BOOK III

I

“I do hope you’ll make a hit, Patience,” said Hal, regarding her critically. “The public, even the little public of a garden party, is a thing you can’t bet on, but you certainly are stunning. If ever papa loses his fortune, in the curious American way, I shall follow the ever seductive example of the English aristocracy and go in for dressmaking. That frock is a triumph of art, if I do say it myself.”

Patience revolved slowly before the Psyche mirror which stood between two open windows in one corner of Hal’s pretty terra-cotta bedroom. She too was pleased with the airy concoction of violet and white. On a chair lay a picture hat, another bird of the same feather. Hal placed it on Patience’s head, a little back, and the violet velvet of the interior made a very effective frame for the soft ashen hair and white skin.

“You certainly carry yourself well,” continued Hal, “and before long you will acquire an air. Always keep in mind that _that_ is the most important thing in life—our life—to acquire. But you look like a lily, a purple and white forest lily.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what to talk to fashionable people about.”

“Don’t be too clever—don’t frighten the men and antagonise the women. You see, you’re not known at all, so people won’t begin by being afraid of you—as they would if they knew all that went on in that pretty skull of yours. Just be Mrs. Beverly Peele. Nobody would ever suspect Bev of marrying a clever woman. You can’t do the artless and infantile, like May: your face is too strong; but you can be unsophisticated, and that always goes.”

“I’m not unsophisticated!”

“Oh, don’t look like that. All the light seems to go out of your skin. I mean give everybody the impression that you have everything to learn, and that each, individually, can teach it all. It’s awfully fetching. That is what has made May’s success. Of course you wouldn’t be another May, if you could; but you want to begin at the beginning—don’t you know? You must let society feel that it gives you everything, tells you everything. Then it will love you. But if it suspects that you are alien—the least little bit—then there will be the devil to pay. Of course a few of the best sort would like you, but I’m set on your making a hit.”

“I’m afraid I’ll never take,” said Patience, with a sigh, “but I am wild to see Vanity Fair, all the same. It must be great fun—all that brilliancy and life. But somehow I don’t feel in tune with the people I have met, so far.”

“Oh, that’s natural. You are not acclimatised yet, so to speak. Society is a distinctly foreign country to those that have not been brought up in it. Just sit down on the edge of that chair and rest while I take a look at myself.”

“White is certainly my day colour,” she continued, revolving in her turn before the mirror. “It is wonderful how it clears the skin, especially with a touch of blue near the face. Pink would make me as yellow as October, and green would suggest thirty-five. Your grey matter will be spared the wear and tear of The Study of Colour, but if I hadn’t reduced it to a fine art, I’d have had to turn literary or something when May came out.”

“You look just like a fairy! I never saw anything so dainty.”

“Oh, of course; I’m so little and light that I have to work the fairy racket for all it’s worth. It’s a heavenly day, isn’t it? The country’s got its best spring clothes on, sure enough.”

The girls leaned out of each of the windows in turn, scrutinising the grounds. In front and on both sides of the house the land rolled away in great irregular waves. Woods were in the sudden hollows, on the lofty knolls; between, shelving expanses of green, bare but for an occasional oak or elm. Beside the driveway was a long narrow avenue of elms, down which two might pace shoulder to shoulder, and no more. In a deep hollow on the right was the orchard, a riot of pink and white. The immediate grounds were small and trim, and fragrant with the flowers of civilisation; out on the hills beyond the wild-flowers and tall grass, the locust and hawthorn, had their way. Behind all flowed the Hudson under the green Palisades, its surface gay with sail and steamboat.

A dancing booth had been erected on one of the lawns, and the musicians were already assembling under the silken curtains.

“It looks very well,” said Hal, “and you couldn’t have a more perfect day for your _début_. Not that I care much for garden parties; the fresh air makes me sleepy, and there’s no concentration, as it were—as there is in a ball-room, don’t you know? But mamma decreed that the world should make your acquaintance out of doors, and that is the end of it. I wonder if you’ll manage to induce Bev to go to town for the winter.”

“I hope so! It will be horribly dull to stay here all winter, with all of you away.”

“That’s an edifying sentiment for a bride of three months. However, I agree with you. I’d go mad shut up in a country house in winter with the most fascinating man that ever breathed. And the dickens of it is, mamma always takes his part, whether he’s wrong or right. She’ll preach wifely duty to you until you’d live on a desert island to get rid of her.”

“I’ve heard her,” said Patience, gloomily.

“I wondered if that was what she was at in the library yesterday. When mamma has her chin well up and her lower lip well out I can tell at long range that she’s embracing the cause of virtue. But she tackled you rather early in the game, considering you haven’t made any notable break as yet.”

“I wouldn’t go driving with Beverly yesterday,—the sun makes my head ache,—and I’d also begged him to take me to the theatre to see Rosita, and he wouldn’t.”

“Oh, you’ll never get Bev to the theatre. We’ll go by ourselves to a matinée. However, it’s better than being a newspaper woman on several dollars a week—come now, own up?”

“I enjoyed Florida and New Orleans and Canada immensely.”

“That was a tremendous concession for Bev to make—he detests travelling. He certainly is in love; but I imagine he expects you to live on that same concession for some time to come—thinks it’s your turn to do the self-sacrificing act. Such is man. Anyhow, I’m glad it’s all turned out so comfortably, and that you are here, and that all is settled—”

“I want to ask you something. I couldn’t get it out of Beverly. Did your mother make a very violent objection to his marrying me? Of course I am a social nobody, and she must have made great plans for her only son. She didn’t say anything when she came to call; but, you see, she didn’t call until three days before the wedding, and Beverly’s and your excuses were not very good.”

“Oh, of course she raised Cain,” said Miss Peele, easily; “that was to be expected. But papa put his foot down and said he was glad to have Beverly marry a clever woman: it might be the making of him. And _I_ just fought! Of course I’d told papa that you were as high bred as any woman in America, and that you’d look a swell in less than no time. That weighed heavy with him, for, in his opinion, God may have made himself first, but he made the Peeles next, and no mistake. And Bev! He went into the most awful tantrums you ever saw. I think that was what brought mamma round—she was afraid he’d burst a blood-vessel. When she wrote and asked Miss Beale to live with you I knew the day was won. And now that you are Mrs. Beverly Peele she’ll respect you accordingly, although you’ll have some lively tussles. But make her think you adore Bev, and you’ll pull through. Suppose we go down now. Tra-la-la! I wish it were over.”

II

The girls descended the twisted stair into the wide hall. All the doors and windows were open, and the soft air blew through the great house, lifting the lace and silken curtains.

A girl, looking like a large butterfly, in her yellow frock, was fluttering about the hall amidst the palms and the huge vases of flowers. Her skin was of matchless tints, her large blue eyes as guileless as those of an infant.

“Oh! Oh!” she cried, as Hal and Patience reached the first landing, “how perfectly sweet! Hal, is my frock all right in the back? My things never fit quite as well as yours do. Isn’t Patience too fetching for words? I wish I was just white like that. How perfectly funny that we should be giving a garden party for Bev’s wife! Who would have thought it last year? Isn’t it odd how things do happen? And hasn’t Honora been perfectly lovely about it? I always knew she didn’t care. I wonder if any decent men will come up! It’s so hard—Hal, _does_ my frock wrinkle in the back?”

“Oh, no, no,” drawled Hal, without looking at her. She glanced at the tall clock in an angle. “They’ll be here in ten minutes, now—Oh—h—h!”

A portière was pushed aside, and a girl entered the hall from a dark background of books and heavy curtains. She was far above the ordinary height of woman, and extremely slender. Golden hair clustered about a long face, pale rather than white. The large azure eyes had the extraordinary clarity of childhood, and an expression of perfect purity. The nose was long, the mouth thin, but well curved and very red. She wore a clinging gown of white crêpe and a large knot of blue wild-flowers at her belt. She moved slowly forward, managing her long limbs with much dexterity, but could hardly be called graceful. Patience thought her the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, and murmured her admiration to Hal, who snorted in a gentle, ladylike way.

“They will be here in a moment, I suppose,” said Honora, wearily. “I think I shall not go out. I’ll stay in the drawing-room and entertain the older people. Some one must attend to them, and I really prefer the house.”

“You are always so amiable,” said Hal, drily, “and you certainly won’t get freckled.”

“It is true that I don’t like freckles,” said Honora, calmly, “and I do like the older people. Even you, when you have a few white hairs, may become more or less interesting. Patience, dear, you look very lovely. You must let me kiss you.” She bent her cool lips to the brow of the bride, swaying over her. Her voice could not be described by any adjective devoid of the letter L. It was liquid, silvery, cold, light.

“She certainly is a stunning-looking woman,” said Hal, as Honora passed into the drawing-room, “but she’s a whole rattlesnake, and no mistake. I’ve never seen her strike real hard yet; she merely spits occasionally, and always in that amiable way. You can imagine how subtle she is, and what a dangerous force such self-control is. I shall never understand how she failed to get Bev.”

“Perhaps, as May suggests, she didn’t want him.”

“Oh, didn’t she! Just wait! you’ll hear from her yet. There’s the whistle. The train’ll be here in three minutes. Let us group ourselves gracefully under Peele the First.”

They went into the large white drawing-room, whose old-fashioned woodwork was as it had been nearly three hundred years ago, even to the heavy shutters over the small-paned windows. The ceiling was fretted with floral designs, executed in _papier mâché_, surrounding a _bas relief_ of “our well beloved Whyte Peele,” who had received the grant of these many acres from James the First. All the woodwork was painted white, and carved. The furniture, modern, but of colonial design, was upholstered in pale pink and blue.

Beyond a side hall was a long dining-room panelled to the ceiling in oak, and hung on all sides with dead and living Peeles. The carved oaken table was spread with the light unsubstantial feast of the modern time. Adjoining the dining-room were two small reception-rooms looking upon the terrace at the back of the rambling old house. In the middle of this hall, under the carved twisted stair, was a round enclosure whose door opened upon a well, from whence a secret passage led to the river.

Mrs. Peele swept across the hall from the dining-room, and raising her lorgnette, considered Patience.

“You look very well,” she said, coldly. “Don’t get nervous, please; it is the one thing for which people have no toleration. Where is Beverly?”

“He has gone for a drive. You know he does not like entertainments.” Patience’s nerves were muttering, and her mother-in-law’s admonition was not of the nature of balm.

Mrs. Peele raised her brows. “It is odd that a bride should have so little influence over her husband,” she remarked; and Patience was now in that equable frame of mind which carries one through the severe ordeals of life.

How she did live through that ordeal of introduction to some five hundred people she never knew. Fortunately, all but the neighbours arrived on the special train which had been sent for them, and there was little for her to do but smile and bend her head as Mrs. Peele named her new daughter-in-law to her guests.

And whatever might be that exalted dame’s private opinion of her son’s choice, whatever methods she might employ in untrammelled domestic hours to make her disapproval felt, to the world she assumed her habitual air of being supremely content with all that pertained to the house of Peele. Had Patience been the daughter of a belted earl she could not have been presented to New York with a haughtier pride, a calmer assumption that New York must embrace with gratitude and enthusiasm this opportunity to meet the daughter-in-law of the Gardiner Peeles.

Her manner gave Patience confidence after a time. Her own pride had already conquered diffidence; and trying as the long ordeal was, she thrilled a little at the sudden realisation of half-formed ambitions. There was no taint of the snob in her; some echo-voice of other generations lifted itself out of the inherited impressions which had moulded her brain cells, and protested against its descendant ranking below the first of the land.

Many of the guests were politely indifferent to the honour provided for them; the girls stared at her in a manner calculated to upset any _débutante’s_ equilibrium; but the gracious kindness of others and the languid admiration of the men kept her in poise.

The neighbours arrived shortly after the train, and it was an hour before the greater part of the company had dispersed over the grounds, and Patience could sit down. Mrs. Peele remained in the drawing-room with some eight or ten people, and as Hal and May had both disappeared, Patience stayed with her mother-in-law, not knowing where to go.

She thought the girls very forbidding with their pert noses and keen eyes, although she admired their luminous skin and splendid grooming, striking even in the airy attire of spring. The older women looked as if they would patronise her did Mrs. Peele withdraw her protecting wing, and one man, passing the window, inserted a monocle and regarded her deliberately. Suddenly Patience experienced a sensation of profound loneliness. No force in life is surer of touch than the subtle play of spirit on spirit, and Patience read that these people did not like her and never would, that they recognised the alien who would regard their world spectacularly, never acquire their comic seriousness.

“Are you fond of golf, Mrs. Peele?” asked one girl, languidly.

“I never have played golf.”

The girl raised her brows. “Really! Are you fond of tennis?”

“I have never played tennis.” Patience repressed a smile as the girl looked frankly shocked. Still the guest was evidently determined to be amiable.

“I hope you don’t think it frivolous?”

“Oh, no, I should like to learn all those things very much.”

“Well, Miss Peele can teach you. She is awfully clever at all those things. Don’t you think Miss Mairs looks like Mary Anderson?”

“Mary Anderson?”

“Yes, the actress, you know.”

“I have never seen her.”

The girl was visibly embarrassed. Another, who looked as if harbouring a grin in her straight little mouth, came to the rescue.

“Oh, I do think Mr. Peele is so good-looking,” she exclaimed, with a fine show of animation. “We all think you are to be congratulated.”

Patience smiled at the frank rudeness of this remark, and said nothing.

“You know Amy Murray was wild about him. She’s not here to-day, I notice. We did think it too bad that he wouldn’t go out. Some of the girls have met him here, but I never have. They say he is awfully fascinating.”

“Oh, yes, he is fascinating,” said Patience.

“What have you been doing with yourself if you have never learned to golf nor play tennis?” asked another girl, insolently. She was a tall girl, with a wooden face, a tight mouth, and an “air.”

“Oh, I read, mostly,” said Patience, with an extremely bored air.

The mother of the third girl turned swiftly and smiled at the bride, a humorous smile in which there was some pity. Patience had observed her before. She was a tall woman with a slender figure of extreme elegance. Her dark bright face was little older than her daughter’s. Her ease of manner was so great that it was almost self-conscious.

“Oh, say!” she exclaimed, “don’t think we’re all like that. The girls don’t have much time to read—that’s true—but after they settle down they do, really. Hal reads French novels—the little reprobate!—We read French novels too, but a lot else besides. Oh, really! Outsiders—the people that only know society through the newspapers, don’t you know?—misjudge us terribly, really. Some of the brightest women of the world are in New York society—why shouldn’t they be? And if the girls don’t study it’s their own fault; they certainly have every opportunity under the sun. I was made to study. My father was old-fashioned, and had no nonsense about him. I always say I was educated beyond my brains, but I’d rather have it that way than the other. Now, I assure you I read everything. I have a standing order on the other side with an English and a French book-seller, to send me every book the minute it attracts attention—”

“Oh, you’re real intellectual, you are,” drawled Hal’s mocking voice.

The lady turned with a start and a little flush.

“Oh, Hal!” she cried gaily, “how you do take the starch out of one.”

“You’ve got enough to stock a laundry, so you needn’t worry. I’ve come to rescue my fair sister-in-law before you talk her to death. Come, Patience.”

Patience arose with alacrity, and followed her out of the house.

“Don’t you like her?” she asked.

“Oh, immensely. She’s as bright as a woman can be who has so little time to think about it. She’s a tall and majestic pillar of Society, you know, and she carries it—the intellect, not the pillar—round like a chip on her shoulder. That makes me weary at times. I’ve heard her talk for an hour without stopping. The only thing that makes me forgive her is her slang. We have a match occasionally.”

“Her daughter doesn’t look as if she used slang.”

“Oh, she doesn’t. She’s no earthly use whatever. Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Not particularly. But it’s a lovely scene.”

The lawns, and knolls, and woods were kaleidoscopic with fashionettes in gay attire, shifting continually. There were not men enough to mar the brilliant effect. The music of birds soared above the chatter of girls, the sound of wood and brass. The river flashed away into the distance, a silver girdle about Earth’s green gown.

“Yes, very pret,” said Hal. “But come, I’m going to introduce you to my latest.”

“You didn’t tell me that you had a latest.”

“I’ve only met him a few times—he’s from Boston. I expect I forgot about him.”

They were walking over the lawns toward the Tea House, a long low rustic building which stood on the edge of the slope. A hubbub of voices floated through the windows, peals of laughter, affected shrieks.

“A lot of my intimates are there,” said Hal. “I’ve managed to get them together. May is doing the hostess act with her accustomed grace and charm, and I’m taking a half hour off.”

They went round to the front of the house and entered. It was an airy structure of polished maple. Little tables, each with a delicate tea-service, were scattered about with artistic irregularity; round the wall ran a divan, luxurious, but not too low for whaleboned forms. On this the girls were stiffly lounging. The men were more at their ease. All were smoking, the girls daintily, but firmly.

“Hal! Hal! sweet Queen Hal!” cried one of the young men, rising to his feet. “I’ve been keeping this place—directly in the middle—for you. See, it shall be a throne.” He piled three cushions atop, and with exaggerated homage led her forward amidst the ejaculatory applause of the others.

“Isn’t Norry too witty?” said one girl to Patience, as she made room for her, “and so original! Whoever else would have thought of such a thing?—although Hal ought to be a queen, don’t you think so? We just rave about her. Do you smoke? try my kind.”

Patience, thankful that at last she could do something like these people, accepted the cigarette. During her three months’ trip she had not smoked, as Beverly thought it shocking.

“Mr. Wynne,” cried Hal, suddenly, “come over here and talk to my sister-in-law. Patience, this is the young man from Boston, famous as the only New Englander whose ancestors did not come over on the ‘May Flower.’”

A man with a smooth serious face rose from his cushions and came forward.

“Awfully good-looking,” murmured the girl who had proffered the cigarette, “and wonderfully smart, considering he’s not a New Yorker. It’s too bad he’s so beastly poor, for he’s terribly _épris_ with Hal.”

The young man, who had paused a moment to speak with Hal, inserted himself as best he could between Patience and her new acquaintance.

“I am glad you are here,” murmured the bride. “You do not look quite at home, and I am not, either.”

He smiled with instant sympathy. “Oh, I don’t care very much for society, and I don’t like to see women smoke. It’s an absurd prejudice to have in these progressive days, but I can’t help it.”

“You mean you don’t like to see Miss Peele smoke,” said Patience, mischievously.

He flushed, then laughed. “Well, perhaps that is it. They are all charming, these girls, but there is something about Miss Peele that distinguishes her. Did you ever notice it?”

“Oh, yes. She is herself, and these others are twelve for a dozen.”

