BOOK V

DANIEL TAY

I

THE great amphitheatre of the Albert Hall was filled from arena to dome: some ten thousand women and three hundred men, exclusive of police. Slim young women in the white uniform of stewards and decorated with the badges of their unions stood at the back of the gangways. On the platform, against flowers and banners, sat the officials of the Woman’s Social and Political Union and of the several unions it had inspired. Of the most important of these, Julia France had been elected president eighteen months before, and to-night sat at the right of Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, who occupied the chair in the absence of Mrs. Pankhurst.

The great rally had a fourfold purpose: to celebrate the victory of the Militants in the general election, during which they had fought the Liberals in forty constituencies; their energy, cleverness, and resource being not the least of the factors which had transferred eighteen seats to the Conservatives (thus throwing the Government upon the Labor and Irish vote for support); to protest once more against the inhuman treatment of the hunger strikers in Holloway gaol; to add to the £100,000 fund; and to listen to Mrs. France’s account of her three months’ lecture tour in the United States.

When Julia had risen to speak, she had been greeted by a magnificent demonstration. Every woman in the audience had sprung to her feet, cheered, and waved her banner for five minutes. This enthusiasm was not inspired by Julia’s notable tour only, nor to the money she had brought back with her, but to her four years’ record of steadfast and valuable work in the Militant cause, the large number of recruits she had brought in by her personal efforts, the many Liberal candidates she had helped to defeat at by-elections, her religious devotion to a work for which nothing in her previous life would seem to have prepared her, and above all, to the great gift for leadership she had displayed during the last year and a half. For her indomitable courage, her indifference to personal comfort, and to bodily suffering when maltreated by police, stewards, or hooligans, or endured in gaol, they had no applause; this was a mere matter of course. But in addition to her services, Julia was a favorite with all of them: she was picturesque without being sensational, a brilliant powerful persuasive speaker, and a lovely picture on the platform. Moreover, she possessed (and desperately clung to) the priceless gift of humor, and humor in suffragette ranks was rare. Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters, great speakers as they were, had not a ray of it; and even Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, the most genial of women, fell under the spell of the world’s tragedy the moment she rose to speak.

To-night, Julia, knowing that most of the minds present were oppressed by the sufferings in Holloway, made the account of her American experiences as diverting as possible, although she finished with a passionate denunciation of the Government, and an appeal to her audience to proselytize unceasingly, until their numbers were irresistible.

When she sat down, Mrs. Lawrence, preparatory to making her appeal for funds, gave a graphic and terrible picture of the hunger strikers, who, forcibly fed through the nose and throat with surgical instruments of torture, were now having a dose of martyrdom that compared favorably with any in the records of the Inquisition. Julia, too well acquainted with the horrible details, glanced over the House and nodded to Ishbel Dark and Bridgit Maundrell, seated in a box. Ishbel was still the prettiest woman in any assembly she chose to grace, and her attire, as ever, looked like the petals of a flower. Bridgit, severely tailored, albeit in velvet, was sitting forward tensely, her eyes flashing at the iniquities of man. Julia noted with amusement that Maundrell was behind her, and listening with an expression no less indignant. Dark consistently refused to show himself at Suffrage rallies, although more sympathetic of late, but Maundrell was not only complaisant, but converted. To have lived with Bridgit for three years and failed to be impressed by that burning and immovable faith would have stamped him superman, and the next step was to surrender to a cause capable of making such an apostle. He already had made a number of speeches, in and out of the House, advocating the extension of the franchise to a limited number of women, and as he was a man of distinguished abilities, there was much rejoicing in Suffrage ranks. He had even permitted his wife to take part in the last great raid on the House, although, without her knowledge, he had circled near her, and diverted the attention of the police when she had been too eager for trouble. He had no intention of letting her go to gaol and ruin her health.

But the Westminster police avoided arresting women of Mrs. Maundrell’s position unless their official faces were slapped. For that matter they were growing more and more averse from arresting women at all, and had been heard to wish that the Parliamentarians would come out and do their own dirty work. The women had so far won their liking and respect that when the Government wanted them knocked about, they were forced to order up reserves from the slums. The Westminster officers formed woman-proof cordons about the Houses of Parliament, effectively protecting the men within, but repulsed their assailants good-naturedly, only making arrests when the women were inexorable. When Julia, determined upon arrest in one of the raids of 1909, made a technical assault upon a tall policeman’s chin, he had whispered: “Harder, Mrs. France. Give me a good crack on me cheek. That’ll be assault, as the Inspector’s looking this way, and I’ll have to arrest ye.”

The great number of Militants arrested, the injustice of their trials and sentences, the severity of their treatment in gaol, had succeeded as nothing else had done in arousing the women of Great Britain. Very nearly a million had declared themselves in favor of Suffrage, and many of these had joined one or other of the forty-one societies and unions.

Only the mean-spirited, the hopelessly old-fashioned, and the sex idolaters had failed to rally to their cause. Never in the history of England had there been such monster mass-meetings, such impressive parades, such a widespread upheaval. If these rebels had been Socialists, or any other body of men demanding concessions, they would have won their battle long since.

Mrs. Lawrence passed on to her favorite subject, the injustice of visiting the penalties of the law upon desperate girls for infanticide, while ignoring her partner in crime. Julia, whose mind had wandered to her own prison experiences, happily over before the hunger strike was organized, and the devices to which she had resorted before she had compelled arrest in spite of the duke’s vigilance, suddenly, without an instant’s transition, began to think vividly of Daniel Tay. She started and sat up straighter, drawing her brows together in perplexity. Her thought was very consecutive these days.

During their long but irregular correspondence—often conducted on his part by cable—she had thought of him exclusively while writing, or reading his characteristic letters, and then dismissed him from her mind. There was always a certain excitement in “talking” confidentially into a mind on the other side of the globe, and his epistles, however brief, were sympathetic. He had long since given up his attempt to turn her from her purpose; he recognized her as a force, and asserted that he was proud of her. She fancied that he no longer cared to meet her again, but found his own amusement in the novelty of the correspondence; and she too no longer experienced tremors at sight of his handwriting. But she was conscious of a bond, and welcomed an occasional vibration from the other end of the line.

And now she suddenly found herself thinking of him intensely. She peered out into that acre of faces. Could he be present? Hardly, as he had written but a few weeks ago that he was “up to his neck” in business and politics. The famous Graft Prosecution was sitting expectantly on the edge of its grave, dug by corrupting gold, the rallying of every dishonest business man in San Francisco to the standard of the scoundrels in politics, and a few mistakes of its own. Business, too, was “awful,” San Francisco’s luck not having turned since the morning of the earthquake. No, he could not be present, but she stirred uneasily, nevertheless. She was highly organized, and quick to respond to the concentration of another mind upon her own. Once more she searched that mass of faces, but they seemed to melt into one. She banished Tay from her mind. He returned promptly. She frowned, but gave it up and let her mind drift.

Mrs. Lawrence had made her usual stirring appeal for an addition to the growing fund, and the money was rolling in. The girl stewards were running back and forth, and Mrs. Lawrence was reading aloud the promise cards as they were handed up, while her husband made the additions on the score board. Some £5000 had been subscribed amidst continuous applause, when Julia forgot Tay and almost laughed aloud as she heard Mrs. Winstone’s name read out to the tune of £20. “Alas!” this convert had cried plaintively to Julia, a few days before. “What will you? Haven’t I always said that one secret of lookin’ young was to dress in the fashion of the moment, not have any silly style of your own? And you’ve got to keep your mind dressed up to date as well as your figger. I’m not goin’ to gaol and ruin what complexion I’ve got left, but I’ve taken a box at Albert Hall and I’m havin’ meetings in my drawin’-room. It’s a God-send to have a new fad, anyway. All the old ones were motheaten.”

Julia lost her breath. She felt her body cold and rigid, and all its blood flown to her face.

“Daniel Tay, £200,” read Mrs. Lawrence.

And the women cheered, as they always did when a man offered himself up for encouragement.

Julia stared at her hands and tried to close her lips! So! He was here! She was furious with herself for her agitation; she also cast a hasty glance over her costume. Ishbel and her maid attended to her wardrobe, keeping her admirably dressed; nothing was asked of her but to wear her clothes, and this she could always be relied upon to do with distinction. She had hardly been aware of the color or fashion of her gown until this moment of searching investigation, and was gratified to observe that it was of white chiffon cloth and gentian blue velvet; made with simplicity, but long of line, and moulded to her round slim young figure. She wore a long chain of blue tourmalines and moonstones, the colors of her Union, and presented by her American admirers. Her abundant flame-colored locks were braided about her head as in the days of Bosquith, little curls escaping on her brow and neck.

Her self-possession returned, and looking out, she deliberately smiled, a very hospitably sisterly smile. She believed that Tay would move, change his seat abruptly; but everybody was moving, and many were standing. To recognize him would be impossible unless he came directly up to the platform. She rather wondered that he did not, being an informal creature. Then she looked forward confidently to finding him at the stage door.

The meeting broke up, amidst renewed cheers and waving of flags. Tay was not at the stage door. After lingering for a few moments in conversation, she went round to the front entrance. But only the police stood there, a long stately and useless rank. They all saluted Julia, and one told her he had missed her. Finally she permitted him to put her into a cab, and drove to Clement’s Inn with her black brows in a straight line. She excogitated until the brilliant idea struggled out that Tay had intrusted his donation to some friend, who had recklessly unchained himself from his desk in that unhappy city of San Francisco.

II

WHEN she had entered her flat she sat down at her desk and scowled more deeply still. She was angry not only at her past agitation but at her present disappointment. For seven years now, save for brief lapses, almost forgotten, she had been complete mistress of herself. During the last four she had so far sunk her personality into the great impersonal cause of her adoption that she had had no time to moon about herself after the fashion of idle women.

Work! Had that been the secret? How commonplace, and how expositive! Who, indeed, when speaking, planning, fighting, proselytizing, writing innumerable leaflets, newspaper and magazine articles, drilling recruits, attending thousands of meetings, to say nothing of organizing her own Union and fighting army, would find a moment’s time to cast a thought to man save as present enemy and future co-worker. Even when in gaol, from which she had been mysteriously released both times at the end of a week, she had deliberately slept when not writing articles in her head. In America she had not gone farther west than Chicago, but she suddenly realized that if the question of including California in the itinerary had arisen she should have felt something like panic, possibly the same superstitious fear that had assailed her at three pillar boxes four years earlier. Well, indeed, that Tay had sent his contribution. She had no desire to have her work interrupted, nor to go through any female throes. To know that she was still hospitable to them was bad enough. Switch him out! She took her typewriter from its case, haughtily refusing to sleep.

The telephone beside her rang. She put the receiver to her ear, wondering who dared interrupt her at night in times of peace. Although a truce with the Government was not formally declared until February 14th, the Militants were resting on the laurels won in the General Election.

A man’s voice answered her “Hello!”

“Who is it?”

“Guess!”

“I—I can’t.”

“Well, I hope my voice has changed some.”

“Oh—so you _are_ here. How generous of you to give us those £200!”

“Generous nothing. You fired me up so with that speech that I came near subscribing my entire letter of credit, and then borrowing back enough to pay my hotel bill and get out.”

“Why didn’t you come up to the platform afterward, or wait for me in the lobby?”

“Frightened out of my wits. I’m never shy at the other end of the telephone, so thought I’d meet you this way first. If you’d made the usual female speech, I should have remained quite myself. But with all your wit and fire, you’re so finished, so polished—and you look that way, too. My teeth are still chattering. Somehow, in spite of everything, I suddenly realized that I’d always remembered you as the little princess on the tower.”

(“And I in the fatal young thirties!”) “Nonsense! I’ve merely worked hard these last four years. No one ever dreamed of being afraid of me. Of course you’ll call to-morrow?”

“I think I might summon up courage if you would infuse a little cordiality into your voice. You’ve thawed a bit, but not too much.”

“You took me so completely by surprise. I had just made up my mind that you had asked some friend to make that donation in your name.”

“Never should have thought of such a thing, although you could have had all I’ve got at any moment. What time may I call to-morrow?”

“When did you arrive?”

“This morning. Saw at once that you were going to speak, and thought I’d see what you were like before I ventured. What time may I call to-morrow morning?”

“Let me think—I’ve always a thousand things to attend to in the morning—”

“Please cut them out. You need a rest, anyhow. I’d like to call at eleven.”

“Well—why not? We might go to the National Gallery—”

“What! You’re not going to begin on that? Reminds me of Cherry and the torments of my youth. I’d like to talk to you for twelve hours on end, and take you out to lunch and dinner, but I’ll go to no morgues!”

“Oh, very well. It will be quite delightful. But as it will be what you call a strenuous day, perhaps I’d better go to bed now. Good night.”

“Good night, Militant Princess.”

When Julia hung up the receiver she was still smiling. Then, to show how completely mistress of herself she was, she went to bed and slept.

III

THE next morning Julia looked dubiously about her little sitting-room. A workshop, truly. No hint here of the charming woman’s boudoir. It would have been impossible for Julia to live in tasteless surroundings, and the walls were covered with green burlap, the carpet was of the same shade, the chairs were of leather, the big desk was of old oak. But there was not a picture on the walls, not a bibelôt, only books, books everywhere; and in the corners piles of papers. She rang for the maid that took care both of her and the flat (her meals were brought in unless she went out for them), and ordered her to make the room as presentable as possible while she took the walk with which she began her day. It was raining, but no weather kept her indoors, and she walked rapidly to Kensington Park and back.

When she reëntered the flat she petrified the maid by ordering her to bring forth her new coats and skirts for inspection. There was a rough but handsome green tweed for heavy wear, the inevitable black cloth, and a more elaborate costume of electric blue cloth with a white velvet collar and fancy blouse, intended for the simple functions of her present life. She arrayed herself in the last without an instant’s hesitation, then after trying on the graceful little hat three times, decided that it would be more hospitable to receive an old friend in the hair he admired.

“Have I any tea-gowns?” she asked abruptly.

“Tea-gowns, mum?” Collins barely articulated. “No, mum. You’ve never had use for tea-gowns.”

“How odd, when I often come home tired.”

“I’ve never seen you really tired, mum.”

“Everybody is tired at times—and—and—I always wanted tea-gowns.”

“I’ll go at once to her ladyship’s—”

“Yes, do. No, go to the big French houses—I’ve given Lady Dark so much trouble. Buy me two, ready-made. A pale green one, and a white one with sapphire-blue ribbons—or cornflower blue. It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, mum.” And Collins went on her errand joyfully.

“Now what a fool I am,” thought Julia. But she did not recall the maid. She carried the forgotten typewriter into the next room and deposited it on the bed, then sat down and reflected that Swani Dambaba, her Hindu master, had often reminded her there was nothing like a short, but thorough, vacation from the mind’s accustomed travail, to recuperate the mental faculties and prepare them for still more arduous labors. She had thought of one thing only for four years. This, no doubt, was the opportunity her mind had impatiently awaited, for its Suffrage activities had lain down to sleep without a preliminary yawn. Her secretary had come and gone, mystified.

Promptly on the stroke of eleven she answered a sharp rap and extended both hands with a cold friendly brightness she could always adjust like a visor. Tay flung his hat on a chair and shook her hands for quite a minute. Obviously his diffidence was a thing of overnight, for it was not in evidence as he smiled down upon her with his keen clever eyes.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed, “but you look good to me. You haven’t changed a bit. To tell the truth, if business hadn’t forced me to come over here, I don’t believe I’d ever have come—was so afraid you’d be old and ugly—”

“Old and ugly!” cried Julia, indignantly. “When I’m only—” She paused abruptly. Tay knew that she was thirty-four, and she was willing that he should know, but, quite like any woman after twenty-eight, she couldn’t force the combination past her lips.

“I know, but you’ve worked like a man, and been in so many free fights. Batting cops over the head, sitting on roofs in the rain to devil politicians at the psychological moment, to say nothing of gaol, doesn’t improve women, as a rule. I was almost certain you would have lost your complexion—and your hair!”

