For Geraldine's Career

by Anne O'Hagan

For Geraldine's Career

By Anne O'Hagan
Author of “The Awakening of Romola,” “Deep Unto Deep,” “The Affair at Penfield,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY E. A. FURMAN

Chapter I.

I STOOD in the street before the house, the friendly crowd of neighbors surging about me, wrapping my night-gowned figure with additional shawls and comforters, and watched the destruction of my home proceed. The flames were roaring now through the lower stories of the ancient wooden pile, and out of the upper windows the smoke poured in black, acrid clouds. I had been dragged from a smoke-drugged stupor, and even yet, in the chill air of the April midnight, my faculties were benumbed. I watched the ineffective streams of water playing over the walls of the house with but little realization of what was happening. Then suddenly, all at once, a terrifying recollection returned to me.

“Geraldine! Geraldine!” I cried frantically. “Oh, where is Geraldine? Geraldine——”

Mrs. Tyson from next door put her motherly hand on my shoulder.

“Why, Amy,” she crooned, “don't you remember? Geraldine went with your pa an' ma to Boston Tuesday——”

“Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” I shrieked again, breaking from her kindly grasp. “Oh, will nobody do anything? Jerry's at home—she came back last night—she's in her room in the L—— Will nobody—— Oh, let me go, let me go!” For some one was trying to restrain me as I started to break through the line the firemen had drawn about the yard.

They held me back firmly, and I struggled as one struggles in a nightmare, straining muscles, overcharging arteries, against the impossible. I gasped my prayers to be allowed to try to rescue my sister, I offered fantastic rewards to whomever would perform the service for me. But the friendly clamor about me was all to the effect that I was probably mistaken; that Geraldine had gone away two days before with our parents; that even if she were in the house, it was hopeless to try to rescue her. And then, through the maddening inaction, the futile argument as to Geraldine's whereabouts, the cruel restraint of the hands laid upon me, there came rushing Dirkman Kidder. I spied him as he cleft a rough way through the crowd.

“Oh, Dirk, Dirk!” I called, managing to wrench myself free of the detaining hands. “Geraldine is inside! Jerry came home last night! They won't let me—— She's in her room! Oh, Dirk, Dirk!” And I promptly collapsed upon his shoulder.

When I recovered consciousness, I was lying on the fresh spring grass in Mrs. Tyson's front yard, my face upturned to the incredible, high, white tranquillity of the moon. All my life, the sensation of that moment has remained with me. To see, above the black and lurid confusion, a thing so marvelously still, so gloriously, austerely remote and beautiful—it was a miracle, and a miracle strangely comforting and calming. Then I moved my head, tried to raise myself upon my elbow, and found the exertion too great. One of the Tyson girls was bending over me on the second, obliterating the silver majesty on high, and pouring brandy between my lips. I sputtered, choked, and demanded, between gasps: “Geraldine?”

“It's all right. Dirk got her out,” Florence Tyson assured me, and her voice was heavenly music in my ears, and her plain face transfigured with celestial light. “She wasn't even overcome with the smoke as you were, poor dear! You see, the main part of the house must have been smoldering a long time before the flames burst, but the L didn't catch until after the fire was blazing in the main part. So Jerry's all right. She's gone to bed at the Mayburys'.”

“Dirk?” I questioned her weakly.

“A little singed,” she replied, smiling. “He's lost an ambrosial lock or two, and half an eyebrow. But he's all right. Now you're to come in to bed. Mother's got one ready for you. The firemen have the fire under control, and there's no sense in any more excitement.”

“Father and mother?” I suggested.

“Dirk has telephoned them; they'll be down on the early train to-morrow.”

Then I permitted myself to be put to bed in the room Mrs. Tyson had got ready for me by the simple and hospitable process of moving her own belongings from it. To my own astonishment, I soon fell asleep and forgot for the time to think upon what the destruction of the house would mean to our family, already too poor for comfort. If I thought of anything, as the drowsiness of sleep began to overtake me, it was of little Jerry, asleep in the Mayburys' across the street, and of Dirk. I remember that I told myself it was quite impossible now to refuse to marry Dirk, if he continued to want to marry me. The old objection that he was some years distant from the ability to support a wife would, it seemed to my slumberous and grateful mind, have to give way to the fact that he had saved my young sister's life.

Our house had stood for many generations on the main street of Salesport, decorously distant from the region that we were accustomed to call, somewhat too grandiloquently, “the business section.” The fact that we owned it had robbed poverty of much of its oppression. We used to say, mother and I, that when father's practice reached the absolutely vanishing point toward which it had long been tending, we could let rooms; though I am sure I do not know to whom we expected to let them, Salesport being a town of notoriously home-owning proclivities. We used also to assure ourselves, on the days when the income seemed smallest, that “if the worst came to the worst,” we could raise enough vegetables in the gardens back of the house to sustain life; and with a roof over our heads, sufficient nourishment for our stomachs, and plenty of love in our hearts, what more could we ask?

Such was the simple creed in which mother had raised me. I used sometimes to think that I would not find it impossible to ask more if I gave rein to my imagination—new rugs for the living room, for example; a complete set of china, matched, uncracked, unnicked; a few new dresses that did not have their origin in our Philadelphia cousin's cast-off clothing. I thought I should like travel, study, luxurious hotels, theaters, strange people—— Oh, by allowing my fancy to range, I could think of numerous things that I could be taught to ask beyond a roof, moderately waterproof, above my head, food for my body, and the domestic affections for my spiritual nourishment!

Sometimes, when I voiced these heresies to mother, she would sigh, and sometimes she would smile. And very often she would answer: “Well, perhaps John will make a great fortune for us, or Jerry's fingers will play us all into affluence.”

1 had more faith in Geraldine's fingers than I had in John's practice. John was entirely the son of his father and mother—an impractical person with high ideals rather than material ambitions, a youth who accepted the theory that a roof, a due amount of food, labor, and love, constituted all that a man could justly demand in the world. Jerry, flashing her brilliant, pliant, wonderful young fingers up and down the scales, had not yet reached an age when a definite philosophy of life could be demanded of her. But in so far as her instinctive acts forecast her later philosophy, I felt considerably greater hope of her than of John.

However, whatever the future, the present seemed dark enough on the April morning when I looked across the lawn dividing the Tyson place from ours, and marked the charred remnants of our home.

Illustration: “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” I shrieked again. “Oh, will nobody do anything? Will nobody—— Oh, let me go, let me go!”

“It's awful, isn't it, Amy?” sighed Mrs. Tyson, coming to the window beside me, and viewing the desolation. “I do hope your pa has kept the insurance up. When Mr. Tyson died——” And she rambled off into a familiar tale of her late husband's neglect to pay his life-insurance premium, and of the disastrous effect of his thoughtlessness upon his heirs.

I didn't listen, because I knew the story by heart, and also because of the sudden constriction of fear in my throat. It would be so exactly like father to have neglected the insurance! Indeed, from the moment when the possibility was suggested to me, I was sure beyond doubt that he had neglected it, and that the charred timbers upon which I was looking represented a total loss.

Jerry came out of the Mayburys' as I stood staring at the ruins and savoring, in anticipation, the taste of a coming poverty worse than any I had known. Her bright head shone in the April sunlight—Jerry's hair is of that particularly glorious red that makes all other colors, even gold, seem dead and dull. She was then a long-legged, thin sixteen, but there was the promise of coming grace in her adolescent angularity. She wore a leaf-green dress that I recognized as one of the youngest Maybury girl's. It was becoming to Jerry, and I thought, with proprietary pride, that the child always managed to look well. She came into the Tysons' hall and called me; her voice in speaking was lovely—round, rich, thrilling, with cadences and trills most musical.

When I came out of the dining room to meet her, her eyes were shining with excitement.

“Oh, Amy!” she cried ecstatically. “Isn't it heavenly? Just think of being rid of that old ark! Now we can build a comfortable modern house, can't we?”

“With what?” I demanded, Mrs. Tyson's gloomy suggestion in mind.

“Why, with the insurance. The Mayburys were talking of it at breakfast. Their house only cost eight thousand dollars, and it's ten times more comfortable than ours. Why, Amy!” She turned upon me sharply. “Why do you look like that? You don't think—— Oh, it isn't possible that father could have been so careless?” She had read the meaning of my expression.

“Of course, we can't tell until he comes down,” I replied. “But—well, there's no use denying it would be just the sort of thing to happen in our family.”

“Just like our family! You mean it would be just like father!” retorted Geraldine with an asperity unbecoming her years. “It wouldn't be like me—I have too much sense for such a stupid piece of business! And it wouldn't be like you, A; you have too much conscience. But father!” She shrugged her thin young shoulders beneath her borrowed frock and dismissed the subject.

“The furniture insurance has been kept up, anyway,” she informed me after a second's sullen pause. “Mother did that—I hounded her into it after the Deweys' house went. I couldn't bear to think of the piano being gone. I shall be glad to get a new one,” she added placidly. “That was always a tin-pan sort of thing. I don't suppose Cousin Judith would have sent it otherwise.”

“But if everything has gone to smash,” I said, trying to prepare her mind for disagreeable possibilities, “they may not be able to replace your piano right away.”

She turned her head toward me and looked her unmitigated astonishment. “But, A,” she informed me, “the piano represents my career—I've got to have a piano! Besides”—her eyes darkened ominously—“the piano is mine. Cousin Judith gave it to me!”

And then we saw our parents walking rapidly up the street, and we ran through the hall and out on to the sidewalk to greet them. Mother caught us both tightly to her bosom. Father patted our shoulders tremulously, after he had looked for signs of injury on our faces.

“My darlings, safe!” cried mother.

“How did it start?” asked father.

“Have you kept the insurance up?” demanded Geraldine.

It was Geraldine who received the first reply. Mother and father turned blanching faces upon each other. The poor, impractical babes in the wood had not put the question to each other before!

“Mary, did you—— Why, when was it due?” cried father resentfully, boisterously, as if by an angry noise he could alter the disagreeable fact and make it flee, acknowledging itself falsehood.

“In February,” faltered mother. “Why, John, don't you remember? You were going to take the Lyons' bill for that and your life-insurance premium.”

Father drooped his gray head. Mother's large, anxious eyes turned loyally from the sight of his self-reproachful misery, but Geraldine's sharp, accusing regard never wavered.

“Well, thank Heaven you managed the furniture insurance yourself, mother!” she said at last, with something hard and contemptuous on her fresh lips. “If only you had managed the whole thing!”

Mother rebuked her; mother never let us forget what was due to our father. But he, more just, said: “Don't scold the child, Mary. She's quite right. I—— Oh, it's unbelievable, it's preposterous, that a man could neglect such a thing!”

“It don't think so,” cried mother warmly. “Why, the house has stood for two hundred years without catching fire—why on earth should you expect it to catch now? In this way? Unexpectedly, out of the clear sky?” Mother spoke with indignation, as if the conflagration had shown very bad and unusual manners in not sending out announcements of its intentions two weeks in advance. And then she added her familiar consolation: “Anyway, we're all together. We've got one another.”

“And there's that little cottage down on Water Street,” said father, cheerful immediately under her soothing. “We can go into that for the present. Those Czernas haven't paid any rent for three months, anyway, and I have given them notice to quit.”

“Go into the Water Street cottage?” cried Jerry, shrill for once in her life, and italizing all her words. “Into the cottage you rented to those immigrants?” Stern accusation blazed from her brown eyes.

Father and mother both seemed to apologize for the necessity. And, somehow, though investigation revealed the fact that it was Geraldine's candle, set unguarded upon a shelf in the bathroom where the curtains might reach it, that had conspired with a change in the wind to set our home afire, the whole family was in the attitude of apologizing to her for the unpleasant privations that she would be forced to undergo as a result of our temporary homelessness. The house, she told us firmly, should have been wired for electricity long ago.

It was, I suppose, characteristic of the general improvidence and impracticality of the family, that my parents should rejoice, a week later, when Dirkman Kidder and I walked into the Tysons' and announced that we were engaged to be married. Dirk had proposed to me that afternoon down at the cove. There are times still, when the wind is from the east, and brings with it briny odors of waves and wet sand and driftwood rotting to its salty death, that I can relive the whole foolish, young scene—Dirk with his singed eyebrows and his burned forelock, I with my toil-grimed hands.

He had come to the Water Street cottage, which I was trying to restore to the Salesport standard of cleanliness before we should move in, and had commanded me, with all the lordliness of twenty-three, to give up work and to come walk with him. I was glad enough to obey. The Czerna tribe had left the cottage in an indescribable condition, and I was immersed in such homely labors as kalsomining, painting, and scrubbing. I washed my face in the iron sink behind the kitchen door, called to the plumbers who were installing a bathroom on the floor above—the sole recognition of any social differences between the Czernas and the Alcotts—put on my hat, and went to walk with Dirk.

The sky was lightly overcast with gray; a moist wind blew in from the sea beyond the line of the islands that fringe the Salesport harbor and shut it in from the great breakers. I can close my eyes now and see the whole scene again—the shingled sand of the beach rolling back to the craggy granite, the rocks pricked with the green of hardy, stunted trees, and behind them the softer, more shimmering color of the early leaves in the woods that, on our favored coast, come down to meet the sea with only the little wall of rough-toothed rocks between. Ever since we were children and had first gone wading and fishing and botanizing together, Dirk and I had known this particular indentation of the shore, where an arm of the bay crept far inland, between the sands and the scrub-grown rocks, and lost itself in a sluggish tide creek in the meadows back of Salesport.

When we had walked to the cove on this particular April afternoon, we sat silent for a while. I was resting mind and body. My muscles were relaxed after the unaccustomed labors of the day; my thoughts gave up for the time the harassing discussion of what the Alcott family was going to do. I ceased to ask myself if there was no way in which the threatened withdrawal of John, now a junior, from Johns Hopkins could be averted. I ceased to ask myself how Geraldine's piano lessons were to be continued. I loafed, basking in the soft air, and basking, too, in the sense of Dirk's admiration and affection.

“Well, A,” he said, after a while—he had called me “A” since our school days, when all my exercises were signed with that noncommittal initial—“well, A, when do you think you'll marry me?”

It was not an unprecedented query. Dirk had begun telling me that he was in love with me when he had come home from Princeton two years before. The statement had never made any difference in the affectionate intimacy in which we passed the periods between his declarations—Dirk was not addicted to the more disconcerting manifestations of ardor. In fact, he had always made his assertion as to his own feelings, and asked for an expression of mine, with a calm, matter-of-fact, take-it-for-granted air of finality that robbed the situation of seriousness Sometimes, when I was moved to laughter at his preposterous attitude, he grew for a moment serious, and there were intimations of passionate possibilities in his blue eyes.

But to-day, when he asked the absurd question, instead of laughing, I felt an inclination to tears. For the first time in my twenty-two years I wanted to be married—Heaven forgive me if the desire was rather for a refuge than for a mate! But I was so worn with the struggle to live—genteelly, as beseemed the Alcotts—on next-to-nothing a year! I was so tired of the indolent, slipshod methods of my father, who had allowed an originally good practice to drift from him! I was even tired of the beautiful idealism of my mother with her “since-we-have-one-another, what does bread and meat matter?” philosophy.

It would be an exquisite relief to drop the burden of thought for my household, and to watch some strong, competent person pick it up—for my sake! It would be the balm of perfect peace to know that never again would I be obliged to consider how John could struggle through the medical school, or how Geraldine could be well trained, or father's bills collected, or mother's wardrobe renewed. But Dirk was no richer than I, and he was very little older. The woman who married him must take his making on her shoulders along with whatever load she already bore. I knew that well enough—and yet—and yet—it was very sweet, druggingly, languorously sweet—to feel love infolding one!

“When do you expect to be able to support a wife?” I replied crudely, mercenarily, but impersonally, to Dirk's question, when I had shaken off the moment's yearning for a cessation of worry in his arms. He looked up at me quickly, sharply, from a stick he was whittling. His blue eyes darkened, glowed.

“Amy!” he cried. “Amy, do you mean——”

“I don't mean anything,” I told him hastily, a little frightened by the atmosphere my words had evoked about us, as the magicians waving hands evoke a thunderous darkness in the theaters. “Except to call your attention to the fact that you aren't really playing fair in asking a woman to marry you.”

“I'll be admitted to the bar next fall,” he protested; he was reading law, in somewhat desultory fashion, I thought, in his uncle's Boston office.

“You've told me a dozen times that you had no bent at all toward the law,” I reminded him.

“That's true enough. But I don't find that I have a very strong bent toward any form of labor yet. But all that I need, A, to make me a hard-working, prosperous citizen, is to have you care for me. I could work as hard as the next fellow if I had anything—any one—to work for! Ah, Amy—you do care a little, don't you?”

His voice was wheedling, caressing, irresistible. He had come close to my side, and a strange weakness shook me; he caught my hand, and I could feel the throbbing of his pulses, and my own began to beat crazily in unison with his.

“Oh, Dirk, let me go!” I whispered, struggling to withdraw my hand. But he held it fast.

“I'll never let you go!” he answered, low-toned, passionate, compelling, a man—or so it seemed to me—and no longer the boy who had been my playmate for so many years. Well—I was strangely content to have it so. My head sank back upon his shoulder. He kissed me, and it seemed to me that the gates of paradise swung open before us.