“That is it.” He glanced about at the girls in their bright gowns, which clung to their tiny waists and hips, their narrow chests and modest busts, with the wrinkleless perfection that has made the modern milliner the god he is. Their polished skin and brilliant shallow eyes, their elegant sexless forms, their haughty poise and supercilious air, laid aside among themselves but always in reserve, their consciousness of caste, were the several parts of a unique and homogeneous effect, which, Patience confided to Mr. Wynne, must mark out the New York girl in whatever wilds she trod.

“Oh, it does,” he said. “The New York girl is _sui generis_, and so thoroughly artificial a product that it seems incredible she can exist through another generation. I will venture to predict that the species will be extinct in three, and that American women of a larger and more human type will gradually be drawn into New York, and found a new race, so to speak. Why, it seems to me that the children of these women must be pigmies—imagine one of those girls being the mother of a man. It is well that New York is not America.”

Involuntarily Patience’s eyes wandered to Hal. Her waist was as small, her figure as unwomanly as the others.

“It is true,” said Wynne, answering her thought; “but she is so charming that one is quite willing she should do nothing further for the human race.”

Patience burst into a light laugh.

“What’s the matter?” asked Wynne.

“It suddenly struck me—the almost comical difference between these girls and the ‘Y’s,’ and the ‘King’s Daughters.’ It does not seem possible that such types can exist within ten miles of each other. I should explain that I have passed the last three years in a country town.”

“It is odd how religion holds its own in those small places. It is opera, theatre, balls, Browning societies, everything to those people shut out of the manifold distractions of cities. Religion seems to be the one excitement of the restricted life. Human nature demands some sort of emotional outlet—”

“What on earth are you two talking about?” cried the girl on the other side. “Will you have another cigarette, Mrs. Beverly?—that is what we shall all call you, you know. Mr. Wynne, please talk to me a while. Isn’t this Tea House too sweet?”

“It is more,—it is angelic,” said Wynne, gravely.

“Oh! you’re guying!” Even her voice pouted. “Oh! please shake those ashes off my gown—quick!—thanks. Oh, your eyes are grey. I thought they were brown. I’m afraid of grey eyes, aren’t you, Mrs. Beverly—Oh, dear! your eyes are grey too. What ever shall I do?” and she cast up her hands. Even her sleek hair seemed to quiver.

“It is the misfortune of the American race to run to grey eyes,” said Wynne. “Habit should have steeled you by this time—”

“Oh, he made a pun! he made a pun!” cried the girl.

“I did not!—I beg pardon, but I never did such a thing in my life,” cried Wynne, indignantly; and Patience felt suddenly depressed, although she too had found a friend in habit.

Hal rose while the girl was lisping mock apologies.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “Isn’t it hateful? But I must go and do my duty. Patience, you must come too. Why are you blocking the doorway, Mr. Wynne?”

“I am going with you.”

“Really? Well, bye-bye;” and the three went off, followed by a gentle chorus of regrets.

“Patience, my dear,” said Hal, “there is a group of people over there looking hideously bored. You go and cheer them up, while I do my duty by those austere and venerable dames who are staring through their lorgnettes at the dining-room windows—”

“Oh, Hal, I can’t! Don’t send me to those people alone. What can I say to them?”

“Patience, my dear, this is a world of woe. One day you will be châtelaine of this place and be giving garden-parties on your own account, so you’d better take the kindergarten course, and be thankful for the chance. Go on.”

Patience walked unwillingly over to a group of four women seated under a drooping oak. She had forgotten the names of nine tenths of the guests, but she recognised Mrs. Laurence Gibbs, a plain rather dowdy little woman with sad face and abstracted gaze. Beside her on the rustic seat was a woman who gave a dominant impression of teeth: they fairly flashed in the shadows. In a chair sat a woman of remarkable prettiness. She would have been a beauty had her features been larger, so regular were they, so sweet her expression, so soft her colouring of pink and white and brown, so tall and full her figure. In another chair was a young woman of no beauty but much distinction. Her prematurely white hair was curled and tied at the base of her head with a black ribbon, realising an eighteenth century effect. Her face was dark and brilliant. She sat forward, her slim figure full of suppressed energy. She had been talking with much animation, but as Patience approached she paused abruptly. The pretty woman burst into a merry laugh.

“Mrs. Lafarge was just remarking what hideous bores garden parties are,” she said audaciously.

“Oh, you needn’t mind me,” said Patience, sitting down on the grass, as there was no other seat. “I quite agree with you.”

“Oh, that’s awfully good of you, Mrs. Peele,” said Mrs. Lafarge, “and awfully mean of you, Mary Gallatin. Of course this is one of the loveliest places on the Hudson, and I love to come here; but there are not enough men. That’s the whole trouble.”

“That always seems to be the cry with you American women,” said she of the teeth. “You have no resources. You should be independent of men. They seem to be of you.”

“Perhaps you are driven to resources in Russia,” said Mrs. Gallatin, sweetly, “but your observation is faulty. We are spoiled over here, and that is the reason we grumble occasionally.”

“You see we haven’t a large leisure class, as you have,” said Mrs. Gibbs, hastily.

“I really think the reason men avoid garden parties is that they are afraid they might be betrayed into sentiment,” broke in Mrs. Lafarge. “They do protect themselves so fiercely. How did you ever make Tom Gallatin propose, Mary dear? He had the most ideal bachelor apartment in New York, and entrenched himself as in a fortress.”

“Oh, one or two fall by the wayside every year, you know, and this time Gally happened to stumble over me. Poor Gally, he told me yesterday that he hadn’t seen me to speak to for a month. The idea of the lower classes grumbling. I should like to know who works as hard as we do. How do you manage to do the society and the charity, both?” she asked of Mrs. Gibbs. “Does Mr. Gibbs ever see _you_?”

“I never neglect my husband,” said Mrs. Gibbs, sternly. “When I must neglect anything it is society. I came to-day because I longed for a glimpse of the country, and I have not been able to go to Woody Cliffs yet—the poverty is so terrible this year. I wish you would come with me sometime and see for yourself—”

“God forbid! I never could stand the smells. I give my pastor so much a year, and I really think that’s doing one’s share. Of course if you like it, it’s another thing.”

“Like it!” cried the Russian. “You speak as if it were her pastime. I cannot express how gratifying it is to me to meet a serious woman occasionally in New York society.”

“I had a lovely time in Petersbourg,” murmured Mrs. Gallatin. “I never met an offensive Russian inside of the country. Poor America!”

“I don’t understand,” said the foreigner, stiffly.

“Oh, I am sure you understand English—you express yourself so clearly. We all weep over America occasionally, you know. It is a sort of dumping ground for foreigners,—who sit at our feet, and abuse us.”

“One is at liberty to abuse insolence,” said the Russian, with suppressed wrath, “and the women of New York are the most insolent I have ever met.”

“Oh, not among ourselves—not really. We think it insolent in outsiders to elbow their way in—”

“Mary! Mary!” cried Mrs. Gibbs. “I hear that you spent some years with Miss Harriet Tremont,” she continued, addressing Patience. “She passed her entire life in charitable work, did she not?”

“Oh, she did, and she enjoyed it too. Don’t you?”

Mrs. Gallatin laughed softly.

“Enjoy it?” said Mrs. Gibbs. “I never have looked at it in that way. I think it my duty to aid my miserable fellow beings, and I am thankful that I am able to aid them.”

“Odd, the fads different people have,” murmured Mrs. Gallatin. “Now mine is Russians. What is yours, Leontine?”

“Oh, Mary, you deserve to be shaken,” exclaimed Mrs. Lafarge, as the Russian sprang to her feet and stalked away.

“I can’t help it. She’s a boor, and I wish she’d go back and live with a Cossack. Foreigners are all very well on their native heath, but as soon as they are transplanted to this side and treated with common decency they become intolerable. They grovel at our feet, swell because we receive them, and sneer at us behind our backs.”

“I think you have a way of irritating them, my dear,” said Mrs. Gibbs. “You are a very naughty girl. Won’t you sit up here by me, Mrs. Peele? I am afraid the ground is damp. I shall ask you some time to explain to me Miss Tremont’s methods. I often feel sadly at sea.”

“Oh, dear!” said Patience, “I doubt if I know them. I just followed her blindly. I may as well confess it—I didn’t take a very great interest in the work.”

“Oh, how lovely!” cried Mrs. Gallatin.

“I am sorry that I have made a mistake,” said Mrs. Gibbs, stiffly.

“Oh, well—you know—there is such a thing as getting too much of anything—”

“Is there?” Mrs. Gibbs rose, and shook out her skirts with an absent air. “I think I will go over and talk to Mrs. Peele;” and she walked away with an awkward gait, her head bent forward. She certainly did not have an “air.”

“Dear! dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Gallatin. “Just think! you have lost the interest of Mrs. Laurence Gibbs. She might have invited you to her exciting musicales or her cast-iron dinners.”

“Oh, don’t abuse her,” said Mrs. Lafarge. “She is a harmless little soul, and does what she thinks is right.”

“She is happier too,” said Patience, her thoughts in Mariaville. “It is odd, but they always are. I think it’s because they’ve unconsciously cultivated the supremest and most inspired form of egoism, and naturally they get a tremendous amount of joy out of it—”

“Hear! Hear!” cried Mrs. Gallatin. “She analyses!”

“My dear, you mustn’t do that out loud,” said Mrs. Lafarge. “You’ll be a terrible failure if you do.”

“That would be a pity, because you are so pretty,” said Mrs. Gallatin, smiling. “I’ve been staring at you whenever I’ve had the chance, and you don’t know how many charming things I’ve heard said of you this afternoon.”

“Oh, have you really?” asked Patience, warming instantly, as much to the kindly sympathy as to the agreeable words.

“Indeed I have. That violet against your hair and skin makes a perfect picture of you. _N’est-ce pas_, Leontine?”

“It certainly does.”

“I think you are both very kind,” said Patience, with a young impulse to be frank. “I feel so out of it all. You see this is my first experience of this sort of thing, and some of those girls have made me feel like a barbarian.”

“They’d be glad of your freshness, not only of looks but of mind,” said Mary Gallatin. “I should think it would be a blessed relief to have some other sort of interest but just this,” and she swept out her arm disdainfully. “That’s the reason I go, go, all the time. I don’t dare think. When you have no talent, and are not intellectual, and not frantic about your husband, what are you to do? There’s no other resource, in spite of that Russian prig. I’d give a good deal to be beginning it all again at eighteen.”

“There is no spice in life without violent contrasts,” said Mrs. Lafarge. “That’s the real reason why so many of our good young friends are larky. The trouble with this world is that although there is variety enough in it, each variety travels in a different orbit. The social scheme is all wrong, somehow.”

“True! True!” said Mrs. Gallatin, plaintively. “But I see they are about to eat. The open air always makes me hungry. That is variety enough for the present.”

As they crossed the lawn she laid her arm about Patience’s waist. “Bev doesn’t like society,” she said, “and I’m afraid you’re not in any danger of satiety; but don’t think out loud when you are in it. Leontine never does, do you, Leontine? And she is clever too. It must be delightful to be clever. Heigh-ho! Well, you must be sure to come to see me anyhow. I feel positive we shall be friends. Come some morning at eleven. That is just after I have had my tub and am back in bed again. I love to see my friends then. Oh, dear, we must scatter. There are not two seats together anywhere. Bye-bye.”

III

“Thank God they’re gone.” Hal divested herself of her tight smart frock, got into a lawn gown, lit a cigarette, and extended herself on the divan in her bedroom. “Well, Patience, how did you like it?”

“I don’t think I made the hit you expected.”

“N-o-o-o, you didn’t exactly create a _furore_; but I don’t know that any one could do that with so much oxygen round: makes peoples so drowsy, don’t you know? But you were admired awfully. And then you are an unconventional beauty, and that always takes longer. Now, May made a howling sensation, but people are tired of her already. That type doesn’t wear. My plain phiz wears much better, because there was never any chance of reaction with me. Oh, dear, here comes Bev.”

A knock, and in response to Hal’s languid invitation, Beverly entered. He was in evening clothes, and as handsome as ever; but he looked rather sulky.

“You might have met me when I got home,” he said to his wife. “I haven’t seen you since luncheon.”

“Tragic!” exclaimed Hal.

“I was so tired I just drifted in here and fell in a heap,” said Patience, apologetically. “My skull feels empty, and aches inside and out.”

“Then you don’t like society?” said Mr. Peele, eagerly.

“Oh, very much indeed! I think it is delightful, delightful! Only the first time is rather trying, you know. I met some charming people, and want to meet them again.”

Peele grunted, and lit his cigar. His eyes devoured his wife’s fair face. Patience looked at Hal.

“My mother says you carried yourself very well,” remarked Mr. Peele, gracefully; “that after the first you were quite at your ease. That was one reason I went away: I was so afraid you’d break down, or something.”

Patience flushed angrily, but made no reply. She had learned that even a slight dispute would move her husband to a violent outbreak.

“She looked more to the manor born than half the guests,” said Hal, “and if you took her out next winter she’d become the rage—”

“I don’t wish my wife to be the rage! And she is going to stay here. If she loves me as much as I love her she’ll be as contented with my society as I am with hers.”

“As if any woman ever loved a man as much as he loved her,” remarked Miss Peele. “I am sure Patience is no such idiot.”

“What?” cried Beverly. Patience rose hastily.

“I think I’ll go and brush my hair,” she said, moving to the door; but he sprang to his feet and stood in front of her.

“Tell me!” he cried, his voice shaking. “Don’t you love me as much as I love you?”

“Oh, Beverly,” she said, impatiently, “how can you get into such tempers about nothing? You have asked me if I loved you about nine thousand times since we were married. How am I to know how much you love me? Have you a plummet and line about you?”

“You are dodging the question. And you have never asked me if I loved you—not once—”

Patience slipped past him and ran down the hall to her room. Before she could close the door he was beside her. He caught her in his arms and kissed her violently.

“I shall always be mad about you,” he said. “And I believe you are growing cold. You have not been the same lately. Sometimes I think that you shrink from me as you did at first. Tell me what I have done. I’d sell my soul to keep you. If you are tired of me, I’ll kill myself—”

She disengaged herself. “Listen,” she said; “I’ve tried to explain—but you don’t seem to understand—that I didn’t want to fall in love with you—not in that way. That should not come first. Then when I found myself made of common clay, I said that I would forget that I had ever been Patience Sparhawk, and begin life again as Mrs. Beverly Peele. Novelty helped me; and when one is travelling, one’s ego appears to be dissolved into the changing scene—one is simply a sensitised plate. But now I am beginning to feel like Patience Sparhawk again, and it frightens me a little.”

Beverly, to whom the larger part of these remarks were pure Greek, blanched to the lips.

“Then you regret it,” he stammered.

“I didn’t say that. I only mean that I seem to spend life readjusting myself; and that now I seem to be all at sea again.”

“You don’t love me any longer! Oh, God!” and he flung himself on the floor, and burying his face in a chair, groaned aloud.

Patience was disgusted, but his suffering, primary as it was, touched her. Moreover, her broad vein of philosophy was active once more. She was by no means prepared to leave him—the tide was ebbing very slowly. She sat down on the chair, and lifted his face to her lap. “There,” she said, “I am sorry I spoke. You don’t seem to understand me. If you did, though, this scene could never have occurred. But I love you—of course—and I do not regret it. So get up and bathe your eyes. It is after seven o’clock.”

He kissed her hands, his face glowing again. The words were all sufficient to him. “Then if you love me you will see how happy I’ll make you,” he exclaimed. “I’ll never leave you a minute I can help; but if you stop loving me I’ll make life hell for you.”

“I thought you said you’d kill yourself.”

“Well, I would, but I’d get square with you first.”

“Well, suppose you go into your own room now, and let me dress for dinner.”

IV

The summer passed agreeably enough. Circumstances prevented Beverly bestowing an undue amount of his society on his wife, and until a woman is wholly tired of a man she retains her self respect. Moreover, Patience chose to believe herself in love with him: “it had been in her original estimate of herself that she had been at fault.” She persuaded herself that she loved him as much as she could love any man, and she did her pathetic best to shed some glimmer of spiritual light into a man who might have been compounded in a laboratory, so little soul was in him. But despite the clay which was hers, she loved it a great deal for a time in loving it at all, for that was her nature.

She went to several other garden-parties, and found them more amusing than her own, although the young men that frequented them were quite uninteresting: even Beverly scintillated by contrast, for he, at least, had a temper; these more civilised youths appeared to have no emotions whatever.

Peele Manor was full of company all summer. Patience found the married men more entertaining than the younger ones, although they usually made love to her; but after she had outgrown her surprise and disapproval of their direct and business-like methods, it amused her to fence with them. They had more self-control than Beverly Peele, and were a trifle more skilful, but their general attitude was, as she expressed it to Hal: “There’s no time to lose, dontcherknow! Life is short, and New York’s a busy place. What the deuce is there to wait for? Sentiment? Oh, sentiment be hanged! It takes too much time.”

Hal was an accomplished hostess, and allowed her guests little time to make love or to yawn. There were constant riding and driving and yachting parties, picnics and tennis and golf. In the evening they danced, romped, or had impromptu “Varieties.”

Patience was fascinated with the life, although she still had the sense of being an alien, and moments of terrible loneliness. But she was too much of a girl not to take a girl’s delight in the dash and glitter and picturesqueness of society. She was not popular, although she quickly outgrew any external points of difference; but the essential difference was felt and resented.

On the whole there was concord between herself and her mother-in-law. Mr. Peele she barely knew. His family saw little of him. He had not attended the wedding. When Patience had arrived at Peele Manor after her trip, he had kissed her formally, and remarked that he hoped she “would make something of Beverly.”

He was an undersized man with scant iron grey hair whose tint seemed to have invaded his complexion. His lips were folded on each other so closely, that Patience watched them curiously at table: when eating they merely moved apart as if regulated by a spring; their expression never changed. His eyes were dark and rather dull, his nose straight and fine, his hands small and very white. He was not an eloquent man at the bar; he owed his immense success to his mastery of the law, to a devilish subtlety, and to his skill at playing upon the weak points of human nature. No man could so adroitly upset an “objection,” no man so terrify a witness. It was said of him that he played upon a jury with the consummate art of a great musician for his instrument. He rarely lost a case.

His voice was very soft, his manners exquisite. He was never known to lose his temper. His cold aristocratic face looked the sarcophagus of buried passions.

He deeply resented his children’s failure to inherit his brain, but in his inordinate pride of birth, forgave them, for they bore the name of Peele. Hal was his favourite, for she, at least, was bright.

May admired her sister-in-law “to death,” as she phrased it, and bored her with attentions. Patience preferred Honora, who puzzled and repelled her, but assuredly could not be called superficial, although her claims to intellectuality were based upon her preference for George Eliot and George Meredith to the lighter order of fiction, and upon her knowledge of the history of the Catholic Church.

