PART III.

MR. CORNELL’S unspoken suspicion that Mrs. Hitt would drop her school-friend as suddenly as she had picked her up was in a way to be falsified, if the events of the next few months were to be taken as testimony.

The two matrons were nearly inseparable—shopping, driving, walking, and visiting together. For Susie had a New York visiting list speedily, and almost every name stood for an introduction by her indefatigable “trainer.” The epithet was the taciturn husband’s, and, as may be surmised, was never uttered audibly. Susie’s wardrobe, furniture, table—her very modes of speech—sustained variations that amazed old friends and confounded him who knew her best. The cherished black velvet she had thought “handsome enough for any occasion” was pronounced “quaintly becoming, but too old for the wearer by twenty-five years.” Slashed and dashed and lashed with gold-color, it did duty as a house evening gown. For small luncheons, she had a tailor-made costume of fawn-colored cloth embroidered and combined with silk; for “swell” luncheons, a rich silk—black ground relieved by narrow crimson stripes, and made en _demi-train_.

For at-home afternoons were two tea gowns; before she received her second dinner invitation, she had made by Mrs. Hitt’s dressmaker—(“a Frenchwoman who doesn’t know enough yet to charge American prices, my dear, and I hold it to be a sin to _throw_ money away!”) a robe of white brocade and sea-green velvet, in which garb she showed like a moss-rose bud, according to her dear friend and trumpeter.

These strides into the realm of fashion, if at first startling to the _débutante_, were quickly acknowledged to be imperatively necessary if one would really live. Kitty’s taste in dress approximated genius. Even she was hardly prepared for the ready following of her neophyte.

Had she needed corroborative evidence of the cashier’s liberal income, his wife’s command of considerable sums supplied it. With all her frankness, Mrs. Cornell did not confide to her bosom-friend where she obtained the ready money that gained her credit with new tradespeople.

Now and then an uneasy qualm stirred the would-be comfortable soul of the wife as to how much or how little Arthur speculated within his sober soul upon the probable cost of her new outfit. There were two thousand dollars deposited in her name, and drawing interest in a Brooklyn Savings Bank. The rich aunt had given her namechild three-quarters of it from time to time. The young couple had saved the rest, and it was tacitly understood that it should not be touched except of necessity. No landmark in her new career was more pronounced than Susie’s resort to this fund for the equipment without which her dawning social success would, she felt, lapse into obscurity more ignominious than that from which she had emerged. She must have the things represented by the money, and intoxicated though she was, she had still too much sense and conscience to deplete her husband’s purse to the extent demanded by the exigency. He would have opened an artery to gratify her, had heart’s blood been coin, but she knew he would look grave and pained did he suspect her visits to the Bank and their result.

He was sober enough, nowadays, without additional cause of discomfort. When questioned, he averred that all was going right at the Bank, and that he was well. Nor would he confess to loneliness on the evenings when she was obliged to leave him in obedience to Kitty’s summons to rehearsal or consultation in some of the countless schemes of amusement the two were all the while concocting.

“Don’t trouble yourself to come for me or to sit up for me, dear,” the pleasure-monger would entreat in bidding him “good-by.” “I’ll have one of the maids call for me,” or “I have a carriage,” or—and after a time this was most frequent of all—“Jack Hitt is always very obliging about bringing me home.”

With a smile upon his lips and gravity she did not read in his eyes, he would hand her to the carriage, or commit her to the spruce maid, hoping that she would have a pleasant evening, and having stood upon the steps until she was no longer in sight, would go back—as she supposed—to sitting room or book. Whereas, it grew to be more and more a habit with him to turn into the nursery instead, and sit there in the dark until he heard the bustle of her return below-stairs. He invariably sat up for her—she never asked why or where. The fire burned cheerily to welcome her, and the offices of maid, assumed, in the beginning in loverly supererogation, half jest, half caress, were now duty and habit. Upon one point he was resolute. If she went to bed late, she must sleep late next morning. This was a matter of health, a concession she owed those to whom her health was all-important.

The two older children had breakfasted with their parents for a year, and he made much of their company when their mother was not the fourth of the party. Sometimes he sent for the baby as well, holding her on his knee with one hand, while the other managed coffee cup and toast.

Susie surprised him thus one morning, having awakened unsummoned, and dressed hastily that she might see him before he went out.

“Arthur Cornell!” The ejaculation was the first intimation he had of her presence. “You spoil the children and make a slave of yourself! Where is their nurse?”

“Don’t blame Ellen, dear!” checking her motion toward the bell. “I sent for the children. They are very good, and I enjoy their company.”

Mrs. Cornell flushed hotly; her lips were compressed.

“I understand! After this, I will make a point of giving you your breakfast. It was never _my_ wish to lie in bed until this hour.”

“It was—and is mine!” rejoined her husband, steadily, unmoved by her unwonted petulance. “As it is, you are pale and heavy-eyed. You have had but five hours of sleep.”

“My head aches!” passing her hand over her forehead. “That will go off, by-and-by. Baby! come to mamma, and let dear papa get his breakfast in peace. Let me pour out a cup of hot coffee for you, first.”

Her softened tone and fond smile cleared the atmosphere for them all. Arthur sunned himself in her presence as a half-torpid bird on an early spring day. The children prattled merrily in answer to the pretty mother’s blandishments; the baby stood up in her lap to make her fat arms meet behind her neck. She looked pleadingly into the proud face bent over mother and child. He was startled to see that the sweet eyes were misty.

