Under the Skylights / Fuller, Henry Blake, 1857-1929

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Title: Under the Skylights

Author: Henry Blake Fuller

Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8196]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on June 30, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE SKYLIGHTS ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Thomas Berger
and the Distributed Proofreaders team.




HENRY BLAKE FULLER

UNDER THE SKYLIGHTS

       *       *       *       *       *

PREFATORY NOTE

The short concluding section of this book--that relating to Dr. Gowdy and
the Squash--is reprinted by permission from _Harper's Magazine_. All the
remaining material appears now for the first time.

       *       *       *       *       *

CONTENTS

  THE DOWNFALL OF ABNER JOYCE

  LITTLE O'GRADY _VS._ THE GRINDSTONE

  DR. GOWDY AND THE SQUASH.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE DOWNFALL OF ABNER JOYCE

       *       *       *       *       *

THE DOWNFALL OF ABNER JOYCE




I

With the publication of his first book, _This Weary World_, Abner Joyce
immediately took a place in literature. Or rather, he made it; the book
was not like other books, and readers felt the field of fiction to be the
richer by one very vital and authentic personality.

_This Weary World_ was grim and it was rugged, but it was sincere and it
was significant. Abner's intense earnestness had left but little room for
the graces;--while he was bent upon being recognised as a "writer," yet
to be a mere writer and nothing more would not have satisfied him at all.
Here was the world with its many wrongs, with its numberless crying
needs; and the thing for the strong young man to do was to help set
matters right. This was a simple enough task, were it but approached with
courage, zeal, determination. A few brief years, if lived strenuously and
intensely, would suffice. "Man individually is all right enough," said
Abner; "it is only collectively that he is wrong." What was at fault was
the social scheme,--the general understanding, or lack of understanding.
A short sharp hour's work before breakfast would count for a hundred
times more than a feeble dawdling prolonged throughout the whole day.
Abner rose betimes and did his hour's work; sweaty, panting, begrimed,
hopeful, indignant, sincere, self-confident, he set his product full in
the world's eye.

Abner's book comprised a dozen short stories--twelve clods of earth
gathered, as it were, from the very fields across which he himself, a
farmer's boy, had once guided the plough. The soil itself spoke, the
intimate, humble ground; warmed by his own passionate sense of right, it
steamed incense-like aloft and cried to the blue skies for justice. He
pleaded for the farmer, the first, the oldest, the most necessary of all
the world's workers; for the man who was the foundation of civilized
society, yet who was yearly gravitating downward through new depths of
slighting indifference, of careless contempt, of rank injustice and gross
tyranny; for the man who sowed so plenteously, so laboriously, yet reaped
so scantily and in such bitter and benumbing toil; for the man who lived
indeed beneath the heavens, yet must forever fasten his solicitous eye
upon the earth. All this revolted Abner; the indignation of a youth that
had not yet made its compromise with the world burned on every page. Some
of his stories seemed written not so much by the hand as by the fist, a
fist quivering from the tension of muscles and sinews fully ready to act
for truth and right; and there were paragraphs upon which the intent and
blazing eye of the writer appeared to rest with no less fierceness,
coldly printed as they were, than it had rested upon the manuscript
itself.

"Men shall hear me--and heed me," Abner declared stoutly.

A few of those who read his book happened to meet him personally, and one
or two of this number--clever but inconspicuous people--lucidly
apprehended him for what he was: that rare phenomenon, the artist (such
he was already calling himself)--the artist whose personality, whose
opinions and whose work are in exact accord. The reading public--a body
rather captious and blase, possibly--overlooked his rugged diction in
favour of his novel point of view; and when word was passed around that
the new author was actually in town a number of the _illuminati_
expressed their gracious desire to meet him.




II

But Abner remained for some time ignorant of "society's" willingness to
give him welcome. He was lodged in a remote and obscure quarter of the
city and was already part of a little coterie from which earnestness had
quite crowded out tact and in which the development of the energies left
but scant room for the cultivation of the amenities. With this small
group reform and oratory went hand in hand; its members talked to spare
audiences on Sunday afternoons about the Readjusted Tax. Such a
combination of matter and manner had pleased and attracted Abner from the
start. The land question was _the_ question, after all, and eloquence
must help the contention of these ardent spirits toward a final issue in
success. Abner thirstily imbibed the doctrine and added his tongue to the
others. Nor was it a tongue altogether unschooled. For Abner had left the
plough at sixteen to take a course in the Flatfield Academy, and after
some three years there as a pupil he had remained as a teacher; he became
the instructor in elocution. Here his allegiance was all to the old-time
classic school, to the ideal that still survives, and inexpugnably, in
the rustic breast and even in the national senate; the Roman Forum was
never completely absent from his eye, and Daniel Webster remained the
undimmed pattern of all that man--man mounted on his legs--should be.

