Chapter I: DIDN’T sleep well that night. The memory of Mr. Masters’ set sullen (1)

face kept me wakeful. At four I got up, lit the light and tried to read Kidd’s _Social Evolution_. Through the ceiling I could hear Mr. Hamilton’s subdued snoring on the floor above. It seemed like the deep and labored breathing of that submerged world whose upward struggle I was following through Mr. Kidd’s illuminating page.

After breakfast, when no sign or word had come from Lizzie, I decided to stay in till I heard from her. I dawdled through the morning and when Emma was cleaning up went out on the landing and listened. The upper floors were wrapt in quiet. I stole up a flight and a half and looked at her door--tight shut and not a sound. I went down again worried, though it was possible she had gone out and I not heard her. After lunch I opened the register and listened--complete silence. During the rest of the afternoon I sat waiting for her footfall. Dusk came and no woman had mounted the stairs. At seven a tap came at my door and Count Delcati pushed it open.

The count brought letters from the Italian aristocracy to its New York imitation and goes to entertainments that the rest of us read of in the papers. He was arrayed for festival and looked like an up-to-date French poster, a high-shouldered black figure with slender arms slightly bowed out at the elbows. His collar was very stiff, his shirt bosom a clear expanse of thick smooth white. He wore his silk hat back from his forehead, and his youthful yet sophisticated face, with its intense black eyes and dash of dark mustache, might have been looking at me from the walls of the Salon Independent.

He removed his hat, and standing in the doorway, said:

“Have you seen her to-day?”

“No,” I answered. “Have you?”

He shook his head.

“I think she must be away. When I came home at six I went up there and knocked, but there was no answer.”

There was nothing in this to increase my uneasiness. She came and went at all hours, often taking her dinner at what she called “little joints” in the lower reaches of the city. Nevertheless my uneasiness did increase, gripped hold of me as I looked at the young man’s gravely attentive face.

“Have you seen her since the concert?” he asked.

“Yes, the day after, when you were all in here.”

“She hadn’t seen the notices?”

I shook my head.

He leaned against the door-post and gazed at his patent leather shoes. As if with reluctance he said slowly:

“I have.”

“What were they like?”

“Rotten.”

He pronounced the word with the “r” strangled yet protesting, as if he had rolled his tongue round it, torn it from its place and put it away somewhere in the recesses of his throat.

“Oh, poor girl!” I moaned.

“That’s why I went up there. She must have seen them and I wished to assure her they were lies.”

“Did they say anything very awful?”

He shrugged.

“They spoke of her beauty--one said she had a good mezzo voice. But they were not kind to her, to Mr. Berwick, _very_.”

I said nothing, sunk in gloom.

The count picked up his fur-lined coat from the stair rail, and shook himself into it.

“I should wait to go to her when she comes in, but this _meeserable_ dinner, where I sit beside young girls who know nothing and married ladies who know too much--no mystery, no allure. But I must go--perhaps you?--” He looked at me tentatively over his fur collar.

“I’ll go up as soon as she comes in,” I answered. “If there’s anything I can do for her be assured I’ll do it.”

“You are a sweet lady,” said the count and departed.

After that I sat with the door open a crack waiting and listening. The hours ticked by. I heard Mr. Hamilton’s step on the street stairs, a knock at the Westerner’s door, and as it opened to him, a joyous clamor of greeting in which Miss Bliss’ little treble piped shrilly. Hazard was painting her and she spent most of her evenings in there with them. It was a good thing, they were decent fellows and their room was properly heated.

At intervals the sounds of their mirth came from below. The rest of the house was dumb. At eleven I could stand it no more and went up. If she wasn’t there I could light up the place for her--she rarely locked her door--and have it bright and warm.

It was dimly lighted and very still on the top floor, the gas-jet tipping the burner in a small pale point of light. I knocked and got no answer, then opened the door and went in. The room was dark, the window opposite a faint blue square. In the draft made by the opening door the gas shot up as if frightened, then sunk down, sending its thin gleam over the threshold. As I moved I bumped into the table and heard a thumping of something falling on the floor. I saw afterward it was oranges. I groped for matches, lighted the gas and looked about, then gave a jump and a startled exclamation. Lizzie Harris was lying on the sofa.

“Lizzie,” I cried sharply, angry from my fright, “why didn’t you say you were there?”

She made no sound or movement and seized by a wild fear, I ran to her. At the first glance I thought she was dead. She was as white as a china plate, lying flat on her back with her eyes shut, her hands clasped over her waist. I touched one of them and knew by the warmth she was alive. I clutched it, shaking it and crying:

“Lizzie, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”

She tried to withdraw it and turned her face away. The movement was feeble, suggesting an ebbing vitality. I thought of suicide, and in a panic looked about for glasses and vials. There was nothing of the kind near her. In my lightning survey I saw a scattering of newspaper cuttings on the table among the rest of the oranges.

“Have you taken anything, medicine, poison?” I cried in my terror.

“No,” she whispered. “Go away. Let me alone.”

I was sorry for her, but I was also angry. She had given me a horrible fright. Failure and criticism were hard to bear, but there was no sense taking them this way.