“Dear! can’t you go with me to-night?”

He fairly staggered at the unexpected appeal.

“If I had known——” he began.

“Yes, I know! I ought to have spoken before you made your engagement. I was careless—forgetful—silly! I do nothing but silly things nowadays. But I _wish_ you could go, darling!”

“I’m afraid it’s impossible,” said Arthur regretfully. “The president made a point of my attending the meeting. I am sorrier than you can be, little wife.”

She shook her head and tried to laugh.

“That shows how little you know about it! Don’t make any more engagements without consulting me. ‘I’m ower young’—not ‘to leave my mammy yet’—but to be running about the world without my dear, old, steady-going husband—and I’m not willing to do it any longer.”

He carried the memory of words and glance with him all day. Coming home at evening, he found a note from her, stating that Kitty had sent for her.

“There is a dress rehearsal at seven,” she wrote. “I wish you could be there and see how ravishing I can be! If your business meeting is over by ten o’clock, won’t you slip into society toggery and come around in season to see ‘the old lady’ home?”

“The fever has run its course!” thought the husband, with kindling eyes. “I knew I should get her back some day.”

His dinner was less carefully served than in the olden supper days, but he dined as with the gods, and ran briskly upstairs to send Ellen down to her meal while he undressed the children and put them to bed. He had done this often during the winter, pretending to make a joke of the disrobing, but knowing it to be duty and vicarious. According to his ideas the mother should see to it in person. No hireling, whose own the bairns are not, can care for them as those in whose veins runs answering kindred blood. Usually, the task was done in heaviness of spirit. To-night, no effort was required to bring laughter to his lips, lightness to his heart. To-morrow mamma would breakfast with them, and resume her place in the home, so poorly filled by him or anybody else. She had come back to them. He tried to sing one of her lullabies as he rocked the baby to sleep, but failed by reason of a “catch in his throat.” Mamma would warble it like a nightingale to them to-morrow night.

The business meeting was unexpectedly brief—“Thanks,” as the president was pleased to say, “to the admirable epitome of the matter in hand prepared and presented by Mr. Cornell.”

At ten o’clock the husband was in his dressing room, hurrying the process of “slipping into society toggery.” He repeated the phrase aloud while tying his cravat with fingers uncertain from nervous haste. He was thankful beyond expression that he had never cast the shadow of his disapproval over Susie’s spirits, even when they threatened to carry her out of the bounds of reason. She was young and pretty; so affluent of vitality, so richly endowed with talents, that a humdrum fellow like himself could not comprehend the stress of the temptation to plunge into and riot in the mad vortex of social parade.

“If there were any one thing I could do as cleverly as she does everything, I should be doing it all the time,” he confessed in contrite candor.

Yesterday he had thanked Heaven that Lent was close upon the panting racers over the pleasure grounds. Now, he was indifferent to the advance and duration of the penitential season. His darling had returned of her own right-headed, right-hearted self to the sanctuary of home, having detected, unaided by his pessimistic strictures, the miserable vanity and carking vexation of the hollow system. He sewed two buttons upon his shirt before he could put it on, and when he pushed the needle through a hole and the linen beneath into the ball of his thumb, he began to whistle “Annie Laurie.”

Susie had practiced “Annie Laurie” for an hour before dinner yesterday. He wondered if she had sung it last night at the Hitts’. She had been overrun with business of late, getting ready for the chamber concert and private theatricals, and mercy knew what else of frolic and folly gotten up by Mrs. Hitt for the benefit of the “Industrial Home” which was the latest charitable fad in her set. He had paid ten dollars for a reserved seat last week at the behest of the volatile Lady Patroness. She had let him have it “at a bargain because he had the good luck to be Susie’s husband.”

“Mr. Vansittart and Mr. Peltry paid fifty apiece for theirs, and I made Jack give me thirty for his. My rooms will seat comfortably just one hundred and fifty people, and I won’t sell a ticket over that number at any price. None will be for sale at the door, and none are transferable. Of course, the rush for them is _fearful_!”

Before going Arthur peeped into the nursery, dropping the most cautious of kisses upon the cheek and forehead of each sleeper. Three-year old Sue made up her lips into a tempting knot as he touched her velvety face.

“Dee’ mamma!” she murmured in her sleep.

He kissed her again for that, the “catch in his throat” in full possession.

“I don’t wonder they love her!” he said brokenly. “Who could help it?”

The block on which the Hitt mansion stood was lined with waiting carriages, and Mr. Cornell supposed that the entertainment, which he called to himself “a show,” must be nearly over. For an instant, he meditated waiting without until the crowd began to pour out, then, making his way into the hall, to send word to his wife that he awaited her pleasure. Something in the immobility of the doors changed his plan. He did not care to lurk for an hour or more among the coachmen who stamped and swore upon the pavement, reminding him of some verses Susie had read to him in other days when she had time for books and the talk over them after they were read. He recalled the first and last verses, and smiled in going through the discontented ranks and up the flight of stone steps:

“My coachman in the moonlight there Looks through the side light of the door; I hear him with his brethren swear, As I could do—but only more.

* * * * *

Oh, could he have my share of din, And I his quiet!—past a doubt, ’Twould still be one man bored within, And just another bored without.”

