Chapter 10

Snaffle sometimes said that he believed in nothing but making money, and there was never any reason to suppose he held an opinion because he expressed it. He said what he felt to be politic, and a long and complicated experience enabled him to defend any view with more or less plausibility upon a moment's notice. He was clever enough to see that for some reason the widow wished him to pursue the line of talk he had taken, and he was ready enough to oblige her. He never took the trouble to inquire of himself what his opinions were, because that question was of so secondary importance; he merely exerted himself to make the most of any points that presented themselves to his mind in favor of the side it was for his advantage to support.

"'Pon my word," Greenfield said, with a laugh, "you talk like an old fogy of the first water. I wouldn't have suspected you of looking at things that way."

"Mr. Snaffle is always surprising," Mrs. Sampson said, with her most dazzling smile, "but he is generally right."

"Thank you. I can't help at any rate seeing that there are two sides to this thing, and I am too old a bird to be caught with the common chaff that people talk."

Mr. Greenfield settled himself comfortably in his chair and laughed softly. The discussion was so purely theoretical that he could be amused without looking upon it seriously.

"For my part," he remarked, his big hand playing with a paper-knife on one of the little tables, which, to a practised eye, suggested cards, "I am of the progressive party, thank you. I believe in opening up the country and putting railroads where they will do the most good. A few people get their old prejudices run against, but on the whole it is for the interest of a town to have a railroad, and it is nonsense to talk any other way."

Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson leaned forward to lay her fingers upon the speaker's arm.

"That is just it, Cousin Tom," she said, with a languishing glance. "You always look at things in so large a way. You never let the matter of personal interest decide, but think of the public good,"

The flattery was somewhat gross, but men will swallow a good deal in the way of praise from women. They are generally slow to suspect the fair sex of sarcasm, and allow themselves the luxury of enjoying the pleasure of indulging their vanity untroubled by unpleasant doubts concerning the sincerity of compliments which from masculine lips would offend them. Greenfield laughed with a perceptible shade of awkwardness, but he was evidently not ill pleased.

"Oh, well," he returned, "that is because thus far it has happened that my personal interests and my convictions have worked together so well. You might see a difference if they didn't pull in the same line."

Mrs. Sampson considered a moment, and then rose, bringing out a decanter of sherry with a supply of glasses and of biscuit from a convenient closet in the bottom of a secretary.

"That's business," Snaffle said, joyously. "Sherry ain't much for a man of my size, but it's better than nothing."

"It is a hint though," the hostess said, filling his glass.

"A hint!" he repeated.

"Yes; a hint that it is getting late, and that I am tired, and you must go home."

"Oh, ho!" he laughed uproariously; "now I won't let you in for that good thing on the Princeton Platinum stock. You'll wish you hadn't turned me out of the house when you see that stock quoted at fifty per cent above par."

"Ah, I know all about Princeton Platinum," she responded, showing her white teeth rather more than was absolutely demanded by the occasion; "besides, I've no money to put into anything."

"What about Princeton Platinum?" Greenfield asked, turning toward the other a shrewd glance. "I've heard a good deal of talk about it lately, but I didn't pay much attention to it."

"Princeton Platinum," the hostess put in before Snaffle could speak, "is Mr. Snaffle's latest fairy story. It is a dream that people buy pieces of for good hard samoleons, and"--

"Good _what?_" interrupted the country member.

"Shekels, dollars, for cash under whatever name you choose to give it; and then some fine morning they all wake up."

"Well?" demanded Snaffle, to whom the jest seemed not in the least distasteful. "And what then?"

"Oh, what is usually left of dreams when one wakes up in the morning?"

The fat person of the speculator shook with appreciation of the wit of this sally, which did not seem to Greenfield so funny as from the laughter of the others he supposed it must really be. The latter rose when Snaffle did and prepared to say good-night, but Mrs. Sampson detained him. "I want to speak with you a moment," she said. "Good-night, Mr. Snaffle. Bear us in mind when Princeton Platinum has made your fortune, and don't look down on us."

