in the Colonel's room,
admiring the skill
with which he conducted the campaign:

a green country lawyer had been got
to introduce the bill,
it had been expedited
to the Committee on the Judiciary,
which would have an executive session immediately after dinner.

I had ventured
to inquire about the hearings.

"There won't be any hearings,
sir,"
the Colonel assured me.

"We own that committee from top
to bottom."

Indeed,
by four o'clock in the afternoon the message came that the committee had agreed
to recommend the bill.

Shortly after that the first flurry occurred.

There came a knock at the door,
followed by the entrance of a stocky Irish American of about forty years of age,
whose black hair was plastered over his forehead.

His sea- blue eyes had a stormy look.

"Hello,
Jim,"
said the Colonel.

"I was just wondering where you were."

"Sure,
you must have been!"
replied the gentleman sarcastically.

But the Colonel's geniality was unruffled.

"Mr. Maker,"
he said,
"you ought
to know Mr. Paret.

Mr. Maker is the representative from Ward Five of your city,
and we can always count on him
to do the right thing,
even if he is a Democrat.

How about it,
Jim?"
Mr. Maker relighted the stump of his cigar.

"Take a fresh one,
Jim,"
said the Colonel,
opening a bureau drawer.

Mr. Maker took two.

"Say,
Colonel,"
he demanded,
"what's this bill that went into the judiciary this morning?"
"What bill?"
asked the Colonel,
blandly.

"So you think I ain't on?"
Mr. Maker inquired.

The Colonel laughed.

"Where have you been,
Jim?"
"I've been up
to the city,
seem'
my wife--that's where I've been."

The Colonel smiled,
as at a harmless fiction.

"Well,
if you weren't here,
I don't see what right you've got
to complain.

I never leave my good Democratic friends on the outside,
do I?"
"That's all right,"
replied Mr. Maker,
doggedly,
"I'm on,
I'm here now,
and that bill in the Judiciary doesn't pass without me.

I guess I can stop it,
too.

How about a thousand apiece
for five of us boys?"
"You're pretty good at a joke,
Jim,"
remarked the Colonel,
stroking his goatee.

"Maybe you're looking
for a little publicity in this here game,"
retorted Mr. Maker,
darkly.

"Say,
Colonel,
ain't we always treated the Railroad on the level?"
"Jim,"
asked the Colonel,
gently,
"didn't I always take care of you?"
He had laid his hand on the shoulder of Mr. Maker,
who appeared slightly mollified,
and glanced at a massive silver watch.

"Well,
I'll be dropping in about eight o'clock,"
was his significant reply,
as he took his leave.

"I guess we'll have
to grease the wheels a little,"
the Colonel remarked
to me,
and gazed at the ceiling....

The telegram apropos of the Ward Five leader was by no means the only cipher message I sent back during my stay.

I had not needed
to be told that the matter in hand would cost money,
but Mr. Watling's parting instruction
to me had been
to take the Colonel's advice as
to specific sums,
and obtain confirmation from Fowndes.

Nor was it any surprise
to me
to find Democrats on intimate terms
with such a stout Republican as the Colonel.

Some statesman is said
to have declared that he knew neither Easterners nor Westerners,
Northerners nor Southerners,
but only Americans;
so Colonel Varney recognized neither Democrats nor Republicans;
in our legislature party divisions were sunk in a greater loyalty
to the Railroad.

At the Colonel's suggestion I had laid in a liberal supply of cigars and whiskey.

The scene in his room that evening suggested a session of a sublimated grand lodge of some secret order,
such were the mysterious comings and goings,
knocks and suspenses.

One after another the
"important"
men duly appeared and were introduced,
the Colonel supplying the light touch.

"Why,
cuss me if it isn't Billy! Mr. Paret,
I want you
to shake hands
with Mr. Donovan,
the floor leader of the
'opposition,'
sir.

Mr. Donovan has had the habit of coming up here
for a friendly chat ever since he first came down
to the legislature.

How long is it,
Billy?"
"I guess it's nigh on
to fifteen years,
Colonel."

"Fifteen years!"
echoed the Colonel,
"and he's so good a Democrat it hasn't changed his politics a particle."

Mr. Donovan grinned in appreciation of this thrust,
helped himself liberally from the bottle on the mantel,
and took a seat on the bed.

We had a
"friendly chat."

Thus I made the acquaintance also of the Hon.

Joseph Mecklin,
Speaker of the House,
who unbent in the most flattering way on learning my identity.

"Mr. Paret's here on that little matter,
representing Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon,"
the Colonel explained.

And it appeared that Mr. Mecklin knew all about the
"little matter,"
and that the mention of the firm of Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon had a magical effect in these parts.

The President of the Senate,
the Hon.

Lafe Giddings,
went so far as
to say that he hoped before long
to see Mr. Watling in Washington.

By no means the least among our callers was the Hon.

Fitch Truesdale,
editor of the St. Helen's Messenger,
whose editorials were of the trite effectiveness that is taken widely
for wisdom,
and were assiduously copied every week by other state papers and labeled
"Mr. Truesdale's Common Sense."

At countless firesides in our state he was known as the spokesman of the plain man,
who was blissfully ignorant of the fact that Mr. Truesdale was owned body and carcass by Mr. Cyrus Ridden,
the principal manufacturer of St. Helen's and a director in several subsidiary lines of the Railroad.

In the legislature,
the Hon.

Fitch's function was that of the moderate counsellor and bellwether
for new members,
hence nothing could have been more fitting than the choice of that gentleman
for the honour of moving,
on the morrow,
that Bill No.

709 ought
to pass.

Mr. Truesdale reluctantly consented
to accept a small
"loan"
that would help
to pay the mortgage on his new press....

When the last of the gathering had departed,
about one o'clock in the morning,
I had added considerably
to my experience,
gained a pretty accurate idea of who was who in the legislature and politics of the state,
and established relationships--as the Colonel reminded me--likely
to prove valuable in the future.

It seemed only gracious
to congratulate him on his management of the affair,--so far.

He appeared pleased,
and squeezed my hand.

"Well,
sir,
it did require a little delicacy of touch.

And if I do say it myself,
it hasn't been botched,"
he admitted.

"There ain't an outsider,
as far as I can learn,
who has caught on
to the nigger in the wood-pile.

That's the great thing,
to keep
'em ignorant as long as possible.

You understand.

They yell bloody murder when they do find out,
but generally it's too late,
if a bill's been handled right."

I found myself speculating as
to who the
"outsiders"
might be.

No Ribblevale attorneys were on the spot as yet,--of that I was satisfied.

In the absence of these,
who were the opposition?

It seemed
to me as though I had interviewed that day every man in the legislature.

I was very tired.

But when I got into bed,
it was impossible
to sleep.

My eyes smarted from the tobacco smoke;
and the events of the day,
in disorderly manner,
kept running through my head.

The tide of my exhilaration had ebbed,
and I found myself struggling against a revulsion caused,
apparently,
by the contemplation of Colonel Varney and his associates;
the instruments,
in brief,
by which our triumph over our opponents was
to be effected.

And that same idea which,
when launched amidst the surroundings of the Boyne Club,
had seemed so brilliant,
now took on an aspect of tawdriness.

Another thought intruded itself,--that of Mr. Pugh,
the president of the Ribblevale Company.

My father had known him,
and some years before I had traveled halfway across the state in his company;
his kindliness had impressed me.

He had spent a large part of his business life,
I knew,
in building up the Ribblevale,
and now it was
to be wrested from him;
he was
to be set aside,
perhaps forced
to start all over again when old age was coming on! In vain I accused myself of sentimentality,
and summoned all my arguments
to prove that in commerce efficiency must be the only test.

The image of Mr. Pugh would not down.

I got up and turned on the light,
and took refuge in a novel I had in my bag.

Presently I grew calmer.

I had chosen.

I had succeeded.

And now that I had my finger at last on the nerve of power,
it was no time
to weaken.

It was half-past six when I awoke and went
to the window,
relieved
to find that the sun had scattered my morbid fancies
with the darkness;
and I speculated,
as I dressed,
whether the thing called conscience were not,
after all,
a matter of nerves.

I went downstairs through the tobacco-stale atmosphere of the lobby into the fresh air and sparkly sunlight of the mild February morning,
and leaving the business district I reached the residence portion of the little town.

The front steps of some of the comfortable houses were being swept by industrious servant girls,
and out of the chimneys twisted,
fantastically,
rich blue smoke;
the bare branches of the trees were silver-grey against the sky;
gaining at last an old-fashioned,
wooden bridge,
I stood
for awhile gazing at the river,
over the shallows of which the spendthrift hand of nature had flung a shower of diamonds.

And I reflected that the world was
for the strong,
for him who dared reach out his hand and take what it offered.

It was not money we coveted,
we Americans,
but power,
the self-expression conferred by power.

A single experience such as I had had the night before would since
to convince any sane man that democracy was a failure,
that the world-old principle of aristocracy would assert itself,
that the attempt of our ancestors
to curtail political power had merely resulted in the growth of another and greater economic power that bade fair
to be limitless.

As I walked slowly back into town I felt a reluctance
to return
to the noisy hotel,
and finding myself in front of a little restaurant on a side street,
I entered it.

There was but one other customer in the place,
and he was seated on the far side of the counter,
with a newspaper in front of him;
and while I was ordering my breakfast I was vaguely aware that the newspaper had dropped,
and that he was looking at me.

In the slight interval that elapsed before my brain could register his identity I experienced a distinct shock of resentment;
a sense of the reintrusion of an antagonistic value at a moment when it was most unwelcome....

The man had risen and was coming around the counter.

He was Hermann Krebs.

"Paret!"
I heard him say.

"You here?"
I exclaimed.

He did not seem
to notice the lack of cordiality in my tone.

He appeared so genuinely glad
to see me again that I instantly became rather ashamed of my ill nature.

"Yes,
I'm here--in the legislature,"
he informed me.

"A Solon!"
"Exactly."

He smiled.

"And you?"
he inquired.

"Oh,
I'm only a spectator.

Down here
for a day or two."

He was still lanky,
his clothes gave no evidence of an increased prosperity,
but his complexion was good,
his skin had cleared.

I was more than ever baked by a resolute good humour,
a simplicity that was not innocence,
a whimsical touch seemingly indicative of a state of mind that refused
to take too seriously certain things on which I set store.

What right had he
to be contented
with life?

"Well,
I too am only a spectator here,"
he laughed.

"I'm neither fish,
flesh nor fowl,
nor good red herring."

"You were going into the law,
weren't you?"
I asked.

"I remember you said something about it that day we met at Beverly FarMs. "

"Yes,
I managed it,
after all.

Then I went back home
to Elkington
to try
to make a living."

"But somehow I have never thought of you as being likely
to develop political aspirations,
Krebs,"
I said.

"I should say not! he exclaimed.

"Yet here you are,
launched upon a political career! How did it happen?"
"Oh,
I'm not worrying about the career,"
he assured me.

"I got here by accident,
and I'm afraid it won't happen again in a hurry.

You see,
the hands in those big mills we have in Elkington sprang a surprise on the machine,
and the first thing I knew I was nominated
for the legislature.

A committee came
to my boarding-house and told me,
and there was the deuce
to pay,
right off.

The Railroad politicians turned in and worked
for the Democratic candidate,
of course,
and the Hutchinses,
who own the mills,
tried through emissaries
to intimidate their operatives."

"And then?"
I asked.

"Well,--I'm here,"
he said.

"Wouldn't you be accomplishing more,"
I inquired,
"if you hadn't antagonized the Hutchinses?"
"It depends upon what you mean by accomplishment,"
he answered,
so mildly that I felt more rued than ever.

"Well,
from what you say,
I suppose you're going in
for reform,
that these workmen up at Elkington are not satisfied
with their conditions and imagine you can help
to better them.

Now,
provided the conditions are not as good as they might be,
how are you going
to improve them if you find yourself isolated here,
as you say?"
"In other words,
I should cooperate
with Colonel Varney and other disinterested philanthropists,"
he supplied,
and I realized that I was losing my temper.

"Well,
what can you do?"
I inquired defiantly.

"I can find out what's going on,"
he said.

"I have already learned something,
by the way."

"And then?"
I asked,
wondering whether the implication were personal.

"Then I can help--disseminate the knowledge.

I may be wrong,
but I have an idea that when the people of this country learn how their legislatures are conducted they will want
to change things."

"That's right!"
echoed the waiter,
who had come up
with my griddle-cakes.

"And you're the man
to tell
'em,
Mr. Krebs."

"It will need several thousand of us
to do that,
I'm afraid,"
said Krebs,
returning his smile.

My distaste
for the situation became more acute,
but I felt that I was thrown on the defensive.

I could not retreat,
now.

"I think you are wrong,"
I declared,
when the waiter had departed
to attend
to another customer.

"The people the great majority of them,
at least are indifferent,
they don't want
to be bothered
with politics.

There will always be labour agitation,
of course,--the more wages those fellows get,
the more they want.

We pay the highest wages in the world to-day,
and the standard of living is higher in this country than anywhere else.

They'd ruin our prosperity,
if we'd let
'em."

"How about the thousands of families who don't earn enough
to live decently even in times of prosperity?"
inquired Krebs.

"It's hard,
I'll admit,
but the inefficient and the shiftless are bound
to suffer,
no matter what form of government you adopt."

"You talk about standards of living,--I could show you some examples of standards
to make your heart sick,"
he said.

"What you don't realize,
perhaps,
is that low standards help
to increase the inefficient of whom you complain."

He smiled rather sadly.

"The prosperity you are advocating,"
he added,
after a moment,
"is a mere fiction,
it is gorging the few at the expense of the many.

And what is being done in this country is
to store up an explosive gas that some day will blow your superstructure
to atoms if you don't wake up in time."

"Isn't that a rather one-sided view,
too?"
I suggested.

"I've no doubt it may appear so,
but take the proceedings in this legislature.

I've no doubt you know something about them,
and that you would maintain they are justified on account of the indifference of the public,
and of other reasons,
but I can cite an instance that is simply legalized thieving."

For the first time a note of indignation crept into Krebs's voice.

"Last night I discovered by a mere accident,
in talking
to a man who came in on a late train,
that a bill introduced yesterday,
which is being rushed through the Judiciary Committee of the House--an apparently innocent little bill--will enable,
if it becomes a law,
the Boyne Iron Works,
of your city,
to take possession of the Ribblevale Steel Company,
lock,
stock,
and barrel.

And I am told it was conceived by a lawyer who claims
to be a respectable member of his profession,
and who has extraordinary ability,
Theodore Watling."