A surge of hot and scented air enveloped him with the opening of the door. The crowd in the hall contradicted the hostess’ declaration that no more people would be admitted than could be comfortably accommodated. Struggling up to the dressing room he got rid of hat and overcoat, and struggled down again and to the door of the rear drawing room. A curtain was rung up from a stage at the end of the apartment as he gained a view of it.

The scene was the interior of an old-fashioned barn. Wreaths of evergreen hung against the walls and depended from the rafters, and the floor was cleared for dancing. From a door at the side a figure tripped into the middle of the stage. Arthur looked twice before he recognized the wearer of the colonial gown of old-gold brocade, brief of waist, and allowing beneath the skirt glimpses of trim ankles in clocked stockings. Her hair was piled over a cushion and powdered; eyebrows and lashes were deftly darkened, and the carmine of cheek and mouth owed brilliancy to rouge-pot and hare’s foot. She was the belle of the ball to be held in the barn, and while waiting for the rest of the revelers, she began to recite, in soliloquy, the old rhymes of _Money Musk_.

At the second line, from an unseen orchestra, issued low and faint, like the echo of a spent strain, the popular dance tune. It stole so insidiously upon the air as to suggest the musical thought of the soliloquist, and was rather a background than an accompaniment to the recitative. Gradually, as the story went on, the lithe figure began to sway in perfect time to the phantom music; the eyes, smilingly eager, seemed to look upon what the lips described; the feet stirred and twinkled rhythmically; form and face were embodied melody. Vivified by reverie, expectant and reminiscent, the radiant impersonation of the poet’s picture floated airily through the enchanting measures. As a morning paper put it, “she seemed to respire the music to which she swayed and chanted.”

The audience, “though _blasé_ with much merrymaking and sight-seeing, hung entranced upon every motion, until, wafted by gentle degrees toward the side-scene opposite to that by which she had entered, she vanished on the last word of the poem.”

Recalled by a tumult of applause, she courtesied in colonial fashion, and kissed her hand brightly to her admirers, but instead of vouchsafing a repetition of what had stirred the spectators out of their _nil admirari_ mood, beckoned archly to the left and right. A troop of young men and girls obeyed the summons and fell into place in the country dance that went forward to the now ringing measures of _Money Musk_.

The comedietta to which this was the prelude had been composed by a well-known author, who was called out at the close of the second act, and led forward the prima donna of the clever piece.

The interlude showed a moonlighted dell. On the distant hilltop was the gleam of white tents; in the foreground stood a woman as colorless in robe and visage as the moonbeams. Her voice, silvery and plaintive, thrilled through the crowded rooms:

“Give us a song!” the soldiers cried, The outer trenches guarding, When the heated guns of the camps allied Grew weary of bombarding.

And so, in distinct, unimpassioned narrative up to—

They sang of love and not of fame, Forgot was Britain’s glory; Each heart recalled a different name, But all sang “Annie Laurie.”

Again the invisible orchestra bore up the uttered words; at first a single cornet bringing down the air from the tented hilltop; then deeper notes joining it, like men’s voices of varying tone and strength, but all singing “Annie Laurie.”

“Something upon the _women’s_ cheeks Washed off the stains of powder.”

said dissonant, derisive tones at Arthur Cornell’s back, as the curtain fell. “Battered veterans of a dozen seasons are snivelling like _ingenues_ of no season at all. What fools New Yorkers are to be humbugged with their eyes open!”

“The fair manager hath a way of whistling the tin out of our pockets,” replied a thin falsetto. “A wonderful creature, that same manager.”

A disagreeable, wheezing laugh finished the speech.

Arthur made an ineffectual effort to extricate himself from the packing crowd, a movement unnoticed or uncared-for by the speakers.

“I admire—and despise—that woman!” continued the harsh voice. “As an exhibition of colossal cheek she is unrivaled. For four years she has preyed upon the majority that is up to her little ‘dodge,’ and the minority that is _not_, pocketing her half of the profits of every ‘charitable’ show; borrowing from innocents that don’t know that she pays not again, and actually—so I am told—receiving a commission for introducing wild Westerners and provincial Easterners into what she calls ‘our best circles.’ And we go on buying her tickets and accepting her specimens, like the arrant asses we are.”

“Madame du Bois, upon a limited scale.”

“Exactly! Madame is her model. Her aping is more like monkeying, but the resemblance is not lost. New Yorkers rather enjoy the sublime audacity of Madame’s fleecing, and she _does_ have the _entrée_ of uppertendom, sham though she is, with her drawing-room readings, where geniuses are trotted out at big prices to ticket buyers, and no price at all to Madame, and ranchmen’s daughters are provided with blue-blooded Knickerbocker husbands. Her schemes are on a large scale. She engineers benevolent pow-wows, clears her one thousand dollars a night, and nobody dare charge her with pocketing a penny. You can see where Kit learned her trade. To my certain knowledge she dresses herself and pays for all her hospitable entertainments by these tricks.”

“Her latest investment isn’t a bad notion, but Kit is working the scheme for all it’s worth. Anybody but the newest of the new would see through the game.”

The other laughed gratingly.