By and by, when we came back to earth again, we talked—practically, I think we called it! We planned how Dirk was to work hard, was to read diligently, was to be admitted to practice at the earliest possible moment, was to command such a good position in his uncle's office that at the end of a year and a half we could be married. He told me how little we could live upon, and I told him that we could live on even less than that little. And then, through the late afternoon, which persisted softly gray and was shot with no sunset gleams, we went back to the Tysons', where father and mother were quartered until the Water Street cottage should be made habitable, and we told our news.

As I said, it was characteristic of our hopelessly impractical way of looking at things that both my parents were as happy as if I had come telling some tale of worldly triumph. They both liked Dirk—as much, I think, because they had known his forbears as for his own lazy, honest, lovable sake. And mother said that she thought the happiest marriages were those for which the young people had had to work and wait; and she prattled very sweetly about the beauty of the engaged period of a girl's life. And father opined that we would be as happy as he and mother had been, and he was sure that there could be no better happiness than that. And then he went back to his game of solitaire, which our tidings had interrupted.

Jerry, strolling in from the Mayburys', in whose hospitable house she was domiciled, and looking very nearly pretty in a brown wool frock made over for her from one of the youngest Maybury girl's, heard the news with less enthusiasm than my parents. She opened her fresh young lips upon some startled exclamation, changed it into a whistle, came and sat on the arm of my chair, kissed me under the ear, and told us merrily that she resented the affair.

“You know I can't get along without A, Dirk,” she informed my lover.

“Don't blame you,” answered Dirk. “Feel that way about her myself. However—I'll let you share her—a little!”

“And besides,” she continued, looking with merry impertinence at him, “I had half intended to marry you myself.”

I laughed at the thought of the long-legged little girl's intending anything in a matrimonial line; mother rebuked her, with a blush for her flippancy; and Dirk reddened. He was only a boy, and he seemed singularly boyish under her gay attack.

“However, I suppose it's all right if you're going to be in the family,” pursued Miss Geraldine. She shot a long, unformed, girlish arm out at him. “I'm glad!” she concluded seriously, as he took her hand and shook it.

And then she relieved the strain of too long a stretch of sentiment by inquiring how soon the cottage would be in readiness for father's shingle on its front door and her new piano in the front room. I gave the information a little heavily—I kept wishing that the five hundred dollars that was to be spent out of the scant furniture insurance might have gone to John in Baltimore. Poor John! He had accepted the disagreeable situation gallantly enough. I forget now what various and uncongenial tasks he found to do in order that he might not be obliged to give up his studies. But I remember what Jerry said when I bemoaned his necessities somewhat.

Illustration: Some of our poor foreign neighbors, lolling on their fences, smiled their understanding, swarthy smiles, and shrugged their shoulders over the dullness of the young in America.

“Of course, it's disagreeable for John,” she said. She was perched on the edge of her bed in the tiny room under the eaves of the cottage. The bed had been a contribution from one of father's few remaining patients of means—a lady who was discarding brass and iron in favor of mahogany four-posters at the dictation of a new æsthetic sense; I had enameled the white frame, and had made the bright chintz cover for it myself, and it looked very fresh and pretty in the room whose uneven walls I had kalsomined a misty bluish-gray. “But, after all, A, medicine is a profession—it isn't a gift. It can be pursued under difficulties—especially by a man. Now music”—she looked dreamily out through the little dormer window upon the leaves of an apple tree burgeoning in the yard—“music is different.”

Downstairs I heard Dirk's whistle. He had entered the house with easy informality. I answered the signal.

“Come on for a walk, A,” he called to me.

“Wait half an hour, and I will,” I replied. “I've got the dishes to do.”

“Come now, please. I have something to tell you.”

“Won't it be true at the end of half an hour?” I demanded as I ran down to the kitchen, catching a long apron from a hook in my own cubby-hole, as I ran.

“Maybe not!” he retorted. “Man is a faithless animal, and it may be that I shall not love you in half an hour.” He stood at the foot of the stairs and caught me and kissed me as I ran down.

“Was that all you had to tell?” I scoffed.

“No—there's something else. But that's the most important. Come on. Take off that pinafore, or whatever you call it, put on your hat, and come.”

I protested that I could do nothing of the sort. I had to do the dinner dishes. In Salesport we dined plebeianly in the middle of the day and supped at night—or at any rate we did on Water Street.

“Why can't Jerry do the dishes?” he grumbled.

I laughed. “You dare to suggest dishes to an up-and-coming young pianist!” I advised him. “Why, stupid, don't you know that a 'performer' must consider her hands almost beyond everything else on the footstool? Have you never read of Paderewski's care of his hands? Why, I think each finger is specially and separately insured!”

“Well, Geraldine isn't quite in his class yet, is she? I must say, A, that I think it a terrible mistake for you and your mother to let the child impose upon you all so! She'll grow up a selfish, useless, little creature.”

“Nonsense!” I answered hurriedly, the more vehemently, perhaps, because he voiced an occasional dread of my own. “Nonsense! She'll be more useful than twenty dishwashers—and selfishness isn't a matter of occupation.”

I hurried past him to the kitchen and wrought diligently among the soapy, steaming pans, and the soiled dishes. In the division of labor that had followed upon the dismissal of the one servant we had allowed ourselves on Main Street, I had taken over the daily housework, and mother the sewing and mending. A woman came twice a week for the laundry work and the heavy cleaning. I trembled sometimes to think how shortly even that assistance might be taken from us. It was certain that new patients of the paying class had not begun to follow our removal into these quarters. Father had more time than ever to play his solitaire and read his French philosophers!

When I had thrown the last dish hastily into its pantry and had hung the dish towels on their rods, I washed my hands, doffed my gingham apron, and joined Dirk, moodily pacing the front hall. As usual, our walk was in the direction of the cove. The fresh beauty of the May day, the sense of his nearness and of our destined companionship, were pleasant to me. If it had been a weakness of the flesh rather than a desire of the heart that had flung me, one tired, enervated day, into Dirk's waiting arms, surely there was growing up within me a very satisfactory dependence upon him!

“Amy,” he began abruptly—and then I knew he had something serious to say to me, for “A” was my everyday name from him—“Amy, Uncle Clifton says I'll never make a lawyer.” He paused, and there went out of the spring day some of its beauty. “But,” he hurried on, watching my face, “he thinks that I'll make something else just as good—only provided you aren't averse to leaving Salesport.”

“Why should I be averse to leaving Salesport—some time?” I asked. “But what is it your Uncle Clif wants you to do?”

“He wants me to go out to Wyoming and look after his interests there. You know, he has a big ranch, and the water rights are threatened. He suspects his manager. He has had me digging into riparian and aquatic rights and all that sort of thing for the last six months. He wants me to go out, to study the situation, to make a detailed report to him in three months—and, if I like the prospect, and get along well, to remain as his representative. Could you stand it, darling?”

He was bending toward me, his young face eager and aflame. It was easy to see that the prospect called Dirk as nothing else in the line of a labor or a career had called him yet.

I looked at the Salesport street we were traversing, at its double row of elms, its white-painted, green-shuttered houses, with here and there a mellow old brick to give a note of color to the architectural effect. I smelled the salt air, marked the fresh, bright green of the lawns, the flame of the red in the recesses of the Japanese quince bushes, the sparkling drops of gold upon the forsythias, the spikes of hyacinth and daffodil in the borders below all the drawing-room and library windows. I knew them all by heart—I knew the rooms behind the noncommittal white paint and the noncommittal red brick. I knew the men and women, the boys and girls, who dwelt in the houses—the Alcotts had known them for generations!

But it was not merely a girl's loyalty to her lover that made me turn quickly to Dirk and say with eager lips: “Stand it? I should adore it!” For sometimes I, like him, had smothered in the little town, and to me also had come the call of wider, wilder reaches, the stirring of the spirit of adventure.

“Oh, you blessed!” he cried, making an ineffective grasp at my hand. “Oh, Amy, I feel I'm made! I've never known exactly what I wanted—except you—or why I have been so listless and lackadaisical in my undertakings here. But I know now. It's because I have been stifling here! It's a little town, a petty place! We've been here too long, we Kidders. Oh, I should have stayed, and I should have made a not half-bad lawyer, in spite of Uncle Clif, if you had said the word. But—you'll never regret it, darling!”

When we had come to the cove itself, he told me how soon he was to start, and across the splendid picture of the future that we had been drawing, there fell a sudden gray veil. He was leaving me before the end of the week, he was leaving me with my difficulties increasing, with all my domestic problems half solved. I should be alone—there would be no more care-dispelling walks, no more laughter and bantering, no more sweet, warm, palpitating love-making.

“Oh, Dirk!” I cried, suddenly dissolving into tears, “I can't bear it—I can't! It will be a year before you could be ready for me—I can't bear a year without you! And they'll never be able to let me go by the end of the year. I can't bear it!”

It was growing dusky in our sheltered nook. He drew me close to him, held me against his heart. His lips were on my hair, my cheeks, my neck. His voice was shaken and broken as I had never yet heard it.

“You do love me!” he kept saying. “You do love me, after all, do you not, you little Puritan? But Amy, Amy—you don't know, no woman can know—how I want you, how I need you! If only you could come with me now! If only I weren't such a poor, miserable creature that my own fare has to be advanced to me! What a wedding journey it would be, sweetheart! What a wedding journey it will be—in a year! In a year! Are you sure you will love me all the time I am away?”

“Sure, sure,” I murmured, beneath his kisses. I had never been so sure of my love as in this abandonment to the pain of losing him, this anticipation of lonely, colorless days ahead.

I don't remember all the wild things he said, all the wild things he prayed of me. I do remember that when his passion had spent itself, and when he was talking “quite reasonably,” as he said, and as I, poor child, believed, he begged me to meet him the next day in Boston, and to be secretly married to him. It would send him on his journey, he declared, fortified against all doubt, fortified almost against the grief of parting, dedicated to success. I remember that I finally promised to meet him in Boston, although I cried: “Remember, remember, Dirk—I don't promise anything more! Oh, I am not promising to do as you say—I am not promising!”

“I shan't ask it of you, A,” he told me solemnly, “if, when we meet to-morrow, it doesn't seem wise. I shan't ask you to do a single thing that does not appeal to your reason.”

We walked home in the evening—we had forgotten supper!—wide-eyed and excited at the burning possibility he had conjured up! Heaven knows why the idea had such attraction for us; I suppose it was because we were young and romantic. I forget now what advantages we found in the plan beside the one of “surety.” I think we had worked our youthful love up to that state of fire where the thought of being inviolably bound to each other was delicious, where it promised a sweet torture of possession that was yet no possession. By the time we reached the house I had quite made up my mind to accede to the plea of my lover. I felt very mature and settled as I told myself that I would marry him if he wished it. I wonder how many of the most egregious follies are committed under the delusion that they are especially sane and reasonable methods of procedure.

As a matter of fact, I did not marry Dirk the next day. I did not even go to Boston to meet him. When we came home from our walk to the cove, he left me at the door of the cottage—he could not bear to go in and talk commonplaces, he said, when all the universe outside was chanting one great bridal hymn. So he left me, with a burning look and a conventional lifting of the hat as I vanished into the tiny entry—whereat some of our poor, foreign neighbors, lolling on their fences, smiled their understanding, swarthy smiles, and doubtless shrugged their shoulders in the darkness over the dullness of the young in America.

Inside the house there was the odor of iodoform. There were bright lights and a curious silence. I called quickly: “Mother!” A nurse appeared at the landing at the top of the stairs. She glided swiftly down; her face was very grave.

“We have been sending everywhere for you, Miss Alcott,” she murmured. “Your mother has had an accident—it is a serious one. You will have to be very brave, for your father is quite unstrung——”

“What is it?” I interrupted her. “When did it happen?”

“This afternoon about four o'clock. She was passing the new building on Main Street near the corner of Essex, and a girder that was being drawn up fell. It seems that there were shouts to warn her, but they only confused her. She—— While there is life, of course, there is——”

“Oh, don't!” I cried impatiently. “Is she conscious?”

“Yes. But you must control yourself if you are allowed in her room. Doctor Alcott—is very much shaken.”

“My sister? Where is she? My brother? Has he been notified?”

“Mrs. Maybury came and took Geraldine away when it was decided that she could be of no use here. And your father has sent for your brother.”

Then I went up the narrow, inconvenient, little stairs, thinking with suddenly clarified mind that this, this, was the meaning of life—ache, torture of body and spirit, loneliness, fear—and not that exquisite dream of bliss that we had dreamed down there in the cove as we had sat, cheek to cheek, listening to the gentle wash of the waves and watching the first flicker of the stars.

Her eyes were closed beneath her bandaged forehead; her uninjured hand lay upon the coverlid, indescribably white and spiritlike. On the bureau behind her, so arranged that the light could not disturb her, was set a lamp—the Water Street houses had no gas. My heart swelled within me to bursting as I saw her lying there, and saw, in one flash, the life she had lived of love and self-sacrifice that she had not known for sacrifice, so informed had it been by sheer devotion. I saw the mean little room where it was all to end—that life, half a child's fairy make-believe, half the saint's clear knowledge of the eternal verities.

As I knelt noiselessly beside the bed, she stirred and opened those large, exquisite eyes of her. They brightened a very little at sight of me. It seemed to me that I could feel a faint return of the pressure I laid upon her hand.

“Amy—darling,” she fluttered. “Amy!” Then her eyes closed again. By and by she opened them, and the poor, scarred face twitched into a smile.

“Dirk—so glad,” she murmured. “Best—in life—good man's—good man's——” She struggled to finish.

“A good man's love?” I supplied the words. It was always easy to supply the words for my poor mother's sentimentalities—they were always the time-honored ones. She nodded faintly to express that I had comprehended her.

“Jerry?” she whispered next, this with a sort of anguish in her manner. The nurse applied something to her lips, and she seemed soothed.

“Jerry—baby,” she whispered, her imploring eyes on me.

“I understand, dearest,” I told her. “Jerry is your baby, and I will take care of her always, always!”

“Always, my good, dear Amy!” she said in a voice almost full and rounded. Then she pressed my fingers again, smiled that poor, distorted, brave smile, and whispered: “Dirk and Amy—always happy.” Then she seemed to doze, and when she woke, she whispered: “John—my poor boy, my poor boy!” I bent over her again.

“Listen, mother darling,” I told her, speaking distinctly to her dulling ear. “I shall try to be everything to him, too. You must not worry, my poor darling mother. I will take care of father.”

Her eyes closed and she looked more peaceful. And by and by my father came in, and we sat together through the hours until she drifted out on the first, faint morning breeze that stirred the curtains at her window.

I looked across at my father, haggard, gray in that first light of the dawn, a broken figure, huddled in his chair, his finely featured, weak face curiously twisted. How my mother had cared for him, had adored him! What a glory had gilded the way they had walked together, obscure and rough as it had been! How she had loved him, the dreamy, the inefficient; and how she had never ceased to see in him the man he had been, perhaps, meant to be! There had been, I realized, no such miracle of love in the feeling that had made me cling happily to Dirk. Last night? A thousand years ago! But perhaps my mother's love was the growth and gift of time, of the years spent together. Perhaps, some day, I, too, should feel that same strange mingling of protecting love and worship and joyful surrender which had made her life so beautiful to her.

Then I sighed. So much remained for me to do before I could begin to live with Dirk! I realized that mother's death had left me to be the uniting principle of the family. It had not needed the sacred promises given her to ease her night of pain to bind me to that service. That was fated from the moment she was smitten! My own affairs must wait. I touched father on the arm and led him from the room. And then I sent for Geraldine to come home.

Not long ago I found among my old papers a note that came to me when the day in Salesport was well awake, when Geraldine had come home, sobbing and distraught, and had been put to bed with a bromide, when my father had gone to sleep under the same beneficent influence. The postman, subduing his whistle at the unexpected sight of flowers and the crape upon our doorbell, had slid it noiselessly under the hall door. There I found it along with an advertisement of some new medical preparation for father, and the bill for some of the new bedding. It was from Dirk, and had been mailed at midnight the night before at a little town halfway to Boston. He wrote:

All night I have been walking, Amy my own; out under the stars that sang together when you promised to meet me to-morrow, out beside the sea whose great tides swelled joyfully at the sound of your words. I could not bear the walls of a house to-night, I could not bear to hear any words but yours, which I keep saying over and over to myself. And if, when you come to me with your dear face shining with goodness, with tenderness, with love for me—for me, the unworthy!—if when you come and give yourself forever to me, to hold against my heart in all the months we are to be separated—ah, Amy, let us not be separated! Let us not lose this divine rapture! Suppose that to-morrow we should go hand in hand to Uncle Clif, and tell him that we were married, and that we must go together or stay together—do you know what I think Uncle Clif would say? I think he would say: “You have some sense, after all, Dirkman. You have done a fine thing, and Amy shall go with you.” Can't you hear him saying it, sweetheart? And even if he doesn't say it, even if we do not tell him the truth, even though we are separated, what joy it will be to know that we belong to each other, solemnly, sacredly, irrevocably! Oh, Amy, you will—you will—you must! It is that that the stars and the waves have been telling me all night.

Strange that the words he had written with all the selfish sincerity of young passion and desire stirred no feeling in me but one of dull pity! Poor boy, poor boy! That was all my response as I slipped the little missive back into its envelope and laid it away.