Krebs put his hand in his pocket and drew out a paper.

"Here's a copy of it,--House Bill 709."

His expression suddenly changed.

"Perhaps Mr. Watling is a friend of yours."

"I'm
with his firm,"
I replied....

Krebs's fingers closed over the paper,
crumpling it.

"Oh,
then,
you know about this,"
he said.

He was putting the paper back into his pocket when I took it from him.

But my adroitness,
so carefully schooled,
seemed momentarily
to have deserted me.

What should I say?

It was necessary
to decide quickly.

"Don't you take rather a--prejudiced view of this,
Krebs?"
I said.

"Upon my word,
I can't see why you should accept a rumour running around the lobbies that Mr. Watling drafted this bill
for a particular purpose."

He was silent.

But his eyes did not leave my face.

"Why should any sensible man,
a member of the legislature,
take stock in that kind of gossip?"
I insisted.

"Why not judge this bill by its face,
without heeding a cock and bull story as
to how it may have originated?

It is a good bill,
or a bad bill?

Let's see what it says."

I read it.

"So far as I can see,
it is legislation which we ought
to have had long ago,
and tends
to compel a publicity in corporation affairs that is much needed,
to put a stop
to practices which every decent citizen deplores."

He drew the paper out of my hand.

"You needn't go on,
Paret,"
he told me.

"It's no use."

"Well,
I'm sorry we don't agree,"
I said,
and got up.

I left him twisting the paper in his fingers.

Beside the clerk's desk in the Potts House,
relating one of his anecdotes,
I spied Colonel Varney,
and managed presently
to draw him upstairs
to his room.

"What's the matter?"
he asked.

"Do you know a man named Krebs in the House?"
I said.

"From Elkington?

Why,
that's the man the Hutchinses let slip through,-- the Hutchinses,
who own the mills over there.

The agitators put up a job on them."

The Colonel was no longer the genial and social purveyor of anecdotes.

He had become tense,
alert,
suspicious.

"What's he up to?"
"He's found out about this bill,"
I replied.

"How?"
"I don't know.

But someone told him that it originated in our office,
and that we were going
to use it in our suit against the Ribblevale."

I related the circumstances of my running across Krebs,
speaking of having known him at Harvard.

Colonel Varney uttered an oath,
and strode across
to the window,
where he stood looking down into the street from between the lace curtains.

"We'll have
to attend
to him,
right off,"
he said.

I was surprised
to find myself resenting the imputation,
and deeply.

"I'm afraid he's one of those who can't be `attended to,'"
I answered.

"You mean that he's in the employ of the Ribblevale people?"
the Colonel inquired.

"I don't mean anything of the kind,"
I retorted,
with more heat,
perhaps,
than I realized.

The Colonel looked at me queerly.

"That's all right,
Mr. Paret.

Of course I don't want
to question your judgment,
sir.

And you say he's a friend of yours."

"I said I knew him at college."

"But you will pardon me,"
the Colonel went on,
"when I tell you that I've had some experience
with that breed,
and I have yet
to see one of
'em you couldn't come
to terms
with in some way--in some way,"
he added,
significantly.

I did not pause
to reflect that the Colonel's attitude,
from his point of view
(yes,
and from mine,--had I not adopted it?)
was the logical one.

In that philosophy every man had his price,
or his weakness.

Yet,
such is the inconsistency of human nature,
I was now unable
to contemplate this attitude
with calmness.

"Mr. Krebs is a lawyer.

Has he accepted a pass from the Railroad?"
I demanded,
knowing the custom of that corporation of conferring this delicate favour on the promising young talent in my profession.

"I reckon he's never had the chance,"
said Mr. Varney.

"Well,
has he taken a pass as a member of the legislature?"
"No,--I remember looking that up when he first came down.

Sent that back,
if I recall the matter correctly."

Colonel Varney went
to a desk in the corner of the room,
unlocked it,
drew forth a black book,
and running his fingers through the pages stopped at the letter K.

"Yes,
sent back his legislative pass,
but I've known
'em
to do that when they were holding out
for something more.

There must be somebody who can get close
to him."

The Colonel ruminated awhile.

Then he strode
to the door and called out
to the group of men who were always lounging in the hall.

"Tell Alf Young I want
to see him,
Fred."

I waited,
by no means free from uneasiness and anxiety,
from a certain lack of self-respect that was unfamiliar.

Mr. Young,
the Colonel explained,
was a legal light in Galesburg,
near Elkington,--the Railroad lawyer there.

And when at last Mr. Young appeared he proved
to be an oily gentleman of about forty,
inclining
to stoutness,
with one of those
"blue,"
shaven faces.

"Want me,
Colonel?"
he inquired blithely,
when the door had closed behind him;
and added obsequiously,
when introduced
to me,
"Glad
to meet you,
Mr. Paret.

My regards
to Mr. Watling,
when you go back.

"Alf,"
demanded the Colonel,
"what do you know of this fellow Krebs?"
Mr. Young laughed.

Krebs was
"nutty,"
he declared--that was all there was
to it.

"Won't he--listen
to reason?"
"It's been tried,
Colonel.

Say,
he wouldn't know a hundred-dollar bill if you showed him one."

"What does he want?"
"Oh,
something,--that's sure,
they all want something."

Mr. Young shrugged his shoulder expressively,
and by a skillful manipulation of his lips shifted his cigar from one side of his mouth
to the other without raising his hands.

"But it ain't money.

I guess he's got a notion that later on the labour unions'll send him
to the United States Senate some day.

He's no slouch,
either,
when it comes
to law.

I can tell you that."

"No--no flaw in his--record?"
Colonel Varney's agate eyes sought those of Mr. Young,
meaningly.

"That's been tried,
too,"
declared the Galesburg attorney.

"Say,
you can believe it or not,
but we've never dug anything up so far.

He's been too slick
for us,
I guess."

"Well,"
exclaimed the Colonel,
at length,
"let him squeal and be d--d! He can't do any more than make a noise.

Only I hoped we'd be able
to grease this thing along and slide it through the Senate this afternoon,
before they got wind of it."

"He'll squeal,
all right,
until you smother him,"
Mr. Young observed.

"We'll smother him some day!"
replied the Colonel,
savagely.

Mr. Young laughed.

But as I made my way toward the State House I was conscious of a feeling of relief.

I had no sooner gained a front seat in the gallery of the House of Representatives when the members rose,
the Senate marched gravely in,
the Speaker stopped jesting
with the Chaplain,
and over the Chaplain's face came suddenly an agonized expression.

Folding his hands across his stomach he began
to call on God
with terrific fervour,
in an intense and resounding voice.

I was struck suddenly by the irony of it all.

Why have a legislature when Colonel Paul Varney was so efficient! The legislature was a mere sop
to democratic prejudice,
to pray over it heightened the travesty.

Suppose there were a God after all?

not necessarily the magnified monarch
to whom these pseudo-democrats prayed,
but an Intelligent Force that makes
for righteousness.

How did He,
or It,
like
to be trifled
with in this way?

And,
if He existed,
would not His disgust be immeasurable as He contemplated that unctuous figure in the
"Prince Albert"
coat,
who pretended
to represent Him?

As the routine business began I searched
for Krebs,
to find him presently at a desk beside a window in the rear of the hall making notes on a paper;
there was,
confessedly,
little satisfaction in the thought that the man whose gaunt features I contemplated was merely one of those impractical idealists who beat themselves
to pieces against the forces that sway the world and must forever sway it.

I should be compelled
to admit that he represented something unique in that assembly if he had the courage
to get up and oppose House Bill 709.

I watched him narrowly;
the suggestion intruded itself--perhaps he had been
"seen,"
as the Colonel expressed it.

I repudiated it.

I grew impatient,
feverish;
the monotonous reading of the clerk was interrupted now and then by the sharp tones of the Speaker assigning his various measures
to this or that committee,
"unless objection is offered,"
while the members moved about and murmured among themselves;
Krebs had stopped making notes;
he was looking out of the window.

At last,
without any change of emphasis in his droning voice,
the clerk announced the recommendation of the Committee on Judiciary that House Bill 709 ought
to pass.

Down in front a man had risen from his seat--the felicitous Mr. Truesdale.

Glancing around at his fellow-members he then began
to explain in the impressive but conversational tone of one whose counsels are in the habit of being listened to,
that this was merely a little measure
to remedy a flaw in the statutes.

Mr. Truesdale believed in corporations when corporations were good,
and this bill was calculated
to make them good,
to put an end
to jugglery and concealment.

Our great state,
he said,
should be in the forefront of such wise legislation,
which made
for justice and a proper publicity;
but the bill in question was of greater interest
to lawyers than
to laymen,
a committee composed largely of lawyers had recommended it unanimously,
and he was sure that no opposition would develop in the House.

In order not
to take up their time he asked:

therefore,
that it be immediately put on its second and third reading and allowed
to pass.

He sat down,
and I looked at Krebs.

Could he,
could any man,
any lawyer,
have the presumption
to question such an obviously desirable measure,
to arraign the united judgment of the committee's legal talent?

Such was the note Mr. Truesdale so admirably struck.

As though fascinated,
I continued
to gaze at Krebs.

I hated him,
I desired
to see him humiliated,
and yet amazingly I found myself wishing
with almost equal vehemence that he would be true
to himself.

He was rising,--slowly,
timidly,
I thought,
his hand clutching his desk lid,
his voice sounding wholly inadequate as he addressed the Speaker.

The Speaker hesitated,
his tone palpably supercilious.

"The gentleman from--from Elkington,
Mr. Krebs."

There was a craning of necks,
a staring,
a tittering.

I burned
with vicarious shame as Krebs stood there awkwardly,
his hand still holding the desk.

There were cries of
"louder"
when he began;
some picked up their newspapers,
while others started conversations.

The Speaker rapped
with his gavel,
and I failed
to hear the opening words.

Krebs paused,
and began again.

His speech did not,
at first,
flow easily.

"Mr. Speaker,
I rise
to protest against this bill,
which in my opinion is not so innocent as the gentleman from St. Helen's would have the House believe.

It is on a par,
indeed,
with other legislation that in past years has been engineered through this legislature under the guise of beneficent law.

No,
not on a par.

It is the most arrogant,
the most monstrous example of special legislation of them all.

And while I do not expect
to be able
to delay its passage much longer than the time I shall be on my feet--"
"Then why not sit down?"
came a voice,
just audible.

As he turned swiftly toward the offender his profile had an eagle-like effect that startled me,
seemingly realizing a new quality in the man.

It was as though he had needed just the stimulus of that interruption
to electrify and transform him.

His awkwardness disappeared;
and if he was a little bombastic,
a little
"young,"
he spoke
with the fire of conviction.

"Because,"
he cried,
"because I should lose my self-respect
for life if I sat here and permitted the political organization of a railroad,
the members of which are here under the guise of servants of the people,
to cow me into silence.

And if it be treason
to mention the name of that Railroad in connection
with its political tyranny,
then make the most of it."

He let go of the desk,
and tapped the copy of the bill.

"What are the facts?

The Boyne Iron Works,
under the presidency of Adolf Scherer,
has been engaged in litigation
with the Ribblevale Steel Company
for some years:

and this bill is intended
to put into the hands of the attorneys
for Mr. Scherer certain information that will enable him
to get possession of the property.

Gentlemen,
that is what
'legal practice'
has descended
to in the hands of respectable lawyers.

This device originated
with the resourceful Mr. Theodore Watling,
and if it had not had the approval of Mr. Miller Gorse,
it would never have got any farther than the judiciary committee.

It was confided
to the skillful care of Colonel Paul Varney
to be steered through this legislature,
as hundreds of other measures have been steered through,--without unnecessary noise.

It may be asked why the Railroad should bother itself by lending its political organization
to private corporations?

I will tell you.

Because corporations like the Boyne corporation are a part of a network of interests,
these corporations aid the Railroad
to maintain its monopoly,
and in return receive rebates."

Krebs had raised his voice as the murmurs became louder.

At this point a sharp-faced lawyer from Belfast got
to his feet and objected that the gentleman from Elkington was wasting the time of the House,
indulging in hearsay.

His remarks were not germane,
etc.

The Speaker rapped again,
with a fine show of impartiality,
and cautioned the member from Elkington.

"Very well,"
replied Krebs.

"I have said what I wanted
to say on that score,
and I know it
to be the truth.

And if this House does not find it germane,
the day is coming when its constituents will."

Whereupon he entered into a discussion of the bill,
dissecting it
with more calmness,
with an ability that must have commanded,
even from some hostile minds,
an unwilling respect.

The penalty,
he said,
was outrageous,
hitherto unheard of in law,--putting a corporation in the hands of a receiver,
at the mercy of those who coveted it,
because one of its officers refused,
or was unable,
to testify.

He might be in China,
in Timbuctoo when the summons was delivered at his last or usual place of abode.

Here was an enormity,
an exercise of tyrannical power exceeding all bounds,
a travesty on popular government....

He ended by pointing out the significance of the fact that the committee had given no hearings;
by declaring that if the bill became a law,
it would inevitably react upon the heads of those who were responsible
for it.

He sat down,
and there was a flutter of applause from the scattered audience in the gallery.

"By God,
that's the only man in the whole place!"
I was aware,
for the first time,
of a neighbour at my side,--a solid,
red-faced man,
evidently a farmer.

His trousers were tucked into his boots,
and his gnarled and powerful hands,
ingrained
with dirt,
clutched the arms of the seat as he leaned forward.

"Didn't he just naturally lambaste
'em?"
he cried excitedly.

"They'll down him,
I guess,--but say,
he's right.

A man would lose his self- respect if he didn't let out his mind at them hoss thieves,
wouldn't he?

What's that fellow's name?"
I told him.

"Krebs,"
he repeated.

"I want
to remember that.

Durned if I don't shake hands
with him."

His excitement astonished me.

Would the public feel like that,
if they only knew?...

The Speaker's gavel had come down like a pistol shot.

One
"war-hoss"--as my neighbour called them--after another proceeded
to crush the member from Elkington.

It was,
indeed,
very skillfully done,
and yet it was a process from which I did not derive,
somehow,
much pleasure.

Colonel Varney's army had been magnificently trained
to meet just this kind of situation:

some employed ridicule,
others declared,
in impassioned tones,
that the good name of their state had been wantonly assailed,
and pointed fervently
to portraits on the walls of patriots of the past,--sentiments that drew applause from the fickle gallery.

One gentleman observed that the obsession of a
"railroad machine"
was a sure symptom of a certain kind of insanity,
of which the first speaker had given many other evidences.

The farmer at my side remained staunch.

"They can't fool me,"
he said angrily,
"I know
'em.