“What _is_ the matter then? What’s happened to make you like this?”

“Let me alone,” she repeated, and lifting one hand, held it palm upward over her face.

That something was wrong was indisputable, but I couldn’t do anything till I knew what it was. I put my fingers on the hand over her face and felt for her pulse. I don’t know why, for I haven’t the least idea how a pulse ought to beat. As it was I couldn’t find any beat at all and dropped her hand.

“I’ll have to get a doctor, I’ll call the man in the boarding house opposite.”

“Don’t,” she said in a voice which, for the first time, showed a note of life. “If you bring a doctor here I’ll go out in the street as I am.”

She was in the blue kimono. I didn’t know whether she had strength enough to move, but if she had I knew that she would do as she said and the night was freezing.

“I won’t call the doctor if you’ll tell me what’s happened to you?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said, and raising the hand from her face caught at my skirt. I bent down for her voice was very low, hardly more than a whisper.

“Masters has left me.”

“Left you,” I echoed, bewildered. “He was here last night. I saw him.”

Her eyes held mine.

“Left me for good,” she whispered, “forever.”

Any words that I might have had ready to brace up a discouraged spirit died away.

“What--what do you mean?” I faltered.

“He and I were lovers--lived together--you must have known it. He got tired of me--sick of me--he told me so himself--those very words. He said he was done with it all, the singing and me.” She turned her head away and looked at the wall. “I’ve been here ever since. I don’t know how long.”

I stood without moving, looking at her, and she seemed as dead to my presence as if she had really been the corpse I at first thought her. Presently I found myself putting a rug over her, settling it with careful hands as if it occupied my entire thoughts.

I do not exactly know what did occupy them. A sort of sick disgust permeated me, a deep overwhelming disgust of life. Everything was vile, the world, the people in it, the sordid dirt of their lives. I almost wished that I might die to be out of it all.

Then I sat down beside her. She lay turned to the wall, with the light of the one burner making long shadows in the folds of the rug. Her neck and cheek had the hard whiteness of marble, her hair, like a piece of black cloth, laid along them. The sickening feeling of repugnance persisted, stronger than any pity for her. I suppose it was the long reach of tradition, an inherited point of view, transmitted by those prim and buckramed ladies on my dining-room wall, and also perhaps that I had never known a woman, well, as a friend, who had done what Lizzie Harris had done. It was the first time in my life, which had moved so precisely in its prescribed groove, that I had ever taken to my heart, believed in, grieved over, loved and trusted a woman thus stained and fallen.

I will also add, for I am truthful with myself, that when I got up and went to her, all inclination to touch her, to console and comfort her, was gone. For those first few moments she was physically objectionable to me, as if she might have been covered with dirt. Yet I felt that I must look after her, had what I suppose you would call a sense of duty where she was concerned. I have always hated the phrase; to me it signifies a dry sterile thing, and it held me there because I would have been uncomfortable if I had gone. Is it the training women get in their youth that makes them like this, makes them only give their best when the object is worthy, as we ask only the people to dinner who can give us a good dinner back? I heard the sense of duty chill in my voice as I spoke to her.

“Have you had anything to eat since--that is, to-day?”

She did not answer. I bent farther over and looked at the profile with the eyes closed. They were sunken, as if by days of pain. I have seen a good many sick people in my life, but I had never seen any one so changed in so short a time. I gazed down at her and the appeal of that marred and anguished face suddenly broke through everything, stabbed down through the world’s armor into the human core. I tried to seize hold of her, to make my hands tell her, and cried out in the poor words that are our best:

“Oh, Lizzie, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for you.”

It was like taking hold of a dead body. Her arm fell from my hand an inert weight. Condemnation or condonement were all the same to her.

What was I to do? The clock marked midnight. The joyful sounds from below had ceased. I did not like to rouse the others, for, as far as I could see, she was in no immediate danger. She appeared to be in a condition of collapse, and I had never heard of any one dying of that. It was twenty-four hours since I had seen Masters on the stairs. She had had nothing to eat since then. Food was the best thing and I went into the kitchen to get some.

The top floor has what Miss Bliss calls “the bulge” on all others by having a small but complete kitchen. The gaslight showed it in a state of chaos, piles of plates waiting to be washed, the ice-box with opened door and a milk bottle overturned, some linen lying swathed and sodden over the edge of the laundry tub. I made a brew of tea and brought it to her, but one might as well have tried to make a statue drink. In answer to my pleadings she turned completely to the wall, moving one hand to the top of her head where it lay outstretched with spread fingers. In the faintly lighted room, in the creeping cold of a December midnight, that speechless woman with her open hand resting on her head, was the most tragic figure I have ever seen.

I took the tea back to the kitchen and washed the plates. Also I hunted over the place for any means of self-destruction that might be there. There were vials in the medicine closet that I stood in a row and inspected, emptying those I wasn’t sure about into the sink. As I worked I thought, sometimes pursuing a consecutive series of ideas, sometimes in disconnected jumps. It was revolutionary thinking, casting out old ideals, installing new ones. I was outside the limits within which I had heretofore ranged, was looking beyond the familiar horizon. In that untidy kitchen, sniffing at medicine bottles, I had glimpses far beyond the paths where I had left my little trail of footprints.