Dirk stayed over for my mother's funeral, and then left me with the half-frightened air of finding me, who had known sorrow, another person than the girl he had kissed so ardently the other evening on the beach. Well, he was right. The endless ages had marked me with their sign.

Chapter II.

It was Mrs. Fenwick-Hall who discovered that Geraldine had a voice. Mrs. Fenwick-Hall was a very great lady indeed, and her summer place, a few miles out of Salesport on Stormy Point, was a sort of castle, crag-enthroned, wood-surrounded, its feet washed by the sea. Mrs. Fenwick-Hall was always “discovering” people. She had passed the age when the gratification of her more personal desires had power to please her, and she had taken to being a patron of the arts and of such artists as cared for patronage. It is, I judge, an employment that compensates for many excitements of which the flight of time robs women.

The way in which she discovered Jerry was much to her liking—it was picturesque, advertisable. An accident had befallen her motor car within the limits of old Salesport, and she, wearying of the monotony of sitting still to be stared at, and declining with unmistakable firmness the proffered hospitality of such of Salesport's first circles as thought themselves entitled to offer it, had walked down to the beach.

She walked like a duchess, Geraldine declared—like a somewhat elderly duchess, to be sure—slowly, with dignity, and a jeweled cane. To my mind she always seemed much more like the malevolent fairy who spoils the career of the princess to whose christening she is not invited. However, that was a matter of individual opinion. Enough to say that on this particular day she was walking majestically along the beach at Salesport, when the tide was out and the shallows and pools and wet sands were glistening in the reflected light of the sunset behind the town, and that as she walked, a voice of piercing beauty and sweetness rang out in an anthem from behind a concealing rock.

Mrs. Fenwick-Hall stopped, looked, and listened, as the railroads so often advise one to do. She saw nothing, but she heard a volume of glorious sound soaring aloft on the summer air. She marched in the direction from which the sound came and as she described it in the next interview that she gave the Sunday papers—she gave them about twenty a year!—she saw there a young peri.

Jerry had unbound her hair—why I don't know, except that she had an inborn love of the spectacular—had removed her shoes and stockings that she might wade among the pools of sea water, and was standing in her improvised studio and dressing room between two rocks, pouring out her soul in the strains of an anthem that she had sung in church on Sunday. She must have made a striking picture—her glorious mop of hair shining, rippling down her black dress, her pretty, white, bare legs gleaming below it, the sea and the sunset her background. Jerry was beginning to outgrow the scrawniness of early girlhood, and her slenderness was becoming a matter of gentle, gracious curves.

It seems that Mrs. Fenwick-Hall, having surveyed the vision through her gold-mounted lorgnette, demanded, not who Geraldine was, but who her singing teacher was. Geraldine, blushing uncomfortably because of her legs and her hair, mumbled that she had no singing teacher—only a piano teacher; and that he was Casanova, of Boston. Whereupon, Mrs. Fenwick-Hall expressed devout thanks that her voice had not been ruined by bad methods, and asked her name.

“I shall call on your parents,” stated Mrs. Fenwick-Hall firmly. “It is a crime, no less, that such a voice as yours should not be trained. Do they realize how few pure contraltos there are in the world? Do they—— The piano! Ridiculous! It is your voice that is the marvelous thing about you. Where do you live?”

Geraldine said, in relating the incident, that at first she felt ashamed to tell this magnificent, but unknown, stranger that we lived on Water Street. Then she bethought herself of the truth often preached by our mother, that it was no matter where an Alcott lived, since nothing could lower him; and she bethought herself further that, if she had such a voice as the lady declared, she had that which made her greater than any hobbling duchess, however majestic. So she mentioned Water Street with proper nonchalance, and in reply to the great lady's announcement that she wished to descend upon Water Street immediately, she smilingly asked the great lady's name. It seemed that the lorgnette came into play at this piece of youthful self-assertion, but as Jerry refused to wither beneath it, and stood smiling and serene, Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's grim face relaxed.

“You'll do!” she informed the child with a sort of amusement in her voice, and she told who she was. And Geraldine accepted the information calmly, untroubled by greatness, although, like all the world of Salesport, she knew the position that Mrs. Fenwick-Hall occupied in the world that amuses itself. She led the way to the cottage, where I was at working canning peas in the kitchen. The same grateful and faithful patient who had given us of her store of discarded beds had now sent me produce from her great, overgrown garden.

I was just at that ticklish moment in the canning process where the covers must be snapped down tight against the intrusion of any air. I told Jerry somewhat crossly that I could not leave the kitchen; if her new-found friend was in such a hurry, she would have to come and see me there. Father was off fishing with some of his friends of leisurely habits and tastes like his own.

No one could be more gracious than Mrs. Fenwick-Hall when she chose. She chose, that day, to be gracious to me. There was frankness, equality, amiability in her handclasp; there was sisterly fellow feeling in her laughing: “How this takes me back to my own young housewife days! There isn't a more fascinating occupation in the world, I think. I have often been sorry that my servants nowadays have all the fun of my houses, and I only the gloomy responsibility of them. However, I came to talk to you and your father about this child's voice. Do you know it is a marvelous one?”

Geraldine was looking at me with eyes on fire with hope and expectation. I kept on snapping down my air-tight covers.

“I know her voice is very sweet,” I admitted grudgingly. I felt so sure that some new trial awaited me that I could not be cordial about it.

“Very sweet!” cried Mrs. Fenwick-Hall in derision. “My dear young lady, you talk as if she were a member of the village choir——”

“She is—of the Young People's Choir,” I interrupted.

“Well, she ought not to be! She ought to be under competent instruction. She ought not to be allowed to strain and ruin her voice. Why, my dear Miss Alcott, it's a voice for the Metropolitan, for Covent Garden——”

Again I interrupted her. I had snapped down the last cover and could give all my attention to the question before us.

“But, Mrs. Fenwick-Hall,” I said—it was easier to stab the great hope that had been born in Geraldine's heart through speech with another than directly—“but Mrs. Fenwick-Hall, we are very poor. We have all known that my sister had musical ability, and she has had careful training in the piano. Even if she had such a voice as you say she has, we could not possibly afford to have it cultivated. Indeed, it is with difficulty that we meet the trifling expenses connected with her piano training—Signor Casanova is most kind, and in view of what he considers her great talent, takes her at a nominal charge. But even so—well, we shall be very glad when she can take pupils on her own account.”

Illustration: Mrs. Fenwick-Hall, having surveyed the vision through her gold-mounted lorgnette, demanded, not who Geraldine was, but who her singing teacher was.

I spoke firmly. Sometimes, lately, Geraldine had seemed to forget that she must soon take her place in the ranks of the workers, and seemed to think more of public appearances, of recitals, and the like than of the plain drudgery that was before her.

Mrs. Fenwick-Hall rose from the chair where she was sitting, swept some papers off one nearer me, and sat down in it.

“But all this,” she cried, “is sacrilege! Your sister has a gift—a genius! It does not belong to her, but to the world. It is not for you to say what shall be done with it—it belongs to the world! I am sure that I am not mistaken—I am sure she has a voice of the most splendid promise, a voice that should be an honor to her country, a joy to all mankind! I——” She hesitated and blushed through her make-up; then she went on: “It is a privilege to aid genius. It is, I think, the greatest privilege which wealth has. I don't see much sense in trying to relieve poverty and to reform crime; there's too much of them, and the task is hopeless. But genius is rare! Wealth may reach the few cases of it that exist. If—if, upon having some real authorities hear your sister's voice, my judgment is upheld in regard to it—it would be the greatest of privileges——” She broke off. I don't know whether she saw the blank repugnance in my face or whether she felt that she had reached the graceful point at which to pause.

“I—— It is quite impossible, Mrs. Fenwick-Hall,” I said; “although you are very kind to suggest it. I——”

“Surely you would not allow a little, petty disinclination to 'be under an obligation,' I think the phrase is”—scornfully—“to stand between your sister and a great career?”

“I am not my sister's guardian,” I replied. “But—if you will not think me rude and unappreciative, I should allow that petty disinclination to stand between my sister and the acceptance of great—very great—favors from strangers.”

She arose then. She shook her head—an age-defying head, crowned with a mahogany-red wig and enameled to hide the wrinkles—gently at me. She smiled.

“Proud as Lucifer—of course! Dear Miss Alcott, I might have known one of your name would be! But as for myself—I come of common stock, as all my enemies delight to remind me from time to time. I had my early schooling—none too much, either—free, the gift of the State. I took all the favors offered me by strangers and friends alike. I am not going to pretend to share, though I admire, your quixotism. But I am going to remind you that while you have the right to be quixotic for yourself, you have not the right to be quixotic for your sister. I am coming in some day soon to talk with your father. When is the best time to find him?”

I told her what father's office hours were, and added that he was withdrawing more and more from practice, and that she could probably find him any time she cared to telephone for an appointment. And then Jerry ran to the head of the street to learn if the Fenwick-Hall car was mended, and Mrs. Fenwick-Hall trailed her crêpe de chine and chiffon out of the Water Street shanty, and went on to the palace that she had made for herself at the point.

“Oh, A, A, A!” cried Geraldine when she was gone. “Isn't it too wonderful? Oh, A, A, A! Suppose it should be true! Oh, my darlingest Amy, you should never put up another can of anything in your life! We should live in the most beautiful rooms, full of silvery brocade hangings and baskets of orchids. And all the most interesting people in the world should come to see us, and emperors should send me emeralds in recognition of my great gifts, and we should——”

“You are forgetting, Jerry, in your raptures,” I interrupted her crassly, “that I haven't the least yearning for silver brocade and orchids and emeralds, but that I want a shack on the edge of the Western prairie. With Dirk,” I added determinedly. Every now and then I was obliged to insist upon my own plans for my own existence—they seemed so relegated to a remote—an indefinite—future in the minds of the rest of the household.

“Oh, as for you and Dirk,” exclaimed Geraldine largely, “I shall be so rich that you can both be on my staff at perfectly regardless salaries! We'll never be separated. He—he might be my press agent,” she added contemplatively.

I laughed long and loud at this, and the air was cleared. Geraldine herself grinned sheepishly.

“But, oh, Amy, if I have such a voice!” she ended.

Well, I was overruled in the discussion that ensued when father came in from his fishing. To tell the truth, I advanced to the fray without sufficient faith in the righteousness of my own cause. What were the inalienable privileges of genius in the world? I did not know, but I felt a dim belief that they were greater and other than the privileges of the ungifted. Perhaps, if Geraldine had such a voice as Mrs. Fenwick-Hall declared—and surely Mrs. Fenwick-Hall, connoisseur of all the arts, hearer of all the operas, patroness of all the stars, ought to know a voice when she heard it!—perhaps, if Geraldine had such a voice, she ought to be spared the drudgery of teaching the piano, she ought to be allowed to devote herself to the cultivation of the greater gift. Perhaps I, with Dirk's enthusiastic letters from Wyoming under my pillow at night, against my heart by day, was selfish, selfish to the core! When the deadening effects of my shock and grief at mother's loss had begun to pass, I had begun to feel again the yearnings I had felt that wonderful evening when I had been almost ready to give myself wholly to my lover.

When father, with his finest air of conferring a favor—it was pretty and amusing to see how Mrs. Fenwick-Hall deferred to the grand seigneur in father, and with what effect she pronounced the words, “Doctor Alcott,” as if she were saying, “your highness”—said that he would permit Geraldine to go with her new friend to New York, there to have a great master of singing hear her voice, I began, desperately, bitterly, to hope that the master would find her voice no such marvel, after all! For they were talking now of three years here, of two years there. They were assuming, in every word, that I had no more sacred duties or desires than to stand guard over my sister while her gift was developing.

And I myself did not see how it would be possible for the motherless girl to drift about the world alone, “taking” here of this teacher, there of that, “finishing” with a third, being tried out before this director of a small German opera company, being passed rapidly on to that Italian. Geraldine was nearly seventeen. I was only six years her senior, but my hair was not gloriously red, my eyes were not the wonderful brown that goes with red hair, my skin was not white as alabaster.

Moreover, I had none of what I began to suspect Geraldine of having—I had no “temperament.” Temperament, as I became aware of it, seemed to me a very dangerous quality for a young woman to carry about the world with her, especially if it were complicated by beauty. I felt that Geraldine would need to be much older than I then was before she could be trusted to manage herself anywhere outside the safe, family-guarded limits of Salesport.

And so, while the trial of her voice was in progress, I sat at home, hoping that she would prove to have some flaw in it fatal to public performing. But they—Mrs. Fenwick-Hall and Jerry—came home from New York, one day in September, triumphant. The great master of singing in that city had told the great lady that she had discovered one of the rare voices of all the ages.

Geraldine seemed touched with a sort of awe at the verdict. She looked at me out of large, starry eyes, and said nothing except, in a low tone: “He says I have a great voice, A.” And then, after I had summoned some false-sounding congratulations from within myself, she went on: “I am to give up Casanova except for once a week—a half hour. And I am to go every day to Boston to Mademoiselle Arnier—for practice as well as instruction. So many voices, they say, are ruined in the early days of practicing. Mrs. Fenwick-Hall is”—she blushed a little, but kept her gaze steadily on mine—“is providing for it all, the railroad fares and the lessons. She says that I am not to feel oppressed by any sense of obligation—that I may pay her, if I care to, when I have my first Metropolitan engagement, and that, anyway, it is more to her to have the renown of discovering me. A, she really has been lovely about it all,” she ended, interrupting her narrative of Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's remarks.

I tried not to cloud her happiness. And when she said to me, with the sudden quivering lips and tearful eyes of a little girl: “Oh, Amy, if only mother could know!” I put my arms about her and kissed her with an unreserved love. After all, Dirk was not ready for me yet. Perhaps, by the time he was, Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's munificence would have extended to the point of providing Jerry with suitable chaperonage as well as with suitable instruction.

For two years life went on in the old way. Father definitely retired from practice when an octogenarian uncle of his died and left him enough money to purchase a small annuity. Mrs. Fenwick-Hall was very generous with Geraldine. Not only did she keep her promise in regard to the lessons and the railroad fares, but she made the child presents of beautiful clothes, of occasional trips. In the summer she invited her a great deal to Stormy Point, and Geraldine used to come home from these expeditions with glowing cheeks and brightened, deepened eyes. Sometimes I suspected an incipient love affair, and I rather rejoiced in the prospect. But nothing of that sort befell her, though she had grown to be a beautiful girl with an air of distinction more rare than beauty itself.

She never sang, of course. Her first step, on the discovery that she had a voice, was, naturally, to resign from the Young People's Choir; and never since she had entered the long ranks of aspirants for the operatic stage had any one heard her sing except Mademoiselle Arnier. She studied, at Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's dictation, the modern languages. She went a good deal to the opera with people whom she met at Stormy Point. She lived, as she once informed me when I suggested that she should dust her room, “for her art.” And she also told me, on that occasion, that she would one day richly repay me for all the dusting I was doing now!

At the end of two years, Dirkman Kidder came home. He wrote me for what he was coming—to claim my promise to marry him. He wrote with enthusiasm of the country in which his lot was now cast, and with confidence of his prospects in it. He was not only manager of his uncle's extensive interests, but he had acquired interests of his own; he was grubstaking a prospector whose riches, when they were discovered, he would share; he had a substantial owner's share in a cattle ranch which the other partner managed. All was ready for our marriage.

I told Geraldine that he was coming home. She was in her room, a strangely exotic figure in the midst of its plain, clean simplicity and poverty; she was wearing as a negligee a gorgeous Chinese coat that Mrs. Fenwick-Hall had given her. She was engaged in polishing a rosy nail. Her hands, I noticed for the thousandth time, were lovely, with taper wrists and fingers, and soft, smooth, finely knit, white flesh. I gave a glance at my own, and tucked them out of sight behind the sleeves of my blouse. They were rough, scarred, unlovely hands. I felt sorry for Dirk, who would want to kiss them—until he suddenly saw them as they were, instead of as he had dreamed them.

I looked at myself with misgivings before Dirk came. The two years of hard work and of anxiety had not improved my appearance. I had begun to look old. It was not that my face was lined, my muscles drooping; it was only that I bore about me the unmistakable signs of harassing responsibility. It seemed to me, studying myself in the small mirror over my bureau—the only pier glass in the Water Street house was in Geraldine's room, where it grazed both ceiling and floor with its gilded frame—that in some dull, gray way there was recorded upon me every week's worry about the household bills, every balancing of corned beef against pot roast and of baked beans against both, every agitated question as to how much longer father and Jerry would endure this or that cheap article of food. It seemed to me that all my study of the worthy literature on “how to cook cheap cuts,” “inexpensive substitutes for dear meats,” “beating the high cost of living” was duly, indubitably, graven upon me.

My clothes lacked charm and lure—I hadn't thought of it until I began to view myself as Dirk would view me. In the old days, mother, with some native talent for effect, had managed to keep both Geraldine and me “looking nice” on next to nothing, and on Cousin Judith's hand-me-downs. But that talent had not been mine. I looked dowdy. I had a moment's intention of refusing to see him. He was suddenly a critical stranger; he was not the lover who had walked along the shore of the sounding sea, listening to the song the stars sang together and hearing in it only our nuptial hymn. I was afraid to see him.

Geraldine, glinting with laughter and dimples, a copper-and-blue-and-white vision in a delft linen and a big panama—gifts of her patron—came to the door of my room.

