Part 9

As he drew off the coat there floated to him a delightful perfume, a mingling of feminine and flowers, of freshness and delicacy, a stimulating suggestion of the sensuous refinements which a woman with taste and the means can employ as powerful allies in her siege of man. She looked up at him--her eyes were, save her teeth, her best feature. She just brushed his arm in one of those seemingly unconscious, affectionate-friendly gestures which are intended to be encouraging without being "unwomanly." "How is my friend to-day?" she inquired.

"So-so," replied he, taking her advances at their face value.

"You never come here unless I send for you, and you always have some excuse for going soon."

He smiled good-natured raillery. "How sure of yourself you feel!"

"Why do you say that?"

"Your remark. You are always making that kind of remarks. They're never made except by women who feel sure."

"But I don't," protested she. "On the contrary, I'm very humble--where you're concerned." She gave him a long look. "And you know that's true."

He laughed at her with his eyes. "No. I shan't do it. You'll have only your trouble for your pains."

She colored. "What _do_ you mean?"

"That I won't propose to you. You've been trying to inveigle me into it for nearly a year now. But you'll have to do without my scalp."

The big Westerner's jesting manner carried his remark, despite its almost insolent frankness. Besides, what with Amy's content with herself and partiality for him, it would have been difficult for him to offend her. Never before had she been able to lure him so near to the one subject she wished to discuss with him. "What conceit," cried she, all smiles. "You fancy I've been flirting with you. I might have known! Men always misunderstand a woman's friendship. I suppose you imagine I'm in love with you."

"Not in the least. No more than I with you."

She looked crestfallen at this. Whether a woman has much or little to give a man, whether she wants his love or not, she always wishes to feel that it is there waiting for her. "Why do you imagine I wish you to ask me to marry you?" she asked, swiftly recovering and not believing him.

He did not answer that. Instead he said: "You came very near to getting your way about a year ago. I had about made up my mind to marry you."

"To marry me," she echoed ironically.

"To marry you," he repeated in his attractive, downright fashion.

"Well--why didn't you?"

"I decided I didn't need you," said he, most matter-of-fact. "I saw I'd be repeating the blunder I made when I married before. When I got out of college, I was so discouraged by the prospect, I felt so weak without money or influence, that I let myself drift into a great folly--for it is a folly to imagine that money or influence are of any value in making a career. They're the results of a career, not its cause. Once more, when I faced the big battle here in New York, I was fooled for a while in spite of myself by the same old delusion. I saw that the successful men all had great wealth, and I made the same old shallow mistake of supposing their wealth gave them their success. But I got back to the sensible point of view very quickly."

"And so--I--escaped."

"Escaped is the word for it."

"You are flattering--to-day."

"That sarcasm because I did not so much as speak of your charms, I suppose?"

"You might have said I was personally a little of a temptation."

"Why go into that?" rejoined he, with an intonation that gave her a chance to be flattered, if she chose. "Of course, if I had decided I needed you in my career, I'd have flung myself over ears into love. As it was, don't you think my keeping away from you complimentary?"

This was the nearest he had ever come to an admission that she was attractive to him; she straightway exaggerated it into a declaration of love. Very few women make or even understand a man's clear distinction between physical attraction and love; Amy thought them one and the same.

"You are so hard!" said she. "I wonder at myself for liking you." As she spoke, she rapidly thought it out with the aid of her vanity; men and women, in their relations with each other, always end by taking counsel of vanity. He wanted her; he had taken this subtle means to get within her defenses and, without running the risk of a refusal, find out whether he could get her, whether a woman of her wealth and position would condescend to him. It was with her sweetest, candidest smile that she went on, "Now it is all settled. You don't want to marry me; you aren't in love with me. I need not be afraid of any designs, mercenary or otherwise. At last, we can be real friends."

He reflected, then said with a judicial, impersonal air, "No matter how well a man plays the game of man and man, he usually plays the game of man and woman badly. Why? Because he thinks the conditions are different. He is deceived by woman's air of guilelessness into imagining he has the game all his own way."

"What has that got to do with what I said to you?" asked she, her color a confession that the question was unnecessary.

He again laughed at her with his eyes. "Why did you think it had?"

She pouted. "You are in a horrible mood to-day."

He rose. "Thanks for the hint."

She began to unroll the plans.

"Now, _there's_ the man for you," said he, with a gesture toward her bundle of blue prints.

"Who?"

"Siersdorf."

"If I had to choose, I'd prefer--even you."

"Siersdorf is adaptable and appreciative. He's good to look at, has a good all-round mind, is extraordinary in his specialty. You couldn't do better."

"I don't want him," she cried impatiently. "I prefer to suit myself in marrying." She stood before him, her hands behind her, the pretty face tilted daringly upward. "Are you trying to make me dislike you?"