“Well, I haven’t. Do sit down. Will you smoke?”

“Will you?”

“I never smoke in the morning.”

“No more do I. Don’t let my nerves get ahead of me.”

“It would be delightful to see you all again,” said Julia, amiably, as he took off his overcoat and made himself comfortable. Then she plunged into the safe subject of Mrs. Bode and her amusing experiences in London during the Spanish war, meanwhile examining him with cool smiling eyes, which appeared to dwell upon the cheerful memory of his sister. She was gratified to find him as well dressed and groomed, even to the crown of his sleek black head, as any man he might meet in Piccadilly, and confessed that she would have been intensely disappointed had his attire been as Western as his vocabulary. His accent was also agreeable, without nasal inflection, and although it lacked the cultivation of the best English voice, it was manly even over the telephone. He had grown several inches taller, although he had been a tall boy, and his figure was straight and well set up. Save for the keen depth of the black-gray eyes, and the accentuated squareness of chin and jaw, he had changed surprisingly little. Even as a boy he had held his head high; now he had the air of one accustomed to command a large number of men. His manner, while courteous and amiable, betrayed possibilities of impatience. She could quite appreciate what he had once written her, that he was “some pumpkins on the street.”

He looked steadily at her as they talked, and she detected an expression both defensive and wary at the back of his eyes, reflected in the slight smile on his firm, rather grim mouth. She guessed that he had no intention of falling in love with her again. Every once in a while, however, his eyes flashed with admiration, and then he looked quite boyish; his smile was spontaneous and delightful. But she suddenly realized that he would not be as easy to understand as she had thought.

“You might have sent me a photograph,” he said abruptly, tired of Cherry. “I have a large collection of libels, cut from weekly magazines, but—”

“How odd you never asked for one.”

“I guess I didn’t want the charming picture in my mind disturbed. I feared you might have grown to look masculine, at the least. It’s queer you haven’t, you know.”

“None of us looks masculine, although a good many look sexless, if you like. Don’t you want to come down to the offices and meet the big ones?”

“I—do—_not_.”

“I thought you were so interested—”

“As far as I am concerned the entire movement is concentrated in you. You may be the type, but I don’t believe it, and anyhow I don’t care.”

“Well, you saw some of them on the platform last night.”

“I saw no one but you. In fact I had an opera-glass trained on you throughout the whole show.”

“Oh! Did you? But you haven’t told me what brought you over.”

“We’re trying to open an important connection in London, and our representative cabled me to come over and help him. An American has to sit up nights to keep an Englishman from getting ahead of him, much as an Englishman has to sit up watching a Scot. This is the top of civilization, all right—and all that term implies. No wonder your women are ahead in their particular game.”

“But the American women are now almost as keen on Suffrage as we are.”

“Yes, but in their way, not yours. I’m for giving them the vote, for they’ll help us to clean up, and incidentally develop their minds. But your women are a century ahead—not that we’ll ever have such women. Thank God, we haven’t the men to breed them. You’re up against the hundred-per-cent male. That is enough to make women stronger than death. With us it’s more likely to be the other way.”

“You don’t look henpecked.”

“No more I am, nor ever shall be. Our women only think they do the tyrannizing. Give a woman her head in trifles, all the money she can whine or nag for, and she thinks she’s the whole show. That’s the way we manage ours. What they don’t know doesn’t hurt them.”

“I rather think that’s worse. We at least know what we are fighting.”

“Exactly. And it has made great fighters of you. None better in the history of the world. That shows how much cleverer the American man is than the Englishman. We lie low like Br’er Rabbit, and say nuffin. American women are discontented, want the earth, but can find nothing to sharpen their axes on, and that is good for us. They may help us in the United States, and we’ll be glad to have ’em, but they’ll never rule. Now I am willing to bet my unmade millions that the Englishwomen will be ruling this country fifty years from now, perhaps twenty. I expect to live to see a woman Prime Minister. You, perhaps! Awful thought!”

“I should like it,” said Julia, frankly. “And I’m glad I wasn’t born an American.”

“Oh, you are _you_. I don’t class you geographically—except—well, I read up after I’d got a letter or two from you, and it set me thinking—also talking with an astrologer we have in San Francisco, who’s some nuts on Oriental lore. We came to the same conclusion, that you were a lightning streak straight out of the past—not Earth’s past, but some previous solar system—”

“Oh!” Julia sprang to her feet, startled quite out of her visor. “San Francisco! You! It is too uncanny!”

“Hoped I’d get a rise out of you. Nothing uncanny about it. Some of the weirdest characters, not to say scholars, have drifted out there. California is not the God-forsaken hole you may have been led to believe. I’ll admit that lore of any sort is not exactly our business man’s idea of recreation, and but for you I might be in happy ignorance of Oriental mysteries myself.”

“And how much do you believe?”

“Oh, sometimes I laugh at it—and myself, but—perhaps I like the queer romance of it. Lord knows it’s sufficiently un-American. Now that I’ve seen you once more—I’m not so sure how much of it I do believe. You don’t look several hundred thousand years old, not by a long sight. I hope you have a young appetite. Will you come over to the Savoy, or is that not allowed in Militant circles?”

“Nonsense. Once, perhaps; but now I’d lunch with a coal heaver if I chose.”

“Thanks! I have a taxi downstairs—”

“Waiting? You _are_ extravagant! Like your cables. They were too funny.”

“Not at all. I’m more at home in a cable office than in bed.”

“But I thought you were all so badly off in San Francisco?”

“My dear princess, the harder up a San Franciscan is, the more money he spends. I can’t explain; doubtless it’s a law of nature. But if you’ll put on a hat to match that charming frock—”

“I’ll be ready in a second. How nice that you notice what a woman has on. I had almost forgotten that pleasant characteristic of a few men.”

“I shall be here a month, and hope to pass on your entire wardrobe.”

And they went as gayly forth as if indeed the good old friends they fain would feel but could not; but young withal, and agreeably titillated.

IV

IF a man and a woman tentatively interested in each other would part for years at the end of a long day together, during which they had talked until every subject on earth seemed exhausted, and ennui inevitable, the cure would be effected before the disease had declared itself. An appreciative thought now and again, a passing regret, other minds as stimulating, the episode is closed. Astute wives have been known to apply a form of this treatment to husbands and the objects of their roving fancy; perchance in time it will be recognized as a sort of love vaccine and scientifically administered.

Julia and Tay talked almost uninterruptedly until eleven o’clock that night, and existed comfortably apart for nearly a week. Julia plunged into routine work with renewed ardors, refused to look at her tea-gowns, and when she thought of Tay at all was rather glad they had met at last and had a jolly talk. Tay sent her a box of roses (automatically), but was too busy to think about her; for the increased importance of his house, to say nothing of his reluctant millions, depended upon the success of his efforts in London. But on Saturday he found himself idle, and promptly thought of Julia. A brief talk on the telephone ended in an invitation to dine at Clement’s Inn that night; and with his desire for feminine society once more alert, and for Julia’s in particular, he appeared with his usual promptness.

Julia, who had grown methodical, had put on the green tea-gown as a logical result of its purchase for the delectation of her old friend; and he gave it instant approval.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed. “That’s the sort of thing you were made for. You look less of a Suffragette than ever. I hope that when you have accomplished your horrible purpose and have nothing to do but vote, you will receive me in a boudoir the same shade.”

“I shouldn’t wonder if I did have a boudoir one of these days— You look rather nice yourself in your evening clothes— That would be a good idea for all of us. We’ll take a rest cure first, and then feminize ourselves just enough.”

“Rather flat, though, to receive women in boudoirs, for no men will go to see you—them.”

“Oh, won’t they? Men will readjust their old ideals when they have to, and be glad of something new in women.”

“Yes, but that sort won’t care a hang about boudoirs.”

“They will about mine. And I’ll promise it shall be large enough for people with long legs. I hope the waiters won’t stumble over yours when they bring in the dinner.”

Tay had had some misgivings about this dinner, having been asked to speak once or twice before women’s clubs, foregathered at the luncheon hour. But Julia had not lost her taste for dainty edibles, and he hardly could have fared better anywhere, save in the city of his birth.

“How is it you know so much about food?” he asked as the dishes were being removed. “You say the Suffragettes are not even masculine, they are sexless. No wonder they could stand gaol. No doubt they live on ancestral memories.”

“Gaol has ruined most of their stomachs, all the same, and I should have choked over every morsel I ate, if I hadn’t deliberately thought about something else—detached my mind.”

“Can you do that?” he asked, looking at her curiously.

“Rather. I learned a good many secrets in the East. I can control both my mental and physical machinery.”

“How appalling! If you found yourself falling in love, I suppose you’d just turn on your mental hose-pipe and wash it out by the roots.”

“Something like that.”

“Julia,” said Tay, removing his cigar and looking at the ash, “what would you really do if you ever did fall in love?”

“I never shall.”

“Ah? Is prophecy included in the mental make-up of the new sex?”

“I mean I’ll never have time.”

“But you’ll win this fight, and then, mercifully, have time to think of other things. There _are_ a few things besides Suffrage in the world even now, you know.”

“We won’t have so much more time; perhaps less. Our work will only just have begun.”

“Yes, but the holy martyr’s fire will have burned out for want of something to feed on. Your interests will be more diverse, at least, your minds less concentrated. Men have time to fall in love, you may have observed. You’ll all begin to look about.”

“I doubt it. We’ve been through too much ever to be quite like other women.”

“Nonsense, Julia, nonsense. You can’t get ahead of Nature. She may take a back seat for a time, but she, being really unhuman, never sleeps. She watches her chance and the moment it comes she gets her fine work in. She hits good and hard, too; all the harder because she appropriates to herself some of the vengeance of the Lord.”

“That’s a man’s reasoning, but it is beside the question as far as I am concerned. Insane people live forever.”

“Have you any prejudice against divorce?”

“Rather not. One of the first things we accomplish is a reform of the unjust divorce laws of this country. But I doubt if even women will consent to the divorce of the insane. It can be done in only one or two states of your own country.”

“True. But a marriage can be annulled if it is shown that one of the parties to the contract was insane at the time of marriage.”

“Marriage can be annulled on the same ground here, but not without more horrors of detail than any woman who had lived with a man for eight years would care to suffer.”

“A simple statement would be enough in Reno—why do you laugh?”

“I have heard of Reno before.”

“Ah?” Tay sat up alertly. “Who else—who has wanted to take you out to Reno and marry you?”

“Oh, that is over long since. He remains a dear friend, my one intimate man friend—except you, of course—but we never meet any more except by accident. He has great responsibilities and is a good deal older now. It has become quite impracticable. Neither of us would desert England.”

“Did you ever love this man?”

“Not enough.”

“What is he like?”

“Oh, the best type of Englishman, and more, for he has genius, and uses it in the interest of the race.”

“Sounds like an infernal prig.”

“He is not!”

“Oh! Is he good-looking?”

“Rather!”

“Do women like him?”

“It shows how really remarkable he is, that he has never been spoiled by them.”

“Are you trying to make me jealous?”

“Of course I am not! I hope I have pulled all my pettiness up by the roots—long ago!”

“You are one of the purest types of female I have ever met. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t radiate charm from every electrical hair on your head.” He had been trying to stride about the little room. He stopped short and leaned both hands on the table. “Julia,” he said, “do you want to know exactly what I think of you?”

“What could be more interesting?”

“I think you are a magnificent bluffer. No, don’t flash those arc-lights on me. I mean you bluff yourself, not the world. You are sincere, all right. But you’ve hypnotized yourself. Ask your old Mohammedan if I’m not right. He gave you a suggestion or two, from all accounts.”

“If you were not talking nonsense, I should be angry. I’m quite well aware that I was deliberately prepared for all this, and long before I went to India. Wait until you meet Bridgit; she’ll tell you her part in it. And even if I were hypnotized? Are not we all more or less? Hypnotized by the currents of life, by its waves beating on our brains? Some are drawn to one current, some to another. It all depends upon our particular gift for usefulness. This happens to be my métier. Sooner or later, whether I had gone to India or not, even if I had not known Bridgit, even if—a friend had not written the book that started us all in this direction, I should have drifted into my current. Only I had the good fortune to be steered soon instead of late.”

“Not bad reasoning.” Tay stared at her for a moment, then took up his restricted march. “All the same there are layers and layers that you have deliberately covered up. Pretended they are not there. That is what I mean by bluffing.”

“Oh, you don’t understand us. Wait until you have met twenty or thirty more.”

“Yes, wait! I don’t propose to know even one more. And I don’t care a continental for the whole Militant bunch. Not even rolled into one magnificent manifestation of sexless sex. I am quite willing to believe they were born that way, and have no desire to dwell on the thought. You are a different proposition.”

“Not at all.”

“Exactly. When a woman is made soft and beautiful and dainty, she’s made for man, don’t you make any mistake about that. Nature is no fool. She hasn’t so much of that sort of material that she can afford to waste it. The number of undesirable women in the world is simply appalling. Mind you—” as Julia nearly overturned the table in her wrath, “I don’t argue that she’s made for that and nothing else. No man has less use for the pretty fool. Nor have I a word to say against this cause you are exercising your talents on. Go ahead and win. It’s a great cause, and deserves a good deal of sacrifice from great women. But for God’s sake don’t go on making a fool of yourself. The real you is under all that manufactured impersonal edifice, and sooner or later, it’ll wake up and knock the impersonal edifice into a cocked hat.”

“Never!” Julia sat down again.

Tay took his own chair and leaned across the table.

“Julia,” he said. “I have heard you speak once. I have read a good many of your more serious speeches. I have had a great many letters from you, all—except those in which you seemed to find some relief in your Eastern experiences—on this one subject. You have given a good deal more than concentration of mind to this cause. You have given it an amount of white-hot passion that not one woman in a million possesses. What are you going to do with that when the cause is won?”

“You are describing all the women—”

“Damn the other women. Do me the favor to leave them out of the conversation. I don’t happen to be a fool, and if I haven’t managed to fall in love all these years, that doesn’t mean I know nothing about women. There is a certain quality of mental passion that springs from sex only. Now you’ve got it, and you’ve got to reckon with it. When do you expect to win this fight?”

“This year. We are almost sure now that the Government is ready to yield, but doesn’t wish to appear coerced. That is the reason we shall declare a truce.”

“Ah? It may be longer than you think. But not so very long. And when that is off your chest, I’m going to marry you.”

“You? You’re not a bit in love with me.”

“I’m not so sure. I came over determined not to be, for although I like strong women, I don’t like ’em too strong. But your personal quality is stronger still—magnetism?—call it what you like—”

“Oh, if that is all, you’ll soon get over it. Remember you are going back to America in a month—”

“Perhaps. That, however, has nothing to do with it. You knocked me out at fifteen, and you’re about to do it again. What have I waited for all these years? I’ve felt superstitious about it before—”

“I don’t love you the least bit, and never could.” And Julia made her eyes look pure steel.

“Oh, couldn’t you? Julia—” He leaned farther across the table and looked into the steel with no appreciable tremor. “Julia, play the part you look for just three minutes and a quarter.”

“Do you want me to kiss you?” asked Julia, furiously.

“Don’t I? I want nothing so much on earth, not even to get the best of those four-flushers in the City.”

“Do you suppose I’d kiss a man unless I intended to marry him?”

“I hope not. I’m quite ready to do the right thing by you.”

“Oh, I wish you would stop joking. It’s rather indecent, anyhow.”

“Not a bit of it. And what do you suppose I’ve come into your life for? To take up your education where Mrs. Maundrell and your Orientals left off. I’m part of the course. I’m inevitable. And if I’ve surrendered, why shouldn’t you?”

“Surrender? I repeat that you are not a bit in love with me.”

“And I repeat that I am not so sure. After we parted the other day, I was comfortably certain there was nothing in it for me, that I was as safe as a cat up a tree. But these last two days—well, I began to be uneasy. I wouldn’t look it squarely in the face, but I was haunted with the idea of something wanting. I was uncomfortable away from you, that is the long and the short of it.”