One day, as Patience was crossing the lawn in front of the house, May called to her from the hall, beckoning excitedly. She and Hal and Honora were standing by a table on which was a saucer half full of what appeared to be dead leaves. As Patience entered, May lifted the saucer to her sister-in-law’s nostrils.

“Why? What?” asked Patience, then paused.

“Oh,—what a faint, delicious, far-away perfume,” she said after a moment. “What is it?”

May dropped the saucer and clapped her hands. Hal laughed as if much gratified. Honora’s eyes wandered to the landscape with an absent and introspective regard.

“What is it?” asked Patience again.

“Why, it’s dried strawberry leaves,” said May. “Don’t you know that they say in the South that you can’t perceive their perfume unless every drop of blood in your veins is blue? The common people can’t smell it at all.”

Patience blushed and moved her head disdainfully, but she thrilled with pleasure.

“Won’t you come up and see my room?” said Honora, softly. “You’ve never called on me yet, and I think I have a very pretty room.”

“Oh, I’ll be delighted,” said Patience, who was half consciously avoiding Beverly: Peele Manor was without guests for a few hours.

“Now you must tell me if you like my room as much as you do me,” said Honora, who looked more like an angel than ever, in a white mull frock and blue sash. Her manner to Patience was evenly affectionate, with an undercurrent of subtle sadness and reproach.

As she opened the door of her room, Patience exclaimed with admiration. The ceiling was blue, frescoed with golden stars, the walls with celestial visions. A blue carpet strewn with lilies covered the floor, fluttering curtains of blue silk and white muslin, the old windows. From the dome of the brass bedstead mull curtains hung like clouds. A faint odour of incense mixed with the sweet perfumes of summer.

“Is it not beautiful?” said Honora, in a rapt voice. “It makes me think of heaven. Does it not you? It was dear Aunt Honora’s last Christmas gift to me. It was so sweet of her, for of course I am only the poor cousin.”

Patience looked at her, wondering, as she had often done, whether the girl were a fool, or deeper than any one of her limited experience. Honora rarely talked, but she had reduced listening to a fine art, and was a favourite in society. Whether she had nothing to say, or whether she had divined that her poverty would make eloquence unpardonable, Patience had not determined. One thing was patent, however: she managed her aunt, and her wants were never ignored.

“Now,” she said softly, “I am going to show you something that I don’t show to every one—but you are dear Beverly’s wife.” She folded a screen and revealed an altar covered with cloth of silver, antique candlesticks, and heavy silver cross.

“My faith which sustains me in all the trials of life,” whispered Honora, crossing herself. “Ah, if I could have made dear Beverly a convert. Once he seemed balancing—but he slipped away. I have tried to win Hal and May to the true faith too; but we were always so much more to each other—Beverly and I,—playmates from childhood. I think I know him better than anybody in the world.”

Patience felt an interloper, a thief and an alien, but out of her new schooling answered carelessly: “Oh, he is awfully fond of you, but I don’t think he is inclined to be religious. This room is too sanctified to speak above a whisper in. Come to my room and talk to me awhile.”

Honora opened a door by the head of her bed, and they passed through a large lavatory, then through Beverly’s room to that of the bride, a square room whose windows framed patches of Hudson and Palisade, and daintily furnished in lilac and white. A photograph of Miss Tremont hung between the windows. On one side were shelves containing John Sparhawk’s library.

Beverly arose from a deep chair, where he had been smoking and glowering upon the Hudson. Patience caught Honora firmly by the waist and pushed her into the most comfortable chair in the room, then with much skill engaged her in a discussion with Beverly upon the subject of music, the one subject besides horse which interested him.

V

In August the girls went to Newport, and Patience became very tired of her mother-in-law. May returned engaged to a wealthy Cuban, who had been dancing attendance on her blondinitude for some months past, and Mrs. Peele became so amiable that she forgot to lecture her daughter-in-law or irritate her with the large vigilance of her polaric eyes. The girls left again for Lenox and Tuxedo. On the first of January the family moved to their town house for the winter.

Patience was alone with her husband.

During the first three days of this new connubial solitude it snowed heavily. Beverly could not ride nor drive, and wandered restlessly between the stable and the library, where his wife sat before the blazing logs.

There were some two thousand volumes at Peele Manor. Patience had had no time to read since her marriage, but on the morning of the family’s departure she made for the library, partly in self defence, partly with pleasurable anticipation. She hoped that Beverly would succumb to the charms of the stable, where there were many congenial spirits and a comfortable parlour; but she had barely discovered Heine’s prose and had read but ten pages of the “Reisebilder,” when the door opened, and he came in. She merely nodded, and went on reading. She was barely conscious of his presence, for Heine is a magician, and she was already under his spell.

“Well, you might shut up your book and talk to me,” said Beverly, pettishly, flinging himself into a chair opposite her. “This is a nice way to treat a fellow on a stormy day.”

“Oh, you read too,” murmured Patience.

“No, I will not. I want to talk to you.”

Patience closed the book over her finger and looked at him impatiently. Then an idea occurred to her, and she spoke with her usual impulsiveness.

“Look, Beverly,” she said, “you and I have to spend many months alone together, and if we are to make a success of matrimony we must be companions, and to be companions we must have similar tastes. Now I’ll make a bargain with you: I’ll try to like horses if you’ll try to like books. On pleasant days I’ll ride and drive with you, and when it storms we’ll read together here in the library. I am sure you will like it after a time. If you find it tiresome to read to yourself I’ll read aloud. I don’t mind, and then we can talk it over.”

“All right,” said Beverly. “Anything you say. What’s that you’re reading now?”

“Heine’s prose. He is wonderful—such a style and such sardonic wit, and such exquisite thoughts. I’ll begin all over again. Now light a cigar and make yourself comfortable.”

For a half hour she read aloud, and then Mr. Peele remarked,—

“Hang it! The skating is spoiled for a week.”

“Oh, Beverly, you haven’t been listening.”

“Well, I don’t like it very much. He skips around so. Besides, I always did hate Germans. Give me America every time.”

“Well, read something American then,” said Patience, crossly.

“You find something and read it to me. I like to hear your voice, even if I can’t keep my mind on it. Wait a while though. I guess I’ll go and see how the stable is getting on.”

He bent down to kiss his wife, but she was once more absorbed, and did not see him. He snatched the book from her with an oath and flung it across the room. She sprang to her feet with flashing eyes, pushed him aside with no gentle hand, and ran after the book.

“You sha’n’t read that book!” he cried. “The idea of forgetting your husband for a book—_a book_! You are a lovely wife! You are a disgrace to the name! You would rather read than kiss your husband! I’ll lock this room up, damned if I don’t.”

“I’ll go and live with Miss Beale and do Temperance work,” sobbed Patience. “I won’t live with you.”

“Oh, you won’t—what? What did I marry you for? My God! What did I marry you for? My life is hell, for I’m no fool. I know you don’t love me. You married me for my money.”

“I wish I had,” she exclaimed passionately, then controlled herself. “I hope we are not going to squabble in the usual commonplace way. I shall not, at any rate. If you lose your temper, you can have the quarrel all to yourself. I shall not pay any attention to you. Now go out to the stable and cool off, and when you come back I’ll read something else to you.”

“Do you love me?”

“Oh, yes—yes.”

And Beverly disappeared, slamming the door behind him.

“I wonder if any one on earth has such a temper,” she thought. “And people believe that vulgarity and lack of control are confined to the lower classes! What is the matter with civilisation anyhow? I can only explain my own remarkable aberration in this way: youthful love is a compound of curiosity, a surplus of vitality, and inherited sentimentalism. It is likely to arrive just after the gamut of children’s diseases has run its course. Of course the disease is merely a complacent state of the system until the germ arrives, which same is the first attractive and masterful man. All diseases run their course, however. I could not be more insensible to Beverly Peele’s dead ancestors out in the vault than I am to him. No woman is capable of loving at nineteen. She is nothing but an overgrown child, a chaos of emotions and imagination. There ought to be a law passed that no woman could marry until she was twenty-eight. Then, perhaps a few of us would feel less like—Well, there is nothing to do but make the best of it, regard life as a highly seasoned comedy, in which one is little more than a spectator, after all—and at present I have Heine.”

Beverly did not return for an hour. When he did she rose at once, and running her eye along the shelves, selected a volume of Webster’s Speeches.

“You like politics,” she said; “and all of us should read the great works of our great men. I’ll read the famous Seventh of March Speech.”

And she did, Beverly listening with considerable attention. When she had finished he remarked enthusiastically,—

“Do you know what that speech has made me make up my mind to do? I’m going to run for the Senate, and make speeches like that myself.”

Patience merely stared at him. She wondered if he were really something more than a fool; if there was a sort of post-graduate course.

“What makes you look at me like that? Don’t you think I can?”

“Well—” She hardly knew what to say.

“Well! Is that the way you encourage a fellow? You are a nice wife. Here my father has been at me all my life to do something, and just as soon as I make up my mind, my wife laughs at me.”

“I didn’t laugh at you.”

“Well, it’s all the same. If I never do anything, it’ll be your fault.”

“Go to the Senate just as fast as ever you can get there. And you might as well spend the rest of the day studying Webster; but suppose you read to yourself for a while: my throat is tired.”

“I don’t like to read to myself.”

“Well, anyhow, I hear Lawson coming. Luncheon is ready.”

The table in the dining-room had been divested of its leaves, and the young couple sat only a few feet apart. The room had once been a banqueting-hall. It was very large and dark. The white light filtered meagrely through the small panes. The wind moaned through the naked elms.

“The country is awfully dull in winter,” remarked Patience. “I wish we were in town.”

“That’s a beautiful speech to make to a husband. I don’t mind so long as you are here.”

“Of course I am deeply flattered,” and she smiled upon him. There seemed nothing else to do.

“Damn it!” cried Beverly, “this steak is as thin as a plate and burnt to a cinder. Patience, I do wish you’d give some of your attention to housekeeping and less to books. It is your place to see that things are properly cooked, now that Honora is gone.”

“Oh, dear. I don’t know anything about cooking, or housekeeping, either.”

“Well, then, I’d be much obliged if you’d learn as quickly as possible. Take this steak out,” he said to the maid, “and bring some cold beef or ham. Damn it! I might have known that when Honora went away I’d have nothing fit to eat, with this new cook.”

But Patience refused to continue the conversation, and when the ham and beef came he ate of them with such relish that his good-nature returned as speedily as it had departed.

During the afternoon the scene of the morning was repeated with variations, and the same might be said of the two following days. Then came an interval of sleighing and skating. Then rain turned the snow to slush, and once again Beverly exhibited the characteristics of a caged tiger.

“I shall have nervous prostration before the winter is over,” thought Patience, who was still determined to take the situation humorously, still refused to face her former self. “I do wish the family would come back, mother-in-law and all.”

Occasionally, despite Beverly’s indignant protests, she went to town for the day, and shopped or paid calls with Hal. On one occasion they went to see Rosita. That “beautiful young prima donna of ever increasing popularity” wore black gauze over gold-coloured tights, and acted and sang and danced and allured with consummate art. The opera house was two-thirds crowded with men, although there was the usual matinée contingent of girls and young married women.

“Well,” thought Patience, “she’s way ahead of me, for she’s made a success of herself, at least, and is not bothered with scruples and regrets.”

The winter dragged along as slowly as if time had lamed the old man, then fallen asleep. The relations between Patience and Beverly became very strained. His frequent tempers were alternated by sulks. He was genuinely unhappy, for limited as he was, mentally and spiritually, he was very human; and in his primitive way he loved his wife.

Patience’s resolution to go through life as a cynical humourist, deaf and blind to the great wants of her nature, died hard, but it died at last. Monotony accentuated fact, and the time came when pretence failed her, and she visibly shrank from his lightest caress. The tide of horror and loathing had risen slowly, but definitely. He threatened to kill her, to commit suicide, to get a divorce; but his threats did not disturb her. He was too weak to kill himself, too proud to make himself ridiculous in the divorce courts, and too much in love to put her beyond his reach. What sustained her was the hope that his passion would die a natural death, and that they would then go their diverse ways as other married people did,—that had come to seem to her the most blessed meaning of the holy state of matrimony. Then she could enjoy her books, and he would permit her to spend the winters in New York, or in travel.

Beverly’s affections, however, showed no sign of dissolution.

VI

One afternoon in March, Patience, glancing out of the library window, saw Hal coming up the lawn from the path that led down the slope to the station. She suppressed a war-whoop with which she and Rosita had been used to awake the echoes of the Californian hills, opened the window, and vaulted out.

“Well,” cried Miss Peele, as Patience ran toward her, “you do look glad to see me, sure enough. Bev can’t be very exciting, for you don’t look as if it were me particularly—just somebody. Oh, matrimony! matrimony! I envy the women that have solved the problem in some other way—the journalists and artists, and authors and actresses, and even the suffragists, God rest them. Hello, there’s Bev. He looks as if he were about to cry. What have you been doing to him?”

“I left him writing an order for some new kind of horse-feed,” said Patience, indifferently. Her husband stood at the window, staring gloomily at the beaming faces. When the girls entered the room he had gone.

“He looks as if he had just been let out of the dark room. Do you beat him? What do you suppose my mother will say?”

“Oh, I suppose he’s bored too. You see it’s nearly three months now. I tried to make him read, but after the third day he went to sleep.”

Hal drew a low chair to the fire, close to the one Patience occupied. She laughed merrily.

“Fancy your trying to make Bev intellectual! That would be a good subject for a one-act farce. Well, I’ve come up here to tell you something, and to talk it over. I, too, am contemplating matrimony.”

“Oh, don’t!” cried Patience.

“I believe that is usually the advice of married people, but the world goes on marrying itself just the same. But my problem is much more complicated than the average, for there are two men in the question.”

“Two? You don’t mean to say you don’t know your own mind?”

“That is exactly the fact in the case. You remember Reginald Wynne? Well, Patience, I do like that man. I never liked any man one tenth as much. I might say he’s the only serious man I’ve ever met, the only one, to put it in another way, that I ever could take seriously as a man. He has brains—he’s a lawyer, you know, and they say very fine things of him—and he is so kind, and _strong_. When I am with him I don’t feel frivolous and worldly and one of a dozen. If I have any better nature and any apology for a brain, they are on top then. He is the last sort of man I ever thought I’d fall in love with, but it takes us some years to become acquainted with ourselves, doesn’t it? I do respect him so, and it is such a novel sensation. He even makes me read. Fancy! And I’ve even promised him that I won’t read any more French novels, excepting those he selects, nor smoke cigarettes. So, you see, I am in love.

“But, Patience,” she continued with tragic emphasis, “he hasn’t a red—and I know I’d be miserable, poor. When papa saw which way the wind was blowing, he took me into the library and told me that although he made fifty thousand dollars a year, we spent nearly all of it, and that he should not have much to leave besides his life insurance—one hundred thousand—which of course would go to mamma. It is a matter of honour never to sell this place, and the revenue from the farm—which is to go to Beverly—would keep it up in a small way. The town house is to be May’s and mine; but what will that amount to? May and I have always pretty well understood that if we want to keep on having the things that habit has made a necessity to us, we must marry rich men! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

“Well, the other man?”

“He has appeared on the scene lately. He is not the usual alternative by any means, for he is very attractive in his way. He has the manners of the man of the world, a _fin de siècle_ brain, and the devil in his eye. He is rather good-looking and tremendously good form. And, my dear, he has three cold millions. Think what I should be with three millions! Fancy me in Boston on three or four hundred dollars a month. Oh, Patience, what shall I do?” And Hal, the most undemonstrative of women, laid her head on Patience’s knee and sobbed bitterly.

“I had to come to see you, Patience,” she continued after a moment. “I have no one else; I could never have said a word of this to mamma or May. And I like you better than any one in the world except Reginald Wynne. And you seem to understand things. Do tell me what to do.”

“Do this: Be true to your ideals. If love means, and has always meant more to you than anything else in the world, marry Reginald Wynne. If money and power and luxury are the very essentials of happiness to you, marry the other man. No temporary aberration can permanently divert one’s paramount want from its natural course. As soon as the novelty has gone, the ego swings back to its old point of view as surely as water does that has been temporarily dammed. There is only one thing that persists, and that is the ideal,—that habit of mind which is bred of heredity and environment, even where care or consciousness is lacking. It is as relentless and pitiless as the law of cause and effect. I believe it would outlive a very leprosy of the soul. And it makes no difference whether that ideal be great or small, high or low, its hold is precisely the same, for it is individuality itself. Rosita is happy because she has realised her ideal. Miss Tremont was happy because she lived up to hers. Miss Beale was supremely satisfied with herself when she let a man die whom she might have saved by smirching her ideals. The religionists are happy generally, not through communion with the presiding deity, as they imagine, but because they have arbitrarily created a sort of spiritual Blackstone whom they delight to obey. The author is happy when he toils, even without hope of reward. Martyrs have known ecstasy—But one could go on for a week. Don’t marry Wynne if you feel that you would be unhappy in poverty after the first few months; and if you feel that great wealth without love would be misery, don’t marry the other.”

“Oh, I could like Latimer Burr well enough,” said Hal, staring gloomily at the fire; “and after a time I suppose I’d forget. You see, I have been in love so short a time that the wrench would be a good deal less violent than the wrench from luxury—I’d soon get over it, I expect. But I do like him—I never thought I could feel like this.”

Patience fondled the sleek head, but she was not in a mood to feel in sympathy with love. The only thing that to her seemed of paramount importance was to fix a clear eye on the future.

“You see,” she said, “the present is ever with us, and the past recedes farther and farther. If the rich man can give you what you most want, time will make you forget the very sensation of love. If you marry Wynne and the love goes, you will have equal difficulty to recall it, and nothing to compensate in the present.”

“I’m not afraid that it would go; but I know that I should be thoroughly miserable poor, and make him miserable too. I do love it all so—all that money means—why, one can’t even be well groomed without money. It has gone to make up nine-tenths of my composition; the other tenth is only a bit of miserable wax. But I love this new feeling, and I never believed that anything could be so sweet. Oh, dear; I’ll have to dry up. Here comes Bev.”

“Remember this,” said Patience, “and let it console you: however you feel or are torn, you’ll do one thing only,—follow along the line of least resistance.”

Beverly entered and kissed his sister affectionately. Her back was to the light, and he did not notice her swollen eyes.

“Well, you are looking hilarious,” she remarked in her usual flippant tones. “Has Tammany gone lame, or Mrs. Langtry refused to take her five bars?”

“My wife doesn’t love me!” Beverly had brooded upon his wrongs for two months. Hal’s words were as a match to a mine.

