Chapter IX: Part 9

"Oh!" She was not expecting this reply and it displeased her. "What's the matter with it?"

"For me, everything. But it's nothing that you would understand."

"I suppose I could understand if you explained to me."

"No, you couldn't. Or, rather, I couldn't. The language isn't coined that would give me the words to tell you. It's not the facts of the life I dislike; it's the spirit of it."

"Is there anything wrong with the spirit of it?"

"I'm not saying so. I merely dislike it for myself. For me it's not a real life any more. I belong to--to simpler people with less complex ideas."

"Less complex ideas about what?'

"About honor for one thing." In my goings and comings round the room I paused in front of her. "Among my friends, my real friends, you can be a coward or a deserter, just as you could be a murderer or a thief, and no one would pass judgment upon you."

"And is that ... a virtue?"

"I don't know anything about its being a virtue; but it is a consolation."

As I stood looking down on her she said, softly:

"Have I passed judgment upon you?"

"You've been a brick, Vio: you've been a heroine. The only difference I should note between you and the people to whom I'm going back is that you've suppressed your condemnation, and they didn't feel it."

"Did they ... _know_?"

"I can't tell you what they knew, for the reason that it wouldn't have mattered. They knew there was something wrong with me, that I was hiding something, that I was probably an outcast of good family; but they gave me a great, big affection to live in, and thought no more about it. You've given me--"

There was an extraordinarily brilliant flash of her dark eyes as she lifted them to mine.

"What?" she interjected. "Have you any idea of what I've given you?"

"You've given me," I repeated, "the great, big affection to live in, but with something in it that poisoned the air. I'm grateful to you, Vio, more grateful than I can begin to tell you, especially as I know now what you've been thinking all the time; but you can easily understand that I prefer not to live in an atmosphere laden with--"

"If we purified that, the atmosphere? What then?"

"It still wouldn't be everything. When I say I don't like the life, it isn't just because it's cast me out; it's because for me--mind you, I'm not speaking of any one else--it's become vapid and--and foolish, and--and a throwing away of time."

"And what do you find among the people you--you call your friends that's more worth while?"

"That's what it's hard to tell you. I find the simple and elemental, something basic and fundamental that the new crisis in existence is telling us to discover and--and rectify. You remember what I said a month or more ago to Stroud, that our building was collapsing?"

"Yes; and I hoped you were, as people say, talking through your hat."

"Well, I wasn't. The building is coming down, right to the foundations. Only the foundations will remain."

"They're awfully crude foundations, aren't they?"

"Exactly. That's just where the trouble is. The bases of our life are ugly and unclean, and so we've turned away and refused to look at them. I'm going back, Vio, to see what I can do to make them less ugly, less unclean, and more secure to build on. How _can_ we erect a society on foundations that already have the element of decay in them before we've added the first layer of our superstructure?"

Rising, she went to a window, leaning against it as if tired, and looking out into the darkness.

"But what can you do, all by yourself?"

"Very little; but a little is something. It isn't altogether the success or the failure that I'm thinking about; it's the principle."

"Oh, if you're going to live by principles--"

"We've got to live by something. When the world is coming down about our heads."

"If it's doing that, one man can't hold it up."

"No; but a good many men may. I'm not the only one who's trying."

"I never heard of any one trying it like that ... by going back to the foundational, as you call it."

"Oh, I think you have. The Man who more than any other has helped the human race did just that thing. You're strict about going to church on Sunday."

She was slightly shocked. "I presume you're not going to try to be like Him."

"Perhaps not. I may not aim so high. I'm only pointing out the fact that going back to the foundational and beginning there again was His method. Others have followed it, a good many. All the work connected with what we call Settlements--"

"I never could bear them."

"Possibly; but that isn't the point. I'm only saying that in their way settlement workers have been feeling out the special weakness of our civilization, and doing their best to meet it. I suppose our politicians and clergymen and economists have been doing the same. The trouble with them is that they so generally nip the symptom while leaving the root of the disease that they don't accomplish much."

"Did you accomplish much yourself when you were--?"

"I didn't try. I didn't see what I was there for. It's only since coming back here that I've begun to understand why I was led the way I was."

Half turning round, she said over her shoulder:

"Do you call that being led?"

I replied with a distinctness which I tried to make significant:

"Yes, Vio; I call it being led. I didn't see it till I got back here; and even here I didn't see it till--till this afternoon. And now--now I've done with all this. I've done with the easy, gentlemanly life of spending money and being waited on. I'm not saying it isn't all right; it's only not all right for me. I've got something else to do. There was a time, you know it as well as I do, when a poor man was an offense to me, and an uncultivated person an abhorrence. I was a snob from every point of view, and I was proud of being one. And now--"

Pulling down the shade and turning completely round, she stood with her back to the window.

"Yes, Billy? And now?"