Abner, then, went on speaking from the platform or distributing
pamphlets, his own and others', at the door, and remained unconscious
that Mrs. Palmer Pence was desirous of knowing him, that Leverett Whyland
would have been interested in meeting him, and that Adrian Bond, whose
work he knew without liking it, would have been glad to make him
acquainted with their fellow authors. Nor did he enjoy any familiarity
with Clytie Summers and her sociological studies, while Medora Giles, as
yet, was not even a name.

Mrs. Palmer Pence remained, then, in the seclusion of her "gilded halls,"
as Abner phrased it, save for occasional excursions and alarums that
vivified the columns devoted by the press to the doings of the polite
world; and Adrian Bond kept between the covers of his two or three thin
little books--a confinement richly deserved by a writer so futile,
superficial and insincere; but Leverett Whyland was less easily evaded by
anybody who "banged about town" and who happened to be interested in
public matters. Abner came against him at one of the sessions of the Tax
Commission, a body that was hoping--almost against hope--to introduce
some measure of reason and justice into the collection of the public
funds.

"Huh! I shouldn't expect much from _him_!" commented Abner, as Whyland
began to speak.

Whyland was a genial, gentlemanly fellow of thirty-eight or forty. He was
in the world and of it, but was little the worse, thus far, for that. He
had been singled out for favours, to a very exceptional degree, by that
monster of inconsistency and injustice, the Unearned Increment, but his
intentions toward society were still fairly good. If he may be
capitalized (and surely he was rich enough to be), he might be described
as hesitating whether to be a Plutocrat or a Good Citizen; perhaps he was
hoping to be both.

Abner disliked and doubted him from the start. The fellow was almost
foppish;--could anybody who wore such good clothes have also good motives
and good principles? Abner disdained him too as a public speaker;--what
could a man hope to accomplish by a few quiet colloquial remarks
delivered in his ordinary voice? The man who expected to get attention
should claim it by the strident shrillness of his tones, should be able
to bend his two knees in eloquent unison, and send one clenched hand with
a driving swoop into the palm of the other--and repeat as often as
necessary. Abner questioned as well his mental powers, his quality of
brain-fibre, his breadth of view. The feeble creature rested in no degree
upon the great, broad, fundamental principles--principles whose adoption
and enforcement would reshape and glorify human society as nothing else
ever had done or ever could do. No, he fell back on mere expediency, mere
practicability, weakly acquiescing in acknowledged and long-established
evils, and trying for nothing more than fairness and justice on a
foundation utterly unjust and vicious to begin with.

"Let me get out of this," said Abner.

But a few of his own intimates detained him at the door, and presently
Whyland, who had ended his remarks and was on his way to other matters,
overtook him. An officious bystander made the two acquainted, and
Whyland, who identified Abner with the author of _This Weary World_,
paused for a few smiling and good-humoured remarks.

"Glad to see you here," he said, with a kind of bright buoyancy. "It's a
complicated question, but we shall straighten it out one way or another."

Abner stared at him sternly. The question was not complicated, but it
_was_ vital--too vital for smiles.

"There is only one way," he said: "our way."

"Our way?" asked Whyland, still smiling.

"The Readjusted Tax," pronounced Abner, with a gesture toward two or
three of his supporters at his elbow.

"Ah, yes," said Whyland quickly, recognising the faces. "If the idea
could only be applied!"

"It can be," said Abner severely. "It must be."

"Yes, it is a very complicated question," the other repeated. "I have
read your stories," he went on immediately. "Two or three of them
impressed me very much. I hope we shall become better acquainted."

"Thank you," said Abner stiffly. Whyland meant to be cordial, but Abner
found him patronizing. He could not endure to be patronized by anybody,
least of all by a person of mental calibre inferior to his own. He
resented too the other's advantage in age (Whyland was ten or twelve
years his senior), and his advantage in experience (for Whyland had lived
in the city all his life, as Abner could not but feel).