“Oh!” exclaimed Patience, springing to her feet, “don’t let us have a scene for Hal’s benefit. Do cultivate a little good taste, if good sense is too far beyond you.”

Her words were not soothing, and Beverly exploded in one of his most violent passions. He tore up and down the room, banging his fist alternately on the table, the mantel, and the books, and once he hit the panel of a door so heavy a blow that it sprang. Patience sat down and turned her back. Hal endeavoured to stop him; but he had found a listener, and would discharge his mind of its accumulated virus. He told the tale of the winter in spasmodic gusts, hung and fringed with oaths. Finally he flung himself out of the room, shouting all the way across the hall.

For a moment there was an intense and meaning silence between the two women; then Hal stood up and laid her palms to her head.

“Patience!” she said, “Patience! this is awful. What have I done? Oh, does it really mean anything? I have seen Bev go into tempers all my life—but—Tell me, please—does this really mean anything—”

“Whether it does or does not it need not worry you beyond warning you against mistakes on your own account. I married with my eyes open, and I can take care of myself. Don’t marry your rich man unless you like him well enough to pretend to like him a good deal more. If you do, you’ll end by loathing him and yourself—and what is more, he’ll know it.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think I am as intense as you are—but what do you suppose makes Beverly such a wild animal? We are none of us like that, and never have been, as far as I know, although some of the old boys were pretty gay, not to say lawless. But for two or three generations we seem to have been a fairly well-conducted lot. Beverly is almost a freak.”

Patience crossed the room, and lifting down a volume of Darwin’s “Descent of Man” read from the chapter on Civilised Nations:—

“‘With mankind some of the worst dispositions which occasionally, without any assignable cause, make their appearance in families, may perhaps be reversions to a savage state from which we are not removed by very many generations.’”

VII

Two weeks later Patience received a letter from Hal which induced no surprise.

The die is cast [it read]. Reginald Wynne has gone back to Boston, and I am going to marry Latimer Burr. On the first of April we sail for Europe—mamma and May and I—to get our things.

Don’t imagine that I am doing the novel-heroine act, and sprinkling my pillow o’ nights. I did feel terribly, and I’ll never love any other man; but the thing is done, and done for the best, and that is the end of it. What you said about following along the line of least resistance is as sure as love and fate and a good many other things; for what Latimer Burr can give me I want more than what Reginald Wynne can give me, and it drew me like a magnet. And the other thing you said is equally true,—that the only joy in life is to pursue your ideals to the bitter end. Mine are not lofty, but they are _me_, and that is all there is to it. I shall not weep it out, because I’ve no beauty to lose, and weeping does no earthly good, anyway. If it would give Wynne Burr’s fortune I’d drown New York.

We’ll be back on the first of June. We’re only going over to order things. I wish you joy of Honora. It’s too bad Bev is so much in love with you, or you might switch him off on to her. Oh, Patience, dear, you don’t know how much I’ve thought about you. It hurts me _hard_ to think that you are unhappy. I feel as guilty as a murderer, but really I thought you’d get along. So many women had been in love with Bev, I thought you would be, too. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that women sometimes had a soul. If I had known as much then as I do now I’d have done all I could to keep you apart, for Beverly Peele certainly has not the attenuated ghost of a soul.

But Patience, dear, do stand it out. Don’t, _don’t_ get a divorce. Remember that all over the world women are as miserable as you are, and as I might be if I would let myself go. Now, at least, you have compensations; and when I am married I’ll do everything I can to make life gay and pleasant for you; but don’t make a horrid vulgar newspaper scandal and leave yourself without resources. This world is a pretty good place after all when you are on top, but it must be hell underneath.

Lovingly HAL.

VIII

The day Mrs. Peele and her daughters sailed for France Mr. Peele and his niece returned to the Manor. Honora kissed Patience on either cheek.

“Oh, I am so glad to come back to my lovely room, and to see you, Patience dear,” she said wearily. “We have had such a gay winter, and I am so tired. Dear me, how fresh and sweet you look in that white frock. I just long to get into thin things.”

When Mr. Peele came up in the evening he narrowed his lids as he kissed Patience, and regarded her critically. “Well, how does Beverly wear in a three months’ _tête-à-tête_?” he asked. “Gad! I shouldn’t care to try it.”

“Oh,” she said flushing, “we didn’t talk much. He had the farm and the horses to attend to, you know, and I had the library. Oh, I am so glad you have that library.”

He laughed aloud, with the harsh notes of a voice unused to such music.

“I see you have had a Paul and Virginia time, as Hal would say. I’m sorry you’ve put your foot in it, for even you can’t make anything of him; but make the best of it. Don’t leave him—Hal has told me something, you see. It was best that she should. There must be no scandal. If he makes too great a nuisance of himself come to me; and if he cuts off your allowance at any time just let me know, and I’ll see that you have all the money you want. He doesn’t own the farm. I like you. You’re a clever woman. If you’d been my daughter I’d have been proud of you.”

And whether he really found pleasure in his daughter-in-law’s society, or whether he merely thought it politic to lighten her burden, from that time until the return of the family he devoted his evenings to her. He was deeply read, and Patience, after years of mental loneliness, was grateful for his companionship, although personally he antagonised her. He was a mentality without heart or soul, and she knew that he would sacrifice her as readily as he accepted her if it better suited his purpose.

She clung to Honora during the day and read aloud to her in the Tea House, while that devoted young Catholic embroidered for the village church or sewed for the poor of her beloved priest. Father O’Donovan, a young man with a healthy serious face and a clear eye, frequently joined them. Every morning the girls rode or sailed. Beverly frequently made one of the party, and Patience and Honora exercised all their tact to keep him in good humour. In the evening he played duets with his cousin. Her touch was as light and hollow as an avalanche of icicles from the roof, he pounded the piano as if it were a prize fighter’s chest.

One evening Patience did not go downstairs until a few moments before dinner was announced. As she entered the library she saw that a stranger stood at the window with Mr. Peele. The priest was present, and she shook hands with him before going over to greet the stranger and her father-in-law. While she was agreeing with him that Honora in her white robe and blue sash looked exactly like an angel, the man at the window turned, and she recognised Mr. Field. She ran forward and held out her hand.

“Oh! Oh!” she cried. “I’m so glad to see you again. I’ve wanted and wanted to.”

He took her hand, smiling, but regarded her with the keen gaze she so well remembered.

“Bless my soul,” he said, “but you have changed. It is not too much to say that you have improved. Even the freckles have gone, I see. I thought I was to make a newspaper woman of you. I felt rather cross when you married. But this life certainly agrees with you. You look quite the _grande dame_—quite—ah! Good evening, sir,” as Beverly entered and was presented. Mr. Field darted a glance from one to the other, his mouth twitching sardonically.

He sat at Patience’s right during dinner, and they talked constantly. Beverly was sulky, and said nothing. Mr. Peele rarely talked at table, even to Patience. Honora and the priest conversed in a solemn undertone. It is doubtful if two courses had been served before the terrible old man understood the situation.

“There’s tragedy brewing here,” he thought, grimly. “That fellow has the temper of a fiend in the skull of a fool, and this girl is not the compound I take her to be if she lives a lie very long for the sake of champagne and truffles. I’d give a good deal to foresee the outcome. Unless I’m all wrong there’ll be a two column story on the first page of the ‘Day’ some fine morning. Well, she’ll have its support, right or wrong. She’s a brick, and he’s the sort of fellow a man always wants to kick.—What is that?” he asked of the priest, who had begun a story that suddenly appealed to Mr. Field’s editorial instinct.

“A physician over at Mount Vernon, who stands very high in his profession, has been accused of poisoning his wife. She died in great agony, and her mother insisted upon a post-mortem. Her stomach was full of strychnine. He maintains that she threatened to commit suicide repeatedly, and that he is innocent; but opinion is against him, and people seem to think that the jury will convict him. I knew both, and I feel positive of his innocence.”

“Undoubtedly he is innocent,” said Mr. Field. “No physician of ordinary cleverness would bungle like that. Strychnine! absurd! Why, there are poisons known to all physicians and chemists which absolutely defy analysis. I don’t doubt that more than one doctor has put his wife out of the way, and the world none the wiser.”

“Is that true?” said Patience, eagerly, leaning forward. Her curious mind leapt at any new fact. “What are they like?”

“That I can’t say. That is a little secret known to the fraternity only, although I don’t doubt they give their friends the benefit of their knowledge occasionally. Indubitably a large proportion of murderers are never discovered—unless they discover themselves, like the guilty pair in ‘Thérèse Raquin.’”

“Oh, they belonged to the cruder order of civilisation,” said Patience, lightly. “I am sure that if I committed a murder, I should not be bothered by conscience if I had felt myself justified in committing it. It seems to me that if the development of the intellect means anything it means the casting out of inherited prejudices. Of course I don’t believe in murder,” she continued, carried away as ever by the pleasure of abstract reasoning, “but if a man of the world and of brains, after due deliberation, makes way with a person who is fatal to his happiness or his career, then I think he must have sufficient development of mental muscle to scorn remorse. The highest intelligences are anarchistic.”

“Undoubtedly there are those that have reached that point of civilisation,” said Mr. Field, “but for my part, I have not. Although I keep abreast of this extraordinary generation, my roots are planted pretty far down in the old one. But assuredly if I did feel the disposition to murder, and succumbed, I’d cover up my tracks.”

“Do these poisons give pain? Are they mineral or vegetable?”

As Mr. Field was about to answer, a peculiar expression crossed his face, and Patience, following his eyes, looked at Beverly. Her husband was staring at her with his heavy brows together, the corners of his mouth drawn down in an ugly sneer. To her horror and disgust she felt the blood fly to her hair. At the same time she became conscious that Mr. Peele, the priest, and Honora were exchanging glances of surprise. Beverly gave an abrupt unpleasant laugh, and pushing his chair violently back, left the room. Patience glanced appealingly about, then dropped her glance to her plate. She felt as if the floor were dissolving beneath her feet.

IX

A week later, after a pleasant morning in the Tea House with Honora and Father O’Donovan, she left it to go to the library. As she turned the corner of the house she saw Beverly standing close to one of the windows.

“What are you doing there?” she asked in surprise.

His brows were lowered and his skin looked black, as it always did when his angry passions were risen.

“I’ve been watching you and that priest,” he said savagely, following her as she retreated hastily out of earshot of the people in the Tea House. “I saw you exchanging glances with him! Now I know why you want to know so much about poisons—”

“Are you insane?” she cried. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“No, I’m not insane—by God! You’re in love with that priest, and I know it. But I’m on the watch—”

“Oh,—you—you—” stammered Patience. She could not speak. Her face was crimson with anger and disgust. In her husband’s eyes she was an image of guilt. He burst into a sneering laugh.

“You think I’m a fool, I suppose, because I don’t know anything about books. But a woman said once that I had the instincts of the devil, and I’ve no idea of—”

Patience found her tongue. “You poor fool,” she said. “It was ridiculous of me to pay any attention whatever to you; but I am not used to being insulted, even by you. And remember that I am not used to any display of imagination in you. As for _love_—” the scorn with which she uttered the word made even him wince—“do not worry. You have made me loathe the thing. I could not fall in love with a god. Don’t have the least fear that I shall be unfaithful to you. I couldn’t!”

She walked away, leaving Beverly trembling and speechless. When she reached her room she locked the doors and sobbed wildly.

“Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?” she thought. “I can’t stand it any longer. I believe I really would kill him if I stayed. I feel as if my nature were in ruins. I hate myself! I loathe myself! I’ll leave this very day!”

But she had said the same thing many times. Why does a woman hesitate long before she leaves the man who has made life shocking to her? Indolence, abhorrence of scandal, shame to confess that she has made a failure of her life, above all, lack of private fortune and the uncertainty of self-support. For whatever the so-called advanced woman may preach, woman has in her the instinct of dependence on man, transmitted through the ages, and a sexual horror of the arena. Patience let the days slip by, hoping, as women will, that the problem would solve itself, that Beverly Peele would die, or become indifferent, or that she would drift naturally into some other sphere.

X

Mrs. Peele and the girls returned with the June roses; the house was filled with guests at once. The Cuban had gone to his islands for the summer, and May chose to wear the willow and occasionally to weep upon Patience’s unsympathetic shoulder; but as frequently she consoled herself with the transient flirtation. Hal, apparently, was her old gay self. She did not mention Wynne’s name, and Patience was equally reticent.

“I should be the last to remind any woman of what she wished to forget,” she thought. “And love—what does it amount to anyhow? If He came I believe I should hate him, because once I felt something like passion for him too.”

She had looked forward with some curiosity to meeting Latimer Burr. He also had been in Paris. He followed his lady home on the next steamer, and immediately upon his return came to Peele Manor. Patience did not meet him until dinner. She sat beside him, and at once became acutely aware that he was a man of superlative physical magnetism. She proscribed him accordingly—magnetism was a repellent force at this stage of her development. She was rather surprised that she could feel it again, so completely had Beverly’s evaporated.

Burr was a tall heavily built man about forty years old. He carried himself and wore his clothes as only a New York man can. His face was florid and well modelled, his mouth and half closed eyes sensual. But his voice and manners were charming. He appeared to be deeply in love with Hal, and his voice became a caress when he spoke to her. Patience did not like his type, but she forgave him individually because he was fond of Hal and appeared to possess brains.

She fell into conversation with him, and his manner would have led her to believe that while she spoke neither Hal nor any other woman existed. To this Patience gave little attention: she had met that manner before; it was pleasant, and she missed it when lacking; but she had practised it too often herself to feel more than its passing fascination. His eyes, however, were more insistently eloquent than his manner, and their eloquence was of the order that induced discomposure.

Patience at times looked very lovely, and she was at her best to-night. Her white skin was almost transparent, and the wine had touched her cheeks with pink. The sadness of her spirit had softened her eyes. Her gown of peacock blue gauze fitted her round elastic figure very firmly, and her bare throat and neck and arms were statuesque. She had by no means the young married woman look, but she had some time since acquired an “air,” much to Hal’s satisfaction. To all appearances she was a girl, but her figure was womanly. Although about five feet six, and built on a more generous plan than the average New York woman, she walked with all their spring and lightness of foot. Her round waist looked smaller than it was; she never laced. Lately she had discovered that she “had an arm,” as Hal would have phrased it, and the discovery had given her such satisfaction that she had forgotten her troubles for the hour, and sent for a dressmaker to take the sleeves out of her evening gowns.

Mr. Burr also discovered it, and murmured his approval as caressingly as were he addressing his prospective bride.

“The milk-white woman!” he ejaculated softly. “The milk-white woman!”

“Can’t you get any farther?” asked Patience. “If you were a poet now, that would make a good first line for a rhapsody—to Hal, for instance.”

He laughed indulgently. “How awfully bright you are. I am afraid of you.” But he did not look in the least afraid. “You are to be my sister, you know. We must become friends at once.”

“And flattery is the quickest and surest way of establishing the fraternal relation? Well, you are quite right; but just look at my hair for a change, will you?” (She felt as if her skin must be covered with red spots.) “Or my profile. They are also good points.”

“They are exquisite. I have rarely seen a woman so beautiful.”

“Dear! Dear! How relieved you must be to feel that you can keep your hand in without straying too far from Peele Manor. And there is also Honora.”

“I don’t admire Miss Mairs. She is too tall, and her nose is too long.”

“Poor dear Honora! But how well you understand women! What tact! I like you so much better than I did before.”

He laughed again in his indulgent way. “You mustn’t guy me. It is your fault if I pay you too many compliments. You are a very fascinating woman.”

“You are wonderfully entertaining. What must you be when you are in love! What do you and Hal talk about?”

“Isn’t Hal a dear little girl? I do love her. I never loved a woman so much in my life—never proposed before. She is so bright. She keeps me amused all the time. I always said I’d never marry a woman that didn’t amuse me, and I’ve kept my word. It isn’t so much what she says, don’t you know, as the way she says it. Dear little girl!”

On this subject they could agree, and Patience kept him to it as long as possible.

After dinner Burr went with Mr. Peele into the library. Patience, passing through the room, found them talking earnestly upon the great question of the day,—the financial future of the country. She paused a moment, then sat down. To her surprise she found that Burr was master of his subject, and possessed of a gift of words which fell little short of eloquence.

The argument lasted an hour, during which Patience sat with her elbows on the table, her chin on her folded hands, her eager eyes glancing from one to the other. Occasionally she smiled responsively as Burr made some felicitous phrase. When the discussion was over, Mr. Peele left the room. Burr arose at once and seated himself beside her.

“I never talked so well,” he said. “You inspired me;” and he took her hand in the matter-of-fact manner she knew so well.

“You talked quite as well before you saw me—”

“I knew you were there—”

“Kindly let me have my hand. I have only two—”

“Nonsense! Let me hold your hand. I want to! I am going to—Why are you—”

“Haven’t you Hal’s hand?”

“Oh, my God! You don’t expect me to go through life holding one woman’s hand? Hal is the most fascinating woman in the world, and I love her—but I want you to let me love you, too.”

“It is quite immaterial to me whether you love me or not; and, I think, if you want plain English, that you are a scoundrel.”

“Oh, come, come. You—_you_—must know more of the world than to talk like that. Why am I a scoundrel?” He looked much amused.

“You are engaged to one woman and are making love to another.”

“Well, what of that so long as she doesn’t know it? I shall be the most uxorious and indulgent of husbands—but faithful—that is not to be expected.”

“You must have great confidence in me. Suppose I describe this scene and conversation to Hal?”

“You will not,—not out of regard for me, but because you love Hal—dear little girl! And you are one of the few women devoid of the cat instincts. That long-legged girl, now, has a whole tiger inside of her, but you have only the faults of the big woman. I hope you have their weaknesses.”

“Well, you shall never know if I have. Please let go my hand.”

He flung it from him. “Oh, well,” he said, haughtily, “I hoped we should be friends, but if you will have it otherwise, so be it;” and he stalked out, and devoted himself to Hal for the rest of the evening.

XI

“Funny world,” thought Patience. She shrugged her beautiful young shoulders cynically, and went forth to do her duty by the guests. As she passed out of the front door to join some one of the scattered groups on the lawns, she heard a voice which made her pause and tap her forehead with her finger. It was a rich deep voice, with a vibration in it, and a light suggestion of brogue. She turned to the drawing-room, whence it came. A man in riding clothes was talking to Mrs. Peele, who was listening with a bend of the head that meant much to Patience’s trained eye. The man had an athletic nervous figure, suggestive of great virility and suppressed force, although it was carried with a fine repose. The thick black hair on his large finely shaped head glinted here and there with silver. His profile was aquiline, delicately cut and very strong, his mouth, under the slight moustache, neither full nor thin, and both mobile and firm, the lips beautifully cut. The eyes, deeply set, were not large, and were of an indefinite blue grey, but piercing, restless, kind, and humourous. There were lines about them, and a deep line on one side of his mouth. His lean face had a touch of red on its olive. He might have been anywhere between thirty-five and forty.