I didn’t know why she had given herself to Masters. Strange as it may sound, it did not then seem to me to matter. It was her affair, concern for her conscience, not mine. What was my concern was that I could not give my love and take it back. It went deeper than her passions and her weaknesses. It went below the surface of life, underlay the complicated web of conduct and action. It was the one thing that was sure amid the welter of shock and amaze.

And I understood Masters, was suddenly shifted into his place and saw his side. He had tried to make her understand and she wouldn’t, then on the straining tie that held them had dealt a savage blow, brought an impossible situation to the only possible end. I hated him, if she had been nothing to me I would have hated him. Shaking a bottle of collodion over the sink I muttered execrations on him, and as I muttered knew that I admired the brutal courage that had set them both free.

The dawn found me sitting by her frozen in mind and body. I had had time to think of what I should say to all inquiries: the failure of the concert, the blow to her hopes, had prostrated her. It was half true and quite plausible.

When the light was bright and the street awake I went out into the hall and waited. Miss Bliss was the first person I caught, coming up from the street door with a milk bottle. Her little face was full of sleep that dispersed under my urgent murmurings. She stepped inside the door and hailed tentatively:

“Hullo, Miss Harris.”

There was no answer and she ventured less buoyantly:

“Don’t you feel good, Miss Harris?”

The lack of response scared her, yet she stood fascinated like the street gamin eying the victim of an accident. She had seen enough to do what I wanted, and I took her by the arm and pulled her into the hall.

“She looks like she was dead,” she whispered, awed. “Would you think a big husky woman like that would take things so hard?”

I had prepared my lesson in the small hours and answered glibly:

“She’s not half so strong as you think and very sensitive, morbidly sensitive.”

“Um,” said Miss Bliss, “poor thing! I don’t see how if she was so sensitive, she could have stood that man Masters around so much.”

She went down to dress and presently the news percolated through the house. There was an opening and shutting of doors and whisperings on the top flight. Everybody stole up and offered help except the count, who rose late to the summons of an alarm clock. Mr. Hazard went across the street for the doctor, met Mrs. Bushey on her way to physical culture and sent her in.

I met her in the third-floor hall and we talked, sitting on the banister. The count’s alarm clock had evidently done its work, for he eyed us through the crack of his door.

“How dreadful--terribly unfortunate,” Mrs. Bushey muttered, then, looking about, caught the count’s eye at the crack: “Good morning, Count Delcati. You’re up early.”

The count responded, the gleaming eye large and unwinking as if made of glass.

Mrs. Bushey’s glance returned to me. The smile called forth by the greeting of the star lodger died away.

“If her concert was such a failure and she’s sick, how is she going to live?”

I hadn’t thought of that. It added a complication to the already complex situation.

“Oh, she must have something,” I said with a vaguely reassuringly air. “She hasn’t been making money but--”

“Do you know anything positive of her financial position?” interrupted Mrs. Bushey.

It was hard to be vague on any subject with Mrs. Bushey, on the subject of finances impossible. She listened to a few soothing sentences then said grimly:

“I see you don’t really know anything about it. Please try and find out. Of course I’m one of the most kind-hearted people in the world, but”--she held her physical culture manuals in the grip of one elbow and extended her hands--“one must live. I can’t be late with my rent whatever my lodgers can be.”

The count’s voice issued unexpectedly through the crack:

“I am late two times now and I still stay.”

Mrs. Bushey smiled at the eye.

“Of course, Count Delcati, but you’re different. I know all about you. But Miss Harris--a singer who can’t make good. They’re notoriously bad pay.” She turned sharply on me. “What seems to be the matter with her?”

“Collapse,” I said promptly. “Complete collapse and prostration.”

Mrs. Bushey hitched the books into her armpit and patted them in with her muff.

“Those are only words. I’m glad Mr. Hazard’s gone for the doctor.” She turned and moved toward the stair-head. “And if it’s anything contagious she must go at once. Don’t keep her here five minutes. The doctor’ll know where to send her.” She began the descent. “If I’d only myself to think of I’d let her stay if it was the bubonic plague. But I won’t expose the rest of you to any danger.” She descended the next flight and her voice grew fainter: “I’m only thinking of you, my lodgers are always my first consideration. If any of you got anything I’d never forgive myself.” She reached the last flight. “I wouldn’t expose one of you to contagion if I never made a dollar or rented a room. That’s the way I am. I know it’s foolish--you needn’t tell me so, but--” The street door shut on her.

The doctor came with speed and an air of purpose. At last he had somewhere to go when he ran down the stairs with his bag, and it was difficult for him to conceal his exhilaration. He was young, firm and businesslike, examined Lizzie, asked questions and said it was “shock”. He was very anxious to find out what had “precipitated the condition,” even read the notices, and then sat with his chin in his hand looking at the patient and frowning.

Out in the hall I enlarged on her high-strung organization and he listened, fixing me with a searching gaze that did not conceal the fact that he was puzzled. We whispered on the landing over nursing, food and the etceteras of illness, then branched into shocks and their causes till he suddenly remembered he had to be in a hurry, snatched up his bag and darted away.