“I'm going out,” she announced. “I'm the most considerate sister you ever had! I am going out to be gone exactly two hours. It is now two o'clock, and Dirk's train gets in at two-fourteen, and the station cab will bear him to your side in four minutes. So I'm off. I've already driven your paternal relative out of the house. He was playing solitaire and yawning himself to death in the office”—we still called my father's den by the name of its more laborious days—“and he is now at the public library deep in the memoirs of some old French court busybody and scandalmonger. He has orders not to return until five. And Cousin Kate is to invite him and me to supper at six, so that you and Dirk may—oh, do something truly devilish, such as having dinner at the Mansion House!”

She laughed joyously, her eyes dancing, at the thought of that dingy substitute for the glittering hostelries of her brighter experience. “Hustle now,” she added, “and get into your pink dimity. You're too pale, and that will give you a little color. Why don't you rub my rabbit's foot across—— Oh, well, don't look like outraged virtue! Pinch your cheeks, at least! And I'll be back at four to tell Master Dirk exactly when he may hope to marry you!” She nodded and ran out of the room.

I moved to the closet to take down the pink dimity. But when I had opened the door, I suddenly didn't want to wear it. No; if I was pale, sallow, dull, and uninteresting looking, let Dirk see me so, and make the best or the worst of me! I shut the door with a bang, and sat down in my white cotton blouse and my cheap, faded khaki skirt to wait for him. My heart was beating uncomfortably, and my breath seemed acrobatic. It was a stranger who was coming. I had a dizzy sensation of thankfulness that it was not my husband! It might have been—and yet he would have been as great a stranger after the two years!

The cheap little bell jangled its rude notes through the house. I rose and took a last look in the mirror before I went downstairs. I was as white as a candle; I looked frightened. I jerked my shoulders back, I held my head high, and walked down the narrow stairs to the tiny box of an entry. I opened the door and looked up into the eyes of my lover. I think that he was eager for that first glimpse of me; perhaps it was merely the eagerness of curiosity. I think we uttered each other's names in the staccato voices customary on such occasions. And then he was in the little entry, the door closed behind him, his arms about me.

He was changed, though, from the boy who had gone away. He seemed bigger—he had grown broader. He was mature, experienced, a man to command life, not a boy to plead with it. He did not look ruthless—not in the least; but he seemed to have developed great possibilities of strength. He had become the sort of man of whom it might be said that he knew what he wanted, and he knew how to proceed to get it.

What he wanted now, when our greetings and our raptures and our reintroduction to each other had passed, was to know how soon I would marry him.

“It's a great world, and you'll love it!” he told me, with more of his old quality of enthusiasm than he had shown before. “I have loved it even without you—I shall be quite mad about it with you by my side. Now, how soon will you be ready to start back with me? I thought perhaps you'd like to do a month's honeymooning around in the East before you bury yourself in the wilds? Shall we be married in a month and go back in two?”

He looked at me squarely, resolutely. For the first time in my life I marked the strength of his chin, the determination of his jaw. I felt a cowardly panic.

“T—I——” I began weakly, twisting my fingers together, biting my lips. “Oh, Dirk, I can't—so soon!” I ended falteringly.

“So soon? But it's two years since you promised to marry me, and it's two months since I wrote you I was coming East to claim your promise.”

“Yes—and to see your Uncle Clif,” I reminded him. “And,” I added with sudden penetration, “I haven't a doubt you've already seen him!”

Dirk laughed. “Ah, now you look more like yourself,” he assured me, and he seemed pleased at the recrudescence of the Amy he had known. “It's true that I have seen Uncle Clif. I knew,” he went on, with something of the air of a practiced gallant, “that once I had seen you, I should want to waste no more time with Uncle Clif. So I got him off my chest, so to speak, last night. But come now, A, tell me whether it shall be this day fortnight, or this day month—or”—he leaned toward me with something of the old, boyish fire and charm—“or this day!”

A little wave of pleasure, of surrender, ran through me. He was emerging—the boy to whom I had pledged myself, the wooer who had almost won me once before. Then I thought of Geraldine and that lovely, golden, floating voice; of Geraldine, with, perhaps, two or three more years of study before her; of Geraldine, spectacularly pretty, woefully impractical, a child to be guarded, a genius to be nurtured, an Alcott to be properly chaperoned!

“Dirk,” I temporized, “I didn't object to waiting one year—two years—any length of time you might think necessary, did I?”

He sat back in his chair and regarded me shrewdly, measuringly.

“On the contrary,” he told me, “you seemed almost frigidly indifferent to the waiting.”

“No, it was not frigidity. It was not even timidity,” I told him, gathering courage as I plunged into the debate. “It was an acceptance of your necessities. Will you accept my necessities, and wait for me?”

He leaned farther back in his chair; his eyes narrowed, his jaw hardened. I seemed to see in him the record of hard-fought fights out there in the West.

“What are your necessities?” he asked slowly. “Do you need to make a home for me? Do you need to be tested in the world of men, and to discover whether you have the ability to meet them as equals, and therefore have the right to talk of marriage? My necessities were for us both. Are yours?”

He shot the question at me harshly. I shook my head.

“No. If I ask you to wait, it will not be for the sake of anything connected with our life together,” I told him, “though it may be for the sake of proving whether I am a woman fit to take responsibilities. If I gave up one—threw it away—made mincemeat of it, in order to assume new ones——”

“I hope”—he smiled whimsically upon me and leaned forward to take my hands—“that you aren't regarding marriage with me wholly in the light of a laborious responsibility to be assumed! Oh, A, what rot you are talking! Do you love me? Do you love me? Of course you do!” And I did, at that moment with his arms about me, his kisses upon me. “Of course, of course you do! And when a man and a woman love each other and there is no obstacle to their marriage—when they both have had the wondrous good luck and good sense not to be already married to some one else—when the man is making a living and can support a home—why, then, my little Puritan, their greatest responsibility is to be married at once, immediately, if not sooner!” He ended, laughing, with a catch witticism from our school days.

I slid out of his arms, and, flushed and happy from his embrace, but fortified in my own resolution, I mentioned the name of my responsibility.

“Geraldine! Nonsense! Fudge and likewise rot!” he cried. “Geraldine is a husky young person, perfectly capable of taking care of herself and of your father. ~And let me tell you, my dear, that if it's a question of chaperonage, Doctor Alcott is better suited to the job than you are! He hasn't such beautiful eyes, my darling.” His voice softened, his gaze dwelt fondly upon me. “Anyway,” he finished masterfully, “I won't have it. You're engaged to marry me, I'm in a position to marry, I've come for you, and I don't mean to go away without you. Let Geraldine live with your Mrs. Fenwick-Hall if she wants to!”

I laughed. Mrs. Fenwick-Hall was not a lady to burden herself with duties. And though his determination warmed my heart, made me forget the tale my mirror had told me, made me forget the down-dragging of the two years since mother's death, nevertheless I felt no weakening in my resolve to stay with Geraldine until her professional launching or her marriage released me. Somehow the very reassurance as to Dirk's sentiments made me feel the more content to wait, to see Geraldine through. With Dirk loving me, the world was a joyful, sunny place; nothing else mattered much—certainly not another year or two of waiting for marriage!

And as I leaned toward him and began to tell him this, the door opened, and, intrusive as a northwest breeze, as sparkling, as vigorous, as joyous, Geraldine burst into the house. I knew her step in the little hall, but she gave another indication of her presence. She hummed a half dozen bars from the “Lohengrin” wedding march in that rich, thrilling voice of hers as she darted in upon us.

“I warned you I'd be back at four, A,” she said to me, though her eyes and her hand were for Dirk. “Dirk! How well you look—how—doesn't he, Amy?”

“Especially the 'how,'” I agreed.

“But—but so much older!” cried Geraldine admiringly. “Oh, I'll give my consent now! You know, Dirk,” she continued with a sort of shy impertinence that sat well upon her, “I never quite agreed in my deepest heart to this marriage——”

“No,” interrupted Dirk, smiling back upon her. “I remember you tempered your congratulations by telling me that you had always intended to marry me yourself!”

She blushed and seemed tongue-tied for a second. But only for a second. “What a brat I was!” she admitted, in complete and handsome apology. “Well, that wasn't what I meant. I never quite subscribed to the engagement, not because I wanted you myself, but because you didn't seem quite masterful enough for Amy. She takes an awful lot of mastering, that dovelike sister of mine! But now”—she looked at him again critically, approvingly—“but now you look equal to the job!”

“I am,” he declared. His eyes were on her, lit with amusement and admiration. “I am capable of mastering her, and I begin by declaring that she is to marry me at once, instead of waiting for you to finish your musical education, which is her present plan.”

Geraldine unpinned her big hat and threw it, with the gesture of one to whom panamas are nothing, upon the sofa. She sank into a big chair and faced him more gravely.

“It can be perfectly well managed,” she informed him, “if you aren't selfish and pig-headed.” She waited a moment for him to deny these qualities, but he did not speak, only sat watching her with narrowed eyes. “I have been talking to Mrs. Fenwick-Hall about it,” she added. “I've been quite miserable; it seemed so abominable to let poor A's happiness wait upon my voice. But a marriage may be solemnized any day in the week, Dirk, and a voice—well, it dictates its own times and terms.” She sighed, the weight of her gift seeming heavy upon her spirit.

“Yes?” said Dirk, after a pause. “Yes? And——”

“Oh, yes! And so I talked with Mrs. Fenwick-Hall about it, and she has a really splendid plan.”

“Yes?” said Dirk again.

I found myself incapable of speech. My cheeks were blazing with a sort of angry shame that Geraldine should have dared to discuss me and my affairs with her patroness, who had managed, with the regal indifference of her type, to limit her acquaintance to the one member of our family who might do her credit. I wondered at Dirk's self-restraint. I could feel him angry, too.

“And she says that, of course, since you were bred to be an Eastern lawyer, and have been out there in the wilderness only two years, you can't have any very deep roots in Western soil. So she says you can—that you probably would be willing to give it up”—she was stumbling a little now—“for Amy—and for a good Eastern opening. And she will arrange that you have one in her cousin's New York office—you know he's Seaman, of Rutherford, Seaman & Van Slaick—and then you and A can be married as soon as you can close up your affairs out there in Wyoming, and can keep house in New York——”

“Chaperoning you in Salesport by long distance, I suppose?” I managed to interject.

Illustration: I kept on snapping down my air-tight covers. “I know her voice is very sweet,” I admitted grudgingly.

“Oh!” cried Geraldine blandly. “No. I am to live with you. Every one says I should have a year and maybe two with Sinotti in New York before I go on to Paris. Mademoiselle Arnier has done all she can with me.”

Dirk looked at her silently for a few minutes. His face, which was darkly tanned, seemed to me to have grown pale with anger under the brown of the open-air years of sun and alkaline winds. His eyes were boring holes in Geraldine, but she seemed oblivious of the rage and contempt of his look. Suddenly and fiercely he turned upon me.

“And what do you say, Amy,” he cried, “to this plan that your sister and her friend have so kindly made for your life and mine?”

“It's absurd, of course,” I answered, and was surprised that I spoke with control and evenness. “It is like the imperious vanity of that rich, spoiled woman to undertake to mold the existence of people she doesn't even know, just to gratify her own ambition. She is crazy to bring out an artist of the first rank, I am told. She refused to help Maude Horton, they say, and has been full of rage ever since. She and that Chicago woman—I forget her name—who did support Horton through her years of training are rivals in a way——”

“Amy,” cut in Dirk sharply, “don't go on psychologizing about Mrs. Fenwick-Hall and berating her colossal impertinence. Devote a stray word or thought or two to your sister.”

“I am sure,” Geraldine thrust in quickly, “that whatever you may be pleased to think in your perfectly natural male egoism”—I devoted a stray thought to wondering where the child had picked up her vocabulary, forgetting the educative influences of Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's house parties—“I am not actuated by selfishness in my desire to perfect my voice and to have a great career! I want to be able to do everything for my family! Nor is Mrs. Fenwick-Hall to be sneered at and vilified”—she flashed a vindictive glance at me—“for making you an offer that half the young lawyers in the East would give five years of their lives for!”

There was something in what she said, of course. It was a magnificent offer, a magnificent opening. But Dirk was no lawyer by taste, however valuable his legal training might be to him in the work he loved. I knew, from his letters, how the wider, more active life of the country in which he now dwelt—friendlier and yet more hostile, harder and easier both, than the life of the East—appealed to him, satisfied him. And I, too, had longed for it.

“Everything depends upon the point of view,” Dirk admitted, less violently now. “But however magnificent the opening Mrs. Fenwick-Hall would arrange for me, I couldn't accept it. She is mistaken. My roots are deep in the Western soil. That is where my career lies, my work, and my life. It is there that my wife will go with me.” He turned toward me. “Will she not, Amy?” he asked more gently.

“Yes—some time,” I answered, my eyes blinded by tears.

“Now,” he insisted.

I looked at him and tried to smile. “Combative person!” I said. “Why does the whole universe have to be readjusted the first hour you are home?” I was temporizing. I believed that by cool discussion, by long, calm thought, we could arrive at some satisfactory conclusion to the whole matter. Dirk looked at his watch.

“I came back East to be married,” he said. “That is the one—the chief—object of my journey. If I am not going to be married, I am going back in a week. I'll give you three days, Amy, to decide.”

He restored his watch to its pocket, and looked at me with level eyes. At first there was nothing tender in them, only a cold challenge. But as he gazed, and as I gazed back, more angry than perturbed—I disliked the businesslike sharpness of his new style—his expression changed. The boyish smile came back to his lips, the boyish cajolery to his manner. He leaned over and caught my hand.

“You'll lose, Jerry, my dear girl!” he informed her with triumphant gayety. “You'll lose!”

The three days were feverish ones for me. Dirk refused to debate the question with me. “Make your decision yourself,” he said to me; “you know where I stand. No talk can alter that.” He would not help me, he would not yield an inch of what he claimed as his right. But he surrounded me with an atmosphere of such warm, gay, admiring affection that it wrung my very soul to contemplate the loss of it. More potent than argument was the constant evidence of his consideration; not since he had gone away had I been first in any one's regard. Geraldine's voice was first in hers, and then all that might minister to its perfection and to her own comfort; and father's indolence was first with him—he called it peace! Now, for three bright days, I was first in some one's thoughts, in some one's love. Even the constant discussion going on in my mind could not destroy all my joy in the fact—all my joy and pride and hopefulness.

Geraldine crept into my room early on the morning of the third day. Her copperish hair hung in two splendid, braided ropes down her back. Her face was ivory-white, her blue eyes darkened by the strain of thought and fear. She curled herself up on the foot of my bed, facing me; I moved my feet beneath the coverlid to make room for her.

“Oh, A!” she cried. “Oh, A!” Her childish young lips quivered. “I can't bear to stand between you and your happiness, but I think he might wait! Since he's so rude about Mrs. Fenwick- Hall's offer. I—I told her that, even if you did marry him now, and go West, I should go to New York to Sinotti just the same. Loads of girls go there alone, and nothing happens to them. But she said—she is awfully bent upon having her own way”—admitted Geraldine reflectively—“that she wanted my golden voice and my golden personality and my golden reputation to burst upon the public all untarnished. She said that I didn't know how to take care of myself, physically or socially—that few artists did! And that I would probably make myself ill and collect undesirable acquaintances and even have cheap experiences—she said it, A, not I—and that all those things would be disastrous. She wanted to introduce a genius who was also a lady, she said; she said it hadn't been done before! Of course that's a mistake. But she was thinking of that Chicago woman and Maude Horton. And—it's abominable, A—but I know she won't go on with me except on her own terms. I dare say,” added Geraldine wistfully, “that some of the others who have heard my voice might take me up if she dropped me. But——”

“You poor child!” I cried, as Geraldine's exposition of her state ended in a sudden shower of tears. I had always hated her position; I had marveled at the ease with which father permitted her dependence on the whim of a rich woman. Suppose she lost her voice, her ambition—where would Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's glory be then?

I thought rapidly. I was burning with wrath over the indignities heaped upon my sister—the coercion, the restraint. Yet it was not just to be too severe—Mrs. Fenwick-Hall had been wildly generous, according to her lights; and what she said was true. Geraldine had not been called upon to develop common sense in regard to her health or her associates. Salesport, when one's great grandfather had been born there, and all one's ancestors since, offers few opportunities for unfortunate acquaintance; and some one had always stood between Jerry and the practical worries of the world. Mrs. Fenwick-Hall was right in thinking that it would be disastrous for the girl to become responsible for her own practical career.

And if Dirk loved me, he would be willing to wait another year or two! I could spend those years in teaching Geraldine to be a level-headed, capable, careful woman; besides, she would be older, staider! If he loved me, he would be willing to let me finish the work I had to do for Geraldine, to prepare her to pay the debt we had all allowed her to contract. So I kissed her and told her not to worry. She brightened at once; she did not ask me for any further pledge or assurance, but, with face as refreshed as a flower's after rain, she went back to her room.

The next morning Dirk started West again. Our engagement was broken. He said that my decision to remain with Geraldine meant that I did not love him, and that he had no desire to be married or engaged to an unloving woman. He was curt, and, it seemed to me, cruel in his decision. I made no allowance for his wounded, youthful vanity, for his hopes and plans shattered. I made no allowance for the fact that he would go back, wifeless, to the country he had left with joyful proclamation of his matrimonial errand. I made no allowance for anything, and hence was able to be sufficiently angry and injured, myself, by his attitude, to lose in those emotions the grief and the forebodings of loneliness that might have made me miserable.