“You merely wanted some one sympathetic to talk to. I shall introduce you to all my old friends.”

“Delighted to meet them. Or—shall I chuck business and take the next steamer?”

He was pale now and staring hard at her, perplexity and some astonishment deepening in his eyes.

“Good idea,” said Julia, coolly.

“You provocative little— Were you ever a coquette?”

“Of course not.”

“I wish I had been ten years older fifteen years ago. However—” He threw himself back in his chair. “I’ll not cut and run. I’ll be hanged if I do know whether I love you or not. You’ve a physical essence that goes to the head, but you are too self-centred, too unified, to give the complete happiness we men dream of. Fifteen years ago!”

“Do you mean I’m too old?”

“In a way, yes. You have lived too much in these fifteen years, although in one sense you haven’t lived at all. But you have the strength of ten women, and a man would have to be a good deal weaker than I am to want that much counterpoise. And yet you pull me like the devil, and I have admired you more these fifteen years than any woman on earth—”

“Really, you mustn’t disturb yourself,” said Julia, who was now so angry that she looked merely satirical. “I should not marry—neither you nor any one—if my husband were dead and the cause won. Winning the vote for women is merely a necessary preliminary, and my work for them but a part of an ideal of development I conceived even before I went to the East. I have a theory that the world will not improve much until a few women achieve a state of moral and mental perfection far ahead of anything the race has yet known. Such an achievement is impossible to man because he is either oversexed, or the reverse, and in both cases incapable of achieving perfect unity in himself, and absolute strength. But to woman it is possible. There will only be a few of us. Man needn’t worry. The world will always be full of the other kind. But to stand alone! To feel yourself equipped to accomplish for the world what twenty centuries of men have failed in—despite even their honest endeavor—do you fancy that one of us would exchange that great work for what any mere mortal could give us?”

“Whew!” Tay’s eyes, that had looked as hard as her own, flashed and smiled as he sprang to his feet and put on his overcoat. He held out his hand.

“Let’s cut all this out for a time,” he said. “Perhaps you’ve put me off, and perhaps you haven’t. Perhaps you are right. But if you are not, well, out to Reno you go. Is it to-morrow you take me to call on your aunt?”

“Yes. Will you come here?”

“I will. Goodnight.”

After he had gone Julia for an hour stared straight at the wall as if deciphering hieroglyphics. Then she smiled and went to bed.

V

MRS. WINSTONE had put on her new intellectual expression. Her lids were slightly drooped, thus banishing the young stare of wonder; her brows were almost intimate, and she had powdered her nose with an art that elevated the bridge.

When Julia and Tay arrived at the house in Tilney Street she was standing beside a table at the end of the drawing-room. One hand rested lightly upon it, the other held a slip of paper. On her left sat Mrs. Maundrell and Lady Dark, on her right Mrs. Flint, a working woman from the slums of Bloomsbury, and an eminent leader in the Militant ranks of her own class. The room was well filled with charmingly gowned women, some mildly but financially sympathetic with the cause of Suffrage, others as mildly adverse. All looked mildly expectant.

“Aunt Maria said nothing about this,” whispered Julia to Tay. “We’ll sit at the back until it’s over—that is, if you think you can stand it.”

“I’ll do my best. Like you, I can detach my mind.”

“Ladies,” began Mrs. Winstone, in a deep grave voice, and not seeing Julia, wondering who on earth the attractive-looking stranger could be, “we all know too much of the great cause which brings us together to-day for me to waste any words on its history. Suffice it to say that—a—” (she referred to the slip in her hand) “it is now a cause which no woman that respects herself can afford to ignore, a cause that for the first time in history has united all classes of women in one indissoluble bond. It originated in the great middle or manufacturing class, eloquently known as the backbone of England, and quickly spread to what is in our generation the most powerful of all, the working class. Thirty members of this great class sit in the House of Commons, but their better part is still clamoring at the gates. I refer, of course, to the thousands of working women now enrolled in the Militant army. One of these, the most—a—distinguished of its leaders, has kindly consented to talk to us to-day. She has her scars of battle. She has stormed the house of the Prime Minister, both when he lived in Cavendish Square, and after he was elevated to the more historic Downing Street. She has six times fought with the police guarding the House of Commons, and three times served a term in Holloway. Her recruits are numberless—Ladies, allow me to introduce Mrs. Flint.”

She sat down and spread out her train. Mrs. Flint rose amidst the pleasant impact of kid, and Julia murmured to Tay:—

“A fine bluffer, my aunt, if you like. But all Englishwomen seem to speak well, by instinct.”

Tay was groaning in spirit, but soon gave his ear to Mrs. Flint, who made a short pointed and effective speech. Her restraint and simplicity alone would have commanded attention. She began by remarking with grim humor that she had not been at all worried by the punching and kicking of the police, as her husband had beaten her every Saturday night for ten years until he disappeared, leaving her to support and bring up seven children as best she might. But although she had long since forgiven him for all this, it being quite in the nature of things, she had enjoyed kicking the policemen back and clawing when she got her chance, as they belonged to that sex which had ruined the lives of two of her girls: one had flung herself into the Thames, and the other come home with her child, shattered in body and mind. Then, dismissing her personal affairs, she went on to speak of the wrongs of working women in general, their miserable wages for men’s work, and the new hope that filled their lives at the prospect of women being able to force men to keep their election promises and command a fixed and adequate wage for women’s work, shorter hours, and improved social conditions; conditions at present beyond the efforts of women on the municipal boards or even of the Friendly Societies. There was no ranting against man. Mrs. Flint recognized that he couldn’t help himself, having been born that way, and incapable of understanding the limited endurance, and the needs, of women and children. She paid a just tribute to the few humane and enlightened men that had improved conditions in the past, but added that she saw no disciples among the present men in power. The only men that seemed to give any thought to the improvement of the poor were the Socialists, and they did nothing but talk and write pamphlets. They showed nothing of the life and the fighting spirit of the women now engaged in a war which would cease only when they were either all dead or victorious. When she had illustrated her address with a number of brief but terrible anecdotes, she finished with an eloquent appeal to her hearers to take part in the next raid on the House of Commons, should the Government fail to keep its tacit promise; and sat down amid a lively applause, as sincere as her speech.

“By Jove!” said Tay. “A working woman! Wish you could see ours. But we have the scum of Europe. Mrs. Flint is the undiluted British article. After all, it doesn’t speak so badly for your men that such women have been allowed to breed in this country—also your own lot. Ever think of that?”

“Rather, and they must take the consequences. We prove ourselves the more logical sex inasmuch as we demand the logical result. Now! Bridgit!”

Mrs. Maundrell spoke like a fiery torrent, reënforcing Mrs. Flint’s personal experiences with several of her own, garnered when she had worked in the slums; and impressing her audience with their duty to go out and fight to mitigate the lot of the poor, even if they had not sufficient self-respect to demand the ballot because it was their right on general principles.

Ishbel followed, speaking with her usual calm practical sense, and her appeal was to the immediate pocket. The funds of the unions must constantly be replenished, and she asked all present, in the soft accents of one unaccustomed to denial, and with her most enchanting smile, to subscribe liberally to the union represented by Mrs. Flint. She herself would distribute the promise cards.

“When I go back,” said Tay, “I’ll drum up all the useless beauties I know and start a class for their education in public speaking, and in thinking of something besides themselves. No wonder these women hit the bull’s-eye every time.”

And he cheerfully parted with five pounds when the distracting Ishbel told him how she had longed to meet this old friend of her own dear friend, and begged him to dine with her on the following evening.

“And you really must take advantage of this truce, dear,” she said to Julia, “and see a bit of the lighter side of life once more. We’ll be just a family party—like old times!”

“Nigel? Is he in town?” asked Julia, in alarm.

“No, he’s in Syria; writes from some hotel on Mount Carmel. I believe you suggested—”

“Ah! At last! I feared he never really would care for the idea.” But the relief in her voice was not in the cause of the Bahai religion.

Here Mrs. Maundrell bore down on them, and her eyes flashed from Tay’s face to Julia’s with an expression of angry misgiving. But Julia was cool and smiling, and Tay shook her hand heartily and protested that he had long thought of her as another old friend. Mrs. Maundrell liked him so spontaneously that she was more alarmed than ever.

“Come and meet my aunt,” said Julia, hastily, and bore him off.

Mrs. Winstone, who knew nothing of the correspondence, almost betrayed her surprise as the two approached her, and wondered if Julia really were going to turn out a woman. At all events she had shown taste in her sudden departure from sixteen years of inhuman indifference. The hostess greeted the one man present with warmth.

“So glad you could come, and so sorry I’m goin’ away. It would have been too jolly to know Charlotte’s brother. But I’m startin’ for my old home in the West Indies on Wednesday.”

“What?” cried Julia. “You never told me.”

“How very odd. But my nerves need a rest. Hannah and Pirie are goin’ with me.”

“To visit my mother?” gasped Julia.

“Rather not. Bath House has been rebuilt, in part. They are goin’ to take the baths for their gout. Any message for your mother?”

“Give her my love, of course.”

“Why not come along?”

“Well, you see, Aunt Maria, I am not quite casual enough, if I am English, to leave my party on a day’s notice.”

“So glad I’m not a leader. I always do what I want, without botherin’ about anybody else. Makes life so simple. How do, Hannah? Have you survived it?”

Tay had been swept off into a vortex of suffragists and antis, all arguing with determination. Julia sought out Ishbel and had a talk in a corner with that ever soothing friend.

VI

“JULIA,” said Tay, as they emerged into Tilney Street, “what is your idea of something real devilish?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that after that flow of soul, I am in a mood to whoop it up, paint the town magenta, get up on a box in Hyde Park and holler, but not to suffragettes. And I want your company. Can’t you feel that way?”

“Perhaps,” admitted Julia, laughing. “What a boy you still are.”

“Not so much of a boy as you think, but enough. But I don’t know your tastes in crime. Give me a hint, and we’ll do it.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t any.”

“You are as truthful as a woman can be, so investigate your possibilities and own up. Admit that under my demoralizing influence you are suffering some from reaction.”

“I believe I am.” Julia laughed again, with youth in her voice.

“I surmised as much, if only on general principles. I am subject to violent reactions myself. You’ve been good too long. If you don’t take a mild fling or two, your nervous system will dictate that you rise in the night and blow up the Prime Minister. Suppose we walk, as it isn’t raining. That, for London, is almost variety enough. Now, if you made up your mind to go on the wildest spree you could think of, what would it be? A French ball, with a hump and a limp; or a day on the Thames, if it happened to be summer, all alone with one man in a punt?”

“Let me think.” Julia had quite fallen in with his mood. “I think I’d go on a sort of platonic honeymoon with the most companionable man I knew—you, for instance—to some foreign town, one I’d never visited, and where we could hear the best music. There would be a certain excitement in avoiding English people lest they misinterpret what was eminently proper, if quite irregular.”

“I could never have conceived of such a hilarious program. But if that is your best, it would be better than nothing. As it is winter, I suppose we would shiver over our respective radiators when not at the opera.”

“Oh, there are always the museums and art galleries—”

“More and more intoxicating. My idea of complete happiness is to wear out my old shoes and the back of my neck in art galleries—”

“As it is winter, think of the exercise.”

“I prefer using a pair of dumb-bells at an open window. Do you happen to know of any musical European town where we could get food fit to eat?”

“Oh, there is always some good restaurant, and of course we could dine together—”

“And breakfast, and lunch, or I don’t go. Of course you’ll send me to a different hotel. Shall you take a sitting-room—”

“Oh, that wouldn’t do at all. Besides, it wouldn’t be necessary. We’ll be out all the time. There are always the theatres at night, when we don’t go to the opera.”

“As I don’t understand a word of any language except my own and Spanish, I can slumber peacefully while you improve your mind and feel wicked. I don’t see where I come in on this game.”

“Joking aside, Ishbel and Dark are going to Munich next week, and we might go along. My mind is a bit relaxed since the arrival of your upsetting self. It might be well to humor it.”

“Ah!” Tay had frowned, but his brow cleared suddenly. After all, he might see more of the real Julia with a chaperon, than if she were tormented by recurring alarms. “Very well. Munich, by all means. Anything to cut you loose from Suffrage. Promise right here that you will chuck it until we return.”

“I shall try to forget it—if only that I may return to it with a mind completely refreshed.”

“Exactly. But I haven’t yet had an object lesson in your switching-off trick, so I’ll strike a bargain with you right here: if you mention Suffrage, I shall make love to you. If you don’t, I won’t.”

“I promise,” said Julia, hastily. “I really should like to feel quite young and frivolous for a bit. And love is as deadly serious as Suffrage.”

“So you will find when I get ready to make love to you.”

“Can you get away—I thought you were so busy?”

“I’ll get away, all right. Just as well to jar their calm deliberation by flaunting my scornful indifference. Here we are. We’ll meet to-morrow night.”

And they parted gayly at the gates of Clement’s Inn.

VII

AS Ishbel had promised, it was but a family party at her house on the following evening, and after dinner, the men went to the billiard room, the women upstairs. Julia was to stay overnight, and after she and Ishbel had made themselves comfortable in negligées, they met in the boudoir for a talk. Bridgit was striding up and down as they entered, her hands clasped behind her. As they dropped into easy chairs, she took up her stand before the fire-screen.

“Julia,” she said fiercely, “you are going to fall in love with that man.”

“I am in love with him,” said Julia, coolly, lighting a cigarette.

“Good!” said Ishbel. “It is high time.”

“High time!” cried Mrs. Maundrell. “You could fall in love and I could fall in love, and no damage done. We have married Englishmen and gone straight ahead with our work. But not only is Julia the leader of a great party which demands her undivided allegiance, but this man is an American.”

“Perhaps he would live over here,” suggested Ishbel, who was normally hopeful. “He is far more sympathetic with our cause than Eric.”

“Not he. He is more American than the Americans—perhaps because he is a Californian. He told me all about his fight for reform in San Francisco—never heard anything so exciting—and he’s going to try it again after they’ve had another dose of corruption under the present mayor. Besides, there’s going to be a big fight this year to put in a reform governor, and he means to take part in it. He’ll never desert. It will be Julia—”

“Don’t excite yourself,” murmured Julia. “I didn’t say I meant to marry him.”

“But why not?” asked Ishbel. “We are sure to win this year, and then you will have done your great work. We should always need you, of course, but it will be mainly educational work for a long time, and the others can do that. It will be ages before women get into a Cabinet or even into Parliament. And—splendid idea—you could drill the American women, become the leader over there. With your experience and reputation you would be simply invaluable to them.”

“Suppose we don’t win this year?” asked Julia, languidly.

“We won’t!” said Mrs. Maundrell, emphatically. “They’re merely hedging. There’s nothing for us but to fight the Liberals at every general election until we get the Conservatives in.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Ishbel, who, like many of the women, was certain of victory in that year of 1910 which was to bring their “Black Friday.” “The Government may hate us, but they have given ample proof that they fear us; they know it is time to make friends of us. They will consent to the enfranchisement of only a limited number, of course, but I wouldn’t care if they only enfranchised the wives of Cabinet ministers. Let them make the fatal admission that woman has a political and legal existence and the rest is only a matter of time.”

“Yes, and nobody knows that better than themselves. They may be brutes, but they are not fools. I don’t hope for it—perhaps not even from the Conservatives—until fully four-fifths of the wives of this country have risen and devilled the lives out of their husbands. And the average British female is about as easy to wake up as a stuffed hippopotamus. She merely protrudes her front teeth and says, ‘How very _odd_!’ No, Julia can’t leave us. Fatal gift, that of leadership. Must take the consequences, old girl.”

“Who said I wouldn’t? Women have fallen in love without marrying before this. I intend to remain in love for a fortnight longer. Then I shall forget it and return to work.”

