Chapter D: Appleton and Company (3)

At "curiosity" his clear, boyish eyes danced and his smile showed even, very white teeth and part of the interior of a too ruddy, too healthily red mouth. Like everything about him that was characteristic, this smile both fascinated and repelled. Evidently this man drew an intense physical joy from life, had made of his intellect an expert extractor of the last sweet drop of pleasure that could be got from perfectly healthy, monstrously acute nerves. When he used any nerve, any of those trained servants of his sybarite passions, it was no careless, ignorant performance such as ordinary mortals are content with. It was a finished and perfect work of art--and somehow suggestive of a tiger licking its chops and fangs and claws and fur that it might not lose a shred of its victim's flesh. But this impression of repulsion was fleeting; the charm of the personality carried off, where it did not conceal, the sinister side. Because Boris understood his fellow beings, especially the women, so thoroughly, they could not but think him sympathetic, could not appreciate that he lured them into exposing or releasing their emotions solely for his own enjoyment.

But Neva was seeing the artist so vividly that she was seeing the man not at all. Only those capable of real enthusiasm can appreciate how keenly she both suffered and enjoyed, in the presence of the Boris Raphael who to her meant the incorporeal spirit of the art she loved and served. He, to relieve her embarrassment and to give her time to collect herself, turned his whole attention to her work--a portrait of Molly, the old servant she had brought with her from Battle Field.

He seemed absorbed in the unfinished picture. In fact, he was thinking only of her. By the infection to which highly sensitive people are susceptible, he had become as embarrassed as she. One of the chief sources of his power with women was his ability to be in his own person whatever the particular woman he was seeking happened to be--foolish with the foolish, youthful with the young, wise with the sensible, serpentine with the crafty, coarse with the grossly material, spiritual with the high-minded. He had all natures within himself and could show whichever he pleased.

As he felt Neva's presence, felt the thrill of those moving graces of her figure, the passion that those mysterious veiled eyes of hers inspired, he was still perfectly aware of her defects, all of them, all that must be done before she should be ready to pluck and enjoy. It was one of her bad mornings. Her skin was rather sallow and her eyelids were too heavy. Since she had been in New York, she had adopted saner habits of regular eating and regular exercise than she had had, or had even known about, in Battle Field. She was beginning to understand why most people, especially most women, go to pieces young; and for the sake of her work, not at all because she hoped for or wished for physical beauty, she was taking better care of herself. But latterly she had been all but prostrate before a violent attack of the blues, and had been eating and sleeping irregularly, and not exercising. Thus, only a Boris Raphael would have suspected her possibilities as she stood there, slightly stooped, the sallowness of her skin harmonizing drearily with her long, loose dark-brown blouse, neutral in itself and a neutralizer. He saw at a glance the secret of her having been able to deceive everybody, to conceal herself, even from herself. He felt the discoverer's thrill; his blood fired like knight's at sight of secret, sleeping princess. But he pretended to ignore her as a personality of the opposite sex pole, knowing that to see her and know her as she really was he must not let her suspect she was observed. He reveled in such adventures upon soul privacy, not the least disturbed because they bore a not remote resemblance to that of the spy upon a nymph at the forest pool. He justified himself by arguing that he made no improper use of his discoveries, but laid them upon the high and holy altars of art and love.

Far from being discouraged by the difficulties which Neva was that morning making so obvious, he welcomed the abrupt change from the monotonous beauty of Doris Coventry. She had given him no opportunity for the exercise of his peculiar talents. With her the banquet was ready spread; with this woman practically everything had to be prepared. And what a banquet it would be! When he had developed her beauty, had made her all that nature intended, had taught her self-confidence and the value of externals and had given her the courage to express the ideas and the emotions that now shrank shyly behind those marvelous eyes of hers-- How poor, how paltry, how tedious seemed such adventures as that with Doris Coventry beside this he was now entering!

As if he were her teacher, he took up the palette and with her long-handled brushes made a dozen light, swift touches--what would have been an intolerable insolence in a less than he. To be master was but asserting his natural right; men hated him for it, but the women liked him and it.

"Oh!" she cried delightedly as she observed the result of what he had done. Then, at the contrast between his work and her own, cried "Oh," again, but despondently.

"You must let me teach you," said he, as if addressing the talent revealed in her picture.

"Do you think I could learn?" she asked wistfully.

He elevated his shoulders and brows. "We must all push on until we reach our limit; and until we reach it, we, nor no man, can say where it is."

"But I've no right to _your_ time," she said reluctantly.

"I teach to learn. I teach only those from whom I get more than I give. You see," with his engaging boyish smile, "I have the mercantile instinct."

She looked at him doubtfully, searching for the motive behind an offer, so curious, so improbable in and of itself. She saw before her now the outward and visible form of the genius she revered--a very handsome man, a man whose knowledge how to make himself agreeable to women must obviously have been got by much and intimate experience; a man whose sensuous eyes and obstreperous masculinity of thick waving hair and thick crisp reddish beard, roused in her the distrust bred by ages on ages of enforced female wariness of the male that is ever on conquest bent and is never so completely conqueror as when conquered. But this primordial instinct, never developed in her by experience, was feeble, was immediately silenced by the aspect of him which she clearly understood--his look of breadth and luminousness and simplicity, the master's eye and the master's air--the great man.