Chapter III.

I sat on a long bench in a dusky, dusty hall. Through the door at one end of it, constantly opening and shutting. I caught uninviting glimpses of the bare, dingy foyer of an old-fashioned office building. A noisy elevator slammed its door constantly upon this landing; even through the wall separating the outer from the inner corridor, one could hear the constant bang and rattle. And every time it crashed, it disgorged into the inner one a new group of men who had business in the office where I sat—of men whose business would not wait, of men who could not be relegated to the long bench, or whose terms of sitting there, provided they were for a moment halted, were brief.

The fox-faced, blond, nonchalant boy who sat behind a wicket halfway along the hall seemed to know most of the comers. I regarded them wistfully; perhaps they were all employed upon the Morning Courier. I was waiting—endless undertaking, it began to seem!—to “see the editor.” I held in my shabbily gloved hand a neat roll of manuscript which I clutched tightly, as if it were an oar and I were struggling with it through a stormy sea.

Well, after a fashion, I suppose I was regarding it as an oar. If I didn't induce the “editor'—unknown Jove!—to look upon it favorably, how were Geraldine and I ever going to manage?

One of the fox-faced, blond, nonchalant gatekeeper's even more nonchalant envoys strolled out from the distant inner region. The young man who happened to be waiting on the bench beside me, might, it seemed, go in toward the Holy of Holies. He had been there three minutes, I thirty. My cheeks burned painfully with nervousness and with resentment; the hand clutching the roll of manuscript was icy cold, and there was a dull constriction in my throat. But, in response to the summons: “Mr. Bromley says for you to come in, Mr. Sawtelle,” the young man, instead of going, looked questioningly at me.

“Were you waiting to see Bromley, too?” he asked me. His voice was cordial, easy, pleasant. “Because, if you were—really my errand has no connection with business! It's about polo ponies.” He confided this with an air of humorous appreciation of the unsuitability of the errand to a workaday newspaper office. “So that——?” His upward inflection seemed to indicate that his turn was mine for the taking.

“Oh, no!” I faltered. “Not until Mr. Bromley sends for me.” I looked sharply at the nonchalant one. “You are sure you gave Mr. Bromley the slip?” I asked him.

It had been a forbidding slip on which Mr., Mrs., or Miss Blank was required to state which Mr. Blank of all the myriads on the Morning Courier she wished to see and on what business. I had filled it out to the best of my ability:

• Miss—Alcott wishes to see
• M.—The Editor
• Concerning—A contribution.

And it had been the king of the nonchalant boys who had supplied me with the information that the editor was Mr. Bromley.

“Oh, yes,” he assured me now. “He said, like I told you, ma'am, to say he'd be busy for an hour.”

“Well, it isn't an hour yet,” I mentioned grimly to Mr. Sawtelle. “And he probably meant that he would be busy about polo ponies. So—thank you just the same.” I couldn't help smiling at him, he had such a smiling manner himself.

“I tell you,” he suggested brilliantly. “Why not give me that roll of manuscript, and I'll take it up with Bromley before we begin on the ponies? And then he'll send for you at once. Gad, the airs these editor persons give themselves! Bromley acts like a little tin czar. Keeping a lady waiting! Shall I take it?”

He held out his hand for it. It was a big, firm, well-kept hand, and the gloves that he held in its fellow—heavy, dull brown doeskin, with big pearl buttons and coarse, expensive stitching—were so much better looking than mine—derelicts from Geraldine's wardrobe—that I wouldn't have lifted my hand to give him the manuscript for a fortune! I thanked him, a little more coldly this time, for his offer, and again declined it. And he, shaking his head humorously upon me, as upon an obstinately impractical person, went his way, and I resigned myself to further waiting.

If I couldn't sell the little thing in my hand, or if I could not induce the editor of the Morning Courier to see that it revealed me as the sort of a person he wanted to employ—what were we to do, Geraldine and I? I began “doing” the mental arithmetic I had been doing for three weeks now—eighteen dollars week for her room, eleven for mine, three dollars for our washing, five dollars a half hour three half hours a week for Sinotti, anything you please for car fares—no more cab fares, I used to tell myself in the midst of my computations—anything you can scrimp together for clothes. Entertainment—we should be obliged to forego entertainment! Doctors—— O heavens! Anything the doctors pleased for the doctors! That was certain after the awful bills for Geraldine's grippe! And other emergencies!

And against the fearful total, what? Dear old John, practicing in his little Southern town—John on a still, determined hunt after something connected with malaria and the malaria mosquito, but meantime eking out existence by general practice—why, good old John could spare us five dollars a week; and father, boarding at Cousin Kate's in Salesport, could spare us out of his annuity another five. Unless I could do something—something——

“Mr. Bromley says he will see you now,” announced the chieftain of the tow-headed boys.

I awoke from addition and subtraction. I noticed that Mr. Sawtelle had not emerged—at least I hadn't seen him! And then, marveling somewhat at the shakiness of my legs, I followed down the dusty, dusky hall to a room at the end of it.

It was a mere cubby-hole of a room, with a huge roll-top desk almost filling it, with only one chair, in which the redoubtable Bromley himself sat, almost submerged, as it were, under a rising sea of newspapers. Leaning against the desk was Mr. Sawtelle, his eyes fixed on the door by which I entered. He made as if to leave, but Bromley stayed him with a gesture.

“That's all right, Sawtelle. I won't be a minute. You wish to see me?” This to me, with a rather ferocious frown. He rumpled the papers on his desk in search of my slip. “Ah, yes, here it is. About a contribution—— Where y'going, Sawtelle?”

“I'll be back,” murmured Sawtelle, considerately vanishing. I blessed him in my heart, and extended my roll.

“I—I wanted to see if you could use that,” I began. “Or if you thought it gave sufficient promise so that you could give me work regularly——”

“Don't you know enough not to roll a manuscript?” he asked gruffly.

He smoothed it out with rough fingers, and I began to apprehend what manner of man he was; until now he had been a blur of indescribable rudeness before my eyes. A man sitting while I stood suppliant before him! Now I saw that he was sturdily built, with a short neck on which his head was thrust belligerently forward; that his shoulders were broad, his skin burned a brickish red; that his eyes, beneath an overshadowing forehead, were gray, forbidding—as if they were a wall that he opposed to you, defying you to penetrate behind its hard surface. He rang a bell impatiently, and thrust my unfortunate contribution into the hand of the office boy who appeared in response to the summons.

“Here,” he said—only it sounded less like “here” than “hyar,” delivered with a snarl—“ask Mrs. Woolson to look at that, and to talk with this young lady. That's all.” He nodded to me. “Good day. Tell Mr. Sawtelle I'm at liberty.”

The last was for Mercury. I set my teeth hard behind my lips to keep them from quivering, I inclined my head in farewell civility, which Mr. Bromley, already deep in some fresh, wet afternoon editions that had been thrust upon his desk, did not see, and I followed toward Mrs. Woolson's quarters.

Mrs. Woolson was a widow, I inferred from her black garb. She was a pretty one, as all widows should be—a woman of thirty-five or six, I thought, with smooth, shining chestnut hair, smooth, rounded, rosy cheeks, clear, smiling eyes, white teeth, and plump arms and throat beneath her soft, black silk blouse. She greeted me with a smile of seeming cordiality, even before she heard my name. Then she exclaimed with added fervor:

“Miss Alcott? Are you related to the beautiful Miss Alcott who is a protégée of dear Miranda Fenwick-Hall's?” She spoke with great vivacity.

“I am Geraldine Alcott's sister,” I answered.

I could scarcely enter upon a recital, with this utter stranger, of the events that had rendered Geraldine no longer a protégée of dear Miranda Fenwick-Hall's. She received the information with friendly rapture; she almost purred over me. She smoothed out my luckless manuscript without comment upon the awful, amateur fact of its rolling; she ran it through with practiced éye, my heart beating unsteadily all the while.

“Have you been writing long?' she asked, when she had finished. She fixed me- with her bright, inquisitive, friendly glance.

“I've been doing things for two years,” I admitted, with a sudden, retrospective vision of the two years' loneliness that had driven me to writing as to an opiate. “But this is the first thing I've tried to publish. I thought it might do on the 'Home Half Page,'” I ended tremulously.

“It will do very well for that,” stated the Olympian Mrs. Woolson calmly; thus unruffledly do the gods apportion human destinies! “With one or two changes—you'll let me make them?—it will do admirably for the 'Home Half Page.' Have you,” she ended smilingly, “any more at home like these?”

My head reeled with happiness. I could scarcely believe my good fortune. I scarcely know what I said. I only know that I went out of the office of the editor of the Morning Courier's “Home Half Page” dizzy with the thought that I was to be a “regular contributor” to it. And not until three months had passed did I have the slightest suspicion that this happy fact was due to anything other than my surpassing literary gifts as revealed in my little sketch. Later I knew that it was due to Mrs. Woolson's mad social aspirations and to the even madder delusion that she thought my close relationship to Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's gifted protégée might help her! But by that time, fortunately, the knowledge could not hurt me quite as it might have hurt at first.

But now I must go back to the events that had led up to my appearance in the office of the Morning Courier. Geraldine, after Dirk had broken our engagement and had hustled angrily off to the West, had lost no time in putting through her New York project. I have never been able to analyze my sister very well; I have never known what part of her strategic campaigns to ascribe to instinct, to temperament, and what to carefully laid plan. So that I do not know whether her instinct told her that it would be unwise to delay our departure from Salesport until I had had time to savor the loneliness of my familiar life suddenly stripped of its hopes and prospects, suddenly saddened even in its memories; or whether reason told her; or whether that arch-arbiter of fate, Mrs. Fenwick-Hall, was her informant.

I only know that Dirk had scarcely had time to reach Wyoming, that my anger at his overbearing attitude had barely begun to merge into the spirit that sought excuses for him, that whispered that love, not lack of love, had dictated his course, that began faintly to cherish new hopes, to look forward to new understandings—that these things had scarcely had time to develop before we were all ruthlessly uprooted, and Geraldine and I were established in a boarding house of Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's recommendation on Madison Avenue. We were all criminally malleable in her hands—Jerry's—so much, of course, I know now. But how far she understood her power, how far she exercised it deliberately, I have never quite determined. Anyway, if she had grown to be a woman ruthless in her calm insistence upon the preeminence of her claims upon life, above all those of all others, it was our work!

During those two years in the boarding house on Madison Avenue, I had ample leisure to ponder the subject. As far back as I could remember, Geraldine had been indulged. That is often the lot of the youngest child in a family where children have not come so rapidly that the youngest has only the weary remnants of parental affection and care; and in our family, six years had elapsed between my birth and Geraldine's, so that a baby had come as a happy novelty once more, and mother had not been too tired with her last nursing to enjoy again the rapture of a child against her breast.

And I had been of an age to adore the baby as if she had been a new and splendid variety of doll. I had had no greater pride in those early days than to push Geraldine's baby carriage through the elm-shaded streets of our block, and to have my mother's friends stop my stately march to say, with sympathetic, admiring smiles: “How is your baby to-day, Amy?” I had been eaten up with conceit when once a lady, unknown in our town, stopped me to exclaim with a little, poignant cry that I had not understood, in spite of her mourning robes: “Oh, my dear, what a lovely baby! What a lovely, strong-looking, little baby!”

Even father, though he had only a vague, mild, though friendly, interest in his offspring, had been proud of Geraldine and the stir she created. We all had felt that such an unusual, such a beautiful, such a winning infant must be reserved by fate for some high destiny. And we all had proceeded to assist fate in the reservation.

That, I suppose, is why Geraldine was not apprenticed to the dish towel, at the age of seven, as I had been; that is why grandma did not place steel knitting needles in her fingers as soon as she was able to hold them; that is why the dull mysteries of the seam, the hem, the running stitch, and the back stitch had not been unfolded to her by the time she was ten.

About that period she had lost the exquisite baby prettiness that had made her daily airing such a triumphal progress through the town in her infancy, and she had not begun to gain the splendid loveliness of her later years. So that she might have been abruptly and rudely introduced to the ordinary routine of female education as practiced in Salesport, had she not suddenly begun to show a marked musical talent. It was beautifully timed! Almost simultaneously with mother's astonished declaration that she didn't see what she had been thinking of to let Jerry attain the age of ten without acquaintance with the dishpan, came the discovery that Jerry's fingers were fit for better things.

I had been conscientiously “taking” from Miss Amanda Dobson for three years, and I am obliged to admit that only Miss Amanda's desperate need of my small tuition fee could ever have kept her at her task. I played the piano as if it were a tin pan; she told me so once, in a moment of extreme exasperation. And I can do her the justice to say, after these years, that she was right. Discord was not discord in my ears, nor was harmony harmony. Laboriously I tried to follow the notes that gentlemen and ladies conversant with the possible combinations of the funny, little black clubs had arranged; but there was nothing to guide me but my eyes and my memory. My ears did not help me; my fingers did not have that sensitiveness to which the wrong note would have been a scorching signal.

Then one day, after the family had suffered for three years, hopefully, trustfully, under my daily half hour of practice, suddenly a true, delicate rendition of something I had been maltreating on the piano sounded through the house. It was Geraldine, who had not yet begun to “take,” playing by ear.

Mother was overjoyed; father was pleased, and his manner said that the happy discovery was a logical result of his never-worry policy. Poor Miss Amanda shed tears of joy; she had a real feeling for music, which must have been hourly crucified in the Salesport of my youth. And Geraldine was duly and formally released from the customary female indenture to dull household tasks, and was bound over, instead, to music for a term of years.

Illustration: Geraldine unpinned her big hat and threw it, with the gesture of one to whom panamas are nothing, upon the sofa.

At first our anticipations were modest; we thought that when she had reached the proper age for such a procedure, she would take Miss Amanda's place in the melodic training of the young. She would give lessons, and would help swell the family exchequer, which was likely to be sadly in need of inflation as the years went on. Then it began to appear that her talent was too great to be hidden under the extinguishing bushel of village music teaching. She would be a pianist—one of those fortunate beings who swept regally across concert-hall platforms, regardless of dust upon satin trains; one of the blest to whom perspiring ushers staggered with great baskets of flowers at the close of each number. She would play before kings, perhaps, and potentates assuredly. And she must be trained for that end exclusively, and not for the common lot of woman—not for the humdrum lot whose two watchwords are work and sacrifice.

Because her fingers must be supple for their work, they were never taught to be busy with another task; because practicing was laborious, no other labor was required of her. Because beauty, scarcely less than talent, was a public woman's asset, she was spared all disfiguring tasks. And because she was to be saved, reserved, set aside, for a brilliant future in which we were all to benefit, we must wait upon her, hand and foot, now! That was the principle upon which our household was run all the years from the discovery of Geraldine's talent until the day when Mrs. Fenwick-Hall proclaimed an even rarer gift than the great pianist's to be hers.

No, I cannot say, whatever plans and hopes of mine had been obliterated under the Juggernaut car of Geraldine's career, that she herself was to blame, or the nature that made her. I think that the family was hideously to blame—the family that discriminated among talents and gifts, declaring this one higher, worthier than that; the family that was not farsighted enough to know when it had begun to rear a Frankenstein for its own undoing!

I, invading the office of the Morning Courier, was still under the old spell. Geraldine's voice must be trained to the utmost demand of the masters and the connoisseurs! Geraldine's person and her personality must still be sacred—the one to be daintily nourished, tended like a princess', garbed finely and richly; the other to be allowed to flower without dwarfing, without blighting influence. Geraldine's favorite poem began: “Vex not thou the poet's soul with cares.” And 'poet' she interpreted as “artist,” artist in turn as singer, and singer, of course, as Geraldine Alcott, between whom and a dizzying, glorious appearance in opera—so the wiseacres said—lay only another year in New York and two in Paris!

When the breaking of my engagement with Dirk was followed by our immediate hegira to New York, Mrs. Fenwick-Hall was disposed to be very gracious to me. She commended my course—it showed, she said, proper family feeling, proper womanly pride, and the spirit of sacrifice without which woman's character was an arid waste. Moreover, she was quite certain—if I happened to care about that!—that my conduct must in time impress my impetuous lover and send him back to me even more ardent, more admiring than before. I rather thought that myself!

She felt herself responsible for Geraldine's career, she said, and she meant to provide for her education properly. She intended to make her an allowance to cover her living expenses, her dress, and her music lessons in New York. I was included in the living expenses. In return, she wanted nothing but the glory of having discovered the golden marvel of the age. It was all very pretty, and though I was seared and scorched with humiliation at the thought of living upon the woman's bounty, I was so schooled in the creed that Geraldine's career took precedence over all other things—even instinctive self-respect and independence—that I acceded.

She gave us an allowance of sixty dollars a week, and she gave my sister a great deal besides—clothes, opera seats, excursions, tickets, introductions, society, patronage. In return, hers was the only house in which Geraldine would sing. Sometimes I have thought that Mrs. Fenwick-Hall drove a thrifty bargain for her three thousand dollars a year—especially since we boarded with a woman who had been a poor connection of the late Mr. Fenwick-Hall's, and who had to be “carried” to a certain extent upon the pay roll of his estate. As for Geraldine, she accepted the favors with a superb air of giving full value—with perhaps a little extra—for them. We had all trained her so well to believe in the surpassing greatness of her gift to society!

After Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's first approval of my course in staying by my sister through the years of training, she seemed to forget my existence. Occasionally she sent me a card to a private art show or to some charity performance for which she had been forced, in the character of patroness, to buy a lot of tickets. She also sent me an invitation to a luncheon once, and once to a crush musicale at which Geraldine sang divinely. But Geraldine was constantly at her house, and it gradually came about that she was much at the houses of Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's friends, also. It was not to be wondered at—she was beautiful enough to be invited merely for the picture that she made, I thought. But in addition to that, she was designed to be a celebrity. They all believed it. And I was kept fairly busy at home, in my room on Madison Avenue, in refurbishing her clothes.

I was not angry or resentful at the conspicuous neglect of Jerry's patron. I did not particularly like that dominant, regally rude, magnificent old dowager. I had what I had never had before—leisure for reading, leisure for study. John, from out of the infinitesimal returns from his practice, sent me enough to enable me to take a few courses at Barnard, and my days, though lonely, were by no means unhappy. It was then that the desire to write first began to stir in me, and while Geraldine was off at dinner and opera, at theater and supper, I pottered away at my little secret sheaf of papers.

Probably it was my absorption in them that made me so blind to the gradual change in Jerry. Not until the storm burst upon our heads did I have the slightest doubt that she was entirely, even if selfishly, devoted to her own ambition; or perhaps I should say never did I doubt that her ambition was to be a great singer. And then, one autumn afternoon, my eyes were rudely opened.

I had been up at Barnard, and had walked down the Drive to Seventy-second Street for delight in the crisp, sparkling air, the blue, dancing river, the sense of freshness and vigor in the world. Then I climbed on top of a Fifth Avenue bus and rode down the crowded, glittering, gay thoroughfare of wealth, enthralled, as always, by the spectacle of brilliant, teeming life that it presents. It was, therefore, after the luncheon hour when I reached our boarding house. Geraldine was spending a few days at Greenwich with some acquaintances she had lately made.

I was astonished, when I entered the wide, dim hall of Mrs. Charterid's impeccable establishment, to see Mrs. Fenwick-Hall seated, in a dignity that I felt, even across the intervening spaces, to be furious, in the long drawing-room. She summoned me with an imperious gesture which I obeyed quakingly, I knew not why.

“I have been waiting for you an hour and a half.” She hurled the information at me.

“I am very sorry,” I replied wonderingly, “to have kept you waiting; but you see I was not expecting you.”

She glared at me. Then she snapped: “We may go to your room, I suppose? I don't care to confide my affairs to all of Mabel's paying guests.”

“By all means,” I answered.

I led the way to my fourth-story room, and, bewildered and alarmed though I was, I managed to extract a certain joy from the sound of Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's panting ascent. I moved before her with an exaggerated suppleness and lightness, an emphasized straightness of the back. I was glad to make her feel that there were a few things that were not purchasable with millions. When I opened the door of my tiny apartment, she sank, puffing, into the nearest chair. I pushed forward another—the other if one comes to that!—saying: “You will find this more comfortable. It is a pull, up those three flights.”

She struggled to regain breath with which to smite me with some untoward news—I felt that it was untoward! And I waited her recovery with an air of polite patience.

“Are you,” she rasped forth finally, “in league with that precious sister of yours?”

“I don't know what you mean.” It took me a full second to force myself to speech at all; what, what had Geraldine been doing?

“Tl tell you!” Mrs. Fenwick-Hall spoke with vindictive emphasis. “I'll tell you! Your sister, Miss Geraldine Alcott, doesn't care for the public career we have planned for her! She prefers to be, instead of the socially acceptable opera singer, the operatically singing society leader! She has been deliberately trying to captivate my stepson before my very eyes! She thinks that she would like to step into my shoes!”

She leaned back and waited to see me wilt and die beneath her news. I admit that I was astonished, but my astonishment was not due, as Mrs. Fenwick-Hall had fondly expected, to horror at the thought of my sister's presumption. It was due to quite another cause—amazement that Geraldine, even deteriorating as she was, could think seriously of Horace Fenwick-Hall as a husband. An idler young man never cumbered this foot-stool of ours; a more unoriginally dissipated young man never squandered the money that his hard-working ancestors had piled up. To my mind, he even lacked the charm, the reckless fascination, that sometimes goes with rich and dissipated young men as a sort of compensation for their lack of moral worth. I could not believe that Geraldine had reached the point of caring for Horace Fenwick-Hall.

“Oh,” said I, “I think you must be mistaken, Mrs. Fenwick-Hall. I hardly think that Geraldine is in love with your stepson.”

“Who said anything about her being in love?” Mrs. Fenwick-Hall snapped out at me. “I merely said that she was trying to worm her way into my position, using Horry as her tool.”

“Even at that,” I answered, “it seems to me quite likely that you are mistaken. You have probably been misled by their free and friendly attitude——”

“Nonsense! Don't you try to play the simpleton. I'm not judging from anybody's attitude—I'm judging only from what my stepson told me. He's in love with her, girl—infatuated—he wants to marry her!”

I admit that I was perturbed, but I fenced for time. “That proves nothing,” I answered as calmly as I could. I was so utterly out of Jerry's real confidence. Could she have fallen in love with him? “A good many men have wished to marry her during this past year, Mrs. Fenwick-Hall. But, even if she does—er—reciprocate his—affection—and wishes to marry him, I fail to see why you should act in this astounding manner about it?” I faced her boldly now.

“You fail to see?” she cried. “Well, Miss Alcott, I will tell you that I have other plans for my son”—he was “son” this time!—“than to have him marry a beggar. Kindly remember that I have fed and housed and clothed and educated your sister for the past four years, and that you yourself are my dependent. I will not allow him to marry a beggar—do you understand? And you are too intelligent a woman to pretend to think that your sister's conduct has been anything but despicable—despicable! She is as selfish a specimen of humanity as I have ever seen. She has developed a wonderful taste for luxury that she has not earned—you know where that taste leads personable young women! Well, let it lead where it will, I don't intend that it shall lead her into my household! She has deceived me! She has behaved dishonorably——”

“Hush!” I interrupted her. “I will not allow you to go on like this. If my sister condescends to care for Mr. Horace Fenwick-Hall, that means that a beautiful and gifted girl condescends to care for a vapid, ambitionless young man, the laughingstock of the small part of the world that has ever heard of him—Titania for a Bottom! If she condescends to care for him, then—you make me talk snobbishly!—a well-born girl, a girl of family, cares for a parvenu! I wonder at her taste, and I will question that with you as much as you please! But I will not allow you to go on calling my sister dishonorable!”

She rose from her chair. She eyed me half amusedly, half malevolently. “You may tell your sister,” she said—calmly now; was she not wielding the only lash she believed effective?—“that my doors are closed to her from to-day. Her allowance stops, of course. Horry has heard reason—he spends a hundred thousand a year and has no romantic notion of living on five with your sister in a bug-ridden, vine-covered cottage—and I'll do her the justice to say that I know she has no such notion, herself! And he has sailed for England. I will send you a statement. Doubtless a young woman of your family pride will not care to be under any obligation to parvenus like us. Of course, you are under no legal obligation.” She nodded at me and went out, leaving me flayed and sore. The favor of princes! The favor of princes!

And that was why I, three days later, sat in a panic of nervousness and anxiety, waiting the pleasure of Mr. Upton Bromley, of the Morning Courier.

Meantime, Geraldine, on her return from Greenwich, had taken the news of Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's repudiation of her angrily, yet calmly.

“The old cat!” she said, in the simple Salesport phrase of our youth. “As if she hadn't already got a great deal more out of me than she has ever given me! I've sung thousands of dollars' worth at her musicales for nothing. Just let her send her statement—I'll send her one in return! Why, with one Metropolitan name and me she had the most stunning musical entertainments in the city. The pig!”

“Geraldine!” I cried, appalled at what seemed to me a hideous vulgarity in my sister. “How can you speak so? How can you talk like a—oh, like a common bargainer! But—what I want to know is this—were you—er—involved with this young man?”

Jerry looked at me quizzically from under narrowed lids. She dimpled deliciously—when Jerry smiled, two deep, beautiful, little beds for kisses came at the corners of her ripe lips. Oh, she was lovely, no doubt about it!

“You dear old Donna Quixota!” she exclaimed. “You ought to live in a stained-glass window. You think I'm a vulgar wretch, don't you? Well, I dare say I am—that comes of too intimate association with that eminent patron of the arts whose sole right to patronize is her money, and who feels that it entitles her to patronize anything—art, religion, morality! Oh, don't talk to me. I'm no fool. I have seen through that purse-proud parvenu almost from the first—through her and her friends. They're all alike—some better veneered than others, that's all. But scratch deep enough, and you'll find love of money. Money, money—that's what really counts with them—not talent, not genius, not goodness, not family—nothing but their beastly money. Of course it has vulgarized me to kotow to that—deliberately and dishonestly, if you come to that!

“As for Horry”—she half laughed and shrugged her graceful shoulders—“I was 'involved' with him to the extent that we were engaged to be married. He's no worse a fool than a lot of them,” she added with infinite, complacent calmness. “But, of course, since the stepdame won't have it, that's off. I was pretty sure she wouldn't. I knew her better than he did. He thought she was mad about me. He told me that she had had lots of enthusiasms before, but never one of such intensity and length as her enthusiasm for me and my voice. He was sure she'd agree, so I let him try it. Well”—she raised her lovely lids and stared unseeingly through the window at the crimson leaves of a frost-touched vine on a church across the street—“it does no harm to know the truth at once. Indeed, it's better.”

“And—your career—for which we have all sacrificed so much”—my voice shook in spite of myself—“was that to be abandoned for a rich marriage, provided you could make it?”

“Poor A!” sighed Geraldine lightly. “But Dirk was never worthy of you, sis—you're well rid of him. As for marriage—a good marriage—versus a career—I'm for the marriage every time! A prima donna is a slave—a slave to a hundred things. She's a slave to the weather, a slave to her health, a slave to her manager, to time-tables, to critics, to the worst thing of all—the public, with its ignorance and its darned caprices. However, don't look so stunned, Amy, my own! I'll go on with the career. I prefer it and its rewards, at any rate, to a humdrum, Salesport variety of domesticity. Besides”—she shot her half-deprecating, half-defiant roguish gleam of a smile at me again—“besides, I am sure that for me the path to a good marriage lies through my gift. And whether fortune comes by the stage or by matrimony, A, you share it!” she promised magnificently.

It was a good deal to face—the brutal flinging-off by our patron, the realization of the utter deterioration in my sister. But in regard to the latter phenomenon, I had the usual comfort of fond relatives in such crises—I told myself that “the child was only talking in that way to hide her real feelings”; that “she was only pretending to be a cynic and a mercenary”; that she was, as little boys do, whistling and strutting and swaggering ungracefully to hide real softness.

We decided, of course, that Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's defection should not drive us from New York or Geraldine from her musical education. Pride, as well as interest, claimed so much. We gave Mrs. Charterid “notice” that day—I had already bargained with two Barnard girls who had a little apartment in one of the great honeycomb of apartment houses up near Morningside Park for two rooms in their place and the privilege of cooking in their kitchenette, which they themselves did not use, as they took their meals in one of the student boarding houses in the neighborhood. They were away all day, as were most of the other inhabitants of the building, and Jerry might practice without becoming a public nuisance. I happened to have a hundred dollars in reserve—it had been a birthday present from Cousin Judith, who said, underscoring her words, that she wished me to spend it for myself; and I had been hoarding it for six months trying to decide whether I wanted most a set of good furs, a lovely evening gown—though I seldom went out—or a beautiful, musty, leather-smelling, mellowed old set of Jane Austen which had tempted me every time I browsed in Scrawley's bookstore. I saw now that I wanted none of these things.

It was in giving Mrs. Charterid notice that I first learned of the financial arrangement between her and Mrs. Fenwick-Hall. The good lady—she was good and a lady, and she ran a charming boarding house of the sort to take the traditional curse off boarding houses forever—seemed genuinely sorry to have us leave. But she smiled as well as sighed when she expressed her regrets.

“They are quite apart from the battle I see ahead of me with Miranda,” she said. “Whenever Miranda obtains a boarder for me—or drives a friend, acquaintance, or protégé to my house—she promptly deducts the amount I receive from that person from the sum that poor old Horatio's estate pays me. It's a horrid situation. Horatio was my cousin, you know, brought up in my home, mothered and fathered by my parents. Well, he left me as a sort of sacred, but rather loosely drawn, trust to Miranda; she was to see to it that I had twenty-five hundred a year during my life, to be paid from whatever investments in her judgment seemed best! She's a funny creature, Miranda—she loathes paying me that twenty-five hundred worse than any other thing in the world, and is always trying to lessen the sum by sending me boarders. Not because she's ungenerous, exactly—I don't really know why. And I foresee our usual battle royal over it when you and your sister leave. However, that's not the chief reason I'm sorry! Come and see me as often as you can.”

Well, that was enlightening, and, in its way, amusing. It served to lessen my searing sense of financial obligation to the eminent patron of the arts who had played fairy godmother to Jerry for a while; it turned the affair into a joke almost.

I have never been so busy—so overworked, to tell the truth—as in the period that now dawned for us. But I scarcely noticed my own fatigue, buoyed up as I was by a sense of adventure and of independence. Mrs. Woolson, thanks at first to the delusion that she cherished in regard to the social possibilities of my acquaintance with dear Miranda Fenwick-Hall, not only gave me work to do for her department of the Morning Courier, but took me under her professional wing, introducing me to the editor of the literary supplement of the paper, who let me review some books for him, and thrusting some of my verses under the august eye of the great Bromley himself, so that they appeared upon the editorial page, of which he was in minute charge, as well as being in general charge of the whole paper. She invited me to her apartment, too, and there I met again the engaging Mr. Dennis Sawtelle—of which, as the old books used to say, more anon. I did no reporting for the Courier, which was a highly conservative sheet, holding the most refined views as to the limitations of woman's sphere, especially of her newspaper work.

Illustration: “Here,” he said, “ask Mrs. Woolson to look at that, and to talk with this young lady. That's all.”

I used to get up at six o'clock in the morning to prepare breakfast for Jerry and myself. Pretty soon the two Barnardian landladies came sniffing to the kitchenette, entreating to be accepted as “breakfast boarders”; they said that the aroma of the coffee was too much to be resisted, and that they would not go to their chicory-serving boarding house any longer. I took them on gladly. With a little gas stove it was scarcely more work to make cereal, coffee, and toast for four than for two, and I was glad of the consequent reduction in our tiny rent. Generally Geraldine's breakfast was served to her in bed; she continued to have and to accept invitations almost as freely as before the break with dear Miranda, and she did not get up until time for her lesson, her exercises, or her practicing. By that time each day—eleven o'clock—I was busy at my beloved desk in the Courier office.

I used to come home about five, and by seven dinner was ready. Sometimes my sister took it with me, quite as often she did not. In the evenings I worked again; I read the books for review, I polished off the little stanzas that brought Upton Bromley's eyes to bear upon me in such a bewildered manner—as if he were saying: “This seems to be yours, you say it is yours, and I suppose it is; but, bless my soul, who ever expected a shabby, scared, mute thing like you to have the trick of verse? And to write political quatrains that are not bad—not bad at all?”

When I wasn't reading or writing, or setting the oatmeal on to cook slowly for to-morrow morning's breakfast, I was mending my own stockings, putting chiffon roses on the toes of Geraldine's slippers, making iridescent little bands for her hair, sewing buttons on the long, white gloves that wrinkled so deliciously up her rounded arms, embroidering elaborate collar-and-cuff sets to brighten her plain serge morning dresses—or making those dresses, even. My own clothes I bought ready-made at the bargain sales, and Jerry also obtained a good deal of her wardrobe in that thrifty way. But her plain morning dresses I made, having early acquired the art of fitting her well. When she was home she used to watch me, sighing in pretty deprecation of her lack of little accomplishments.

Sometimes, as I have said, I went to Mrs. Woolson's apartment—a very artistic, though somewhat dingy, place on the purlieus of Washington Square. She was a Southern woman who had inherited, along with a sweet, drawling voice, and the ability to coerce, without violence, what she wanted from the world, a cook of the “mammy” type. Dinner at Mrs. Woolson's was a feast—an intimate, delightful, pretty feast. All of the Courier men—at least all who were among her intimates—went there constantly, with their wives, their sisters, their mothers—whatever feminine belongings they happened to have; if they had none, they passed through a period of imagining themselves in love with the pretty, silken, experienced little woman, and then they graduated into the large class of her devoted and useful friends. She told me, with her slurred, girlish accent, that “if evah she married again, it would have to be a man with money”; she had had her romance, she added with a bitterness apparent through the drawl, and I inferred that she had little belief left in that chief ingredient of novels.

Mr. Dennis Sawtelle, it seemed to me for a time, was a gentleman who might persuade her that romance and a competence need not be hopelessly divorced. He was a rather frequent guest at her house; he paid her, as he did most women, extravagant compliments which were saved from impertinence and burlesque only by the charm of his manner—friendly, merry, spontaneous, and sincere even when he was most absurd. He was an idle young man of the most bewildering multiplicity of occupations. He played polo with his own ponies, and he yachted on his friends' crafts; he played tennis with the young, and golf with the more mature and less agile; he was a cotillion leader of renown; he spent time enough in organizing amateur theatricals for the rich to have accomplished some real work; he was constantly chronicled as “among those present.” I have never known a man so unendingly in demand as best man and usher at weddings. And in the midst of the strenuous activity of his indolent days and nights, he managed, it seemed to me, to make a great deal of time for Peggy Woolson, who was only very precariously, very intermittently, on the edge of the favored circle in which he disported himself as an intimate.

