Part I, who called my attention to her.

"Say," he greeted me one morning about noon, "There's a fee-male lawyer here today--looking for you. And say--she's a peach!"

I do not know why I thought he was joking. I suppose I shared the comic paper idea that most professional women were pop-eyed and short-haired. Anyhow it was a definite surprise when I caught sight of her. Leery was pointing me out to her.

Yes. I am sure surprise was the chiefest element in the impression she made on me. Everything about her was different from what I expected of women. She was the most matter-of-fact looking person I have ever seen--and the most beautiful. I cannot describe her way of dressing, all that sticks in my mind is the crisp, white collar she wore. Somehow one's attention centered on that clean, orderly bit of linen. There was no suggestion of aping man-fashion about her, nor were there any frivolous tweedledees nor tweedledums. It was all as straightforward as that collar.

She had a mass of Titian red hair. A complexion so delicate that the sun had freckled it already in early spring. The lines of her face were altogether beautiful. Her mouth was firm and immobile. Her shifts of mood showed only in her eyes. They were always changing color, from deep tones of brown to a glowing chestnut almost as red as her hair. The way her head balanced on her neck, made me want to cheer. It seemed a victory for the race, that she--one of us--could carry her head so fearlessly.

"Here is an introduction," she said.

It was a letter from a young lawyer. The junior member of his firm, he was sometimes sent into the Tombs to defend the servants of their rich clients. I had often given him pointers on the practice of our courts, which differs materially from that of the civil courts. He asked the same courtesies for his friend, Miss Martin.

I felt with some embarrassment the amused stares of the crowded corridors.

"This isn't a very convenient place to talk," I said. "Let's go round to Philippe's and lunch."

As we walked downstairs, I sized her up as about twenty-five. I noted that the grace of her neck extended down her spine. I have never seen a straighter back. There was something definitely boyish in the way she walked, in her stride and the swing of her shoulders. This impression of boyishness was always coming and interfering with realization that she was a beautiful woman.

We found a quiet table at Philippe's and she explained her case. She was counsel for the Button-Hole Makers' Union. They were on strike and one of the girls had been arrested on the charge of assaulting a private policeman. The question at issue invoked the legality of picketing. If the girl had been within her rights in standing where she did, the watchman, who tried to drive her away, was guilty of assault. It was a case to fight out in the higher courts. The unions demanded a definite decision. Miss Martin wanted to have her client convicted, and still have grounds to take it up on appeal. It was simple and I had given her the necessary points before we had finished our coffee.

The very first sight of her in the Tombs had stirred me, as the first sight of no other woman had ever done. It was not so much a desire for personal possession as a vague feeling that the man to whom she gave her love would be happy above other men. In the back of my brain, as I sat talking to her, was a continual questioning. She had said she was a socialist. I saw that she had the fearless, open attitude to life, which is the hallmark of the revolutionists. I wondered if she had a lover. Was the friend, who had given her the introduction, the lucky man? What were her theories in such matters?

But if she made a more direct sensuous appeal to me than other women, to an even greater degree she seemed to ignore the possibility of such ideas being in my mind. I have never known even an ugly woman who was less coquettish. She was strangely aloof. She made the purely business side of our meeting dominate, did not seem to realize there might be a personal aspect. The way in which she made it quite impossible for me to suggest paying for her lunch was typical. She shook hands with me firmly, frankly, as a boy would with a man who had given him some slight help, and strode up the street to her office. I was surprised.

In and out of the Tombs, she walked for the next few weeks. Judge Ryan, before whom she tried her case, and who believed that all women should marry and keep indoors as soon after eighteen as a man would have them, was mightily exercised over her invasion.

"Damn her soul, Whitman," he said, "she isn't a woman--she's just brain and voice. She sits there before the court opens and looks like a woman--good-looking woman at that--then she gets up on her hind legs and talks. Hell! I forget she is a woman--forget she wears skirts. And, so help me God, there aren't a dozen men in the building who know as much law as she does. She's got the goods. That's the devil of it. You can't snub her. You can't treat her the way she deserves. You want to call her unwomanly and she won't let you remember she's a woman."

She had made Ryan, facing her from the bench, feel the same aloofness, she had impressed on me across the table at Philippe's. But if the judge found it impossible to snub her, it was just as impossible, I found, to be friendly with her. We had frequent encounters in the corridors. I frankly sought them, and she did so as frankly--when she wanted some information. Away from her, I thought of her as a desirable woman. Face to face, she forced me to consider her as a serious minded socialist.

Aside from the details of her case, we had only one talk. The second day she was at court she cross-questioned me on my politics. I had none. "Why not?" she demanded. She had all the narrow-minded prejudice which most socialists have towards the mere reformer, the believer in palliatives, the spreaders on of salve. Did I not realize the futility of such work as mine? I was more keenly aware of it than she. Well, why did not I go to the root of the matter? Why not attack the basic causes? I was not sure what they were. She was. Although she had not been in the Tombs as many days as I had years, she knew all about it. The whole problem of crime sprang from economic maladjustment. Socialism would cure it. It was all so beautifully simple! I have unspeakable admiration for such faith. It is the most wonderful thing in the world. But all I can do is to envy it. I cannot believe.

Her aloofness increased noticeably after she had sounded the depth of my unbelief. When the case was finished, she sought me out to thank me for the very real service I had rendered. Despite my intentions in the matter, her hand slipped out of mine quicker than I wished. I hoped to see her again. She was uncertain how soon, if ever, her work would bring her back to the Tombs. I suggested that I might call on her. She seemed really surprised.

"Why," she exclaimed; "thank you. But you know I'm very busy. I have five or six regular engagements a week--committees and all that. And this strike takes what time is left. I am too busy for the social game. I'm sorry. But we'll run into each other again some time. Goodbye. No end obliged."

It was the snub direct. Her friendship was only for those who saw the light. She had no time for outsiders, for "mere reformers."

She filled more of my mind after she was gone than in the few days of our intercourse. For the first time in my life romance laid hold on my imaginings. I am not sure whether it was real love or simply wounded _amour propre_. But I dreamed of all sorts of extravagant ways of winning her esteem and love--generally at the cost of my life. I was not nearly unhappy enough to want to die, but I got a keen, if somewhat lugubrious delight in picturing her kneeling at my bedside, realizing at last the mistake she had made in snubbing me--repenting it always through a barren, loveless life.

The memory I held of her was altogether admirable--the straight line of her back, the glorious poise of her head, the rich brown of eyes, her frank and boyish manner. But pride held me back from seeking her out. I knew a snub would be the result.

Once, a month or so later, I passed a street corner crowd, under a socialist banner. She was just getting up to speak. I walked a block out of my way for fear she would see me and think I was trying to renew our acquaintance. But I also was busy. Too busy to waste time over a phantom, gradually she sank back into a vaguer and vaguer might-have-been. A year later I ran across her name in the paper in connection with some strike. For a day or two her memory flared up again. That sentimental spasm I thought was the last of her. I was deep in proof-reading.

*IV*

That my book brought recognition from professional penologists was a surprise to me. I had written it with the intent of interesting laymen. But a German psychological journal gave it a long review. It was quickly translated into French and Italian. I was made contributing editor of "La revue penologique." Last of all the American Prison Society took notice of me and chose me as a delegate to the International Congress at Rome.

Europe never attracted me, and I doubt if I would have gone, except for the urgings of Norman and Ann. I was sea-sick for five days, and bored beyond words the rest of the way over. It rained so hard the day I spent in Naples that I got no good view of Vesuvius.

Arrived in Rome, I found that they had put down my name for the first day's program, and I spent the time, till the congress opened, in my room writing up my paper. I had chosen for my subject: "The Need of a New Terminology in the Study of Crime." More and more this reform seems imperative to me. The effort to express the modern attitude towards crime in the old phraseology is like putting new wine in old skins. Just as we no longer say that a man is "possessed of the devil," but use such newer words as "paranoia," "paresis" and so forth, we must give up such terms as "burglary in the second degree." It is a remnant of mediaeval scholasticism and means nothing today. It is a dead concept of an act and gives no account of the live human being who is supposed to have committed it. "Murder," the code implies, "is always murder, just as oxygen is always oxygen." But while one atom of oxygen is exactly like every other, no two murderers are at all alike. Crime is infinitely complex. "Larceny"--a fixed and formal term--cannot describe the intricate reactions from the varied stimuli of environment, which lead a particular bunch of nerve cells to steal. We must turn our back on the abstract words of the ancient law books and develop a vocabulary which expresses actualities.

That first day of the congress, seemed to me the very apotheosis of absurd futility. Half a hundred delegates from all corners of the world assembled in one of the court rooms of the palace of justice. We were supposed to be serious, practical men, come together to devise means of improving the methods of combating crime. We sat for an hour and a half through tiresome, bombastic exchanges of international greetings. The election of a chairman, of honorary presidents and vice-presidents, of a real secretary and a host of honorary secretaries took up the rest of the morning. A nation's parliament could have organized in less time and we had only come together to exchange ideas, we had no power.

When we convened after lunch, I was called on. There were three delegates from England, one from Canada and another from the United States. The rest had only a long-distance knowledge of English. I have rarely felt more uncomfortably foolish than I did, reading my paper to that uncomprehending audience.

The first two to discuss my thesis were Germans. Neither had completely understood my argument, they attacked me with acrimony. The third speaker was an Italian, who shook his fist at me. I have not the faintest idea what he was talking about. Then one of the English delegation, a bishop, got up and said that it was well to have a note of humanism in our discussion, after all criminals were--or at least had been--men like us. As Archbishop Somebody had said on seeing a prisoner led out to execution--"There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Then a Frenchman, with carefully groomed beard and equally carefully groomed cynicism, said I was a sentimentalist. He told us that he was a "positivist." He referred frequently to Auguste Compte--a philosopher whom I had up till that moment always regarded very highly. My mawkishness he felt was a most regrettable incident in a scientific assembly. Criminology unless it could be reduced to an exact science like mineralogy or mathematics was no science at all. He ended up by telling us that he was glad to report that the sentimental objections to corporal punishment were rapidly dying out in France and that there was every prospect of the cat-o'-nine-tails being reintroduced into their prisons in the near future. What that had to do with my subject I could not see.

How to reply to such critics? It was not only the difficulty of language. Somehow I was oppressed with loneliness. I was a barbarian, an outlandish person among them. In their thoughts they were "officials," they were "pillars of society"--what Norman scornfully called "the best people." It was a stupid mistake which had brought me before them. They knew nothing about crime, except a jumble of words. They never would.

And so--being weary of soul--I said, that as far as I had understood, they were all against me except the gentleman from England. I wanted as far as possible to repudiate his attitude. I protested against the blasphemy of his archbishop. I was no churchman, but I could not find heart to blame the Deity for our outrageous human injustice. I was sorry that he believed in a God so immoral as to exercise special acts of grace to keep him and me out of prison. I felt that a better motto for prison reform would be--"There but for pure luck, go we."

This was taken as a witty sally by everyone but the English delegates who understood what I said and we adjourned to a state reception at the Quirinal; there was a dinner afterwards given by the Italian prison society. The congress reconvened the next day at two in the afternoon. The subject was "Prison Ventilation." I sneaked out and found my way to The Forum. There I encountered a congenial soul--a youthful guide who had learned to speak English in New York. We sat down on a piece of ancient Rome and he told me about his adventures in the new world.

"Ever arrested?" I asked.

"Twict."

"In the Tombs?"

"Sure," he said with a broad grin. "Fer a fight."

I engaged him for the rest of my stay in Rome. He led me to a little restaurant near-by and after supper we sat in the very top gallery of the Coliseum and talked about Mulberry Square. So I missed the dinner tendered us by the municipality.