"You will teach me more than I you," he insisted.

"Why?" she managed to object, wondering at her own courage as much as at his condescension--for such an offer from such a man was, she felt, indeed a condescension.

"Because you paint with your heart while I paint rather with my head."

"But that is the greater."

"No. It is simply different. Neither is great."

"Neither?"

"Only he is supremely great who works with both heart and mind."

She showed how well she understood, by saying, "Leonardo, for example?"

Boris's face was the devotee's at mention of the god. The worldliness, the aggressive animality vanished. "Leonardo alone among painters," said he. "And he reached the pinnacle in one picture only--the picture of the woman he loved yet judged."

Her own expression had changed. The least observant would have seen just then why Boris, connoisseur, had paused before her. She had dropped her mask, had come forth as the shy beauties of the field lift their heads above the snow in response to the sun of early spring. For the first time in her life she had met a human being to whom life meant precisely what it had meant to her. His own expression of exaltation passed with the impulse that had given it birth; but she did not see. He was for her Boris Raphael, artist through and through. Instead of suspicion and shrinking, her long narrow eyes, luminous, mysterious, now expressed confidence; she would never again be afraid of one who had in him what this man had revealed to her. She had always seen it in his work; she greeted it in the man himself as one greets an old, a stanch friend, tested in moods and times of sorrow and trial.

He glanced at her, glanced hastily away lest she should realize how close he had thus quickly got to her soul, shy and graceful and resplendent as a flamingo. "You will let me teach you?" said he.

"I don't understand your asking."

"Nor do I," replied he. "All I know is, I felt I must come and offer my services. It only remains for you to obey your impulse to accept."

Without further hesitation she accepted; and there was firmly established the intimate relations of master workman and apprentice, with painting, and through painting the whole of life, as the trade, to be learned. For, the arts are a group of sister peaks commanding the entire panorama of truth and beauty, of action and repose; and to learn of a master at any one of them is to be pupil to all wisdom.

Boris arranged with her to come three mornings a week to the atelier, raftered and galleried, which he had made of the top stories of two quaint old houses in Chelsea's one remaining green square. Soon he was seeing her several afternoons also, at her apartment; and they were lunching and dining together, both alone and in the company of artists and the sort of fashionable serious-idle people who seek the society of artists. The part of her shyness that was merely strangeness did not long withstand his easy, sympathetic manner, his simplicity, his adroitness at drawing out the best in any person with whom he took pains to exert himself. It required much clever maneuvering before he got her rid of the shyness that came from lack of belief in her power to interest others. The people out West, inexpert in the social art, awkward and shy with each other, often in intimate family life even, had without in the least intending it, encouraged her and confirmed her in this depressing disbelief. In all her life she had never been so well acquainted with anyone as with Boris after a week of the lessons; and with him, even after two months of friendship, she would suddenly and unaccountably close up like a sensitive plant, be embarrassed and constrained, feel and act as if he were a stranger. Self-confidence finally came through others, not at all through him. Her new acquaintances, observant, sympathetic, quickly saw what Boris pointed out to them; and by their manner, by their many and urgent invitations and similar delicate indirect compliments, they made her feel without realizing it that she was not merely tolerated for his sake, but was sought on her own account.

We hear much of the effect of things internal, little of the far more potent effect of externals. Boris, frankly materialistic, was all for externals. For him the external was not only the sign of what was within, but also was actually its creator. He believed that character was more accurately revealed in dress than in conversation, in manners than in professions. "Show me through a woman's living place," he often said, "and I will tell you more about her soul than she could tell her confessor." His one interest in Neva was her physical beauty; his one object, to develop it to the utmost of the possibilities he alone saw. But he was in no hurry. He had the assiduous patience of genius that works steadily and puts deliberate thought into every stroke. He would not spoil his creation by haste; he would not rob himself of a single one of the joys of anticipation. And his pleasure was enhanced by the knowledge that if she so much as suspected his real design, or any design at all, she would shut herself away beyond his reach.

"I want you as a model," said he one day, in the offhand manner he used with her to conceal direct personal purpose. "But you've got to make changes in your appearance--dress--way of wearing the hair--all that."

She alarmed him by coloring vividly; he had no suspicion that it was because she had been secretly using him as a model for several months. "I've hurt your vanity?" said he. "Well, I never before knew you had that sort of vanity. I fancied you gave the least possible attention to your outside."

"I'll be glad to help you in any way," she hastened to assure him. "You're quite wrong about my reason for not accepting at once. It wasn't wounded vanity.... I don't know whether I have much vanity or not. I've never thought about it."

He laughed. "Well, you will have, when you've seen the picture I'll make. What a queer, puritanic lot you Westerners are!" He seated himself at ease astride a chair, and gazed at her impersonally, as artist at model in whom interest is severely professional. "I suppose you don't know you are a very beautiful woman--or could be if you half tried."

"No, I don't," replied she indifferently. "What do you wish me to do?"

"To become beautiful."

"Don't tease me," said she curtly. "I hate my looks. I never see myself if I can help it."

He took the master's tone with her. "You will kindly keep this away from the personal," reprimanded he. "I am discussing you as a model. I've no interest in your vanity or lack of it."