"No fear," he returned. "When that happens, I shall come to you for advice how to spend it."

There was too much covetousness in her voice as she answered jocosely that she could tell him. The struggle of life made even a jesting supposition of wealth excite her cupidity. She sighed as she turned back into the parlor and motioned Greenfield to a seat. Placing herself in a low, velvet-covered chair, she stretched out her feet before her, displaying the black silk stocking upon a neat instep as she crossed them upon a low stool.

"I am sure I don't know how to say what I want to," she began, knitting her brows in a perplexity that was only part assumed. "Something has come to me in the strangest way, and I think I ought to tell you, although I haven't any interest in it, and it certainly isn't any of my business."

Her companion was too blunt to be likely to help her much. He simply asked, in the most straightforward manner,--

"What is it?"

"It's about public business," she said. "Why!" she added, as if a sudden light had broken upon her. "I really believe I was going to be a lobbyist. Fancy me lobbying! What does a lobbyist do?"

"Nothing that you'd be likely to have any hand in," returned Greenfield, smiling at the absurdity of the proposition. "What is all this about?"

"I suppose I should not have thought of it but for the turn the talk took to-night," she returned with feminine indirectness. "It was odd, wasn't it, that we should get to talking of the harm railroads do, when it was about a railroad that I was going to talk."

"There's only one railroad scheme on foot this spring that I know anything about, and that's for a branch of the Massachusetts Outside Railroad through Wachusett. That isn't in the Legislature either."

"That's the one. It's going to be in the Legislature. There's going to be an attempt to change the route."

"Change the route?"

"Yes, so it will go through--but will you promise not to tell this to a living mortal?"

"Of course."

"I suppose," she said, regarding her slipper intently, "that I really ought not to tell you; but I can't help it somehow. Your name is to be used."

"My name?"

"Yes, the men who are planning the thing say that it will be so evident that you'd want the road to go this new way, that if you vote with the Wachusett interest they'll swear you are bought."

"Swear I'm bought? Pooh! Tom Greenfield is too well known for that sort of talk to hold water."

"But through your own town"--

Mrs. Sampson regarded her companion closely as she slowly pronounced these words. They roused him like an electric shock.

"Through Feltonville?"

She nodded, compressing her lips, but saying nothing.

"Phew! This is a tough nut to crack. But are you sure that is to be tried?"

"Yes; there is a scheme for a few monopolists to buy up mill privileges and run factories at Feltonville; and they mean to make the road serve them, instead of its being put where the public need it."

"So that's what Lincoln's been raking up in Boston," Greenfield said to himself. "I knew he was up to some deviltry. Wants to sell off those meadows he's been gathering in on mortgages."

"Of course you'll want to help your town," Mrs. Sampson said, regretfully. "The men that voted for you'll expect you to do it; but it's helping on a sly scheme at the expense of the state. I'm sorry you've got to be on that side."

"Got to be on that side?" he retorted, starting up. "Who says I've got to be on that side? we'll see about that before we get through. The men that voted for me expect me to do what is right, and I don't think they'll be disappointed just yet."

And all things considered, Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson thought she had done a good evening's work.

XVI

WEIGHING DELIGHT AND DOLE. Hamlet; i.--2.

"Oh, this is completely captivating," Mrs. Frostwinch said, as she sat down to luncheon in Edith Fenton's pretty dining-room, and looked at the large mound-like bouquet of richly tinted spring leaves which adorned the centre of the table. "That is the advantage of having brains. One always finds some delightful surprise or other at your house."

"Thank you," Edith returned, gayly; "but at your house one always has a delightful surprise in the hostess, so you are not forced to resort to makeshifts."

Helen Greyson, the third member of the party, smiled and shook her head.

"Really," she said, "is one expected to keep up to the level of elaborate compliment like that? I fear I can only sit by in admiring silence while you two go on."