But after I had known Peggy six months, and she had forgiven me because she could never ask Miranda Fenwick-Hall to dinner as a friend of her dear Geraldine and Amy Alcott's; and after she had told me all her love affairs from the time she was six, she set my mind at rest concerning Dennis Sawtelle.

“There's nothing in it for either of us, Amy dear,” she said, when I had intimated that I thought him devoted to her. “He'll never marry at all unless he falls awfully in love; or unless he falls ill, by and by. He's just the sort of man to ward off matrimony until he's forty-tive, and then marry a hospital nurse who has taken care of him after an automobile accident. He's a harmless trifler. He may fall in love, of course—and then he'd want to marry—want it hard. But not with me, my dear. I'm too much of a harmless trifler, myself. No—it'll be some one of the serious sort, I think. You're a serious sort, yourself, Amy,” she added, beaming mischievously upon me.

I felt myself redden. It was true that I had tried to sound her on her relations with Mr. Sawtelle because I had begun, in my vanity, to imagine a something “special” in his manner to me; and I did not wish to be guilty of the remotest disloyalty to kind, ambitious, hard-working Peggy Woolson.

“Go ahead, my dear, corral and brand him!” she advised merrily—she sometimes talked the jargon of the Texas cattle country where she had lived with her husband. “I am a good judge of men—he'll go beautifully in double harness, once he's broken to it! He's got plenty of money. Go ahead—with my blessing!”

I was twenty-eight years old when this advice was given me. The last four years of my life had been laborious, lacking in deep personal interest, lacking altogether in the stimulation of masculine admiration. From the day when Dirk had turned his accusing eyes upon me and had told me, with his shaking, angry voice, that I must chose for all time between him and Geraldine, no man had spoken a word of love to me. That which might have been the warmth, the sunshine of existence to a woman of my sort had been utterly lacking.

Long ago I had given up the hope that Dirk might come back to me. Long ago I had ceased to think that I saw him coming, in the person of every tall man in the distance; long ago I had ceased to imagine to myself the words with which he would tell me that he loved me so that he could not live without me! I had even ceased—so dulling a thing is time, so deadening is sordid anxiety—to wish to hear them! I no longer awoke, thrilling, from wild, frightened, sweet dreams of the cove and of bridals by the sea. I suppose, in short, that I had stopped loving Dirk, if, indeed, that outreaching of my untried youth toward his had been love, and not merely the material out of which love is made by life.

And Dennis Sawtelle, whose compliment to me was never to pay me any compliment in words; whose devoirs to me were never those of the gallant, but always those of the considerate friend; whose little gifts to me were never the orchids and bonbons he sent Peggy, but books whose ancient leather bindings had been worn smooth by many loving generations of readers—Dennis Sawtelle was beginning to play a part in my starved emotional life. I felt, in the bleak, New England, sensible core of me, that he and I were no true mates; I seemed to myself, when I thought of us together, a crawling earthworm, while he seemed to me a peculiarly iridescent butterfly. Yet, since no man had made the least love to me for years, I was starved for love-making. Since no other man, except, perhaps, the always astonished Bromley, had even bothered to look at me twice, I cherished the memory of every one of Dennis' warm, cordial glances. Marriage with him—supposing he should ever come to the point of proposing to me—would mean no separation from Geraldine, I reasoned, even if she still needed my services as duenna; for this citizen of the world was in the habit, so I learned, of spending a few months now and again in this and that European city, and it would be no interference with his habits to sojourn where the necessities of Jerry's art might demand for a while.

Whether Jerry's art was to demand a sojourn abroad immediately was something of a question. Ludwig Rosenhammer, that amazing impresario who was turning the opera in America topsy-turvy about this time, had heard her sing, and he had sworn one of his great, round, picturesque oaths that she needed no European bush for her wine—that he would put her on in another year, the first truly American prima donna! Jerry, who had done a little “paid” singing since she had been dropped by Mrs. Fenwick-Hall—helping out this violinist's recital, that pianist's appearance, supplying the vocal numbers of this small orchestra's concert—decided, at Rosenhammer's urgence, to give up all that slow, laborious climb to fame. She was to reserve herself for her great, her flamingly heralded appearance in his new opera house.

“They shall watch for you as astronomers watch for the great comet!” he told her. “As they watch for the eclipses. But this shall be no eclipse, my dear Alcott! Trust Rosenhammer for that—little Rosey, who alone. knows how to advertise. You do not believe me, hein? Watch me, and you shall see!”

He was very convincing, and the mere fact that he had all sorts of litigation on his hands—suits for breaches of contract, injunctions against the appearance of this and that artist—kidnaped, so to speak, from rival impresarios—suits for the payment of the builders of the theaters and opera houses with which he seemed possessed to bestrew the earth—all this widely advertised litigation could not shake one's faith in his sincerity and in his capacity, when he talked to one.

Geraldine was in a flame of excitement over his promises, over the spangled hopes he waved before her dazzled eyes. All her early ambition seemed restored to her; the artistically deadening effect of the years when she had been smothered by Mrs. Fenwick-Hall's patronage, and had learned to worship the false gods of luxury and leisure rather than the artist's one true god of achievement, seemed evaporated. She worked diligently. She gave up half her social engagements; she took long, brisk walks to keep herself in condition instead of merely lying abed and allowing me to wait upon her for the same end. And she would often sit, her hands clasped about her shapely knees—Jerry was the only woman I ever knew who could look graceful with her legs crossed—looking at me with dewy, radiant eyes, and cry: “Oh, A, A! If I do land, how I shall repay you, you poor martyr, you! How I shall repay you! And I am going to land, am I not, A? Am I not?”

“Rosey thinks so,” I used to answer, trying to be casual and unemotional about it all, but in reality almost as much excited as she was herself, and deeply touched by the expressions of her gratitude to me. After all, she was mother's own child! After all, life had wrought with us for the best! If she should have her success now—if in the prime of her youth and beauty, the untarnished, unworn pride of girlhood, the flower of her genius, she should have the chance for which so many struggled unavailingly, would not my sacrifice of myself, my fostering of her selfishness, be justified? And if, upon this triumph, another should be vouchsafed! If I should learn to feel again! If the pleasant little waves of gratitude and warmth and companionability that I experienced in the gladdening society of Dennis Sawtelle should grow into a real woman's passion for a man—and a passion shared, reciprocated! If I should have, after the bare years, the life for which I felt myself best fitted—a home, a husband, children! Though I should not again know even the beginnings of love, as once I had known them, was there not a full life before me? After all, that had been a child's unripe affair, that engagement with Dirk! It need not rob me of my life! We were full of hope, Geraldine and I, during those weeks.

And then, one day after I had taken a walk with Dennis and had tried, with conscientious effort, to persuade myself that I could learn to care for him, the elegant, pleasant trifler, with a whole heart, and that it would gratify more than my sense of vanity to win him away from the other women who might care to win him, I came home to find Geraldine sitting in the little drawing-room of the apartment—it had been altogether ours during the past six months of our prosperity and hope—her face gray, her lips drawn, her body limp. I thought of calamity to father or to John—I had not yet learned Geraldine well enough to know that only calamity to herself could so profoundly move her.

“What is it?” I cried. “Father? John?”

She turned reproachful eyes upon me. “Look at that. Haven't you seen it?' she demanded. She thrust a crumpled afternoon paper before my eyes. In large type across a double column ran the words:

ROSENHAMMER YIELDS.

RETIRES FROM OPERA PRODUCTION.

Below was printed the story of his agreement with the rival musical interests of the city to give up all the musical undertakings in which he was interested in the United States and Canada. And his own confirmation of the news was given in a report obtained from him in his stateroom on board the outgoing Lusitania that morning! He was sailing for Europe for a year's rest.

I gave the paper back to her, with some weak words about the unreliability of newspaper reports. But she had already verified the tale through one of his secretaries.

“Even so, Jerry dear,” I said, standing beside her and laying my fingers upon her bright hair, “it is not the end of the world, you know. There is still all that you hoped for—there is still the Metropolitan——”

“Only after a European success!” Geraldine answered lugubriously. “Those men aren't the splendid gamblers that Rosenhammer is. No—all the months we've been believing in him were wasted. I should have been in Paris or Rome or Munich. Or I should have been married——” She fell into a profounder melancholy.

“We'll go abroad in the autumn!” I cried fervently. I did not quite see how we were to manage it, but I felt the enthusiasm that moves mountains of obstacles. 'We'll go—— Oh, Jerry, you shall have your triumph! See”—I added, turning the paper upside down in my eagerness—“see! It says here that after he has had a long rest, Rosenhammer may enter the field of European production. Think of it, Jerry—he may be your first impresario yet, and you may come back to the Metropolitan from a triumph under him in—oh, anywhere! Rome, Naples, Dresden!”

“And I may go into musical comedy to make enough to pay my board!” she interjected bitterly. “And in musical comedy, a past is of more use than a future! And I hate pasts. Oh, by the way”—her voice changed slightly; it was still bored, still pessimistic, but no longer personally so—“it seems that Dirkman Kidder has been here—speaking of pasts. The hallboy gave me his card.”

She found it on the table and handed it listlessly to me. My fingers were suddenly like ice as I took it, and read, in neat English block letters:

Mr. Dirkman Kidder, Twin Peaks Ranch, Cobalt, Wyoming.

Chapter IV.

He had forgiven me—forgiven me with the whole-souled completeness of the man who has long since ceased to feel the slightest twinge from a wound. He was inclined to treat the memory of our engagement and of our parting in much the same manner as he treated recollections of our remote childhood—the time he was whipped for teaching me to climb the roof of the L from the apple tree, the time when I, in a burning zeal for art, painted his face with sumac and he remained a purply-spotted monstrosity for weeks.

I do not mean to say that he actually brought up the subject of our engagement and burlesqued it in reminiscence; I do not mean that I actually asked for his forgiveness, and thus assured myself of his present amiable indifference to me. But it was all evident, notwithstanding. He came to visit us not because he wanted to resume the relations of six years ago, but because he thought kindly of the relations of sixteen and twenty-six years ago! He was East on business—important business. He was immersed in important affairs; but he had a fondness for the friends of his childhood, and so, learning in Salesport from father and Cousin Kate where Jerry and I were to be found, he came to call on us. And missing us at first, he telephoned, almost before I had recovered from the shock of his presence in town, to know when he might come again. He came the next evening.

Illustration: “They'll wilt before you get home,” he told me. “But I had a fancy to see you among them.”

Geraldine was not at home. She was in a bad mood. All the discipline, bodily and intellectual, to which she had subjected her luxury-loving soul during the months of exaltation and hope under Rosenhammer's spell, she had flung aside immediately. She had re-established prompt connection with all the idlers whom she had been conscientiously avoiding; she had become irritable, reckless—a spoiled child showing her displeasure with the cosmos by an attack of naughtiness. And on the evening when Dirk first came to see us and to teach me how thorough his cure had been, she was booked for a dinner at a noisy restaurant with some of the less magnificent of her rich acquaintances, to be followed by the theater and a supper in a restaurant famous for the daring of its cabaret show.

But I was not alone when my old lover arrived. Dennis Sawtelle had dropped in on his way somewhere—so he said: and though Morningside Heights seemed somewhat out of the usual line of Mr. Sawtelle's travel, I didn't question him as to his route.

They were very unlike. Dirk big, hearty, boyish and manly both—a person upon whom, I felt, one might lean; handsome, too, as he had not been in his restless, dissatisfied youth; all Western now, with the air of outdoor spaces about him. And Dennis, slight, casually cordial, witty, at ease, one of the less debased products of money and clubs, of idleness, and women's petting, his native powers subordinated to trifling ends for so long that they had been atrophied in the process. When I sat in the little room with the two of them, my whole soul rose in revolt against what I had been deliberately trying to persuade myself to—namely, a marriage with the lesser man. That evening—that little half hour when they sat, taking, despite the quick, responsive courtesy of their attitudes, shrewd stock of each other—opened my eyes to my own demands.

Dennis, after making, in his charming, indolently genial way, an engagement with the Westerner for his club the next afternoon, went on to the place where his agreeable, idle talents were awaited, and Dirk and I turned to look at each other. In the deep, unruffled friendliness of his eyes, in the very warmth of his manner, I read his release from the young love that had once troubled him. I read it with a stormy desire to fight against his freedom; I read it with an ambition to bring him again to my feet.

I don't think that I was still in love with him—if, indeed, I ever had been in love with him! But—why deny it?—I was ripe for marriage; I wanted that sort of domesticity that no merely feminine household is able to achieve; I wanted the settled comfort, the intimacy, the security of marriage. Geraldine was almost beyond need of me; daily I was farther pushed out of her life, more ignored in her plans, except for momentary splendid visions of gratitude. I wanted my own life, and for me, what life was there but the satisfied life of the heart? I so earnestly wanted to be married that I had flogged myself, almost, into believing that I could learn to care deeply, satisfyingly for the first and only man who had seemed drawn to me since my girlhood.

And just one half hour's contrast of Dennis Sawtelle with the manlier, robuster hero of my girlhood's little, abortive romance had shown me that I could never work myself up into a contented caring for him. Suddenly I saw myself as unwomanly, brazenly, scarletly indecent, for the intention I had cherished for revamping old emotions for a newcomer, of warming up my recollections of the few thrilling days with Dirk to serve Dennis!

No, having again seen in the flesh the one man who had ever really stirred my pulses, the emotional flagellations through which I had put myself in an endeavor to feel my pulses stirred by another seemed wicked, useless, indelicate. And yet, you understand, it was not that I felt myself in love with Dirk; it was only that he taught me I could never delude myself into thinking myself in love with Dennis! And yet I wanted to be married—I wanted my man, my home, my children, my own deep springs of life!

Of course, I did not analyze myself thus, then. Of course, I was not aware of all my revulsions and propulsions at the moment. It is only that, on looking back at my past life, I see what forces were struggling in me as I sat and talked with Dirk, as I accepted his invitation for a downtown luncheon the next day, as I restlessly remembered, that night upon my bed, the other night when we had been on the verge of mighty experiences, of mighty emotions. And I see, too, what force was directing me when, a few days later, I refused Dennis Sawtelle's offer of marriage.

Dennis, who was one of the kindest of men, capable of infinite trouble over nothing, took a kindly interest in the matter of my education in art, and had called for me at the office to go with him to the exhibition of a painter friend of his. The Courier office was still downtown, in the old Park Row neighborhood, and we had a long, twisting ride in a taxi, which was Dennis' favorite means of locomotion, before we emerged into Washington Square, feathery green and fresh with new spring leaves, sparkling with its fountain, and running over, as usual, with nursemaids and babies. Just beside the arch stood a flower huckster's cart, bright with jonquils and narcissus. Dennis stopped the cab to buy me a load of them.

“They'll wilt before you get home,” he told me. “But I had a fancy to see you among them.” He turned his smiling eyes upon me with ready admiration. “I don't believe I've ever given you any flowers before, have I? And now, from a street huckster's supply! Did any one ever tell you that you have yellow and tawny lights in your eyes, for all their sweet, saintly dovelikeness? No? Not even that splendid old friend of yours who had years and years in which to make discoveries about your eyes before I had ever seen them? Well, he's duller than he seemed!”

He stopped his chatter as we drew up before the dealer's in which his new enthusiasm's work was displayed. And in another second or two we were upstairs, in the long, dim, almost prayerfully quiet gallery. We made the round of the rooms once, and he called my attention, with his air of a connoisseur, to what he considered the particular points of excellence in the canvases. Then he said, in a voice subtly changed:

“Come, let us sit down for a minute on that brown settee in the little room where no one seems to be going. I have something to say to you.”

I went obediently to the little brown settee, and sat facing a large canvas, which I have always remembered—a picture of a great, green comber rolling in toward a strip of glaring sand under the hottest blue sky I have ever seen.

For a moment after we were seated, Dennis did not speak. Then he remarked: “I don't care for beauties.” I looked at him, laughing, and he smiled in response, but he maintained his position. “I mean it—I don't like beauties. I adore beauty, and I adore it especially in a woman; but a beauty has ceased to be a woman—she's nothing but an incarnate piece of egoism. Peggy Woolson threatened me with falling in love with your sister; I told her I shouldn't. I told her I had had better taste than to fall in love with a beauty since I was twenty. Then it was one of the English professional brand that made mincemeat of my heart! Since then—ah, since then, Amy, I should like to think that I had never played at falling in love at all until I fell truly, unfathomably, inextricably in love with you! You knew it, didn't you?”

He ceased, and looked at me with the same pleasant, admiring, unimpassioned gaze that he always wore. But he was a trifle pale.

“You knew it, didn't you?” he went on, after a second, with a faint urgency in his voice. “You meant me to fall in love with you, didn't you?”

“No, no!” I cried furiously, reddening. I could not face that accusation calmly—it was far too true. “Of course, I have been glad of your—your liking——” I stumbled on, trying to compromise with the truth.