He looked down at her; there was not a hint in his expression that her dare was a temptation. "I must be going," said he.

Tears gathered in her eyes, made them brilliant, took away much of their natural hardness. "Won't you be friends?" she appealed.

He continued to look straight into her eyes until her expression told him she knew he was not deceived by her maneuverings and strategies. Then he said, "No," with terse directness of manner as well as of speech. "No, because you do not want friends. You want victims."

In sudden anger she flung off her mask. "I am a good hater," she warned. "You don't want me to turn against you, do you?"

His face became sad and somewhat bitter. There had been a time when such a menace from a source so near his career would have alarmed him, would have set him to debating conciliation. But his self-confidence had developed beyond that stage, had reached the point where a man feels that, if any force from without can injure him, the sooner he finds it out, the more quickly he will be able to make a career founded upon the only unshakable ground, his own single strength.

"I've taken a great deal off you," she went on in a menacing tone, a tone intended to remind him that he was an employee. "You ought to be more careful. I'm not all sweetness. I can be hard and unforgiving when I cease to like."

He laughed unpleasantly as vanity thus easily divested itself of its mask of love. "And to cross you is all that's necessary to rouse your dislike."

"That's all," said she. And now she looked like her father in his rare exhibitions of his true self. She had never deceived Armstrong altogether. But he was too masculine not to have lingerings of the universal male delusion that feminine always and necessarily means at least something of sweetness and tenderness.

"Shall we be friends?" she demanded sharply, imperiously. At bottom, she could not believe anyone would stand against the power that gave her a scepter--the power of wealth. "Friends, or--not?"

"As you please," replied he, bowing coldly. And he went, his last look altogether calm, not without a tinge of contempt. He realized that he had come there to put an end to his flirtation with her, to assert his own independence, to free himself from the entanglement which his temporary weakness of the first days in overwhelming New York had led him into. The swimmer, used only to pond or narrow river, is unnerved for a moment when he finds himself in the sea; but if he knows his art, he is soon reassured, because he discovers that no more skill is needed for sea than for pond, only a little more self-confidence.

He was not clear of the house when she was saying to herself, "Hugo is right about him. Father must take him in hand. He shall be taught his place."

*XI*

*AT MRS. TRAFFORD'S*

Armstrong felt that he had regained his liberty.

The principal feature of every adequate defense is vigorous attack; and, so long as Amy was pretending to be and was thinking herself his friend, was in fact as much his friend as it was possible for one to be who had been bred to self-worship, Armstrong could take only lame, passive measures against Fosdick. But now-- In the oncoming struggle in which he would get no quarter, he need give none. Several times, as he was dressing for dinner, a cynical smile played over his features. What a queer game life was! In other circumstances, that might easily have come about, he and Amy would have plunged into a romantic love affair; they would have been standing by each other against all the world, the stronger in their love and devotion for the opposition. A few words, and off flies her mask of sweetness, so deceptive that it almost deceived herself, and away goes her pretense of friendship; the friends become enemies, liking becomes hate. No real change in either of them; each just as likable as before; yet, what a difference! It amused him. It saddened him. "Probably at this very moment she's edging her father on to destroy me," he thought. But that disturbed him not at all. He had no fear of enemies; he knew that they fling themselves against the gates in vain, unless there are traitors within.

This break with Amy was most opportune. He was dining at the Traffords that evening; he could tell Trafford he would accept without any reservations the long-standing invitation to enter the Atwater-Trafford plot to seize the O.A.D.

Trafford was one of the rising stars in finance. He originated in a village in southern New Jersey where he was first a school teacher, then a lawyer. He spent many years in studying the problem of success--success, of course, meaning the getting of a vast fortune. He discovered that there were two ways to enormous wealth--by seizing an accumulation amassed by some one else; by devising a trap that would deceive or compel a multitude of people to contribute each his mite of a few dimes or dollars. The first way was the quicker, of course; but Trafford saw that the number of multi-millionaires incapable of defending at least the bulk of their wealth was extremely limited, and that, of them, few indeed kept their wealth together so that one swoop could scoop it all. His mind turned to the other way. After carefully examining the various forms of trap, he was delighted to discover that the one that was easiest to use was also the best. Insurance! To get several hundred thousand people to make you absolute trustee of their savings, asking no real accounting; and all you had to do was to keep a certain part of the money safely invested so that, when anybody died, you could pay his heirs about what he had paid you, with simple interest, or less, added. Trafford studied the life insurance tables, and he was amazed that nobody had ever taken the trouble to expose the business. He stood astounded before the revelation that the companies must be earning, on "risks" alone, from ten to thirty per cent, this in addition to what clever fellows on the inside must be doing in the way of speculation; that policy holders got back in so-called dividends less than five, usually less than four, often less than three per cent!