“‘New’ is a mild way of putting it. We call her ‘Kit’s windfall’ at our Club. Madame’s disciple had, as she fondly imagined, netted a couple of veritable musical lions, and ten people were invited to hear their after-dinner roar. The very day before the feast the male lion fell sick, and the lioness wouldn’t or couldn’t leave her mate. Kitty was tearing her false bang over the note apprising her of the disaster when a card was brought in, telling her that an old schoolmate who had been educated as a music-teacher, and had a niceish talent for recitation, had removed to the city. Kit caught at the straw; raced around to inspect her, judged her to be more than eligible, and roped her in. Delorme was at the dinner and told me the story, which his wife had from Kit’s own lips. The new ‘find’ had beauty as well as a voice and a taste for theatricals, and a neat income, so Kit says—some thirty thousand a year. Moreover, she is tremendously grateful for the lift in the world, and so daft with enjoyment of her first glimpse of _le bon ton_ that she would send Kit ten out of the thirty thousand sooner than lose her social standing. She doesn’t guess that she will be tossed aside like a squeezed orange next year, poor thing!”

Arthur leaned against the door-frame, too giddy and sick to move, had action been practicable in such a press. One of the tedious “waits” inseparable from amateur performances gave every woman there a chance to outscream her neighbor. It might be dishonorable not to make himself known to the gossips who considered themselves absolved by the payment of an entrance fee from the obligation to speak well, or not at all, of their hosts. He did not put the question to himself whether or not he should continue to listen. In a judicial mood he would have weighed the _pros_ and _cons_ of fact or fiction in the tale he had heard. Every word had, to his consciousness, the stamp of authenticity. In the shock of the confirmation of his worst misgivings with regard to his wife’s chosen intimate, his ruling thought was of the anguish the truth would cause her. How best to lessen the shock to her tender, loving heart, how to mitigate her mortification, began already to put his deliberate faculties upon the strain.

The wiry falsetto and wheezy laugh struck in from his very elbow.

“Kit’s exemplary spouse may not share her pecuniary profits, but he has an eye to innings of another sort. I met him at the Club last night, and saw that he had about six champagnes and four cocktails more than his brain could balance. An hour later, I was passing the house of our pretty prima donna when a carriage drew up and out stepped Jack and turned to help out his wife’s favorite. And, by Jove! the way he did it was to put his arm about her waist, swing her to the side-walk and try to kiss her! She espied me, I suppose, for she broke away from him with a little screech, and flew up her steps like a lapwing. She must have had her latchkey all ready, for she got the door open in a twinkling, and slammed it. I guffawed outright, and didn’t Jack swear!”

“What a beastly cad he is!” said the deep voice disgustfully.

Few men in the circumstances would have kept so forcibly in mind the shame to wife and children that would follow a blow and quarrel then and there, as the commonplace husband upon whose ear and heart every vile word had fallen like liquid fire. He rent a path through the throng, got his hat and coat and went out of the abhorrent place. He had seen to it that Susie’s hired carriage was always driven by the same man—a steady, middle-aged American—and recognizing him upon the box, signaled him to draw up to the sidewalk, stepped into the vehicle, and prepared to wait as patiently as might be until the man’s number should be called by the attendant policeman.

The “show” was not over for an hour longer, and his carriage was the last called. The fair manager had detained her lieutenant to exchange felicitations over the triumph of the evening. Susie appeared, finally, running down the steps so fast that her attendant only overtook her at the curbstone. He had come out bareheaded, and without other protection against the bitter March wind than his evening dress and thin shoes. Mrs. Cornell’s hand was on the handle of the carriage door, and he covered it with his own.

“Are you cruel or coquettish, sweet Annie Laurie?” he asked in accents thickened by liquor and laughter.

By the electric light Arthur saw the pale terror of her face, as she tried to wrest her fingers from the ruffianly grasp. Without a second’s hesitation the husband leaped out through the other door, passed behind the carriage, lifted the man, taller and heavier than himself, by the nape of the neck, and laid him in the gutter.

“The fellow is drunk!” he remarked contemptuously to the policeman who hastened up, imagining that the gentleman had tripped and fallen. “It is lucky you are here to look after him.”

He handed his trembling wife into the carriage, swung himself in after her, and bade the coachman drive home.

Then—for as I have expressly affirmed, this man was heroic in naught save his love for wife and children—he put strong tender arms about the sinking woman, who clung to his neck, convulsed by sobs, as one snatched from destruction might hang upon the saving hand.

“There, my darling! It is all over! I ought to have taken better care of you. The old account is closed. We’ll begin another upon a clean page.”

He was only a bank cashier, you see, and familiar with no figures except such as he used every day.

THE ARTICLES OF SEPARATION.

BEFORE and since the day when a certain man—idling while Israel and Syria warred—drew a bow at a venture (the margin has it, “in his simplicity,”) that let a king’s life out, the air has vibrated to the twang of other bowstrings, and millions of barbs, as idly sent, have been dyed with life-blood.

In every 50,000 cases of this sort of manslaughter, 49,999 fall by the tongue.

The Hon. Simeon Barton, radiating prosperity from every pore of his snug person, and clothed with complacency as with a garment, rolled about the soon-to-be-vacated bachelor quarters of his nephew-namesake, thumbs in armholes, and chin in air, while he discoursed:

“You’re a pluckier fellow than your uncle, me boy! Of course, it is on the cards that your head may be level. There are literary women _and_ literary women, no doubt, and this must be a favorable specimen of the tribe, or you wouldn’t have been in your present fix, but none of the lot in mine, if you please. When my turn comes—and I aint sure that I shan’t look out for a match some day, when I am too stiff to trot well in single harness, I shall hold the reins. No inside seat for me.”