"It's no use. I can't tell you. I couldn't explain if I used up all the words in the dictionary. It's just a tugging in my heart to get back where--" I had a sudden inspiration. "Read that," I said, taking Pelly's letter from my pocket.

She stood under the central bunch of electrics while I closed the suit-case and fastened the straps. Having finished the letter, she handed it back to me.

"Well?" I asked.

"It's just--just a common person's letter, as far as I see, and rather coarse. Boosey might have written it, or Miles, the chauffeur."

"And that's all you see in it?"

"What more is there to see?"

"That's just it. That's just where the inexplicable thing lies. I see, or rather I feel, a tenderness in it that probably no one could detect but myself. Even the reference to drinking--"

"The quart."

"Yes; the quart. You've got to remember how small the margin for pleasure is in a life like Sam's, and how innocently he and Bridget and Jim can do what they had much better let alone. They're not vicious; they're only--how shall I say?--they're only undeveloped. We're not such saints ourselves, even with our development; and when all civilization has bent its efforts, church and state together, to keep their minds as primitive as possible so that they'll do the most primitive kinds of work, you can't blame them if they take their pleasures and everything else primitively. We've got to have another educational system."

"But they say our educational system is very good as it is."

"As far as it goes; but we still have one system for the rich and another for the poor, and we shall never get equality of mind till we have equality of educational opportunity. But that's only a detail. It all hangs together. As far as I'm concerned, it sums itself up in the urging that takes me back among simple people because--because I love them, Vio; that's the only word for it, and in their way they've loved me."

She crossed the room aimlessly.

"Other--other people have--have loved you, as you call it, who--who mayn't have been simple."

"Y-yes. But--but in the cup they handed to me there were bitter ingredients. In the cup I'm talking of there was only ... love. It was a blind, stumbling, awkward, mannish love, if you like; but it was ... love. It was the pure, unadulterated thing, as unconscious of itself as the air is. The girl who was here this afternoon is an example of it. For anything I know, she was an idiot to have come; but she came, poor soul, because she thought--"

"Well, what did she think?"

"That if Dick Stroud were out of the way I should have a better chance with you."

She was still moving aimlessly about the room, picking up small objects and putting them down again.

"She said--she said he'd been tagging around after her, it's her expression, for nearly three years."

"To my practically certain knowledge that is so."

"She said, too, that she could marry him if she liked, but that she didn't want to."

"I don't know anything about that."

"If she went with him at all, she said, it would probably be ... without marriage, as she didn't wish to be bound to him."

I looked up in curiosity.

"And did she say there was any possibility of her going with him at all?"

"I think she did. That's what made me think her touched in her mind or crazy. She said she hadn't decided, or something like that; but as she was going to be an adventuress she had to begin some time, and perhaps it might as well be with him as with any one else. She spoke as if it rested entirely with her to take him or throw him away."

Again I decided to be cruel.

"It very likely does."

She was standing now by my dressing-table, and as if my words had meant nothing to her she said:

"Aren't you going to take your hair-brush?"

"Oh, I was forgetting to put it in. Thanks."

When I went for it she was holding it in her hand.

"What a queer, cheap-looking thing! Where on earth did you get it?"

"I suppose it was at Tours, with the other things, when--"

"Oh yes! I remember." She moved toward the door. "Your other brushes, the ebony ones with the silver initials, that I gave you before--before we were married, are here. They were with the things found on the bank of that-- They forwarded them to me. Shouldn't you--shouldn't you like them?"

"Thanks, no. This sort of common thing suits me better."

I was doing the last things about the room. She was standing with her hand on the knob of the door, which was half open.

"And when you're back in New York, Billy, doing that kind of thing you talk about, shall you be all alone?"

A second's reflection convinced me that it was best to be clear about everything.

"At first."

"And later?"

I pulled open a drawer from which I knew I had taken all the contents.

"You mean when we're both ... free?"

"Suppose I put it ... when _you're_ free?"

"Oh, then there may be ... some one else."

"Some one ... I know?"

I delved into another drawer, hiding my face. "Some one you may have heard of; but I don't--I don't think you know her."

When I had pushed in the drawer I raised myself; but I was alone in the room. Ten minutes later I had left the house without a good-by on either side.

On the door-step, in my working-man's costume, and with the everlasting bag and suit-case in my hands, I looked up at a starry, windy sky, with the trees of the Common tossing beneath it.

"My God, what an end!" I cried, inwardly.

But, as far as my knowledge or purpose went, an end it was.

*CHAPTER II*

Noble intentions being easier to conceive than to carry out, it is hardly surprising that on settling again in New York I found myself "let down." The sense of adventure was out of it, while that of the mission had crept in. The old friends were still the old friends; but if my intercourse with them was not less spontaneous it was certainly more self-conscious. Back in my squint-eyed room, with the new paper and the more showy set of fungi, the knowledge that I was there because I chose to be there, and not because I couldn't help it, marked all my goings and comings with a point of interrogation.