Trafford's fingers twitched. Rich? Why, he would be worth millions!

He made choice among the different kinds of insurance. The object was to get a company that would draw in the greatest number of "beneficiaries" and would have to pay the smallest proportion of "benefits." The greatest number were obviously the very poor; and, by happy coincidence, the very poor could also be exploited more easily and more thoroughly and with less outcry than any other class. So, Trafford made burial insurance his "graft." He would play upon the horror the poor have of Potter's Field.

He began in a small way in Trenton; he presently had several thousand policy holders, each paying ten cents a week to his agent-collectors. As soon as a policy of this kind has run for several months, it is to the advantage of both agent and company for it to lapse. Thus, Trafford's policies, obscurely worded, unintelligible to any but a lawyer, read that the weekly payments must be made at the office of the company; that an omission promptly to pay a single month's dues made the policy lapse; that a lapsed policy had no surrender value. He was too greedy at first, and Trenton was too small a place. When it became "too hot to hold him," he went to New York--New York with its vast, ignorant, careless tenement population, with its corrupt government, with its superb opportunities for floating and expanding a respectable grafting scheme.

If he had stayed in Trenton, he would probably have gone to the penitentiary. But in New York he became ever richer, ever more respectable; he attracted about him a group of eminently respectable sustainers of church and society, always eager to get their noses into a large, new trough of swill. The Home and Hearth Mutual Defense Company soon dwelt in a palace, built at a cost of many millions, every penny of it picked from the pockets of ragged trousers and skirts; Trafford himself dwelt in another and even more costly palace farther uptown, built with the same kind of money. He was a vestryman in the fashionable Church of the Holy Family, a subscriber to all the fashionable charities, an authority on the fashionable theories as to the tenement house question and other sociological problems relating to the slums. And he thought as well of himself as did his neighbors. Was it _his_ business if the company's collectors forgot to be accommodating and to relieve the poor of the necessity of making their payments at the offices? Was it _his_ business if policies lapsed by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, through the carelessness or ignorance of the policy holders? Look at the hundreds of thousands whose funeral expenses were provided by the Home and Hearth! Look at the charities he subscribed to; listen to the speeches in behalf of charity and philanthropy he made! Did he not give the policy holders all that was legally theirs?--at least, all that was _rightfully_ theirs under the accepted business code; certainly, more than the law would have allowed them, if laws could be made so that the good could carry on "practical" business and yet the wicked not get undue license. Trafford had never been a moral theorist. He had accepted the code known as legal morals--"the world's working compromise with utopianism," he sonorously called it. As he expanded financially, he expanded morally; by the time he became a high financier, he was ready for the broader code known as financial morals--wherein allowances are made for all those moral difficulties which the legal code, being of necessity of wider application, cannot take into account.

A fine man was Trafford, with a face that the women and the clergy called "sweet" and "spiritual," with a full gray beard, young eyes, bright blue and smiling, iron-gray hair that waved a little, and the dress of the substantial citizen.

His home life was beautiful.

He had made his first and false start with a school teacher--she had had the first grade in the school where he taught the sixth grade. She was of about his own age, and indolent, and had never heard that a married woman ought to keep herself up to the mark; she was, therefore, old at thirty-two, and he still a mere boy in looks and in feeling. She said rather severe things when he so narrowly escaped disgrace during his apprenticeship at Trenton; they quarreled, they separated.

In the boarding house where he first stopped in New York there was a serious, shrewd, pretty girl, the daughter of the landlady and the niece of one of the high dignitaries of the church. Trafford induced his wife to divorce him--before she discovered how swiftly and luxuriantly he was putting forth bough and leaf in congenial New York. He married the niece of the church dignitary in the parlor of the boarding house; a "most elegant function" it was pronounced by the boarders--and, as they read all the "fashionable intelligence" and claimed kinship with various fashionable people, they ought to have known. The wedding was like the bright dawn of a bright day--a somewhat cool, even frosty day, but brilliant. Neither Trafford nor the second Mrs. Trafford had much affection in them. Who knows, perhaps the marriage was the more cloudless for that. Instead of exploiting each other, as loving couples too often do, they exploited their fellow beings, he downtown, she up. As he grew, she grew. As he became rich, she became fashionable; ten years after that wedding, hardy indeed would have been the person who would have dared remind her that she had once lived in a boarding house.

Conventionally, it is man's chief business to get rich, woman's chief business to keep young looking; the Traffords were nothing if not conventional. Mrs. Trafford appreciated that she lived in a land where beauty in a woman counts more than seventy-five points in the hundred, that she lived in a city where it counts at least ninety points in the hundred. She had no use for her charms beyond mere show--show, the sole purpose of all she did and thought and was. She took herself in hand, after the true New York fashion, at Time's first sign of malice. She had herself cared for from top to toe, and that intelligently--no credulous prey to fake beautifiers was Lily Trafford. When Trafford was fifty-two, though he did not look so much by half a dozen years, his wife was thirty-eight, and looked less than thirty.