That was yesterday. To-night I have brought up my writing things and while I watch am scratching this off at the desk where, not so long ago, I found her choosing her stage name. Poor Lizzie--is there a woman who would refuse her pity?

I can run over the names of all those I know and I don’t think there’s one, who, if she could look through the sin at the sinner, would entirely condemn. The worst of it is they all stop short at the sin. It hides the personality behind it. I know if I talked to Betty this way she’d say I was a silly sentimentalist with no knowledge of life, for even my generous Betty wouldn’t see over the sin. There’s something wrong with the way women appraise “the values” in these matters; actions don’t stand in the proper relations to character and intentions. We’re all either sheep or goats. Everything that makes our view-point, books, plays, precedent, public opinion, will have it that we’re sheep or goats, and though we can do a good many bad things and remain pure spotless sheep, there’s just one thing that if we do do, puts us forever in the corral with the goats.

But, oh--I groan as I write it--if it only hadn’t been Masters! That brute, that brigand! A hateful thing some one once told me keeps surging up in my memory--Rousseau said it I think--that one of the best tests of character was the type of person selected for love and friendship. I can’t get it out of my head. What fool ever told it to me? Oh--all of a sudden I remember--it was Roger--Roger! I feel quite frightened when I think of him. He would be so angry with me for being mixed up in such an affair, or--as he’s never angry with me--angry with fate for leading me into this _galère_. He is one of the people who adhere to the sheep and goat theory. To him women are black or white, and the white ones must have the same relation to the black that Voltaire had to _Le bon Dieu_--know them by sight but not speak.

XI

IT IS three weeks since I have written a word. There’s been too much to do, and sleeping about in chairs and on the foot of beds is not stimulating to the brain. We have had an anxious time, for Lizzie Harris has been desperately ill. Doctor Vanderhoff--that’s the young man’s name--has had no necessity to run to the corner of Lexington Avenue and then wonder which way to go, for he has been in here a good deal of the time. He is a dear, and a clever dear, too, for he has pulled Lizzie back from dreadful dangers. For a while we didn’t think she would ever be herself again. Her heart--but what’s the sense of recapitulating past perils. She’s better, that’s enough, and to-night I’m down in my apartment leaving Miss Bliss in charge.

She’s another dear, poor little half-fed thing, running back from her sittings to post up-stairs, panting and frost nipped, and take her place in that still front room. How still it’s been, with the long motionless body on the bed, that wouldn’t speak and wouldn’t eat, and hardly seemed to breathe. Sometimes the men came up and took a turn at the nursing. The count was no use. The sight of her frightened him and he had to be taken into the kitchen and given whisky. But young Hazard was as good as a hospital graduate, soft-handed and footed, better than Mrs. Phillips, who came up once or twice between her own cases, was very superior and nagged about the sun-dial.

When he could, Mr. Hazard watched for the first half of the night and Dolly Bliss and I went into the kitchen and had supper of tea and eggs. We’ve grown very intimate over these midnight meals. I don’t see how she lives--ten dollars a week the most she has made this winter, and often gaps without work. One night I asked her if she had ever posed for the altogether. Under normal circumstances I would no more have put such a question than I’d have inquired of Mrs. Bushey what she had done with her husband. But with the specter of death at our side, the reticences of every day have dropped away.

She nodded, looking at me with large pathetic eyes.

“Often in the past, but now, unfortunately, I’m not in demand for that. I’m getting too thin.”

In this close companionship I have found her generous, unselfish and honest to the core. Is our modesty an artificial attribute, grafted on us like a bud to render us more alluring? This girl, struggling against ferocious poverty, is as instinctively, as rigorously virtuous as I am, as Betty, as Mrs. Ashworth, yet she does a thing for her livelihood, the thought of which would fill us with horror. I’m going to put it to Betty, but I wouldn’t dare tell her what I really think--that of the two points of view Miss Bliss’ is the more modest.

When we were sure Lizzie was on the up-grade, a new worry intruded--had she any independent means? Nobody knew. Mrs. Bushey was urgent and to keep her quiet I offered to pay the top-floor rent for a month and found that the count had already done it. I, who knew her best, feared she had nothing, and it was “up to me” to get money for her from somewhere.

Of course Betty was my natural prey and yesterday afternoon fate rendered her into my hands. She came to take me for a drive in a hansom, bringing with her her youngest born, Henry Ferguson, Junior, known familiarly as Wuzzy. Wuzzy is three, fat, not talkative and spoiled. He wore a white bunny-skin coat, a hat with rosettes on his ears, leather leggings and kid mitts tied round his wrists with ribbons. He had so many clothes on that he moved with difficulty, breathing audibly through his nose. When he attempted to seat himself on the prie-dieu, the only chair low enough to accommodate him, he had to be bent in the middle like a jointed doll.

I can not say that I love Wuzzy as much as I do Constance. He is the heir of the Fergusons and the conquering male is already apparent. It is plain to be seen that he thinks women were made to administer to his comfort and amuse him in his dull moments. I have memories of taking care of Wuzzy last autumn at Betty’s country place when his nurse was off duty. I never worked so hard in my life. Half the energy and imagination expended in what the newspapers call a “gainful occupation” would have made me one of those women of whom _The Ladies’ Home Journal_ prints biographies.