She resumed her place as pupil with a meek "I beg your pardon."

"First, I want you to spend time in looking at yourself in the glass and in thinking about yourself, your personal appearance. I want you to do this, so that you may be of use to me. But you really ought to do it for your own sake. If you are to be an artist, you must live. To live you must use to its fullest capacity every advantage nature has given you. The more you give others, the more you will receive. It is not to your credit that you don't think about dress or study yourself in the mirror. The reverse. If you are homely, thought and attention will make you less so. If you are beautiful, or could be-- What a crime to add to the unsightliness of the world when one might add to its sightliness! And what an impertinence to search for, to cry for beauty, and to refuse to do your own part."

"I hadn't thought of it in that way," confessed she, evidently impressed by this unanswerable logic.

He eyed her professionally through the smoke of his cigarette. "If you are to help me with the picture I have in mind, you'll have to change your hair--for the next few months. Your way of wearing it, I mean--though that will change the color too--or, rather, bring out the color."

Neva colored with embarrassment, remembered she was but a model, braced herself resolutely.

"For my purposes-- Just stand before that mirror there." He indicated the great mirror which gave him double the width of the atelier as perspective for his work. "Now, you'll observe that by braiding your hair and putting it on top of your head, you ruin the lines I wish to bring out. The beautiful and the grotesque are very close to each other. Your face and figure ought to be notable as an exhibit of beautiful lengths. But when you put your hair on top of your head, you extend the long lines of neck and face too far--at least, for my purposes."

"I see," said she, herself quite forgotten; for, his impersonal manner was completely convincing, and his exposition of the principles of art was as important as novel and interesting.

"Do your hair well down toward the nape of the neck--and loosely. Somewhat as it was that night at the Morrises, only--more so."

"I'll try it," she said with what sounded hopefully like the beginnings of acquiescence.

"That's better!" exclaimed he, in approval of her docile tone. "And keep on trying till you get it right. You'll know. You've got good taste. If you hadn't, it'd be useless to talk these things to you. The thing is to bring out your natural good taste--to encourage, to educate, instead of repressing it.... No, don't turn away, yet. I want you to notice some color effects. That dress you have on-- You always wear clothes that are severely somber, almost funereal--quite funereal. One would think, to look at your garb, that there was no laughter anywhere in you--no possibilities of laughter."

Neva's laughing face, looking at him by way of the mirror, showed that she was now in just the mood he wished. "I want to make a very human picture," he went on. "And, while the dominant note of the human aspect in repose is serious--pensive to tragic--it is relieved by suggestions of laughter. Your dress makes your sadness look depressed, resigned, chronic. Yet you yourself are strong and cheerful and brave. You do not whimper. Why look as if you did, and by infection depress others? Don't you think we owe it to a sad world to contribute whatever of lightness we can?"

She nodded. "I hadn't thought of that," said she.

"Well, don't you think it's about time you did? ... Now, please observe that you wear clothes with too many short lines in their making--lines that contradict the long lines of your head and body."

She whirled away from the mirror, hung her head, with color high and hands nervous. "Don't, please," she said. "You are making me miserably self-conscious."

"Oh, very well." He seemed offended, hurt. "I see you've misunderstood. How can I get any good out of you as a model unless you let me be frank? Why drag self, your personal feelings, to the fore? That is not art."

A long silence, during which she watched him as he scowled at his cigarette. "I'm sorry," she exclaimed contritely. "I'm both ungracious and ungrateful."

"Vanity, I call it," he said, with pretended disdain. "Plain vanity--and cheap, and altogether unworthy of you."

"Go on, please," she urged. "I'll not give you further trouble." Then she added, to his secret delight, "Only, _please_ don't ask me to look at myself before you--until--until--I've had a chance to improve a little."

"To go back to the hair again," pursued he, concealing his satisfaction over his victory. "My notion--for my picture--is much less severe than you are habitually--in appearance, I mean. The hair must be easy, graceful, loose. It must form a background for the face, a crown for the figure. And I want all the colors and shades you now hide away in those plaits." He surveyed her absently. "I'm not sure whether I shall paint you in high or low neck. Get both kinds of dresses--along the lines I've indicated.... Have them made; don't buy those ready-to-wear things you waste money on now.... I want to be able to study you at leisure. So, you'll have to put aside that prim, puritanic costume for a while. You won't mind?"

She had her face turned away. She simply shook her head in answer.

"I know you despise these exterior things--so far as you personally are concerned," he proceeded in a kindlier tone. "I've no quarrel with that. My own views are different. You pride yourself on being free from all social ties or obligations----"

"Not at all," cried she. "Indeed, I'm not so egotistical."

"Egotism!" He waved it away. "A mere word. It simply means human nature with the blinds up. And modesty is human nature with the blinds down. We are all egotists. How is it possible for us not to be? Does not the universe begin when we are born and end when we die? Certainly, you are an egotist. But you are very short-sighted in your egotism, my friend."

"Yes?" She was all attention now.

"You want many things in the world--things you can't get for yourself--things you must therefore look to others to help you get. You want reputation, friendship, love, to name the three principal wants, bread being provided for you. Well--your problem is how to get them in fullest measure and in the briefest time--for, your wants are great and pressing, and life is short."