Do you see that fellow gettin'
up
to talk now?

Well,
I could tell you a few things about him,
all right.

He comes from Glasgow,
and his name's Letchworth.

He's done more harm in his life than all the criminals he's kept out of prison,--belongs
to one of the old families down there,
too."

I had,
indeed,
remarked Letchworth's face,
which seemed
to me peculiarly evil,
its lividity enhanced by a shock of grey hair.

His method was withering sarcasm,
and he was clearly unable
to control his animus....

No champion appeared
to support Krebs,
who sat pale and tense while this denunciation of him was going on.

Finally he got the floor.

His voice trembled a little,
whether
with passion,
excitement,
or nervousness it was impossible
to say.

But he contented himself
with a brief defiance.

If the bill passed,
he declared,
the men who voted
for it,
the men who were behind it,
would ultimately be driven from political life by an indignant public.

He had a higher opinion of the voters of the state than those who accused him of slandering it,
than those who sat silent and had not lifted their voices against this crime.

When the bill was put
to a vote he demanded a roll call.

Ten members besides himself were recorded against House Bill No.

709! In spite of this overwhelming triumph my feelings were not wholly those of satisfaction when I returned
to the hotel and listened
to the exultations and denunciations of such politicians as Letchworth,
Young,
and Colonel Varney.

Perhaps an image suggesting Hermann Krebs as some splendid animal at bay,
dragged down by the hounds,
is too strong:

he had been ingloriously crushed,
and defeat,
even
for the sake of conviction,
was not an inspiring spectacle....

As the chase swept on over his prostrate figure I rapidly regained poise and a sense of proportion;
a
"master of life"
could not permit himself
to be tossed about by sentimentality;
and gradually I grew ashamed of my bad quarter of an hour in the gallery of the House,
and of the effect of it--which lingered awhile--as of a weakness suddenly revealed,
which must at all costs be overcome.

I began
to see something dramatic and sensational in Krebs's performance....

The Ribblevale Steel Company was the real quarry,
after all.

And such had been the expedition,
the skill and secrecy,
with which our affair was conducted,
that before the Ribblevale lawyers could arrive,
alarmed and breathless,
the bill had passed the House,
and their only real chance of halting it had been lost.

For the Railroad controlled the House,
not by owning the individuals composing it,
but through the leaders who dominated it,--men like Letchworth and Truesdale.

These,
and Colonel Varney,
had seen
to it that men who had any parliamentary ability had been attended to;
all save Krebs,
who had proved a surprise.

There were indeed certain members who,
although they had railroad passes in their pockets
(which were regarded as just perquisites,--the Railroad being so rich!),
would have opposed the bill if they had felt sufficiently sure of themselves
to cope
with such veterans as Letchworth.

Many of these had allowed themselves
to be won over or cowed by the oratory which had crushed Krebs.

Nor did the Ribblevale people--be it recorded--scruple
to fight fire
with fire.

Their existence,
of course,
was at stake,
and there was no public
to appeal to.

A part of the legal army that rushed
to the aid of our adversaries spent the afternoon and most of the night organizing all those who could be induced by one means or another
to reverse their sentiments,
and in searching
for the few who had grievances against the existing power.

The following morning a motion was introduced
to reconsider;
and in the debate that followed,
Krebs,
still defiant,
took an active part.

But the resolution required a two-thirds vote,
and was lost.

When the battle was shifted
to the Senate it was as good as lost.

The Judiciary Committee of the august body did indeed condescend
to give hearings,
at which the Ribblevale lawyers exhausted their energy and ingenuity without result
with only two dissenting votes the bill was calmly passed.

In vain was the Governor besieged,
entreated,
threatened,--it was said;
Mr. Trulease had informed protesters--so Colonel Varney gleefully reported--that he had
"become fully convinced of the inherent justice of the measure."

On Saturday morning he signed it,
and it became a law....

Colonel Varney,
as he accompanied me
to the train,
did not conceal his jubilation.

"Perhaps I ought not
to say it,
Mr. Paret,
but it couldn't have been done neater.

That's the art in these little affairs,
to get
'em runnin'
fast,
to get momentum on
'em before the other party wakes up,
and then he can't stop
'em."

As he shook hands in farewell he added,
with more gravity:

"We'll see each other often,
sir,
I guess.

My very best regards
to Mr. Watling."

Needless
to say,
I had not confided
to him the part I had played in originating House Bill No.

709,
now a law of the state.

But as the train rolled on through the sunny winter landscape a sense of well-being,
of importance and power began
to steal through me.

I was victoriously bearing home my first scalp,--one which was by no means
to be despised....

It was not until we reached Rossiter,
about five o'clock,
that I was able
to get the evening newspapers.

Such was the perfection of the organization of which I might now call myself an integral part that the
"best"
publications contained only the barest mention,--and that in the legislative news,--of the signing of the bill.

I read
with complacency and even
with amusement the flaring headlines I had anticipated in Mr. Lawler's
'Pilot.'
"The Governor Signs It!"
"Special legislation,
forced through by the Railroad Lobby,
which will drive honest corporations from this state."

"Ribblevale Steel Company the Victim."

It was common talk in the capital,
the article went on
to say,
that Theodore Watling himself had drawn up the measure....

Perusing the editorial page my eye fell on the name,
Krebs.

One member of the legislature above all deserved the gratitude of the people of the state,- -the member from Elkington.

"An unknown man,
elected in spite of the opposition of the machine,
he had dared
to raise his voice against this iniquity,"
etc.,
etc.

We had won.

That was the essential thing.

And my legal experience had taught me that victory counts;
defeat is soon forgotten.

Even the discontented,
half-baked and heterogeneous element from which the Pilot got its circulation had short memories.

XI.

The next morning,
which was Sunday,
I went
to Mr. Watling's house in,
Fillmore Street--a new residence at that time,
being admired as the dernier cri in architecture.

It had a mediaeval look,
queer dormers in a steep roof of red tiles,
leaded windows buried deep in walls of rough stone.

Emerging from the recessed vestibule on a level
with the street were the Watling twins,
aglow
with health,
dressed in identical costumes of blue.

They had made their bow
to society that winter.

"Why,
here's Hugh!"
said Frances.

"Doesn't he look pleased
with himself?"
"He's come
to take us
to church,"
said Janet.

"Oh,
he's much too important,"
said Frances.

"He's made a killing of some sort,--haven't you,
Hugh?"
...

I rang the bell and stood watching them as they departed,
reflecting that I was thirty-two years of age and unmarried.

Mr. Watling,
surrounded
with newspapers and seated before his library fire,
glanced up at me
with a welcoming smile:

how had I borne the legislative baptism of fire?

Such,
I knew,
was its implication.

"Everything went through according
to schedule,
eh?

Well,
I congratulate you,
Hugh,"
he said.

"Oh,
I didn't have much
to do
with it,"
I answered,
smiling back at him.

"I kept out of sight."

"That's an art in itself."

"I had an opportunity,
at close range,
to study the methods of our lawmakers."

"They're not particularly edifying,"
Mr. Watling replied.

"But they seem,
unfortunately,
to be necessary."

Such had been my own thought.

"Who is this man Krebs?"
he inquired suddenly.

"And why didn't Varney get hold of him and make him listen
to reason?"
"I'm afraid it wouldn't have been any use,"
I replied.

"He was in my class at Harvard.

I knew him--slightly.

He worked his way through,
and had a pretty hard time of it.

I imagine it affected his ideas."

"What is he,
a Socialist?"
"Something of the sort."

In Theodore Watling's vigorous,
sanity-exhaling presence Krebs's act appeared fantastic,
ridiculous.

"He has queer notions about a new kind of democracy which he says is coming.

I think he is the kind of man who would be willing
to die
for it."

"What,
in these days!"
Mr. Watling looked at me incredulously.

"If that's so,
we must keep an eye on him,
a sincere fanatic is a good deal more dangerous than a reformer who wants something.

There are such men,"
he added,
"but they are rare.

How was the Governor,
Trulease?"
he asked suddenly.

"Tractable?"
"Behaved like a lamb,
although he insisted upon going through
with his little humbug,"
I said.

Mr. Watling laughed.

"They always do,"
he observed,
"and waste a lot of valuable time.

You'll find some light cigars in the corner,
Hugh."

I sat down beside him and we spent the morning going over the details of the Ribblevale suit,
Mr. Watling delegating
to me certain matters connected
with it of a kind
with which I had not hitherto been entrusted;
and he spoke again,
before I left,
of his intention of taking me into the firm as soon as the affair could be arranged.

Walking homeward,
with my mind intent upon things
to come,
I met my mother at the corner of Lyme Street coming from church.

Her face lighted up at sight of me.

"Have you been working to-day,
Hugh?"
she asked.

I explained that I had spent the morning
with Mr. Watling.

"I'll tell you a secret,
mother.

I'm going
to be taken into the firm."

"Oh,
my dear,
I'm so glad!"
she exclaimed.

"I often think,
if only your father were alive,
how happy he would be,
and how proud of you.

I wish he could know.

Perhaps he does know."

Theodore Watling had once said
to me that the man who can best keep his own counsel is the best counsel
for other men
to keep.

I did not go about boasting of the part I had played in originating the now famous Bill No.

709,
the passage of which had brought about the capitulation of the Ribblevale Steel Company
to our clients.

But Ralph Hambleton knew of it,
of course.

"That was a pretty good thing you pulled off,
Hughie,"
he said.

"I didn't think you had it in you."

It was rank patronage,
of course,
yet I was secretly pleased.

As the years went on I was thrown more and more
with him,
though in boyhood there had been between us no bond of sympathy.

About this time he was beginning
to increase very considerably the Hambleton fortune,
and a little later I became counsel
for the Crescent Gas and Electric Company,
in which he had shrewdly gained a controlling interest.

Even toward the colossal game of modern finance his attitude was characteristically that of the dilettante,
of the amateur;
he played it,
as it were,
contemptuously,
even as he had played poker at Harvard,
with a cynical audacity that had a peculiarly disturbing effect upon his companions.

He bluffed,
he raised the limit in spite of protests,
and when he lost one always had the feeling that he would ultimately get his money back twice over.

At the conferences in the Boyne Club,
which he often attended,
his manner toward Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Scherer and even toward Miller Gorse was frequently one of thinly veiled amusement at their seriousness.

I often wondered that they did not resent it.

But he was a privileged person.

His cousin,
Ham Durrett,
whose inheritance was even greater than Ralph's had been,
had also become a privileged person whose comings and goings and more reputable doings were often recorded in the newspapers.

Ham had attained
to what Gene Hollister aptly but inadvertently called
"notoriety":

as Ralph wittily remarked,
Ham gave
to polo and women that which might have gone into high finance.

He spent much of his time in the East;
his conduct there and at home would once have created a black scandal in our community,
but we were gradually leaving our Calvinism behind us and growing more tolerant:

we were ready
to Forgive much
to wealth especially if it was inherited.

Hostesses lamented the fact that Ham was
"wild,"
but they asked him
to dinners and dances
to meet their daughters.

If some moralist better educated and more far-seeing than Perry Blackwood
(for Perry had become a moralist)
had told these hostesses that Hambleton Durrett was a victim of our new civilization,
they would have raised their eyebrows.

They deplored while they coveted.

If Ham had been told he was a victim of any sort,
he would have laughed.

He enjoyed life;
he was genial and jovial,
both lavish and parsimonious,- -this latter characteristic being the curious survival of the trait of the ancestors
to which he owed his millions.

He was growing even heavier,
and decidedly red in the face.

Perry used
to take Ralph
to task
for not saving Ham from his iniquities,
and Ralph would reply that Ham was going
to the devil anyway,
and not even the devil himself could stop him.

"You can stop him,
and you know it,"
Perry retorted indignantly.

"What do you want me
to do
with him?"
asked Ralph.

"Convert him
to the saintly life I lead?"
This was a poser.

"That's a fact,"
sand Perry,
"you're no better than he is."

"I don't know what you mean by
'better,'"
retorted Ralph,
grinning.

"I'm wiser,
that's all."

(We had been talking about the ethics of business when Perry had switched off
to Ham.)
"I believe,
at least,
in restraint of trade.

Ham doesn't believe in restraint of any kind."

When,
therefore,
the news suddenly began
to be circulated in the Boyne Club that Ham was showing a tendency
to straighten up,
surprise and incredulity were genuine.

He was drinking less,--much less;
and it was said that he had severed certain ties that need not again be definitely mentioned.

The theory of religious regeneration not being tenable,
it was naturally supposed that he had fallen in love;
the identity of the unknown lady becoming a fruitful subject of speculation among the feminine portion of society.

The announcement of the marriage of Hambleton Durrett would be news of the first magnitude,
to be absorbed eagerly by the many who had not the honour of his acquaintance,-- comparable only
to that of a devastating flood or a murder mystery or a change in the tariff.

Being absorbed in affairs that seemed more important,
the subject did not interest me greatly.

But one cold Sunday afternoon,
as I made my way,
in answer
to her invitation,
to see Nancy Willett,
I found myself wondering idly whether she might not be by way of making a shrewd guess as
to the object of Hambleton's affections.

It was well known that he had entertained a hopeless infatuation
for her;
and some were inclined
to attribute his later lapses
to her lack of response.

He still called on her,
and her lectures,
which she delivered like a great aunt
with a recondite knowledge of the world,
he took meekly.

But even she had seemed powerless
to alter his habits....

Powell Street,
that happy hunting-ground of my youth,
had changed its character,
become contracted and unfamiliar,
sooty.

The McAlerys and other older families who had not decayed
with the neighbourhood were rapidly deserting it,
moving out
to the new residence district known as
"the Heights."

I came
to the Willett House.

That,
too,
had an air of shabbiness,--of well-tended shabbiness,
to be sure;
the stone steps had been scrupulously scrubbed,
but one of them was cracked clear across,
and the silver on the polished name-plate was wearing off;
even the act of pulling the knob of a door-bell was becoming obsolete,
so used had we grown
to pushing porcelain buttons in bright,
new vestibules.

As I waited
for my summons
to be answered it struck me as remarkable that neither Nancy nor her father had been contaminated by the shabbiness that surrounded them.

She had managed rather marvellously
to redeem one room from the old- fashioned severity of the rest of the house,
the library behind the big
"parlour."

It was Nancy's room,
eloquent of her daintiness and taste,
of her essential modernity and luxuriousness;
and that evening,
as I was ushered into it,
this quality of luxuriousness,
of being able
to shut out the disagreeable aspects of life that surrounded and threatened her,
particularly impressed me.

She had not lacked opportunities
to escape.