“Yes, if you can. I fought, fought like the devil. Didn’t I confide in you? Didn’t I look like the last rose? You are strong, but so am I. Let me tell you that love is a disease—”

“Quite so. There you have it. Love _is_ a disease—of the subconscious or instinctive mind. It is a profound auto-suggestion, induced, in the region where the primal instincts dwell, by the superior suggestive power of some one else, and can be treated mentally like any disease of the body.”

Bridgit flung herself on the floor and clasped her knees. “How diabolically interesting! Tell us how you do it.”

Ishbel smiled and lit another cigarette.

“I may not be able to do it myself. Love, like sleep, the circulation of the blood, the digestive apparatus, to say nothing of drug and drink habits, is controlled by the subconscious mind. We can unwittingly give ourselves suggestions, but not deliberately. But all mental diseases, short of insanity, can be cured by counter-suggestions, administered by an expert. If I found that my will was helpless before intermittent attacks of love fever, and all that horrible accompaniment of longing and aching we read about, to say nothing of confusion of mind which unfits one for work, I should go to Paris and put myself in the hands of an eminent psychotherapeutist I know of. He would throw me into a semicataleptic state, or hypnotic, if I were not amenable in the other, and give me counter-suggestions until I was as completely cured as if I merely had had an attack of insomnia, or had taken a drug until it had weakened my will.”

“How beautifully simple! Why didn’t you tell me when I was in the throes, and doubtful of its being for the best?”

“I didn’t think of it. It only occurred to me when I was beginning to feel—perplexed. Now, as I really need a rest, and can take it in this interval of peace, I am going to see what the preliminary surrenders are like, and enjoy them. That much I owe to myself. And I shall not have its memory destroyed, neither.”

“No, don’t,” said Ishbel. “Merely have it put in cold storage. Suspended animation. You might be able to marry Mr. Tay, after all. It would be a pity to lose it altogether. Should you have to fall in love all over again, or should you go back to your psychowhatyoucallhim and have the original suggestions replanted? Will he keep them in alcohol in a glass jar like those things in the Sorbonne?”

“You can jest, my dear, but I am talking pure science. And I learned it at the fountainhead. The Anglo-Saxon world is slow to accept anything it thinks new, but suggestive therapeutics were practised two thousand years B.C.”

“No one could be less conservative than I, although I have an adorable husband and two babies. Some day that may be thought radical. My mind is hospitable to all your lore, but I want to hear you work it out to its logical conclusion. What shall you do if you suddenly find yourself free to marry Mr. Tay—delightful man!—before he, with or without the aid of psychos, has recovered from you?”

“I have other reasons for intending to marry no man. And as for Dan—he is not even sure he is in love with me—”

“Oh, isn’t he?” cried Bridgit and Ishbel in chorus.

“Well, granted he is; he was not when he came over. He was convinced that I had grown hard and masculine, altogether terrifying; he was quite over his boyish infatuation. Now, he is attracted because he is delighted to find me not so much changed outwardly from his old ideal, and much more interesting to talk to. Besides, his masculinity is alert at the prospect of a difficult hunt. But when he is once more on the other side of the world, he will recover.”

“Julia,” said Ishbel, “you haven’t studied that man’s jaw-bones. And he has had his own way too much. He is tenacious. Now, as you are a human woman, you will adopt my suggestion. You will take him with you to Paris, and persuade him to go in for alternate treatments. Sauce for the goose, etc.”

“No,” said Julia, frowning.

“Julia!” said Ishbel, severely. “Are you losing your sense of humor?”

“Of course not!” Julia sprang to her feet. “But, you see, all this is A B C to me; and as it’s merely funny to you, you think there must be an air pocket in my mind into which my sense of humor has dropped—”

“No, dear, not a bit of it. We all know that you learned more in the East than you’ll ever tell, and we’ve heard vague rumors of Charcot—”

“Oh, his hypnotism is all out of date. The present men are as scientific as the ancients—”

“Well, don’t be too hard on us, Julia, and pity Mr. Tay. Take him with you to Paris. I mean it. It’s the least you can do.”

“I’ll not.”

“And why not, dear?”

“Oh, you see,” said Julia, “the unexpected might happen, and I might want to marry him. And when men recover, they recover so completely; not to say console themselves with some one else. I shall have the suggestion made, that if I ever should—but I’m not going to say another word about it. Good night.” And she ran out of the room.

“I don’t doubt she could do all that,” said Ishbel, as Bridgit gathered herself up. “But one thing I am positive of, and that is that she won’t.”

“I rather hope she will. Then we can have a private conference with the psycho and tell him to plant the haunting image of Nigel in the place of Tay, dispossessed. Then we’ll all be happy.”

“Do you believe Nigel cares still for Julia?”

“Don’t I? But he’s strong, if you like. He can’t marry her in England, so he thinks of her as little as possible and does the work of two men.”

“But if he can’t marry her?”

“I’ll tell you something if you’ll vow not to tell Julia—or Mr. Tay.”

“Very well.”

“France has been having bad heart attacks. I have it from Aunt Peg.”

“Julia is as likely to hear it from the same source.”

“Not she. The duke has forgiven her, but has no desire to be reminded that he has a suffragette in the family. Never reads the Militant news, and all the rest of it. So Julia spares his feelings and never goes there. (I spare him the sight of me!) I don’t want her to know it until Mr. Tay is safely at home in his absorbing San Francisco. It would never do, Ishbel. I’d like to see Julia happy myself, but she can’t leave England. And she’d be happier with Nigel, for he’s her own sort. I like Mr. Tay; he’s really frightfully attractive—but—after Part I of love-plus-matrimony had run its course, they’d have a bad time adapting themselves. The real tyrants are the masterful Americans, because in their heart of hearts they regard women as children, handle them subtly, won’t fight in the open. Now remember, you’ve promised. If Mr. Tay found out that France was likely to die any minute, he’d ‘camp’ here, as he expresses it, until he could marry Julia out of hand. He has a jaw, as you’ve observed yourself.”

“Yes,” said Ishbel. “I’ve promised, but I rather wish I hadn’t. I like fair play.”

“We are in war,” said Mrs. Maundrell, coolly. “Good night.”

VIII

“JULIA!” came Tay’s voice over the telephone. “We are in adjoining hotels! I never felt so truly wicked in my life! How do you feel?”

“Cold. My stove won’t warm up.”

“Mine looks like a polar bear on end. I expect it to open its jaws and devour me. Wish it would if what you English chastely call its inside is warmer than its out. I’ve just had an exhilarating supper of cold ham, beer, and double-barrelled crusts, which appear to be a staple. I suppose you have had precisely the same, as this is Germany and the hour 11.30 P.M.”

“Yes, and I’m going to bed this minute and forget it. Good night.”

“One minute. To-morrow morning?”

“Hadn’t we better wait till the Darks arrive?”

“Not much! Do you think I’m going to moon about a strange town by my lonesome? If we could travel together—”

“There are so many English people in Munich, and I am in the position of Cæsar’s wife at present—”

“Don’t dare to mention the word—the fatal word. Now, expect me to-morrow morning at nine-thirty. If you are not downstairs on the minute, I’ll send a procession of bell-boys up to your room until the hotel is ringing with the scandal.”

“Very well. It would be rather stupid.”

“Glad you see the point. By the way, what have you told the police you are? I longed to write anarchist and see what would happen. I compromised by writing, ‘Proprietor of a Free Lunch Counter and Antigraft Sausage Factory.’”

“You didn’t!”

“Cross my heart.”

“I hope you’ll have a visit from the police first thing in the morning. I wrote ‘Ward in Chancery’; thought that rather funny.”

“Best English joke I ever heard! Well, go to bed, Princess of the Tower. Mind you stay on it.”

Lord Dark had been detained at the last minute, and Julia easily had been persuaded to go on alone with Tay. Both had made merry at first over the mock elopement; but the trains were crowded and cold, the wait at Cologne was long and colder still, and both were unsentimentally relieved to arrive at their destination. Here, at least, in the beautiful city of Munich, they really could enjoy a day or two of complete liberty. Julia had not had the faintest notion of secluding herself.

On the following morning as Tay left his hotel he saw her waiting in front of her own. As she smiled and waved her hand he experienced a slight agreeable shock. “Aha!” he thought. “I really believe she has switched off. For all mercies, etc.”

Julia’s eyes were dancing with anticipation, the firm lines of her mouth had relaxed, and it looked even younger than when he first met her, for then it had curved with some of that bitterness of youth which she had long since outgrown; although it had been replaced first by a cynical humor and then by pride and determination. This morning she was smiling almost as she may have smiled through her first party at Government House. And she was looking remarkably pretty in her forest-green tweed, and the sable toque and stole she had taken from their long storage.

“Did you ever feel such air?” she cried. “After the heavy dampness of London, it goes to one’s head. I can almost see the Alps, as well as feel them.”

“It’s positively immoral, this climate,” said Tay, shaking her hand vigorously. “How do people ever sleep here? Now I know why they drink so much beer—to keep their feet on the earth.”

“We’ll walk miles and miles.”

“So we will. Sorry I couldn’t keep my engagement with you for breakfast, but they fairly shoved that frugal meal into my bed. When we have walked a few hours, we’ll drop in somewhere and eat veal sausages and drink chocolate. That, I am told, is the proper stunt about eleven o’clock. Certainly in this climate one could digest the maternal cow between meals.”

They had been walking briskly, but paused at the Maximilianplatz. The closely planted trees and shrubs of the long narrow park were covered with ice and glittered blindingly in the bright winter sunshine. Even the tall houses on the further sides of the streets that enclosed it had icicles depending from the windows, glittering with the prismatic hues. Overhead soft thick masses of cloud hung below the deep rich blue of the sky. People were hurrying along in their furs, the shop-windows were full of color. A royal carriage passed, as blue as the sky, and an old man saluted his loyal subjects.

Tay whistled.

“Lucky for you it’s so hard to get married in a foreign town, or my promises might go up in smoke. This is just the place for a honeymoon.”

“Isn’t it? Let’s imagine we are just married and doing Europe for the first time.”

“You can do the imagining,” said Tay, dryly. “My imagination will take a well-earned rest for the present. We’ll return to Munich later.”

They wandered about the narrow crooked shopping district for a time, then up the wide Ludwigstrasse, almost deserted at this hour.

“Good clean street,” said Tay, approvingly. “And I like these flat brown old palaces. They look like Italy without suggesting daggers and poison.”

Julia didn’t answer, and Tay looked at her curiously. Her head was thrown back, her mouth half open, as if inhaling the crystal air. There was a faint pink flush in her white cheeks, and her lips were scarlet. Her shining happy eyes were moving restlessly, as if to take in all points of the beautiful street at once. Tay was about to ask her a question that had been in his mind since they started, when she caught him suddenly by the arm.

“Look!” she exclaimed. “Do you see that party there across the street? They have skates! I remember now, Ishbel said there was fine skating in the park. Oh, how I should love to skate once more!”

“Then skate!” cried Tay. “We’ll follow them.”

“But of course you don’t. There is no ice in California.”

“But of course I do. You forget I spent four winters in New England. Let me tell you, I didn’t miss a trick.”

“Do you fancy we can hire skates?”

“I fancy we’ll skate if you want to. Come along. We mustn’t let them out of our sight.”

They followed the group of girls and boys into the Englischer Garten, a vast and glittering expanse of ice-laden trees. The lake was already well covered with skaters, young people for the most part, as it was Saturday, wearing worsted sweaters, scarves, and mitts, and all looking very red, very ugly, and very happy in a stolid deliberate way. Tay found skates without difficulty, and after a few minutes’ uncertain practice, they skimmed smoothly over the surface.

“I wish we had it to ourselves,” said Tay, discontentedly. “If it were not for these unromantic mortals, we could imagine we were in a sort of polar fairy land. I’ve seen the ice-storm in New England but never on such a scale. We are quite in the middle of a frozen wood.”

“If the people of Munich were as artistic about themselves as they are about their city, they would all dress in white for skating. Then what a sight it would be! But at least they look happy.”

“So do you.”

“I am, oh, I am!”

“May I ask if it is because you have the rare privilege of a day in my exclusive society?”

“Partly that. But not all. Can you make curves? I never shall forget my delight when I skated for the first time—after being brought up in the tropics! Fancy!”

“Perhaps it didn’t take so much to make you happy in those days.”

“Oh, far more! Far, far more! I have been really happy since then.”

“If you don’t mind what you call it.”

“Where do you suppose the swans go in winter?”

“Haven’t an idea, and care less. Look out!”

They almost collided with a large corsetless lady in a white sweater, a red woollen scarf tied round her purple face, and a gray skirt exhibiting massive pedestals. She glared at the fashionable intruders, but described a curve of surprising agility, although as she propelled herself to the other side of the lake she gave the impression of waddling.

Julia snatched her hand from Tay’s and shot after the expansive back. “Catch me!” she cried. And for the next twenty minutes Tay pursued her, sometimes almost heading her off, sometimes almost grasping her waving hand, only to find her flying to the other end of the lake. She looked like an elf, with her green dress and golden hair, and was not for a moment lost sight of in the undistinguished throng. Tay, whose blood was up, chased her until he finally brought her to bay, when she threw herself down on the bank and held out her skates to be unbuckled.

“Good symbol,” said Tay, as he knelt before her, “I’ll catch you every time, my lady. Don’t ever try running away, or you’ll merely get tired for nothing.”

“I’m the better skater!”

“You are. But I’m a good sprinter. Do you want to race me?”

“Rather!”

He delivered up the skates, and when they reached a straight expanse of road, they drew a long breath, hunched their shoulders, and started on a dead run.

To Tay’s surprise she kept abreast of him for nearly fifty yards, making up for what she lacked in length of limb with a fleetness of foot that gave her the effect of a bird in full flight. Then he shot past her, and came back to find her panting, but with dancing eyes.

“I am so hungry!” she cried. “Is it time for sausages and chocolate?”

“It’s time for lunch, or whatever they call it here. Do you suppose we can find a cab? Much as I dote on exercise I think a cab after coffee and rolls some three hours agone would suit me.”

“Where shall we lunch?”

“I’ll sample your hotel, if you don’t mind, and you will dine with me.”

“And afterward we must go to one of the big cafés for coffee. That is the proper thing.”

“You shall have your way in trifles so long as I have beaten you twice.”

They found a cab near one of the gates of the park, and drove as rapidly to the hotel as the fat driver and lean horse could be persuaded to go, and both too hungry for further nonsense. They had an admirable luncheon, in spite of the fact that it was not the “high season,” and then were directed to the Café Luitpold for their coffee. It was full of students, the “trees” covered with their caps of every color, and the atmosphere dense with smoke. They found a table in an alcove, and Julia lit a cigarette with the agreeable sensation of having come at last to the real Bohemia.

“Now,” said Tay, “I’ve got you where you can’t escape, and there are no English people to overhear. I propose to know what you think you are this morning. You are playing some sort of a part, and a charming enough part it is, but for complete enjoyment I must be on. I only half understand. Out with it.”

Julia leaned her head against the wall and smiled.

“I don’t mind telling you in the least. I am just eighteen, and I have just arrived from Nevis. I never had time to be really young, you know. So here is my opportunity.”

“You look the rôle, but how—well, you are young enough in any case; but how do you manage to relight the eighteen candles? You’ve lived _some_ since then. I couldn’t do it!”

Julia smiled mysteriously. “We never really exhaust any phase, particularly of youth. It is merely stowed away waiting for the current. Mine leaped up at the first signal. You appeared with the battery, and presto!”

“You suppressed it mighty well for quite two weeks.”

“Oh, I could have buried it deeper still, but I didn’t choose to. I deliberately shook it out of its cave where it was comfortably hibernating, and put all the rest in its place.”

“Why didn’t you do it before? I can’t be the first young and ardent admirer you have met. You are thirty-four—you have been free eight years—it is incredible. Is it merely the first good chance you have had? I don’t know whether I like being your stalking horse or not.”

Julia leaned her elbows on the table and looked him straight in the eyes.