The next day the great Lombroso was to discuss head measurements. Antonio and I visited the Vatican. He was an anti-clericalist and the indecent stories he told me about the dead popes, as he showed me their tombs in Saint Peter's were much more vivid than the sing-song guide book phrases he used in commenting on the wonder and the beauty of the place. He took me to supper with his family in a tenement district of Rome. So the "sights" I saw were not so much the pictures and the ruins as the souls of the down-trodden peasant folk bitter against church and state. I lost a chance--undoubtedly--to increase my meagre store of "culture," but I do not regret it.

My fellow delegate from America was shocked at my desertion of the congress. He thought I was in a pet over the reception given my paper and said it was not decent to stay away. So I went the next day and listened to a discussion on the advisability of introducing drugs into prison diet to reduce unpleasant nervous disorders among the inmates. Everyone seemed in favor of the proposition, the only opposition came from a realization of the expense involved. The chairman expressed the hope that some drug might yet be discovered which would be effective, and at the same time cheap.

When the congress was finished the delegates were taken as guests of the government to visit a model prison, recently opened in North Italy. Our inspection consisted of a hurried stroll through the cell-blocks and a banquet in the warden's palatial apartments. We drank several toasts to members of the royal family and then, someone proposed a bumper to the International Prison Congress. I noticed by chance that the bottle, from which a convict waiter filled my glass, was labelled, "_Lacrimae Christi_."

"Tears of Christ!" I said to my next neighbor. "It would be more fitting to drink this toast of the water in which Pilate washed his hands."

My neighbor was a Frenchman with a loud laugh--so the thoughtless jibe had to be repeated. The English delegate seized the opportunity to return my accusation of blasphemy. There was considerable angry comment. It was a regrettable incident, as it did no good.

The Hungarian government had also invited us to visit some of their blue-ribbon prisons. But in the railroad station at Milan, where we were waiting to take train for Trieste and Budapest, I heard the _Chef de Gare_ call the Paris express. It came over me with a rush. I could get home a week earlier. Why waste more time with these barren old gentlemen? I bolted, had just time to rescue my baggage.

Arrived in Paris in the early morning, I drove at once to Cook's and reserved passage on the first boat home. As I was turning away from the steamship desk, I had to walk past the window where mail is distributed. I do not think I was consciously looking at the crowd of men and women who were waiting for letters, in fact I remember quite well that I was losing my temper over an effort to put a too large envelope into my pocket, but suddenly I saw Suzanne Martin's back. It was impossible to mistake it, or the glorious pile of hair above her slender neck.

I walked on, intending to hurry away. But I stopped at the door. I picked up one of those highly colored tourist pamphlets--I think it was an advertisement of a "Tour to Versailles in motor cars"--and over the top of it I watched Suzanne gradually approach the window, get her handful of letters, and sit down in one of the easy chairs to read them.

At last she finished with them and started towards the door. I wished that I had not waited, but was ashamed to let her see me run away. I became deeply interested in the little book. She would have to walk right past me but if she did not care to recognize well---she should not know that I had seen her.

*V*

"Why--hello--Mr. Whitman."

It was not till I heard her voice that I realized how much it mattered to me, whether she spoke or not. Somehow or other we got out of the door onto the Avenue de l'Opera.

"Which way are you going?" she asked.

"Nowhere in particular. May I walk along with you?"

So here I was in Paris walking beside Suzanne. I suppose it had been a beautiful day before--it was early June, but it had suddenly become resplendent. The day had begun to laugh. I found out that she was intending to spend several weeks in Paris, so I lied and said I also was there for a month. With selfish glee I learned that Suzanne was lonely. She was evidently glad to have some one to talk to. Afraid that if I did not keep busy some other way, I might shout, I launched into a whimsical account of the prison congress. This carried us as far as a bench in the garden of the Tuileries. And there some chance word showed her that this was my first visit to Paris, that I had arrived hardly an hour before we met.

"Oh!" she said, jumping up, "Then, the very first thing you must do, is to climb the tower of Notre Dame. That's the place to get your first look at Paris."

"_Allons donc_," I cried. I would have said the same if she had suggested the morgue.

I remember that, as we rode along, Suzanne pointed out various places of interest, but I doubt if my eyes went further afield than the gracious hand with which she pointed. Then suddenly we turned a corner and came out into the place before the cathedral. The charm of youth beside me was broken for a moment by the wonder of antiquity. How alive the old building seems with the spirits of the long dead men who built it! They say that Milan Cathedral is also Gothic. But my fellow delegate must have stood in my way. I had not seen it as for the first time I saw Notre Dame.

"You can look at the facade afterwards," Suzanne said--her voice breaking the spell. "The important thing is to get the view from the top first."

The twisting, worn stairs of the North Tower was one of the treasures of my memory. A strange impression--the thick masonry, our twinkling little tapers in the darkness, stray wisps of Hugo's romance and of even older stories, the beads of moisture on the stones, the chill dank breath of very-long-ago and dominating it all, Suzanne's two tiny and very modern tan shoes and little glimpses of her stockings. I remember the sudden glare of the first balcony. I caught a quick view down the river and wanted to stop. But Suzanne, who was "personally conducting" this tour, said we could climb higher. So we entered the darkness again and came at last to the top.

I could not tell you how Paris looks from the tower of Notre Dame. I only remember how Suzanne looked. The stiff climb had shortened her breath and heightened her color. The breeze caught a stray wisp of her hair and played delightful tricks with it. And how her eyes glowed with enthusiasm.

"This is my favorite spot on earth," she said. "It's the very center of civilization. From here you can see the birthplace of almost every idea which has benefited the race, the battle-fields where every human victory was won. See! Over there on the Mont Ste. Genevieve is where Abelard shattered mediaevalism and commenced the reformation. And over there in the Latin Quarter is the oldest faculty of medicine in the world. It was in one of those houses on the hillside that men dared for the first time to study anatomy with a knife. And there--further to the west--is where Voltaire lived. Nearby is the house of Diderot, where the encyclopedists met to free the human mind. And here--on the other side of the river--is the Palais Royal. See the green clump of trees. Under one of them Camille Desmoulins jumped upon a chair and made the speech which overthrew the Bastille. And there--see the gold statue of victory above the housetops--that's all there is left of the grim old fortress. And so it goes. All the history of man's emancipation spread out before you in brick and mortar."

How lifeless it sounds now, as I write down the ghosts of her words which haunt my memory! But how wonderfully alive they sounded that dazzling summer morning--Paris spread out at our feet--we two alone on the top of the world! Even then her words might have seemed dead things, if they had not been illumined by her vibrant beauty, by the glorious faith and enthusiasm within her. All this history was vitally alive to her. So had passed the first acts in the great drama of progress. And she saw the last act--the final consummation of universal brotherhood--as something near indeed, compared to the long centuries since Abelard had rung up the curtain. We are always attracted by what we lack and her faith threw new chains about me.

A swarm of German tourists broke in upon us, and to escape them we went down to lunch. At this second meal with her she told me something of her life. She had been bred to the faith. Her mother, a Frenchwoman, had married an American. Suzanne had been born in New York. But her three uncles had been involved in the Communard revolt of 1871. One had died on the barricade. The other two had been sent to New Caledonia. The younger, living through the horrors of that Penal Colony, had escaped to America and had brought the shattered remnant of his life to his sister's home. He had been the mentor of Suzanne's childhood.

Six months before I encountered her in Paris, she had fallen sick from overwork, and had come to relatives in Southern Prance to regain her strength. Recovered now, she was spending the last month of her vacation sight-seeing in Paris. She asked me where I was stopping, which reminded me that I had not yet secured a place to sleep. I blamed it on her for having taken me off to the cathedral when I should have been looking up a hotel.

"Why waste money on a hotel?" she asked. "If you're going to be here several weeks a _pension_ is lots cheaper."

She told me of the place where she was staying over on the Left Bank. There were vacant rooms. I dashed away to cancel my sailing, to collect my baggage and, before I had time to realize my good fortune, I was installed under the same roof with her. My memory of the next few days is a jumble of Suzanne in the Musee Carnavelet, Suzanne in the Luxembourg, Suzanne in the Place de la Concorde, pointing out where they had guillotined the king, Suzanne under the dome of Les Invalides, denouncing Napoleon and all his ways.

Coming back from Versailles one evening, I asked her if she ever thought of living permanently in France.

"No," she said emphatically. "I love France, but I don't like the French. The men don't know how to treat a woman seriously. They always talk love."

"I envy them the _sang froid_ with which they express their feelings."

Suzanne's eyes shot fire. Displaying all her storm signals, she flared out into a denunciation of such flippancy. This business of telling a woman at first sight that she made your head swim, disgusted her. This continual harping on sex, seemed nasty. "Why can't men and women have decent, straightforward friendships?" she demanded. She liked men, liked their point of view, liked their talk and comradeship. But Frenchmen could not think seriously if a woman was in sight. Friendship was impossible with them.

"It's pretty uncertain with any men, isn't it?" I asked.

"Well. Anyhow American men are better. I've had some delightful men friends at home."

"And did the friendships last?" I insisted.

"Well, no." She was wonderfully honest with herself. "Why is it? It wasn't my fault."

"Probably nobody's fault," I said. "Just the grim old law of nature. You don't blame the sun for rising. You can't blame a man for....."

"Oh, don't you begin it," she interrupted. "I give you fair warning."

We sat glum on opposite seats until the train reached Paris.

"Oh, bother!" she said, as we got out. "What's the use of moping? Let's be friends. Just good friends."

She held out her hand so enticingly I could not help grasping it.

"Honest Injun," she said. "No cheating? Cross your heart to die."

So I was committed to a platonic relation which even at the first I knew to be unstable.

The next morning, as though to prove the firmer basis of our friendship, she told me that she was expecting two comrades, a Mr. and Mrs. Long, who were then in Germany, to arrive in Paris in a few days. They were planning a tramp through Normandy--to take in the cathedrals. Would I join them? We spent the afternoon over a road map of North-western France, plotting an itinerary.

And then, two days before we expected to start, came a telegram from the Longs. They were called home suddenly, were sailing direct from Hamburg.

"Let's go, anyhow," I said. "We can put up the brother and sister game. These French don't know whether American brothers and sisters ought to look alike or not. Anyhow, what does it matter what anybody thinks?"

Well. We had bought our rucksacs. The trip was planned. All its promises of pleasures and adventures had taken hold on both of us. She hesitated. I became eloquent. After a few minutes she broke out--evidently not having listened to me.

"Would you keep your word?--Yes--I believe you would. I'll go if you promise me to--well--not to get sentimental--really treat me like a sister."

"Isn't there any time limit on the promise? Am I to bind myself to a fraternal regard till death us do part? I don't approve of such vows."

"You're either stupid or trying to be funny," she snapped. "You propose that we go alone on a tramping trip. You could make it miserably uncomfortable--spoil it all. I won't start unless you promise not to. That's simple."

"Well," I said. "Give and take. I'll promise not to get sentimental, if you'll promise not to talk socialism. Agreed? We'll draw up a contract--a treaty of peace."

And in spite of her laughing protests that I was a fool, I drew it up in form. Suzanne, Party of the First Part, Arnold, Party of the Second Part, do hereby agree, covenant, and pledge themselves not to talk sentiment nor sociology during the hereinafter to be described trip....

So it was ordained. We started the next morning--by train to St. Germain-en-Laye.

*VI*

One of my treasures is a worn road map of Northwestern France. Starting from Paris, a line traces our intended course, down the Seine to Rouen, across country to Calais. It is a clear line. I had a ruler to work with, and the map was laid out on the marble top of a table in the little Cafe de la Rotonde. Also starting from Paris is another line, which shows the path we did follow. It is less dearly drawn, traced for the most part on a book balanced on my knee. Stars mark the places where we stopped, at night. From St. Germain-en-Laye, we doubled back to St. Denis, then a tangent off to Amiens, a new angle to Rheims. It stops abruptly at Moret-sur-Loing.