In some measure, too, it was a point of disapproval. That is to say, those who welcomed me back took me somewhat in the spirit of a "returned empty."

"Why, yes, of course, if you want it," was Miss Smith's reply to my request to have my old room back again; but her intonation was not wholly that of pleasure. "We thought, my sister and I, that your social duties in Boston would restrict your movements for the future."

I had pricked their little bubble of romance, and they were disappointed. That one who had been their lodger was now with the Olympian gods was a tale to be told as long as they had a room to let, and to every one who rented one. I saw at once that I couldn't ask them to believe that I had come back of my own free will. The very magnitude of my hopes compelled me to be silent with regard to them.

"Punk!" was Pelly's comment, when I braced myself to tell him I had found home life disillusioning.

That was across the table of the familiar eating-house, as we took our first meal together. I was obliged to explain myself for the reason that in the back of his mind, also, I read the conviction that I hadn't "made good." Compelled to be more primitive than I should have liked, I had to base my dissatisfaction on the grounds of physical restriction rather than on those of divine discontent.

"Some of them Boston women will put the lid on a man and lock it down," he observed further. "Punk, I call it. Well, now that you've broken loose, and with your wad, I suppose you'll be givin' yourself a little run."

I allowed him to make this assumption, thankful that he should understand me from any point of view; but it was not the point of view of our former connection. That a man should be down on his luck was one thing; but that, having got on his feet, he should deliberately become a waster was another. In any light but that of a reversion to low tastes I could never have made Sam see my return to the house in Meeting-House Green. For low tastes he had the same toleration as for misdemeanors; but he did not disguise the fact that for a man who had got his chance he considered them low tastes.

At Creed & Creed's I received a similar tempered welcome.

"Sure here's Brogan," Bridget called out to the other men, on seeing me enter the cavern where four of them were at the accustomed work of sweeping a consignment that had just been unpacked. Burlap and sheepskins were still strewn about the floor, so that I had to restrain the impulse to pick things up and stack them.

Perhaps I can best compare my return to that of a spirit which has passed to a higher sphere and chooses to be for a short time re-embodied. Denis, the Finn, and a small wiry man, a stranger to me, all drew near to stare solemnly. My visit could only be taken as a condescension, not as a renewed incorporation into the old life. From that I had been projected forever by the sheer fact of not having to earn a living in this humble way.

"Aw, but it's well you're lookin'," Gallivan said, awesomely.

"And why shouldn't he be lookin' well," Bridget demanded, "and him with more butter than he's got bread to spread it on?"

"It's different with us," the Finn said, bitterly, "with no butter and not enough bread, and more mouths to feed than can ever be filled. I'll bet you Brogan doesn't think of them, now that he's got his own belly full."

It seemed to me an opening.

"Well, suppose I did? Suppose I'd come back to hand down some of the butter?"

"Aw, cut it out, Brogan," the Finn laughed, joylessly. "I was only kiddin' you. We don't pass the buck, none of us don't. What you got, keep; and if you don't, then the more fool you."

In Denis's yearning eyes were the only signs of remote comprehension in the company.

"Sure ye don't have to pass the buck just because y' ask the saints to pray for ye, do ye? Pray for us, Brogan. Ye've got nothing else to do."

It was another opening.

"I wish I had, Denis. I've found that I don't know how to loaf. If you hear of anything--"

He nodded, with beatified aspiration in his leathery old face.

"Aw, then, if it's that way you feel, the Holy Mother 'll find ye something, Protestant though y' are, just as sure as she showed ould Biddy Murphy, and her a Protestant too, that me mother knew in Ireland where there was two-and-sixpence lyin' in the mud, and she with the rent comin' due the next mornin': This is the new Brogan," he continued, with a wave of his hand toward the dark, wiry man, who responded with a grin. "He can't talk our talk hardly not at all, not no more than the monkey I used to tell you about. A Pole he calls hisself; but I nivver heard of no such nation as that till I come to this country. We nivver had them in Ireland at all--at all. There was Ulster men, and Munster men, and men from the County Monaghan; but I nivver heard tell of no Poles. Do you think they's have sowls like us? Or would they be like them Chinees and Japansey men?"

"For Gawd's sake, here's the Floater," Bridget warned, softly, and every man got back to his work.

Back at their work they had no time for further conversation; and in some way, impossible for me to tell you in words, I felt myself eliminated from their fellowship. They would always be friendly; but the knowledge that I was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, which had once been the outcome of a common need, was no longer theirs nor mine. I could look in at them in this non-committal way as often as I chose; but I should never get any farther.

Something of the sort was manifest when I next met Lydia Blair. Our standing toward each other was different. Little as she had understood me before, she understood me less in this new role than in any other.

"You sure are the queerest guy I ever met," she said, at one time in the course of the evening. "I sometimes wonder if you're all there."

But that was after I had been foolish enough to try to make her see my point of view toward life, and failed. Before that she had been sympathetic.