Patience recognised him and trembled a little, but with excitement, not passion. She had understood herself for once when she had said that in her present conditions she was incapable of love. Beverly Peele would have to go down among the memories before his wife could shake her spirit free, and turn with swept brain and clear eyes to even a conception of the love whose possibilities dwelt within her.

But she was fully alive to the picturesqueness of meeting this man once more, and suddenly became possessed of the spirit of adventure. There must be some sort of sequel to that old romance.

She withdrew to the shadow of a tree, where she could watch the drawing-room through the window. Burr entered, slapped the visitor on the back, and bore him away to the dining-room, presumably to have a drink. When they returned, Mr. Peele was in the room. He shook hands with the stranger more heartily than was his wont. In a few moments he crossed over to the library, and Patience, seeing that her early hero would be held in conversation for some time to come, followed her father-in-law and asked casually who the visitor was.

“Oh, that’s Bourke, Garan Bourke, the legal idol,” sarcastically, “of Westchester County. In truth he’s a brilliant lawyer enough, and one of the rising men at the New York bar, although he will go off his head occasionally and take criminal cases. I don’t forgive him that, if he _is_ always successful. However, we all have our little fads. I suppose he can’t resist showing his power over a jury. I heard an enthusiastic youngster assert the other day that Bourke whips up a jury’s grey matter into one large palpitating batter, then moulds it with the tips of his fingers while the jury sits with mouth open and spinal marrow paralysed. Personally, I like him well enough, and rather hoped he and Hal would fancy each other. But he doesn’t seem to be a marrying man. You’d better go over and meet him. He’ll just suit you.”

Patience returned to her post. Burr had disappeared, Bourke was talking to half a dozen women. In a few moments he rose to go. Patience went hastily across the lawns to the narrow avenue of elms by the driveway. No two were billing and cooing in its shadows, and Beverly was in bed with a nervous headache.

The moon was large and very brilliant. One could have read a newspaper as facilely as by the light of an electric pear. As Bourke rode to the main avenue a woman came toward him. He had time to think her very beautiful and of exceeding grace before she surprised him by laying her hand on his horse’s neck.

“Well?” she said, looking up and smiling as he reined in.

“Well?” he stammered, lifting his hat.

“I am too heavy to ride before you now.”

He stared at her perplexedly, but made no reply.

“Still if I were up a tree—literally, you know—and a band of terrible demons were shouting at a man beside a corpse—”

“What?” he said. “Not you?—not you? That homely fascinating little girl—no, it cannot be possible—”

“Oh, yes,” lifting her chin, coquettishly. “I have improved, and grown, you see. I was more than delighted when I saw you through the window. It was rather absurd, but I disliked the idea of going in to meet you conventionally—”

He laid his hand strongly on hers, and she treated him with a passivity denied to Latimer Burr.

“I am going to tie up my horse and talk to you a while, may I?” America and the law had not crowded all the romance out of his Irish brain, and he was keenly alive to the adventure. He had forgotten her name long since, and it did not occur to him that this lovely impulsive girl was the property of another man; but although he had lived too long, nor yet long enough, to lose his heart to the first flash of magnetism from a pretty woman, yet his blood was thrilled by the commingling of spirituality and deviltry in the face of this high-bred girl who cared to give the flavour of romance to their acquaintance. He saw that she was clever, and he had no intention of making a fool of himself; but he was quite willing to follow whither she cared to lead. And it was night and the moon was high; the leaves sang in a crystal sea; a creek murmured somewhere; the frogs chanted their monotonous recitative to the hushed melodies and discords of the night world; the deep throbbing of steamboats came from the river.

He tied his horse to a tree, and they entered the avenue.

“You told me that it was a small world, and that we should probably meet again,” she said; “and I never doubted that we should.”

“Oh, I never did either,” he exclaimed. He was racking his brains to recall the conversation which had passed between them a half dozen years ago, and for the life of him could not remember a word; but he was a man of resource.

“I am glad that it is at night,” he continued, “even if the scene is not so charming as Carmel Valley from that old tower. How beautiful the ocean looked from there, and what a jolly ride we had in the pine woods!”

She understood perfectly, and grinned in the dark.

“Ah! I remember I gave you some advice,” he exclaimed with suspicious abruptness. “I thought afterward that it was great presumption on my part.”

“I wonder if you had an ideal of your own in mind when you spoke?”

“An ideal?” He cursed his memory and floundered hopelessly. Even his Irish wit for once deserted him.

“Oh, I hoped you had not forgotten it. Why, I have made a little ‘Night Thoughts’ of what you said, and it has been one of the strongest forces in my development. Shall I repeat it to you?”

“Oh, please.” He was blushing with pleasure, but sore perplexed.

And she repeated his comments and advice, word for word.

“Is it possible that you remember all that? I am deeply flattered.” And he was, in fact.

“What more natural than that I should remember? I was a lonely little waif, full of dreams and vague ideals, and with much that was terrible in my actual life. I had never talked with a young man before—a man of seventy was my only experience of your sex, barring boys, that don’t count. And you swooped down into my life in the most picturesque manner possible, and talked as no one in my little world was capable of talking. So, you see, it is not so remarkable that I retain a vivid impression of you and your words. I was frightfully in love with you.”

“Oh—were you? Were you?” He was very much at sea. It was true that she had paid him the most subtle tribute one mind can pay to another, but her very audacity would go to prove that she was a brilliant coquette. He had a keen sense of the ridiculous, and he was still a little afraid of her. He took refuge on the broad impersonal shore of flirtation, where the boat is ever dancing on the waves.

“If you felt obliged to use the past tense you might have left that last unsaid.”

“Oh, there are a thousand years between fifteen and twenty-one. I am quite another person, as you see.”

“You are merely an extraordinary child developed; and you have carried your memory along with you.”

“Oh, yes, the memory is there, and the tablets are pretty full; but never mind me. I want to know if your ideals are as strong now as I am sure they were then—if any one in this world manages to hold onto his ideals when circumstances don’t happen to coddle them.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t thought much about them since that night. I doubt if I’d given too much thought to them before. Deep in every man’s brain is an ideal of some sort, I imagine, but it is seldom he sits down and analyses it out. He knows when he’s missed it and locked the gates behind him, and perhaps, occasionally, he knows when he’s found it—or something approximating it. We are all the victims of that terrible thing called Imagination, which, I sometimes think, is the sudden incursion of a satirical Deity. I have not married—why, I can hardly say. Perhaps because there has been some vague idea that if I waited long enough I might meet the one woman; but partly, also, because I have had no very great desire to marry. I keep bachelor’s hall over on the Sound, and the life is very jolly and free of small domestic details. There are so many women that give you almost everything you want—or at least four or five will make up a very good whole—that I have never yet faced the tremendous proposition of going through life expecting one woman to give me everything my nature and mind demand. But there are such women, I imagine,” he added abruptly, trying to see her face in one of the occasional splashes of moonlight.

“A very clever woman—Mrs. Lafarge; perhaps you know her—said to me the other day, that many men and women of strong affinity took a good deal of spirituality with them into marriage, but soon forgot all about it—matrimony is so full of reiterant details, and everything becomes so matter of course. Do you think that is true?”

“I am afraid it is. The imagination wears blunt. The Deity is sending his electricity elsewhere—to those still prowling about the shores of the unknown. Perhaps if one could keep the danger in mind—if one were unusually clever—I don’t know. I fancy civilisation will get to that point after a while. Unquestionably the companionship of man and woman, when no essentials are lacking, is the one supremely satisfying thing in life. If we loved each other, for instance—on such a night—it seems to me that we are in tune—”

“But we don’t love each other, as it happens, and we met about three quarters of an hour ago. We’ll probably hate each other by daylight.”

“Oh, I hope not,” he said, accepting the ice-water. “But tell me what your ideals were. I hope they have proved more stable than mine.”

“Oh, mine were a sort of yearning for some unseen force in nature; I suppose the large general force from which love is a projection. Every mortal, except the purely material, the Beverly Peele type, for instance, has an affinity with something in the invisible world, an uplifting of the soul. Christianity satisfies the great mass, hence its extraordinary hold. Do you suppose the real link between the soul of man and the soul of nature will ever be established?”

He laughed a little, piqued, but amused. “You are very clever,” he said, “and this is just the hour and these are just the circumstances for impersonal abstractions. Well—perhaps the link will be established when we have lived down this civilisation and entered upon another which has had drilled out of it all the elements which plant in human nature the instincts of cupidity and sordidness and envy and political corruption, and all that goes to make us the aliens from nature that we are. About all that keeps us in touch with her now are our large vices. There is some tremendous spiritual force in the Universe which projects itself into us, making man and nature correlative. What wonder that man—particularly an imaginative and intelligent child—should be affected and played upon by this Mystery? What wonder that the heathens have gods, and the civilised a symbol called the Lord God?—a concrete something which they can worship, and upon which unburden the load of spirituality which becomes oppressive to matter? It is for the same reason that women fall in love and marry earlier than men, who have so many safety-valves. On the other hand, men who have a great deal of emotional imagination and who can neither love nor accept religion take refuge in excess. It is all a matter of temperament. Cold-blooded people—those that have received a meagre share of this great vital force pervading the Universe, which throws a continent into convulsions or a human being into ecstasy—such, for instance, are religious only because their ancestors were,—their brain is pointed that way. Their blood has nothing to do with it, as is the more general case—for Christianity is pre-eminently sensuous.”

“What do you suppose will take its place? The world is bound to become wholly civilised in time; but still human nature will demand some sort of religion (which is another word for ideality), some sort of lodestar.”

“A superlative refinement, I think; a perfected æstheticism which shall by no means eradicate the strong primal impulses; which shall, in fact, create conditions of higher happiness than now exist. Do we not enjoy all arts the more as they approach perfection? Does not a nude appeal with more subtle strength to the senses the more exquisite its beauty, the more entire its freedom from coarseness? When people strive to place human nature on a level with what is highest in art and in nature itself, the true religion will have been discovered. So far, man himself is infinitely below what man has achieved. It is hard to believe that genius is the result of any possible combination of heredity. It would seem that it must, like its other part, imagination, be the direct and more permanent indwelling of the supreme creative force—as if the creator would lighten his burden occasionally, and shakes off rings which float down to torment favoured brains.”

“I always knew that I should love to hear you talk,” murmured Patience.

His hand closed over hers. He drew it through his arm and held it against his heart, which was beating irregularly.

“And I haven’t talked so much nor such stuff to a woman since God made me. I believe that I could talk to you through twenty years. You have said enough to-night to make me hope that our minds have been running along the same general lines. Tell me—honestly—no coquetry—has what I said that night had the slightest effect in your development?”

She told the tale of the day in the crystal woods, giving a sufficiently comprehensive sketch of the events which had led up to it to make her the more keenly interesting to the man whose brain was beginning to whirl a little.

“If you had come at that moment,” she concluded, “I would have gone with you to the end of the earth. I have a pretty strong personality, but there was a good deal of wax in me then, and if you could have gotten it between your hands I think that what you moulded would have closely resembled your ideal—the impression you had already made had so strongly coloured and trained my imagination. But,” she continued hastily, and glancing anxiously to the far distant end of the avenue, “you see my life changed immediately after that, and I went into the world and became hard and bitter and cynical. I have no ideals left, and I do not want any—I have seen too much—”

“Hush!” he said passionately, “I do not believe a word of it. Why, that was not two years ago, and you are still a young girl. Have you loved any one else?” he asked abruptly, his voice less steady.

“No!”

He was too excited to note the meaning of her emphasis. He was only conscious that he was very close to a beautiful woman who allured him in all ways as no one woman had ever done before.

“You are full of a girl’s cynicism,” he said; “you have seen just enough to make you think you know the world—to accept the superficial for the real. You—you yourself are an ideal. All you need is to know yourself, and I am going to undertake the task of teaching you—do you hear? If I fail—if I have made a mistake—if it is only the night and your beauty that have gone to my head—well and good; but I shall have the satisfaction of having tried—of knowing—”

“No, no! No, no!” she said. “You must not come here again. I do not want to see you again—”

“Nonsense! You have some sentimental foolish idea in your head,—or perhaps you are engaged to some man who can give you great wealth and position. I shall not regard that, either. If I feel to you by daylight as I do now, I’ll have you—do you understand?”

Patience opened her lips to tell him the truth, then cynically made up her mind to let matters take their course. At the same time she was bitterly resentful that she should feel as she did, not as she had once dreamed of feeling for this man.

“Very well,” she said, “I shall be here for a while.”

“And I shall see you in the course of a day or two. I’m going now. Good-night.” He let her arm slip from under his, but held her hand closely. “And even if it so happened that I never did see you again, I should thank you for the glimpse you have given me of a woman I hardly dared dream existed.”

When he had gone she anathematised fate for a moment, then went back to her guests.

XII

Latimer Burr was evidently a man upon whom rebuff sat lightly. The next morning he came suddenly upon Patience in a dark corner, and tried to kiss her. Whenever the opportunity offered he held her hand, and once, to her infinite disgust, he planted his foot squarely on hers under the dinner table. A few hours later they happened to be alone in one of the small reception-rooms.

“Look here,” exclaimed Patience, wrathfully, “will you let me alone?”

“No, I won’t,” he said good-naturedly. “Jove! but you are a beauty!”

She wore a gown of white mull and lace, trimmed with large knots of dark-blue velvet. She had been talking all the evening with Mr. Peele, Mr. Field, and Burr, and was somewhat excited. Her lips were very pink, her eyes very bright and dark. She held her head with a young triumph in beauty and the intellectual tribute of clever men.

“Hal would be delighted. She has always wanted me to become the fashion.”

“You never will be that, for there are not enough brainy men in society to appreciate you. If all were like myself, you would be wearied with the din of admiration—”

“There’s nothing like having a good opinion of oneself.”

“Why not? I don’t set up to be an intellectual man—intellectual men are out of date; but I’m a brainy man, and I’d like to know how I’m to help being aware of the fact. I certainly don’t claim to be pretty, so you can’t say I’m actually wallowing in conceit.”

Patience was forced to laugh. “Oh, you’d do very well if you’d exercise as much sense in regard to women as you do to affairs. Just answer me one question, will you? Are you so amazingly fascinating that women have the habit of succumbing at the end of the second interview?”

“I never set up to be an ass.”

“But your manner is quite assured. You seem very much surprised that I don’t tumble into your arms and say ‘Thank you.’ Oh, you New York men are so funny!”

“Well, answer me one question—you don’t love your husband, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you like me?”

“I would if you wouldn’t make such an idiot of yourself. You certainly are very agreeable to talk to.”

He came closer, his lids falling. The fine repose of his manner was a trifle ruffled. “Do you love anybody else?” he asked.

“I do not.”

“Then let me love you.”

“I shall not.”

“Then if you don’t love your husband and you like me and will not let me love you, you must have a lover.”

Patience burst into brief hilarity.

“Is that the logic of your kind?”

“A beautiful woman that does not love her husband always loves another man.”

“Or is willing to be loved by the first man that happens to have no other affair on hand.”

“You have said that you like me.”

“I didn’t say I loved you!”

“I’d make you!”

“Oh!” with a deep contempt he was incapable of understanding, “you couldn’t. But tell me another thing; I’m very curious. Has it never occurred to you that a woman must be wooed, that it is somewhat necessary to arouse sentiment and feeling in her before she is willing to advance one step? Why, you and your kind demand her off-hand in a way that is positively funny. What has become of all the old traditions?”

“Oh, bother,” he said. “Life is too short to waste time on old-fashioned nonsense. If a man wants a woman he says so, and if she’s sensible and likes him she meets him half way. Men and women of the world know what they want.”

“That is all there is to love then? It no longer means anything else whatever?”

“Oh—you are all wrong. If you were not a spiritual woman I wouldn’t cross the room to win you. One can buy the other sort. It is your spirituality, your intellectuality, that fascinates me as much as your beauty.”

“What do you know about spirituality?” she said contemptuously. “I don’t like to hear you speak the word. You desecrate it.”

He flushed purple. “There are few things I don’t understand—and a good deal better than you do, perhaps.”

“You have a clever man’s perception, that is all. Association with all sorts of women has taught you the difference between them. But what could you give a spiritual woman? Nothing. You have not a shrunken kernel of soul. The sensual envelope is too thick; your brain too crowded with the thousand and one petty experiences of material life. You are as ingenuous as all fast men, for the women you have spent your life running after make no demands upon subtlety—”

“Take care,” he said angrily; “you are going too far. I tell you I have as much soul as any man living.”

“Perhaps. I doubt if any man has much. Men give women nothing, as far as I can see. If we want companionship there seems nothing to do but to descend to your level and grovel with you.”

“I would never make you grovel. I would reverence—”

“Oh, rot!” she cried, stamping her foot. “What a fool—and worse—the average woman must be. You have no idea how ingenuously you are giving away the women of society. And soul! The idea of a man who pretends to love the woman he is engaged to and is making love to another, and that her sister-in-law and most intimate friend, claiming to have a soul! Have you no sense of humour? I say nothing about honour, as I wish to be understood, if possible; but you are clever enough to see the ridiculous in most things—Please don’t walk over me. There is plenty of room. And the windows are open, you know—”

“Yes, and I am here,” cried a furious voice, and Beverly sprang into the room.

Patience stepped back with a faint exclamation. Burr turned white. Beverly was shaking with rage. His face was almost black; there were white flecks on his nostrils.

“I kept quiet,” he articulated, “to hear every word. You dog!” to Burr. “I may be pretty bad, but I’d never do what you have done. And as for you,” he shook his fist at his wife, “you were only leading him on. If I could only have held myself in another moment I’d have seen you in his arms. Get out of this house,” he roared, “both of you. You’ll never marry my sister. I’m going to tell her this minute—”

Burr sprang forward and caught him by the collar; but Beverly was not a coward. He turned, flinging out his fist, and the two men grappled. Patience closed the door and glanced out of the window. No one was near. Voices floated up from the cliffs. Burr was the more powerful man of the two, and in a moment had flung Beverly, panting, into a chair.

“Keep him here,” said Patience, rapidly, and she left the room.

“Man is certainly still a savage, a brute,” she thought. “What is the matter with civilisation?”

As she crossed the lawn, she met one of the servants.

“Go and find Miss Hal, and ask her to come here,” she said. A few moments later her sister-in-law hurried up from the cliffs.