The nephew laughed in a hearty, whole-souled way. He was not touched yet.

“You mix your figures as you do your cobblers—after you get hold of the sherry bottle—with a swing. Wait until you see my ‘match.’ She is a glorious woman, Uncle Sim. The wonder is that she ever got her eyes down to my level.”

The forty-year-old celibate continued to roll and harangue. His dress coat was new and a close fit to his rotund dapperness; with one lavender glove he smote the palm of his gloved left hand; the rose in his buttonhole was paler than the hard red spots on cheeks like underglazed pottery for smoothness and polish, his mustache curled upward and wriggled at animated periods.

“Quite the thing, me dear boy, altogether proper. For me part, I wouldn’t care to be under obligations to a woman when she _had_ worked down to my level, but tastes differ, and a man of twenty-six who has a living to make ought to cast an anchor to windward, in case of squalls. A woman who can chop a stick, at a pinch, to set the pot to boiling is a convenience. Literature’s a better trade now than it used to be, I suppose. Jones of Illinois was telling me last night of the prices paid to good selling authors, and by George! I was surprised. All the same, I’d fight shy of the Guild if I were contemplating matrimony. If you could see some of the many objects that hang about the Capitol in wait for Tom, Dick, or Harry to pick up a ‘personal,’ or lobby a bill, or get subscriptions to a book or magazine, you wouldn’t wonder at my ‘prejudice,’ as you are pleased to style it. Pah!”

To rid his mouth of the taste he caught up a tumbler of sherry cobbler, filmy without and icy amber within, and drained it.

The expectant bridegroom glanced at the clock. His best man was to call for him at a quarter-past seven. It was exactly seven now, and the minutes drove heavily.

“But Uncle Sim,”—still good-humoredly,—“Miss Welles is not a newspaper reporter, nor a lobbyist, nor yet a penny-a-liner. She wrote to please herself and her friends until her father’s death, six years ago. He was considered fairly wealthy, but something went wrong somewhere, and his widow would have suffered for the want of much to which she had been accustomed but for the talents and courage of her young daughter. I am afraid the poor girl worked harder than her mother suspected for a while, although the public received her favorably from the outset. Mrs. Welles survived her husband three years. Agnes then went to live with her only sister, Mrs. Ryder, the wife of my partner. I first met her at his house. She has continued to write and has supported herself handsomely in this way. She is as heroic as she is sweet—a thorough woman.”

“With a masculine intellect! I comprehend, me boy. Don’t multiply epithets on my account. As I’ve said, I don’t presume to question the wisdom of your choice in this particular case, and that your inamorata is the best of her kind, but personally, I don’t take to the _kind_. By Jupiter! I was telling Jones of Illinois, last night, of an incident that gave me a ‘scunner’ against woman authors, twenty years ago. Mrs. Shenstone of New York was a literary light in her day. There’s a fashion in writers, as in everything else, and she went out with balloon skirts and _chig-nongs_. But she was a star of the first magnitude in her own opinion, and, at any rate, something in the stellar line in others’ eyes. Her husband had money and she was a poor girl when she married him. They say he made a show of holding his own while the shekels lasted. A more meek-spirited atomy I never beheld than when they called upon my friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lamar from Charleston, then staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, one evening, when I chanced to be sitting with the Lamars in their private parlor. And as sure as I am a sinner and you’re another, the card brought in to Mrs. Lamar was ‘Mrs. Cordelia Shenstone _and husband_.’ The last two words were added in pencil. Fact, ’pon honor! Mrs. Lamar carried the card home and had it framed as a domestic and literary curiosity.”

“You cite an extreme case”—another glance at the slow clock. “If that woman had been a shopkeeper, or a dressmaker, with the same arbitrary, selfish spirit, she would have been guilty of the same gross violation of taste and feeling.”

“Maybe so! maybe so! But the writing woman is a prickly problem in modern society. She is leading the van in all revolutionary rot about women’s wrongs and women’s rights. The party can’t do without her, for the rank and file couldn’t draft a resolution or write a report to save their lives, and they’ve flattered up our blue-stocking until she steps out of all bounds. It makes a conservative patriot’s blood run cold to think what the upshot of it all is to be. And I confess I don’t like to anticipate seeing your cards engraved—‘Mrs. Clytemnestra Ashe and husband.’”

A dark red torrent poured over the listener’s face. Physically and morally, he was thin-skinned.

“There is nothing of the Clytemnestra in her make-up, sir. No woman ever made could rule me, were she my wife. Agnes is too gentle and too sensible to attempt it. As to the cards!” He went to a drawer and took out a bit of pasteboard which he tossed to his kinsman, with a derisive laugh. “That is all settled, you see. Come in!” to a knock at the door.

When the tardy best man appeared, the Hon. Simeon Barton, his head on one shoulder, and eyes half shut, after the manner of an impudent cock-sparrow, was scanning the engraved inscription,

MR. AND MRS. BARTON ASHE, 170 West —— St.

“Leave the ‘Simeon’ out, do you? Clytem—_Agnes_ doesn’t like it, maybe?” And without waiting for a reply—“Good-evening, Mr. White. I’m just advising Bart here to use up this batch of cards plaguey quick, to make room for ‘Mrs. Ashe _and husband_.’”