I wondered uneasily as I waited why she had not embraced them.

I strayed about the room.

A coal fire burned in the grate,
the red-shaded lamps gave a subdued but cheerful light;
some impulse led me
to cross over
to the windows and draw aside the heavy hangings.

Dusk was gathering over that garden,
bleak and frozen now,
where we had romped together as children.

How queer the place seemed! How shrivelled! Once it had had the wide range of a park.

There,
still weathering the elements,
was the old-fashioned latticed summer-house,
but the fruit-trees that I recalled as clouds of pink and white were gone....

A touch of poignancy was in these memories.

I dropped the curtain,
and turned
to confront Nancy,
who had entered noiselessly.

"Well,
Hugh,
were you dreaming?"
she said.

"Not exactly,"
I replied,
embarrassed.

"I was looking at the garden."

"The soot has ruined it.

My life seems
to be one continual struggle against the soot,--the blacks,
as the English call them.

It's a more expressive term.

They are like an army,
you know,
overwhelming in their relentless invasion.

Well,
do sit down.

It is nice of you
to come.

You'll have some tea,
won't you?"
The maid had brought in the tray.

Afternoon tea was still rather a new custom
with us,
more of a ceremony than a meal;
and as Nancy handed me my cup and the thinnest of slices of bread and butter I found the intimacy of the situation a little disquieting.

Her manner was indeed intimate,
and yet it had the odd and disturbing effect of making her seem more remote.

As she chatted I answered her perfunctorily,
while all the time I was asking myself why I had ceased
to desire her,
whether the old longing
for her might not return--was not even now returning?

I might indeed go far afield
to find a wife so suited
to me as Nancy.

She had beauty,
distinction,
and position.

She was a woman of whom any man might be proud....

"I haven't congratulated you yet,
Hugh,"
she said suddenly,
"now that you are a partner of Mr. Watling's.

I hear on all sides that you are on the high road
to a great success."

"Of course I'm glad
to be in the firm,"
I admitted.

It was a new tack
for Nancy,
rather a disquieting one,
this discussion of my affairs,
which she had so long avoided or ignored.

"You are getting what you have always wanted,
aren't you?"
I wondered in some trepidation whether by that word
"always"
she was making a deliberate reference
to the past.

"Always?"
I repeated,
rather fatuously.

"Nearly always,
ever since you have been a man."

I was incapable of taking advantage of the opening,
if it were one.

She was baffling.

"A man likes
to succeed in his profession,
of course,"
I said.

"And you made up your mind
to succeed more deliberately than most men.

I needn't ask you if you are satisfied,
Hugh.

Success seems
to agree
with you,--although I imagine you will never be satisfied."

"Why do you say that?"
I demanded.

"I haven't known you all your life
for nothing.

I think I know you much better than you know yourself."

"You haven't acted as if you did,"
I exclaimed.

She smiled.

"Have you been interested in what I thought about you?"
she asked.

"That isn't quite fair,
Nancy,"
I protested.

"You haven't given me much evidence that you did think about me."

"Have I received much encouragement
to do so?"
she inquired.

"But you haven't seemed
to invite--you've kept me at arm's length."

"Oh,
don't fence!"
she cried,
rather sharply.

I had become agitated,
but her next words gave me a shock that was momentarily paralyzing.

"I asked you
to come here to-day,
Hugh,
because I wished you
to know that I have made up my mind
to marry Hambleton Durrett."

"Hambleton Durrett!"
I echoed stupidly.

"Hambleton Durrett!"
"Why not?"
"Have you--have you accepted him?"
"No.

But I mean
to do so."

"You--you love him?"
"I don't see what right you have
to ask."

"But you just said that you invited me here
to talk frankly."

"No,
I don't love him."

"Then why,
in heaven's name,
are you going
to marry him?"
She lay back in her chair,
regarding me,
her lips slightly parted.

All at once the full flavour of her,
the superfine quality was revealed after years of blindness.--Nor can I describe the sudden rebellion,
the revulsion that I experienced.

Hambleton Durrett! It was an outrage,
a sacrilege! I got up,
and put my hand on the mantel.

Nancy remained motionless,
inert,
her head lying back against the chair.

Could it be that she were enjoying my discomfiture?

There is no need
to confess that I knew next
to nothing of women;
had I been less excited,
I might have made the discovery that I still regarded them sentimentally.

Certain romantic axioms concerning them,
garnered from Victorian literature,
passed current in my mind
for wisdom;
and one of these declared that they were prone
to remain true
to an early love.

Did Nancy still care
for me?

The query,
coming as it did on top of my emotion,
brought
with it a strange and overwhelming perplexity.

Did I really care
for her?

The many years during which I had practised the habit of caution began
to exert an inhibiting pressure.

Here was a situation,
an opportunity suddenly thrust upon me which might never return,
and which I was utterly unprepared
to meet.

Would I be happy
with Nancy,
after all?

Her expression was still enigmatic.

"Why shouldn't I marry him?"
she demanded.

"Because he's not good enough
for you."

"Good!"
she exclaimed,
and laughed.

"He loves me.

He wants me without reservation or calculation."

There was a sting in this.

"And is he any worse,"
she asked slowly,
"than many others who might be mentioned?"
"No,"
I agreed.

I did not intend
to be led into the thankless and disagreeable position of condemning Hambleton Durrett.

"But why have you waited all these years if you did not mean
to marry a man of ability,
a man who has made something of himself?"
"A man like you,
Hugh?"
she said gently.

I flushed.

"That isn't quite fair,
Nancy."

"What are you working for?"
she suddenly inquired,
straightening up.

"What any man works for,
I suppose."

"Ah,
there you have hit it,--what any man works
for in our world.

Power,--personal power.

You want
to be somebody,--isn't that it?

Not the noblest ambition,
you'll have
to admit,--not the kind of thing we used
to dream about,
when we did dream.

Well,
when we find we can't realize our dreams,
we take the next best thing.

And I fail
to see why you should blame me
for taking it when you yourself have taken it.

Hambleton Durrett can give it
to me.

He'll accept me on my own terms,
he won't interfere
with me,
I shan't be disillusionized,--and I shall have a position which I could not hope
to have if I remained unmarried,
a very marked position as Hambleton Durrett's wife.

I am thirty,
you know."

Her frankness appalled me.

"The trouble
with you,
Hugh,
is that you still deceive yourself.

You throw a glamour over things.

You want
to keep your cake and eat it too.

"I don't see why you say that.

And marriage especially--"
She took me up.

"Marriage! What other career is open
to a woman?

Unless she is married,
and married well,
according
to the money standard you men have set up,
she is nobody.

We can't all be Florence Nightingales,
and I am unable
to imagine myself a Julia Ward Howe or a Harriet Beecher Stowe.

What is left?

Nothing but marriage.

I'm hard and cynical,
you will say,
but I have thought,
and I'm not afraid,
as I have told you,
to look things in the face.

There are very few women,
I think,
who would not take the real thing if they had the chance before it were too late,
who wouldn't be willing
to do their own cooking in order
to get it."

She fell silent suddenly.

I began
to pace the room.

"For God's sake,
don't do this,
Nancy!"
I begged.

But she continued
to stare into the fire,
as though she had not heard me.

"If you had made up your mind
to do it,
why did you tell me?"
I asked.

"Sentiment,
I suppose.

I am paying a tribute
to what I once was,
to what you once were,"
she said.

A--a sort of good-bye
to sentiment."

"Nancy!"
I said hoarsely.

She shook her head.

"No,
Hugh.

Surely you can't misjudge me so!"
she answered reproachfully.

"Do you think I should have sent
for you if I had meant--that!"
"No,
no,
I didn't think so.

But why not?

You--you cared once,
and you tell me plainly you don't love him.

It was all a terrible mistake.

We were meant
for each other."

"I did love you then,"
she said.

"You never knew how much.

And there is nothing I wouldn't give
to bring it all back again.

But I can't.

It's gone.

You're gone,
and I'm gone.

I mean what we were.

Oh,
why did you change?"
"It was you who changed,"
I declared,
bewildered.

"Couldn't you see--can't you see now what you did?

But perhaps you couldn't help it.

Perhaps it was just you,
after all."

"What I did?"
"Why couldn't you have held fast
to your faith?

If you had,
you would have known what it was I adored in you.

Oh,
I don't mind telling you now,
it was just that faith,
Hugh,
that faith you had in life,
that faith you had in me.

You weren't cynical and calculating,
like Ralph Hambleton,
you had imagination.

I--I dreamed,
too.

And do you remember the time when you made the boat,
and we went
to Logan's Pond,
and you sank in her?"
"And you stayed,"
I went on,
"when all the others ran away?

You ran down the hill like a whirlwind."

She laughed.

"And then you came here one day,
to a party,
and said you were going
to Harvard,
and quarrelled
with me."

"Why did you doubt met"
I asked agitatedly.

"Why didn't you let me see that you still cared?"
"Because that wasn't you,
Hugh,
that wasn't your real self.

Do you suppose it mattered
to me whether you went
to Harvard
with the others?

Oh,
I was foolish too,
I know.

I shouldn't have said what I did.

But what is the use of regrets?"
she exclaimed.

"We've both run after the practical gods,
and the others have hidden their faces from us.

It may be that we are not
to blame,
either of us,
that the practical gods are too strong.

We've learned
to love and worship them,
and now we can't do without them."

"We can try,
Nancy,"
I pleaded.

"No,"
she answered in a low voice,
"that's the difference between you and me.

I know myself better than you know yourself,
and I know you better."

She smiled again.

"Unless we could have it all back again,
I shouldn't want any of it.

You do not love me--"
I started once more
to protest.

"No,
no,
don't say it!"
she cried.

"You may think you do,
just this moment,
but it's only because--you've been moved.

And what you believe you want isn't me,
it's what I was.

But I'm not that any more,--I'm simply recalling that,
don't you see?

And even then you wouldn't wish me,
now,
as I was.

That sounds involved,
but you must understand.

You want a woman who will be wrapped up in your career,
Hugh,
and yet who will not share it,--who will devote herself body and soul
to what you have become.

A woman whom you can shape.

And you won't really love her,
but only just so much of her as may become the incarnation of you.

Well,
I'm not that kind of woman.

I might have been,
had you been different.

I'm not at all sure.

Certainly I'm not that kind now,
even though I know in my heart that the sort of career you have made
for yourself,
and that I intend
to make
for myself is all dross.

But now I can't do without it."

"And yet you are going
to marry Hambleton Durrett!"
I said.

She understood me,
although I regretted my words at once.

"Yes,
I am going
to marry him."

There was a shade of bitterness,
of defiance in her voice.

"Surely you are not offering me the--the other thing,
now.

Oh,
Hugh!"
"I am willing
to abandon it all,
Nancy."

"No,"
she said,
"you're not,
and I'm not.

What you can't see and won't see is that it has become part of you.

Oh,
you are successful,
you will be more and more successful.

And you think I should be somebody,
as your wife,
Hugh,
more perhaps,
eventually,
than I shall be as Hambleton's.

But I should be nobody,
too.

I couldn't stand it now,
my dear.

You must realize that as soon as you have time
to think it over.

We shall be friends."

The sudden gentleness in her voice pierced me through and through.

She held out her hand.

Something in her grasp spoke of a resolution which could not be shaken.

"And besides,"
she added sadly,
"I don't love you any more,
Hugh.

I'm mourning
for something that's gone.

I wanted
to have just this one talk
with you.

But we shan't mention it again,--we'll close the book."

...

At that I fled out of the house,
and at first the thought of her as another man's wife,
as Hambleton Durrett's wife,
was seemingly not
to be borne.

It was incredible!
"We'll close the book."

I found myself repeating the phrase;
and it seemed then as though something within me I had believed dead--something that formerly had been all of me--had revived again
to throb
with pain.

It is not surprising that the acuteness of my suffering was of short duration,
though I remember certain sharp twinges when the announcement of the engagement burst on the city.

There was much controversy over the question as
to whether or not Ham Durrett's reform would be permanent;
but most people were willing
to give him the benefit of the doubt;
it was time he settled down and took the position in the community that was
to be expected of one of his name;
and as
for Nancy,
it was generally agreed that she had done well
for herself.

She was not made
for poverty--and who so well as she was fitted
for the social leadership of our community?

They were married in Trinity Church in the month of May,
and I was one of Ham's attendants.

Ralph was
"best man."

For the last time the old Willett mansion in Powell Street wore the gala air of former days;
carpets were spread over the sidewalk,
and red and white awnings;
rooms were filled
with flowers and flung open
to hundreds of guests.

I found the wedding something of an ordeal.

I do not like
to dwell upon it-- especially upon that moment when I came
to congratulate Nancy as she stood beside Ham at the end of the long parlour.

She seemed
to have no regrets.

I don't know what I expected of her--certainly not tears and tragedy.

She seemed taller than ever,
and very beautiful in her veil and white satin gown and the diamonds Ham had given her;
very much mistress of herself,
quite a contrast
to Ham,
who made no secret of his elation.

She smiled when I wished her happiness.

"We'll be home in the autumn,
Hugh,
and expect
to see a great deal of you,"
she said.

As I paused in a corner of the room my eye fell upon Nancy's father.

McAlery Willett's elation seemed even greater than Ham's.

With a gardenia in his frock-coat and a glass of champagne in his hand he went from group
to group;
and his familiar laughter,
which once had seemed so full of merriment and fun,
gave me to-day a somewhat scandalized feeling.

I heard Ralph's voice,
and turned
to discover him standing beside me,
his long legs thrust slightly apart,
his hands in his pockets,
overlooking the scene
with typical,
semi-contemptuous amusement.

"This lets old McAlery out,
anyway,"
he said.

"What do you mean?"
I demanded.

"One or two little notes of his will be cancelled,
sooner or later-- that's all."

For a moment I was unable
to speak.

"And do you think that she--that Nancy found out--?"
I stammered.

"Well,
I'd be willing
to take that end of the bet,"
he replied.

"Why the deuce should she marry Ham?

You ought
to know her well enough
to understand how she'd feel if she discovered some of McAlery's financial coups?

Of course it's not a thing I talk about,
you understand.

Are you going
to the Club?"
"No,
I'm going home,"
I said.

I was aware of his somewhat compassionate smile as I left him....

XII.

One November day nearly two years after my admission as junior member of the firm of Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon seven gentlemen met at luncheon in the Boyne Club;
Mr. Barbour,
President of the Railroad,
Mr. Scherer,
of the Boyne Iron Works and other corporations,
Mr. Leonard Dickinson,
of the Corn National Bank,
Mr. Halsey,
a prominent banker from the other great city of the state,
Mr. Grunewald,
Chairman of the Republican State Committee,
and Mr. Frederick Grierson,
who had become a very important man in our community.