“What is it?” she called cheerily. “Has Bev had an apoplectic fit?”

“Beverly has been making a greater fool of himself than usual,” said Patience, as the girls met, “and I want to see you before he does. I was standing in one of the reception-rooms talking to Mr. Burr after Mr. Field and Mr. Peele had gone out, and he had on all his manner and was telling me how beautiful I was, in his usual after dinner style, when Beverly leaped through the window like the wronged husband in the melodrama and accused us of making love. He threatened to come and tell you, and he and Mr. Burr wrestled like two prize-fighters. If Beverly were put on the witness stand he’d be obliged to admit that Mr. Burr had not so much as touched my hand. I suppose you will believe me?”

Hal gave her light laugh. “Certainly, my dear, certainly; although if I were a man I should fall in love with you myself. I wouldn’t bet on Latimer, but I would on you—so don’t worry your little head. Do you suppose I expect a man with that mouth and those eyes to be faithful to me? Still, I must say that I should have given him credit for more decency than to make love to my sister-in-law—”

“He didn’t! I swear he didn’t.”

“Oh, of course not! Nor will he make love to every pretty woman he finds himself alone with for five minutes. He can’t help it, poor thing. Let us go and talk to the gentlemen.”

As they entered the little room she exclaimed airily, “Been making a fool of yourself again, Bev? No, don’t speak. Patience has told me all about it. I have every confidence in her and Latimer. Better go and take a spin with Tammany. Latimer, you really must mend your manners. They’re too good. From a distance a stranger would really think you were making love when you are swearing at the heat. Now, come down to the Tea House. Good-night, Bevvy dear.”

And she went off between her lover and her sister-in-law, leaving her brother to swear forth his righteous indignation.

That night Patience opened the door of her husband’s room for the first time. Beverly, who had just entered, was so astonished that the wrath he had carefully nourished fell like quicksilver under a cool wave, and he stared at her without speaking.

“I wish to tell you,” said his wife, “that you were entirely justified in being angry to-night. I could have suppressed Burr by a word, but I chose to lead him on to gratify my curiosity. Hal wishes to marry him, and I am determined that she shall. If I had admitted the truth to her or permitted you to enlighten her, her self-respect would have forced her to break the engagement. That would have been absurd, for the match is exactly what she wants, and she is not marrying with illusions. But you have been treated inconsiderately, and I apologise for my share in it. Will you forgive me?”

“Of course I’ll forgive you,” said Beverly, eagerly. “I wasn’t angry with you, anyhow—only with that scoundrel. But I never believed you’d do this. Do you care for me a little?”

Patience averted her face that she might not see the expression on his. Despite her loathing of him she gave him a certain measure of pity. With all the preponderance of the savage in him and the limitations of his intelligence he had his own capacity for suffering, and to-night he stood before her crushed under the sudden reaction, his eyes full of the dumb appeal of shrinking brutes.

“If we are going to live peacefully don’t let us discuss that subject,” she said gently. “We have both missed it, and I sometimes think that you are more to be pitied than I am. However, I shall not flirt—I promise you that. Good-night.”

That was the last of Mr. Burr’s illegal love-making at Peele Manor. He had had a fright and a lesson, and he forgot neither.

XIII

“Garan Bourke is coming to dinner to-night,” said Hal, the next day. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to get him; he never goes anywhere; but he half promised mamma, when he called the other night, that he’d come some day this week, and he wrote yesterday, saying he’d dine with us to-day. I want you to meet him. He is awfully clever, and when he talks I want to close my eyes and listen to his voice. If the dear girls ever get the vote and do jury duty, all he’ll have to do will be to quote law. He needn’t take the trouble to sum up. His voice will do the business every time.”

Patience, in a French gown of black chiffon, was very beautiful that night. She did not go down to dinner until every one was seated. Bourke sat next to Mrs. Peele. Her own chair was near the end of the opposite side of the long table. For a time she did not look at Bourke. When she did she met his eyes; and knew by their expression that some one had told him she was the wife of Beverly Peele.

After dinner he went with Mr. Peele and Burr into the library. Patience was about to follow a party of young people down to the bluff, when Mr. Field drew her arm firmly through his.

“You are not going to desert your court?” he said. “Why, you don’t suppose I come up here to talk to Peele, do you? If you go out with those boys I’ll never come here again.” And he led her into the library.

It was nearly twelve o’clock when she found herself alone with Bourke. The others had gone out, one by one. She had made no attempt to follow them. She sat with defiant eyes and inward trepidation. Bourke regarded her with narrowed eyes and twitching nostrils.

“So you are married?” he said at last.

“Yes.”

“And you deliberately made a fool of me?”

“No—no—I did nothing deliberately that night—no—I acted on impulse. And all that I said was quite true. Of course I should have told you—”

“But it would have spoiled your comedy.”

“No—no—don’t think that. I see that I was dishonest—I am not making excuses—I never thought you’d become really interested—”

“I am not breaking my heart. Don’t let that worry you. The mere fact of your dishonesty is quite enough to break the spell—for you are not the woman I imagined you to be. I was merely worshipping an ideal for the hour. Do you love your husband?”

“No.”

“Then you are a harlot,” he said, deliberately. “It only needed that.” He rose to his feet and looked contemptuously at her scarlet face. “At all events it was an amusing episode,” he said. “Good-night.”

XIV

It was a matter of comment before the summer was over, both among the guests at Peele Manor and the neighbours, that Mr. and Mrs. Beverly Peele had come to the parting of the ways. As the young man’s infatuation was as notable as his wife’s indifference, he received the larger share of sympathy. The married men championed Patience and expressed it in their time-honoured fashion; and although they worried her she looked forward with terror to the winter: she would willingly have taken them all to board and trusted to their wives to keep them in order.

Beverly had confided his woes long since to his mother. She declined to discuss the subject with her daughter-in-law, but treated her with a chill severity. Fortunately they were gay that summer, and Patience had much to do. Hal and May were absorbed in preparations for their wedding, and the duties of hostess fell largely on her shoulders.

Late in the fall there was a double wedding under the medallion of Peele the First. Immediately thereafter May went to Cuba; and Hal to Europe, to pay a series of visits. Mrs. Peele continued to entertain, and was obliged to confess that her daughter-in-law was very useful, and in deportment above reproach. Outwardly Patience looked almost as cold a woman of the world as herself, and gave no evidence of the storms brewing within; but one day she hung out a signal. Mrs. Peele announced that she should go to town on the first of December. Patience followed her into her bedroom and closed the door.

“May I speak to you a moment alone?” she asked.

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Peele, frigidly. “Will you sit down?”

She herself took an upright chair, and suggested, Patience thought, a judge on his bench.

“I want to go to town with you this winter.”

“I should be happy to have my dear son with me, and I will not deny that you are a great help to me; but Beverly is as strongly opposed as ever to city life. I asked him myself to go down for the winter, but he refused. He is one of Nature’s own children, and loves the country.”

“He certainly is very close to Nature in several of her moods. But I wish to go whether he does or not.”

“You would leave your husband?” Mrs. Peele spoke with meditative scorn.

“It will be better for both of us not to be shut up here together for another winter. I—I will not answer for the consequences.”

“Is that a threat?”

“You can take it as you choose.”

“Do you not love my son?”

“No, I do not.”

“And you are not ashamed to make such an admission?”

“Would you prefer to have me lie about it?”

“It is your duty to love your husband.”

“That proposition is rather too absurd for argument, don’t you think so? Will you persuade Beverly to let me go with you to town?”

“I shall not. You should be glad, overjoyed, to have such a husband. You should feel grateful,” she added, unburdening her spite in the vulgarity which streaks high and low, “that he loved you well enough to overlook your lack of family and fortune—”

But Patience had left the room.

That evening she went to her father-in-law and stated her case. She spoke calmly, although she was bitter and sore and worried. “I cannot stay here with Beverly this winter,” she continued. “I need not explain any farther. Mrs. Peele will not consent to my going to town with her. But couldn’t I live abroad? I could do so on very little. I should care nothing for society if I could live my life by myself. I should be quite contented with books and freedom. But I cannot stay here with Beverly alone again.”

Mr. Peele shook his head. “It wouldn’t do. I understand; but it would only result in scandal, and I don’t like scandal. We have never gone to pieces, like so many great New York families. Our women have been proud and conservative, and have not used their position to cloak their amours. I have perfect confidence in you, of course; but if you went to Europe and left Beverly raging here, people would say that you had gone to meet another man. Moreover, it would do no good. Beverly would follow you. And he will give you no cause for divorce: he has the cunning peculiar to the person of ugly disposition and limited mentality. No, try to stand it. Remember that all the humours of human nature have their limit. Beverly will become indifferent in time. Then he will let you come to us. I intend to take a rest in a year or two and go abroad, and I shall be glad to have you with us. I do not mind telling you that you are the brightest young woman I have ever known—and Mr. Field has said the same thing.”

But Patience was not in a mood to bend her neck to flattery. She shook her head gloomily.

“If I have any brain, cannot you see that I suffer the more? Mr. Peele, I cannot stay here with Beverly! Do you know that sometimes I have felt that I could kill him? I am afraid of myself.”

“Hush! Hush! Don’t say such things. You excitable young women are altogether too extravagant in your way of expressing yourselves. Words carry a great deal farther than you have any idea of—take an old lawyer’s word for it. Now try to stand it. In fact, you must stand it. I’ll do all I can. I’ll leave a standing order with Brentano to send you all the new books, and I’ll insist upon your coming up every week or so to have some amusement. But for God’s sake make no scandal.”

XV

On the first of December Patience and Beverly were alone once more. The weather was fine, and Beverly temporarily absorbed in breaking in a colt on his private track. Patience spent the first day wandering about the woods, tormented by her thoughts. She remembered with passionate regret the old crystal woods where she had been a girl of dreams and ideals. Her ideals were in ruins. The hero of her dreams had told her a hideous truth that had made her hate him and more abundantly despise herself. She longed ardently to get away to a mountain top, a hundred miles from civilisation. Nature had been her friend in the old Californian days, and the green or white beauty of her second environment had satisfied her in that peaceful intermediate time. But Westchester County, although exquisitely pretty, lacked grandeur and the suggestion of colossal throes in remote ages with which every stone in California is eloquent. That was what she wanted now. But there was no prospect of getting away. Did she have enthusiasm enough left to leave summarily she had little money. She was very extravagant, and left the larger part of her quarterly allowance with New York shops and milliners and dressmakers; but she knew that the end was approaching, and listlessly awaited it.

Heavy with rebellious disgust she returned to the house and went mechanically to the library. For a while she did not read; she felt no impulse to do so. But after a time she took down a book in desperation, a volume of a new edition de luxe of “Childe Harold.” She had not read it during her brief Byronic fever, and had not opened the poet since. Gradually she forgot self. She began with the third canto, and when she had finished the fourth she discovered that her spirits were lighter, a weight had risen from her brain. She had always regarded “notes” as an evidence of the amateur reader, but to-day she scrawled on a fly-leaf of Mr. Peele’s new morocco edition:—

“As the Christian goes to his God for help, the intellectual, in hours of depression and disgust and doubt go to the great Creators of Literature, those master minds that lift our own temporarily above the terrible enigma of the commonplace, and possess us to the extinction of personal meditation. Are not these genii as worthy of deification by the higher civilisation as was Jesus Christ—their brother—by the great illogical suffering mass of mankind? ‘Faith shall make ye whole,’ said Christ; ‘come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden.’ ‘Develop your brain, and I will give you self-oblivion, philosophy, and a soul of many windows,’ say the great masters of thought and style, the stupendous creative imaginations.”

Beverly came home in high good humour; his colt had showed his blood, and nearly pulled him out of the break-cart. Patience endeavoured to appear interested, and he was so pleased that the atmosphere during dinner was quite domestic. Afterward he went to sleep on a sofa by the library fire, and his wife read.

A week passed more placidly than Patience had expected. Beverly was evidently under stress to make himself agreeable. His wife suspected that he had had a long and meaning conference with his father. In truth he was desperately afraid that she would leave him. Patience did not know whether she hated him most when he was amiable or violent; but she hated herself more than she hated him.

“I think I’ll go to town and see Rosita,” she thought one morning as she awakened. “It seems to me that she is the fittest companion I could find.”

At the breakfast-table she appeared in a tailor frock and turban, and informed Beverly that she was going to town to pay some visits. Beverly looked at her for a moment with black face, then dropped his eyes without comment. He recalled his father’s advice.

“What train shall you come home in?” he asked after a moment. “I’ll go down to the station to meet you.”

“I cannot say. I shall be back to dinner.”

“Aren’t you going to kiss me good-bye?” he asked sullenly, when she was about to open the front door. She hesitated a moment, then raised her face, closing her eyes, lest he should see the impulse to strike him. He saw the hesitation and turned away with an oath, then ran after her, flung his arms about her and kissed her. She walked down to the station with burning face, rubbing her mouth and cheeks violently, careless of the wide-eyed regard of two gardeners.

XVI

When she arrived at Rosita’s the maid admitted her without protest, not recognising in this elegant young woman the countrified girl of two years before. She left Patience in the dark drawing-room, but returned in a moment and announced that Madame would see Mrs. Peele at once. Patience followed the woman through the boudoir and bedroom to the bath-room, a classic apartment of pink tiles. The tub was merely one corner of the room walled off with tiles; and in it, covered from throat to foot with a sheet, her head on a silken strap, lay Rosita. By her side sat a girl in a fashionable ulster and large hat, a note-book and pencil on her lap. Rosita looked like a dark-haired Aphrodite, and was as fresh as a rose. A maid had just dried one pink and white hand, and she held it out to Patience.

“Patita! Patita! Patita!” she said with her sweet drawl and accent, and without a trace of resentment in her soft heavy eyes. “Where, where have you been all these years? Miss Merrien, this is my oldest and dearest friend, Mrs. Beverly Peele [she pronounced the name with visible pride]. Patita, this is Miss Merrien of the ‘Day.’ She is interviewing me.”

Patience flushed as she bent her head to the young woman, who regarded her with conspicuous amazement, and whose nostrils quivered a little, as if she scented a “story.” She was a pretty girl with a dark rather worn face, a frank eye, and a nervous manner.

“Patita, sit down there just for a moment while I look at you. Then we will go into the other room. I could not wait to see you. _Dios de mi alma_, but you have changed, Patita _mia_. Who would ever have thought that you would be such a beauty and such a swell. Gray cloth and chinchilla! Just think, Miss Merrien, we used to wear sunbonnets and copper-toed boots, and drove an old blind horse that would not go off a walk.”

“May I put that down?” asked the girl, eagerly.

“Oh, please don’t,” exclaimed Patience. Miss Merrien’s face fell. Then she smiled, and said good-naturedly, “All right, I won’t.”

“And now Patita is a swell,” pursued Rosita, as if no interruption had occurred, “and I am a famous _prima donna_. Such is life. Patita, do you know that I have two hundred thousand dollars invested?”

“Really?”

“_Si, señorita!_ Oh, my price has gone up, Patita _mia_,” and she laughed her low delicious laugh.

Miss Merrien smiled. “A man shot himself for that laugh the other day—I suppose you read about it,” she said.

“No, I did not. I have read the newspapers irregularly of late—the ‘stories,’ at least.”

“It is true,” said Rosita, complacently. “Oh, Patita, life is so lovely. To think that we both had such great destinies! _Pobre_ Manuela, and Panchita, and all the rest! _Bueno_, go into the bedroom, both of you, and I will be there in ten minutes.”

Patience and Miss Merrien seated themselves in the white bower of velvet and lace.

“Please do not put me into your story,” said Patience, hastily. “It would not do—you see my husband would not like it—but we are old friends, and I wanted to see her.”

Miss Merrien nodded intelligently. With the suspicion of her craft she leaped to the conclusion that the fashionable young woman came to her disreputable friend for an occasional lark.

“Oh, I promise you. If you hadn’t asked me I should though. It would make a fine story.”

“Tell me,” said Patience abruptly, “do you like being a newspaper woman? Is it very hard work?”

“Yes, it’s hard work,” Miss Merrien answered in some surprise; “but then it is the most fascinating, I do believe, in the whole world. I have a family and a home out West, and I could go back and be comfortable if I wanted to; but I wouldn’t give up this life, with all its grind and uncertainty, for that dead and alive existence. I only go out there once a year to rest. I came on here for an experiment, to see a little of the world. I had a dreadful time catching on; once I thought I’d starve, for I was bound I wouldn’t write home for money; but I hung on and got there. And I’m here to stay.”

“Oh, is it really so pleasant? Sometimes I wish I were a newspaper woman.”

“You? You? I never saw anybody that looked less like one.”

“I am very strong. I am naturally pale, that is all.”

“Oh, your skin is lovely: it’s that warm dead white. I wasn’t thinking of that. But you look like the princess that felt the pea under sixteen mattresses.”

“One adapts one’s self easily to luxury. I have only had it two years. I do like it certainly. Nevertheless, I’d like to be a newspaper woman. You look tired; are you?”

“Yes, I am, Mrs. Peele. It’s hard work, if it is fascinating; for instance, I’ve chased about this entire week for stories that haven’t panned out for a cent. I haven’t made ten dollars. I came up here as a last resource. La Rosita is always good-natured, and I hoped she’d have a story for me. But all I’ve got is a crank that’s following her about threatening to kill her if she doesn’t marry him, and that’s such a chestnut. If I could only fake something I know she’d let it go, but my imagination’s worn to a thread—”

The portière was pushed aside, and Rosita entered. She wore a glistening night-robe of silk and lace and ribbon under a yellow plush bath gown. Her dense black hair fell to her knees. She slid into bed and ordered her maid to admit the manicure. An old woman, looking like a witch and clad in shabby black, came in and took a chair beside the bed. The maid brought a crystal bowl and warm water, and a golden manicure set, and Rosita held forth her incomparable arm with its little Spanish hand. She lay with indolent grace among the large pillows.

“You certainly are a beauty,” exclaimed Miss Merrien, enthusiastically.

Rosita smiled with much pleasure. “I love to hear a woman say that, and I shall make good copy for many years yet. I shall not fade like most Spanish women. Oh, I have learned many secrets.”

“I wish you hadn’t told them to me, and then I should still have them to write about. They made a great story.”

“_Dios! Dios!_” said Rosita, plaintively, “I wish we could think of something. I hate to send you away with nothing at all. I love to be written about. Patita, can’t you think of something?”

“Now, Mrs. Peele,” said Miss Merrien, “let us see if you are a good fakir. That is one of the first essentials of being a successful newspaper woman.”

“Oh, dear! Is it? If I could fake I’d make books. I’d like that even better. Rosita, did you ever tell the newspapers about that time I coached you for your first appearance on any stage, and the great hit you made?”