"I should be glad if you could lunch with me at the club," said Whyland
in the friendliest fashion possible. "I am on my way there now."

"Club"--fatal word; it chilled Abner in a second. He knew about clubs!
Clubs were the places where the profligate children of Privilege drank
improper drinks and told improper stories and kept improper hours. Abner,
who was perfectly pure in word, thought and deed and always in bed
betimes, shrank from a club as from a lazaret.

"Thank you," he responded bleakly; "but I am very busy."

"Another time, then," said Whyland, with unimpaired kindliness. "And we
may be able to come to some agreement, after all," he added, in reference
to the tax-levy.

"We are not likely to agree," said Abner gloomily.

Whyland went on, just a trifle dashed. Abner presently came to further
knowledge of him--his wealth, position, influence, activity--and hardened
his heart against him the more. He commented openly on the selfishness
and greed of the Money Power in pungent phrases that did not all fall
short of Whyland's ear. And when, later on, Leverett Whyland became less
the "good citizen" and more the "plutocrat"--a course perhaps inevitable
under certain circumstances--he would sometimes smile over those
unsuccessful advances and would ask himself to what extent the
discouraging unfaith of our Abner might be responsible for his choice and
his fall.




III

Though Mrs. Palmer Pence kept looking forward, off and on, to the
pleasure of making Abner's acquaintance, it was a full six months before
the happy day finally came round. But when she read _The Rod of the
Oppressor_ that seemed to settle it; her salon would be incomplete
without its author, and she must take steps to find him.

Abner's second book, in spirit and substance, was a good deal like his
first: the man who has succeeded follows up his success, naturally, with
something of the same sort. The new book was a novel, however,--the first
of the long series that Abner was to put forth with the prodigal ease and
carelessness of Nature herself; and it was as gloomy, strenuous and
positive as its predecessor.

Abner, by this time, had enlarged his circle. Through the reformers he
had become acquainted with a few journalists, and journalists had led on
to versifiers and novelists, and these to a small clique of artists and
musicians. Abner was now beginning to find his best account in a sort of
decorous Bohemia and to feel that such, after all, was the atmosphere he
had been really destined to breathe. The morals of his new associates
were as correct as even he could have insisted upon, and their manners
were kindly and not too ornate. They indulged in a number of little
practices caught, he supposed, from "society," but after all their modes
were pleasantly trustful and informal and presently quite ceased to irk
and to intimidate him. Many members of his new circle were massed in one
large building whose owner had attempted to name it the Warren Block; but
the artists and the rest simply called it the Warren--sometimes the
Burrow or the Rabbit-Hutch--and referred to themselves collectively as
the Bunnies.

Abner found it hard to countenance such facetiousness in a world so full
of pain; yet after all these dear people did much to cushion his
discomfort, and before long hardly a Saturday afternoon came round
without his dropping into one studio or another for a chat and a cup of
tea. To tell the truth, Abner could hardly "chat" as yet, but he was
beginning to learn, and he was becoming more reconciled as well to all
the paraphernalia involved in the brewing of the draught. He was boarding
rather roughly with a landlady who, like himself, was from "down state"
and who had never cultivated fastidiousness in table-linen or in
tableware, and he sniffed at the fanciful cups and spoons and pink
candle-shades that helped to insure the attendance of the "desirable
people," as the Burrow phrased it, and at the manifold methods of
tea-making that were designed to turn the desirable people into
profitable patrons. That is, he sniffed at the samovar and the lemons and
so on; but when the rum came along he looked away sternly and in silence.

Well, the desirable people came in numbers--studios were the fad that
year--and as soon as Mrs. Palmer Pence understood that Abner was to be
met with somewhere in the Burrow she hastened to enroll herself among
them.

Eudoxia Pence was a robust and vigorous woman in her prime--and by
"prime" I mean about thirty-six. She was handsome and rich and
intelligent and ambitious, and she was hesitating between a career as a
Society Queen and a self-devotion to the Better Things: perhaps she was
hoping to combine both. With her she brought her niece, Miss Clytie
Summers, who had been in society but a month, yet who was enterprising
enough to have joined already a class in sociological science, composed
of girls that were quite the ones to know, and to have undertaken two or
three little excursions into the slums. Clytie hardly felt sure just yet
whether what she most wanted was to gain a Social Triumph or to lend a
Helping Hand. It was Abner's lot to help influence her decision.