Our first conversation had been over the telephone, when I had called up Clotilde's to ask if Miss Blair had returned from Boston.

"Miss Blair at the 'phone," was the reply. "Who's this?"

Somewhat timidly I said I was Mr. Harrowby, repeating the name twice before she recognized it as mine. Having invited her to dine with me and go to the theater I got a quavering, "Sure!" which lacked her usual spontaneity.

"You don't seem pleased," I said.

"Oh, I'm pleased enough. I'm only wondering if--if you are."

"Why shouldn't I be, when I've asked you?"

"Well, I put my foot in it for fair, didn't I?"

"You mean in Boston? Oh, that was all right. I know you meant to do me a good turn; and perhaps you've done it."

"Oh, I _meant_ to; but I sure did get a lesson. My mother used to tell me to keep my fingers out of other people's pies; and I'm going to from this time on."

In the evening, seated opposite me at the little table at Josephine's, with the din of a hundred diners giving us a sort of privacy, she told me more about it.

"You see, it was this way: He'd always been talking to me about this rich young Boston widow he'd met at Palm Beach, trying to get my mad up."

"What did he say of her?"

"Well, the sort of thing he _would_ say. He's a good judge of a woman, you must admit; and he thought she was about the classiest. It was when I began to tell him what I wanted to be that he sprang that on me, said she was the model for me to study, and that when it came to the dressy vampire Agnes Dunham wasn't in it.

"Did he call this--this Boston lady a dressy vampire?"

"Oh, he didn't mean that. It was only that for any one who wanted to be a dressy vampire she was a smart style. A vampire mustn't look a vampire, or she might as well go out of business. The one thing I criticized in Agnes Dunham in 'The Scarlet Sin' was that a woman who advertised herself so much as an adventuress wouldn't get very far with her adventuring."

"I see. You'd go in for a finer art."

"I'd go in for pulling the thing off, whatever it was; but that's not what I want to tell you. To go back to what he was always saying about this Boston lady, it made me crazy to see her. In the corset business I'd got intimate with a good many society women, and most of them were gumps. For one good vampire there were a hundred with the kick of a boiled potato. That made me all the crazier to see, and I thought about it and thought about it. Then, one day, Harry called me on the 'phone to say-- fxsYou see, he's living with the Averills, and when that Mrs. Mountney-- Well, when he told me who you were, and that the lady wasn't a widow any more than I am, well, I simply laid down and passed away. To think that _you_, the fellow we'd been putting down as a mystery and a swell crook--"

"What did you put me down for then when you found out?"

"We didn't get a line on it all at once. That was later. Mrs. Mountney told Lulu, and Dick Stroud told me, and so--"

"Did you all believe what you heard?"

"It was pretty hard not to, wasn't it? after the queer things you'd been doing. There was just one person who stuck it out that it wasn't true; and that was little Milly. She didn't say much to the family; but to me she declared that if all the armies in France were to swear to it, she'd still know there was some mistake. She's another one I can't make out."

"What can't you make out about her?"

"Whether she's got a heart in her body, or only a hard-boiled egg."

"Oh, I fancy she has a heart all right."

"I used to fancy the same thing, or rather I took it for granted; but ever since-- Well, she just stumps me."

She reverted to her errand in Boston and what came of it.

"It wasn't till I began to hear of what was going on there that it seemed to me--" the veil of tears to which her eyes were liable descended like a distant mist--"that it seemed to me a darned shame."

"What seemed to you a darned shame in particular?"

"Well, first that Dick Stroud should be pulling the wool over any other woman's eyes, especially a rich one, and then that he should be upsettin' your apple-cart when you'd had so much trouble already. After that it all came easy."

"What came easy?"

"Getting to know Mrs. Harrowby, and all the rest of it. The first once or twice I didn't see how to bring in Dick Stroud's name without seeming to do it on purpose; but after I met you in the up-stairs hall, why it was just natural. Say, you copped a peach when you got married; do you know it?"

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I've got eyes in my head; and, say, she's the one I saw you with that time I told you about, ever so long ago, and it must have been in New York. I suppose some guy had taken me to a swell restaurant to blow me in for a dinner; but anyhow she was the one. The minute I saw her back I knew there were not two such _speaking_ backs in the world. As for me modeling myself on her, well, an old hour-glass pair of stays might as well try to be Clotilde's Number Three Coar Pearl. And, say, she's some sport, isn't she? When I told her more about Dick Stroud and me, after you'd gone away that afternoon, she never turned a hair. Mrs. Mountney says she was going to marry him if you hadn't turned up, and even now he's hoping to marry her; but when I let her have the whole bunch of truth, she took it like a rag doll will take a pin-prick. Never moved a muscle, or showed that it wasn't just my story, and not a bit her own. Of course I took my cue from that--it was my line all along--and was just the poor working-girl telling her life history to a sympathetic lady, just as they hand it out in books; but she carried the thing off something swell. In fact, she made me more than half think--"

"What?" I questioned, when she held her idea suspended there.