"But I must have them by fair means and they must be really mine. I don't want what mere externals attract."

"Pish! Tush! Tommy rot!" Boris left the chair, took the middle of the floor and the manner of the instructor of a class. "To get them you must use to the best advantage all the gifts nature has given you--at least, you will, if you are wise, I think. Some of these gifts are internal, some are external. We are each of us encased in matter, and we get contact with each other only by means of matter. Externals are therefore important, are they not? To attract others, those of the kind we like, we must develop our external to be as pleasing as possible to them. In general, we owe it to our fellow beings to be as sightly a part of the view as we can. In particular, we owe it to ourselves to make the best of our minds and bodies, for our own pleasure and to attract those who are congenial to us and can do us the most good."

"I shall have to think about that," said she, and he saw that she was more than half converted. "I've always been taught to regard those things as trivial."

"Trivial! Another word that means nothing. Life--this life--is all we have. How can anything that makes for its happiness or unhappiness be trivial? You with your passion for beauty would have everything beautiful, exquisite, except yourself! What selfishness! You don't care about your own appearance because you don't see it."

She laughed. "Really, am I so bad as all that?"

"The trouble with you is, you haven't thought about these things, but have accepted the judgment of others about them. And what others? Why, sheep, cattle, parrots--the doddering dolts who make public opinion in any given place or at any given time."

She nodded slowly, thoughtfully.

"Another point. You are trying to have a career. Now, that's something new in the world--for women to have careers. You face at best a hard enough struggle. You must do very superior work indeed, to convince anyone you are entitled to equal consideration with men as a worker. Why handicap yourself by creating an impression that you are eccentric, bizarre?"

Neva looked astonished. "I don't understand," said she.

"What is the normal mode for a woman? To be feminine--careful of her looks, fond of dress, as pleasing to the eye as possible. Do you strive to be normal in every way but the one way of making a career, and so force people to see you're a real woman, a well-balanced human being?"

Neva had the expression of one in the dark, toward whom light is beginning to glimmer.

"A woman," proceeded he, the impersonal instructor, "a woman going in for a career and so, laying herself open to suspicion of being 'strong-minded' and 'masculine' and all sorts of hard, unsympathetic, unfeminine things that are to the mutton-headed a sign of want of balance--a woman should be careful to remove that impression. How? By being ultra-feminine, most fashionable in dress, most alluring in appearance-- Do you follow me?"

"Perfectly," said Neva. "You've given me a great deal to think about.... Why, how blind we are to the obvious! Now that I see it, I feel like a fool."

"Use the same good taste in your own appearance that you use in bringing out beauty in your surroundings. Note that----"

Boris paused abruptly; his passion was betraying itself both in his eyes and in his voice. But he saw that Neva had, as usual, forgotten the teacher in the lesson. He felt relieved, yet irritated, too. Never before had he found a woman who could maintain, outwardly at least, the fiction of friendship unalloyed with passion. "She acts exactly as if she were another man," said he discontentedly to himself, "except when she treats me as if I were another woman."

He did not return to the subject of her appearance. And his judgment that he had said enough--and his confidence in her good taste--were confirmed a few days later. She came in a new hat, a new blouse, and with her hair done as he had suggested. The changes were in themselves slight; but now that her complexion had been cleared and taken on its proper color--a healthy pallor that made her eyes sparkle and glow, every little change for the better wrought marvels. A good complexion alone has redeemed many a woman from downright ugliness; Neva's complexion now gave her regular features and blue-white teeth and changeful, mysterious eyes their opportunity. The new blouse, one of the prettiest he had ever seen, took away the pinched-in look across the shoulders to which he had objected. As for her hair, it was no longer a _melange_ of light brown and dark brown, but a halo of harmonizing tints from deepest red to brightest gold, a merry playground for sunbeams. He was astounded, startled. "Why, she has really marvelous hair!" he muttered. Then he laughed aloud; she, watching him for signs of his opinion, wore an expression like a child's before its sphinxlike teacher. She echoed his laugh.

"My advice about the mirror was not so bad, eh?" said he.

"No, indeed," replied she, with the first gleam of coquetry he had ever seen.

Puzzling over her seeming unconsciousness of the, to him, all-important fact that she was a woman and he a man, he decided that it must be a deliberately chosen policy, the result of things she had heard about him. He had always avoided talking of his conquests, though he appreciated that it was the quick and easy road to a fresh conquest; but it pleased him to feel that his reputation as a rake, a man before whom women struck the flag at the first sign from him, was as great as his fame for painting. And it seemed to him that, if Neva had heard, as she must, she could not but be in a receptive state of mind. "That's why she's on her guard," he concluded. "She's secretly at war with the old-fashioned notions in which she was bred."

He could not long keep silent. "Has somebody been slandering me to my friend?" asked he abruptly, one day, after they had both been silently at work for nearly an hour.

She paused, glanced at him, shook her head--a very charming head it was now, with the hair free about her temples and ears and in a loose coil low upon her neck. "No," said she, apparently with candor. "Why?"

"It seemed to me you were peculiar of late--distant with me."

"Really, it isn't so. You know I'd not permit anyone to speak against you to me."

"But--well, a man of my sort always has a lot of stories going round about him--things not usually regarded as discreditable--but you might not take so lenient a view."