I can command no literary form to do justice to that Odyssey--it led me unto those high mountains from which one can see the wondrous land of love.

What did we do? I remember hours on end when we trudged along with scarcely a word. I remember running a race with her through the forest of Saint Germain. I remember a noontime under the great elm in the Jardin of a village cafe. There was delectable omelette and _Madame la patronne_ chattered amiably about her children and chickens and the iniquitous new tax on cider. I remember the wonder of those century old windows at Rheims and Suzanne's talk of the Pucelle. I remember trying to teach her to throw stones and her vexation when I laughingly told her she could never learn to do it like a man. And here and there along our route, I remember little corners of the Elysian Fields where we rested awhile and talked. Suzanne had found me unappreciative of Browning. Often by the wayside she would take a little volume of his verse out of her rucksac and make me listen. The first poem to charm me was "Cleon." It led us far afield into a discussion of the meaning of life and Suzanne--to make more clear Browning's preference for the man who lives over the man who writes about life--read "The Last Ride Together." Her voice faltered once--she realized I think how near it came to the forbidden subject--but she thought better to read on. After that I belonged to Browning.

Those verses seemed written to express our outing. Whether she looked beyond our walk or not I do not know. I did not. What would happen when our pilgrimage was over I did not ask. The present was too dizzyingly joyful to question the future.

At last we came to Moret on the border of the great forest of Fontainebleau. It had been our intention to push on and sleep at Barbizon, but we had loitered by the way, and at the little Hotel de la Palette, they told us the road was too long for an afternoon's comfort. So there we stopped, to stroll away some hours in the forest and get an early start in the morning.

They gave us two garret rooms, for the hotel was crowded with art students and the better part was filled. I recall how the bare walls were covered with sketches and caricatures. There was a particularly bizarre sunset painted on the door between our rooms.

Lunch finished, we started for the forest. We came presently to a hill-top, with an outlook over the ocean of tree-tops, the gray donjon keep of Moret to the north. Suzanne as was her custom, threw herself face down in the long grass. I seem to hold no sharper memory of her than in this pose. I sat beside her, admiring. Suddenly she looked up.

"Tomorrow night Barbizon," she said, "the next day Paris and our jaunt is over."

She looked off down a long vista between the trees. I do not know what she saw there. But no matter which way I looked, I saw a cloud of tiny bits of paper, fluttering into a waste-paper basket.

"And then," I said, "a certain iniquitous treaty of peace will be torn into shreds."

My pipe had burned out before she spoke again. Her words when they did come were utterly foreign to my dreaming.

"Why did you write that kind of a book?"

There was earnest condemnation in her voice. To gain time, I asked.

"You don't like it?"

"Of course not. It's insincere."

I filled my pipe before I took up the challenge.

"You'll have to make your bill of indictment more detailed. What's insincere about it?"

"You know as well as I do."

Never in any of our talks did she give me so vivid an impression of earnestness. With a sudden twist she sat up and faced me.

"It's cynical. There are two parts to the book--exposition and conclusions. The conclusions are pitiable. You suggest a program of reforms in the judicial and penal system. And they are petty--if they were all accepted, it wouldn't solve the problem of crime. You imply one of two things, either that these reforms would solve the problem, which they wouldn't, or that the problem is insoluble, which it isn't."

"Count one," I said. "Pleading deferred."

"And then--this is worse--you know there is no more chance of these reforms being granted under our present system, than of arithmetic being reformed to make two and two five."

"Count two. Not guilty."

"No jury would acquit you on it. But there's a third count--perhaps the worst of all. The book is horribly superficial. Hidden away in your preface you mention the fact that the worst crimes against society are not mentioned in the code. You gently hint that some Wall Street transactions are larcenous, even if they are not illegal. All hidden in your preface!"

"That's entirely unfair," I protested. "You are quarreling with me over a definition. My book deals with the phenomena of the criminal courts. I have no business with what you or the newspapers call crime. If I wanted my work to be scientific I had to get a sharp definition. And I said that crime consists of acts forbidden by the legislature. I pointed out that it is an arbitrary conception, which is always changing. Some things--like kissing your wife on the Sabbath day--are no longer criminal and some things--like these Wall Street transactions--probably will be crimes tomorrow. Your third count is not against me but against the 'Scientific Method.'"

"Tommyrot!" she retorted. "You try to evade a big human truth by a scientific pretext. You know that ninety per cent of the criminal law, just as ninety-nine per cent of the civil law, is an effort to make people recognize property relations which are basically unjust. If our economic relations were right it would eliminate ninety per cent of crime. And justice--socialism--would do more, it would result in healthier, nobler personalities and wipe out the other ten per cent. There's the crux of the problem of crime and you dodge it.

"You have a chapter on prostitution. It's splendid, the best I've seen--where you describe present conditions. But the conclusions are--well--sickening. Do you really think that taking the poor women's finger prints will help? Of course you don't! It's all wrapped up in the great injustice which underlies all life. You come right up to the point--you say that most prostitution comes because the daughters of the poor have no other alternative but the sweatshop--and then you shut your mouth like a fool or a coward.

"Your book might have been wonderful--a big contribution. Oh, why didn't you? It's only half-hearted--insincere!"

I cannot recall my defense. I tried to make her see how we came at the problem from the opposite poles, how her point of departure was an ideal social organization, while I started from the world as it is, how she spoke in terms of the absolute, and I thought only of relative values, how she saw an abiding truth back of life and I believed in an all-pervading change. We fought it out bitterly--with ungloved words--all the afternoon. Neither convinced the other, but I think I persuaded her of my sincerity, almost persuaded her that "narrow" was not the best word to express my outlook--that "different" was juster. The sun was down in the tree-tops when at last she brought the argument to a close.

"We'll never agree. Our points of view are miles apart."

"But that," I said, "need make no difference, so long as we are honest to each other--and to ourselves."

"I'm not sure about that," she said. "I must think it out."

She stretched out on the grass again and began to poke a straw into an ant-hole. I sat back and smoked and blessed the gods who had moulded so perfect a back. Then she looked at her watch and jumped up.

"Do you realize, Suzanne, that you have violated the treaty? You've talked sociology and socialism. Now--I'm free..."

"Oh! Please don't!" she interrupted. "Not now. We must hurry to dinner."

I got up laughing and we walked in silence, between the great trees, in the falling dusk, back to the Hotel de la Palette. The joviality of that troupe of young artists forced us to talk of trivial things. After supper we stood for a moment in the doorway. Behind us was noisy gayety, before us the full moon illumined the gray walls of the citadel, shone enticingly on a quiet reach of the river.

"Come," I said. "Let's go down to the bridge--the water will be gorgeous in this light."

For a moment she hung back reluctantly; then suddenly consented. But in the village, she wasted much time looking for the house where Napoleon had slept in hiding on his return from Elba. When we came at last to the bridge she clambered up on the parapet. I leaned against it beside her. The light on the river was gorgeous. Although there was no wind for us to feel, the great clouds overhead were driven about like rudderless ships in a tempest. For a moment the moon would be hidden, leaving us in utter darkness, the next it would break out, its glory bringing to life all the details of the picturesque old houses by the riverside. Suzanne made one or two barren attempts at conversation. At last I plunged into the real business of the moment.

"Of course," I began, "if you really wish it, I will postpone this till we get to Paris."

There was a perceptible tightening of her muscles--a bracing. But she did not speak.

If I was eloquent that night, persuasive, it was because I did not plead for myself, but for love. It is sometimes said that love is egoistic, subjective, to me it seems the most objective thing in the world. It is--at its grandest--I think, a complete surrender to the ultimate bigness of life. Without love we have nothing to fight for except our little personalities, no better occupation than to magnify our individuality. Love shows us bigger things. At least it was this I tried to tell Suzanne. She had looked on love as a disturbing element in life. I tried to show it to her as the goal, the apotheosis of life.

It seems to me, as I look back on it now, that I was hardly thinking of Suzanne--not at all of my desire for her. I was talking to something further away than she, perhaps to the moon. I was trying desperately to formulate a faith--to give voice to a belief.

And then she laid her hand on mine--and I forgot the moon. I saw only the glory of her face, different from what I had ever seen it. It was paler than usual and dreamy. It seemed surprisingly near to me. When I kissed her, she did not turn away.

Suddenly it rained.

Much of my life has hinged on just such stupid, ludicrous chances. It poured--soaking and cold. It was a serious matter for us. We were traveling light, with nothing but our rucksacs nearer than Paris, no outer clothes except those we wore. Although we ran all the way we were drenched to the skin before we reached the hotel. The rain stopped as abruptly as it had commenced. We were too breathless to talk as we clambered up the stairs to our garret rooms.

After a hard rub, dry underclothes and pajamas, I wrapped myself in a blanket and lit my pipe. Through the thin partition I could hear Suzanne giving directions to the bonne to dry her clothes by the kitchen fire. Then her bed creaked. From the cafe downstairs came sounds of riotous mirth. Our talk had been so inconclusive.

"Suzanne," I said, knocking on the door between our rooms. "May I come in? Please. It's awfully important."

There was no answer and I opened the door. The moon, having escaped from the clouds, shone in through the mansard window, full on her bed, painting her hair a richer red than usual. I must have been a weird sight, with that blanket wrapped about my shoulders. But she did not smile. I can find no word to name her expression, unless wonder will do. There was a suggestion of the amazed face of a sleepwalker. Instinctively I knew that she would not repulse me. That moment she was mine for the taking. But I did not desire what a man can "take" from a woman. I wanted her to give.

I sat on the foot of the bed and tried to talk her into the mood I hungered for. It was not self-restraint on my part. I was not conscious of passion. What I wanted seemed finer and grander. If she had reached out her hand to me, all my pent up desires would have exploded. If she had tried to send me away, it might have inflamed me. If she had spoken--I do not remember a word. She lay there as one in a dream. There was a strange, dazed look in her eyes, perhaps it was awed expectancy. I did not read it so.

Hoping to wake her, I kissed her hands and her forehead. The great coil of her hair moved in my hands like a thing alive. Its fragrance dizzied me. Fearful of intoxication, I went apart for a moment by the window, looked out at the sinking moon, until my head was clear again. I came back and knelt by her bed.

"Suzanne. What I want is not a thing for the night, not a thing of moonlight and shadows. What I want must be done by day in the great open air--at high noon--for all time and whatever comes after. To-morrow in the blaze of the sun...."

I could not say what was in my heart. The last rays of the moon touched the profile of her face so glowingly that suddenly I wanted to pray.

"Oh, Suzanne, I wish that we believed in a God--we two. So I could pray his blessing on you--on us."

Then I kissed her on the lips and went away.

The hours I spent in my window that night were I suppose the nearest I ever got to Heaven. It seemed that at last my torturing doubts were over, that I had read in the Divine Revelation, that the way, the truth and the light had been made plain to me. For the second time in my life I had the assurance of salvation.

Just as the rim of the sun came up over the eastern hills, I heard her get out of bed, heard the sound of her bare feet coming towards the door. I jumped down from my seat in the window. My dream was fulfilled--she was coming to me in the dawn.

The door opened barely an inch. Her voice seemed like that of a stranger.

"Arnold. Please go down in the kitchen and get my clothes."

I was ready to open my veins for her and she asked me to walk downstairs and bring her a skirt and blouse and shoes.

"Don't stand there like an idiot," the strange voice said. "I want my clothes."

Well--somehow I found the clothes and brought them back. She took them in hastily through the door, closed it in my face--locked it. I think the grating of the bolt in the lock was the thing I first realized clearly. She was afraid I would force myself on her. We were utter strangers, she did not know me at all.

Once in a strike riot I saw a man hit between the eyes with a brick. It must have knocked him senseless at once, but he finished the sentence he was shouting, stooped down to pick up a stone, stopped as though he had thought of something, sat down on the curb in a daze--it must have been a full half minute before he groaned and slumped over inert.