"Oh, no," the hostess responded. "Mrs. Frostwinch is to talk to you. That is what you people are here for. I am only to listen."

Edith had invited Helen and Mrs. Frostwinch to take luncheon with her, and she had really done it to bring these two more closely together. She was fond of them both, and the effect of her life in the world into which her marriage had introduced her had been to render her capable of judging both these women broadly. She admired them both, and while her feeling of affection had by circumstances been more closely cemented with Helen, she felt that a strong friendship was possible between herself and Mrs. Frostwinch should the lines of their lives ever fall much together.

The modern woman, particularly if she be at all in society, has generally to accept the possibilities of friendship in place of that gracious boon itself. The busy round of life to-day gives ample opportunity for judging of character, so that it is well nigh impossible not to feel that some are worthy of friendship, some especially gifted by nature with the power of inspiring it, while, on the other hand, there are those who repel or with whom the bond would be impossible. But friendship, however much it be the result of eternal fitness and the inevitable consequence of the meeting of two harmonious natures, is a plant of slow growth, and few things which require time and tranquillity for their nourishment flourish greatly in this age of restlessness and intense mental activity. The radical and unfettered Bohemian, or such descendants of that famous race as may be supposed still to survive, attempts to leap over all obstacles, to create what must grow, and to turn comradeship into friendship simply because one naturally grows out of the other; the more conservative and logical Philistine recognizes the futility of this attitude, and in his too careful consistency sometimes needlessly brings about the very same failure by pursuing the opposite course.

Edith was not of the women who naturally analyze their own feelings toward others over keenly, but one cannot live in a world without sharing its mental peculiarities. The times are too introspective to allow any educated person to escape self-examination. The century which produced that most appalling instance of spiritual exposure, the "_Journal Intime_" which it is impossible to read without blushing that one thus looks upon the author's soul in its nakedness, leaves small chance for self-unconsciousness. Edith could not help examining her mental attitude toward her companions, and it was perhaps a proof of the sweetness of her nature that she found in her thought nothing of that shortcoming in them, or reason for lack of fervor in friendship other than such as must come from lack of intercourse.

Perhaps some train of thought not far removed from the foregoing made her say, as the luncheon progressed,--

"Really, it seems to me as if life proceeded at a pace so rapid nowadays that one had not time even to be fond of anybody."

"It goes too fast for one to have much chance to show it," Helen responded; "but one may surely be fond of one's friends, even without seeing them."

"If you will swear not to tell the disgraceful fact," Mrs. Frostwinch said, "I'll confess that I abhor Walt Whitman; but that one dreadful, disreputably slangy phrase of his, 'I loaf and invite my soul,' echoes through my brain like an invitation to Paradise."

Edith smiled.

"If Arthur were here," she returned, "he would probably say that you think you mean that, but that really you don't."

"My dear," Mrs. Frostwinch answered, with her beautiful smile and a characteristic undulation of the neck, "your husband, although he is clever to an extent which I consider positively immoral, is only a man, and he does not understand. Men do what they like; women, what they can. There may be moral free will for women, although I've ceased to be sure of that even; but socially no such thing exists. Do we wear the dreadful clothes we are tied up in because we want to? Do we order society, or our lives, or our manners, or our morals? Do we"--

"There, there," interrupted Helen, laughing and putting up her hand. "I can't hear all this without a protest. If it is true I won't own it. I had rather concede that all women are fools"--

"As indeed they are," interpolated Mrs. Frost-winch.

"Than that they are helpless manikins," continued Helen. "In any other sense, that is," she added, "than men are."

"My dear Mrs. Greyson," the other said, leaning toward her, "you take the single question of the relation of the sexes, and where are we? I wouldn't own it to a man for the world, but the truth is that men are governed by their will, and women are governed by men; and, what is more, if it could all be changed to-morrow, we should be perfectly miserable until we got the old way back again; and that's the most horribly humiliating part of it."