At four o'clock they emerged from the club:

citizens in Boyne Street who saw them chatting amicably on the steps little suspected that in the last three hours these gentlemen had chosen and practically elected the man who was
to succeed Mr. Wade as United States Senator in Washington.

Those were the days in which great affairs were simply and efficiently handled.

No democratic nonsense about leaving the choice
to an electorate that did not know what it wanted.

The man chosen
to fill this high position was Theodore Watling.

He said he would think about the matter.

In the nation at large,
through the defection of certain Northern states neither so conservative nor fortunate as ours,
the Democratic party was in power,
which naturally implies financial depression.

There was no question about our ability
to send a Republican Senator;
the choice in the Boyne Club was final;
but before the legislature should ratify it,
a year or so hence,
it were just as well that the people of the state should be convinced that they desired Mr. Watling more than any other man;
and surely enough,
in a little while such a conviction sprang up spontaneously.

In offices and restaurants and hotels,
men began
to suggest
to each other what a fine thing it would be if Theodore Watling might be persuaded
to accept the toga;
at the banks,
when customers called
to renew their notes and tight money was discussed and Democrats excoriated,
it was generally agreed that the obvious thing
to do was
to get a safe man in the Senate.

From the very first,
Watling sentiment stirred like spring sap after a hard winter.

The country newspapers,
watered by providential rains,
began
to put forth tender little editorial shoots,
which Mr. Judah B.

Tallant presently collected and presented in a charming bouquet in the Morning Era.

"The Voice of the State Press;"
thus was the column headed;
and the remarks of the Hon.

Fitch Truesdale,
of the St. Helen's Messenger,
were given a special prominence.

Mr. Truesdale was the first,
in his section,
to be inspired by the happy thought that the one man preeminently fitted
to represent the state in the present crisis,
when her great industries had been crippled by Democratic folly,
was Mr. Theodore Watling.

The Rossiter Banner,
the Elkington Star,
the Belfast Recorder,
and I know not how many others simultaneously began
to sing Mr. Watling's praises.

"Not since the troublous times of the Civil War,"
declared the Morning Era,
"had the demand
for any man been so unanimous."

As a proof of it,
there were the country newspapers,
"which reflected the sober opinion of the firesides of the common people."

There are certain industrious gentlemen
to whom little credit is given,
and who,
unlike the average citizen who reserves his enthusiasm
for election time,
are patriotic enough
to labour
for their country's good all the year round.

When in town,
it was their habit
to pay a friendly call on the Counsel
for the Railroad,
Mr. Miller Gorse,
in the Corn Bank Building.

He was never too busy
to converse
with them;
or,
it might better be said,
to listen
to them converse.

Let some legally and politically ambitious young man observe Mr. Gorse's method.

Did he inquire what the party worker thought of Mr. Watling
for the Senate?

Not at all! But before the party worker left he was telling Mr. Gorse that public sentiment demanded Mr. Watling.

After leaving Mr. Gorse they wended their way
to the Durrett Building and handed their cards over the rail of the offices of Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon.

Mr. Watling shook hands
with scores of them,
and they departed,
well satisfied
with the flavour of his cigars and intoxicated by his personality.

He had a marvellous way of cutting short an interview without giving offence.

Some of them he turned over
to Mr. Paret,
whom he particularly desired they should know.

Thus Mr. Paret acquired many valuable additions
to his acquaintance,
cultivated a memory
for names and faces that was
to stand him in good stead;
and kept,
besides,
an indexed note-book into which he put various bits of interesting information concerning each.

Though not immediately lucrative,
it was all,
no doubt,
part of a lawyer's education.

During the summer and the following winter Colonel Paul Varney came often
to town and spent much of his time in Mr. Paret's office smoking Mr. Watling's cigars and discussing the coming campaign,
in which he took a whole-souled interest.

"Say,
Hugh,
this is goin'
slick!"
he would exclaim,
his eyes glittering like round buttons of jet.

"I never saw a campaign where they fell in the way they're doing now.

If it was anybody else but Theodore Watling,
it would scare me.

You ought
to have been in Jim Broadhurst's campaign,"
he added,
referring
to the junior senator,
"they wouldn't wood up at all,
they was just listless.

But Gorse and Barbour and the rest wanted him,
and we had
to put him over.

I reckon he is useful down there in Washington,
but say,
do you know what he always reminded me of?

One of those mud-turtles I used
to play
with as a boy up in Columbia County,-- shuts up tight soon as he sees you coming.

Now Theodore Watling ain't like that,
any way of speaking.

We can get up some enthusiasm
for a man of his sort.

He's liberal and big.

He's made his pile,
and he don't begrudge some of it
to the fellows who do the work.

Mark my words,
when you see a man who wants a big office cheap,
look out
for him."

This,
and much more wisdom I imbibed while assenting
to my chief's greatness.

For Mr. Varney was right,--one could feel enthusiasm
for Theodore Watling;
and my growing intimacy
with him,
the sense that I was having a part in his career,
a share in his success,
became
for the moment the passion of my life.

As the campaign progressed I gave more and more time
to it,
and made frequent trips of a confidential nature
to the different counties of the state.

The whole of my being was energized.

The national fever had thoroughly pervaded my blood--the national fever
to win.

Prosperity--writ large--demanded it,
and Theodore Watling personified,
incarnated the cause.

I had neither the time nor the desire
to philosophize on this national fever,
which animated all my associates:

animated,
I might say,
the nation,
which was beginning
to get into a fever about games.

If I remember rightly,
it was about this time that golf was introduced,
tennis had become a commonplace,
professional baseball was in full swing;
Ham Durrett had even organized a local polo team....

The man who failed
to win something tangible in sport or law or business or politics was counted out.

Such was the spirit of America,
in the closing years of the nineteenth century.

And yet,
when one has said this,
one has failed
to express the national Geist in all its subtlety.

In brief,
the great American sport was not so much
to win the game as
to beat it;
the evasion of rules challenged our ingenuity;
and having won,
we set about devising methods whereby it would be less and less possible
for us winners
to lose in the future.

No better illustration of this tendency could be given than the development which had recently taken place in the field of our city politics,
hitherto the battle-ground of Irish politicians who had fought one another
for supremacy.

Individualism had been rampant,
competition the custom;
you bought an alderman,
or a boss who owned four or five aldermen,
and then you never could be sure you were
to get what you wanted,
or that the aldermen and the bosses would
"stay bought."

But now a genius had appeared,
an American genius who had arisen swiftly and almost silently,
who appealed
to the imagination,
and whose name was often mentioned in a whisper,--the Hon.

Judd Jason,
sometimes known as the Spider,
who organized the City Hall and capitalized it;
an ultimate and logical effect--if one had considered it--of the Manchester school of economics.

Enlightened self-interest,
stripped of sentiment,
ends on Judd Jasons.

He ran the city even as Mr. Sherrill ran his department store;
you paid your price.

It was very convenient.

Being a genius,
Mr. Jason did not wholly break
with tradition,
but retained those elements of the old muddled system that had their value,
chartering steamboats
for outings on the river,
giving colossal picnics in Lowry Park.

The poor and the wanderer and the criminal
(of the male sex at least)
were cared for.

But he was not loved,
as the rough-and-tumble Irishmen had been loved;
he did not make himself common;
he was surrounded by an aura of mystery which I confess had not failed of effect on me.

Once,
and only once during my legal apprenticeship,
he had been pointed out
to me on the street,
where he rarely ventured.

His appearance was not impressive....

Mr. Jason could not,
of course,
prevent Mr. Watling's election,
even did he so desire,
but he did command the allegiance of several city candidates--both democratic and republican--for the state legislature,
who had as yet failed
to announce their preferences
for United States Senator.

It was important that Mr. Watling's vote should be large,
as indicative of a public reaction and repudiation of Democratic national folly.

This matter among others was the subject of discussion one July morning when the Republican State Chairman was in the city;
Mr. Grunewald expressed anxiety over Mr. Jason's continued silence.

It was expedient that somebody should
"see"
the boss.

"Why not Paret?"
suggested Leonard Dickinson.

Mr. Watling was not present at this conference.

"Paret seems
to be running Watling's campaign,
anyway."

It was settled that I should be the emissary.

With lively sensations of curiosity and excitement,
tempered by a certain anxiety as
to my ability
to match wits
with the Spider,
I made my way
to his
"lair"
over Monahan's saloon,
situated in a district that was anything but respectable.

The saloon,
on the ground floor,
had two apartments;
the bar-room proper where Mike Monahan,
chamberlain of the establishment,
was wont
to stand,
red faced and smiling,
to greet the courtiers,
big and little,
the party workers,
the district leaders,
the hangers-on ready
to be hired,
the city officials,
the police judges,--yes,
and the dignified members of state courts whose elections depended on Mr. Jason's favour:

even Judge Bering,
whose acquaintance I had made the day I had come,
as a law student,
to Mr. Watling's office,
unbent from time
to time sufficiently
to call there
for a small glass of rye and water,
and
to relate,
with his owl-like gravity,
an anecdote
to the
"boys."

The saloon represented Democracy,
so dear
to the American public.

Here all were welcome,
even the light- fingered gentlemen who enjoyed the privilege of police protection;
and who sometimes,
through fortuitous circumstances,
were hauled before the very magistrates
with whom they had rubbed elbows on the polished rail.

Behind the bar-room,
and separated from it by swinging doors only the elite ventured
to thrust apart,
was an audience chamber whither Mr. Jason occasionally descended.

Anecdote and political reminiscence gave place here
to matters of high policy.

I had several times come
to the saloon in the days of my apprenticeship in search of some judge or official,
and once I had run down here the city auditor himself.

Mike Monahan,
whose affair it was
to know everyone,
recognized me.

It was part of his business,
also,
to understand that I was now a member of the firm of Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon.

"Good morning
to you,
Mr. Paret,"
he said suavely.

We held a colloquy in undertones over the bar,
eyed by the two or three customers who were present.

Mr. Monahan disappeared,
but presently returned
to whisper:

"Sure,
he'll see you,"
to lead the way through the swinging doors and up a dark stairway.

I came suddenly on a room in the greatest disorder,
its tables and chairs piled high
with newspapers and letters,
its windows streaked
with soot.

From an open door on its farther side issued a voice.

"Is that you,
Mr. Paret?

Come in here."

It was little less than a command.

"Heard of you,
Mr. Paret.

Glad
to know you.

Sit down,
won't you?"
The inner room was almost dark.

I made out a bed in the corner,
and propped up in the bed a man;
but
for the moment I was most aware of a pair of eyes that flared up when the man spoke,
and died down again when he became silent.

They reminded me of those insects which in my childhood days we called
"lightning bugs."

Mr. Jason gave me a hand like a woman's.

I expressed my pleasure at meeting him,
and took a chair beside the bed.

"I believe you're a partner of Theodore Watling's now aren't you?

Smart man,
Watling."

"He'll make a good senator,"
I replied,
accepting the opening.

"You think he'll get elected--do you?"
Mr. Jason inquired.

I laughed.

"Well,
there isn't much doubt about that,
I imagine."

"Don't know--don't know.

Seen some dead-sure things go wrong in my time."

"What's going
to defeat him?"
I asked pleasantly.

"I don't say anything,"
Mr. Jason replied.

"But I've known funny things
to happen--never does
to be dead sure."

"Oh,
well,
we're as sure as it's humanly possible
to be,"
I declared.

The eyes continued
to fascinate me,
they had a peculiar,
disquieting effect.

Now they died down,
and it was as if the man's very presence had gone out,
as though I had been left alone;
and I found it exceedingly difficult,
under the circumstances,
to continue
to address him.

Suddenly he flared up again.

"Watling send you over here?"
he demanded.

"No.

As a matter of fact,
he's out of town.

Some of Mr. Watling's friends,
Mr. Grunewald and Mr. Dickinson,
Mr. Gorse and others,
suggested that I see you,
Mr. Jason."

There came a grunt from the bed.

"Mr. Watling has always valued your friendship and support,"
I said.

"What makes him think he ain't going
to get it?"
"He hasn't a doubt of it,"
I went on diplomatically.

"But we felt--and I felt personally,
that we ought
to be in touch
with you,
to work along
with you,
to keep informed how things are going in the city."

"What things?"
"Well--there are one or two representatives,
friends of yours,
who haven't come out
for Mr. Watling.

We aren't worrying,
we know you'll do the right thing,
but we feel that it would have a good deal of influence in some other parts of the state if they declared themselves.

And then you know as well as I do that this isn't a year when any of us can afford
to recognize too closely party lines;
the Democratic administration has brought on a panic,
the business men in that party are down on it,
and it ought
to be rebuked.

And we feel,
too,
that some of the city's Democrats ought
to be loyal
to Mr. Watling,--not that we expect them
to vote
for him in caucus,
but when it comes
to the joint ballot--"
"Who?"
demanded Mr. Jason.

"Senator Dowse and Jim Maher,
for instance,"
I suggested.

"Jim voted
for Bill 709 all right--didn't he?"
said Mr. Jason abruptly.

"That's just it,"
I put in boldly.

"We'd like
to induce him
to come in
with us this time.

But we feel that--the inducement would better come through you."

I thought Mr. Jason smiled.

By this time I had grown accustomed
to the darkness,
the face and figure of the man in the bed had become discernible.

Power,
I remember thinking,
chooses odd houses
for itself.

Here was no overbearing,
full-blooded ward ruffian brimming
with vitality,
but a thin,
sallow little man in a cotton night-shirt,
with iron-grey hair and a wiry moustache;
he might have been an overworked clerk behind a dry-goods counter;
and yet somehow,
now that I had talked
to him,
I realized that he never could have been.

Those extraordinary eyes of his,
when they were functioning,
marked his individuality as unique.

It were almost too dramatic
to say that he required darkness
to make his effect,
but so it seemed.

I should never forget him.

He had in truth been well named the Spider.

"Of course we haven't tried
to get in touch
with them.

We are leaving them
to you,"
I added.

"Paret,"
he said suddenly,
"I don't care a damn about Grunewald--never did.

I'd turn him down
for ten cents.

But you can tell Theodore Watling
for me,
and Dickinson,
that I guess the `inducement'
can be fixed."

I felt a certain relief that the interview had come
to an end,
that the moment had arrived
for amenities.

To my surprise,
Mr. Jason anticipated me.

"I've been interested in you,
Mr. Paret,"
he observed.

"Know who you are,
of course,
knew you were in Watling's office.