Her face turned toward her easel again, her expression unreadably reserved.

"Not that I've been a saint," he went on. "We who have the artistic temperament-- What does that temperament mean but abnormal sensibility of nerves, all the nerves?"

"That is true," assented she.

Then she was not so cold as she seemed! She understood what it was to feel. "Of course," he proceeded, "I appreciate your ideas on those subjects. At least I assume you have the ideas of the people among whom you were brought up."

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, as if she were carefully choosing her words, "I've learned that standards of morals, like standards of taste, are individual. There are many things about human nature as I see it in--in my friends--that I do not understand. But I realize I deserve no credit for being what I am when I have not the slightest temptation to be otherwise."

Silence again, as he wondered whether her remark was a chance shot or a subtle way of informing him that, if he were thinking of her as a woman and a possibility, he was wasting energy. "What I wished to say," he finally ventured, "was that I had the right to expect you to accept me for what I am to you. You cannot judge of what I may or may not have been to anyone else, of what others may or may not have been to me."

"What you are to me," replied she earnestly, "I've no right, or wish, to go beyond that."

"And," pursued he with some raillery, "don't forget we should be grateful for all varieties of human nature--the valleys that make the peaks, the peaks that make the abysses. What a world for suicide it would be, if human nature were one vast prairie and life one long Sunday in Battle Field.... What did you hear about me?"

"Nothing that interested me."

"Really?" He could not help showing pique.

"Nothing that would have changed me, if I had believed."

"I warned you it might be true," he interrupted.

"True or false, it was not part of the Boris Raphael I admire and respect."

He shifted his eyes, colored, was silenced. He did not like her frank friendliness; he did not want her respect, or the sort of admiration that goes with respect. But he somehow felt cheap and mean and ashamed before her, had a highly uncomfortable sense of being an inferior before a superior. He was glad to drop the subject. "At least," reflected he, "the longer the delay, the richer the prize. She was meant for some man. And what other has my chance?"

And, meanwhile, following his instinct and his custom, he showed her of his all-sided nature only what he thought she would like to see; time enough to be what he wished, when he should have got her where he wished--a re-creation for the gratification of as many sides of him as she had, or developed, capacity to delight.

*VII*

*A WOMAN'S POINT OF VIEW*

Narcisse, summoned by a telephone message, went to Fosdick's house. As she entered the imposing arched entrance, Amy appeared, on the way to take her dog for a drive. "It's father wants to see you," said she. "I'll take you to him, and go. I'd send Zut alone, but the coachman and footman object to driving the carriage with no one but him in it. Fancy! Aren't some people too silly in their snobbishness--and the upper class isn't in it with the lower classes, is it?"

"You don't begin to know how amusing you are sometimes," said Narcisse.

"Oh, I'm always forgetting. You've got ideas like Armstrong. You know him?"

"I've met him," said Narcisse indifferently. "You say your father wants to see me?"

Amy looked disappointed. Her mind was full of Armstrong, and she wished to talk about him with Narcisse, to tell her all she thought and felt, or thought she thought and felt. "There's been a good deal of talk that he and I are engaged," she persisted. "You had heard it?"

"I never hear things of that sort," said Narcisse coldly. "I'm too busy."

"Well--there's nothing in it. We're simply friends."

"I'm sorry," said Narcisse.

Amy bridled. "Sorry! I'm sure _I_ care nothing about him."

"Then, I'm glad," said Narcisse. "I'm whatever you like. Is your father waiting for me?"

Narcisse liked old Fosdick--his hearty voice, his sturdy optimism, his genial tolerance of all human weaknesses, even of crimes, his passion for the best of everything, his careless generosity. "It's fine," she often thought, "to see a man act about his own hard-earned wealth as if he had found it in a lump in the street or had won it in a lottery." He seemed in high spirits that morning, though Narcisse observed that the lines in his face looked heavier than usual. "Sorry to drag you clear up here about such a little matter," said he when they two were seated, with his big table desk between them. "I just wanted to caution you and your brother. Quite unnecessary, I know; still, it's my habit to neglect nothing. I'm thinking of the two buildings you are putting up for us--for the O.A.D. How are they getting on? I've so much to attend to, I don't often get round to details I know are in perfectly safe hands."

"We start the one in Chicago next month, and the one here in May--I hope."

"Good--splendid! Rush them along. You--you and your brother--understand that everything about them is absolutely private business. If any newspaper reporter--or anybody--on any pretext whatever--comes nosing round, you are to say nothing. Whatever is given out about them, we'll give out ourselves down at the main office."

"I'll see to that," said Narcisse. "I'm glad you are cautioning us. We might have given out something. Indeed, now that I think of it, a man was talking with my brother about the buildings yesterday."

Fosdick leaned forward with sudden and astonishing agitation. "What did he want?" he cried.

"Merely some specifications as to the cost of similar buildings."

"Did your brother give him what he asked for?" demanded the old man.

"Not yet. I believe he's to get the figures together and give them to him to-morrow."

Fosdick brought his fist down on the table and laughed with a kind of savage joy. "The damned scoundrels!" he exclaimed. Then, hastily, "Just step to the telephone, Miss Siersdorf, and call up your brother and tell him on no account to give that information."