"It is easy to see that you are not a woman suffragist," commented Edith.

"Woman suffrage," echoed the other, her voice never for an instant varied from its even and highbred pitch; "woman suffrage must remain a practical impossibility until the idea can be eradicated from society that the initiative in passion is the province of man."

"Brava!" cried the hostess. "Mr. Herman ought to hear that epigram. He asked me last night if he ought to put an inscription in favor of woman suffrage on the hem of the _America _he is modelling."

Helen turned toward her quickly.

"Is Mr. Herman making a model of the _America_?" she asked. "Has he the commission?"

"He hasn't the commission, because nobody has it, but he has been asked by the committee to prepare a model."

"That is"--began Helen. "Strange," she was going to say, but fortunately caught herself in time and substituted "capital. It is good to think that Boston will have one really fine statue."

"Aren't you in that, Mrs. Greyson?" Mrs. Frostwinch asked.

"No," Helen answered. "I am really doing little since I came home. I am waiting until the time serves, I suppose."

She spoke without especial thought of what she was saying, desiring merely to cover any indications which might show the feeling aroused by what she had just heard and the decision she had just taken to have nothing to do with the contest for the statue of _America_, although she had begun a study for the figure.

"I admire you for being able to make time serve you instead of serving time like the rest of us," Mrs. Frostwinch said.

"I shouldn't hear another call you a time server without taking up the cudgels to defend you," responded Edith.

Mrs. Frostwinch smiled in reply to this. Then she turned again to Helen.

"To tell the truth, Mrs. Greyson," she observed, "I am glad you are not concerned in this statue, for I am myself one of a band of conspirators who are pushing the claims of a new man."

"Is there a new sculptor?" Helen asked, smiling. "That is wonderful news."

"Yes; we think he is the coming man. His name is Stanton; Orin Stanton."

"Oh," responded Helen, with involuntary frankness in her accent.

Mrs. Frostwinch laughed with perfect good nature.

"You don't admire him?" she commented. "Well, many don't. To say the truth, I do not think anybody alive, if you will pardon me, Mrs. Greyson, knows the truth about sculpture. Perhaps the Greeks did, but we don't, even when we are told. I know the Soldiers' Monument on the Common is hideous beyond words, because everybody says so; but they didn't when it was put up. Only a few artists objected then."

"And the fact that a few artists have brought everybody to their opinion," Edith asked, "doesn't make you feel that they must be right; must have the truth behind them?"

"No; frankly, I can't say that it does," Mrs. Frostwinch responded.

She leaned back in her chair, a soft flush on her thin, high-bred face. Her figure, in a beautiful gown of beryl plush embroidered with gold, seemed artistically designed for the carved, high-backed chair in which she sat, and both her companions were too appreciative to lose the grace of the picture she made.

"I cannot see that it is bad," she went on. "Mr. Fenton has proved it to me, and even Mr. Herman, who seems, so far as I have seen him, the most charitable of men, when I asked him how he liked it, spoke with positive loathing of it. I can't manage to make myself unhappy over it, that's all. And I believe I am as appreciative as the average."

To Helen there was something at once fascinating and repellent in this talk. She was attracted by Mrs. Frostwinch. The perfect breeding, the grace, the polish of the woman, won upon her strongly, while yet the subtile air of taking life conventionally, of lacking vital earnestness, was utterly at variance with the sculptor's temperament and methods of thought. She no sooner recognized this feeling than she rebuked herself for shallowness and a want of charity, yet even so the impression remained. To the artistic temperament, enthusiasm is the only excuse for existence.

"I think Mrs. Fenton is right," she said. "The few form the correct judgment, and the many adopt it in the end because it is based on truth. It seems to me," she continued, thoughtfully, "that the prime condition of effectiveness is constancy, and only that opinion can be constant that has truth for a foundation, because no other basis would remain to hold it up."