Then some of the boys spoke about you when you were down at the legislature on that Ribblevale matter.

Guess you had more
to do
with that bill than came out in the newspapers--eh?"
I was taken off my guard.

"Oh,
that's talk,"
I said.

"All right,
it's talk,
then?

But I guess you and I will have some more talk after a while,--after Theodore Watling gets
to be United States Senator.

Give him my regards,
and--and come in when I can do anything
for you,
Mr. Paret."

Thanking him,
I groped my way downstairs and let myself out by a side door Monahan had shown me into an alleyway,
thus avoiding the saloon.

As I walked slowly back
to the office,
seeking the shade of the awnings,
the figure in the darkened room took on a sinister aspect that troubled me....

The autumn arrived,
the campaign was on
with a whoop,
and I had my first taste of
"stump"
politics.

The acrid smell of red fire brings it back
to me.

It was a medley of railroad travel,
of committees provided
with badges--and cigars,
of open carriages slowly drawn between lines of bewildered citizens,
of Lincoln clubs and other clubs marching in serried ranks,
uniformed and helmeted,
stalwarts carrying torches and banners.

And then there were the draughty opera-houses
with the sylvan scenery pushed back and plush chairs and sofas pushed forward;
with an ominous table,
a pitcher of water on it and a glass,
near the footlights.

The houses were packed
with more bewildered citizens.

What a wonderful study of mob-psychology it would have offered! Men who had not thought of the grand old Republican party
for two years,
and who had not cared much about it when they had entered the dooms,
after an hour or so went mad
with fervour.

The Hon.

Joseph Mecklin,
ex-Speaker of the House,
with whom I traveled on occasions,
had a speech referring
to the martyred President,
ending
with an appeal
to the revolutionary fathers who followed Washington
with bleeding feet.

The Hon.

Joseph possessed that most valuable of political gifts,
presence;
and when
with quivering voice he finished his peroration,
citizens wept
with him.

What it all had
to do
with the tariff was not quite clear.

Yet nobody seemed
to miss the connection.

We were all of us most concerned,
of course,
about the working-man and his dinner pail,--whom the Democrats had wantonly thrown out of employment
for the sake of a doctrinaire theory.

They had put him in competition
with the serf of Europe.

Such was the subject-matter of my own modest addresses in this,
my maiden campaign.

I had the sense
to see myself in perspective;
to recognize that not
for me,
a dignified and substantial lawyer of affairs,
were the rhetorical flights of the Hon.

Joseph Mecklin.

I spoke
with a certain restraint.

Not too dryly,
I hope.

But I sought
to curb my sentiments,
my indignation,
at the manner in which the working-man had been treated;
to appeal
to the common sense rather than
to the passions of my audiences.

Here were the statistics!
(drawn,
by the way,
from the Republican Campaign book).

Unscrupulous demagogues--Democratic,
of course--had sought
to twist and evade them.

Let this terrible record of lack of employment and misery be compared
with the prosperity under Republican rule.

"One of the most effective speakers in this campaign
for the restoration of Prosperity,"
said the Rossiter Banner,
"is Mr. Hugh Paret,
of the firm of Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon.

Mr. Paret's speech at the Opera-House last evening made a most favourable impression.

Mr. Paret deals
with facts.

And his thoughtful analysis of the situation into which the Democratic party has brought this country should convince any sane-minded voter that the time has come
for a change."

I began
to keep a scrap-book,
though I locked it up in the drawer of my desk.

In it are
to be found many clippings of a similarly gratifying tenor....

Mecklin and I were well contrasted.

In this way,
incidentally,
I made many valuable acquaintances among the
"solid"
men of the state,
the local capitalists and manufacturers,
with whom my manner of dealing
with public questions was in particular favour.

These were practical men;
they rather patronized the Hon.

Joseph,
thus estimating,
to a nicety,
a mans value;
or solidity,
or specific gravity,
it might better be said,
since our universe was one of checks and balances.

The Hon.

Joseph and his like,
skyrocketing through the air,
were somehow necessary in the scheme of things,
but not
to be taken too seriously.

Me they did take seriously,
these provincial lords,
inviting me
to their houses and opening their hearts.

Thus,
when we came
to Elkington,
Mr. Mecklin reposed in the Commercial House,
on the noisy main street.

Fortunately
for him,
the clanging of trolley cars never interfered
with his slumbers.

I slept in a wide chamber in the mansion of Mr. Ezra Hutchins.

There were many Hutchinses in Elkington,--brothers and cousins and uncles and great-uncles,--and all were connected
with the woollen mills.

But there is always one supreme Hutchins,
and Ezra was he:

tall,
self-contained,
elderly,
but well preserved through frugal living,
essentially American and typical of his class,
when he entered the lobby of the Commercial House that afternoon the babel of political discussion was suddenly hushed;
politicians,
traveling salesmen and the members of the local committee made a lane
for him;
to him,
the Hon.

Joseph and I were introduced.

Mr. Hutchins knew what he wanted.

He was cordial
to Mr. Mecklin,
but he took me.

We entered a most respectable surrey
with tassels,
driven by a raw-boned coachman in a black overcoat,
drawn by two sleek horses.

"How is this thing going,
Paret?"
he asked.

I gave him Mr. Grunewald's estimated majority.

"What do you think?"
he demanded,
a shrewd,
humorous look in his blue eyes.

"Well,
I think we'll carry the state.

I haven't had Grunewald's experience in estimating."

Ezra Hutchins smiled appreciatively.

"What does Watling think?"
"He doesn't seem
to be worrying much."

"Ever been in Elkington before?"
I said I hadn't.

"Well,
a drive will do you good."

It was about four o'clock on a mild October afternoon.

The little town,
of fifteen thousand inhabitants or so,
had a wonderful setting in the widening valley of the Scopanong,
whose swiftly running waters furnished the power
for the mills.

We drove
to these through a gateway over which the words
"No Admittance"
were conspicuously painted,
past long brick buildings that bordered the canals;
and in the windows I caught sight of drab figures of men and women bending over the machines.

Half of the buildings,
as Mr. Hutchins pointed out,
were closed,--mute witnesses of tariff-tinkering madness.

Even more eloquent of democratic folly was that part of the town through which we presently passed,
streets lined
with rows of dreary houses where the workers lived.

Children were playing on the sidewalks,
but theirs seemed a listless play;
listless,
too,
were the men and women who sat on the steps,--listless,
and somewhat sullen,
as they watched us passing.

Ezra Hutchins seemed
to read my thought.

"Since the unions got in here I've had nothing but trouble,"
he said.

"I've tried
to do my duty by my people,
God knows.

But they won't see which side their bread's buttered on.

They oppose me at every step,
they vote against their own interests.

Some years ago they put up a job on us,
and sent a scatter-brained radical
to the legislature."

"Krebs."

"Do you know him?"
"Slightly.

He was in my class at Harvard....

Is he still here?"
I asked,
after a pause.

"Oh,
yes.

But he hasn't gone
to the legislature this time,
we've seen
to that.

His father was a respectable old German who had a little shop and made eye-glasses.

The son is an example of too much education.

He's a notoriety seeker.

Oh,
he's clever,
in a way.

He's given us a good deal of trouble,
too,
in the courts
with damage cases."

...

We came
to a brighter,
more spacious,
well-to-do portion of the town,
where the residences faced the river.

In a little while the waters widened into a lake,
which was surrounded by a park,
a gift
to the city of the Hutchins family.

Facing it,
on one side,
was the Hutchins Library;
on the other,
across a wide street,
where the maples were turning,
were the Hutchinses'
residences of various dates of construction,
from that of the younger George,
who had lately married a wife,
and built in bright yellow brick,
to the old-fashioned mansion of Ezra himself.

This,
he told me,
had been good enough
for his father,
and was good enough
for him.

The picture of it comes back
to me,
now,
with singular attractiveness.

It was of brick,
and I suppose a modification of the Georgian;
the kind of house one still sees in out-of-the way corners of London,
with a sort of Dickensy flavour;
high and square and uncompromising,
with small-paned windows,
with a flat roof surrounded by a low balustrade,
and many substantial chimneys.

The third storey was lower than the others,
separated from them by a distinct line.

On one side was a wide porch.

Yellow and red leaves,
the day's fall,
scattered the well-kept lawn.

Standing in the doorway of the house was a girl in white,
and as we descended from the surrey she came down the walk
to meet us.

She was young,
about twenty.

Her hair was the colour of the russet maple leaves.

"This is Mr. Paret,
Maude."

Mr. Hutchins looked at his watch as does a man accustomed
to live by it.

"If you'll excuse me,
Mr. Paret,
I have something important
to attend to.

Perhaps Mr. Paret would like
to look about the grounds?"
He addressed his daughter.

I said I should be delighted,
though I had no idea what grounds were meant.

As I followed Maude around the house she explained that all the Hutchins connection had a common back yard,
as she expressed it.

In reality,
there were about two blocks of the property,
extending behind all the houses.

There were great trees
with swings,
groves,
orchards where the late apples glistened between the leaves,
an old-fashioned flower garden loath
to relinquish its blooming.

In the distance the shadowed western ridge hung like a curtain of deep blue velvet against the sunset.

"What a wonderful spot!"
I exclaimed.

"Yes,
it is nice,"
she agreed,
"we were all brought up here--I mean my cousins and myself.

There are dozens of us.

And dozens left,"
she added,
as the shouts and laughter of children broke the stillness.

A boy came running around the corner of the path.

He struck out at Maude.

With a remarkably swift movement she retaliated.

"Ouch!"
he exclaimed.

"You got him that time,"
I laughed,
and,
being detected,
she suddenly blushed.

It was this act that drew my attention
to her,
that defined her as an individual.

Before that I had regarded her merely as a shy and provincial girl.

Now she was brimming
with an unsuspected vitality.

A certain interest was aroused,
although her shyness towards me was not altered.

I found it rather a flattering shyness.

"It's Hugh,"
she explained,
"he's always trying
to be funny.

Speak
to Mr. Paret,
Hugh."

"Why,
that's my name,
too,"
I said.

"Is it?"
"She knocked my hat off a little while ago,"
said Hugh.

"I was only getting square."

"Well,
you didn't get square,
did you?"
I asked.

"Are you going
to speak in the tows hall to-night?"
the boy demanded.

I admitted it.

He went off,
pausing once
to stare back at me....

Maude and I walked on.

"It must be exciting
to speak before a large audience,"
she said.

"If I were a man,
I think I should like
to be in politics."

"I cannot imagine you in politics,"
I answered.

She laughed.

"I said,
if I were a man."

"Are you going
to the meeting?"
"Oh,
yes.

Father promised
to take me.

He has a box."

I thought it would be pleasant
to have her there.

"I'm afraid you'll find what I have
to say rather dry,"
I said.

"A woman can't expect
to understand everything,"
she answered quickly.

This remark struck me favourably.

I glanced at her sideways.

She was not a beauty,
but she was distinctly well-formed and strong.

Her face was oval,
her features not quite regular,--giving them a certain charm;
her colour was fresh,
her eyes blue,
the lighter blue one sees on Chinese ware:

not a poetic comparison,
but so I thought of them.

She was apparently not sophisticated,
as were most of the young women at home whom I knew intimately
(as were the Watling twins,
for example,
with one of whom,
Frances,
I had had,
by the way,
rather a lively flirtation the spring before);
she seemed refreshingly original,
impressionable and plastic....

We walked slowly back
to the house,
and in the hallway I met Mrs. Hutchins,
a bustling,
housewifely lady,
inclined
to stoutness,
whose creased and kindly face bore witness
to long acquiescence in the discipline of matrimony,
to the contentment that results from an essentially circumscribed and comfortable life.

She was,
I learned later,
the second Mrs. Hutchins,
and Maude their only child.

The children of the first marriage,
all girls,
had married and scattered.

Supper was a decorous but heterogeneous meal of the old-fashioned sort that gives one the choice between tea and cocoa.

It was something of an occasion,
I suspected.

The minister was there,
the Reverend Mr. Doddridge,
who would have made,
in appearance at least,
a perfect Puritan divine in a steeple hat and a tippet.

Only--he was no longer the leader of the community;
and even in his grace he had the air of deferring
to the man who provided the bounties of which we were about
to partake rather than
to the Almighty.

Young George was there,
Mr. Hutchins's nephew,
who was daily becoming more and more of a factor in the management of the mills,
and had built the house of yellow brick that stood out so incongruously among the older Hutchinses'
mansions,
and marked a transition.

I thought him rather a yellow-brick gentleman himself
for his assumption of cosmopolitan manners.

His wife was a pretty,
discontented little woman who plainly deplored her environment,
longed
for larger fields of conquest:

George,
she said,
must remain where he was,
for the present at least,--Uncle Ezra depended on him;
but Elkington was a prosy place,
and Mrs. George gave the impression that she did not belong here.

They went
to the city on occasions;
both cities.

And when she told me we had a common acquaintance in Mrs. Hambleton Durrett--whom she thought so lovely!--I knew that she had taken Nancy as an ideal:

Nancy,
the social leader of what was
to Mrs. George a metropolis.

Presently the talk became general among the men,
the subject being the campaign,
and I the authority,
bombarded
with questions I strove
to answer judicially.

What was the situation in this county and in that?

the national situation?

George indulged in rather a vigorous arraignment of the demagogues,
national and state,
who were hurting business in order
to obtain political power.

The Reverend Mr. Doddridge assented,
deploring the poverty that the local people had brought on themselves by heeding the advice of agitators;
and Mrs. Hutchins,
who spent much of her time in charity work,
agreed
with the minister when he declared that the trouble was largely due
to a decline in Christian belief.

Ezra Hutchins,
too,
nodded at this.

"Take that man Krebs,
for example,"
the minister went on,
stimulated by this encouragement,
"he's an atheist,
pure and simple."

A sympathetic shudder went around the table at the word.

George alone smiled.

"Old Krebs was a free-thinker;
I used
to get my glasses of him.

He was at least a conscientious man,
a good workman,
which is more than can be said
for the son.

Young Krebs has talent,
and if only he had devoted himself
to the honest practice of law,
instead of stirring up dissatisfaction among these people,
he would be a successful man to-day."

Mr. Hutchins explained that I was at college
with Krebs.

"These people must like him,"
I said,
"or they wouldn't have sent him
to the legislature."

"Well,
a good many of them do like him,"
the minister admitted.

"You see,
he actually lives among them.

They believe his socialistic doctrines because he's a friend of theirs."

"He won't represent this town again,
that's sure,"
exclaimed George.

"You didn't see in the papers that he was nominated,--did you,
Paret?"
"But if the mill people wanted him,
George,
how could it be prevented?"
his wife demanded.