I carried him down-stairs. It was not necessary, for dangling from the maternal hand he could have been dragged along, but there is something so nice about hugging a healthy, warm, little bundle of a boy. As I bent for him he held up his arms with a bored expression, then stiff and upright against my shoulder, looked down the staircase and yawned. It’s the utter confidence of a child that makes it so charming. Wuzzy relinquished himself to my care as if, when it came to carrying a baby down-stairs, I was the expert of the western world.

As we descended I rubbed my cheek against his, satin-smooth, cold and firm. He drew back and gazed at me, a curiously deep look, impersonal, profound. The human being soon loses the capacity for that look. It only belongs to the state when we are still “trailing clouds of glory.”

We squeezed him between us and tooled away toward Fifth Avenue. It was a glorious afternoon and it was glorious to be out again, to breathe the keen sharp air, to see the park trees in a thin purplish mist of branch on branch. Wuzzy, seeing little boys and girls on roller skates, suddenly pounded on us with his heels and had to be lifted to a prominent position on our knees, whence he leaned over the door and beat gently on the air with his kid mitts.

“What a bother this child is,” sighed Betty, boosting him up, “I only brought him because I had to. Some relation of his nurse is sick and she went out to see them.”

Her only son is the object of Mrs. Ferguson’s passionate adoration, yet she always speaks of him as if he was her greatest cross.

Wuzzy comfortable, his attention concentrated on the moving show, I brought my subject on the carpet.

“Dear me, how dreadful,” Betty murmured, much moved by the expurgated version of Lizzie Harris’ troubles. “Wuzzy, if you don’t stop kicking me with your heels I’ll take you home.”

Wuzzy stopped kicking, throwing himself far over the door to follow the flight of a golden-locked fairy in brown velvet. We held him by his rear draperies and talked across his back.

“It’s a cruel situation,” I answered. “Everything has failed the poor creature.”

“She has no means of livelihood at all?”

“I’m not sure yet, but I don’t think so. As soon as she’s well enough I’ll find out. Meantime there’s this illness, the doctor--”

“Yes, yes,” Betty interrupted, “I know all that. But it needn’t bother you. I’ll attend to it.”

“Dear Betty!” I let go of Wuzzy to stretch a hand across to her.

“Now, _don’t_ be sentimental, Evie. This is the sort of thing I like doing. If I could find some one--”

The prospects suddenly palled on Wuzzy and he threw himself violently back and lay supine between us, gazing up at the trap.

“Good heavens, why did I bring him,” groaned his mother. “I wouldn’t take care of a child like this for millions of dollars. Why _do_ nurses have sick relations? There ought to be a special breed raised without a single human tie. Get up, Wuzzy.”

She tugged at his arm, but he continued to stare upward, inert as a flour sack.

“What does he see up there?” I said, bending my head back to try and locate the object. “Perhaps it’s something we can take down and give him.”

“You can’t unless you break the hansom to pieces. It’s the trap.”

I felt of it. Wuzzy’s eyes followed my hand with a trance-like intentness and he emitted a low sound of approval.

At that moment, as though fate pitied our helplessness, the trap flew back and a section of red face filled the aperture.

“Is it straight down the avenue I’m to go, Mrs. Ferguson?” came a cheerful bass. “You ain’t told me.”

Wuzzy looked, flinched, his pink face puckered and a cry of mortal fear burst from him. He clutched us with his mitts and wrenched himself to a sitting posture, then, determined to shut out the horrible vision, leaned as far over the door as he could and forgot all about it. Betty gave directions and we sped along into the line of carriages by Sherman’s statue. We had to wait there, and a policeman with gesticulating arms and a whistle caught Wuzzy’s attention. He waved a friendly mitt at him, muttering low comments to himself. His mother patted his little hunched-up back and took up the broken thread:

“What was I saying? Oh, yes--if I could get some one who would hunt up such cases as Miss Harris’ and report them to me I’d pay them a good salary. Those are the people one never hears about, unless in some accidental way like this.”

The policeman whistled and we moved forward. I began to feel uncomfortable. I’d never before told Betty half a story. She went on:

“Of course there’s charity on a large scale, organized and all that. But the hundreds of decent people who get into dreadful positions and are too proud to ask for aid, are the ones I’d like to help. Especially girls, good, hard-working, honest girls.”

In my embarrassment I fingered Wuzzy’s ear-rosette. He resented the familiarity and angrily brushed my hand away.

“Oh, do let him alone,” said his mother. “You can’t tell how he’ll break out if he gets cross--and I know Miss Harris is all that, in spite of her hat and her looks, or you wouldn’t be so friendly with her.”

“Charity given to her is charity given where it’s needed,” I muttered with a red face.

I felt wretchedly underhanded and mean, and that’s one of the most unbearable feelings for a self-respecting woman to endure. For one reckless moment I thought of telling Betty the whole story. And then I knew I mustn’t. I couldn’t make her understand. I couldn’t translate Lizzie into the terms with which Mrs. Ferguson was familiar. I saw that broken woman emerging from my narrative a smirched and bespattered pariah of the kind that, from time immemorial, ladies have regarded as their hereditary foe.