Narcisse hesitated. "But--that's a very common occurrence in our business," objected she. "I don't see how we can refuse--unless the man is a trifler. Anyone who is building likes to have a concrete example to go by."

"Please do as I ask, Miss Siersdorf," said Fosdick. "We'll discuss it afterwards."

Narcisse obeyed, and when she returned said, "My brother will give out nothing more. But I find I was mistaken. He gave the estimates yesterday afternoon."

Fosdick sank back in his chair, his features contracted in anger and anxiety. When she tried to speak, he waved her imperiously into silence. "I must think," he said curtly. "Don't interrupt!" She watched his face, but could make nothing definite of its vague reflections of his apparently dark and stormy thoughts. Finally he said, in a nearer approach to his usual tone and manner, "It's soon remedied. Your brother can send for the man. You know who he was?"

"His name was Delmar. He represented the Howlands, the Chicago drygoods people."

"Um," grunted Fosdick, reflecting again; then, as if he had found what he was searching for, "Yes--that's the trail. Well, Miss Siersdorf, as I was saying, your brother will send for Delmar and will tell him there was a mistake. And he'll give him another set of figures--say, doubling or trebling the first set. He'll say he neglected to make allowance for finer materials and details of stonework and woodwork--hardwood floors, marble from Italy, and so forth and so forth. You understand. He'll say he meant simply the ordinary first-rate office building--and wasn't calculating on such palaces as he's putting up for the O.A.D."

Narcisse sat straight and silent, staring into her lap. Fosdick's cigar had gone out. She had never before objected especially to its odor; now she found it almost insupportable.

"You'd better telephone him," continued Fosdick. "No--I'll just have the butler telephone him to come up here. We might as well make sure of getting it straight."

Narcisse did not stir while Fosdick was out of the room, nor when he resumed his seat and went on, "All this is too intricate to explain in detail, Miss Siersdorf, but I'll give you an idea of it. It's a question of the secrecy of our accounts."

"But we know nothing of your company's accounts, Mr. Fosdick," said she. "You will remember that, under our contracts, we have nothing whatever to do with the bills--that they go direct to your own people and are paid by them. We warned you it was a dangerous system, but you insisted on keeping to it. You said it was your long established way, that a change would upset your whole bookkeeping, that----"

"Yes--yes. I remember perfectly," interrupted Fosdick, all good humor.

"You can't hold us responsible. We don't even know what payments have been made."

"Precisely--precisely."

"It's a stupid system, permit me to say. It allows chances for no end of fraud on you--though I think the people we employed are honest and won't take advantage of it. And, if your auditors wanted to, they could charge the company twice or three times or several times what the building cost, and----"

"Exactly," interrupted Fosdick, an unpleasant sharpness in his voice. "Let's not waste time discussing that. Let me proceed. We wish no one to know what our buildings cost."

"But--you have to make reports--to your stockholders--policy holders rather."

"In a way--yes," admitted Fosdick. "But all the men who have the direction and control of large enterprises take a certain latitude. The average citizen is a picayunish fellow, mean about small sums. He wouldn't understand many of the expenditures necessary to the conduct of large affairs. He even prefers not to be irritated by knowing just where every dollar goes. He's satisfied with the results."

"But how does he know the results shown him are the real results? Why, under that system, figures might be juggled to cheat him out of nearly all the profits."

"The public is satisfied to get a reasonable return for the money it invests--and _we_ always guarantee that," replied Fosdick grandly.

Narcisse looked at him with startled eyes, as if a sharp turn of the road had brought her to the brink of a yawning abyss. It suddenly dawned on her--the whole system of "finance." In one swift second a thousand disconnected facts merged into a complete, repulsive whole. So, _this_ was where these enormous fortunes came from! The big fellows inveigled the public into enterprises by promises of equal shares; then they juggled accounts, stole most of the profits, saddled all the losses on the investors. And she had admired the daring of these great financiers! Why, who wouldn't be daring, with no conscience, no honor, and a free hand to gamble with other people's money, without risking a penny of his own! And she had admired their generosity, their philanthropy, when it was simply the reckless wastefulness of the thief, after one rich haul and before another! She saw them, all over the world, gathering in the mites of toiling millions as trust funds, and stealing all but enough to encourage the poor fools to continue sending in their mites! She read it all in Josiah's face now, in the faces of her rich clients; and she wondered how she could have been so blind as not to see it before. That hungry look, sometimes frankly there, again disguised by a slimy over-layer of piety, again by whiskers or fat, but always there. Face after face of her scores of acquaintances among the powerful in finance rose beside Josiah's until she shrank and paled. Under the slather of respectability, what gross appetites, what repulsive passions! But for the absence of the brutal bruisings of ignorance and drink, these facts would seem exhibits in a rogues' gallery.

Josiah had no great opinion of the brains of his fellow men. Women he regarded as mentally deficient--were they not incapable of comprehending business? So, while he saw that Narcisse was not accepting his statement as the honorable, though practical, truth he believed it to be, he was not disturbed. "I see you don't quite follow me," he said with kindly condescension. "Business is very complex. My point is, however, that our accounts are for our own guidance, and not for our rivals to get hold of and use in exciting a lot of silly, ignorant people."