Mr. White laughed a little and politely. The jest was in miserable taste, but much was pardonable in rich uncles who were self-made men, when they showed a disposition to help make their nephews. A glimmer of like reasoning may have entered Barton’s mind, for he turned an unshadowed brow to the eccentric millionaire.

“When that time comes I shall employ you to draw up the articles of separation. White, here, is witness to the agreement.”

An hour later, he would not have believed the words had passed his lips. Jest upon such a horror would have seemed profanation to the newly made husband. As the woman who would never again answer to the name of Agnes Welles stood beside him, his were not the only eyes that paid silent homage to her strange beauty—strange, because to the guests, and to the assembled relatives, this phase of one whom most people had hitherto thought only “interesting” and “pleasing,” was new and unexpected. She was but a few inches shorter than her manly partner, and slender to fragility. Straight and supple as a willow-wand, she was ethereal in grace when clad in the misty robes and veil which were the wedding gift of her godmother. Her dark eyes were full of living light, illumining the colorless face into weird loveliness, that belonged neither to feature nor complexion. The short, tense bow of the upper lip, the fine spirited line of the nostrils, the perfect oval of cheek and chin, were always high-bred—some said, haughty. To-night they were chastened into lofty sweetness that was pure womanly.

“She might pass for _twenty_-two,” said an audaciously young _débutante_ to a crony just behind Mr. Barton.

And—“By George!” thought that astute individual—“the young dog never hinted that his divinity was six years his senior. I should have been surer than ever of receiving that card. Pity! pity! pity! _That’s_ a fault that won’t mend with time.”

Agnes knew better than he could have told her what risks the woman takes who consents to marry her junior in years. Early in their acquaintanceship she had contrived to apprise Barton of this disparity. When he declared his love she set it boldly in the foreground of hesitation and demur.

“When you are thirty-five, in man’s proudest prime and yet far from the comb of the hill, I shall have begun to go down the other side,” she urged. “You might be able to contemplate the contrast boldly, but could I forgive myself? There may be a suspicion of poetry—pathetic but real—in the idea of an old man’s darling, but an old woman’s pet! _that_ is a theme no painter or poet has dared to handle. The suggestion of grotesqueness is inevitable. Both are to be pitied, but I think the wife needs compassion even more than the man she has made ridiculous.”

The rising young lawyer was a clever advocate, and he had never striven longer and harder to win a cause. When his triumph was secured Agnes could not quite dismiss the subject. It haunted her like a wan ghost, with threatening beck and ominous eye. Once, but a month before their wedding day, they were speaking of George Eliot’s singular marriage with a man young enough to be her son, and an abrupt change fell upon Agnes’ visage—a shade of painful doubt and misgiving.

“Dinah Maria Mulock, too!” she exclaimed. “And Mme. de Staël! Elizabeth Browning’s husband was some months younger than she. Then, there are Mrs. —— and Mrs. ——” naming two prominent living American authors. “How very singular! There must be some occult reason for what we cannot set down as coincidences. It looks like fatality—or” hesitatingly—“infatuation.”

“Rather,” said Barton in gentle seriousness, for her perturbation was too real for playful rallying—“attribute such cases to the truth of the eternal youthfulness of genius. These men see in the faces and forms of the women they woo, the beautiful minds that will never know age or change. Time salutes, instead of challenging those high in favor with the king.”

“Do you know,” Agnes said, her slim white hand threading the brown curls of the head she thought more beautiful than that of Antinous—“that you will never say a more graceful thing than that? You are more truly a poet than I. Don’t disclaim, for I am not a bard at all. When I drop into poetry _à la_ Wegg, it is _not_ ‘in the light of a friend.’ When I am in the dark or at best in a half-light, sorry or weary, or lonely of heart, my thoughts take rhythmic shape. They are only homely little crickets, creeping out in the twilight to sing by the fire that is beginning to gather ashes. I am a born story-teller, but I deserve no credit for that. Something within me that is not myself tells the stories so fast that I can hardly write them down as they are made. I am no genius, dear. Don’t marry me with that impression. I wish for your sake that I were. How gloriously proud you would be of me!”

“I am ‘gloriously proud’ of you now!” He said it in fervent sincerity. “If you have genius, don’t develop it. I can hardly keep you in sight as it is.”

Dimly and queerly, the feeling that prompted the half-laughing protest returned upon him to-night. The solemn radiance overflooding her eyes and clearing into exalted beauty lineaments critics pronounced irregular, positively awed him—an uncommon and not altogether agreeable sensation for a bridegroom, especially one of his practical and somewhat dogmatic cast of mind. Rebel though romantic lovers may at what they consider derogatory to the constancy and depth of wedded affection, it is not to be denied that the turn of the bridal pair from the altar symbolizes a reversal in their mutual relation. The bonds that have held the lover in vassalage—very sweet bondage, perhaps, but still not liberty—are with the utterance of the nuptial benediction transferred to the woman he holds by the hand. Barton Ashe was very much in love, but he was a very man. His wife was now his property.

“I feel a wild desire to put my arms around you to keep your wings from unfurling,” he found occasion to whisper presently. “I suppose these people would think me insane if I were to yield to the impulse and tell them why I did it.”

The luminous eyes laughed joyously into his. With all her intellect and passionate depth of feeling, she had seasons of childlike glee that became her rarely.

“As you would be. I was never farther from ‘wanting to be an angel’ than at this instant. The life that now is appears to me eminently satisfactory.”