“That has something to do with it, but not all. If you had come a year earlier, when I couldn’t have left for a minute, it would have been different, of course. But there was this sudden lull, and, you see, I am frightfully in love.”

The shot was so unexpected that Tay turned white, then the red rushed to his face. He had been lounging. He sat up stiffly and leaned forward.

“Julia!” he said. “Be careful. I shan’t stand for any flirting.”

“Oh, I’m much too young to flirt—I mean I hadn’t heard the word when I left Nevis. Of course I’m in love with you—fancy I have been for years. I don’t mind in the least if you no longer are in love with me.”

“I’m in love all right, but I’d like mighty well to know which of the several Julias you’ve treated me to I’m in love with.”

“Don’t you like this one?”

“I’d like nothing better than to know that you really were eighteen and that I could teach you all you would ever know.”

“You’ll teach me all I’ll ever know about love.”

“Ah!”

“The past is a blank as far as I am concerned. I can wipe anything off the slate.”

“I don’t know—I don’t know— Charming as you are now, I found you enchanting fifteen years ago, and quite as fascinating in another way when we met again. I don’t think I want the other Julias obliterated.”

“But you can stand this one for a week?”

“I’ll ask for nothing better—for a week. But—somehow—you look almost too young to know what love is. You look like a child pretending.”

“I am and I’m not. I can’t annihilate the years, but I can send them to the rear, and put youth, and all that means when it has its rights, in front—and keep it there as long as I choose.”

Tay stirred uneasily. “I’ve seen women of thirty—forty—in love before this, and they always look rejuvenated—but—well, I wish you had never lived those years in the Orient. You’ve got yourself too well in hand. It’s uncanny.”

“Oh, if you prefer me as the general of a Militant army,” and she drew herself up, her features arranged themselves in an expression of stern composure, her eyes were steady and exalted, and her mouth subtly older.

“Drop it!” said Tay, savagely. “Drop it! That at least you are to cut out for good and all. I’m quite content with you as you are—” Julia’s face was relaxed and smiling once more. “It is enough to know your possibilities. Remain as you are until you have developed under my tuition; and forget your Oriental learning also.”

“That is just the one thing I never would part with. Without it I should be no match for you.”

“Tell me one thing right here. Do you fancy yourself something more than mere woman? I mean did those old wiseacres in the East convince you that you were a soul reincarnated for a purpose, even before they taught you too much of their psychic lore? I don’t know whether I like the idea or not. Living with a reincarnated immortal soul several hundred million years old, developed that much beyond ordinary women, might not be all that a mortal man desires. How in creation could I ever live up to you?”

“Don’t look so far ahead. Do I look like anything but a very mortal woman at the present moment?”

“You look so adorable that if there were a little more smoke in this room I should kiss you. But—you little devil!—you have chosen the most public place in Munich to tell me all this, and you waited until you got out of England, where I did have a chance to see you alone—”

“Of course. Love-making would spoil it all. Nothing can ever be as enchanting as just being in love and asking for no more.”

“Can’t it? Well, you can have your little comedy here, and I’ll take matters in my own hands when we get back. You’ve got things all your own way now—hang it! hang it!”

“Can’t you, too, feel young and irresponsible? You really would be happy, and make me happy. And it would be something to remember!”

“I feel more like going out and getting drunk. However—have your own way. I’ll play up—”

“No, feel.”

“No doubt I shall. Your utter youth was contagious enough this morning. I’ve got some will myself. But say it again— Is it possible that you really love me?”

“Yes, I do,” said Julia, softly. “Never let that worry you.”

IX

THEY spent the following day wandering with the crowds that fill the Munich streets on bright Sundays, and the Darks arrived at midnight. The next morning they all went to the lake, this time finding a very different class of skaters in possession. Munich has a small fashionable set whose members dress as fashionable people do everywhere. To-day, the women in their short cloth or tweed frocks and rich furs, their faces rosy with cold and exercise, enhanced the glittering beauty of the landscape; and the young officers were quite as decorative.

“Some class,” said Tay. “In Europe there’s no choice between the aristocrats and the peasants. In my country, now, you couldn’t take your oath that all these birds of paradise weren’t clever shop-girls, until you got close enough to take notes. But here even a snub-nosed baroness, dressed like a housekeeper, shows her class.”

“That’s about all we’ve got left,” said Dark. “You helped yourself to a sort of ready-made imitation of it, as you did to everything else it took us twenty centuries to grind out. Think you might be generous and give us a little hustle in return. Can I help you, Mrs. France?”

He buckled on her skates and they joined the throng on the ice, Tay following with Ishbel. Lord Dark, something in the fashion of his wife, was a man of almost romantic appearance covering a practical character and a keen alert brain. He was as pure a Saxon in type as still persists, with fair hair and moustache, straight proud features, and languid blue eyes in thick brown frames. His tall figure was lean and sinewy, but carried listlessly. Thrown on his own resources, he would not have been driven on to the stage, out to South Africa, or become a vague “something in the City”; he would deliberately have applied himself to the science of money-making and mastered it, his ends accelerated by his indolent manner, so tempting to sharpers. Having inherited a considerable fortune, he was content with a career on the turf. His racing stud was notable, and rarely a year passed without adding to its reputation. He also amused himself with politics and society. Devoted to Ishbel for years before he could marry her, he was now as completely happy as a man may be whose wife is giving a large part of her energies to a cause of which he fastidiously disapproves. Broadminded, he was quite willing that all women outside of his particular circle should vote, but wished that his ancestors had settled the question and spared his generation. Astute in all things, however, he not only gave his wife her head up to a certain point, but of late had done what he could to help rush the thing through and have done with it. Ishbel, like Julia, was pledged to ignore the detested subject during this brief vacation.

“Jolly place, Munich,” he observed. “We always come here in August for the Wagnerfeste. You see all Europe as well as hear good music in comfort, which is more than you could ever say of Baireuth. We’ve never been here in winter before. Have you read up a bit? There ought to be good winter sports in the mountains.”

“Rather. I don’t fancy Mr. Tay was here an hour before he discovered there was tobogganing (rodelling) and skiing at Partenkirchen. He’s talked of little else.”

“Good! Then we’ll be really happy for a week.”

Meanwhile Ishbel was gently extracting a declaration of Tay’s intentions toward Julia by the diplomatic method of assuming all.

“It is too dreadful that you will take Julia from us,” she said plaintively. “Couldn’t you live in London?”

“Not yet.” Tay turned upon her a face of almost boyish delight. “But if she’ll really have me, we could come over every summer. Do you think she will?”

“In the end, of course. I’ve known Julia for sixteen years, and waited for her to fall in love. She never does anything by halves. But she may think she can’t leave England yet.”

“I wish these women didn’t take themselves so seriously,” said Tay, viciously. “One would think the fate of England depended on them.”

Ishbel laughed. “How like Eric! But we are used to the sixteenth century masculine attitude. It wouldn’t matter so much about me, except that every one of us helps to swell the total, but Julia is a great leader, with a wonderful power of attracting attention, making recruits, and inspiring her followers. We couldn’t spare her if the fight was to go on, but if it is won this year—well, I have told her to go and leave the rest to the other women in command.”

“Oh, you have! Bully for you! What did she say?”

“She wouldn’t commit herself. If I were you, I’d simply marry her.”

“So I shall, if I’m convinced she really cares for me.”

“You don’t doubt it?”

“I don’t know. She’s a puzzle to me. Sometimes I think she’s the most natural being on earth, and at others—well—the so-called complex women aren’t in it.”

“She’s both, but none the less interesting.”

“Oh, she’s interesting, all right. But she’s become such an adept at bluffing herself that I doubt if she always knows just where she’s at. Just now she’s bluffed—or hypnotized?—herself into thinking she’s interested in me. But I have an idea she could switch off in the opposite direction as easily.”

“Julia is a bit odd,” admitted Ishbel. “Especially since she came back from the East. Even before she went, she wasn’t much like anybody else, owing, no doubt, to that strange old mother of hers; but au fond she’s the most loyal and sincere of mortals. And it takes matrimony—a love-match—to clear a woman’s brain of cobwebs. Marry Julia and take her to the young world, and I’ll venture to say she’ll forget all she learned in the East, and a good part of her inheritance. Then she’ll be the most charming of women.”

“That’s the way I talk to myself when I’m not in the dumps. But do you really want her to marry an American? It would be more like you to want to keep her over here.”

“I did once plot and scheme to make her marry a very dear friend of us all, Lord Haverfield—Nigel Herbert—you must have read his books.”

“Ah!”

“That was rather imprudent of me. But it’s all over long ago. Julia never cared for him, and I have always said that when she did care for any man, I’d turn match-maker in earnest and do all I could to help him marry her—that is, if I liked him—and we’re all quite in love with you.” She flashed the sweetness of her charming countenance on him, and he thought her almost as beautiful as Julia. “I want her to be happy, for she was once terribly unhappy. Her experience was truly awful—”

“I never want to think of it,” said Tay, hastily. “I refuse to remember that she has ever been married. Look at here—will you promise to be on my side if she goes off on one of her tangents?”

“I will!” and she gave his hand a little shake. She longed to tell him that France might die any minute, but she had once more given her word to Bridgit, and could only hope that France would take himself off before Tay left England. “But if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll get round it somehow,” she thought.

A moment later a rapid change of partners was effected, Tay threw his arm lightly round Julia’s waist, and they waltzed down the lake to the amazement of the less agile Germans.

“Suppose you look up,” said Tay. “If you’re blushing because I have my arm round you for the first time, I’d like to see it.”

Julia laughed and threw back her head. She was blushing, and her eyes sparkled. “I’ll admit I never felt so happy in my life.”

“Are you as much in love with me as you were two days ago?” he asked dryly.

“Oh—rather more, I think.”

“If you like the sensation of my arm round you at a temperature of ten above zero, in full view of all Munich, can you imagine the ineffable happiness of being kissed by me in the vicinity of one of those tiled stoves with the door shut?”

“Then if all these people should suddenly disappear, you wouldn’t care to kiss me in the midst of this enchanted wood?”

“I’d kiss you wherever I got a chance, and what’s more I’ll do it. So prepare yourself.”

“Your promise!”

“Promise nothing. I absolve myself right here. And you talk Suffrage if you can!”

“Alas, I don’t want to. But I shan’t let you make love to me.”

“Oh, yes, you will,—when and where I please.”

Julia looked a little frightened. “Oh, no—we mustn’t go that far—”

“You merely want to flirt and make me miserable? Well, I’ve had just as much of that as I propose to stand. You’re laying up a frightful retribution, my lady.” He tightened his clasp and drew her as close as the skates would permit. “Be consistent,” he whispered. “You are eighteen. You remember nothing. We are really engaged, you know. You are mine this week. We have four days more. Put that imagination of yours to some good use. Believe that we are to be married this day fortnight.”

“If I go too far—you would never forgive me.”

He laughed grimly. “If you go that far, you’ll go farther. Of course I understand you. It’s a proof of the adorable innocence you have managed to preserve that you don’t know what playing with fire means to the man. You propose to abandon yourself discreetly, get a certain excitement out of words and coquetry while we’re here safely chaperoned, and then throw me down hard in the cause of duty when we return to London. Well, that’s not my program. Now, we’ll say no more about it.”

They climbed up the interior of the great statue Bavaria, in the afternoon, to gaze at the tumbled peaks of the Alps glittering through the haze that promised fine weather. Then the women rested for the opera of the evening, and Tay and Dark smoked in one of the cafés, talked horse and business, and, incidentally, drifted into a friendship that was to lead to strange results. Dark had influential friends in the City and promised Tay his immediate assistance in bringing his prospective partners to terms. Tay, who liked sport as well as most American men, although he had little time to devote to it, forgot that he was in love while “swapping” stories of the race-track. Both, secretly despising the other’s nationality, discovered that when men are men they are pretty much the same the world over. They cemented the bond by cursing Suffrage with all the epithets, profane, picturesque, savage, and humorous, in their respective vocabularies, and left the café arm in arm, feeling that they had talked woman back into her proper sphere and that all was well with the world.

X

THOSE were the last days of the Munich Opera-house in all its glory. Mottl, prince of conductors, was alive; Fay, Preuse-Matzenauer, Bosetti, Bender, Feinhals, the incomparable Fassbender, sang every week, and, now and again, Knote and Morena. To-day death and disaster have overtaken that great company, and few are left to make the pilgrimage to Munich worth while.

“Die Walküre” was given on Monday night, and included nearly all of the staff. The hotel portier had reserved seats for the English party in the first row of the balkon, and they had a full view of a typical Wagnerian audience. In these days, owing no doubt to the American residents, the entire auditorium, as well as the balkon and loges, was well dressed. No more did the hausfrau come in her street costume of serviceable stuff turned in at the neck with a bit of tulle, but made shift to wear a demitoilette of sorts, and light in color even if of mean material. The fashionable Müncheners outdressed the Americans and occupied the first row of the balkon and the loges. Even the royalties presented a far better appearance than in the old days, and the large number of officers present alone would have given the house a brilliant appearance. The upper tiers were picturesque with the girl students in their Secessionist costumes and bazaar heads, the men with their untidy hair and flowing ties. But the crowning grace of the “Hof” at all times is that no one is allowed to enter after the overture begins, nor dares to speak until the curtain goes down.

Julia had carefully arrayed herself in her most becoming gown, a white Liberty satin under pale green chiffon, so casual in effect that it looked as if held together by the sheaf of lilies-of-the-valley on the corsage. Ishbel was resplendent in black velvet and English pink; and the party was the cynosure of the audience below, standing with its back to the stage and frankly inspecting the balkon until the last bell rang and the lights went out.

The tenor was wrenching the sword from the tree, and Fay was standing with her famous arms rigidly aloft, in one of the prescribed Wagnerian attitudes, when Tay saw Julia move restlessly, sit forward with a frown, and then sink back with an expression of sadness so profound that he longed to ask what ailed her now, but had no desire to be hissed down or put out by the fat doorkeeper. When they were in the buffet, however, during the first pause, and he had walked up two trains and nearly lost his cufflinks in a determined effort to procure ices, and they were alone at a table in a corner, he referred to the incident, if only to prove that no performance, no matter how great, could divert his attention from her.

“Oh, I was only thinking,” said Julia. “I wonder where the Darks are?”

“Engaged in a wrestling match, probably. Aren’t you always thinking? What struck you so suddenly in the middle of that alleged dramatic scene where the fat man, purple in the face, was struggling to get a tin sword out of a paper tree and trying to sing at the same time? Never was so excited in my life.”

Julia laughed. “I was sure you were not musical.”

“You insult San Francisco. We are the most musical people in America. The very newsboys whistle the opera tunes. But I like to see a decent sense of the proprieties observed. Those two could have said all they had to say in five minutes. Set to music, it should take about fifteen. However— Tell me what struck you all of a heap.”

“Oh—well—I—”

“Shoot!”

“What?”

“More slang. Fire away.”

“Do you expect to know all my thoughts?”

“I don’t, but I’d like to.”

“I wonder! However—I don’t mind telling you. It occurred to me rather forcibly how much simpler women’s problems were in those days. Two young people, isolated from the world, meet and spontaneously fall in love. They are creatures of instinct, and ignorant of any law except Might. A sleeping potion in the savage husband’s nightly horn settles that question, and they run away into the forest and are happy—would be happy forever more if let alone. But in these complicated days—all our obstacles are inside of us! Any one can find courage to defy the primitive and obvious—”

“Plenty of primitive people right in the midst of civilization,” interposed Tay, grimly.

“Yes, I know, and in your country divorce is easy. But for the highly civilized, life, even with divorce, is anything but easy. Women question that condition called happiness when it would appear to offer itself, examine it on all sides. They know men too well—life—above all, themselves. Or they have assumed impersonal duties and responsibilities. Or their brains have become so complex that love alone cannot satisfy. They would have love plus far more! If the choice must be made, they dare not cast for love, in their fear of disaster. Nothing is so dishonest as the so-called psychological novel, which leaves two thinking moderns in each other’s arms at the end of a forced situation, with their natures unchanged, all their problems—their inner problems—unsolved. They never can be solved by love, marriage, children, the good old way. The sort for whom all problems can be treated by the conventional recipe are not worth writing about. But it is a terrible proposition; for these highly civilized women have the automatic desires of their sex for love and happiness—intensified by imagination! But—they know that a greater need still is to fill their lives and use their brains.”