Alois Siersdorf now entered and was effusively welcomed. "What's the matter?" he exclaimed. "Have I made a mess of some sort?"

"Not at all, my boy," said Fosdick, clapping him on the back. "Our rivals have got up an investigating committee--have set on some of our policy holders to pretend to be dissatisfied with our management. I thought until yesterday that the committee was simply a haphazard affair, got together by some blackmailing lawyer. Then I learned that it was a really serious attempt of a rival of mine to take the company away from me. They're smelling round for things to 'expose'--the old trick. They think this is a rare good time to play it because the damn-fool public has been liquored up with all sorts of brandy by reformers and anarchists and socialists, trying to set it on to tear down the social structure. No man's reputation is safe. You know how it is in big affairs. It takes a broad-gage man to understand them. A little fellow thinks he sees thief and robber and swindler written everywhere, if he gets a peep at the inside. I don't know what we're coming to, with the masses being educated just enough to imagine they know, and to try to take the management of affairs out of the hands of the substantial men."

With lip curling Narcisse looked at her brother, expecting to see in his face some sign of appreciation of the disgusting comedy of Fosdick's cant; but he seemed to be taking Josiah and his oration quite seriously; to her amazement he said, "I often think of that, Mr. Fosdick. We must have a stronger government, and abolish universal suffrage. This thing of ignorant men, with no respect for the class with brains and property, having an equal voice with us has got to stop or we'll have ruin."

A self-confessed thief trying to justify himself by slandering those he had robbed, and angry with them because they were not grateful to him for not having taken all their property--and her brother applauding!

"You're right," said Fosdick, clapping him on the knee. "I've been trying to explain to your sister--though I'm afraid I don't make myself clear. The ladies--even the smartest of them--are not very attentive when we men talk of the business side of things. However, I suggested to her that you recall those specifications you gave my enemies----"

"Is it possible!" exclaimed Siersdorf, shocked. "Yes--yes--I see--I understand. But I can straighten it all out. I was rather vague with Delmar. I'll send for him and tell him I was calculating on very different kinds of buildings for him--something much cheaper----"

"Precisely!" cried Josiah. "Your brother's got a quick mind, Miss Siersdorf."

Narcisse turned away. Her brother had not even waited for Fosdick to unfold his miserable chicane; his own brain had instantly worked out the same idea; and, instead of in shame suppressing it, he had uttered it as if it were honest and honorable!

"There's another matter," continued Fosdick. He no longer felt that he must advance cautiously. Sometimes, persons not familiar with large affairs, not accustomed to dealing under the conditions that compel liberal interpretation of the moral code, had been known to balk, unless approached gradually, unless led by gentle stages above narrow ideas of the just and the right. But clearly, the Siersdorfs, living in the atmosphere of high finance, did not need to be acclimated. "It may be this committee can get permission from the State Government to pry into our affairs. I don't think it can; indeed, I almost know it can't; we've got the Government friendly to us and not at all sympathetic with these plausible blackmailers and disguised anarchists. Still, it's always well to provide for any contingency. If you should get a tip that you were likely to be wanted as witnesses you could arrange for a few weeks abroad, and not leave anything--any books or papers--for these scoundrels to nose into, couldn't you?"

"Certainly," assented Siersdorf, with great alacrity. "You may be sure they'll get nothing out of us."

"Then, that's settled," said Fosdick. "And now, let's have lunch, and forget business. I want to hear more about those plans for Amy's house down in Jersey. She has told me a good deal, but not all."

"We can't stop to lunch," interposed Narcisse, with a meaning look at her brother. "We must go back to the office at once." And when she saw that Fosdick was getting ready for a handshake, she moved toward the door, keeping out of his range without pointedly showing what she was about. In the street with her brother she walked silently, moodily beside him, selecting the softest words that would honestly express the thoughts she felt she must not conceal from him.

"A great man, Fosdick," said Alois. "One of the biggest men in the country--a splendid character, strong, able and honorable."

"Why do you say that just at this time?" asked his sister.

Alois reddened a little, avoided meeting her glance.

"To convince yourself?" she went on. "To make us seem less--less dishonest and cowardly?"

He flashed at her; his anger was suspiciously ready. "I felt you were taking that view of it!" he cried. "You are utterly unpractical. You want to run the world by copybook morality."

"Because I haven't thrown 'Thou shalt not steal' overboard? Because I am ashamed, Alois, that we are helping this man Fosdick to cover his cowardly thief tracks?"

"You don't understand, Cissy," he remonstrated, posing energetically as the superior male forbearing with the inferior female. "You oughtn't to judge what you haven't the knowledge to judge correctly."

"He is a thief," retorted she bluntly. "And we are making ourselves his accomplices."

Alois's smile was uncomfortable. With the manner of a man near the limit of patience with folly, he explained, "What you are giving those lurid names to is nothing but the ordinary routine of business, throughout the world. Do you suppose the man of great financial intellect would do the work he does for small wages? Do you imagine the little people he works for and has to work through, the beneficiaries of all those giant enterprises, would give him his just due voluntarily? He's a man of affairs, and he works practically, deals with human nature on human principles--just as do all the great men of action."

Narcisse stopped short, gazed at him in amazement. "Alois!" she exclaimed.