It would have been indulging my conscience at her expense, and my conscience--well, it had to resign its job for the present. It was odd that with a worthy intention and in connection with one of the best of women, I felt my only course was to deceive. All may have been well with Pippa’s world, but certainly all was not well with mine. I don’t know what was wrong, only that something was. I know I should have been able to tell the truth, I _know_ I ought not to have been made to feel a coward and a sneak.

Betty enlarged upon her scheme of benefaction and we drove down the avenue, full from curb to curb and glittering in its afternoon prime. Wuzzy was much entertained, leaning forward to eye passing horses and call greetings to dogs on the front seats of motors. Once when he needed feminine attention he turned to me, remarking commandingly, “Wipe my nose.” As I performed this humble service he remained motionless, his eyes raised in abstraction to a church clock. I have heard many people envy the care-free condition of childhood and wish they were babes again. I never could agree with them; the very youthful state has always seemed to me a much overrated period. But as I obeyed Wuzzy’s command it suddenly came upon me how delightful it would be to be so utterly free of responsibility, so unperplexed by ethical problems, so completely dependent, that even the wiping of one’s nose was left to other hands.

I left Lizzie early that evening. Miss Bliss and Mr. Hazard were with her and I had a fancy they liked being together without me sitting about and overhearing. I pulled a chair up in front of the fire and mused over that question of taking Betty’s money. My discharged conscience was homesick and wanted to come back. In the midst of my musing Roger came in, and presently, he and I sitting one on either side of the grate, it occurred to me that he would be a good person to put in the place of my conscience--get his opinion on the vexed question and not let him know it. I would do it so cleverly he’d never guess and I could abide in his decision. Excellent idea!

“Roger,” I began in a simple earnest tone, “I want to ask you about a question of ethics, and I want you to give me your full attention.”

“Go ahead,” said Roger, putting a foot on the fender. “I’m not an authority, but I’ll do my best.”

“Suppose I knew a woman--no, a man’s better--who was, well, we’ll say a thief, not a habitual thief but one who had thieved once, got into bad company and been led away. And I happened to know he wanted help--financial--to tide him over a period of want. Would I be doing something underhanded if I asked some one--let’s say you--to give him the money and didn’t tell you about the thieving?”

I thought I had done it rather well. Roger was interested.

“Are you supposed to know for certain he’d only committed the one offense?”

“Quite sure,” with conviction.

“What made him do it?”

It wasn’t so easy as I thought. Theft didn’t seem to fit the case.

“Well--he was tempted, and--er--didn’t seem to have as strict a moral standard as most people.”

“Um,” Roger considered, then: “This seems to be a complicated case. Was he completely without will, no force, no character?”

“Not at all,” I said sharply. “He had a great deal of will and any amount of character.”

“He sounds like a dangerous criminal--plenty of force and will and no moral standard.”

I felt irritated and raised my voice in a combative note:

“Now, Roger, don’t be narrow-minded. Can’t you imagine quite a fine person who mightn’t think stealing as wrong as you or I think it?”

Roger did not look irritated, but he looked determined and spoke with an argumentative firmness:

“Evie, I’ve always regarded you as an unusually intelligent woman. As such I’d like you to explain to me how a fine person of will and character can steal and not think it as wrong as you or I would think it.”

It wasn’t working out as I expected and because it wasn’t and because Roger was giving it his full attention, I felt more irritated.

“Didn’t I tell you he’d fallen into bad company?”

“You did and I’ve taken it into consideration, but--”

“Roger, this isn’t a legal investigation. You’re not trying to break up the beef trust or impose a fine on Standard Oil. It’s just a simple question of right and wrong.”

“I’m glad you think it’s simple. This person with any amount of character fell under a bad influence?”

“That’s it--he was undermined, and though he was, as I said, a fine person, quite noble in some respects, he didn’t think stealing was so wicked as the average respectable citizen does.”

Roger put the other foot on the fender and looked at me with increasing concentration.

“I don’t understand at all. Let me try and get to the bottom of it. What did he steal?”

For a moment I stared at him blankly without answering.

He went on. There was no doubt about his giving me his full attention, it was getting fuller every moment.

“If you’ll tell me the nature of his theft and under what provocation and circumstances it was committed maybe I’ll be able to get a better idea of the kind of person he was. What did he steal?”

“But, Roger, this is a hypothetical case.”

“I know it is, but that doesn’t make any difference in the answer. What was the nature of the theft--money, jewels, grafting on a large scale, or taking an apple from the grocer’s barrel?”

I looked around the room in desperation, saw the blank left on the wall by the Marie Antoinette mirror, and said doggedly:

“He stole a mirror.”

“A mirror,” said Roger with the air of having extracted an important bit of evidence. “Umph-- Why did he take it?”

“Roger, what’s the sense of going into all these details?”

“Evie,” with maddening obstinacy, all the more maddening because it was so mild, “if I’m to give an answer I must know. Did he intend to sell it?”

“Yes, he did.”

I was so angry that I felt ready to defend any one who stole anything from anybody.