IV

The Bunnies could hardly believe their eyes when, one day, Mrs. Palmer
Pence came rolling into the Burrow. She was well enough known indeed at
the "rival shop"--by which the Bunnies meant a neighbouring edifice
loftily denominated the Temple of Art, a vast structure full of theatres
and recital-halls and studios and assembly-rooms and dramatic schools;
but this was the first time she had favoured the humbler building, at
least on the formal, official Saturday afternoon. Long had they looked
for her coming, and now at last the most desirable of all the desirable
people was here.

"Ah-h-h!" breathed Little O'Grady, who made reliefs in plastina.

It was for Mrs. Palmer Pence that the samovar steamed to-day in the dimly
lighted studio of Stephen Giles, for her that the candles fluttered
within their pink shades, for her that the white peppermints lay in
orderly little rows upon the silver tray, for her that young Medora
Giles, lately back to her brother from Paris, wore her freshest gown and
drew tea with her prettiest smile. Mrs. Pence was building a new house
and there was more than an even chance that Stephen Giles might decorate
it. He held a middle ground between the "artist-architects" on the one
hand and the painters on the other, and with this advantageous footing he
was gradually drawing a strong cordon round "society" and was looking
forward to a day not very distant when he might leave the Burrow for the
Temple of Art itself.

Mrs. Pence sat liberally cushioned in her old carved pew and amiably
sipped her tea beneath a jewelled censer and admired the dark beauty of
the slender and graceful Medora. Presently she became so taken by the
girl that (despite her own superabundant bulk) she must needs cross over
and sit beside her and pat her hand at intervals. In certain extreme
cases Eudoxia was willing to waive the matter of comparison with other
women; but to find herself seated beside a man of lesser bulk than
herself seriously inconvenienced her, while to realize herself standing
beside a man of lesser stature embarrassed her most cruelly. As she was
fond of mixed society, her liberal figure was on the move most of the
time.

She was too enchanted with Medora Giles to be able to keep away from her,
but the approach of Adrian Bond--he was a great studio dawdler--presently
put her to rout. For Adrian was much too small. He was spare, he was
meagre; he was sapless, like his books; and the part in his smoothly
plastered black hair scarcely reached to her eyebrows. She felt herself
swelling, distending, filling her place to repletion, to suffocation, and
rose to flee. She was for seeking refuge in the brown beard of Stephen
Giles, which was at least on a level with her own chin, when suddenly she
perceived, in a dark corner of the place, a tower of strength more
promising still--a man even taller, broader, bulkier than herself, a
grand figure that might serve to reduce her to more desirable
proportions.

"Who is he?" she asked Giles, as she seized him by the elbow. "Take me
over there at once."

Giles laughed. "Why, that's Joyce," he said. "He's got so that he looks
in on us now and then."

"Joyce? What Joyce?"

"Why, Joyce. The one, the only,--as we believe."

"Abner Joyce? _This Weary World? The Rod of the Oppressor_?"

"Exactly. Let me bring him over and present him."

"Whichever you like; arrange it between Mohammed and the Mountain just as
you please." She looked over her shoulder; little Bond was following.
"Waive all ceremony," she begged. "I will go to him."

Giles trundled her over toward the dusky canopy under which Abner stood
chafing, conscious at once of his own powers and of his own social
inexpertness. In particular had he looked out with bitterness upon the
airy circulations of Adrian Bond--Adrian who smirked here and nodded
there and chaffed a bit now and then with the blonde Clytie and openly
philandered over the tea-urn with the brunette Medora. "That snip! That
water-fly! That whipper-snapper! That----"

Abner turned with a start. A worldly person, clad voluminously in furs,
was extending a hand that sparkled with many rings and was composing a
pair of smiling lips to say the pleasant thing. This attention was
startlingly, embarrassingly sudden, but it was welcome and it was
appropriate. Abner was little able to realize the quality of aggressive
homage that resided in Mrs. Pence's resolute and unconventional advance,
but it was natural enough that this showy woman should wish to manifest
her appreciation of a gifted and rising author. He took her hand with a
graceless gravity.