After Suzanne drove the bolt of her door through the dream, I got dressed and sat down dumbly to wait. I heard her moving about her room, heard her putting on her shoes--I remember thinking that as they had been wet, they must be stiff this morning--then she unlocked and opened the door.

"Arnold," she said in that constrained voice I did not know. "I've got to go away--I want to be alone. There's a train for Paris in a few minutes."

I suppose I made some movement as if to follow her.

"No. Don't you come. I've got to think things out by myself. I've got to"--the strained tone in her voice was desperate, almost hysterical--"Let me go alone. I'll write to you--Cook's. I'm...."

She turned without a word of good-bye and I heard her footsteps on the stairs of the still quiet house. And presently, perhaps fifteen minutes, perhaps half an hour, I heard the whistle of a train.

*VII*

After a while I "came to." I went into her room and looked about it. In her haste to be gone she had forgotten her rucksac, it lay there in plain sight on the tumbled bed. I went downstairs and drank some coffee and paid the bill. I remember a foolish desire to cry when I realized that I must pay for both of us. In all the trip she had scrupulously insisted in attending to her share. With only our two bags for company I went up to Paris. She had taken her baggage from the pension an hour before I arrived, she had left no address. I spent most of my time in the garden of the Tuileries, going every hour or so to Cook's in quest of the letter she had promised. There were times when I hoped she would come back, when it seemed impossible that I should not find her again, sometimes I despaired. But mostly it was just a dull, stunned pain, which was neither hope nor despair. After three days the letter came. It was postmarked Le Havre.

"Dear friend Arnold,

"It has taken me longer than I had thought to be sure of myself. I cannot marry you. It has never been hard for me to say this before. It is hard now. I know how much it will hurt you. And I care more than I ever did before. More, I think, than I ever will care again. For I can imagine no finer way of being loved than your way.

"If it were not for the pain it has cost you--I would be glad of the chance which threw us together in Paris. The days which followed were the most joyous I have ever known--almost the only ones. I have not found life a happy business. Surely you won't, I doubt if anyone does, realize how sad the world seems to me. But somehow, out of the overwhelming misery about us, you helped me to escape awhile, helped me to snatch some of 'the rarely coming spirit of delight.' They were perfect--those never-to-be-forgotten days on the open road.

"I can't--even after all this thinking, and I have thought of nothing else--understand clearly, what happened at Moret. When you began to talk love to me--well--it was the first time in my life, I did not want to run away. We all have our woman's dream hidden somewhere within us. I don't remember what you said to me there on the bridge but suddenly my dream came big. Love seemed something I had always been waiting for. I kept asking myself 'can this at last be love'--and because I did not want to run away I thought it was.

"When you came to my room I was drunk with the dream. That you did not take advantage of my bewilderment--well--that's what I meant when I said I could think of no finer love than what you have given me. I could not have reproached you if you had. God knows what it would have meant. It might have turned the balance, I might have loved you--in a way. But it would not have been _you_, and it would not have been what you wanted.

"When you went away, I began to recall your words--I had scarcely heard them--and then I realized what you wanted. It seemed very beautiful to me and--will you believe it--I wanted to give it to you, be it for you. But as the hours slipped by the fear grew that I could not, grew to certainty. And I was afraid that if I stayed, I would cheat you. And so, in fear, I ran away.

"I know I must have seemed very cruel to you that morning. And I am writing all this in the hope that you will understand that I was harsh because I was afraid, it was the cruelty of weakness. I wanted to put my arms about you and cry. You will see that it was better that I did not. For now--with a cool head--it is very clear to me, not only that I could not be to you what you wish, but that at bottom I do not want to. I do not love you.

"I would like to make this sound less brutal, but it is true. It's not only in regard to socialism that our view-points are miles apart, but also in this matter of love.

"The porter is calling the 'bus for my steamer. I must stop or miss the tender. It is just as well. If I have not shown you in these few pages what I feel, I could not in twice as many."

I was not man enough to take my medicine quietly. The letter jerked me out of my lethargy, threw me into a rage, the worst mood of my life. I cursed Suzanne, cursed love, cursed Europe. I engaged passage on the first boat home. I took along Suzanne's rucksac with the intention of having its contents laundered and returning it to her with a flippant, insulting note. I occupied most of the time till the boat sailed, on its composition. On board I drank hoggishly, gambled recklessly--and as such things often go--won heavily.

But the last night out, anchored off quarantine, the fury and the folly left me. After all I had been making an amazing tempest in a teapot. What did it matter whether my love affair went straight or crooked? I felt so much the spoiled child, that I was ashamed to look up at the eternal, patient stars. After the vague open spaces of the sea, the crowded harbor, the distant glow and hum of the great city, seemed real indeed. A flare of rockets shot up from Coney Island, dazzled a moment and went out. I laughed. The lower lights along the shore were not so brilliant--but abiding.

I leaned over the rail and strained my eyes towards the city. And it seemed as if life came to me through the night as a thing which one might hold in the hand and study.

The Tombs and all its people, corrupt judges and upright criminals. In a few days I would drop back into the rut among them. What had become of Sammy Swartz? A pick-pocket of parts, he had, when I left, been virtuously scrubbing floors in an office building--a deadly grind, compared to the dash and adventure of his old life. What held him to it? Was it only fear of prison or some vague reaching out for rectitude? Was he still "on the square" or had he gone back to the "graft?"

The Teepee, Norman, Nina and little Marie. What were they doing? Probably wondering when I would return--planning some fete. My questionings shot back to the old home in Tennessee. The Father and Margot--what were they doing, what had been done to them? And Ann? I would have to hurt her in the morning, with my news. Life had driven a wedge in between us.

And Suzanne? She was somewhere in the city. I pictured her in council with her comrades in some grimy committee room, some tenement parlor--the light of the glorious vision in their eyes--planning the great reconstruction, plotting the coronation of justice. She had turned her back on the love I offered that some greater love might be made manifest. It seemed to me wrong. But right or wrong, I loved her better that night than ever before. It was as though a comet had become a fixed star.

And I was sorry for her--while admiring. Like all the rest of us, she was caught in the vast spider web of life, beating her wings to pieces in the divine effort to reach the light. All the people I could think of seemed in the same plight--admirable and pitiable. Is not this immense, spawning, struggling family of ours as much alike in the uncertainty of life as in the certainty of death?

Once ashore, I called up Ann on the telephone. Her laboratory had been moved into the city, and so we could arrange to lunch together. I was glad of the public restaurant, I would have found it harder to tell her about Suzanne, if we had been alone. When once Ann understood, she made it as easy for me as possible.

"And so," she said at last as we reached the entrance to her laboratory, "you won't be coming out to Cromley?"

"I would be a decidedly glum guest, I'm afraid,"

She stood for a moment on the step, her brows puckered.

"Well," she said, "If you really want her--go after her. Hit her on the head and drag her to your cave. Oh, I know. I'm too matter of fact and all that. But it's the way to get her--beat her a little."

"I had my chance to do that," I said, "and couldn't. Perhaps you're right--but I love her a bit too much. I shan't go after her."

Ann sniffed.

"If I was a man, I'd go after what I wanted." Then her eyes softened. "But I'm only a woman. All I can do is to tell you--you're always welcome at Cromley."

She turned and ran up the steps to her laboratory.

In this conversation I realized the basic difference between Ann's point of view and mine, more clearly than before. Her philosophy taught her to be, if not satisfied, at least content, with half things. If she could not get just what she wanted, nor all of it, she tried to be happy with what was available. Doubtless she found life better worth living than I did. But such an attitude towards Suzanne would have seemed to me a desecration. Perhaps if I had sought her out, argued with her, tried to dominate her will--tried figuratively to "beat her a little"--I might have persuaded her to marry me. Perhaps. But what I might have won in this way, would not only have been less than what I wanted, but something quite different.

It had taken no "persuading" to make me love Suzanne. I had seen numberless women, had met, I suppose, several thousands. Many I had known longer than Suzanne. But she stood out from the rest, not as "another" woman, not as a more beautiful, or cleverer or more earnest woman--although she was all these--but as something quite different--my woman. If she did not recognize me, in the same sudden, unarguable way as her man, there was nothing I could do about it. She did not.

The wise man of Israel said that the way of a man with a maid is past all finding out. It would be truer to say that the ways of men with maidens are too varied and numerous for any classifying. My way was perhaps insane. Very likely I was asking of life more than is granted to mortals. But that is small comfort.

Perhaps Suzanne did love me and had, in running away, obeyed some age-old, ineradicable instinct of her sex. It is possible that she mourned because I did not play the venerable game of pursuit. Perhaps if I had taken advantage of the hour when she was wholly mine, it might have "turned the balance." I might have entered into the glory. I do not understand the forces of life which rule our mating. But one thing I know--I was not in love with any Suzanne who could have been "persuaded."

I sat for some time on a bench in Union Square, thinking this out, after I left Ann. I had a strange reluctance to plunge back into the old life. I remember watching with envy two tramps who sat in contemplative silence on a bench opposite me. I was tempted to wander away, out of the world of responsibilities, out into that strange land where nothing matters. There are two sorts of wanderlust; the one which pushes the feet and the one which pushes the spirit. But at last I shook this cowardly lassitude from me and walked downtown to the Teepee.

Nina threw her arms about my neck. Norman pounded me on the back, the little lassie Marie kissed me shyly, and Guiseppe hobbled in from the kitchen to complete the welcome. While they were still storming me with questions, Norman went back to his work. He had a large sheet of drawing paper thumbtacked to the table and was sketching an advertisement for a new brand of pickles. When the rest of them disappeared to kill the fatted calf, he put a hand on my shoulder and looked me over carefully.

"Been on the rocks?" he said.

I had not realized that it showed. I nodded assent.

He laid on a dash of crimson alongside some glaring green.

"Isn't it fierce?" he said. "They wouldn't hang this sort of thing in the Louvre but it's what makes the public buy." He squinted at it ruefully--"This love business is beyond me. Who would think that I could stumble on Nina where I did? You know that song of Euripides.

'This Cyprian Is a thousand, thousand things She brings more joy than any God, She brings More woe. Oh may it be An hour of mercy when She looks at me.'

I'd given the whole matter up in disgust--and it was solved for me.--Say. I need to work in a little raw blue here. Green pickles, red pepper, blue--oh yes--a blue label on the bottle. Sweet! isn't it?

"You know sometimes I think we are all wrong trying to join brains. You wouldn't call Nina exactly my intellectual equal, but I don't know any chap married to a college graduate who's got anything on me. I'll put up Marie against any highbrow offspring."

He pulled out the tacks and set his sketch up on the mantel-piece and walked across the room to get the effect. He jerked his head, gestured with his hand and his lips moved as though he were arguing with it. He pinned it down again and began putting in the lettering.

"Of course," he took up the thread of his thoughts, "there are people who say that it isn't marriage at all, that I've just legalized my mistress. But I've seen a lot of people striving, breaking their necks, for something they'd call finer, more spiritual--and getting nothing at all. I know I'm happier than most. I'm satisfied with _my_ luck. That's the point. I can't call it anything but luck--By the way. There's a pile of letters for you."

And so I dipped back in the rut. In the Tombs I sought out new duties, tried to lose myself--forget the mess I had made of things--in work. Nina and Norman stood beside me in those days with fine sweet loyalty. They asked no questions, but seemed to know what was wrong. Always I felt myself in the midst of a conspiracy of cheer. It was during these dreary months that I first began to like children. Marie's prattle, after the gloom and weariness of the Tombs, was bright indeed.

I know nothing more beautiful than the sight of a little child's soul gradually taking shape. The memory of my own lonely, loveless childhood has given me, I suppose, a special insight into the problems of the youngsters. The fact that I succeeded in gaining this little girl's love and confidence has compensated me for many things which I have missed.