A fresh bevy of congratulatory guests interrupted the hasty “aside.”

“We find it hard to forgive you, Mr. Ashe,” twittered an overdressed, overcolored, and overmannered spinster. “How can you reconcile it to your conscience to change a broad, beneficent river into a canal to serve your own particular mill? I shall not congratulate you upon a private good which is a public disaster.”

“Many others are thinking the same thing, but they cannot express it so beautifully,” said a plaintive matron, one of the many whose perfunctory sighs at weddings are the reverse of complimentary to their bonded partners. “But we must be thankful you have been spared so long to make us happy and do so much good in the world.”

“I am puzzled,” Barton observed, looking from one to the other. “If I were taking her out of town, to Coromandel, we will say, or even to New Jersey, there might be occasion for outcry.”

“You are robbing us of the better part of this woman,” interrupted the hortatory spinster in a dramatic contralto. “My protest is in the name of those to whom she belonged by the right the benefited have to the benefactor, before you crossed her path, in an evil hour for the world. It passes my comprehension, and I know much of the arrogant vanity of your sex, how any one man can hope to make up to his author wife for the audience she resigns when she sits down to pour out his coffee and darn his socks for the rest of her mortal existence. It is breaking stones with a gold mallet to make a mere housekeeper out of such material as this,” lightly touching the head crowned by the bridal veil. “But my imagination is not of the masculine gender.”

“Don’t strain it needlessly,” smiled Agnes, before the attacked person summoned wit for a retort. “Soup-making is a finer art than writing essays, to _my_ comprehension, yet I hope to learn it.”

The matron put in her sentence, sandwiched between sighs.

“You will find the two incompatible. Once married, a woman’s life is merged in that of another. She has no volition, no thought, no name of her own.”

“The married woman does not possess herself!” cried the spinster in shrill volubility. “She effaces her individuality in uttering the promise to ‘serve and obey’—vile words that belong rather to the harem of the sixteenth century than to the home of the nineteenth. Somebody else has reported me in yesterday’s _World_ and _Herald_, so I may as well tell you that I brought forward a motion in Sorosis last Monday, that the club should wear crape upon the left arm for thirty days, dating from this evening, in affectionate memory of one of our youngest and most brilliant members. Talk of the self-immolation of the Jesuit who changes the name his mother gave him and resigns the right of private judgment and personal desire in joining the Order! He is riotously free by comparison with the model wife. Her assumption of the conventual veil is mournfully symbolical.”

Another wave of newcomers swept her onward, still hortatory and gesticulatory.

She was never spoken of again by the bridal pair until the marriage day was a fortnight old.

They were pacing the wooden esplanade in front of the Hygeia Hotel at Old Point Comfort, basking in the December sunshine. The sea air had set roses in Agnes’ cheeks; her lips were full and red, her eye sparkled with soft content, and her step was elastic. Barton, surveying these changes with the undisguised satisfaction of a man who has secured legally the right to exhibit his prize, took his cigar from his mouth to say carelessly:

“By the way, I have never asked the name of the painted-and-powdered party who gave a parlor lecture upon Jesuits and harems the night we were married.”

“It was Miss Marvel,” said Agnes, laughing. “She is an eccentric woman, and as I need not tell you, indiscreet and flippant in talk, letting her theories and spirits run away with her judgment. But she accomplishes a great deal of good in her way and has many fine traits of character. It is a pity she does herself such injustice.”

“Humph! Does she belong to the sisterhood of letters?”

“In a way—yes. Her articles upon the Working Girls of New York, written for newspaper publication two years ago, attracted so much attention that they were collected into a volume last summer.”

“She is a member of Sorosis—I gather from her tirade?”

“Oh, yes. One of the oldest members.”

“What a hotch-potch that society or club—or whatever you may choose to call it—must be! Do you know, darling, I never associate you—or any other true, refined woman with the crew to which you nominally belong? You are a lily among thorns in such a connection. I should rather say among thistles and burdocks and stramonium and the like rank, vile-smelling weeds.”

“I thank you for the pretty praise of myself,” smiling sweetly and fondly at him. “But I cannot accept it at the expense of fairer flowers than I can ever hope to be, true, strong women who are trying to help their sex to a higher plane and prepare them for better work than they have yet accomplished, in spite of the limitations of sex—”

He caught her up on the word.

“Don’t fall into their cant, for Heaven’s sake! The ‘limitations of sex’ are woman’s crown of glory. I have done some sober thinking lately—especially since the drubbing received from your Miss Marvel—with regard to the mooted subject of the emancipation of women, falsely so called. My conclusions may not coincide with your views upon the subject. But, perhaps you do not care to discuss it?”

Her face was sunny; her look at once fearless and confiding.

“We are both reasonable people, I hope. If we are not, we love each other too well not to agree amicably upon unavoidable disagreements.”

Barton tossed his cigar stump into the foam of the nearest wave; a touch of impatience went with fling and laugh.

“Isn’t that like a woman? She presupposes disagreement and forestalls argument by pledging herself to forgive for love’s sake whatever she will not admit. The wisest and best of the sex—and you are both of these—will press feeling into what should be impersonal debate. Perhaps it is safer to talk of other things. See that gull swoop down and come up empty-clawed. That is his fourth unsuccessful trip to market within thirty minutes. The _passée_ belle upon the pavilion over there has had that rich youngling in tow twice as long. I will wager a pair of gloves against a buttonhole bouquet with you that she doesn’t land him.”