Tay had turned pale. “The modern man, unless he is an ass, gives his wife her head.”

“That is beside the question. The real trouble doesn’t sound particularly attractive when put into plain English: it is the raising of the ego to the _n_th power that makes these women want to stand alone, resent the idea of finding completion in a man.”

“Then let us pray that they will all die old maids, and their race die with them.”

“No hope! Children of the most commonplace parents are the products of their times. Heredity is modified from generation to generation. Otherwise, we should all be Siegmunds and Sieglindes. Their little brains are impregnated by forces seen and unseen. Hadji Sadrä would explain it by the theory of reincarnation, or by planetary conditions at birth—the only reasonable explanation of Shakespeare, by the way, if he wasn’t Bacon. But although, no doubt, many of the great do return to complete their work, there are not enough to go round. And there is a simpler explanation. In these vibrating days the very air is flashing and humming with secrets for those that have the magnet in their brains. Bright minds learn from life, not from their old-fashioned parents. Oh, the breed will increase, not diminish! Happiness, old style, is about done for. Women will be happier in consequence—or in another way. I don’t know about men. They have reigned too long. And then they are simple ingenuous creatures, the most tyrannical of them, and pathetically dependent upon women. Women are growing more independent every day, more indifferent to that sex ‘management’ of men, which so far has constituted a large part of man’s happiness.”

Tay was angry, therefore more jocular than ever. “Don’t forget the adaptability of even the male animal, also that man is born of woman; also brought up by her. I don’t worry one little bit about the future happiness of man. As for the Home—apartment-houses and the decline and fall of servants have about relegated it to the last stronghold of the old-fashioned love story—the country town. I said just now that I’d like to know all your thoughts. Well, I shouldn’t. My idea of happiness is a lifetime with a woman who would always be more or less of a mystery, who would have her own life—inner and outer—as I should have mine. And I’m not so sure that mine would be simple and ingenuous. Marriage with her would be a sort of intense personal partnership, with separations of irregular recurrence and length. Then, my lady, there would be a constant ache; passion would never wear itself out; and neither would be looking for novel affinities elsewhere.”

Julia smiled. “It sounds very enticing. But that isn’t the point. The subtlest enemy—it is that desire to find our highest completion alone.”

“A bully good phase for the next world. Something to look forward to. The Fool’s Paradise in this life is the grandest failure on record. Men and women are not constituted to perfect by their lonesomes. Otherwise the mutual attraction of sex would not be what it is. No woman that a man wants was ever intended to complete herself; nor can she become so highly developed in this life as not to find it quite safe to follow her instincts on her own plane.”

The second bell had rung and the buffet was nearly empty. He leaned across the table and brought his face close to hers. “If you are dead sure that I never could make you happy, that you never could love me, that you haven’t a human instinct that I could gratify, then chuck me. But if you are only psychologizing on general principles, then chuck that as fast as you can. I don’t want to hear any more of it, and I shan’t pay any more attention to it hereafter than if you were speculating about possible grandchildren inheriting a taste for drink from your brother. Switch off! You are eighteen.”

Julia sprang to her feet with a laugh, her seriousness routed. “Right you are! Come, or we’ll be locked out.”

Both Dark and Tay stolidly refused to remain for the last act, and the party went to the best of the restaurants for the supper, which was to take the place of dinner; the opera had begun at six o’clock. The meal was cooked by a chef, and they lingered over it until long after the Wagnerites were in bed. Dark and Tay were in the best of spirits, for however they might love music, they loved dinner more; Julia and Ishbel, who were disposed to be sulky, soon recovered, and the party was so gay that even the yawning waiters smiled and felt sure of recompense. When they finally left the restaurant, Munich might have been the tomb of its history. Not a cab was on the rank. Not a policeman was to be seen. When they reached the small paved square before the loggia, Dark threw his arm about Julia, and they waltzed until Tilly must have longed to step down and join them. A delighted giggle did come from the sentry-boxes before the side portals of the palace as Tay and Ishbel followed the example of their companions. It is not often that the Munich night is disturbed by anything more original than roistering students. The moon was out, the cold air crisp. They could have danced for an hour, but Ishbel suddenly reminded them that they were to start for Partenkirchen in a few hours, and they raced one another to their hotel.

XI

THEY spent the rest of their week at Partenkirchen, a village in a mountain valley, surrounded by a chain of glittering peaks. The village was little more than one steep street bordered by inns and shops, but there were farms in the valley and on the nearer hillsides. The natives wore high fur caps, not unlike the cossack headgear, and seemed to exist for decorative purposes only, although alive to the lure of tourist silver. The hotel at the top of the street was very modern, with a good cook, little balconies for those that would enjoy the view, and many nooks in the rooms downstairs for those that would talk unhindered if not unseen. At this season there were no other English or Americans, but a sufficient number of Europeans of the leisure class to make the dining-room brilliant at night and animated at all times.

Julia and Ishbel had provided themselves with short white skirts of thick material, white men’s sweaters, and white Tam o’ Shanters. The men couldn’t wear white, but looked their best, as men always do, in rough mountaineering costume. They climbed, skated, skied, and tobogganed; and, under Julia’s gentle manipulation, kept close together. It was natural that Tay should fall to Ishbel in their outings, and only once or twice did he manage to drag Julia’s sled up the hill, or direct her uncertain footsteps when on the snow-shoes. Then she was so excited with the new sport that she paid little attention to him. She threw herself into it with the zest of a child, and he couldn’t flatter himself that her merry laugh was forced, nor the dancing lights in her eyes. Nor was he depressed himself by any means; the tonic air went to the heads of all of them, and they enjoyed themselves with an abandon possible only to those that have seen too much of life.

But on the last day, Ishbel, who saw through Julia’s manœuvres, deliberately stayed in bed with a headache, and Dark, without warning of his intention, departed early with a guide. Tay and Julia met alone at the breakfast table.

“Now!” he said gayly. “I’ve got you. What are you going to do about it? If you shut yourself up in your room, I’ll break the door down.”

“As if I’d do anything so silly. How I wish we could stay here a month.”

“Why not?”

“I left no address, and I may have stayed too long already—”

“Sh-h!”

“You could not, either.”

“Oh, yes, I could. Dark has been pulling wires, and I’m dead sure now that the thing will go through.”

“I’m so glad! But no doubt you could have managed it by yourself sooner or later. I fancy you’ll always be a success in business.”

“Thanks. If you mean to insinuate that business and cards are in the same class, I’m not a bit discouraged.”

“Pour me out another cup of coffee. I believe American men like to wait on women.”

“It’s part of our game. You see how honest I am. You’ll marry me without illusions.”

“Shall you boss me frightfully?” Julia looked at him over her cup, and he nearly dropped his. He kept his bantering tone, however.

“The more you do for me, the more I’ll spoil you. It will be quite an exciting race. How should you like being spoiled for a change?”

“It would be glorious. So irresponsible.”

“Exactly. That’s what makes many a man get drunk. Few sensations so delightful as that of complete irresponsibility.”

“Do you get drunk?” asked Julia, in mock alarm.

“Gorgeously. Am I not a good San Franciscan? Not too often, however. Bad for business.”

“You never told me if you went on that spree when you got those ten thousand dollars. Or didn’t you get it? Perhaps you anticipated, and your father wouldn’t—what did you call it—plunk?”

“I didn’t, and he did, and I did. I whooped it up for just five days. To tell you the truth, I didn’t find as much in it as I expected, but felt I owed it to myself. Wish now I’d come over and eloped with you.”

“Ah!” Julia made a rapid mental calculation. He would have arrived at about the time Nigel was laying his last desperate siege. Poor Nigel! Julia could picture Tay’s wooing and methods. Would he have won where her more courtly knight had failed?

“Suppose I had never turned up?” asked Tay, abruptly. “That husband of yours can’t live forever, is many years older than you, anyhow. Do you fancy you would have eventually married Herbert? Corking books! He must be some man.”

Julia had flushed to her hair. “How did you know I was thinking of him?” she stammered.

“Were you? Well, those flashes happen, you know. You haven’t answered my question.”

“It is quite impossible for me to tell, even to imagine, what I might have done if you—well, if you had not come over again. I’ve never really thought of marrying Nigel, but there would be a certain rest in it—not now, but later, perhaps. And we think and work with much the same objects.”

“Nothing in rest till you’ve had the other thing first. How much thinking did you expend on that other thing before you were submerged in the unmentionable?”

Julia blushed again, then laughed. “Oh, well—some day, I’ll tell you a funny experience I had in India.”

“Tell me now.”

“Over empty coffee-cups and fragments of buttered rolls? Not I. What shall we do first? Skate?”

“If you like. Do you want to toboggan afterward?”

“I think I’d like a tramp through the woods. We’ve never really investigated them.”

“Good. Come along.”

They found the lake deserted and skated in silence until Tay remembered her promise.

“This is a sufficiently romantic spot for confidences,” he observed. “And in full view of the waiters of the hotel, who appear to have nothing to do but watch us. Tell me your Indian experience. Whom did you think you were in love with over there?”

“Nobody. That was the trouble.”

“Did he love and ride away, perhaps? That’s just the sort of experience you need.”

“Well, I’ve never had it,” said Julia, indignantly.

“A man never minds telling when he’s been left, but I doubt if a woman ever admits it even to herself. You’re weak-kneed creatures, the best of you, and need nine-tenths of all the vanity there is in the world to keep going.”

“I believe you really despise women. But you’re just the sort that couldn’t live without them.”

“Right and wrong. I shan’t explain that cryptic statement. Fire away.”

“You’ll laugh at me.”

“If I really could laugh at you, I’d be half cured. I try, but it does no good. What would be funny in another woman is tragic in you—and pathetic.”

“Ah?” She was prepared to be indignant again, but met a new expression in the eyes with which he was intently regarding her. “What do you mean by that? I am not to be pitied.”

“You poor isolated child! I’ve never felt sorrier for anybody in my life. But never mind. Tell me your Indian experience.”

“Well—one night—a warm heavenly Indian night—I was alone in a boat on a lake. There was a great marble palace at one end. The nightingales were singing in the forest; and such perfumes!”

“Gorgeous! Why wasn’t I there? Some fun, love-making in southern Asia. But this is just the setting for real enjoyment of the story. Go ahead.”

“Yes, I never could be in a sentimental mood in this temperature. Well, I was completely happy—I had been happy for nearly a year in India, enjoying its strange beauty and never wishing for a companion. It was happiness enough to be alone and free. But that night—suddenly—I felt furious—”

“Ah! I begin to catch on.”

“I wish you wouldn’t always guess what I’m going to say.”

“Shows I’m the real thing. Go on.”

“I did wish with all my soul—every part of me—that I had a lover and that he was there. Heavens, how I could have loved him! I felt abominably treated by fate. Up to that time I hadn’t even thought about love. My experience had been too dreadful. I had felt sure that all capacity for love had been withered up at the roots. When a man looked at me as men do look at women they admire very much, it was enough to make me hate him. But I suddenly realized all that had passed. I had come to the conclusion that Harold had been mad from the beginning, so I could do no less than forgive him. That seemed to wipe it all out.”

“When did this happen?” asked Tay, abruptly. “What year?”

“It must have been—in 1903.”

“Oh! Cherry hadn’t been to England for two or three years. She went that year and came back with a good deal of your story—got it from your aunt, of course. I remember I thought about you pretty hard for a time. Was on the brink of falling in love with another girl, and it all went up in smoke. What time of the year was it?”

“Late autumn.”

“Yes! I told myself it was tomfoolery. That you had forgotten me; and I had pretty well forgotten you. Nevertheless, I couldn’t get you out of my head. You believe in that sort of thing, I suppose!”

“Oh, yes. I wonder!”

They were both pale and staring at each other. “Well, go on,” said Tay. “What next?”

“I made up my mind that I would find some one to love; and take the consequences. I went down to Calcutta, and for a whole winter tried to fall in love. There were many charming men, but it was no use.”

“Now are you convinced?”

There was a bend in the lake, which Julia had artfully avoided. Tay swung her suddenly around it, and in spite of her desperate attempt to free herself, caught her in his arms.

“Now,” he said, “I propose to show you that temperature has nothing to do with it. Keep quiet. You are on skates, remember.” And he kissed her.

“You can kiss me again,” said Julia, after a moment or two.

“I thought so.” And he kissed her for several minutes.

“You look quite different,” murmured, Julia finally.

“I can look more so. Skates and worsted collars that take your ears off are infernally in the way.”

“Will you always joke?”

“My dear child, if I didn’t joke, I might really frighten you.”

Julia shivered. “I’ve been frightened for days. I knew this would come. If I’d been really wise, I’d have run away.”

“It wouldn’t have done you one bit of good. Never try that game. If you do, I’ll jump right up on the platform in Albert Hall and kiss you in the presence of ten thousand suffragettes—damnable word!”

“I believe you would.”

“I would.” And he kissed her again.

This time she didn’t respond, and he gave her a little shake. “Forget it. You’re to think of nothing but me this long day we have all to ourselves. Time enough in London for you to set up your ninepins for me to bowl over. You’ve shown what you can do. Lady Dark told me that you did nothing by halves, and you’ve just proved it. To-day for love. Do you hear?”

Julia smiled radiantly. “I couldn’t think of anything but you for more than a minute if I would. That was one thing that terrified me at night—when I had time to think— I had switched off with a vengeance! The past seemed blotted out. I wonder! I wonder!”

“I don’t. And I never saw a mortal woman look so happy. Your faculty of living in the moment is a grand asset, my dear. Ten months— Good lord! It takes all of that time to establish a residence in Nevada, and all the rest of it. However— Well, let us go for a walk in the woods.” He glanced about with a quickening breath. “Blessed spot! We’ll come back to it one of these days.”

XII

“IT shows how much in love we are that we don’t mind this luncheon,” said Tay, who made a face, nevertheless. They had decided to remain away from the hotel all day, and were fortifying themselves at the inn on the lake. The meal was the usual one of watery veal, fried potatoes, and pastry. “I remember eating ‘kalb’ when I was in Germany before until I choked. Can any one explain why there are more calves in Germany than anywhere else on the face of the globe? You don’t see so many cows. The offspring must arrive in litters like pigs.”

“And the German, true to his creed, is furious if you flout his commonest staple.” Julia smiled, but, in truth, her mind was deeply perturbed, and she spoke mechanically. There had been no more love-making, for guests and peasants had met them at every turn of the woods. Her Hindu master had once told her that profound as were the suggestions he had given her, and systematic as was the control she had been taught to acquire over herself, either might suffer interruption unless she lived in India for many years longer. A violent awakening of the primal emotions, the assault of a mind and nature, temporarily, at least, stronger than her own, and that devil that lives in the subconsciousness would sit on his hind legs and chuckle.

During the hours that had succeeded those moments of unquestioning surrender on the lake, her thirty-four years with their highest accomplishment had crept back, and she had ceased forever to feel eighteen. The immediate future rose before her like a black wall pricked out with menacing fingers. There was no question as to where her duty lay for the moment, as to what she must accomplish before she could think of happiness. All the steel in her nature had reasserted itself, her brain was cold and keen. She would put an end to the present state of affairs this very day. But how? How?

She continued pleasantly.

“Perhaps it would have been better to go back to the hotel.”

“Not much. The hotel is associated with three evenings of fruitless manœuvrings to get you alone in one of those corners. Besides, Lady Dark may have recovered. I’ll take no chances. You are to be mine alone for an entire day.”

“We could stay a few days longer.”

“No, on the whole, I want to wind up London as quickly as possible. So must you. I shall send you on a steamer ahead to make sure of you.”