“My dear girl,” said Roger, still mild but also reproachful, “how can you sit there and tell me that a man who steals a mirror intending to sell it is a fine person, quite noble in some respects?”

“I can’t tell you. I won’t. I asked you a simple question about a man--a man I just made up--and you cross-examine me as if I was being tried for murder and you were the lawyer on the other side.”

“But, Evie, I only was trying to do what you asked.”

“Well, stop trying. Let that man and his mirror drop or I’ll lose my temper.” I snatched up the poker and began to poke the fire. “I’ve lost it now.” I poked furiously in illustration. “It’s too aggravating. I did so want your opinion about it.”

“Well, then, here it is--”

I stopped poking and leaned forward, so far forward that to keep my balance I had to put a foot on the fender.

“Has one a right to accept pecuniary aid for a person who has committed an offense--the first--without telling the benefactor of that offense? Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“I think one has.”

“You’re sure they needn’t tell the benefactor?”

“I wouldn’t. If you want to give a man a hand-up why rake up his past?”

I got it at last. My bad temper vanished. I was wreathed in smiles--

“Oh, Roger,” I cried joyously, “that’s just what I wanted you to say. It’s such a relief that we’ve worked it out at last,” and I heaved a sigh and put the other foot on the fender.

I sat for a moment, absently looking down, then I became conscious of my feet, side by side on the brass rail--two small patent leather points. I looked along the rail and there on the other side were Roger’s--two large patent leather points. They looked like four small black animals, perched in couples, sociably warming themselves by the blaze.

“What are you smiling at?” said Roger.

“How near we came to quarreling over an imaginary man stealing an imaginary mirror,” said I.

XII

LIZZIE is coming to life, hesitatingly and as if with reluctance. I suppose it’s natural for her to be extraordinarily weak, but I never would have believed she could be conscious enough to talk and so utterly indifferent to everything that should concern her. When I told her about the money, saying it came from a friend, she murmured, “That’s all right,” and never asked who the friend was. She seemed to have no interest in the subject, or in any subject, for that matter. She makes me think of a brilliant, highly colored plant that a large stone has fallen on.

One afternoon last week, when I was sitting by the table in her room reading, she suddenly spoke.

“Evie, how long is it that I’ve been sick here?”

“Nearly a month. You’ve been very ill, but you’re getting better now every day.”

She said no more and I got up and began moving about the room, arranging it for the evening. I was pulling down the blinds when I heard her stirring, and looking back, saw that she had twisted about in the bed and was watching me. In the dusk, her face, framed in elf locks of black hair, looked like a white mask. I thought she was going to ask me something--there was a question in her eyes--but she made no sound. I lighted the lamp and shifted into place the paper rose that hung from the shade. She continued to follow my movements with the intent observation of an animal. I have seen dogs watch their masters just that way. The feeling that something was on her mind grew stronger. I went to her and sat on the side of the bed.

“Do you want to ask me anything?” I said.

She shook her head, but her eyes were unquiet. Suddenly I thought I guessed. I put my hand on hers and spoke very low.

“Lizzie, the thing you told me that night when I came up and found you here”--I looked into her face to see if she understood--“I’ve never told to anybody.”

She stared at me without answering.

“Do you know what I mean?”

She gave a slight affirmative nod.

“And I never will tell it to any one unless you ask me to.”

“_I_ don’t care if you tell it,” she said with weak indifference.

It was the first gleam of her old self. Whatever she had wanted to say to me it was not that. Other women--the women of my world--would have been fearful of their secret lightly guarded. I don’t believe she had given it a thought. Either her trust in me was implicit or she didn’t care who knew it. I like to think it was the first.

She settled back against the pillow and made feeble smoothings of the sheet. Still persuaded of her inward disquiet I sat silent waiting for her to speak. After a moment or two she did.

“Have any letters come for me?”

I knew _this_ was the question. I got up and gave her the pile of letters stacked on the desk. She looked over the addresses, then pushed them back to me.

“I was afraid he might write to me,” she said. “But it’s all right, he hasn’t.”

I got a shock of displeased surprise.

“You didn’t expect him to _write_ to you, Lizzie?”

“He might have.”

“But after--after what you told me, surely, oh, surely, you don’t want to hear from him?”

I was fearful of her answer. If she was waiting, hungering for a letter from him, it would have been too much even for me.

“That’s just it--I _don’t_ want to. It’s all in the past, as if it had happened a hundred years ago. I want it to stay there--to be dead.”

She looked into my eyes, a deep look, that for some inexplicable reason reminded me of Wuzzy’s. I have long realized that my point of view, my mental processes, are too remote from hers for me ever to see into her mind or understand its workings. But I was certain that she meant what she said. My poor Lizzie, coming up out of the Valley of the Shadow, with her feeble feet planted on the past.

A few days after this she was well enough to sit up in bed with her hair brushed and braided, and read her letters. One was from Vignorol asking her why she had not come for her lessons.

She gave it to me, remarking:

“I wish you’d answer that. Tell him I’ve been sick, and that I’ll never come for any more lessons.”

I dropped my sewing, making the round eyes of astonishment with which I greet her unexpected decisions.