“I am glad of that. It is entirely yours. And a great deal more is yours. I—Amy, I am thirty-eight, and I cannot pretend that my heart is a virgin book, opened for the first time. But I can tell you, truthfully, that I have not wanted to marry any woman for many and many a year. You'll think me a doting sentimentalist when I tell you that you remind me, in some dim, delicately sweet way, of my mother——”

I bit my lip to keep back a smile; it was one of Peggy Woolson's axioms that no man ever makes serious love to a woman without telling her, at some point in the process, that she reminds him of his mother! Dennis interpreted my expression correctly.

“You are laughing at me for a blithering ass,” he said cheerfully. “We all do it, don't we? Never mind—it's true! Well, Amy—have I any show?”

“Oh, Dennis!” I cried, abject now. “I am so sorry—I am so unhappy! But—I shall never marry. I shall never care for any one that way!” It seemed to me only fair to promise that, so guiltily conscious was I of the atmosphere of invitation in which I had sought to envelop myself for him.

“My dearest girl! Don't doom yourself to perpetual spinsterhood just because you are sorry for me.” He forced a smile, and the pleasant light in his kind eyes was not clouded for an instant, but he was gray now beneath his city pallor. “I—think I made a mistake in bothering you to-day. I had intended—a longer wooing, my dear, to tell the truth. But—I think it was that delightful fellow I met at your house the other night who made me rush you in a panic of fright lest he grab you first! Sometimes poor old Bromley's eyes, devouring you, have given me the same feeling of the necessity of haste; but I have thought of his poor wife and his high principles, and have regained courage to be leisurely.”

“His poor wife?”

I passed over the absurdities of Dennis' speech. He was as grotesque—as madly grotesque—in his imputation of emotion to Bromley, as of danger to his own hopes from Dirkman Kidder. But I didn't want to argue with him about that. I wanted to know about my grim, gray editor's wife. I had not known that he was married. Indeed, I knew almost nothing of him.

“Yes. Poor soul!” Dennis spoke with facile sympathy. “She's in an asylum, incurably insane.”

“Oh!” I moaned.

“It's horrible,” went on Dennis. He seemed to want to talk, to regain possession of himself. “He married when he was a mere boy. The taint was in her blood, but her mother, a calculating devil, managed the thing swiftly and secretly. Bromley had a little money and a promising position. He was much in love, and saw in the girl's moods and vagaries only lovable, feminine quirks—we're such asses, when we're in love, Amy, my dear! And her terrific outbursts of exaction and jealousy, when they were first married, meant nothing—well, nothing diseased—to him. I believe they used to have a fiendish time. That is one of the things poor old Bromley reproaches himself for—that he didn't understand her, supposed her outbreaks to be merely a normal person's unrestrained temper, and—oh, well, fought her back, by and by, with her own weapons, and worse—with biting satire and cruel tongue-lashing and with contemptuous silence and absence from his home. That's the thing that torments him now. She's been out there at the asylum for five years now—and he goes to see her once a week! Cheerful way for a hard-working man to spend his day off, isn't it?

I could only murmur another “oh” of inarticulate pity and horror. What a life, what a life!

“So you see why I haven't allowed myself to be too greatly hurried by poor Bromley's eyes following you around as if he couldn't quite believe you true. And—haven't I been too precipitate, Amy? If I gave you a little longer——”

The little room was empty. He learned toward me, his gaze on the two women who were making a slow progress around the outer gallery; their backs were toward us, and he took my hand.

“Is there no use in my waiting, Amy? Or would it only bother your kind heart to think of me as still hoping, still hanging on?”

Heaven knows I wanted to care for him! Life with him would be so serene, so delicately, gracefully, kindly sheltered! But when I felt my hand cool, indifferent in his clasp, and when, staring at the great, green comber painted on the canvas opposite me, I seemed to see, instead, the sea at Salesport, the long line of waves lapping the beach at the cove, and felt again, for one stinging second, the expectant happiness that had surged through me at Dirk's touch—a thousand years ago!—I knew that I could not care for him. My eyes were wet as I turned to tell him so. I could not speak.

“Never mind, dearest child!” he said, and released my hand with a final pressure. “You and I are going to keep on being the best friends—and you'll buy my bride a far too expensive wedding present, and I'll be an usher at your wedding, and everything shall go on delightfully, just as if I hadn't bothered you with this offer of a somewhat shop-worn heart!”

I laughed a little through my mist of tears. How dear and thoughtful he was in spite of his indolence, his trifling! If only I could have loved him! If only Dirk had not elected to come East and reawaken my youth at just that moment! I was never quite so near to being in love with Dennis Sawtelle as when he left me at the door of my apartment house that day; I felt sentimental about it until I recalled that the fountainhead of amatory wisdom in my acquaintance, Mrs. Woolson, had declared as a dictum that a woman could always persuade herself she was in love with a man the instant after she had rejected him.

“I met Dirk Kidder downtown to-day,” announced Geraldine, who was, as it chanced, at home. “I took lunch with him at Sherry's. Has he told you, A, that his party is to run him for Congress next fall? Isn't it wonderful—Dirk Kidder in Congress!”

“He isn't there yet,” I remarked, not quite amiably.

Still under the spell of a lesser man's personality, I felt, unconsciously, a sort of dim resentment of men of achievement! It was ridiculous—here was Dirk spoiling Dennis Sawtelle for me, and here was Dennis, in turn, spoiling Dirk! And besides, he had not told me of his congressional possibilities.

“He's made an awful lot of money,” went on Jerry. “Did he tell you that he was here to interest some Eastern capitalists in mining property? They have a wonderful mine out there, he and his associates, and he says that if they can get the money to work it, it will mean millions and millions for everybody connected with it.”

“That would be nice,” I replied idiotically, only half hearing her as I looked through some mail.

Suddenly she disturbed my inattention by a long, rippling laugh—a laugh as melodious as her singing. I turned toward her to learn the cause of her mirth, and, as so often happened, I was smitten afresh, sharply, with the perception of her beauty. Her arms, from which the lacy sleeves of a negligee had slipped back, were clasped behind her bright head; they were as rounded, as tender, as a sculptor's dream of a nymph's arms. Her bare throat was exquisite; her color—that shimmering combination of coppery gold, of rose, and sapphire, and ivory—was dazzling. My heart throbbed with a vicarious vanity. What a marvel she would be, what a sensation she would create, with that rare and perfect beauty and that rare and perfect voice, once she made her appearance!

“What are you laughing at?” I asked her, when I had feasted my eyes on her for a second, and had taken almost a mother's joy in her—after all, had not my sacrifices helped to create her as she was?

“I saw 'dear Miranda' at Sherry's,” she explained. “She hobbled over to our table to speak to me. She treated Dirk much as if he were a deaf mute or something else as negligible. She said she had been ashamed of herself for a long time, and that this seemed as good a time as any to tell me so and to ask my pardon! I gave it to her as graciously as you can imagine. I said”—Geraldine sat up and assumed the blandly innocent look with which she had met her former patron's new advances—"I said that there could be no talk of apology from her to me—that she was always my benefactress, whatever she might try to think herself, especially for her stand in that silly affair with Horry. And then she told me that Horry was going to be married in two or three weeks to an English 'Honorable Evelyn' or something! And I answered, as sweetly as possible, rather like a maiden aunt, you know, that I was so glad his affair with that Belgian dancer had been ended—and that I supposed the newspaper reports of it had been horribly exaggerated, anyway! Then she laughed and asked me to come to see her.”

“You wouldn't go?' I cried breathlessly.

“Why not? What's the use of cherishing animosities against persons who may be useful to you? What's proper pride but a rather poor sauce to starvation? I'll go and see her any time it seems to me profitable to go.”

As usual, I comforted myself with the thought that Jerry liked to talk with a crude commercialism, but that it was quite impossible she could really feel anything of the sort. She had merely picked up the jargon of the vulgar while she consorted with them under the leadership of Mrs. Fenwick-Hall; but at heart she must always be an Alcott, of Salesport, and true daughter of the dear soul who used to sweeten her unflavored viands with the reflection: “So long as we have one another, what does anything matter?” And even while I was telling the part of my mind that criticized Jerry how blameless she must, of necessity, be at the core, she looked at me, with a long, deliberative glance.

“Are you, by any pleasant chance, going to have the good sense to marry Dennis Sawtelle when he asks you?” she interpreted the stare.

I felt myself hot beneath her inquisitive eyes. I had never confided to Geraldine, whom I felt immeasurably my junior, any of the feelings that I cheerished toward any one; I resented her intrusion into an intimacy that should be entered only upon invitation.

“He hasn't asked you already!” she cried incredulously, reading my expression somewhat differently from the way in which I had intended.

“My dear girl,” I answered somewhat tartly, “there are some things that I think don't bear discussion.”

“Fiddle!” cried Geraldine musically. “Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle! You talk like Cousin Judith at her most Victorian, or dear mother at her most otherworldly. Everything is the better for discussion—for an airing. There are no sacred reticences—the dark corners of one's mind don't breed any sort of sacrednesses! But what I want to know is if you are going to marry him? He'll ask you the minute you give him a chance—and I'd rather like him for a brother-in-law!”

“That's a consideration that would have great weight with me!” I scoffed.

“Well, it ought to have,” answered Geraldine seriously. “But—are you going to? I have sometimes marveled,” she went on with the amazing candor that never ceased to startle me, so different was it from my spirit of concealment, “why he fell in love with you instead of with me. But, after all, I think to a somewhat jaded palate, like Dennis', you would be rather the more piquant morsel, You see, essentially, I'm only a handsome creature with a voice—he's seen my type, on the stage and in society, forever and ever. But here you are, a nice blend of saint and aristocrat and hard-working woman—and quite lovely to look at, A, my dear! —and he has the discrimination to prefer you. But don't be foolish on that account! Not many men have such good taste. Most of them take their beauties as they do their other wares, on the largest advertiser's word. Are you going to take him?”

“I am not, since you persist in your impertinent probing.”

“Oh, Amy!” There was really a long wail of sorrow in her golden voice. “And why not? He'd be such a good match for you—and such a comfortable brother-in-law for little sister!”

“Because I am not in love with him,” I snapped.

“Have you already refused him?” There was real consternation in her manner now.

“Yes.”

“Oh, you idiot! You poor, romantic idiot!” She gazed at me with pity and contempt and a little anger. “For, you know, he'll never ask you again!”

“I don't want him to,” I asseverated.

“More imbecile you!” She brooded silently upon me for a minute. Then she said, more hesitantly now: “Amy—tell me—and forgive me if I offend you—you aren't still in love with Dirk, are you?”

“Geraldine, I will not submit to this for another minute,” I cried stormily. “You are impertinent and tasteless, and you must confine your tastelessness to your own affairs.”

“Oh, Amy, Amy! I do believe you still care for him.”

“I do not!” I cried, stung into the denial by I hardly. know what swelling of anger. “I don't suppose I ever was in love with him! We were a pair of children—it was a rehearsal of love, not love itself!”

She watched me deeply, gravely for a minute. Then she sighed.

“I hope that is true,” she said. “I hope it is true. And I am awfully sorry about Dennis. He's a dear fellow.”

“He is, indeed,” I agreed heartily. I meant it sincerely. And from thinking about what a dear fellow he was, I began to think of the ill-assorted friendship between him and Upton Bromley; and thence to the horrible tale he had told me of my editor's life. No wonder the man's face was seamed with lines that were not of age, that his hair was whitened in queer streaks, startling in the midst of his dense brown thatch! No wonder he was forever curt, bowed, brusque!

It seemed to me that the next few weeks of my life were crowded, disordered; I no longer had a chance to think. Dirk was forever coming to see Jerry and me, was forever carrying us forth upon pleasurings. Mrs. Fenwick-Hall, who shared Geraldine's philosophy about the folly of cherishing animosities—who, indeed, was probably its author—came to see us, and insisted upon laying hold of my sister again. She was opening a new country place she had just bought on the Hudson with a great, flaming entertainment, and it developed that she wanted Jerry to sing. Jerry, with a queer little smile, acceded to the request, much to my amazement and disgust. Dennis was almost as much in the foreground of my existence as in the days before he had made me an offer of marriage, although he was planning a long season in Germany where he had a sister married to a count connected with the court. And constantly there seemed more work for me to do in the Courier office. Some of Peggy Woolson's rich friends had invited her on a Mediterranean cruise—Peggy was the one woman of my acquaintance who received from the cultivation of the wealthy more than she bestowed!—and I was given charge of her department during her absence.

Each afternoon I used to place the “layout” of the “Home Half Page” before Mr. Bromley for approval. Peggy had graduated beyond the need of that, but the office felt some distrust of my untried ability. We never spoke of anything except my work, Mr. Bromley and I, but through all the brief interviews I had a scared, turbulent sense of intimacy with him, of a secret understanding with him. And when once, entering his quarters unannounced, I saw his leonine head bent upon his hands, and surprised the look of torture in his deep-set eyes, I had to fight against a sudden, blinding impulse to lay my hand upon his roughened hair, and to say: “Oh, my dear, my dear! I know. I am so sorry!” What I did say, however, was, “Oh, I—I beg your pardon—I thought the boy said——” And what he said was: “Come in, come in!”

Perhaps it was because of my excitement over my increased responsibilities that I failed to notice what was going on at home. Perhaps it was because the thing was concealed from me. But one night, when I had come in late from the office, I found Geraldine waiting up for me. Her eyes were large, and brilliant, and determined, and a high, unlovely color burned on her cheeks. She bade me sit down; she said she had something to tell me. I obeyed with a curious weakness.

“There is absolutely no good in mincing matters, Amy,” she said harshly. “I don't believe in doing it. And—what I have to tell you can't be dressed up very prettily at best.”

“Yes?” I answered.

“I am going to marry Dirk Kidder,” she said.

We sat in the little room, perfectly quiet for a space. My first consciousness was of disloyalty, dishonor, heartlessness. But, after a pause, I heard myself asking meditatively: “Why not?”

Why not, indeed? Dirk had succeeded in his errand East. He had the money to work his mines; a fortune, a great fortune, was assured to him. He had the prospect of eminence in politics. And to him in his maturity, successful, energetic, emulous of all the symbols of success and energy, Geraldine appealed more strongly even than Amy had appealed to that drifting, dreaming youth of his, before he had found himself. In those old days his idealism had craved a shrine, his unsuccess, his purposelessness, a mother; well, I had been, I know, the divinity of the shrine, the knees of benignant mother love. Now his manhood craved a mistress, his success, his assurance, a sign, an advertisement. He was in love with Jerry, of course, in love with the superb beauty of her, in love with the renown and réclamé of her golden voice! Why not, then?

And Geraldine? She loved him after her fashion, I suppose. He was virile and dominant. He offered her what she wanted more than she wanted anything else in the world—ease, power, brilliance. For hers had been only half the artist's gift. The voice of honey and of gold was hers, but not the fiery desire to give it to the world. With her—so had we all trained her!—her gift was to be a means of purchase for herself and for us of renown and luxury. Well, she had bought them in a more acceptable way!

So again I said, “Why not?” And when she came and knelt by my side and cried, I soothed her gently.

“Oh, A, A!” she besought me with sobs at the end of it all. “Tell me again that you don't love him! Tell me, tell me!”

I answered her, truthfully, that I did not. For I knew, clearly enough, that it had been but the pregnant seed of love I had destroyed for the sake of her career. I would not tell her that I believed in my heart it might have flowered into a lovelier blossom than any other in all the world, had it not been killed for her sake!

I still believe it. Illogically, persistently, I believe that there is nothing so beautiful as the love that grows out of the seed of beautiful, glamorous first love. I find no fault with life or with its exactions and demands. I do not envy Geraldine—she is the new, rich, Western congressman's wife, and their house in Washington is a show place—her husband or her house or her twin babies, her equipages, her fashion, or her leadership. She, curiously enough, envies me my modest little success, although when I went over to see her last winter, she pretended to be very proud of “Pauline,” and had the fact that she was entertaining the writer of an almost best-seller duly chronicled in all the papers, and gave me teas and dinners and receptions until I was dizzy, and even cajoled the president into quoting from the book!

“You were awfully wise, Amy, never to marry,” she said to me seriously. “You have a better figure than mine now, though you're thirty-six to my thirty. And you have your successes, your renown—every one dying to meet you for yourself and not just for your husband's millions or his vote on some old thing or other! And you have such friendships—I'm inclined to believe they are more vital to men than their loves! Dirk is more solidly fond of you than he is of me, I honestly believe! And Dennis Sawtelle is as devoted to you since he married that English widow as he was before—and so is she! Women never seem to care for me! And as for that terrible bear of a friend of yours, that Bromley— By the way, Amy, I read in the paper a few months ago of the death of a Mrs. Upton Bromley. Was it—— Oh, my dear! After all these hideous years! And you—never mind what I have been saying against marriage—you will, won't you? You will make him happy after that horror he has lived through? And yourself? Oh, you will have got all the best out of life! But you deserve it, you deserve it, my dear!”

But I know otherwise. I shall not have had the best of life, good as life has been to me. I know the aching tenderness I feel for that dear. and scarred heart against which mine is henceforth to beat is not like the happy love that might have flowered from the little idyl that was killed for Geraldine's sake. First love—one love—the great, sacred stream of life that flows unbroken from the shy, silver spring of youth—that I might have had, and that I lost!

But perhaps, as Geraldine says, no one has that except in dreams.