George winked at me.

"There are more ways of skinning a cat than one,"
he said cryptically.

"Well,
it's time
to go
to the meeting,
I guess,"
remarked Ezra,
rising.

Once more he looked at his watch.

We were packed into several family carriages and started off.

In front of the hall the inevitable red fire was burning,
its quivering light reflected on the faces of the crowd that blocked the street.

They stood silent,
strangely apathetic as we pushed through them
to the curb,
and the red fire went out suddenly as we descended.

My temporary sense of depression,
however,
deserted me as we entered the hall,
which was well lighted and filled
with people,
who clapped when the Hon.

Joseph and I,
accompanied by Mr. Doddridge and the Hon.

Henry Clay Mellish from Pottstown,
with the local chairman,
walked out on the stage.

A glance over the audience sufficed
to ascertain that that portion of the population whose dinner pails we longed
to fill was evidently not present in large numbers.

But the farmers had driven in from the hills,
while the merchants and storekeepers of Elkington had turned out loyally.

The chairman,
in introducing me,
proclaimed me as a coming man,
and declared that I had already achieved,
in the campaign,
considerable notoriety.

As I spoke,
I was pleasantly aware of Maude Hutchins leaning forward a little across the rail of the right-hand stage box--for the town hall was half opera-house;
her attitude was one of semi-absorbed admiration;
and the thought that I had made an impression on her stimulated me.

I spoke
with more aplomb.

Somewhat
to my surprise,
I found myself making occasional,
unexpected witticisms that drew laughter and applause.

Suddenly,
from the back of the hall,
a voice called out:--
"How about House Bill 709?"
There was a silence,
then a stirring and craning of necks.

It was my first experience of heckling,
and
for the moment I was taken aback.

I thought of Krebs.

He had,
indeed,
been in my mind since I had risen
to my feet,
and I had scanned the faces before me in search of his.

But it was not his voice.

"Well,
what about Bill 709?"
I demanded.

"You ought
to know something about it,
I guess,"
the voice responded.

"Put him out!"
came from various portions of the hall.

Inwardly,
I was shaken.

Not--in orthodox language from any
"conviction of sin."

Yet it was my first intimation that my part in the legislation referred
to was known
to any save a select few.

I blamed Krebs,
and a hot anger arose within me against him.

After all,
what could they prove?

"No,
don't put him out,"
I said.

"Let him come up here
to the platform.

I'll yield
to him.

And I'm entirely willing
to discuss
with him and defend any measures passed in the legislature of this state by a Republican majority.

Perhaps,"
I added,
"the gentleman has a copy of the law in his pocket,
that I may know what he is talking about,
and answer him intelligently."

At this there was wild applause.

I had the audience
with me.

The offender remained silent and presently I finished my speech.

After that Mr. Mecklin made them cheer and weep,
and Mr. Mellish made them laugh.

The meeting had been highly successful.

"You polished him off,
all right,"
said George Hutchins,
as he took my hand.

"Who was he?"
"Oh,
one of the local sore-heads.

Krebs put him up
to it,
of course."

"Was Krebs here?"
I asked.

"Sitting in the corner of the balcony.

That meeting must have made him feel sick."

George bent forward and whispered in my ear:

"I thought Bill 709 was Watling's idea."

"Oh,
I happened
to be in the Potts House about that time,"
I explained.

George,
of whom it may be gathered that he was not wholly unsophisticated,
grinned at me appreciatively.

"Say,
Paret,"
he replied,
putting his hand through my arm,
"there's a little legal business in prospect down here that will require some handling,
and I wish you'd come down after the campaign and talk it over,
with us.

I've just about made up my mind that you're he man
to tackle it."

"All right,
I'll come,"
I said.

"And stay
with me,"
said George....

We went
to his yellow-brick house
for refreshments,
salad and ice-cream and
(in the face of the Hutchins traditions)
champagne.

Others had been invited in,
some twenty persons....

Once in a while,
when I looked up,
I met Maude's eyes across the room.

I walked home
with her,
slowly,
the length of the Hutchinses'
block.

Floating over the lake was a waning October moon that cast through the thinning maples a lace-work of shadows at our feet;
I had the feeling of well-being that comes
to heroes,
and the presence of Maude Hutchins was an incense,
a vestal incense far from unpleasing.

Yet she had reservations which appealed
to me.

Hers was not a gushing provincialism,
like that of Mrs. George.

"I liked your speech so much,
Mr. Paret,"
she told me.

"It seemed so sensible and--controlled,
compared
to the others.

I have never thought a great deal about these things,
of course,
and I never understood before why taking away the tariff caused so much misery.

You made that quite plain.

"If so,
I'm glad,"
I said.

She was silent a moment.

"The working people here have had a hard time during the last year,"
she went on.

"Some of the mills had
to be shut down,
you know.

It has troubled me.

Indeed,
it has troubled all of us.

And what has made it more difficult,
more painful is that many of them seem actually
to dislike us.

They think it's father's fault,
and that he could run all the mills if he wanted to.

I've been around a little
with mother and sometimes the women wouldn't accept any help from us;
they said they'd rather starve than take charity,
that they had the right
to work.

But father couldn't run the mills at a loss--could he?"
"Certainly not,"
I replied.

"And then there's Mr. Krebs,
of whom we were speaking at supper,
and who puts all kinds of queer notions into their heads.

Father says he's an anarchist.

I heard father say at supper that he was at Harvard
with you.

Did you like him?"
"Well,"
I answered hesitatingly,
"I didn't know him very well."

"Of course not,"
she put in.

"I suppose you couldn't have."

"He's got these notions,"
I explained,
"that are mischievous and crazy-- but I don't dislike him."

"I'm glad
to hear you say that!"
she answered quietly.

"I like him,
too- -he seems so kind,
so understanding."

"Do you know him?"
"Well,--"she hesitated--"I feel as though I do.

I've only met him once,
and that was by accident.

It was the day the big strike began,
last spring,
and I had been shopping,
and started
for the mills
to get father
to walk home
with me,
as I used
to do.

I saw the crowds blocking the streets around the canal.

At first I paid no attention
to them,
but after a while I began
to be a little uneasy,
there were places where I had
to squeeze through,
and I couldn't help seeing that something was wrong,
and that the people were angry.

Men and women were talking in loud voices.

One woman stared at me,
and called my name,
and said something that frightened me terribly.

I went into a doorway--and then I saw Mr. Krebs.

I didn't know who he was.

He just said,
`You'd better come
with me,
Miss Hutchins,'
and I went
with him.

I thought afterwards that it was a very courageous thing
for him
to do,
because he was so popular
with the mill people,
and they had such a feeling against us.

Yet they didn't seem
to resent it,
and made way
for us,
and Mr. Krebs spoke
to many of them as we passed.

After we got
to State Street,
I asked him his name,
and when he told me I was speechless.

He took off his hat and went away.

He had such a nice face--not at all ugly when you look at it twice--and kind eyes,
that I just couldn't believe him
to be as bad as father and George think he is.

Of course he is mistaken,"
she added hastily,
"but I am sure he is sincere,
and honestly thinks he can help those people by telling them what he does."

The question shot at me during the meeting rankled still;
I wanted
to believe that Krebs had inspired it,
and her championship of him gave me a twinge of jealousy,--the slightest twinge,
to be sure,
yet a perceptible one.

At the same time,
the unaccountable liking I had
for the man stirred
to life.

The act she described had been so characteristic.

"He's one of the born rebels against society,"
I said glibly.

"Yet I do think he's sincere."

Maude was grave.

"I should be sorry
to think he wasn't,"
she replied.

After I had bidden her good night at the foot of the stairs,
and gone
to my room,
I reflected how absurd it was
to be jealous of Krebs.

What was Maude Hutchins
to me?

And even if she had been something
to me,
she never could be anything
to Krebs.

All the forces of our civilization stood between the two;
nor was she of a nature
to take plunges of that sort.

The next day,
as I lay back in my seat in the parlour-car and gazed at the autumn landscape,
I indulged in a luxurious contemplation of the picture she had made as she stood on the lawn under the trees in the early morning light,
when my carriage had driven away;
and I had turned,
to perceive that her eyes had followed me.

I was not in love
with her,
of course.

I did not wish
to return at once
to Elkington,
but I dwelt
with a pleasant anticipation upon my visit,
when the campaign should be over,
with George.

XIII.

"The good old days of the Watling campaign,"
as Colonel Paul Varney is wont
to call them,
are gone forever.

And the Colonel himself,
who stuck
to his gods,
has been through the burning,
fiery furnace of Investigation,
and has come out unscathed and unrepentant.

The flames of investigation,
as a matter of fact,
passed over his head in their vain attempt
to reach the
"man higher up,"
whose feet they licked;
but him they did not devour,
either.

A veteran in retirement,
the Colonel is living under his vine and fig tree on the lake at Rossiter;
the vine bears Catawba grapes,
of which he is passionately fond;
the fig tree,
the Bartlett pears he gives
to his friends.

He has saved something from the spoils of war,
but other veterans I could mention are not so fortunate.

The old warriors have retired,
and many are dead;
the good old methods are becoming obsolete.

We never bothered about those mischievous things called primaries.

Our county committees,
our state committees chose the candidates
for the conventions,
which turned around and chose the committees.

Both the committees and the conventions--under advice--chose the candidates.

Why,
pray,
should the people complain,
when they had everything done
for them?

The benevolent parties,
both Democratic and Republican,
even undertook the expense of printing the ballots! And generous ballots they were
(twenty inches long and five wide!),
distributed before election,
in order that the voters might have the opportunity of studying and preparing them:

in order that Democrats of delicate feelings might take the pains
to scratch out all the Democratic candidates,
and write in the names of the Republican candidates.

Patriotism could go no farther than this....

I spent the week before election in the city,
where I had the opportunity of observing what may be called the charitable side of politics.

For a whole month,
or more,
the burden of existence had been lifted from the shoulders of the homeless.

No church or organization,
looked out
for these frowsy,
blear-eyed and ragged wanderers who had failed
to find a place in the scale of efficiency.

For a whole month,
I say,
Mr. Judd Jason and his lieutenants made them their especial care;
supported them in lodging-houses,
induced the night clerks
to give them attention;
took the greatest pains
to ensure them the birth-right which,
as American citizens,
was theirs,--that of voting.

They were not only given homes
for a period,
but they were registered;
and in the abundance of good feeling that reigned during this time of cheer,
even the foreigners were registered! On election day they were driven,
like visiting notables,
in carryalls and carriages
to the polls! Some of them,
as though in compensation
for ills endured between elections,
voted not once,
but many times;
exercising judicial functions
for which they should be given credit.

For instance,
they were convinced that the Hon.

W.

W.

Trulease had made a good governor;
and they were Watling enthusiasts,--intent on sending men
to the legislature who would vote
for him
for senator;
yet there were cases in which,
for the minor offices,
the democrat was the better man! It was a memorable day.

In spite of Mr. Lawler's Pilot,
which was as a voice crying in the wilderness,
citizens who had wives and homes and responsibilities,
business men and clerks went
to the voting booths and recorded their choice
for Trulease,
Watling and Prosperity:

and working- men followed suit.

Victory was in the air.

Even the policemen wore happy smiles,
and in some instances the election officers themselves in absent-minded exuberance thrust bunches of ballots into the boxes! In response
to an insistent demand from his fellow-citizens Mr. Watling,
the Saturday evening before,
had made a speech in the Auditorium,
decked
with bunting and filled
with people.

For once the Morning Era did not exaggerate when it declared that the ovation had lasted fully ten minutes.

"A remarkable proof"
it went on
to say,
"of the esteem and confidence in which our fellow-citizen is held by those who know him best,
his neighbours in the city where he has given so many instances of his public spirit,
where he has achieved such distinction in the practice of the law.

He holds the sound American conviction that the office should seek the man.

His address is printed in another column,
and we believe it will appeal
to the intelligence and sober judgment of the state.

It is replete
with modesty and wisdom."

Mr. Watling was introduced by Mr. Bering of the State Supreme Court
(a candidate
for re-election),
who spoke
with deliberation,
with owl-like impressiveness.

He didn't believe in judges meddling in politics,
but this was an unusual occasion.

(Loud applause.)
Most unusual.

He had come here as a man,
as an American,
to pay his tribute
to another man,
a long-time friend,
whom he thought
to stand somewhat aside and above mere party strife,
to represent values not merely political....

So accommodating and flexible is the human mind,
so
"practical"
may it become through dealing
with men and affairs,
that in listening
to Judge Bering I was able
to ignore the little anomalies such a situation might have suggested
to the theorist,
to the mere student of the institutions of democracy.

The friendly glasses of rye and water Mr. Bering had taken in Monahan's saloon,
the cases he had
"arranged"
for the firm of Watling,
Fowndes and Ripon were forgotten.

Forgotten,
too,
when Theodore Watling stood up and men began,
to throw their hats in the air,--were the cavilling charges of Mr. Lawler's Pilot that,
far from the office seeking the man,
our candidate had spent over a hundred thousand dollars of his own money,
to say nothing of the contributions of Mr. Scherer,
Mr. Dickinson and the Railroad! If I had been troubled
with any weak,
ethical doubts,
Mr. Watling would have dispelled them;
he had red blood in his veins,
a creed in which he believed,
a rare power of expressing himself in plain,
everyday language that was often colloquial,
but never --as the saying goes--"cheap."

The dinner-pail predicament was real
to him.

He would present a policy of our opponents charmingly,
even persuasively,
and then add,
after a moment's pause:

"There is only one objection
to this,
my friends--that it doesn't work."

It was all in the way he said it,
of course.

The audience would go wild
with approval,
and shouts of
"that's right"
could be heard here and there.

Then he proceeded
to show why it didn't work.

He had the faculty of bringing his lessons home,
the imagination
to put himself into the daily life of those who listened
to him,--the life of the storekeeper,
the clerk,
of the labourer and of the house-wife.

The effect of this can scarcely be overestimated.

For the American hugs the delusion that there are no class distinctions,
even though his whole existence may be an effort
to rise out of once class into another.

"Your wife,"
he told them once,
"needs a dress.

Let us admit that the material
for the dress is a little cheaper than it was four years ago,
but when she comes
to look into the family stocking--"
(Laughter.)
"I needn't go on.

If we could have things cheaper,
and more money
to buy them with,
we should all be happy,
and the Republican party could retire from business."

He did not once refer
to the United States Senatorship.

It was appropriate,
perhaps,
that many of us dined on the evening of election day at the Boyne Club.