Julia laughed. “How like a man. We could hardly be happier than we are now. Why not let well enough alone, for a bit?”

“Well, you see, I am a man, and therefore differ from you as to what constitutes real happiness. I want to get the cursed Reno matter over as quickly as possible. Besides, I am due at home. The business might wait, but there’s a big piece of political work to pull off, and I must do my share in prying my poor rotten state out of the slough.”

Julia’s mind took a leap. “I believe you are really ambitious,” she said, with bright sympathetic eyes. “Politicians don’t work for nothing. Do you know you never have told me a word of your ultimate intentions?”

“I’ve been too busy talking about you. I was only too glad to side-track my own affairs for a time. We were all so strung up during the graft prosecution that we jumped at anything that would give us a chance to forget it, and recuperate our energies.”

“Well, you have had a change! Do tell me how you have planned out your life. Do you look forward to being President of the United States?”

“Not as much as when I was fifteen.”

“Oh, you will always joke! Can’t you fancy what your future is to me? You are capable of great things, and I don’t for a moment believe that you care for nothing but money making, varied by an occasional rush at reform. Do be serious.”

“My dear, I never felt more serious than I do at this moment. God knows I’m only too grateful for your interest. It struck me as ominous that you never asked me.”

“I didn’t dare,” murmured Julia. “A man’s career is a so much more brilliant thing than a woman’s ever can be, for he has two distinct sides. We women are bound by our physical limitations to one side. We must make new traditions—and new bodies to transmit—”

“Hold on! Let us avoid that subject as long as possible.”

“But tell me.”

“Well, here is the way I am fixed: I am for reform, my father is not. I am a full partner in the firm, but I can’t use the firm’s money for an object to which my father is bitterly opposed. But I have been making money on the outside, investing and reinvesting, and, in two years at most, I shall have an independent fortune, irrespective of my father’s large estate. Then I intend to go in for politics, doing all I can meanwhile to educate the people in the precepts of the true democracy and to keep the Reform party on top. I intend to hold conspicuous office in California, then go to Congress. You can call this ambition, if you like; no doubt ambition is mixed up with all deep sense of personal usefulness. It takes a good-sized ego to permit you to fancy yourself able to reform long-existing conditions; and egoism and ambition are good working partners. I shall work for my own state first, and then for the country at large. That is the way for Americans to begin, or, at all events, the way we do begin, our country being what it is. State pride is almost as strong as national. Moreover, a man must prove himself in his own state before he can get a chance to command the attention of the nation. If a man happens to belong to a notoriously corrupt state like California, and manages to shine by contrast, his opportunities are so much the greater! But the nation is the thing. Every Union man during the Civil War fought for his flag, not for his section. But our country is now a republic only in name. We are piling up problems our founders could not anticipate, and if they go on unchecked, they will land us either in an autocracy, or in the worst form of tyranny known to history,—mob rule. It is the business of a few of us to avert a French Revolution. Just at present we are between two camps, Monopoly and Labor-Unionism, and have almost forgotten that we are citizens of a free country. Our skins have been safe so far, owing to the lack of brains and initiative in the masses; also, because they are far from starvation. But let that condition arise—before the Money Power has been made to open its eyes, or has been controlled by legislation—then horrors beside which the French Revolution will be mere picturesque material for novelists. A few thinking men with money enough to give them weight with the solid moneyed class at the top—where the reform must begin—as well as to place them above suspicion, and who have cultivated common-sense and patriotism instead of greed, must do the business. Let’s get out of this.”

XIII

WHEN they were walking over the crisp snow in the woods—now deserted, for hotel guests and peasants alike were at the long midday meal—he resumed the subject. Her vivid sympathy and interest had brought back the bitter struggle of the past two years with a rush.

“How I wish you had been with me when we made our graft fight,” he said, looking at her with fond eager eyes. “What a mate you would have been. When the whole town is howling at a man because he is trying to do the right thing, he needs just such a woman as you to keep the courage in him. The concerted opinion of the majority has an insidious power! Sometimes we wondered if we could be right, if we were not all dreamers, unpractical, doing our city more harm than good. The whole country was aghast at our exposures, business was almost dead, capital refused to come our way; the poor old city that had been wrecked by the most fearful natural calamity of modern times—$500,000,000 went up in smoke—seemed to cry out against us for holding her down, to beg for a chance to limp out of her bog. But we looked ahead, convinced that there could be no permanent prosperity for San Francisco until the sore was scraped to the bone and sterilized; in other words, until the political scoundrels and the get-rich-quick element, that obtained their crushing franchises by corrupting a packed Board of Supervisors, and bought everybody, from the boss and the mayor down to the man in the street with a vote to sell, were either gaoled or so discredited that they would be forced into private life or out of the state. We unseated the boss and the mayor, the supervisors having come through, and we were able to indict several of what we call the higher-ups—the men that had done the buying. I never had much hope of convicting these men, for in California, in its present state of moral development, it is next to impossible to convict a rich man. If you get an honest judge, there are always men in the jury that have got in for no purpose but to be bribed. But we won out in another way. The long trial aired the abominable practices of these corporations, and, together with the many sensational episodes—the shooting of the prosecuting attorney in court, and the suicide of the would-be murderer in prison before he could be put on the stand, the kidnapping of the only editor that fought with us,—woke up the state; it talked of little else, and talking, thought, and was ashamed. The city machine got ahead of us, for the mayor we had managed to seat was too virtuous to build up a machine of his own; but we hope for great things in the state itself when our Reform candidate runs for the office of governor this year. Perhaps it was unreasonable to hope for more at the beginning, and it was a tough fight to get that much.

“Oh, God!” he cried bitterly, “the rottenness of young communities with potentialities of wealth. Human nature in the raw, when it is still in the ingenuous stage of greed, is a damnable thing. It has never shown any originality since the world began. Socialism may clip its wings, if it ever gets control, but—here is the cursed anomaly: you can’t hope for Socialism until a miracle eliminates greed from the nature of man; for it is men that must grant Socialism, and Socialism means the balking of greed. Even if some unforeseen set of circumstances forced it upon us, I doubt if it would last. You can no more eliminate greed from men than you could eliminate sex by forcing men and women to dress alike, shave their heads, and say their prayers three times a day. But the world is better in some respects than it was a century ago, and this is primarily due to the untiring efforts of the minority. But, again, the work must be done by a few men—the few that are awake and can see farther than their noses. Well, my dear, I hope and pray that I am one of those men. There you have my program, so far as a mere finite mind can project it.”

“Now I know why I have been permitted to love you,” said Julia, softly, and looking at him with glowing eyes. “Hadji Sadrä told me that he should watch over me, and that if I dared love a man who would pull me down, instead of being far greater than I could ever hope to be, he would blast me, transform me into a mere commonplace female, but haunted by the memory of what I had been—”

“How much of all that do you believe?”

“Ah! I saw marvellous exhibitions of power. They are common enough in the East, but one would hardly dare relate them in this part of the world. If I longed with all the concentrated powers of my mind for Hadji Sadrä, he would come to me in a flash—with that secondary material body they call the astral, and we call the ghost. If I were terribly perplexed, I should send for him—”

“I want no go-betweens, particularly Mohammedan ghosts.”

But Julia had no intention of letting him down.

“I wonder I could remember him, or any one else! It was only because I suddenly realized what all this means—that I may have another and far greater part to play—”

“You see that at last! Perhaps I should have appealed to you before. But—it is only to-day that I have felt really close to you—really loved you, perhaps. I fancy I was merely infatuated before.” He took her in his arms, and she looked up at him with the deepest sympathy a woman can express, particularly when gifted with eyes that are the dazzling headlights of a finished and powerful machine behind. “Oh, if you could only know,” he continued in tones of intense feeling, “what it will mean to me to have you, not only to love, but to work with! I really want with all my soul to be of use to my country, to be one of the few that are willing to work for her unselfishly, to leave a decent name behind me. It is thankless work, fighting the majority, battling for an ideal nobody wants, to be the butt of the press, accused of sordid motives, balked at every turn. The only sort of patriotism the average American understands is sounding promises by ambitious politicians and huge donations from repentant millionnaires. To raise the morale of a people, and in the process prevent them from growing too rich, may mean the respect of posterity, but it also means the hatred of your contemporaries. The Big Voice! It confuses the mind and the standards. The constant failures, the recurring sense of hopelessness, of futility, the inevitable contempt for the masses you are striving to emancipate from themselves,—many a man that has started out with the loftiest and most selfless ideals loses courage, shrugs his shoulders, and falls back. I am no better and stronger than many of them. I have dreamed one minute, the next wondered how far I would go, how long my enthusiasm would last. Material success is easy enough, and always rewarded by approbation and respect! _What is the use?_ I am young still, but I asked myself that question more than once, for even my family were all against me. My father was furious. He is honest, but his business has been his god. I left home and went to a hotel—to avoid the everlasting discussions at table. My old friends cut me on the street. I was regarded as an enemy of society, and society cast me out. The rest of our little group shared the same fate. We were obliged to keep one another’s courage up. That we carried our lives in our hands and were liable to assassination at any moment was the least of our trials. The Big Voice! We felt as if we were at the foot of an avalanche, or some other inexorable enemy in Nature herself, trying to push it back with our hands. Inevitably there were black moments when we felt we were fools, especially when we faced certain defeat. And it’s all to do again, not once, but many times. Do you wonder that the light side of my nature has given me many cynical moments, or that I have seethed with disgust, or wondered if I would last? But with you—ah! If I had ever dreamed you lived, I believe I never should have despaired for a moment. But my only memory of you was of a charming and lovely child. And it is only to-day, here, that I have realized what it means for any of us to stand alone. With your faith and your brain, with you always beside me, sympathizing, helping—I never shall lose courage for a moment. I could accomplish anything—everything—”

This sudden vehement disclosure of the serious depths of his nature under its surface gayety, with more than one glimpse of heights and powers she had barely divined, had thrilled Julia even more than his passionate love-making. All her own greatness responded, and for a moment or two she had been swept irresistibly on that tide of self-revealing words. She had a vision of the complete passion, the perfect union. But her brain remained cool. She never lost sight of her purpose.

She sprang from him suddenly and flung out her arms. Her eyes looked black. Her skin shone with a peculiar radiance like white fire. So she had looked more than once on the platform during her last moments of irresistible appeal; when her bewildered audiences had felt as if dissolving in a crucible from which there was no escape. “Oh,” she cried in low vibrating tones of intense passion, “now I know you—the real You! I’ll never fail you. You are wonderful, and I worship you! I believe we can be happier than any two mortals have ever been. But, Dan, I must go to you free, with a conscience as clean as your own. You must see that. You are too great not to see it. I must be tormented with no regrets, no remorse. If I should leave at this moment—‘rat’ like any scoundrelly selfish politician—desert these women publicly while all the world is watching them, make them ridiculous—oh, I don’t mean that I am indispensable; there are too many great women among them for that— But don’t you see that if I threw them over to follow an American to the other side of the world, now, while their fate hangs in the balance—why, it would amount to nothing less than a cynical declaration that we are all alike when it comes to a man—that we fight for a great impersonal cause only so long as no man comes along to play the old tune on our passions—why—Good God!—they would be the butt of every malicious wit in the kingdom. Their cause would be set back a generation. And I? I should be execrated by women the world over. I, who am now a sort of goddess. My immense following is due as much to the youth and beauty which I have appeared to immolate so indifferently, as to all my talents put together. What use should I be to you if I scuttled the ship and deserted it? What place could I take among the women of your country? Do you think they would listen to me, that I could teach them, help them? They would laugh in my face!”

She caught him by the shoulders, her eyes piercing into his, which stared at her full of sombre perplexity. She went on in a rapid monotonous voice, which fell on his brain like a rain of fire: “Why didn’t you come for me, as you promised? I should have gone. Four years ago! I was free. Something was always knocking at my mind. I knew that I had useful energies of some sort. They were always groping to find vent. If you had come, if you had told me then what you have told me to-day, I should not have hesitated a moment. I should have known that my work was to be done with you. But you forgot your promise. The bond was not strong enough. Why did you wait until I had become a public figure, written about daily—until I had hopelessly compromised myself? Oh, can’t you see that you have made me the most tragic figure among women? I love you so that I long with all those other and far greater forces within me—that you have brought to life—to go, to be happy, to give you all you want and deserve, to become truly great—with you! Oh, I am the most unhappy woman on earth—and the happiest!”

Tay had tried to interrupt her several times. But he was dazed. She looked like a sibyl. He felt disjointedly that he had less desire to claim her as a woman than to ascend with her to the plane whither she seemed to have borne herself. He had been shaken out of his own reserve and bared his soul for the first time in his life; his defences were down, she seemed to have entered his mind and taken possession. Human passion would appear to have fallen to ashes. His senses felt numb, he was vaguely conscious of a material dissolution that left his soul free to mingle with hers.

She gave him no chance to speak. Her words flowed on with the same fiery monotony.

“You have taught me what duty means. I believe I never was really capable of the sacrifice of self before. I worked to fill my time, to forget my depths. Then because the greatness of that work really put my womanhood to sleep! But you! I have not a personal ambition left, not a want apart from you, but this terrible duty. I want to live in you, for you. You! You! You!” Tay had a confused idea that he was turning into a demi-god. “But I must go to you free—that I may never look back—that I may know and give complete happiness. I must be all woman, not a mere brain, humiliated, ashamed, tortured by regrets. _And you must go at once, at once, at once._ If you stay, if you prove too strong for me, if you force me to go with you—and I love you so I might go—then we never shall know the meaning of happiness for a moment. I will follow you before long. If we don’t win the battle early this year, I will train some one to take my place. I shall speak, appear in public less and less, drop out by degrees. I shall soon be forgotten—long before I can marry you. But to leap from the front rank of these women straight into a divorce court in a city whose name is a synonym for vulgarity, that is never mentioned without a laugh or a sneer— Oh, you see! You see! What an anticlimax to all these years on a pedestal! What a wife for you, a public man! Oh, God! I should be the ruin of your own career—”

“Julia!” exclaimed Tay, trying to get his breath.

She fell back limply against a tree, as if exhausted with her own passion, but neither voice nor eyes lost their power.

“Oh, go! Go! Go! If you don’t, I shall be in the dust. I shall be incapable of love in my abasement. I know myself. To love, to be happy, I must be free. I must have my self-respect. I can’t love, tortured by shame and remorse. I want love and you more than anything on earth, but I want them utterly. Oh, go!”

For a moment or two Tay had been conscious of an angry struggle in the depths of his mind. He suddenly became master of himself. He shot a glance at Julia as piercing as her own, and she gasped and flung herself face downward on the snow and began to sob. He made no attempt to pick her up for the moment.

“You have strange powers, Julia,” he said. “If I were weaker than I am,—and God knows I am weak enough,—I should be slinking through the woods with my tail between my legs, hypnotized out of my manhood, and ready to lick your hand for the rest of my life.” Julia stopped sobbing and listened intently. Tay walked up and down before he spoke again. “But mind you, I don’t question your sincerity, your love, whatever the devilish arts you tried to practise on me. Every leader of a great revolution is a fanatic and a Jesuit. And, methods aside, every word you spoke was sound common-sense. I don’t care to assume the responsibility of injuring those women, and I believe you would be incapable of happiness if you handed their enemies another weapon—a pretty deadly one it would be!”

He picked her up and dusted her off. “I am going,” he went on grimly, “and I shall wait exactly six months. Or rather—” He caught her hands in his powerful grip, his eyes blazing into hers. “I shall never see you again, not even with your royal consent, unless you swear to me here that you’ll not try that on again. That you’ll be woman to my man from this time forth—that and nothing more. I’ll be damned if I’ll live with a woman who doesn’t play a square game. Swear it.”