Mrs. Pence, upon a nearer view, found Abner all she had hoped. Confronted
by his stalwart limbs and expansive shoulders, she was no longer a
behemoth,--she felt almost like a sylph. She looked up frankly, and with
a sense of growing comfort, into his broad face where a good strong
growth of chestnut beard was bursting through his ruddy cheeks and
swirling abundantly beneath his nose. She looked up higher, to his wide
forehead, where a big shock of confident hair rolled and tumbled about
with careless affluence. And with no great shyness she appraised his
hands and his feet--those strong forceful hands that had dominated the
lurching, self-willed plough, those sturdy feet that had resolutely
tramped the miles of humpy furrow the ploughshare had turned up blackly
to sun and air. She shrank. She dwindled. Her slender girlhood--that
remote, incredible time--was on her once more.

"I shall never feel large again," she said.

How right she was! Nobody ever felt large for long when Abner Joyce
happened to be about.




V

Abner regarded Mrs. Pence and her magnificence with a sombre intensity,
far from ready to approve. He knew far more about her than she could know
about him--thanks to the activities of a shamefully discriminating (or
undiscriminating) press--and he was by no means prepared to give her his
countenance. Face to face with her opulence and splendour he set the
figure of his own mother--that sweet, patient, plaintive little presence,
now docilely habituated, at the closing in of a long pinched life, to
unremitting daily toil still unrewarded by ease and comfort or by any
hope or promise or prospect of it. There was his father too--that good
gray elder who had done so much faithful work, yet had so little to show
for it, who had fished all day and had caught next to nothing, who had
given four years out of his young life to the fight for freedom only to
see the reward so shamefully fall elsewhere.... Abner evoked here a
fanciful figure of Palmer Pence himself, whom he knew in a general way to
be high up in some monstrous Trust. He saw a prosperous, domineering man
who with a single turn of the hand had swept together a hundred little
enterprises and at the same time had swept out a thousand of the lesser
fry into the wide spaces of empty ruin, and who had insolently settled
down beside his new machine to catch the rain of coins minted for him
from the wrongs of an injured and insulted people....

Abner accepted in awkward silence Mrs. Pence's liberal and fluent praise
of _The Rod of the Oppressor_,--aside from his deep-seated indignation he
had not yet mastered any of those serviceable phrases by means of which
such a volley may be returned; but he found words when she presently set
foot in the roomy field of the betterment of local conditions. What she
had in mind, it appeared, was a training-school--it might be called the
Pence Institute if it went through--and she was ready to listen to any
one who was likely to encourage her with hints or advice.

"So much energy, so much talent going to waste, so many young people
tumbling up anyhow and presently tumbling over--all for lack of thorough
and systematic training," she said, across her own broad bosom.

"I know of but one training that is needed," said Abner massively: "the
training of the sense of social justice--such training of the public
conscience as will insist upon seeing that each and every freeman gets an
even chance."

"An even chance?" repeated Eudoxia, rather dashed. "What I think of
offering is an even start. Doesn't it come to much the same thing?"

But Abner would none of it. Possessed of the fatalistic belief in the
efficacy of mere legislation such as dominates the rural townships of the
West, he grasped his companion firmly by the arm, set his sturdy legs in
rapid motion, walked her from assembly hall to assembly hall through this
State, that and the other, and finally fetched up with her under the dome
of the national Capitol. Senators and representatives co-operated here,
there and everywhere, the chosen spokesmen of the sovereign people; Abner
seemed almost to have enrolled himself among them. Confronted with this
august company, whose work it was to set things right, Eudoxia Pence felt
smaller than ever. What were her imponderable emanations of goodwill and
good intention when compared with the robust masculinity that was
marching in firm phalanxes over solid ground toward the mastery of the
great Problem? She drooped visibly. Little O'Grady, studying her pose and
expression from afar, wrung his hands. "That fellow will drive her away.
Ten to one we shall never see her profile here again!" Yes, Eudoxia was
feeling, with a sudden faintness, that the Better Things might after all
be beyond her reach. She looked about for herself without finding
herself: she had dwindled away to nothingness.




VI

"Do you take her money--_such_ money?" Abner asked of Giles with
severity. Eudoxia had returned to Medora and the samovar.

"_Such_ money?" returned Giles. "Is it different from other money? What
do you mean?"

"Isn't her husband the head of some trust or other?"

"Why, yes, I believe so: the Feather-bed Trust, or the Air-and-Sunlight
Trust--something of that sort; I've never looked into it closely."

"Yet you accept what it offers you."

"And give a good return for it. Yes, she had paid me already for my
sketches--a prompt and business-like way of doing things that I should be
glad to encounter oftener."