"I don't believe I'll tell you. There are things a man had better find out for himself; do you know it?"

"I sha'n't find out anything for myself," I said, "because--because I've given up the fight."

She stared at me with eyes wide open in incredulous horror.

"You've given up the fight for a peach like that! Well, of all the poor boobs!" Leaning back in her chair she scanned my appearance. "I thought there was something wrong when I saw you got up like that. You can beat Walter Haines, the quick-change man, when it comes to clothes, believe _me_. What have you got on now?"

I explained that it had been my Sunday suit during the time I had been working at Creed & Creed's.

"Then for Gawd's sake go and take it off, before we start for the theater. I'll wait for you here. You can go and come in a taxi. I've been looking at you all along, and thinking it must be the latest wrinkle from Boston. Boston _has_ funny ways, now hasn't it? And so--"

It was here that I ventured on the exposition of my new scheme of life, getting no appreciation beyond the question as to my sanity quoted above. Later in the evening as, after the theater, I drove her back to Miss Flowerdew's in a taxi, she summed up the situation thus:

"Look-a-here! I never did take stock in that bum story of your being a quitter on the battlefield; but now I sure will if you walk out and hand the show over to Dick Stroud. Why, he's worth two of you! Look how he sticks! He'll get _me_ one of these days, just by his sticking, if I'm not careful; and when it comes to a woman like that-- Why, I'm ashamed to go round with such a guy. And say, the next time you ask me to dinner, you'll not be got up like the bogie-man dressed for his wife's funeral. You'll look like you did the other day in Boston, or the first time I saw you, or it will be nix on little Lydia."

Drinkwater's tone was similar and yet different. It was different in that while his premises as to "sticking" coincided with Lydia's, his conclusions were not the same.

Perhaps he was not the same Drinkwater. More than two years having passed since I had seen him, I found in him more than two years of development. A crude boy when last we had met, association with a man like Averill, combined with his own instinct for growth, had made him something of a man of the world not the less sympathetic for his honest pug-face and his blindness. The fact that he asked me to dine with him at his university club was an indication of progress in itself.

He gave me his confidences before I offered mine, sketching a career in which stenography figured as no more than the handmaid to a passion for biological research. From many of the details of research he was, of course, precluded by his blindness; but his methodical habits, his memory, and his faculty for induction had more than once put Averill on the track of one thing when looking for another. It was thus that they had discovered the _ophida parotidea_ while experimenting for the germ of the Spanish influenza. Incidentally, his salary had been creeping upward in proportion as he made himself more useful.

"And Lydia's been a wonder," he declared, his face shining. "Talk about sticking! The way that girl's stuck to me in every kind of tight place! Always thinking of other people and how to pull them out of the holes they get into! In the Middle Ages she'd have been a saint. Now she's just an up-to-date New York girl."

By the time he had finished this rhapsody I was ready to tell him a part of my own life tale, on which I found him more responsive than any one I had met. As to my mental misfortunes in France he accepted the narrative without questioning. When I came to what I painted as domestic conditions outlived on both sides he passed the topic over with the lightness born of tact. You see it was an altogether older and more serious Drinkwater with whom I had to deal; and yet one not less enthusiastic.

I discovered this when, with much misgiving, I hinted at the task to which I wished to dedicate anything left in my life.

"You've got it, old boy," he half shouted, slapping his leg. "There are three or four big jobs through which we white Americans have got to save our country, and among them the free play of class-contribution is almost the first. Say, these fellows that go jazzing about class welfare get my goat. Class co-operation is what we want; and it's what classes come into existence to give. You can't suppress classes, not yet awhile at any rate, in a country full of inequalities; but what we can do is to get the classes that form themselves spontaneously to take their gifts and pass 'em on to each other. Each works out something that another doesn't, and so can benefit the bunch all round. Say, Jasper, you'll hit the nail of one of our biggest national weaknesses right on the head as soon as you've learned how to do it."

"Yes, but the learning how to do it is just where the hitch seems to come in. I've been in New York three weeks and I'm just where I was when I came."

"Say, I'll give you a line on that. Do you know how a young fellow in a country town--I don't know anything about swell places like New York--becomes a barber?"

I said I didn't, that I had never given a thought to the subject.

"Well, he doesn't learn, and nobody ever teaches him. He just sits round in the barber shop, brushing hats and hanging up overcoats, and wishing to the Lord he _was_ a barber, and all of a sudden he _is_ one. He's watched the shaves and hair-clips, hardly knowing he's been doing it, but wishing like blazes all the while, and at last it comes to him like song to a young bird. Now you've got to sit round. Sit tight and sit round. Wish and watch, and watch and wish, and the divine urge that turns a youngster into a barber, because that's what he's got his heart on, will steer you into the right way. This isn't going to be anything you can learn, as you'd learn to drive a motor or dissect a dead body. It won't be a profession, it'll be a _life_, that'll show you the trick. Don't try to hurry things, Jasper; and don't expect that three weeks or three months or three years are going to make this mum old world fork you out its secrets. Just stick, and if you don't do the thing you're aiming at you'll do another just as useful. Why, the doctor was going to chuck all his experiments on the influenza bug when I persuaded him to keep at it; and so he discovered the thing that scientists have been after since Dockendorff thought he'd tracked it down as long ago as 1893. All _sticking_!"