"That may be true," was the reply, "if you take matters in a sufficiently long range, but you seem to me to be viewing things from the standpoint of eternity."

The smile with which she said these last words was so charming that Helen warmed toward her, and she smiled also in replying,--

"Isn't that, after all, the only safe way to look at things?"

"What deep waters we are getting into," Edith commented. "And yet they say women are always frivolous."

"The Boston luncheon," returned Mrs. Frost-winch, "is a solemn assembly for the discussion of mighty themes. Yesterday, at Mrs. Bodewin Ranger's, we disposed of all the knotty problems relating to the lower classes."

"I didn't know but it might be something about my house. The last time Mrs. Greyson lunched here we solemnly debated what a wife should do whose husband did not appreciate her."

She spoke brightly, but there was in her tone, an undercurrent of feeling which touched Helen, and betrayed the fact that this return to the old theme was not wholly without a cause. Mrs. Greyson divined that Edith was not happy, and with the keenness of womanly instinct she divined also that there was not perfect harmony between Mrs. Fenton and her husband. She looked up quickly, with an instinctive desire to turn the conversation, but found no words ready.

Edith had at the moment yielded to a woman's craving for sympathy. An incident which had happened that forenoon troubled and bewildered her. She had been down town, and remembering a matter of importance about which she had neglected to consult her husband in the morning, she had turned aside to visit his studio, a thing she seldom did in his working hours. She found him painting from a model, and she was kept waiting a moment while the latter retired from sight. She thought nothing of this, but as she stood talking with Arthur, her glance fell upon a wrap which she recognized as belonging to Mrs. Herman, and which had been carelessly left upon the back of a chair in sight. Even this might not have troubled her, had it not been that when she looked questioningly from the garment to her husband, she caught a look of consternation in his eyes. His glance met hers and turned aside with that almost imperceptible wavering which shows the avoidance to be intentional; and a pang of formless terror pierced her.

All the way home she was tormented by the wonder how that wrap could have come in her husband's studio, and what reason he could have for being disturbed by her seeing it there. She was not a woman given to petty or vulgar jealousy, and she had from the first left the artist perfectly free in his professional relations to be governed by the necessities or the conveniences of his profession. She could not to-day, however, rid herself of the feeling that some mystery lay behind the incident of the morning. She began to frame excuses. She speculated whether it were possible that Arthur were secretly painting the portrait of his friend's wife, to produce it as a surprise to them all. She said to herself that Ninitta naturally knew models, and might easily have enough of a feeling of comradeship remaining from the time when she had been a model herself, to lend or give them articles of dress. Unfortunately, she knew how Ninitta kept herself aloof from her old associates since the birth of her child, and the explanation did not satisfy her.

No faintest suspicion of positive evil entered Edith's mind. She was only vaguely troubled, the incident forming one more of the trifles which of late had made her very uneasy in regard to her husband. She told herself that she had confidence in Arthur; but the woman who is forced to reflect that she has confidence in her husband has already begun, however unconsciously, to doubt him.

"The question is profound enough," Mrs. Frostwinch answered Edith's words in her even tones, which somehow seemed to reduce everything to a well-bred abstraction. "Of course the thing for a Woman to do is to remain determinedly ignorant until it would be too palpably absurd to pretend any longer; and then she must get away from him as quietly as possible. The evil in these things is, after all, the stir and the talk, and all the unpleasant and vulgar gossip which inevitably attends them."

Poor Edith cringed as if she had received a blow, and to cover her emotion she gave the signal for rising from the table. But as she did so, her eyes met those of Helen, and the truth leaped from one to the other in one of those glances in which the heart, taken unaware, reveals its joy or its woe with irresistible frankness. Whatever words Edith and Helen might or might not exchange thereafter, the story of Mrs. Fenton's married life and of the anguish of her soul was told in that look; and her friend understood it fully.

XVII

THE HEAVY MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. Measure for Measure; iv.--10.