He disregarded her rebuke, her reminder of the time when he had thought and talked very differently. "Suppose," he persisted, "these great fortunes didn't exist; suppose Fosdick were ass enough to take a salary and divide up the profits; suppose all these people of wealth we work for were to be honest according to your definition of the word--what then? Why, millions of people would get ten or twelve dollars a year, or something like that, more than they now have, and there'd be no great fortunes to encourage art, to employ people like us, to endow colleges and make the higher and more beautiful side of life."

"That's too shallow to answer," said Narcisse sternly. "You know better, Alois. You know it's from the poor that intellect and art and all that's genuine and great and progressive come--never from the rich, from wealth. But even if it were not so, how can _you_ defend anything that means a sacrifice of character?" She stopped in the street and looked at him. "Alois, _what_ has changed you?"

"Come," he urged rather shamefacedly. "People are watching us."

They went on in silence, separated at the offices with a few constrained words. They did not meet again until the next morning--when he sought her. He looked much as usual--fresh, handsome, supple in body and mind. Her eyes were red round the edges of the lids and her usually healthy skin had the paleness that comes from a sleepless night. "Well," he said, with his sweet, conciliatory smile--he had a perfect disposition, while hers was often "difficult." "Do you still think I'm wrong--and desperately wicked?"

"I haven't changed my mind," she answered, avoiding his gaze.

He frowned; his face showed the obstinacy that passes current for will in a world of vacillators.

"You've always left business to me," he went on. "Just continue to leave it. Rest assured I'll do nothing to injure my honor in the opinion of any rational, practical person--or the honor of the firm."

She was not deceived by the note of conciliation in his voice; she knew he had his mind fixed. She was at her desk, stiffly erect, gazing straight ahead. Her expression brought out all the character in her features, brought out that beauty of feminine strength which the best of the Greeks have succeeded in giving their sculptured heroines. Without warning she flung herself forward, hid her face and burst into tears. "Oh, I _hate_ myself!" she cried. "I'm nothing but a woman, after all--miserable, contemptible, weak creatures that we are!"

He settled himself on the arm of her chair and drew her into his arm. "You're a finer person in every way than I am," he said; "a better brain and a better character. But, Cissy dear, don't judge in matters that aren't within your scope."

"Do as you please," she replied brokenly. "I'm a woman--and where's the woman that wouldn't sacrifice anything and everything for love?"

She had, indeed, spent a night of horror. She felt that what he had done was frightful dishonor--was proof that he was losing his moral sense and, what seemed to her worse, becoming a pander to the class for which they did most of the work they especially prided themselves upon. She felt that, for his sake no less than for her own, she ought to join the issue squarely and force him to choose the right road, or herself go on in it alone. But she knew that he would let her go. And she had only him. She loved him; she would not break with him; she could not.

"You know nothing about those buildings, anyhow," he continued. "Just forget the whole business. I'll take care of it. Isn't that fair?"

"Anything! Anything!" she sobbed. "Only, let there be peace and love between us."

*VIII*

*IN NEVA'S STUDIO*

Shown into the big workroom of Neva's apartment with its light softened and diffused by skillfully adjusted curtains and screens, Narcisse devoted the few minutes before Neva came to that thorough inspection which an intelligent workman always gives the habitat of a fellow worker.

"What a sensitive creature she is!" was the reminiscent conclusion of the builder after the first glance round. A less keen observer might have detected a nature as delicately balanced as an aspen leaf in the subtle appreciation of harmony and contrast, of light and shade. And there were none of the showy, shallow tricks of the poseur; for, the room was plain, as a serious worker always insists on having his surroundings. It appeared in the hanging of the few pictures, in the colors of the few rugs and draperies, of walls, ceiling, furniture, in the absence of anything that was not pleasing; the things that are not in a room speak as eloquently of its tenant as do the things that are there.

"Not a scrap of her own work," thought Narcisse, with a smile for the shyness that omission hinted.

"Pardon my keeping you waiting," apologized Neva, entering in her long, brown blouse with stains of paint. "I was at work when you were announced."

"And you had to hustle everything out of sight, so I'd have no chance to see."

Neva nodded smiling assent. "But I'm better than I used to be. Really, I am. My point of view is changing--rapidly--so rapidly that I wake up each morning a different person from the one who went to bed the night before."

Narcisse was thinking that the Neva before her was as unlike the Neva of their school days as a spring landscape is unlike the same stretch in the bleak monotones of winter. "Getting more confidence in yourself?" suggested she aloud. "Or are you beginning to see that the world is an old fraud whose judgments aren't important enough to make anyone nervous?"

"Both," replied Neva. "But I can't honestly claim to be self-made-over. Boris teaches me a great deal beside painting."

Narcisse changed expression. As they talked on and on--of their work, of the West, of the college and their friendship there, Neva felt that Narcisse had some undercurrent of thought which she was striving with, whether to suppress or express, she could not tell. The conversation drifted back to New York, to Boris. There was something of warning in Narcisse's face, and something of another emotion less clearly defined as she said with a brave effort at the rigidly judicial, "Boris is a great man; but first of all a man. You know what that means when a man is dealing with a woman."

Neva's lip curled slightly. "That side of human nature doesn't interest me."