*VIII*

Shortly after my return from Europe, I came into communication again with my family. First it was a letter from the Father. He regretted that so many years had passed without hearing from me. Knowing him as I did, I recognized in this a real apology for having tried to starve me into obedience. He had read my book with great pleasure and had been especially proud to learn that I had been chosen to represent our nation abroad. Then there was a little news of the village--a list of those who had died and been born and married. Oliver, he wrote, had recently been called to a pastorate in New York City. He gave me his address so that I might call. And he ended with the hope that I had conquered the doubts which had troubled my youth and won to the joy of religious peace.

It was a hard letter to answer. I had no more of the bitterness I once felt towards him. I wanted very much to give him news which would cheer him. And yet I knew that the one question which seemed really important to him--in regard to my religious beliefs--I could not answer frankly without giving him pain. I did the best I could to evade it.

About Oliver I was less certain. I had never liked him. I did not want to revive the connection. But I knew that it would please the Father to have me. I resolved to call, but having no enthusiasm for it, other engagements seemed more important, I kept postponing it.

But coming home to the Teepee one winter afternoon about five, I found that he had forestalled me by calling first. As I opened the door, I heard Nina's voice and then one that was strange--but I knew at once it was a clergyman's voice. They had not lit a lamp yet and the library was illumined only by the open fire. Norman was sitting on the divan playing with Marie's pig-tail--it was a habit with him, just as some men play with their watch charm. Nina had on her company manners and was doing the entertaining. The clergyman rose as I entered. He was tall and broad, on the verge of rotundity. He wore a clerical vest and collar and the fire light sparkled on a large gold cross which hung from his watch chain.

"Here he is," Nina said as I came in.

"I--am--very--glad--to--see--you--again--Arnold."

I did not realize who it was, until Norman spoke up.

"It's your cousin, Dr. Drake."

"Oh. Hello, Oliver," I said, shaking hands.

I realized at once that this had not been an entirely fitting way to respond to his dignified, almost pompous greeting. I find it hard not to portray Oliver in caricature. He was so utterly foreign to the life I was leading, so different from the people I knew that inevitably he looked outlandish--at times comical. I have always regretted that Browning did not write another poem, the reverse of "Bishop Blougram's Apology," giving us the free thinker's account of that interview.

At first Oliver seemed to me appallingly affected. But as I got to see more of him I changed the adjective to "adapted." Just as a practicing physician must develop certain mannerisms so had Oliver adapted himself to his _metier_. His voice was most impressive. It was his working capital and he guarded it with infinite care. He was as much afraid of a sore throat as an opera singer. He belonged to that sub-variety of his species which is called "liberal." He had accepted the theory of evolution end higher criticism. He prided himself on being abreast of his time. He strove--successfully--to give the impression of a broad-minded, cultured gentleman.

I think he enjoyed the flattery of success and he had the brains to win it. His wife, whom I met later was, I think, dominated by "social" ambitions. She also had brains. They were a strong team. Their progress had been a steady upward curve. From a small town to a small city, then from a mission chapel in Indianapolis to its biggest church, from there to Chicago and at last to a fashionable charge in New York. And when you saw Oliver this progress seemed inevitable.

Spirituality? I do not think he had need of any. It would have been an impediment to his progress. It was very hard to remember that he was the son of Josiah Drake.

"How long is it," he said in his suave, modulated voice, "since we saw each other. Not since I left you at your prep. school--at least fifteen years."

"More," I said, "twenty." I could think of nothing to say. His presence was rather oppressive. But it was part of his profession never to be awkward.

"Well. Now that we are in the same city, I trust we will see each other more frequently. You were in Europe when we arrived. I wasn't quite sure whether you were back yet or not. But I came in on the chance--I got your address from your publishers"--he made a congratulatory bow--"to see if we could have you for dinner next Friday. It's been a great pleasure to meet Mr. and Mrs. Benson, I envy you such friendship...."

"Nina," Norman interrupted, "has been chanting your praises for the last half hour."

"Ah. You cannot dodge your responsibilities that way, Mr. Benson," Oliver remarked, with rather heavy playfulness. "You have been a most effective chorus. Of course, Arnold,"--he turned to me--"your friends will always be welcomed at our house. I would be very glad, and I am sure Mrs. Drake would be also, if you could bring them with you on Friday night."

Norman bounced off the divan, as if someone had exploded a bomb under him.

"Oh, no," he said. "We're very much obliged to you. But Nina and I never go out in society,"--as Oliver looked a bit taken aback, Norman went on to explain. "You see our marriage was--well--picturesque. I've forgotten the date, but you can find the details in the files of any of our newspapers. Fortunately, my wife has no social ambitions, so we don't have to risk embarrassing people who are kind enough to invite us."

Oliver had regained his poise.

"Being a stranger to the city," he said, "I am of course ignorant of the matter to which you refer but"--he gracefully took Nina's hand--"I am quite sure that Mrs. Benson would honor any society. However if it would expose you to any embarrassment, I cannot, of course, insist."

Nina's attitude to Oliver after he was gone was amusing. She had evidently been impressed with his grandeur. But when Norman jokingly accused her of having fallen in love with him, she shuddered.

"No," she said with real but ludicrous solemnity--"I wouldn't like to be his wife."

Marie, who had had to undergo the ordeal of sitting on his knee, remarked that he did not know how to play.

But in spite of the dislike she had taken to him Nina made me tell in detail everything about the dinner party. It had, I am sure, been a great success from Mrs. Drake's point of view. There had been two Wall Street millionaires at the table, a great lawyer, a congressman and an ambassador. Because French came to me easily I had to entertain the latter's wife. The food and the wine had been exquisite. Socially a success, but humanly a barren affair.

I made my duty call on Mrs. Drake and would never have gone near them again, if it had not been for a letter I received from Oliver about a month later. He asked me to come for lunch to talk over a scheme he was working out for penal reform. It interested me immensely to see him and his wife working together. He began with a sonorous peroration. The reason the church was losing influence was that it did not take sufficient interest in social problems. He was developing this idea at some length when Mrs. Drake coughed.

"The idea is familiar," she said.

"Yes, my dear."

Coming, as he did, to the direction of one of New York's most influential churches, a congregation which included many people of great wealth, many people of great influence in the world of business and politics.... Mrs. Blake coughed.

"I'm sure Cousin Arnold knows about the church."

"Yes, my dear. I was about to say...."

He was about to say that he felt it his duty to try to utilize this great force in the cause of human betterment. In a few minutes Mrs. Drake coughed again and said, "Naturally." He had given a good deal of consideration, prayerful consideration, to the subject: personally he was opposed to the church going into politics. He spoke of several well-known clergymen who had gone into the fight against Tammany Hall, he doubted their wisdom. Of course if one could be sure that all their congregation were republicans.... The lunch was finished at this point and we went into the sumptuous library. Mrs. Drake took the subject out of his hand.

"You see, Cousin Arnold," she said, "we think that the role of the church should be conciliating. It is our object to attract people--all people to the church--not to alienate anyone. And the church cannot mix in any of the issues which are vexed--which have partisans on each side--without offending and driving people away. It is evident that the church must interest itself in social questions, must show that it is a power to overcome this horrible unrest. But it is very hard to find a social problem which is consistent with the conciliatory role which the church must preserve.

"When Oliver and I read your book, we both had the same inspiration. Here is just the very problem. What you wrote about the prisons is awful. And no one can object to the church taking a definite attitude on this question. The Master, himself has instructed us to visit those who are in prison."

"Exactly," Oliver put in.

But she did not give him time to go on. She rapidly laid before me their plan. Oliver was to call together a group of a dozen fellow clergymen, the most influential--I presume she meant the most fashionable--in each denomination. I was to speak to them and help him to get them interested. They would organize a committee, they would give out interviews to the newspapers, preach sermons on the subject, get some good bills introduced into the legislature--and make a great splash!

I sat back and listened to it with grim amusement. This was to be Oliver's debut in New York. In vulgar phrase it was a "press agent campaign." Oliver--the progressive, the fighting clergyman--was to get columns of free advertising. There would surely be a great mass meeting in one of the theaters and Oliver would get his chance to cast the spell of his oratory over fashionable New York. It was an admirable scheme. No attack on Tammany Hall, was not one of his deacons a director in the street car company? Did not the real owner of the gas company rent the most expensive pew in the church and did not complaisant Tammany Hall arrange to have the gas company's ashes removed by the city's street cleaning department? No support to the campaign for decent tenements, some of the congregation were landlords. And of course no playing with the dangerous subject of labor unions.

"J. H. Creet doesn't belong to your church, does he?" I asked.

"No," Mrs. Drake replied. "Why?"

"Well, he has a fat contract for manufacturing cloth for prison uniforms."

"J. H. Creet?" Oliver said, making a note. "A queer name. I never heard of it."

Their interest in the matter was evident, but where did I come in? Well--after all--publicity is a great thing. It must be the basis of every reform. I had very little faith in any real good coming from such a campaign, but at least it would call people's attention to the issue. It was not to be despised. So I fell in with the scheme.

Several outsiders have complimented me on the newspaper noise we made, supposing that I was the motive power of it. The praise belongs to Oliver--and his wife. It was remarkable the skill with which they handled it. It was amusing to watch the suave manoeuvres by which Oliver always secured the top line. For a month he worked hard, put in hours of real study. His great speech in Daly's was masterful. And then things fizzled out. None of the bills got past a second reading.

At one of the last conferences I had with Oliver, he asked me why I did not go to Tennessee and visit the Father.

"Why don't you have him come on here for a vacation?" I asked. "He hasn't been in New York since before the war."

Oliver shrugged his shoulders.

"I make a point of going out to see him every two years--but he'd be out of place here. The world has moved a lot since his day. He would not understand. He's the type of the old school. Progress is heresy. Why I'm sure he'd be shocked at my wearing a collar like this. He'd accuse me of papacy. I always put on mufti when I visit him."

It was the patronizing superiority of his tone that angered me. I realized suddenly how lonely the Father must be. I had always thought of him as quite happy in having a son who had followed in his footsteps. I am not sure but that with all my outspoken heresy, I was more of a true son to him than Oliver. I resolved to go out to Tennessee at my first opportunity.

I am half sorry I went. It was an unsuccessful visit. The barren little mountain village had changed not at all in the years I had been away. There were a few more battle monuments on the hillside and the people still talked of little beside the war. The big parsonage beside the barn-like church was just as I had left it. The Father's wants were looked after by the numerous progeny of Barnabas, the negro body servant who had followed him through the war.

I had been thrown out for my Godlessness and had been expected to go to the dogs. It was something of an affront to the traditions that I had not. To have written a book was a matter of fame in that little village. I found that the Father with childlike pride had boasted far and wide of my having been chosen as delegate to the prison congress at Rome. It was not to be accounted for that instead of coming back as the prodigal I should return as a "distinguished son." The minor prophets of the place were disappointed in me.

Even the Father was bewildered. He came down to the gateway to meet me--a fine old figure, leaning on his ebony cane, his undimmed eyes shining from under his shaggy white eyebrows. He put his arm over my shoulder as we walked back to the house, as though he was glad of someone to lean upon. And all through supper he talked to me about my father and mother. He told me again how my father had died bravely at the head of a dare-devil sortie out of Nashville. And he told me with great charm about the time when they had been children. We sat out on the porch for a while and he went on with his reminiscencing. Then suddenly he stopped.

"Oh," he said, "how I ramble. You will be wanting to go and call on Margot."

It was like visiting the ghosts. Margot had aged more than any of my generation. We were still under forty but her hair was quite gray. Her face had lost its beauty--pinched out by her narrow, empty life. And yet as she stood on the porch to greet me, as I came up the walk to her house, there was much of the old charm about her. There are few women like her nowadays. I knew many in my childhood--the real heroes of the great war. The women who in the bitter days of reconstruction, bound up the wounds of defeat, bore almost all the burdens and laid the foundations of the new South. They were gracious women, in spite of their arrogant pride in their breed. They knew how to suffer and smile.