Neither tone nor manner was pleasant. Agnes laid her hand upon his arm.

“Won’t you go on with what you were about to say? I may not be able to argue. I think, with you, that logic is not woman’s forte. Perhaps we may learn, with time and education, to divorce thought and feeling. But I am a capital listener, and a willing learner.”

“You are an angel”—pressing the hand to his side, “and so far above Miss Marvel and her compeers in intellect and breeding that I fret at the alleged partnership. This talk of woman’s serfdom and the need of elevating her, mentally and politically, is stuff from first to last. Vile and pestilential stuff! Heresy against the teachings of Nature and of Him who ordained that man should be the superior being of the two. Those who are pressing forward in what they call Reform of Existing Wrongs are your worst enemies. You should need no champion but your other self, Man. In arraying one sex against the other, you antagonize him. I see this rampant attitude of woman everywhere and hourly. If a man resigns his seat in a public conveyance to a woman, she takes it arrogantly—not gratefully. She pushes him aside with sharp elbows in crowds, jostles him upon gangways, presses before him into doors, always with a ‘good-as-you’ air which exasperates the most amiable of us. Her voice is heard in debating societies; she sits beside man upon the rostrum; competes with him in business, often successfully, because she can live upon less than he. The devilish spirit of revolt permeates all grades of society. The home—God’s best gift to earth—has no longer a recognized governor, no judge to whom appeal is final. Sisters wrangle with brothers for equal educational advantages, instead of making home so pleasant that boys will be content to stay there. Women’s Clubs, Women’s Congresses, Women’s Protective Unions, are part and parcel of the disunion policy. Instead of refining man this is surely, if slowly, arousing the latent savage in him. When that does spring to action, let the weaker sex beware. Outraged natural laws will right themselves in the long run, but sometimes at fearful cost.”

Agnes was perfectly silent during this harangue, ignorant as was he of his resemblance to pudgy and pompous Uncle Simeon, while he beat the palm of the right hand with the empty left-hand glove, and rolled slightly from one leg to the other in the slow promenade. The bloom gradually receded from her cheeks, her profile was still and clear as a cameo. Her eyes were directed toward the gray-blues of the meeting line of wave and sky. Once she glanced up to follow the gull, rising from a fifth unsuccessful dip.

Presently she halted and leaned upon the parapet to watch the half-consumed cigar, swinging and bumping like a truncated canoe in the foam-fringes of the rising tide. Barton stopped with her without staying his talk. An impulse born of the innate savagery he imputed to his sex, bore him on. His wife’s very impassiveness irked him. Silence was non-sympathetic; white silence, like hers, chilling. Irritation, engendered by piqued vanity, does not withhold the home-thrust because the victim is dearly beloved.

“You do not like to hear me talk in this strain,” he pursued. “It is only natural that a woman of independent thought and action, accustomed to adulation, and to whom the excitement of a public hearing for whatever she has to say has become a necessity of existence; who has looked beyond the quiet round of home interests and home loves for a career; who has fed her imagination upon unreal scenes and situations—should——”

He could get no further. Fluent as he was in speech, he had wound himself up in nominative specifications, and the verb climax failed him unexpectedly.

“Should—what?” said Agnes, turning the set, tintless visage toward him. Her eyes, blank and questionless, showed how far from her thought was sarcastic pleasure in his discomfiture. Barton was too much incensed to reason.

“Should—and _does_ sneer at her husband’s serious talk upon a matter in which, as he is fast discovering, his happiness is fatally involved!”

“_Fatally!_ O Barton!”

Independent and strong-minded she might be to others, but he had hurt her terribly. The stifled cry took all her strength with it. She caught at the railing for support, and leaned upon it, sick and trembling.

He lifted his hat in mock courtesy.

“If you will excuse me I will continue my walk alone. It is useless to attempt the temperate discussion of any subject when my words are caught up in that tone and manner. May I take you back to the hotel?”

Agnes straightened herself up. Her color did not return, but her voice was her own. It had always a peculiar and vibrant melody, and her articulation was singularly distinct for an American speaking her own language.

“You misunderstand me. I did not mean to be abrupt, much less rude. If I seemed to be either or both I ask your forgiveness. You need not trouble yourself to escort me to the hotel. I will sit here for a while and then go in. I hope, when you think the matter over dispassionately, you will see that I could not be guilty of what you imply.”

He strode off toward the Fort, the deep sand somewhat derogatory to dignity of carriage, but favoring the increase of irritability. Agnes strolled slowly along the beach until she found a lonely rock upon the tip of a tongue of bleached sand, where she could sit and think out the bitterest hour she had ever known. People, passing upon pier and esplanade, saw her there all the forenoon, a slight figure whose gray gown matched in color the stones among which she sat, as motionless as they. The brackish tide rose slowly until the spray sprinkled her feet, whispering mournful things to rock and sand. She saw and heard nothing, while her eyes seemed to follow the stately sail and swoop of the gulls whose breasts showed whitely against the blue of the December sky.

Other wives than Lorraine Loree have wedded men of high degree only to find that “husbands can be cruel,” and more than Lorraine or Agnes dreamed of have made the discovery before the wane of the honeymoon.

This bride felt bruised and beaten all over, and suffered the more, not less, for her sorrowful bewilderment as to the exact cause of this, the first quarrel.