“Oh, I do, I do! Oh, Dan!” The tears were running down her face, honest tears, for she was frightened, while rejoicing. “Do believe that I was only doing my best—I knew that you wouldn’t listen—I had only one object—”

“Oh, as I told you, I have never questioned your queer complicated honesty. Only, being a perfectly normal person myself, I prefer to postpone occult trickery until I reach the next world. No doubt it will be all in the day’s work there. But I’ve got my job cut out in this, matching my earthly wits against the next man’s. Now, you’ve given me your word! If you ever go back on it—”

“Oh, never!” Julia was now really limp, and looked wholly feminine. Tay took her in his arms once more and dried her tears. “It’s my fate to love you,” he said, with a sigh. “And that’s about the size of it. I’m sorry you ever went to your East, but live in the hope I can make you forget it.”

“And do you love me as much as ever?” asked Julia, unintellectually.

Tay laughed outright, the ancient formula almost routing the memory of those moments when the same woman that uttered them automatically had launched her ruthless will into his relaxing brain. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I love you, all right, and for good and all. Now, we’ll be practical. I shall leave England the day I wind up my affairs in London. That should be in less than a week. I am going to ask you to stay here until I sail. I am resigned to going without you, am willing to admit that a separation of a few months is inevitable—but, all the same, the less temptation, the better. Besides, I shall need all my wits in London— If you were there—”

“Oh, I’d rather stay, far, far rather! I don’t think I could stand it, either. Here, at least, I can keep out of doors, exercise until I am past thought—”

“Well, don’t change your mind. I _insist_ that you stay here. If you return to London while I am there—well, I’ll not say just what I won’t do. Enough that I should not return to America alone. Come, let’s get back to the hotel.”

XIV

JULIA went at once to Ishbel’s room. She found that conspirator sitting on the little balcony enjoying the view of ice peak and forest. Ishbel sprang to her feet when she saw Julia’s face.

“Oh— Ah— So—”

“Quite so,” said Julia, dryly. “But never mind. I have won out for a bit. He has promised to go to California at once and wait while I eliminate myself by degrees. I have promised to follow in six months. Of course I shall if I can. If I can’t—well, I must make him listen to reason again. But I hope—”

“Of course, you can’t bolt,” said Ishbel, who was burning with sympathy for both. “But surely you can manage to let yourself out in six months. Your vice-president is an efficient woman; and then we are sure to win this session—”

“I don’t know! If we did, of course I’d make some excuse and go at once. But—otherwise—I can’t leave them for a divorce court until I have taught them to forget me—disassociated myself from them—”

She dropped on the edge of the bed, face and body expressing utter discouragement. Ishbel half opened her lips, then went out upon the balcony lest she break her word and tell Julia that France was dying. But a moment’s reflection convinced her that this information would only complicate matters at present. She thought hard for a few minutes, then ran back into the room.

“Julia!” she exclaimed, “I have an idea! Why not go to Nevis? Your mother is very old. You haven’t seen her for many years. You can give out that she is ill—or I will if you won’t. My conscience wouldn’t hurt me a bit, for old people are always ill. No doubt you’ll find her with rheumatism, lumbago, dropsy, Bright’s disease, diabetes, tumors, or a few other ills incident to old age. It would make just the break you need; and it’s just the time to go, for your officers can attend to everything. Also—you could stay on and on.”

Julia looked up with some return of animation in her heavy eyes.

“It’s not a bad idea, if I could go.”

“Of course you could, and the minute I get to London I’ll set the whole shop to work on your tropic wardrobe. You can get many things ready-made, anyhow—people are always going out to India on a moment’s notice.”

“I’ll think it over while I’m here. I’m to stay until he sails.”

“Ah!—I hate to leave you alone. Shall I stay with you?”

“I think I’d rather be alone.”

“Yes, I understand.” She sat down on the bed and put her arm about Julia’s relaxed form. “I want you to promise me that you will marry Mr. Tay, whatever happens. You’ve a right to happiness, if ever a woman had, and this is your only chance, my dear. There’s only one real man in every woman’s life, and happiness is the inalienable right of all of us. Even Bridgit was forced to admit that.”

“Oh, I intend to marry him. But when? That is the question!”

“As soon as possible. You have given four uninterrupted years to this work, and you have done great things for it. That is enough—”

“We have all gone in—that inner band—to devote a lifetime to it if necessary.”

“Don’t you suspect that those women have an extra something in their make-up that the rest of us lack?”

“I have accomplished as much as any of them—”

“Quite so. And enough. Don’t you feel that the spring has gone out of you?”

“Just now, yes.”

“You’ll never work with the same spirit again, for you never can be impersonal again. You would feel a hypocrite, for you would always be resenting the loss of what you really want most in life. You’ve a duty to yourself, to say nothing of Mr. Tay; and you’re not going to a frivolous useless life—not with him! No one is indispensable to any real cause, and in ours there are too many to carry on the work without the supreme sacrifice on your part. Promise me, at least, that you will go at once to Nevis. It would be the beginning of the solution.”

“I’d like to go.”

“You really must want to see your mother, and your old home,” continued Ishbel, insinuatingly. “One’s mother and one’s birthplace are the great refuges in time of trouble. You were very fond of your mother when you were a child.”

“I’m fond of her now, but she seems to have lost all affection for me.”

“Never believe it. She is a strange proud old woman, but she has always loved you. Go back to her. There is your refuge.”

“You are playing on my deepest feelings, but you are right. Nevis! When you are crushed, your own land calls you. And, as you say, I haven’t much work in me at present.”

“Then you’ll go?”

“When you get to London, telegraph me how matters stand. If it looks as if the truce would be a long one—yes, I’ll go. I believe I want to go more than anything else in the world—except one! Perhaps I’ll get a grip on myself down there. Perhaps I’ll find that—well, that I love this great cause best, after all.”

“Not a bit of it!” cried Ishbel, in alarm. “Don’t try to persuade yourself of anything so unnatural and foolish. Do you realize how few women have complete happiness offered them? I could shake you.”

Then she reflected that Nevis was a tropical island; and another scheme was forming in her agile brain. “Well, never mind all that. You are worn out now. It is not a matter to discuss, anyhow. Stay out of doors here, and I will prepare your wardrobe. Then you can start as soon as you return to England. I will tell Collins to pack your other things. Eric will secure your accommodations on the first steamer that sails after Mr. Tay’s. Now lie down. Or shall you come down to our last dinner?”

“No, I am not going to see him again. I’ll be glad when he has gone, and that, at least, is over. But I’ll go to Nevis, if all is quiet in England.”

XV

THEY left on the evening train in order to catch the morning train out of Munich. Julia, who had been sitting inertly in her room, too listless to go to bed, heard the carriage rattle down the street, and sprang to her feet with a wild sense of protest and despair. It required all her self-control to refrain from ringing for a droschke and following before it was too late. Then, angry at this complete surrender to her femininity, she undressed and went to bed.

Here, she discovered to her dismay that California was not farther off than sleep. Perversely, she would not relax, nor go through any of the other forms with which she had always been able to summon sleep when excited. She doubted if they would conquer these new impressions, but refused to give them a trial. She lay awake until nearly dawn, the events of the day marching through her brain with maddening reiteration. She dreaded sleep, also, for now at least her brain was stimulated, and she guessed that it would be correspondingly depressed upon awakening. So it was. The weather, also, had changed. It was raining.

When Julia heard the heavy raindrops splashing on her balcony, she sat up with a gasp of horror, then laughed grimly. But this conspiracy of Nature gave her a certain obstinate fortitude, and she rose at once, took a cold bath, and dressed. But when she opened her door to go down to the dining-room, her courage failed her, and she rang and ordered breakfast to be brought upstairs.

“What am I to do?” she thought in terror. “What am I to do?”

It rained all day. Julia had brought no storm clothes. She prowled about the halls, getting what exercise she could, but dared not go downstairs. She sent for books from the library, but they might have been written in Greek. She summoned resolution to go to the dining-room at seven o’clock, but turned at the door, and ran back to her room. She saw Tay at every turn, and to sit alone at the table with his empty chair opposite, was beyond her endurance. Nor could she eat the food brought to her room. She went to bed again, and slept fitfully.

She awoke in the small hours to hear it still raining, and this time she fell into a fury over her demoralization.

“And this is love!” she thought. “Terrors! Ignominy! A will turned to water. I’d not be more helpless if I were in a hospital with typhoid fever.”

Her mind suddenly flew to the conversation with her friends on the night she had last dined with Ishbel. Should she go to Paris and rid herself of the disease once for all? What prospect of happiness if love were able to induce a misery keener than any of its compensations? If she could feel like this now, knowing that he loved her, and that the separation was but a matter of time, what might she not suffer if he ceased to love her, if he gave her cause for jealousy, if she found herself disappointed in him? It would be worse, far worse. Now, at least, she was—not free; no one ever felt more of a slave—but at least with the power to attain freedom. There would be a deep satisfaction, to say nothing of relief, in the knowledge that she never need think of him again—this man that had destroyed her fine poise, her remarkable powers, made her the slave of the race, the victim of the ancient instinct, a mere instrument upon which Nature was playing her old tune in contemptuous disregard of those years in which she had dwelt on impersonal heights seldom attained by young and beautiful women. She almost hated him. Better have done with it at once. In all her life with France she had never known depression like this, for love adds the sense of impotence to calamity.

She got out of bed, without ringing for her bath, and began to pack her trunk. She didn’t care if she never took a bath again. She hated herself, and she hated Tay. Above all she hated the rain.

But in the midst of her packing she sat back on the floor and scowled. To receive suggestions one must be perfectly amenable. There must be no reserve at the back of the head. Although she ground her teeth, she admitted that she would permit no man, no science, to destroy the image of Tay in her mind, root him out of her life. Nor would she confess herself a coward—nor violate the jealous instincts of her sex. If the time came when she must banish him, she would do it herself. Good God! She was female all through. Suffering was a part of her birthright. She would give up not the least of the accompaniments of love.

Cursing herself for a fool, she rang for her bath, dressed herself, and determined to walk out of doors, if the valley had turned into a lake.

But by the time she had swallowed her coffee and rolls the skies had cleared, and she started out with a guide and a sled. There was always excitement in tobogganing. For a bit the keen air revived her, but the hills and valley had new terrors, for every step reminded her of her lover. Black protest left her, but was followed by a sadness so profound that she feared to dissolve in the presence of her guide, and sent him home. She had planned to visit the lake, but she found that it would be as easy to break her word and follow Tay to London.

A new and horrid fear had begun to haunt her. Did he really love her as he had loved her before she had made him, for a few moments, at least, the plaything of her will and her science? He had forgiven her, but must not such a memory rankle, eventually induce a permanent resentment—fear—hatred possibly?

She returned to her room, the only place unassociated with him. But although it was a refuge in a sense, she found little comfort in it, for the very atmosphere was thick with her long hours of misery. She sat down and made a deliberate attempt to banish her depression, that manifest of Nature’s resentment at even the temporary balking of her desires.

“The ancient instinct!” she thought bitterly. “We are all the same fools when it comes to a man—_the_ man—when the race is trying to struggle on through its victims.” She looked back upon the past eight years as upon a period of transcendent happiness. More than ever she was convinced that the only unmitigated happiness lay in self-completion, in independence of the sex in man. Love was a splendid disease induced by Nature to further her one end; accompanied by moments of hallucination called happiness, but which in the last analysis were but the prelude to a lifetime of every variety of sorrow and disillusion. On the other hand, the women that steered safely clear of this smiling island with a thousand jagged teeth beneath the rippling waters, and elected to stand alone, were free to accept the other great gifts of life, to attain to a form of serenity and content, beside which love and its delusions were the earthly hell. In the last four years she had never cast a thought to love, the future had loomed as perfect as the present. And she had weakly slid down into chaos!

The immortal women! Oh, lord! Oh, lord!

She reviewed her life from the time when, the wife of an abhorred husband, she had begun, unconsciously at first, to build up that strength, which, when the crucial tests came, enabled her to control, in a measure, the present, to exult in the knowledge that she had proved herself stronger than life; instead of losing her mind, or becoming the plaything of men. She had even dismissed Nigel Herbert when he came with freedom and something like happiness in his hand; proud of her strength to work out her destiny unaided.

Strength! Her mind flew from this vision of past solidarity to her years at the feet of the wise men of Benares. It was not pleasant to dwell upon the compliments of Hadji Sadrä, but she recalled his initiations and suggestions, and those of Swani Dambaba; they had given her a power over herself and others seldom possessed by Occidentals. But she could hardly formulate them; they were enveloped in a haze, as elusive and remote as dreams. Had she been but cunningly equipped to play her part in the great battle; and, the part played, was she perchance set free to follow the commoner destiny of woman? There was some satisfaction in the thought, but her ego felt slapped in the face. She had fancied her destiny mightily, and this anticlimax was no part of the program of the immortal women. Still, why not? Her inner vision, sharpened though it might have been by her masters, could not pierce the future, nor her judgment, while captive in the gray matter of the mortal brain, presume to determine exactly what destinies those immortal women had mapped out for themselves on earth. For all she knew Tay might have been composed to save his country, and hers the glorious part to help him.

But at this point she sat down on the floor once more and finished the packing of her trunk. None knew better than she the distinguished powers of the human mind for self-deception. With her own personal gift for subtle reasoning, to say nothing of her imagination, she could persuade herself in another fifteen minutes that it was her duty to take the first steamer for New York and await Tay in the facile state of Nevada. She should reason no more, but be guided by events. Meanwhile let love devour her, burn her up, torment her with fears, exalt her with visions of the perfect union. But not in Partenkirchen. She should amuse herself in Berlin until Tay’s final telegram set her free to go to Nevis. “The dog to its kennel,” she thought grimly. “That’s the place for me. I’ll find my balance there if anywhere.”

XVI

ON the evening of Julia’s departure for Nevis, Ishbel entered her husband’s study and perched herself on the arm of his chair.

“Eric,” she said, “when you have made a promise you can’t break, is it wrong to get round it, if it is for the good of some one you are very fond of?”

“What are you driving at? Nothing more interesting than the workings of the female conscience under fire.”

“You like Mr. Tay?”

“Rather. Never liked a man more. Deuced good chap all round.”

“You think that he and Julia should marry?”

“I do. But am not so sure they will. Julia’s a hard nut to crack.”

“Quite so. But I want her to be as happy as I am.”

“Right you are. Tay’s the man.”

“There’s something I promised Bridgit not to tell either Julia or Mr. Tay. But I didn’t promise not to tell you.”

Dark laughed. “I begin to see daylight. I suppose even Bridgit doesn’t encourage you to have secrets from your husband.”

“You _are_ a dear! Well, it’s this. France is very low, has a bad case of heart and may go any minute.”

Dark whistled. “That would simplify matters.”

“Yesterday I called at Kingsborough House and gently wormed the whole truth out of the duchess. The attacks are growing more and more frequent. The doctors don’t give him a fortnight.”

Dark stood up, “I see! I see!”

“I didn’t dare tell you until Mr. Tay and Julia had both left. If you had told him, he wouldn’t have gone, and Julia would hold out, here in England. But on Nevis, on a tropical island! All these associations and duties will seem like a dream down there, and one hasn’t much energy in the tropics, anyhow, to say nothing of being steeped in an atmosphere of romance. I want you to cable Mr. Tay—so that he will get your message when he arrives in New York day after to-morrow—that France is dying, that Julia has sailed for Nevis, and that if he is wise, he will go there at once—he can get there first, I should think, for the Royal Mail takes eighteen days—and marry her the moment he gets another cable from you announcing France’s death. Do you mind?”

“Rather not!”

“Tell him to say nothing to Julia about France’s condition until he is quite certain she is free—”

“Do you want me to go stony—”

“Oh, what do a few pounds matter—”

“When arranging people’s destinies! Well, go on.”

“Julia must not return to England. If she did, Mr. Tay would have to begin all over again. I don’t like anything that looks like treachery to the women, but still—”

“I do,” said Dark, dryly. “Permit me to take the whole matter over to my own conscience. That’s what a man is made for, among other things. Tay shall marry Julia if I can help him manage it, and the women can go where I’ve consigned them several times already. Now, I’ll go out and send that cablegram.”