We sat side by side on the porch--leagues and leagues apart. I found it strangely hard to talk with her. She told, in her quiet colorless voice, all her news. Her mother had died several years before. Al was married and established in Memphis and so forth. Just as the supply of news ran out, a rooster awoke from some bad dream and crowed sleepily.

"Margot," I said, "do you still steal eggs?"

"O Arnold," she laughed, "haven't you forgotten that? I have--almost. A long time ago I paid mother back and I saved fifteen dollars out of my allowance and sent it to the Presbyterian church."

I had always considered myself a fairly honest man, but it had never occurred to me to make restitution for these childish thefts.

"It was awful," she went on, "why did we do it?"

"Margot," I said, "haven't you ever committed a worse sin than that?"

She fell suddenly serious. It was several minutes before she replied.

"Yes, Arnold, I've been discontented and rebellious."

I looked out at the village street, at the uninteresting houses, at the glare of the "general store" where liquor was sold and where doubtless Col. Jennings, illumined by the moonshine whiskey of our mountains, was recounting to a bored audience of loafers some details of one of Stonewall Jackson's charges. It was needless to ask what it was that made her discontented, against what she had been rebellious. And the deadly torpor of that village life seemed to settle about me like a cloud of suffocating smoke. There sat beside me this fine spirited woman--useless. Her glorious potentiality of motherhood unused. Defrauded of her birth-right--wasted! I had an impulse to jump up and shake my fist at it all. I wanted to tell her that her greatest sin had been not to revolt more efficiently. But that would have been cruel now that her hair was so gray.

"Do you know who has helped me most?" she asked. "Your uncle. He is a saint, Arnold. We are great friends now. He came here one time when father was sick. He has been a wonderful comfort to me. Sometimes I go and call on him. He's very lonely. And he's such a gallant old gentleman. When I see him drive by in his buckboard I always wave to him and as soon as he's out of sight I go over to the house and scold the niggers. They would never do any work if somebody did not fuss them. And you know it makes me more contented to watch him. I say to myself that if such a wonderful man, so wise and learned can find plenty to do to serve the Master in this little village there must be quite enough for just a woman like me. There's a heap of comfort in that thought. But sometimes I read some story or think about you all out in the big world and it seems very small here--and lonely."

There was nothing I could think to say, so again we were silent.

"Arnold," she said suddenly. "Do you ever read King Arthur stories any more?"

"Whenever I get five minutes," I replied. "The people I live with have a little girl--Marie. I'm teaching them to her."

"I'm so glad--and Froissart?"

She went into the house and brought out the old soiled volume. We looked through it together and then she said that perhaps I would want to take it East for Marie. But I had a feeling that she wished to keep it. So I said Marie was too young for Froissart yet. Once more we fell silent. I remember the open book on her thin knees, her thin aristocratic hand between the pages, the profile of her face. Lamp-light shone out through the window upon her and she looked almost beautiful again.

I am never sure of what is in a woman's heart. But I could not explain the constraint upon us except that perhaps she had always been waiting for my homecoming, still nourishing in her heart our childish love--still hoping. But there was nothing to hope. It was not in her power to conceive what I was. I was battered and scarred by fights she had never imagined, disillusioned of dreams she had never dreamed. I had left the village years ago--irrevocably. She would have been utterly lost in my world. At last, rather mournfully, I said "good night."

The next day the Father was on the porch when I came down. He greeted me with a sort of wistful expectancy in his eyes. And my cordial "good morning" did not seem to satisfy him. I did not understand until at breakfast.

"My son," he said, "I have often wished--it would have made me very happy--if you had married Margot." So he at least had hoped that this would be the result of my home-coming.

"She's a rare girl," he said, "a fine spirit. A good wife is a great help to a man in leading an upright life. A pillar of strength."

"The fates have denied me that help," I said. And I did not realize till too late the pagan form I had given my words.

But the match had been lighted. The Father did not believe that any good could come to a man except from the religion of Christ. Try as hard as I might I could not prevent the conversation from taking that turn. If he had loved me less we might have been better friends. But the only thing which mattered to him was the salvation of souls. And in proportion to his love for me he must needs seek my conversion. On the one point where we could not agree, his very affection made him insistent.

We both tried very hard to be sweet tempered about it. But I was in a difficult position. If I did not try to answer his arguments he thought I was convinced but unwilling to admit it. If I argued, it angered him. He would lose his temper and then be very apologetic about it. For an hour or so we would talk pleasantly of other things. Then inevitably the conversation would swing back to the subject he cared most about. After supper he at last brought things to a pass from which there was but one escape.

"My son," he said, "the day after to-morrow is the first Sunday in the month--Communion Sunday. You are still a member of my church, you have never asked to be relieved of the solemn responsibilities you took when you united with us. Will you join the rest of the members at the communion table?"

"I'm sorry, Father," I said, my heart suddenly hardening at the memory of the way I had been pushed into church membership. "I'll have to leave to-morrow night. I must be back at work early next week."

I had expected to stay longer. But for me to have gone to church and refused communion, would have been almost an insult to him. To have pretended to a faith I did not have, seemed to me a worse sort of a lie than the one I used. And so--having been home but two nights--I returned to the city and work.

*IX*

Except for my vacations, I have missed very few working days in the Tombs since. And as the months have slipped along I have added steadily to my writings on criminology. To some it might seem a dreary life. It has not been so. There have been compensations.

The chief one has been the pleasant home in the Teepee. It would be easy to fill pages about it. But those who have been part of a loving family will know what I mean without my writing it. And it is past my power to paint it for those who have not shared it.

I recall especially the Christmas Eve when Marie was nine years old. Norman was at work at the table. Marie sat on my knee telling me some wonderful story. Nina came in from the kitchen where she and Guiseppe were concocting the morrow's feast. She sat down on the arm of my chair and said she had a secret to whisper in my ear. Norman looked up from his work and smiled.

"It's the one thing which has troubled her," he said. "Not having done her duty by the birth-rate but once."

The startled wonder came back again to Nina's eyes in those days. Even little Marie felt the "presence" among us and was awed.

But the fates had one more blow reserved for me. The year was just turning into spring when it fell. One morning at the Tombs, a court attendant called me to the telephone. It was Nina. Norman, she said in a frightened voice, was very sick. He had complained the day before of a cold and had gone to bed in the afternoon. I had not seen him that morning. When I reached the Teepee, he was delirious, in a high fever. We had no regular doctor, so I called up Ann on the telephone.

"It looks to me like pneumonia," I told her. "Can you send us a good doctor and a nurse?"

Within half an hour Ann had come herself with one of the city's most famous doctors.

Nina would not leave the bed-side. I waited for news in the library. It reminded me of the time, years before, when I had waited for a verdict on my eyes. I do not suppose that there are many friendships as ours had been. It is hard to believe that such relationships can be anything but permanent. It seemed impossible that I could lose Norman. But Ann made no pretense of hope. There was almost no chance she said. She telephoned out to her mother that she would be kept in town, and went back to the sickroom.

All the afternoon and all night long they fought it out. Sometimes when the suspense was too great I would go to the door. Nina sat with staring eyes at the head of the bed. Ann and the doctor were busy with ice-presses. At night-fall I gave Marie her supper and put her to bed in my room. She had become suddenly frightened and I sat beside her a long time, comforting her with stories of the Round Table, until at last she fell asleep.

Norman slept a little, but most of the time, tossed about deliriously--calling out to someone who was not there. "Oh Louise!" he would moan, "How can you believe that about me? I'm not spotless--but that isn't true. Don't think that of me. It's too cruel." But he got no comfort. The woman of his delirium was obdurate.

The dawn was just breaking when Ann came and told me he was conscious. It was the end. Nina was kneeling beside him weeping silently. He smiled at me and tried to hold out his hand, but he was too weak.

"It's as though they had let me come back to say 'goodbye,'" he whispered. "Be good to them, Arnold--to Nina and Marie and the one that's coming. She's a good girl...." A look of wonder came into his eyes, with his last strength he stroked her hair.

"It's funny. I thought she was--just a toy--but she's got a soul, Arnold. Don't forget that, old man. Promise me"--I gripped his hand--"Oh yes. I know you'll be good to her. I know--that's all right. Poor little girl. I wish she wouldn't cry so.--I'd like to kiss her once more"--Ann lifted her up so that he might kiss her. "There! There! Little one. You mustn't cry. It's not so bad as all that. Arnold'll take care of you. Good luck--all of you. Don't be afraid.... I'm...."

It was a queer funeral. Some of his relatives, who had cut him since his marriage, came. It was on a Sunday so the Studenten Verein could turn out. Mrs. O'Hara, whose coal he had bought for seven years, came with her eight children. So did our washerwoman, Frau Zimmer, with her epileptic son. Guiseppe rode in the front carriage with Nina, Marie and I, and cried more than any of us. The Studenten Maenner Chor sang a dirge. In the motley crowd I saw a man in the costume of an Episcopalian clergyman. As they were dispersing, he came up to me.

"I am unknown to you, sir," he said, "I want to tell you that I believe in immortality--and that I am sure your friend is sitting on the right-hand of our Heavenly Father. I hope to be worthy to meet him again. He was so good that I am surprised that he escaped crucifixion. I am only one of many whom he pulled out of hell. I can not...."

He burst into tears and disappeared into the crowd. Somehow, out of all the tributes to Norman which poured in on me in those days, the incoherent words of this unknown clergyman touched me most. What his story was, how Norman had helped him, I have no idea.

When we got back to the Teepee, we found Ann there, she had put things in order for us. She took Nina to bed and gave her something to make her sleep. Then she joined me in the library. She picked up her hat to go away, but I detained her. And so we sat together through the afternoon. As I remember we talked very little--except for some directions she gave me about Nina's health. At twilight Guiseppe came in with Marie, whom he had taken for a walk in the park. We all had supper together. Ann helped me put Marie to bed and then she went away.

It was very comforting, having just lost one friend, to refind another. There has been no ripple of estrangement between us since. Our love relation has been the anchor--the steadfast thing--of my later life.

Norman's will left a comfortable annuity to Nina and the children, the rest went into his educational endowment. I am a trustee of both sums. I think they have both been administered as he would have wished.

The baby was a boy. Nina told me that long before its father died, they had arranged, if it was a boy, to name it after me. I would have preferred to have called it Norman. One evening, as I was writing in the library, I glanced up from my paper. Nina was nursing the youngster, there were tears on her cheeks.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Oh! I wish he could have lived to see the man-child. Sometimes I was afraid he might grow tired of me. But he would have loved his son--always. I wish he could have seen him."

But I wish that Norman could have lived to see Nina. I had always a feeling that he did not entirely appreciate her. She has developed greatly since his death. Not long afterwards I began to notice long and serious Italian conversations between her and Guiseppe. And I asked him one day, jokingly, what they found to talk about so earnestly.

"I am teaching her, Mister Arnold, how to be a lady. Now that their father, who was a gentleman, is dead, it is necessary that the mother of the children should be a lady."

Guiseppe is too much of a Republican and Nina too little of a snob for these words to have anything but the noblest meanings.

"It is difficult for a simple man like me," he went on. "But have I not been a soldier of liberty on two continents? I have seen many fine ladies and I tell her about them. And also I have read books."

Nina as well has taken to reading. Painfully she has recalled the lessons of her brief school days. Of course I have helped her all I could. She has taken the responsibilities of motherhood in a way she would scarcely have done if Norman had lived.

It was perhaps a year after his death, that I came home one evening and found Nina in a great flurry. On tiptoe, her finger on her lips, she led me into the library and closed the door.

"Oh! my friend," she said, "you will not be angry? There's a woman in my room. Such a sad old woman. She is very drunk. I found her downstairs--in the hallway. There were boys teasing her. At first I was frightened and ran upstairs. Then I remembered how he would never leave anyone so. I brought her up to my room. You will not be angry?"