“What is that?” asked Miss Merrien, sharply.

“I never thought of it. Patita, you tell the story.”

This Patience did, while Miss Merrien wrote rapidly in shorthand, pausing occasionally to exclaim with rapture.

“Oh, my good angel sent me here this morning,” she said when Patience had finished. “I won’t mention your name, of course, but you won’t mind my saying that you are one of the Four Hundred.”

“I don’t suppose there is any objection. I am such an obscure member of it that no one will suspect me. Only don’t give any details.”

“Oh, I won’t, indeed I won’t.” She slipped her book into her muff and rose to go. “You don’t know how much obliged I am. I’ll do as much for you some day. If ever you want to be written up, let me know.”

“I never should want to be in the newspapers.”

“Oh, there’s no telling. You haven’t had a taste of it yet. Well, good-morning,” and she went out.

Patience leaned back in her luxurious chair, and watched the old woman polish the pretty nails. Rosita babbled, and Patience watched her face closely. Its colouring was as fresh, its contours as perfect as ever, but there was a faint touch of hardness somewhere, and the eyes held more secrets than they had two years ago. They were the eyes of the wanton. For a moment Patience forgot her surroundings. Her mind flew back to the old days, to the rickety buggy with the two contented innocent little girls, then, by a natural deflection, to her tower and her dreams. She longed passionately for the old Mission, and wondered if Solomon were still alive. Then she thought of Bourke, and came back to the present with a shudder. The woman had gone.

“What is the matter?” asked Rosita. “Is it true—what the men say—that you are not happy with your husband?”

“I hate him,” said Patience.

“Why don’t you get a divorce?”

“I have no grounds.”

“No grounds? Fancy a wife having no grounds!”

“I have not the slightest doubt of his faith.”

“Send him to me.”

“Oh, Rosita! How can you be so coarse?”

“No-o-o-o! You are my old friend. I would do anything for you. Think it over, Patita _mia_.”

“I do not need to think it over. I would never do so vile a thing as that. Have you no refinement left?”

“What earthly use would I have for refinement? Patita, you are such a baby, and you always had ideals and things. Have you got them yet?”

“No,” said Patience, rising abruptly. “I haven’t. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Patita dear,” said Rosita, with unruffled good humour, “and if ever you are in trouble come here and I will take you in. I would even lend you money, and if you knew me you would know how much I loved you to do that. There is not another person living I would give a five cent piece to.”

* * * * *

When Patience reached the sidewalk she filled her lungs with fresh air, then looked at her watch. It was only a half after twelve, and she decided to call on Mary Gallatin. She had never yet paid that charming young fashionette the promised morning call, although she had attended one or two of her afternoon receptions.

She told the coachman to drive to the house in Fifty-seventh Street, then threw herself back on the seat and laughed, a long unpleasant laugh. She tapped first one foot and then the other, with increasing nervousness.

“What fools we mortals be to cry for the unattainable,” she said, addressing the little mirror opposite. “Probably that young newspaper woman envies me bitterly. So, doubtless, do many others. Why on earth am I longing for what I’ll never find, instead of making the best of a bad bargain and the most of my position? I think I’ll find my way out of the difficulty with the average woman’s solution: I’ll take a lover.”

The carriage stopped before a house with the breadth of stoop which in New York means plentiful wealth. She waited in the drawing-room while the cautious butler went up to see if his mistress would receive this stranger. He returned in a moment and conducted her up to a door at the front of the house. Patience entered a large room whose light was so subdued that for a moment she could see only vaguely outlined forms.

“Oh, Mrs. Beverly, how dear of you,” cried a sweet voice, and Patience groped her way round the angle of a large bed and saw Mrs. Gallatin sitting against a mass of pillows. “I’m so glad you came this morning. I’m feeling so blue. I’ve twisted my foot, you know, and my friends are so kind to me. Mr. Rutger, give Mrs. Peele a chair. Mrs. Beverly, you know Mr. Rutger and Mr. Maitland and Mr. Owen, do you not? There is Leontine.”

The three young men, who had risen as she entered, bowed and resumed their seats. Mrs. Lafarge threw her a kiss from the depths of a chair by the fire.

Patience sat down and glanced about her while Mrs. Lafarge finished an anecdote she had been telling. Her eyes became accustomed to the light, and in a moment she saw things quite distinctly. The large room was furnished in Empire style, the walls and windows and the great mahogany and brass bedstead covered with crimson satin damask. There were only a few pieces of heavy furniture, in the room, but like the bed they were magnificent. Each brass carving told a different story.

Mrs. Gallatin, smiling, exquisite, wore a cambric gown, less elaborate than Rosita’s but more dainty. Her shining hair was drawn modishly to the top of her head and confined with a pink porcelain comb, carved into semblance of wild roses. A pink silk shawl slipped from her shoulders. Another wild rose was at her throat. On her hands she wore rubies only.

The story Mrs. Lafarge told was slightly naughty, and all laughed heartily at its conclusion. Patience had heard too many naughty stories in the last two years to be shocked; but when one of the young men began another he was promptly hissed down.

“You are not going to tell that before Mrs. Beverly,” said Mary Gallatin. “She is quite too frightfully proper. But we’re awfully fond of her all the same,” and she patted Patience’s hand while her lovely young face contracted in a charming scowl. Patience wondered if she had a lover—Mr. Gallatin was a dapper little man—and if that was why she looked so happy. She glanced speculatively at the men, and wondered if she could fall in love with one of them. But they were very ordinary New York youths of fashion, high of shoulder, slow of speech, large of epiglottis, vacuous of expression. She shook her head unconsciously.

“Why, what on earth are you thinking about?” cried Mrs. Gallatin, with her silvery laugh. “That wasn’t a shake of disapproval, was it?”

“Oh, no, no!” said Patience, hastily. “Something occurred to me, and I forgot I was not alone. You see, I am so much alone that I’ve even gotten into the habit of thinking out loud.” She felt that she was a restraint—the suppressed young man had relapsed into moody silence—and, as soon as she reasonably could, rose to go. Mrs. Gallatin kissed her warmly and Mrs. Lafarge came forward and kissed her also; but Patience detected a faint note of relief in their voices, and went downstairs feeling more depressed than ever. “There seems to be no place for me,” she thought. “I must be out of tune with everything.”

She went to her father-in-law’s house in Eleventh Street and found Mrs. Peele and Honora gowned for expected luncheon guests. The former apologised coldly for not being able to ask her to join them, but “there was only room in the dining-room for eight.” Honora rippled regret, and Patience felt that she should disgrace herself with tears if she did not get out of the house. She went directly to the station, intending to return home, but as the train approached Peele Manor she turned her back squarely on the old house and decided to go on to Mariaville and see Miss Beale. She remembered with satisfaction that she knew at least one wholesome thoroughly sincere woman, however misguided.

When she reached the station she concluded to walk to the house. She felt nervous and excited. Her cheeks burned and her temples ached a little. She had taken no nourishment that day but a cup of coffee and a roll, and her head felt light. It was now two o’clock.

When she had gone a little more than half way she lifted her eyes and saw Miss Beale coming toward her with beaming face, one hand ready to wave.

“Why, Patience!” she cried, as they met. “I’m so glad to see you. I’m just going to kiss you if it is on the street. I can’t say I thought you’d forgotten me, for you’ve sent me money for my poor every time I begged for it; but I did think you’d never come to see me.”

* * * * *

Patience had no excuse to offer, so wisely attempted none, but returned Miss Beale’s embrace heartily. The older woman’s face was brilliant with pleasure.

“Dear me, how pretty you have grown! What a colour! I’m so glad to see you looking so well. How happy dear Miss Tremont would be to see you now. She was always afraid you would be delicate. But we can’t wish her back, can we, Patience?”

“There’s no use wishing anything undone. Where are you going?”

“Where I am going to take you. Now, don’t ask any questions, but just come along.”

Patience, hoping that the destination was a fair where she could get luncheon, followed submissively, and evaded Miss Beale’s personal inquiries as best she could.

“How does the Temperance Cause get on?” she asked at length.

“Oh, just the same! Just the same!” said Miss Beale, with a cheerful sigh. “One makes slow progress in this wicked world; all we can do is to trust in the Lord and do our humble best. Mariaville has three new saloons, and the father of one of my scholars beat him nearly to death the other day for coming to the Loyal Legion class; but we’ll win in the end.”

“Meanwhile are you as much interested as ever?” asked Patience, curiously.

“Oh, my!” Miss Beale gave an almost hilarious laugh. “Well, I should think so. How could I ever lose interest in the Lord’s work? Why, I never even get discouraged.”

“It has occurred to me, sometimes—since I have been away and met all sorts of people—that if you really were Temperance you might have more chance of success.”

“If we were what?”

“Temperance in the actual meaning of the word. You’re not, you know; you’re teetotalists. That is the reason you antagonise so many thousands of men who might be glad to help you with their vote otherwise. The average gentleman—and there are thousands upon thousands of him—never gets drunk, and enjoys his wine at dinner and even his whiskey and water. He doesn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t have it, and there isn’t any. It adds to the pleasures of life. Those are the people that really represent Temperance, and naturally they have no sympathy with a movement that they consider narrow-minded and an unwarrantable intrusion.”

Miss Beale shook her head vigorously. “It is a sin to touch it!” she exclaimed, “and sooner or later they will all be drunkards, every one of them. The blessing of God is not on alcohol, and it should be banished from the face of the earth.”

Patience was in a perverse and almost ugly mood. “Tell me,” she said, “how do you reconcile your animosity to alcohol with the story of Christ’s turning the water into wine at the wedding feast?”

“It wasn’t wine,” said Miss Beale, triumphantly; “it was grape juice. Wine takes days to ferment, so the water couldn’t possibly have become wine all in a minute.”

Patience burst into laughter. “But, Miss Beale, it was a miracle anyhow, wasn’t it? If he could perform a miracle at all it would have been as easy to make wine out of water as grape juice.”

Miss Beale shook her head emphatically and set her lips. “I _know_ that the Lord never would have offered wine to anybody; but grape juice is delightful, and he probably knew it, and they called it wine. That is all there is to it.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Patience, forgetting the Temperance question, as Miss Beale turned into a path and walked toward the side entrance of the First Presbyterian Church, “are we going here?”

“Yes, this is just where we are going. There is a special meeting of the Y’s and Christian Endeavourers of Mariaville and White Plains and two or three other places. Ah! I’ve caught you now, you naughty girl.”

Patience turned away her face and frowned heavily. All her old dislike of religion, almost forgotten during the past two years, surged up above the impulsion of her fermenting spirit. She felt the old impatience, the old intolerance.

“Do you want me to go in there?” she asked. “I came to see you.”

“Oh, you’re not going to get out of it,” cried Miss Beale, gayly. “And I know you better than you know yourself. I know you always wanted to give yourself to the Lord, only you are too proud.”

Patience stared at her, wondering if she had so far forgotten herself as to indulge in a little joke at the expense of her idols; but Miss Beale was looking at her with kind, earnest eyes. Patience laughed, and shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, I’ll go in to please you; but I hope it won’t be too long, for I’m horribly hungry.”

“Dear, dear! Why didn’t you come a little earlier? But it won’t be more than two hours, and then I’ll have a hot luncheon prepared for you.”

She led Patience through the large church parlour and straight up to a table, lifting a chair as she passed the front row of seats.

“I don’t want to sit here,” whispered Patience, hurriedly; but Miss Beale pushed her into the chair, and seated herself beside her, at the back of the table.

“I am going to preside, and you are the guest of honour,” she said. “Young ladies,” she continued, smiling at the rows of bright and serious faces, “I am sure you will all be glad to see Patience again. I know she is glad to see you.”

Patience arose and bowed awkwardly, then sat down and tapped the floor with her foot. The young women looked surprised and pleased. One and all smiled encouragingly, sure that she had been converted at last. Many of the faces were bright with youth and even mischief; others were careworn and aging. Not one of them but looked happy.

Patience under her calm exterior began to seethe and mutter once more. Once she almost laughed aloud as she thought of the effect upon these simple-minded girls if the hell within her were suddenly made manifest.

The meeting opened at once. Miss Beale offered a prayer, in which she implored that they all might love the Lord the more. Hymns were sung, the Bible read, and reports by the various secretaries and treasurers. Then one serious and not unintelligent-looking woman of thirty read a platitudinous paper beginning: “Some one has said, ‘The time will come when it will be the proudest boast of every man and woman to say “I am an American.”’ I say that the time will come when it will be the proudest boast of every man and woman to say, ‘I am a Christian.’”

All regarded the reader with eyes of affection and approval. Each word Patience, in her abnormal state of mind, took as a personal insult to Intellect. She felt furiously resentful that in this Nineteenth Century with its educational facilities, its libraries full of the achievements of great masters of thought, there should be so low a standard of intellectuality in the middle classes. Even the fashionable women, frivolous as they were, were brighter, and keener to pierce outworn traditions. They might not be thinkers, but they had a species of lightning in their brain which rent superstition and gave them flashlight glimpses of life in its true proportions.

The girls began to give experiences. One had just joined the Y’s, and she related with tears the story of her struggle between the World and the Church, and her thankfulness that at last she had been permitted to decide in favour of the Lord. Patience remembered her as the vapid daughter of rather wealthy parents who in her own day had been devoted to society and young men. She was very faded. Many of the girls wept in sympathy, and Miss Beale mopped her eyes several times.

An extremely pretty girl stood up, a girl with black hair and pale blue eyes and rich pink colour. Patience regarded her satirically, thinking what a beauty she would be if properly gowned. Miss Beale, noting her interest, patted her hand and smiled.

“I just want to say,” began the girl, with deep earnestness, “that every day of my life I have greater confidence that the Lord loves me and hears what I ask Him. You know that I write the reports of the Y. W. C. T. U., and of course I have to get them printed for nothing. So when I sit down to write them I just ask the Lord to tell me what to say and how to say it, and all the way to the office I keep asking Him to tell me what to say to the editor so that he will print it and help our great cause along. And, girls, he prints it every time, and only yesterday he said to me: ‘I like your stuff because it’s direct and to the point, no gush, no rhetoric—it’s plain horse sense.’ Now, girls, you need not think I say that to compliment myself. I just say it to prove that the Lord writes those newspaper articles, not I.”

Patience put her handkerchief to her face and shook convulsively. She bit her lips to keep from laughing aloud; she wanted to scream.

Suddenly she became conscious of a deep murmur. Supposing it to be of disapproval, she straightened her mouth and dropped her handkerchief; but her face was scarlet, her eyes full of tears. The girls were leaning forward, regarding her earnestly. Miss Beale leaned over and placed her arm about her.

“Speak,” she said softly. “Don’t be afraid.”

“What on earth are you thinking about?” gasped Patience.

“Tell us what is in your heart,” said Miss Beale, in a tremulous voice.

And, “Tell us! Tell us!” came from the girls.

“You don’t know what you are saying,” said Patience, freeing herself angrily. “Let me go.” She was trembling with excitement. Her head felt very light. The blood was pounding in her ears. She started to her feet, meaning to rush to the door; but Miss Beale was too quick for her. She caught her firmly by the waist and led her to the middle of the space at the head of the room.

“I know she will speak,” said Miss Beale. “Patience, we all feel our awful responsibility. If you speak out now, you will be saved. If your timidity overcomes you, you may go hence and never hear His knock again.”

“Speak! Speak!” came with solemn emphasis from the Y’s.

“Oh, well, I’ll speak,” cried Patience. “And suppose you hear me out. It will be only polite, since you have forced me to speak. You have always misunderstood me. I am by no means indifferent to the God you worship. I have the most exalted respect and admiration for this tremendous creative force behind the Universe, a respect so great that I should never presume to address him as you do in your funny little egoism. Do you realise that this magnificent Being of whose essence you have not the most approximate idea, is the Creator, not only of this but of countless other worlds and systems, and furthermore of the psychic and physical laws that govern them and of the extraordinary mystery of which we are a part, and which has its most subtle expression in the Space surrounding us? And yet you, atoms, pigmies, tiny individual manifestations of a great correlative force called human nature, you presume to address this stupendous Being, and stand up and kneel down and talk to It, to imagine that It listens to your insignificant wants,—that It writes newspaper articles! Is it Christianity that has destroyed the sense of humour in its disciples?

“In each of you is a shaft from the great dominating Force—that is quite true, and it is for you to develop that force—character—and rely upon it, not upon a spiritual lover, as weak women do upon some unfortunate man. What good does all this religious sentimentality do you? Your brains are rotting. You have nothing to talk about to intelligent men. No wonder the men of small towns get away as soon as they can, and seek the intelligent women of lower strata. Men are naturally brighter than women, and girls of your sort deliberately make yourselves as limited and colourless as you can. Go, make yourselves companions for men, if you would make the world better, if you must improve the human race. Study the subjects that interest them, that fill their life; study politics and the great questions of the day, that you may lead them to the higher ethical plane on which nature has placed you. Quit this erotic sentimentalising over an abstract being to whom you must be the profoundest joke of his civilisation—”

“Hush!” shrieked Miss Beale. For some moments Patience had been obliged to raise her voice above the angry mutterings of her audience. One or two were sobbing hysterically. Miss Beale’s cry was the signal for the explosion of pent-up excitement.

“Go! Go!” cried the girls. “Go out of this church! Blasphemer! Shame! Shame!”

Patience looked out undaunted upon the sea of flushed angry faces, which a few moments before had been all peace and love. She shrugged her shoulders, bowed to Miss Beale, who was staring at her with horrified eyes in a livid face, and walked toward the door. The girls pressed her forward, lest she should speak again.

“We have a right as churchwomen to hate you,” cried one, “for we are told to hate the devil, and you are he incarnate.”

Patience refused to accelerate her steps, but reached the door in a moment. As she was about to pass out a joyous face was uplifted to hers. It belonged to a girl still sitting. Her lap was piled with loose sheets of paper. There was an excited smirch of lead on her cheek. Even as she raised her head and spoke she continued writing. “That was a corker,” she whispered, “the biggest story I’ve had in weeks.” It was Miss Merrien.

XVII

Patience was an early riser, and had usually read the “Day” through before Beverly lounged downstairs, sleepy and cross and masculine. On the morning after her day of varied experience she took the newspaper into the library and read the first page leisurely, as was her habit. The news of the world still interested her profoundly. Then she read the editorials, and, later, glanced idly at the headlines of the “stories.” The following arrested her startled eye:

AN EARTHQUAKE IN MARIAVILLE! THE GOOD PEOPLE ARE OUTRAGED! A SENSATION BY THE BEAUTIFUL AND BRILLIANT MRS. BEVERLY PEELE!