*CHAPTER III*

I confess that I was comforted by these hearty words, and braced in a determination that was beginning to splutter out. Drinkwater's divine urge was not unlike my own thread of flame and Denis's Holy Mother, who was a light even to the feet of Protestants. It was the same principle--that of a guide, an impulse, an illumination, which our own powers could generate when lifted up to, and associated with, the universal beneficence. I decided to take to formula, "Wish and watch, and watch and wish," as the device of my knight-errantry. As a matter of fact, by the sheer process of wishing I secured a secondary position for myself in the textile department of the Metropolitan Museum, while by that of watching I found that one of Bridget's boys and two of the Finn's had aptitudes highly worth developing right along this line. It wasn't much; but it was a beginning in the way in which I hoped to go, and might lead to something more.

In all this time, as you can imagine, Vio was my ruling thought, and guessing her intentions my daily occupation. Since she presumably wanted a divorce, there were doubtless grounds on which she could secure one by going the right way to work; but as to whether she was doing this or not nothing had yet been said to me. Nothing was said to me of any kind. I had not written to her, nor had she to me; and my other communication with Boston was only through my bankers. Even that was growing more irregular since I had changed my business address to Meeting-House Green.

What I was chiefly seeking was forgetfulness. Lydia had reproached me with being a "poor boob" in giving up the struggle for Vio's love; but Lydia hadn't known the wound Vio had inflicted. The more I thought of that the more I felt it due to the dignity of love to attempt neither explanation nor defense. On mere circumstantial evidence Vio had believed me guilty of the crime she would probably have rated as the blackest in the calendar. I couldn't forgive that. I had no intention of forgiving it. The more I loved her the less I could forget that she had returned my love in this way. The most chivalrous thing I could do, the most merciful toward her, and the most tender was what I was doing. I could leave her without a contradiction, so justifying tacitly whatever she may have thought, and putting no restraint on her future liberty of action.

I said so to Mildred Averill when we talked it over about the middle of March. I had not intended to renew this connection unless a sign was made from the other side; but it was given in the form of a line from Miss Averill begging me to come and see her in the apartment she had taken for herself in Park Avenue, where at last she had a little home. Knowing that my duties kept me at the Museum on week-days she had fixed the time for a Sunday afternoon.

It will be remembered that we had met in the previous December, so that I found little change in her now. As I had noticed then, she had grown more spiritual, with an expression of restfulness and peace.

"That's because I don't struggle so much," she explained, in answer to my remark on this change; "I don't fight so much. I'm not nearly the rebel I used to be."

"Does that mean that you've made up your mind to let things go?"

"No; to let things come. That's what I wouldn't do before. I wanted to hurry them, to force them, to drag them along. I begin to see that life has its own current upward, and that we succeed best by getting into it and letting it carry us onward."

"But doesn't that theory tend to take away one's own initiative?"

"I don't know that initiative is any good if it's directed the wrong way. Did you ever watch a leaf being carried down-stream? As long as it's in the current it goes swiftly and safely. Then something catches it and throws it into some little side-pool or backwater, where it goes fretting and swirling and tearing itself to pieces and never getting anywhere. Well, it's something like that. I was in a side-pool, lashing round and round and churning my spirit, such as it is, into nervous irritations of every kind, making myself the more furious because my efforts were to no purpose."

"And how did you get out into the current again?"

"By wishing, in the first place. It began to seem to me such a foolish thing that, being given all the advantages in the world, I could do nothing but frustrate them. I was like a person with a pack of cards in his hand, not knowing how to play any game. I longed to learn one, even the simplest; and I think it was the idea of the simplest that saved me."

"I'm not sure that I get that, the simplest."

"Oh, it's nothing abstruse or original. I suppose it's no more than the accepted principle of doing the duty that's nearest. Hitherto, I'd felt that nothing was a real duty but what was far away. Then I began to see that right under our own roof-- You see, Boyd and Lulu weren't very happy, and I'd been leaving them to shift for themselves while I tried to do things for people like Lydia Blair and Harry Drinkwater, and a lot of others who were perfectly well able to take care of themselves. So I began to wonder if I couldn't ... and to wish.... And it's so curious! The minute I did that the things I could do were right there just as if they'd been staring me in the face for years, and I hadn't had the eyes to see them."

"What sort of things?"