She has turned the Teepee into an informal sort of a rescue mission. I never know whom I will find in my favorite chair. Sometimes they have delirium tremens and shriek all night. At first I was worried about the effect on the children. But Nina and Ann said it would do them no harm. I cannot see that it has. One thing about it has impressed me immensely. It has often happened in my work that I have brought home a boy or a man from the Tombs and let them sleep on the divan till some better place was found for them. Not infrequently these guests have departed without formalities, taking as mementoes any silver spoons they found at hand. Not one of Nina's women have stolen anything. It passes my understanding.

Nina has a great admiration for Ann, but does not understand her at all. She cannot conceive of the reasons why Ann refuses to get married. It is a thing to philosophize about, the attitude of these two women towards matrimony. They are both good women, yet to one marriage seems a degradation and serfdom, to the other marriage meant escape from the mire, emancipation from the most abysmal slavery the world has ever known. Watching them has helped me understand many of life's endless paradoxes.

The only new thing which has come into my life since Norman's death has been the children. I am legal guardian for Nina's two. And several years ago, when Billy--Ann's nephew--grew to high school age, she turned him over to me, fearing that all-woman household might not be the best place for a growing boy. So he came to the Teepee, going to school in the city, spending only his week-ends at Cromley.

My work in the Tombs goes on as ever. A new prison has been built, with cleaner corridors, roomier cells, sanitary plumbing and so forth. But the old tragedy goes on just the same. My title has been changed from county detective to probation officer, and I have been given some assistants. Certainly there has been improvement. The rougher edges of justice have been worn off. But the bandage is still over the eyes of the goddess. The names of the judges have changed, but the inherent viciousness of their situation is unaltered. There is now, just as when I started, ten times as much work as I can do to even alleviate the manifold cruelties of the place. It is still--in spite of the new building--called the Tombs.

And Suzanne? If anyone should ask me what has become of her, I would have to reply by a question--"Which Suzanne?" I have seen very little of the one who came back to America. Once or twice I have encountered her in public meetings. Three years after I came back from Europe, I received her wedding cards--an architect named Stone. I knew him slightly. He seems to be very much in love with his wife. One comes across their names in the papers quite frequently. They are active socialists. But Mrs. Stone is a strange and rather unreal personality to me.

But there is the other Suzanne, her of the slim, boyish form, who tried to learn to throw stones like a man and was vexed when I laughed at her, the Suzanne who loved the poppies, the Suzanne of our earnest discussions, the Suzanne who was a prophetess, the enthusiastic apostle of the new faith, who like Deborah of old, sang songs of the great awakening to come, and the Suzanne of Moret--whom I loved. She still lives. I cannot see that the passing years have in any way dimmed the vision. Mrs. Stone is getting matronly, her hair is losing its luster. Suzanne is still straight and slender. There are moments when she comes to me out of the mystery of dreams and, sitting on the floor, rests her head--her fearless head--on my knees. I run my fingers through her amazing hair and try to capture the fitful light of the fire, which glows there, now so golden, now so red.... And as the dream is sweet, so is the awakening bitter.

*BOOK VII*

I come now to the last section of my book. There can be no doubt that it must be about the children.

As I get older, in spite of my best intentions, the work in the Tombs grows mechanical. Each new prisoner has of course his individual peculiarities, but I find myself frequently saying: "It's like a case I had back in 1900." And it is the same with my writing. It is mostly a re-statement--I hope a continually better and more forceful statement--of conclusions I have held for many years.

The light of these later yeans has been my vicarious parentage--these three young adventurers who call me, "Daddy." I suppose I look at them with an indulgent eye, magnifying their virtues, ignoring their limitations. But they seem very wonderful to me. Thinking of them, watching them, make me sympathize with Moses on Nebo's lonely mountain. Through them I catch glimpses of a fairer land than I have known, which I win never enter.

On his eighteenth birthday, Billy asked me why I was not a socialist. I knew he was leaning that way. He is an artist. Ann wanted him to go to college, but he broke away to the classes at Cooper Union. Now at twenty-four he is bringing home prizes and gold medals which he pretends to despise. Many of his artist chums are socialists. I tried to get him into an argument on the subject, but, as is his way, he would not argue. He would only ask me questions. What did I think about this? What did I think about that?

About a week later at breakfast; he handed me a little red card, which was his certificate of membership in the party.

"You can't join till you're eighteen," he said. "You see, Daddy, I don't think a chap can ever paint anything, do anything worth while in art, unless he believes in something besides himself--something bigger. I don't know anything bigger than this faith in the people."

He had a pretty bad time of it the next Sunday at Cromley. His grandmother is such a seasoned warrior for anarchism, that she has as little tolerance for socialists as our "best people" would have for her. Ann was neutral, for she holds that what one believes matters not half so much as the way one believes it. And I would do nothing to dampen the youngster's ardor. It is amazing to me. He has the faith to look at our state legislature and believe in democracy, to look at the Tombs and believe in justice.

In fact I have sometimes thought of joining his party. I would like to enter as closely into his life as possible. But all this talk of revolution repulses me. It is the impatience of youth. The world does not move fast enough for them--they forget that it moves at all. But it has spun a long, long way even in my life.

I recall our fight for a reformatory. It ended in fiasco. But it was only the beginning of a movement. Baldwin was a man who held on. Before long he had persuaded a western state to try his scheme. To-day there are more than thirty of our states with reformatories for boys. The later ones, better than Baldwin's dream. And then this probation system. It is the biggest blow ever dealt to the old idea of the Tombs. Of course it is having growing pains. The special advocates of the system are distressed because of the hundreds of probation officers only a few are efficient. Give it time.

And of broader import is the awakening of democracy in the land. It will take a generation or more before historians can properly adjudge this movement. To-day we see only sporadic demonstrations of it, speeches here and there, in favor of referendum and so forth. The real issue often veiled by the personalities of candidates. The noise is only the effervescence of a great idea, a great aspiration, which is taking form in the mind of the nation.

The country is ten times as thoughtful about social problems as it was when my generation began. Recently the legislature made an appropriation to give me a new assistant in the Tombs. I wrote to several colleges and a dozen men applied for the job. I could take my pick. Twelve men out of one year's college crop! I was a pioneer.

And young Fletcher, the man I chose, asked me the other day, what I thought of Devine's book, "The Causes of Misery." He is beginning work on the basis of that book. And Devine speaks of "The Abolition of Poverty" as if it was a commonplace. No one dared to dream that poverty could be abolished when I was a young man. We thought it was an indivisible part of civilization. I remember when I first heard Jacob Riis talk of abolishing the slums! I thought he was a dreamer. The tenement house department reports that a million new homes have been built in the city--under the new law--with no dark rooms. And the abolition of tuberculosis! Why I can remember a cholera epidemic! These young socialists do not realize what we have done.

Last summer I took Nina and Marie and young Arnold, he is ten now, down on the Maine coast to an island where Billy and some of his artist friends have a camp. As I mingled with this colony of ardent young people, in spite of the sympathy, which real friendship with Billy has given me for them, I felt like a stranger. I am sure they think I am an old fogey. My mind kept jumping back to my own youth, comparing them with what I had been at their age. In so many ways they were better men than I was, better equipped for life.

I remember especially one conversation with Billy. He had just finished a canvas as the twilight was falling. I think it is the finest thing he has done yet. There is a stretch of surf in the foreground and beyond the islands rise higher and higher to the peak of Mount Desert. I cannot describe it beyond these barren details. Somehow he has accentuated the rising upward lines, by some magic of his color he has infused the thing with immense emotion.

"What are you going to call it?" I asked as he was putting up his tubes.

"It hasn't any name," he said. "It's just a feeling I get sometimes--up here with the sea and the mountains." He pondered it a moment, seeking words. He is not a ready talker. "I think it's one of the psalms," he said at last, "you know the one that begins: 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.' It's sort of religious--being all by one's self and looking up."

"What is your religion, Billy?" I asked.

He sat silent, stopped arranging his brushes and looked off at the last of the sunlight on the summit of the mountain.

"Have you got one?" I persisted.

"Oh, yes," he said quickly. "Yes--at least sometimes it comes to me. There are days on end when it doesn't come--barren days. And then again it comes very strong. I haven't any name for it. I think the trouble with most religions is that people try to define them. It doesn't seem to fit into words."

Again he was busy with his kit. But when everything was ready, instead of starting home, he sat down again.

"It's funny," he said, "I'm quite sure you can't talk about religion satisfactorily. But we all want to. And as soon as you try to put it into words some of it escapes--the best part of it. I think that's why painting appeals to me. You can say things with colors you can't with words.

"You remember those reproductions, I showed you, of Felicien Rops, the Belgium etcher. You didn't like them. I don't either. He's wonderfully clever--My God! I wish I could draw like that man--but I don't think it's art. I don't think he ever looked upward--lifted up his eyes to the hills. I guess my religion is just that indescribable something which changes craftsmanship into art. I want to draw well, I want my color to be right, I want technique--all I can get of it. But even if I was perfect in all these, I would have to lift up my eyes unto the hills for help before I could do the real thing--the thing I want to do."

"And when you lift up your eyes, Billy," I asked, "who is it that gives you help?"

He spoke rather reluctantly after a moment's pause.

"That's the trouble with talking religion. You get mixed up between the figurative and the literal. Does it really matter Who--or Where? I don't think of any person up there in the afterglow on the mountain top. There doesn't have to be any hills even. Sometimes I get 'help' in my studio--with nothing to look up to but the white-washed lights and the rafters.

"We all need 'help' and when we get it--we've 'got religion.' It's all so vague that we have to use symbols. One person has associated 'help' with high mass and choir boys and tawdry images. Another gets his connection by listening to a village quartet murder 'Nearer my God to Thee.' When Nelson was over illustrating that book on Egypt he learned the Mohammedan 'Call to Prayer.' It's a weird sing-song thing. There are millions of people who, when they hear that, get the feeling that they need 'help' and chase round to the Mosque. I haven't found anything more suggestive than those words of King David.

"Sometimes my pictures are rotten and I sign them 'William Barton.' Once in a long while I paint one that is better,--better than my brush tricks, better than my technique, better than just me--and I always put a little star after my name. It means 'this picture was painted by William Barton and God.' That's my religion."

"It's all summed up in that old Jewish song--'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.' Do you know it?"

Yes. I knew it. I sat in the Father's study, all one fine afternoon, when the other boys were playing ball, and learned that song by rote, in punishment for upsetting his inkwell. It seems very wonderful to me that the Bible should seem a thing of beauty to a youngster. It was at best an unpleasant piece of drudgery for me--more often a form of chastisement. What stirs the deepest emotions in Billy's heart, only reminds me of a blot of ink on the Father's desk and the shouts of the boys out in the street whom I might not join.

I had been suspecting for some time that although Billy and Marie both call me "Daddy," they were coming to realize that they are not brother and sister. My suspicions were confirmed the other day by Nina. She asked me solemnly what I thought of Billy. And when I declared that he was the straightest, cleanest, finest youngster I knew, she said.

"Perhaps. But he is not as fine as Norman was."

I said that God had apparently mislaid the mold in which He had cast Norman.

"I wish that Marie could have as good a husband as I did--she's a better girl."

Nina has immense respect for her daughter. And Marie deserves it. A habit of philosophizing forces me to realize that the greatest part of the world has failed to appreciate, has in fact utterly ignored the existence of, this marvelous foster daughter of mine. There are, doubtless, many parents who even if they had had the good fortune to know Marie would stubbornly prefer their own daughters. But if I were twenty years younger, I would certainly enter the race against Billy. She gets her looks from her mother--pure Lombard--but she has inherited Norman's irreverent, incisive vision and his tricks of speech. She decided to follow her father's chief interest and now, at nineteen, is attending a kindergarten normal school.