The story covered two thirds of a column. Patience read it three times in succession without stopping to comment. It was graphically told, much exaggerated, and as carefully climaxed as dramatic fiction. And it was interesting reading. Patience decided that if it had not been about herself she should have given it more than passing attention. Her beauty and grace and elegance, her grand air, were described with enthusiasm. Every possible point of contrast was made to the serious and unfashionable Y’s.

At first Patience was horrified. She wondered what Mr. and Mrs. Peele would say. Beverly’s comments were not within the limitations of doubt.

“I’m in for it,” she thought. Then she smiled. She felt the same thrill she had experienced when the men looked askance at her after her assault upon her mother. The Ego ever lifts its head at the first caress, and quickly becomes as insatiable as a child for sweets. Patience glanced at the article to note how many times her name—in small capitals—sprang forth to meet her eyes. She imagined Bourke reading it, and Mrs. Gallatin, and Mrs. Lafarge, and many others, and wondered if strangers would find it interesting; then, suddenly, she threw back her head and laughed aloud.

“What fools we mortals be!” she thought. “And the President of the United States has dozens of paragraphs written about him every day. And actors and writers are paragraphed _ad nauseam_. If a woman is run over in the street she has a column, and if she goes to a hotel and commits suicide, she has two, and is a raving beauty. Rosita is persecuted for stories. The Ego ought to have its ears boxed every morning, as some old-fashioned people switch their children. Well, here comes Beverly.”

Her husband entered, and for the first time in many months she sprang to her feet and gave him a little peck on his cheek. He was so surprised that he forgot to pick up the newspaper, and followed her at once into the dining-room. During the meal she talked of his horses and his farm, and even offered to take a drive with him. He was going to White Plains to look at some blooded stock which was to be sold at auction, and promptly invited her to accompany him; but her diplomacy had its limits, and she declined. However, he went from the table in high good humour. When she left him in the library, a few moments later, he was arranging the scattered sheets of the “Day,” without his accustomed comments upon “the infernal manner in which a woman always left a newspaper.”

Patience went up to her room and wrote a note of apology to Miss Beale. She was half way through a long letter to Hal when she heard Beverly bounding up the stair three steps at a time.

“The cyclone struck Peele Manor at 10.25,” she said, looking at the clock. “Sections of the fair—”

Beverly burst in without ceremony.

“What the hell does this mean?” he cried, brandishing the newspaper. His dilating nostrils were livid. The rest of his face was almost black.

“Beverly, you will certainly have apoplexy or burst a blood vessel,” said his wife, solicitously. “Think of those that love you and preserve yourself—”

“Those that love me be damned! The idea of my wife—_my wife_—being the heroine of a vulgar newspaper story! Her name out in a headline! Mrs. Beverly Peele! My God!”

“God was the cause of the whole trouble,” said Patience, flippantly. “I thought the young women were entirely too intimate with him. The spectacle conjured of The Almighty with his sleeves rolled up grinding out copy at five dollars per column was too much for me. I have the most profound admiration and respect for the Deity, and felt called upon to defend him—the others seemed so unconscious of insult—”

“This is no subject for a joke,” cried Beverly, who had sworn steadily through these remarks. “I don’t care a hang if you had a reason or not for making a public speech—Christ!—it’s enough that you made it, that your name’s in the paper—my wife’s name! What will my father and mother say?”

“They will not swear. A few of the Peeles are decently well bred.”

“No one ever gave them cause to swear before. You’ve turned this family upside down since you came into it. You’ve been the ruin of my life. I wish to God I’d never seen you.”

“I sincerely wish you hadn’t. What had you intended to make of your life that I have interfered with?”

“If I’d married a woman who loved me I’d have been a better man.”

“I wonder how many weak men have said that since the world began! You were twenty-six when I married you, and I cannot see that there has been any change in kind since, although there certainly is in degree. If you had married the ordinary little domestic woman, you would have been happier, but you would not have been better, for you possess neither soul nor intelligence. But I am perfectly willing to give you a chance for happiness. Give me my freedom, and look about you for a doll—”

“Do you mean to say that you want a divorce?”

“I think you know just how much I do.”

“Well, you won’t get it—by God! Do you understand that? You’ve no cause, and you’ll not get any.”

“There should be a law made for women who—who—well, like myself.”

Her husband was incapable of understanding her. “Well, you just remember that,” he said. “You don’t get a divorce, and you keep out of the newspapers, or you’ll be sorry,” and he slammed the door and strode away.

A quarter of an hour after Patience heard the wheels of his cart. At the same time the train stopped below the slope. A few moments later she saw Miss Merrien come up the walk. The maid brought up the visitor’s card, and with it a note from Mr. Field.

DEAR MRS. BEVERLY [it read],—Forgive me—but you are a woman of destiny, or I haven’t studied people sixty years for nothing. I chose to be the first—the scent of the old war-horse for news, you know. Peele will be furious, but I can’t bother about a trifle like that. Just give this young woman an interview, and oblige your old friend

J. E. F.

Patience started to go downstairs, then turned to the mirror and regarded herself attentively. She looked very pretty, remarkably so, as she always did when the pink was in her cheeks; but her morning gown was plain and not particularly becoming. She changed it, after some deliberation, for a house-robe of pearl grey silk with a front of pale pink chiffon hanging straight from a collar of cut steel. The maid had brought her some pink roses from the greenhouse; she fastened one in the coil of her soft pale hair. Then she smiled at her reflection, shook out her train, and rustled softly down the stair.

Miss Merrien exclaimed with feminine enthusiasm as she entered the library.

“Oh, you are the loveliest woman to write about,” she said. “I do a lot of society work; and I am so tired of describing the conventional beauty. And that gown! I’m going to describe every bit of it. Did it come from Paris?”

“Yes,” said Patience, amused at her immediate success. “My mother-in-law brought it to me last summer—but perhaps you had better not mention Mrs. Peele in your story.”

“Well, I won’t, of course, if you don’t want me to. I have written the story about La Rosita for the Sunday ‘Day,’ and I did not hint at your identity. It made a good story, but not as good as the one about you. Mr. Field wrote me a note this morning, complimenting me, and told me to come up here and interview you. I hope you don’t mind very much.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea whether I do or not. How do you do it?”

“Well, you see, I’ll just ask you questions and you answer them, and I’ll put it all down in shorthand, and then when I go to the office I’ll thresh it into shape. You can be sure that I won’t say anything that isn’t pleasant, for I really never admired any one half so much.”

“Very well, you interview me, and then I’ll interview you. I have some questions to ask also.”

“I’ll tell you anything you like. This story, by the way, is to be in the Sunday issue on the Woman’s Page. Now we’ll begin. Were you always an unbeliever? Tell me exactly what are your religious opinions.”

“Oh, dear me! You are not going to write a serious analysis of me?”

“Yes, but I’ll give it the light touch so that it won’t bore anybody. It is to be called ‘A Society Woman Who Thinks,’ and will be read with interest all over America.”

“But I am not a society woman.”

“Well, you’re a swell, and that’s the same thing, for this purpose anyhow. The Gardiner Peeles are out of sight, and I have heard lots of times how beautifully you entertain in summer and how charmingly you gown yourself. Tell me first—what do you think of this everlasting woman question? I hate the very echo of the thing, but we’ll have to touch on it.”

“Oh, I haven’t given much thought to it, except as a phase of current history. One thing is positive, I think: we must adjust our individual lives without reference to any of the problems of the moment,—Womanism, Socialism, the Ethical Question, the Marriage Question, and all the others that are everlasting raging. He that would be happy must deal with the great primal facts of life—and these facts will endure until human nature is no more. Moreover, however much she may reason, nothing can eradicate the strongest instinct in woman—that she can find happiness only through some man.”

“Good,” said Miss Merrien. “I’d have thought the same thing if I’d ever had time. Now tell me if you have any religion at all.”

“I suppose I should be called an anarchist. Don’t be alarmed: I mean the philosophical or spiritual anarchist, not these poor maniarchists that are merely an objectionable variety of lunatics. The religious situation is this, I think: Jesus Christ does not satisfy the intellectual needs of the Nineteenth Century. And yet, indisputably, the religionists are happier than the multiplying scores that could no more continue in the old delusion than they could worship idols or torture the flesh. Civilisation needs a new prophet, and he must be an anarchist,—one who will teach the government of self by self, the government of man’s nature by will, which in its turn is subservient to the far seeing brain. Human nature is anarchic in its essence. The child never was born that was brought to bend to authority without effort. We are still children, or we should not need laws and governments.”

“Wait till I get that down.”

“Of course these are only individual opinions. I don’t claim any value for them, and should never have thought of airing them if you hadn’t asked me. For my part I’m glad I live in this imperfect chaotic age. When we can all do exactly as we please and won’t even remember how to want to do anything wrong—Awful!”

“But you said the advanced thinkers needed this new religion to make them happy.”

“Their happiness will consist in the tremendous effort to reach the difficult goal. That will take centuries, just as the spiritualised socialism of Jesus Christ has taken twenty centuries, and only imperfectly possessed one third of the globe. When anarchy is a cold hard fact—well, I suspect the anarchists will suddenly discover that _ennui_ is in their vitals, and will gently yawn each other to death. Then the tadpoles will begin over again; or perhaps there will then be mental and moral developments that we in our present limitations cannot conceive. Haven’t you had enough?”

“No, no. I’ve a dozen questions more.”

Miss Merrien, like all good newspaper reporters, was an amateur lawyer and a harmless hypnotist. In an hour she had extracted Patience’s views of society, books, dress, public questions, and the actors in the great national theatre, the Capitol at Washington.

“Oh, this is magnificent,” she announced, when the pages had been folded. “Now can I look at the house?”

“We will have luncheon first. No, don’t protest. I am delighted. Mr. Peele is away for the day, otherwise I fear you would not have had this interview.”

“Oh, you don’t believe in the submission of wives, then?”

“I’ve never thought much about it,” said Patience, indifferently. “There is too much fuss made about it all. When a man commands his wife to do a thing she does not care to do, and when a woman does what she knows will displease her husband, it is time for them to separate.”

“Oh, that is too simple. It wouldn’t do to reduce the woman question to a rule of three. What would all the reformers do? And the poor polemical novelists! Oh, these are the famous portraits, I suppose?”

“You can look at them if the luncheon is bad,” said Patience, as they took their seats at table. “I’m not a very good housekeeper, although I actually did take some lessons of Miss Mairs. And sometimes I forget to order luncheon. I did to-day.”

But the luncheon proved to be a very good one, and Miss Merrien did it justice, while Patience explained the portraits. Afterward she showed her guest over the lower part of the house. Then they went back to the library, and Patience had her interview.

“Tell me exactly how does a woman begin on a newspaper?” she asked.

“Oh, different ones have different experiences,” said Miss Merrien, vaguely. “Sometimes you have letters, and are put on as a fashion or society reporter, or to get interviews with famous women, or to go and ask prominent people their opinion on a certain subject—for a symposium, you know; like ‘What Would You do if You Knew that the World was to End in Three Days?’ or, ‘Is Society Society?’ I have written dozens of symposiums. Sometimes you do free-lance work, just pick up what you can and trust to luck to catch on. But of course you must have the nose for news. I was at a matinée one day and sat in front of two society women. Between the acts they talked about a prominent woman of their set who was getting a divorce from her husband so quietly that no newspaper had suspected it. They also joked about the fact that her lawyer was an old lover. I knew this was a tip, and a big one. I wrote all the names on my cuff, and before the matinée was over I was down at the ‘Day’ and had turned in my tip to the City editor. He sent a reporter to the lawyer to bluff him into admitting the truth. The next day we had a big story, and after that the editor gave me work regularly.”

“How much do you make a week?”

“Sometimes forty, sometimes not twenty; but I average pretty well and get along. Still, when you have to lay by for sickness and vacations, and put about one half on your back it doesn’t amount to much. You see, a newspaper woman must dress well, must make a big bluff. If she doesn’t look successful she won’t be, to say nothing of the fact that she couldn’t get inside a smart house if she looked shabby. And then she’s got to eat good nourishing food, or she never could stand the work. Of course there’s got to be economy somewhere, so I live in a hall bedroom and make my own coffee in the morning. Still, I don’t complain, for I do like the work. If I had to go back home I’d ruin the happiness of the entire family.”

“What do you look forward to?—I mean what ultimate? You don’t want to be a reporter always, I suppose. Everybody is striving for some top notch.”

“Oh, maybe I’ll become Sunday editor, or I might fall in with somebody that wanted to start a woman’s newspaper, or magazine—you never can tell. There aren’t many good berths for women. Of course there are a good many very bright newspaper women, and it’s a toss up who goes to the top.”

“You don’t seem to take matrimony into consideration.”

“Oh, I don’t deny I get so tired sometimes that I’d be only too glad to have a man take care of me. I guess we all look forward to that, more or less. I think I’d always work, but not so hard. It would make all the difference in the world if you knew some one else was paying the bills. And then, you see, we go to pieces in eight or ten years. A man is good for hard newspaper work until he’s forty, but we women are made to be taken care of, and that’s a fact. We take turns having nervous prostration. I haven’t had it yet, but I’m looking cheerfully forward to it.”

“Now I want to tell you,” said Patience, “that I am going to be a newspaper woman.”

“Oh, nonsense, Mrs. Peele! Excuse me, but you belong here. Your rôle is that of the châtelaine in exquisite French gowns and an air half of languor, half of pride. You were not made for work.”

“That is very pretty, but I suspect you don’t want to lose me for copy.”

“Well, I don’t deny it. I wish you’d keep the ball rolling, and give me a story a month.”

“I’m afraid I’ve given you my last. In a week or two I shall be a châtelaine in a pink and grey gown no longer, but a humble applicant for work in Mr. Field’s office.”

“Is it possible that you mean it?”

“Do I look as if I were joking?”

“You don’t look unhappy—Pardon me—but—but—does he beat you?”

“Oh, no,” said Patience, laughing outright, “he doesn’t beat me. I have better grounds for desertion than that. Do you think you would do me a favour? I shall have to slip away. He would never let me go with a trunk. I am going to ask you to let me send you a box of things every few days. That will excite no comment among the servants, as we are always sending clothes to the poor. May I?”

“Of course you may. I’ll do everything I can to help you. But—I can’t imagine you out of this environment. Don’t you hate to give it up,—all this luxury, this ease, this atmosphere?”

“Yes, I like it all. I’m a sybarite, fast enough. But I’ve weighed it all in the balance, and Peele Manor stays up. I have a hundred dollars or so, and that will last me for a time. I’ll give it to you to take care of for me. I never was wealthy, but I have no idea of economy. I don’t think I should like a hall room though. Are the others so very expensive?”

“They are if you have a good address, and that’s very important. And you want to be in a house with a handsome parlour.”

“I have no friends,—none that will come to see me.”

“Oh, you’ll make friends. You’re an awfully sweet woman. I can’t bear to think—Well, there’s no use saying any more about it. I expect you’re the sort that knows your own mind. I should like to keep on seeing you a great lady, but if you can’t be a happy one I suppose you are right. Well, I’ll stand by you through thick and thin, and I’ll show you the ropes. Now I must get back to the office and work up my story. Here’s my address. There’s a spare room on the floor above mine. If you’re in dead earnest I’d better take it right away; then I can unpack your things and hang them up. But—but—do you really mean it?”

“Of course I do.”

“You know Mr. Field personally, don’t you?”

“Very well, indeed; and he told me when I was sixteen that he should make a newspaper woman of me.”

“Oh, well, then, you’ll have a lot of push, and your road won’t be as hard as some—not by a long shot. About six out of every ten newspaper women either go to the wall or to the bad. It is a mixture of knack and pluck as much as brains that carries the favoured minority through. You have brains and pluck, and you’ll have push, so you ought to get there. About the knack of course I can’t tell. Good-bye.”

XVIII

The evening mail brought from Mrs. Peele to her son a note which he read with a rumbling accompaniment, then tossed to Patience.

“Do you intend to permit your wife to disgrace your family?” it read. “If I had my way that abominable paper, the ‘Day,’ should never enter this house—nor any other paper that dealt in personalities. I literally writhe every time I see my name—your father’s honoured name—in the society columns. You may, then, perhaps, imagine my feelings when your father handed me the ‘Day’ this morning with his finger on that outrageous column. He was speechless with wrath, and will personally call Mr. Field to account. I am in bed with a violent headache, in consequence, and dictating this letter to Honora. But although I deeply feel for you, my beloved son, I must _insist_ that you assert your authority with your wrong-headed wife and command her to refrain from disgracing this family. I don’t wish to reproach you, but I cannot help saying that it is _always_ a dangerous experiment to marry beneath one. This girl is not one of us, she never can be; for, not to mention that we know nothing whatever of her family, she comes from that dreadful savage _new_ Western country. In spite of the fact that she has been clever enough to superficially adapt herself to our ways, I always knew that she would break out somewhere—I always said so to Honora. But I don’t wish to add to your own sorrow. I know how you, with all your proud Peele reserve, must feel. Only, my son, use your authority in the future.”

Patience finished this letter with a disagreeable lowering of the brows. She made no comment, however, but opened a book and refused to converse with her husband.

On Sunday morning she found three columns on the Woman’s Page of the “Day” devoted to her beauty, her intellect, her gowns, and her opinions. It was embellished with a photograph of Peele Manor and a sketch of herself, which Miss Merrien had evidently made from memory. When Beverly came down she handed the newspaper to him at once, to read the story with the raw temper of early morning. She hoped that Mrs. Peele would read it in similar conditions.

After he had gone through the headlines he let the newspaper fall to the floor, and stared at her with a face so livid that for a moment she felt as if looking upon the risen dead. Then gradually it blackened, only the nostrils remaining white.

“So you deliberately defy me?” he articulated.

“Yes,” she said, watching him narrowly. She thought that he might strike her.

“You did it on purpose to drive me crazy?”

“I had no object whatever, except that it pleased me to be interviewed. Understand at once that I shall do exactly as I please in all things. This is not the country for petty household tyrants. I don’t doubt there are many men in this world whom I should be glad to treat with deference and respect if I happened to be married to one of them; but with men like you there is only one course to take. I have asked you to let me live abroad. If you consent to this, it may save you a great deal of trouble in the future; for, I repeat, I shall in all things do exactly as I choose.”

“We’ll see whether you will or not,” he roared. “You’ll do as I say, or I’ll lock you up.”

“Oh, you will not lock me up. You are way behind your times, Beverly. There is no law in the United States to compel me to obey you.”

“I’ll stop your allowance. You’ll never get another cent from me.”

“That has nothing whatever to do with it. Now, I ask you for the last time, Will you let me travel?”

“No!” he shouted, and he rushed from the room.