There was early evidence of a Republican land-slide.

And when,
at ten o'clock,
it was announced that Mr. Trulease was re-elected by a majority which exceeded Mr. Grunewald's most hopeful estimate,
that the legislature was
"safe,"
that Theodore Watling would be the next United States Senator,
a scene of jubilation ensued within those hallowed walls which was unprecedented.

Chairs were pushed back,
rugs taken up,
Gene Hollister played the piano and a Virginia reel started;
in a burst of enthusiasm Leonard Dickinson ordered champagne
for every member present.

The country was returning
to its senses.

Theodore Watling had preferred,
on this eventful night,
to remain quietly at home.

But presently carriages were ordered,
and a
"delegation"
of enthusiastic friends departed
to congratulate him;
Dickinson,
of course,
Grierson,
Fowndes,
Ogilvy,
and Grunewald.

We found Judah B.

Tallant there,--in spite of the fact that it was a busy night
for the Era;
and Adolf Scherer himself,
in expansive mood,
was filling the largest of the library chairs.

Mr. Watling was the least excited of them all;
remarkably calm,
I thought,
for a man on the verge of realizing his life's high ambition.

He had some old brandy,
and a box of cigars he had been saving
for an occasion.

He managed
to convey
to everyone his appreciation of the value of their cooperation....

It was midnight before Mr. Scherer arose
to take his departure.

He seized Mr. Watling's hand,
warmly,
in both of his own.

"I have never,"
he said,
with a relapse into the German f's,
"I have never had a happier moment in my life,
my friend,
than when I congratulate you on your success."

His voice shook
with emotion.

"Alas,
we shall not see so much of you now."

"He'll be on guard,
Scherer,"
said Leonard Dickinson,
putting his arm around my chief.

"Good night,
Senator,"
said Tallant,
and all echoed the word,
which struck me as peculiarly appropriate.

Much as I had admired Mr. Watling before,
it seemed indeed as if he had undergone some subtle change in the last few hours,
gained in dignity and greatness by the action of the people that day.

When it came my turn
to bid him good night,
he retained my hand in his.

"Don't go yet,
Hugh,"
he said.

"But you must be tired,"
I objected.

"This sort of thing doesn't make a man tired,"
he laughed,
leading me back
to the library,
where he began
to poke the fire into a blaze.

"Sit down awhile.

You must be tired,
I think,--you've worked hard in this campaign,
a good deal harder than I have.

I haven't said much about it,
but I appreciate it,
my boy."

Mr. Watling had the gift of expressing his feelings naturally,
without sentimentality.

I would have given much
for that gift.

"Oh,
I liked it,"
I replied awkwardly.

I read a gentle amusement in his eyes,
and also the expression of something else,
difficult
to define.

He had seated himself,
and was absently thrusting at the logs
with the poker.

"You've never regretted going into law?"
he asked suddenly,
to my surprise.

"Why,
no,
sir,"
I said.

"I'm glad
to hear that.

I feel,
to a considerable extent,
responsible
for your choice of a profession."

"My father intended me
to be a lawyer,"
I told him.

"But it's true that you gave me my--my first enthusiasm."

He looked up at me at the word.

"I admired your father.

He seemed
to me
to be everything that a lawyer should be.

And years ago,
when I came
to this city a raw country boy from upstate,
he represented and embodied
for me all the fine traditions of the profession.

But the practice of law isn't what it was in his day,
Hugh."

"No,"
I agreed,
"that could scarcely be expected."

"Yes,
I believe you realize that,"
he said.

"I've watched you,
I've taken a personal pride in you,
and I have an idea that eventually you will succeed me here--neither Fowndes nor Ripon have the peculiar ability you have shown.

You and I are alike in a great many respects,
and I am inclined
to think we are rather rare,
as men go.

We are able
to keep one object vividly in view,
so vividly as
to be able
to work
for it day and night.

I could mention dozens who had and have more natural talent
for the law than I,
more talent
for politics than I.

The same thing may be said about you.

I don't regard either of us as natural lawyers,
such as your father was.

He couldn't help being a lawyer."

Here was new evidence of his perspicacity.

"But surely,"
I ventured,
"you don't feel any regrets concerning your career,
Mr. Watling?"
"No,"
he said,
"that's just the point.

But no two of us are made wholly alike.

I hadn't practised law very long before I began
to realize that conditions were changing,
that the new forces at work in our industrial life made the older legal ideals impracticable.

It was a case of choosing between efficiency and inefficiency,
and I chose efficiency.

Well,
that was my own affair,
but when it comes
to influencing others--"
He paused.

"I want you
to see this as I do,
not
for the sake of justifying myself,
but because I honestly believe there is more
to it than expediency,--a good deal more.

There's a weak way of looking at it,
and a strong way.

And if I feel sure you understand it,
I shall be satisfied.

"Because things are going
to change in this country,
Hugh.

They are changing,
but they are going
to change more.

A man has got
to make up his mind what he believes in,
and be ready
to fight
for it.

We'll have
to fight
for it,
sooner perhaps than we realize.

We are a nation divided against ourselves;
democracy--Jacksonian democracy,
at all events,
is a flat failure,
and we may as well acknowledge it.

We have a political system we have outgrown,
and which,
therefore,
we have had
to nullify.

There are certain needs,
certain tendencies of development in nations as well as in individuals,--needs stronger than the state,
stronger than the law or constitution.

In order
to make our resources effective,
combinations of capital are more and more necessary,
and no more
to be denied than a chemical process,
given the proper ingredients,
can be thwarted.

The men who control capital must have a free hand,
or the structure will be destroyed.

This compels us
to do many things which we would rather not do,
which we might accomplish openly and unopposed if conditions were frankly recognized,
and met by wise statesmanship which sought
to bring about harmony by the reshaping of laws and policies.

Do you follow me?"
"Yes,"
I answered.

"But I have never heard the situation stated so clearly.

Do you think the day will come when statesmanship will recognize this need?"
"Ah,"
he said,
"I'm afraid not--in my time,
at least.

But we shall have
to develop that kind of statesmen or go on the rocks.

Public opinion in the old democratic sense is a myth;
it must be made by strong individuals who recognize and represent evolutionary needs,
otherwise it's at the mercy of demagogues who play fast and loose
with the prejudice and ignorance of the mob.

The people don't value the vote,
they know nothing about the real probleMs. So far as I can see,
they are as easily swayed to-day as the crowd that listened
to Mark Antony's oration about Caesar.

You've seen how we have
to handle them,
in this election and--in other matters.

It isn't a pleasant practice,
something we'd indulge in out of choice,
but the alternative is unthinkable.

We'd have chaos in no time.

We've just got
to keep hold,
you understand--we can't leave it
to the irresponsible."

"Yes,"
I said.

In this mood he was more impressive than I had ever known him,
and his confidence flattered and thrilled me.

"In the meantime,
we're criminals,"
he continued.

"From now on we'll have
to stand more and more denunciation from the visionaries,
the dissatisfied,
the trouble makers.

We may as well make up our minds
to it.

But we've got something on our side worth fighting for,
and the man who is able
to make that clear will be great."

"But you--you are going
to the Senate,"
I reminded him.

He shook his head.

"The time has not yet come,"
he said.

"Confusion and misunderstanding must increase before they can diminish.

But I have hopes of you,
Hugh,
or I shouldn't have spoken.

I shan't be here now--of course I'll keep in touch
with you.

I wanted
to be sure that you had the right view of this thing."

"I see it now,"
I said.

"I had thought of it,
but never--never as a whole--not in the large sense in which you have expressed it."

To attempt
to acknowledge or deprecate the compliment he had paid me was impossible;
I felt that he must have read my gratitude and appreciation in my manner.

"I mustn't keep you up until morning."

He glanced at the clock,
and went
with me through the hall into the open air.

A meteor darted through the November night.

"We're like that,"
he observed,
staring after it,
a
"flash across the darkness,
and we're gone."

"Only--there are many who haven't the satisfaction of a flash,"
I was moved
to reply.

He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder as he bade me good night.

"Hugh,
you ought
to get married.

I'll have
to find a nice girl
for you,"
he said.

With an elation not unmingled
with awe I made my way homeward.

Theodore Watling had given me a creed.

A week or so after the election I received a letter from George Hutchins asking me
to come
to Elkington.

I shall not enter into the details of the legal matter involved.

Many times that winter I was a guest at the yellow-brick house,
and I have
to confess,
as spring came on,
that I made several trips
to Elkington which business necessity did not absolutely demand.

I considered Maude Hutchins,
and found the consideration rather a delightful process.

As became an eligible and successful young man,
I was careful not
to betray too much interest;
and I occupied myself at first
with a review of what I deemed her shortcomings.

Not that I was thinking of marriage--but I had imagined the future Mrs. Paret as tall;
Maude was up
to my chin:

again,
the hair of the fortunate lady was
to be dark,
and Maude's was golden red:

my ideal had esprit,
lightness of touch,
the faculty of seizing just the aspect of a subject that delighted me,
and a knowledge of the world;
Maude was simple,
direct,
and in a word provincial.

Her provinciality,
however,
was negative rather than positive,
she had no disagreeable mannerisms,
her voice was not nasal;
her plasticity appealed
to me.

I suppose I was lost without knowing it when I began
to think of moulding her.

All of this went on at frequent intervals during the winter,
and while I was organizing the Elkington Power and Traction Company
for George I found time
to dine and sup at Maude's house,
and
to take walks
with her.

I thought I detected an incense deliciously sweet;
by no means overpowering,
like the lily's,
but more like the shy fragrance of the wood flower.

I recall her kind welcomes,
the faint deepening of colour in her cheeks when she greeted me,
and while I suspected that she looked up
to me she had a surprising and tantalizing self-command.

There came moments when I grew slightly alarmed,
as,
for instance,
one Sunday in the early spring when I was dining at the Ezra Hutchins's house and surprised Mrs. Hutchins's glance on me,
suspecting her of seeking
to divine what manner of man I was.

I became self-conscious;
I dared not look at Maude,
who sat across the table;
thereafter I began
to feel that the Hutchins connection regarded me as a suitor.

I had grown intimate
with George and his wife,
who did not refrain from sly allusions;
and George himself once remarked,
with characteristic tact,
that I was most conscientious in my attention
to the traction affair;
I have reason
to believe they were even less delicate
with Maude.

This was the logical time
to withdraw--but I dallied.

The experience was becoming more engrossing,--if I may so describe it,--and spring was approaching.

The stars in their courses were conspiring.

I was by no means as yet a self- acknowledged wooer,
and we discussed love in its lighter phases through the medium of literature.

Heaven forgive me
for calling it so! About that period,
it will be remembered,
a mushroom growth of volumes of a certain kind sprang into existence;
little books with
"artistic"
bindings and wide margins,
sweetened essays,
some of them written in beautiful English by dilettante authors
for drawing-room consumption;
and collections of short stories,
no doubt chiefly bought by philanderers like myself,
who were thus enabled
to skate on thin ice over deep water.

It was a most delightful relationship that these helped
to support,
and I fondly believed I could reach shore again whenever I chose.

There came a Sunday in early May,
one of those days when the feminine assumes a large importance.

I had been
to the Hutchinses'
church;
and Maude,
as she sat and prayed decorously in the pew beside me,
suddenly increased in attractiveness and desirability.

Her voice was very sweet,
and I felt a delicious and languorous thrill which I identified not only
with love,
but also
with a reviving spirituality.

How often the two seem
to go hand in hand! She wore a dress of a filmy material,
mauve,
with a design in gold thread running through it.

Of late,
it seemed,
she had had more new dresses:

and their modes seemed more cosmopolitan;
at least
to the masculine eye.

How delicately her hair grew,
in little,
shining wisps,
around her white neck! I could have reached out my hand and touched her.

And it was this desire,--although by no means overwhelming,--that startled me.

Did I really want her?

The consideration of this vital question occupied the whole time of the sermon;
made me distrait at dinner,--a large family gathering.

Later I found myself alone
with heron a bench in the Hutchinses'
garden where we had walked the day of my arrival,
during the campaign.

The gardens were very different,
now.

The trees had burst forth again into leaf,
the spiraea bushes seemed weighted down
with snow,
and
with a note like that of the quivering bass string of a
'cello the bees hummed among the fruit blossoMs. And there beside me in her filmy dress was Maude,
a part of it all--the meaning of all that set my being clamouring.

She was like some ripened,
delicious flower ready
to be picked....

One of those pernicious,
make-believe volumes had fallen on the bench between us,
for I could not read any more;
I could not think;
I touched her hand,
and when she drew it gently away I glanced at her.

Reason made a valiant but hopeless effort
to assert itself.

Was I sure that I wanted her--for life?

No use! I wanted her now,
no matter what price that future might demand.

An awkward silence fell between us--awkward
to me,
at least--and I,
her guide and mentor,
became banal,
apologetic,
confused.

I made some idiotic remark about being together in the Garden of Eden.

"I remember Mr. Doddridge saying in Bible class that it was supposed
to be on the Euphrates,"
she replied.

"But it's been destroyed by the flood."

"Let's make another--one of our own,"
I suggested.

"Why,
how silly you are this afternoon."

"What's
to prevent us--Maude?"
I demanded,
with a dry throat.

"Nonsense!"
she laughed.

In proportion as I lost poise she seemed
to gain it.

"It's not nonsense,"
I faltered.

"If we were married."

At last the fateful words were pronounced--irrevocably.

And,
instead of qualms,
I felt nothing but relief,
joy that I had been swept along by the flood of feeling.

She did not look at me,
but gazed straight ahead of her.

"If I love you,
Maude?"
I stammered,
after a moment.

"But I don't love you,"
she replied,
steadily.

Never in my life had I been so utterly taken aback.

"Do you mean,"
I managed
to say,
"that after all these months you don't like me a little?"
"`Liking'
isn't loving."

She looked me full in the face.

"I like you very much."

"But--"
there I stopped,
paralyzed by what appeared
to me the quintessence of feminine inconsistency and caprice.

Yet,
as I stared at her,
she certainly did not appear capricious.

It is not too much
to say that I was fairly astounded at this evidence of self-command and decision,
of the strength of mind
to refuse me.

Was it possible that she had felt nothing and I all?

I got
to my feet.

"I hate
to hurt your feelings,"
I heard her say.

"I'm very sorry."

...

She looked up at me.

Afterwards,
when reflecting on the scene,
I seemed
to remember that there were tears in her eyes.

I was not in a condition
to appreciate her splendid sincerity.

I was overwhelmed and inarticulate.

I left her there,
on the bench,
and went back
to George's,
announcing my intention of taking the five o'clock train....