"Oh, hardly worth naming when it comes to words. Not big things, little things. If Lulu wanted something she couldn't find in New York, a particular sort of scarf or piece of music, no matter what, I'd tell Boyd and he'd send for it; and, of course, you see! Or if Lulu said anything nice about Boyd, which she did now and then, I'd make it a point of telling him. That's the sort of thing, nothing when you come to talk about it, and yet in practice-- That's what I mean by the simplest, the easiest, and most natural; and so I formed a kind of principle."

"Do you mind telling me what it is?"

"Only that, whoever you are, your work is given you; you don't have to go into the highways and hedges to look for it. That queer boy, Harry Drinkwater, gave me the secret of it first. I asked him one day how it was that, in spite of all his handicaps, he managed to get on so well. He said he had only one recipe for success, which was wishing and watching, and watching and wishing. He said there was no door that wouldn't open to you of its own accord if you stood before it long enough with that Sesame in your heart. I remember his saying, too, that in the matter of work, desire--desire that's not wrong, of course--was our first point of contact with the divine, since the thing that we urgently wish to do is the thing by which we re-express the God who has first expressed Himself in us. The most important duty, then, is to find out what we really want, and then to wish and watch. Most of us don't know what we want, or, if we do, we're not clear enough about it, and so we get lost in confusion, like travelers in a swamp. Of course he said it all much more quaintly than I'm doing it; but that was the gist, and it helped to put me into the line of thought in which I've--I've found content."

"That is, you analyzed first what it was you really wanted to do."

"Exactly; and I discovered two things: first, that I didn't want anything half so much as to help--I've told you that before--unless it was the happiness of the people to whom I was nearest. I found, too, that if I began at the beginning and followed the line of least resistance I'd get farther in the end. Up to that time I'd begun in the middle, and so could get neither backward nor forward, as I used to complain to you."

Having thought this over, I said:

"You're fortunate in having the people to whom you're nearest close enough to you for--for daily intercourse and influence."

There was distinct significance in her response.

"Perhaps I'm fortunate in never having turned my back on them as long as they were in need of me. Do you remember how I used to want a home of my own? Well, something kept me at least from _that_. Whenever I came face to face with doing what I've felt free to do at last, there was always a second thought that held me back. If Boyd and Lulu had had children it would have been different. But Lulu didn't want any till--till lately, and so I felt that something was needed to ease the grinding of the wheels between them. I did recognize that. But now that they've got the little boy--"

"Got a little boy?" I said, in astonishment.

"Why, yes. Didn't any one tell you? Two weeks old to-day, and such a darling! One day he looks like Lulu, and the next like Boyd, and they're both as happy as two children. That's why I've felt free to be my own mistress, to this extent, at least. Things do work out, you know, if you'll only give them half a chance, and stop fretting. That's another thing," she smiled; "it came to me one day in church when they were reading the Psalms, though I'd often heard the words before without paying them attention. '_Fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil_.' I suppose people worried three thousand years ago just as we do to-day; and had to be told not to. Well, I've tried not to _fret myself_, and I've got on, oh, so much better."

She was so serene that as I passed my cup for more tea I ventured on something from which otherwise I should have shrunk:

"I'm a little surprised that in your analysis of the things you really wanted you've forgotten the one most people crave for first."

She took this with her customary simple directness.

"Oh no, I haven't. It's only that something seems to have been left out of me that--that I don't demand it as much as many other women; and then--it's hard to put into words--the conviction has come to me that--that whenever I'm ready for it I shall get it. I'm not ready for it, yet." Her amber eyes rested on me with the utmost truthfulness. "It's odd; but I'm not. The very fact that I don't demand it yet, some women, you know, are like that, and I suppose some men, but that very fact shows that it's wiser not to congest one's life by tackling too many things at a time. The one thing I'm growing certain of is that it all depends on oneself as to whether or not the windows of heaven are open to pour us out blessings, and that whatever I want, within reason, I shall get in the long run."

It was partly this theory of life, and partly a sense of assurance and relief, that led me on to talk of my personal situation. As Drinkwater had done, she dismissed my mental misfortunes as incidental, interesting pathologically, but not morally decisive. As to my return to New York after having actually found my way home I felt obliged to give her some explanation. It was while I was doing this that she asked, as if casually:

"Do you like Colonel Stroud?"

"No," I said, bluntly. "Do you?"

"I can see that he has a sort of fascination ... for other women." She nodded, more thoughtfully, "I don't trust him."

"Neither do I."

"I thought not. That's what makes me wonder--"

She hesitated so long that I was compelled to say:

"Wonder, what?"

"Perhaps I had better not go on."

"Please do."

"I only will on condition that you authorize me."

"I authorize you to say anything you choose."

"Well, then, since you _don't_ trust him, I wonder how you could expose any woman to--to his influence."

"Oh, but I don't. The--the events all took place while I was away, and I've no control over them."

"No control, perhaps; but there are other things in life besides control."

"I know that; but what things, for instance, do you mean?"