Nor had she neglected her other duties as woman and wife. Her husband was rich; she had learned how to spend money. The theory among those who have no money "to speak of," and never had, is that everyone is born with the knowledge how to spend money. In fact, there are thousands who know how to make money where there are ten who know how to spend it. The whole mercantile class fattens on the ignorance of this neglected science--fattens by selling at high prices to those who do not know what they want or how much they should pay. Mrs. Trafford knew exactly what she wanted--she wanted to be fashionable. She had fashion as an instinct, as a passion. She wanted the "latest thing" in mental and material furnishings. She cared nothing for knowledge; she was determined to have culture, because culture was fashionable. She had no ideas of her own, and wanted none; she followed the accepted standards. It was the fashion to go to church; she went to church. It was the fashion to be a little skeptical; she was cautiously skeptical. It was the fashion to live in a palace; in a palace she lived. She went to the fashionable dressmakers and art stores and book stores. She filled her house with things recommended by the fashionable architects. She had the plainest personal tastes in food, but she ate three fashionable meals a day; and, though she loved coffee with cream, took it with hot milk in the mornings and black after lunch and dinner, because cream was unfashionable. Yes, Mrs. Trafford knew how to spend money. The science of spending money is getting what you want at as low a price as anybody can get it. Mrs. Trafford got exactly what she wanted, and got it with no more waste than is inevitable in spending large sums with people who lie awake of nights plotting to get more than they are entitled to.

As Armstrong looked round the salon into which he was shown, it seemed to him he had never seen anything so magnificent or so stiff. Trafford was housed exactly like a king--and, like a king, he had the air of being a temporary tenant of the magnificence about him. It was the typical great house--a crude, barbaric structure, an exhibition of wealth with no individuality, no originality, ludicrous to the natural eye, yet melancholy; for, from every exhibit of how little wealth buys there protrudes the suggestion of how much it has deprived how many. In such displays the absence of price marks is a doubtful concession to canons of taste which in no wise apply; the price mark would at once answer the only question that forms in the mind as the glance roams. The Traffords, however, were as content as royalty in their uncomfortable and unsightly surroundings; they had attained the upper class heaven.

"So glad you could come," said Mrs. Trafford graciously to Armstrong. Her toilet was the extreme of the fashion, and without a glimmer of individual taste. "This is my small daughter." And she smiled up at the thin, pretty young woman beside her in diaphanous white over palest yellow. "We are to be six this evening," she went on. "And Boris is coming--you know Boris Raphael?"

"Never heard of him," said Armstrong.

Miss Trafford smiled broadly. Mrs. Trafford was pained, and showed it--not at her daughter's smile, for it she did not see, but at Armstrong's ignorance of so important a fact in the current fashionable fund of information. Ignorance of literature, science, art, politics, of everything of importance in the great world, would not have disturbed Mrs. Trafford; but ignorance of any of the trivialities it was fashionable to know--what vulgarity, what humiliation! "He is _the_ painter of portraits," she explained. "Everyone has him. He gets really fabulous prices."

"An American?" inquired Armstrong.

"I believe he was born here. But, of course, he has spent his life abroad. We are so commercial. No artist could develop here."

"Is there any place on earth where they don't take all they can get?" asked Armstrong. "Does Raphael refuse 'fabulous prices'?"

Miss Trafford laughed. Mrs. Trafford looked pained again. "Oh--but the spirit is different over there," she replied vaguely.

"Where the men won't marry unless the girl brings a dowry?"

"The customs are different from ours," said Mrs. Trafford, patiently and pleasantly. "Raphael has done me a great honor. He has asked to paint me."

"Naturally, he's on the lookout for all the jobs he can get," said Armstrong, his mind really on his impending treaty with her husband--arranging the articles, what he would give, what demand in exchange. The instant the words were out he realized their inexcusable rudeness. He reddened and looked awkwardly big and piteously apologetic.

Trafford, who had been stroking the huge deerhound on the tiger skin before the fire, now burst in. "What's that about Raphael? Did my wife tell you she has at last persuaded him to paint her picture?"

A miserable silence. Miss Trafford had to turn away to restrain her laughter. Mrs. Trafford became white, then scarlet, then white again.

"The airs he's putting on!" continued Trafford, unconscious. "Why, they tell me his father was a banana peddler and----"

"Mr. Raphael," announced the butler, holding aside one of the ten-thousand-dollar portieres.

"Oh--Raphael!" exclaimed Trafford, with enthusiasm.

"So glad you could come," said Mrs. Trafford, gracious and sweet.

"Miss Carlin," announced the butler.