“You’re not thinking of giving up your singing?”

“Yes, forever.”

“But why? Surely you’re not going to let one failure discourage you.”

I was disturbed. From a few recent remarks, I am satisfied that she has no means whatever. She _must_ go on with her singing; as Mrs. Bushey would say, “One must live.” She could curb her ambitions, make her living on a less brilliant plane.

“I’ll never sing again,” she answered.

“You might give up attempting the opera, or even concerts. But there are so many other things you could do. Church singing--you began that way.”

“Yes, that’s it. I began, and I’m not going back to where I began. I’m going on or I’m going to stop. And I can’t go on.”

I thought she alluded to her lack of means and said:

“Lizzie, I can get the money for you to go back to Vignorol--I can get people who will stand behind you and give you every chance.”

She looked listlessly at the wall and shook her head.

“It’s no use. I don’t want it. Masters was right. I know it now.”

“You mean--” I stopped; it seemed too cruel.

But she was minded now to be as ruthlessly clear-sighted about herself as she had once been obstinately blind.

“The whole equipment--I haven’t got it. He banked too much on my looks, thought they were going to go farther than they did. If I’d had a great voice--one of the wonderful voices of the world, like Patti or Melba--it wouldn’t have mattered about not having the rest. But there are hundreds with voices as good as mine. He thought beauty and dramatic instinct were going to carry me through. He knew I had the one and he thought he could give me the other--train it into me. Nobody knows how hard he tried. He used to make me stand up and go over every gesture after him, he even made marks on the floor where I was to put my feet. And then he’d sit down and hold his head and groan. Poor Jack”--she gave a little dry laugh--“he had an awful time!”

I could realize something of Masters’ desperation. To have discovered a song-bird in the western wilds, hoped to retrieve his fortunes with it and then found a defect in its mechanism that neither work nor brains nor patience could supply--it _was_ bitter luck.

“He was an artist,” she went on. “He could have gone straight to the top but he lost his voice after the first few years, while he was still touring the small European towns.”

I noticed that she spoke in the past tense, her tone one of melancholy reminiscence as if he really _was_ dead. She might have been delivering his funeral sermon and placing flowers of memory on his tomb.

“Why couldn’t you have got from him what he tried to teach you? I can’t understand, you’re so intelligent.”

She mused for a moment, then said:

“I’ve been thinking of that myself while I’ve been lying here. Looking back I don’t seem to have given it my full mind and I’ve been wondering if perhaps I wasn’t too taken up with him. I couldn’t get away from the real romance, the love-making and the quarrels, first one and then the other. There wasn’t anything else in my life. I hadn’t time to be interested in those women I had to pretend to be. My affairs and me were the only things that counted.”

“But you were so much in earnest, so desperately anxious to succeed.”

She gave me a side look, sharp and full of meaning.

“Because, though I wouldn’t acknowledge it, I knew he wanted to break with me and the only way I could keep him was to make good.”

“Good heavens, how horrible!” I winced under her pitiless plain speaking.

“Yes, it was,” she said gently.

There was a pause. The little palliatives I had to offer, the timid consolations, were shriveled up by that fierce and uncompromising candor. Her voice broke the silence, quietly questioning:

“I suppose you think I did a very bad thing?”

“Oh, Lizzie, don’t ask me that. I can’t sit in judgment. That’s for you, not for me.”

She looked at her hands, long and thin on the quilt. Thus down-drooped, her face was shockingly haggard and wasted. Yet of the storm which had caused this ruin she was now speaking with a cold impersonal calm, as if it had all happened to somebody else. My own emotions that swelled to passionate expression died away before that inscrutable and baffling indifference.

“He was a very fine man,” she said suddenly.

“_Fine?_” I gasped.

“Yes, in lots of ways. About his art and work for one thing--he had great ideals. And he was very good to me.”

That was the coping stone. I heard myself saying in a faint voice:

“How?”

“Well, for one thing, he never lied to me. He told the truth about the singing, about me, about everything. He wasn’t a coward, either. He didn’t run away and send me a letter. He came and had it out with me, made me understand.”

This time I couldn’t speak. Her next words were like the laying of the final wreath on the bier of the loved and respected dead:

“It had to end and he ended it. He didn’t care how much it hurt me, or what I felt, or what anybody thought. That’s the right way to be--not to let other people’s feelings make you afraid, not to be considerate because it’s easier than fighting it out. He was a fine man.”

That was John Masters’ obituary as delivered by his discarded mistress.

The thing I couldn’t get over was that she showed no signs of penitence. As far as I could see she was in no way inclined to admit her fault, to bow her head and say, “I have sinned.” Her own conduct in the affair seemed to be the last thing that troubled her. Yet I can say that I, a woman with the traditional moral views, could not think her either abandoned or base. I don’t know to what world or creed she belonged, or to what ethical code she adhered, except that it was not mine or anybody else’s that I have ever known. Whatever it was it seemed to uphold her in her course. What was done was done and that was the end of it. No strugglings of inner irresolution, no attempt to exonerate or exculpate, disturbed her somberly steadfast poise. What would have been admirable to any one was her acceptance of the blow, and her recognition of her lover’s right to deliver it.