But the thing, for which I give Marie my highest reverence is her attitude to her mother. She knows the truth. I found that they had talked this over before Norman died. It was his wish that she should not be told by strangers. And so nothing was hidden from her, no questions were evaded and she grew into the knowledge of her mother's story, with as little shock as she learned the multiplication table. It is very sweet to watch them together, this quiet, sad eyed old woman, who can write with difficulty and this superbly modern girl, who has had every advantage of education. Marie has sense enough to know that very, very few people have been blest with finer mothers.

A few nights after this talk with Nina, I found Marie alone in the library reading a red paper covered book by Earl Krautsky--"The Road to Power." Across the corner, in his big, boyish handwriting, was scrawled, "William Barton."

"Marionette," I said, thinking of what her mother had said, "Do you believe in free love?"

"Not for a minute," she snapped, "it's just another of your man tricks to get the better of your superiors."

Marie is a suffragette. But her jibe at me did not satisfy her. The thing was evidently on her mind. She came over and sat on the arm of my chair.

"Don't laugh at me, Daddy. It's so serious. I think it's all wrapped up in the big woman question. How can there be any real freedom except among equals? In the bottom of my heart I think it is a beautiful ideal. If I were in love with a man, I'd just want to be with him. It seems a little degrading to take a justice of the peace into one's confidence in so private a matter. I would feel ashamed to tell a stranger I was going to love my sweetheart. And in a sense I like the idea of freedom. It would be horrible to have my husband kiss me because it was the law; because he'd promised to--if he didn't really want to.

"But that's only a private personal view of it. It doesn't seem to me the important thing, what the politicians call 'the main issue.' This trying to be individually free, this fussing over individual rights, seems sort of early Victorian...."

"What," I interrupted, "you wouldn't call Ann--one of the first women to win distinction in a profession--you wouldn't call her Early Victorian?"

"Well. I don't mean Ann. She's an exception. No, she isn't either. I mean her, too. Nowadays we think of things socially. It doesn't matter so much whether I'm free, whether I get justice, it's the others--the race--we must work for. Ann's wonderful. You know how much I love her. But she don't look at things the way we do.

"We must think not only of the few women, here and there, the giants like Ann, who are strong enough to stand alone, but of all the women--and the children. That's just the point. We're trying to learn how not to stand alone--how to stand together. We've got to ignore our own preferences and rights and learn to fight for woman's rights.

"Doesn't most of the prostitution come from the free love of weak girls? Even when the cadets go after them just to make money, isn't it love on the girl's part? What they think is love? We must fight and fight and fight to make women realize that they mustn't love just for themselves. That it isn't right towards the race for them to love blindly--that it's a sin, a social sin, for us to love until we're sure of ourselves, sure of the man, sure for the children. It's a sin for a woman to sacrifice herself to a man just because she loves him--a sin even to take risks.

"Somehow, until we've won freedom and equality and independence, we've got to insist on guarantees. I don't see how we can get them except through laws, through old-fashioned marriages. We women who are stronger, and better educated and able to support ourselves and children, we must always think of the others who are less fortunate. And as long as you men take advantage of any of our sisters, we won't listen to your free love talk. So there!"

"Daddy," she said after she had rested her cheek against mine for a while. "I'll tell you a secret. Ssh! Don't you ever breathe it! Do you know whom we suffragists have to fight? It's women! If it was only you men, we'd have won long ago. It isn't the men who enslave us. It's tradition and habit. Long training had made us selfish--divided--weak.

"Just take the worst case. It's mother's story all over again--all the time. She tried to get away. Half a dozen men, instinctively, acted together, for their common interest--and were strong. They didn't reason it out. Blackie did not have to say to them, you help me beat my girl, and I'll help you beat yours and so we'll keep them all scared. It's a long inherited tradition with men to act together like that, second nature--almost an instinct. But when a cadet beats a girl, do the other girls rush together like that and fight for their common interest? No. Each one for herself sneaks off and tries to placate her man. It's just the same with 'respectable' people. If a woman tries to be free, the men are all against her with their legislatures and courts and all that. Do the other women stand together to help her? Oh, no. They cut her. Just like the prostitutes, they try to ingratiate themselves with their husbands by spitting at the one who tried to be free.

"If we women were only civilized enough really to co-operate, to stick together, shoulder to shoulder--oh, we'd put you men in your place quick enough. Individualism, trying to stand alone, is the worst enemy women can have to-day. We've got to learn how to use our united strength.

"And we are learning--too. Remember that big shirtwaist strike? It was wonderful the way the girls stuck together. I don't believe that any time before in the history of this old world women have stood by each other like that--with such loyalty. A lot of your stupid men-papers, had editorials wondering why up-town society women took so much interest in the strike. Why, even the rich suffragists have sense enough to know that solidarity is ten times more important than the vote. If you men only give us a long, hard fight for it, make us throw stones and slap policemen and go to jail and all that, we'll learn this lesson of standing together and then we'll know how to use the franchise when we get it. Oh! The time is coming, Daddy. Watch out."

"I'm not frightened." I said, "If I was as near to thirty as I am to fifty, I guess I would be an enthusiastic suffragetter. Anything you wanted would look good to me. Do you think I would have had any chance if I had encountered you when I was young enough to be your lover?"

"I wonder what you were like, Daddy, twenty years ago--just when I WAS beginning. Oh, I guess I would have liked you. But even if I did, I would have sent a lawyer to you with a long contract, specifying my various and sundry privileges and your corresponding duties. Then I would have led you down to the City Hall and made you sign each and every article with a big oath. How would you have liked that?"

"I'd have submitted joyfully."

Her arm tightened about my neck.

"And do you know what I would have done then, Daddy?" she asked after a moment's silence. "I guess--just as soon as we were alone--I'd have torn up that contract into little pieces. And I'd have said, 'Oh, My Lord and Master, be humble to me in public, for the sake of all my poor sisters who are afraid--but here in private, please, trample on me some. And oh! if you love me--make me darn your socks.'

"Oh Daddy, that's the heart-break of it all"--there was a catch in her voice--"That's what's hard. We know that we must fight for our freedom and equality--for the other women's sake. And all the while--if we are in love--what our heart cries out for is a ruler. We want to serve."

I think when I get a chance I will tell Billy to show his muscle now and then.

So this is where I am today. My experiment in ethics? It has failed. I can no more surely distinguish right from wrong today, than when I was a boy in school.

My best efforts landed Jerry--innocent--in prison. The one time when I violated every rule I had laid down for my guidance in the Tombs, when I lied profusely, played dirty politics, compounded a felony, and went on a man-hunt, with hate in my heart, I disposed of the pimp Blackie, freed Nina, gave happiness to Norman. Marie is the result.

Certainly one of the best things in my life has been Ann's love. It came to me without any striving on my part, it has been in no way a reward for effort or aspiration. Step by step it has seemed to me wrong. I do not believe in free love. I cannot justify it any more than I could stealing eggs when I was a boy. It was something I wanted and which I took. Yet I am quite sure it has been good.

On the other hand, the time when I strove hardest to reach a higher plane, when I was most anxious to be upright and honorable, those days I spent in France with Suzanne, resulted in the most bitter pain, the most dismal failure of my life. This is not a little thing to me, even after all these years. The days come when I must open my trunk, take out her rucksac and the map--the only mementos I have of her--they are days of anguish. Why should it not have been? My life seems bitter and of small worth when I think of what it might have been with her.

I am as much at a loss today in regard to moral values as I ever was. I have little hope left of succeeding in my experiment. This is the sad thing. The good fight has been a long one. From the continued campaigning, I am prematurely spent. Under fifty, I am prematurely old. The _elan_ of youth is gone.

At the Hotel des Invalides in Paris they tell the story of a war-scarred crippled veteran of the Napoleonic wars. His breast was covered with service medals. At one of the annual inspections a young commander complimented on his many decorations. "My General," the old soldier replied, "I can no longer carry a musket, it would have been better to have died gloriously at Austerlitz."

I am far from the sad pass of this decrepit veteran, yet his story touches me nearly. The best days have flown. I have lived intensely. Into each combat whether the insignificant skirmish of my daily work, or the more decisive battles--I have thrown myself with spendthrift energy. I do not regret this attitude towards life. I am glad I met its problems face to face--with passionate endeavor. But the price must be paid. Nowadays I have little ardor left. The youthful questing spirit is gone--and I have not found the Holy Grail.

Perhaps these young people are right. I may have started wrong--in trying to find the truth for myself alone. Perhaps there are no individualistic ethics. They may find the answer expressed in social terms. Perhaps. But I have no energy left to begin the experiment again.

But once more I must repeat, I do not regret my manner of life. We are offered but two choices; to accept things as they are or to strive passionately for new and better forms. Defeat is not shameful. But supine complaisance surely is.

Out of the lives of all my generation a little increment of wisdom has come to the race. Neither the renaissance, nor the reformation seem to me as fundamental changes as we have wrought. We have made the nation suddenly conscious of itself. We have not cured its ills, but at least we have made great strides in diagnosis. And my experiment--in its tiny, coral-insect way--has been an integral part in this increment of wisdom.

I am more optimistic today than ever before. And if I wish to live on--as I surely do--it is to watch these youngsters in their struggle for the better form. How much better equipped they are than we were, how much clearer they see!

I think of myself as I left college--so afraid of life that I was glad to find shelter among old books. I recall how strange seemed that first dinner in the Children's House with Norman. And then I think of Billy. Why! The knowledge of life those pioneer settlement workers were just beginning to discover are conversational commonplaces among Billy's friends. The abolition of poverty!

The vision comes to me of Margot, delicate, fragile, ignorant--too ignorant to be afraid. All the wisdom of the ages--past and future--seemed to her to be bound up in the King James version. I compare her with Marie. She is as strong as a peasant girl. I have given up playing tennis with her, she beats me too easily. And the certain, fearless way she looks out at life takes my breath, leaves me panting just as her dashing net play does. She speaks of Ann as early Victorian, she would I fear place Margot as Elizabethan.

Most wonderful of all, these youngsters have never had to fight with God, never had to tear themselves to pieces escaping from the deadly formalism and tyranny of Church Dogma. They never had to call themselves Atheists.

And then I think of how Billy and Marie are facing this biggest problem of all--this business of love. They will have their squalls no doubt and run into shoal water perhaps. But they are not blindfolded as I was, as Norman was--as all my generation was. Pure luck was all that could save us. They are steering--not drifting.

Yes. My story is ended. The old troupe has been crowded off the stage. There would be little interest in writing of the work left me--brushing the wigs of the leading man, packing the star's trunk,--pushing the swan for Lohengrin, currying the horses of the Walkyrie--it will all be behind the scene.

And how I envy them their faith! Ave--Juventas--morituri salutamus!

* * * * * * * *

*The following pages contain advertisements of a few of the Macmillan novels.*

*The Friar of Wittenberg*

BY WILLIAM STEARNS DAVIS, author of "A Friend of Caesar," "God Wills it."

In the character of Martin Luther, William Stearns Davis has found admirable material around which to build an historical novel of more than ordinary importance. He has succeeded above all else in making the picturesque figure live, imparting to the stirring episodes in which he played a part so much of reality that the reader is enabled to visualize as never before the conditions leading to the religious revolt of which the Friar of Wittenberg was so powerful a leader.

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*MR. JAMES LANE ALLEN'S NOVELS*

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*The Reign Of Law -- A Tale of the Kentucky Hempfields*

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*Summer in Arcady -- A Tale of Nature*

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*The Doctor's Christmas Eve*

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*The Man in the Shadow*

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*John Temple: Merchant Adventurer, Convict and Conquistador*

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*The Touchstone of Fortune*

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*The Celebrity An Episode*

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*The Crossing*

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*A Modern Chronicle*

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*Julia France and Her Times*

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*Joseph in Jeopardy*

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*White Ashes*

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