"Oh, lots of things." She looked about the room as if not attaching much importance to her words. "Love, for one."

"But in this case love has to be counted out."

"Can you ever count out love? I thought that was the one permanent factor in existence, though the skies were to fall."

"It may be a permanent factor, and yet have to remain in abeyance."

She laughed.

"Nonsense! Who ever heard of love remaining in abeyance? You might as well talk of fire remaining in abeyance when it's raging, or water when it's bursting a dam, or any other element in active operation. If I loved any one, no matter how little, I should want to save them from a man like Colonel Stroud."

"In spite of the fact that you'd been considered guilty of--"

"Oh, what does it matter what any one thinks of so poor a thing as oneself? I mean that oneself _to_ oneself is so very unimportant."

"Oh, do you think so?"

"Of course I know that there are other points of view, and that from some of them oneself _to_ oneself is the most vital of all considerations. But in the detail of what other people think of one--"

"Even when the other people are those of whom you think most in all the world?"

"Let us think most of them then. Don't let us think most about ourselves."

"Do you suppose I'm thinking most about myself now? I assure you I'm not."

She laughed again, not lightly, but rather pitifully.

"I must leave you to judge of that."

*CHAPTER IV*

I did judge of it, all through that spring, coming more and more to the conclusion that I was right. It was not the only occasion on which Mildred Averill and I talked the matter over; but it became at last a subject on which agreeing to differ seemed our only course. The time came when I remembered with an inward blush that I had once feared that this clear-eyed, well-poised girl, who had really found herself, might be in love with me. What her exact sentiment toward me was I have never been able to name further than to put it under the head of a "deep interest." Had circumstances been in our favor that interest might at one time have ripened into something more; but from that she was saved by the instinct which told her that, in spite of my assertions, as to which she nevertheless didn't charge me with untruth, I was a married man.

One more detail I must add concerning her.

On a Saturday afternoon in early May I had gone to her to talk over the great news of the day, that the peace terms had been handed to the enemy at Versailles. It must be remembered that she was the one person, outside my colleagues in the Museum, with whom I could discuss the topics nearest to my heart. With Pelly, Bridget, the Finn, and even with Miss Smith, I had friendly arguments as to the League of Nations and similar matters of public concern; but they rarely went beyond the catchwords of the newspapers.

"My dear father," Miss Smith would say, gently, "who was an eminent oculist in his time, Doctor Smith, you may have heard of him, used to say that his policy was to keep this country out of entangling alliances. That was his expression, entangling alliances. I always think of it when I see foreigners."

"From awl I hear," Bridget informed me, "this here League o' Nations they make so much talk about is on'y to help the English to oppress Ireland."

"Will it bring down prices?" the Finn demanded, if ever I spoke of it with him, and when I confessed that I couldn't be sure that it would, he dismissed the theme with, "Then that's all I want to know."

"Punk, I call it," was Pelly's verdict, "unless Lloyd George is for it; and whatever he says goes with me."

This being the scope of my conversations on the subject it became a special pleasure to air my opinions with one who, while not always agreeing with me, took in such matters the same kind of interest as myself.

We were, therefore, in what is called the thick of it when a shuffling and laughing were heard from the hall. Suspending our remarks to look up in curiosity we saw Lydia come in leading Drinkwater. From the festive note in their costumes Miss Averill leaped to a conclusion.

"_No!_" she cried, as the two stood giggling sheepishly before her tea-table. "You _haven't_?"

"We _have_."

The statement was his.

"I talked him into it," Lydia declared, laughingly. "He didn't want to, but I was afraid that if I didn't tie him by the leg he'd fly the coop."

"But," I asked, "what about your great career?"

"Oh, well, I've put that off a bit. I can always take it up again. Anyhow, you never heard of an adventuress who wasn't married. She doesn't have to stay married; but a single woman who's an adventuress gets nowhere. The Russian countess in 'The Scarlet Sin' had been married twice, first to a professor--that 'd be Harry--and then to a count. I can begin looking forward to the count right now, because Harry is what you may call a thing of the past."

When they giggled themselves out again, to go and give the news to some one else, Miss Averill said, whole-heartedly:

"Well, I'm glad!"

Thinking of Vio and Stroud I asked why.

"Because Lydia is safe for a while anyhow."

"Didn't you think she was safe already?"

"Not wholly. There was _some one_."

"Some one she liked?"

"No, some one she didn't like. That was the funny part of it. But about four or five months ago she came to me with so incoherent a tale that I couldn't make anything out of it. There was a man, a gentleman she said he was, who wanted her to go off with him; and to save some one else she began to think she ought to do it. I really can't tell you what it was, because I couldn't get it straight; only there was a wild, foolish, lovely idea of self-sacrifice in it, and now it's over. _He_ won't get her; and if ever any one deserved an exquisite thing like her it's Harry Drinkwater. He can't see how pretty she is, of course; but he gets the essence of beauty that is more than physical."