Abner shook his head sadly. "I thought we might come to be real friends."

"And I hope so yet. Anyway, it takes a little money to keep the tea-pot
boiling."

Abner drifted back to the shelter of his canopy and darkly accused
himself for his acceptance of such hospitality. He ought to go, to go at
once, and never to come back. But before he found out how to go, Clytie
Summers came along and hemmed him in.

Clytie was not at all afraid of big men; she had already found them
easier to manage than little ones. Indeed she had pretty nearly come to
the conclusion that a lively young girl with a trim figure and a bright,
confident manner and a fetching mop of sunlit hair and a pair of wide,
forthputting, blue eyes was predestined to have her own way with about
everybody alike. But Clytie had never met an Abner Joyce.

And as soon as Clytie entered upon the particulars of her last slumming
trip through the river wards she began to discover the difference. She
chanced to mention incidentally certain low-grade places of amusement.

"What!" cried Abner; "you go to theatres--and _such_ theatres?"

"Surely I do!" cried Clytie in turn, no less disconcerted than Abner
himself. "Surely I go to theatres; don't you?"

"Never," replied Abner firmly. "I have other uses for my money." His
rules of conduct marshalled themselves in a stiff row before him; forlorn
Flatfield came into view. Neither his principles nor his practice of
making monthly remittances to the farm permitted such excesses.

"Why, it doesn't _cost_ anything," rejoined Clytie. "There's no admission
charge. All you have to do is to buy a drink now and then."

"Buy a drink?"

"Beer--that will do. You can stay as long as you want to on a couple of
glasses. Lots of our girls didn't take but one."

"Lots of----?"

"Yes, the whole class went. We found the place most interesting--and the
audience. The men sit about with their hats on, you know, in a big hall
full of round tables, drinking and smoking----"

"And you mixed up in such a----?"

"Well, no; not exactly. We had a box--as I suppose you would call it;
three of them. Of course that _did_ cost a little something. And then Mr.
Whyland bought a few cigars----"

"Mr. Whyland----?"

"Yes, he was with us; he thought there ought to be at least one gentleman
along. He couldn't smoke the cigars, but one of the girls happened to
have some cigarettes----"

"Cigarettes?"

"Yes, and we found _their_ smoke much more endurable. That was the worst
about the place--the smoke; unless it was the performance----"

"Oh!" said Abner, with a groan of disgust.

"Well, it wasn't as bad as _that!_" returned Clytie. "It was only dull
and stale and stupid; the same old sort of knockabouts and serio-comics
you can see everywhere down town, only not a quarter so good--just cheap
imitations. And all those poor fellows sat moping over their beer-mugs
waiting, waiting, waiting for something new and entertaining to happen. I
never felt so sorry for anybody in my life. We girls about made up our
minds that we would get together a little fund and see if we couldn't do
some missionary work in that neighbourhood--hire some real good
artists"--Abner winced at this hideous perversion of the word--"hire some
real good artists to go over there and let those poor creatures see what
a first-class show was like; and Mr. Whyland promised to contribute----"

"Stop!" said Abner.

Clytie paused abruptly, astonished by his tone and by the expression on
his face. The flush of innocent enthusiasm and high resolve left her
cheek, her pretty little lips parted in amaze, and her wide blue eyes
opened wider than ever. What a singular man! What a way of accepting her
expression of interest in her kind, of receiving her plan for helping the
other half to lead a happier life! Adrian Bond, a dozen, a hundred other
men would have known how to give her credit for her kindly intentions
toward the less fortunate, would have found a ready way to praise her, to
compliment her....

Abner Joyce had a great respect for woman in general, but he entertained
an utter detestation of anything like gallantry; in his chaste anxiety he
leaned the other way. He was brusque; he often rode roughshod over
feminine sensibilities. He was very slightly influenced by considerations
of sex. He viewed everybody asexually, as a generalized human being. He
dealt with women just as he dealt with men, and he treated young women
just as he treated older ones. He treated Clytie just as he treated
Eudoxia Pence, just as he would have treated Whyland himself--but with a
little added severity, called forth by her peculiar presence and her
specific offence. He brought her to book just as she deserved to be
brought to book--a girl who went to low theatres and wore frizzled yellow
hair and made eyes at strangers and took her share in the heartless
amusements of plutocrats.

"Why, what is it?" asked Clytie. "Don't you think we ought to try to
understand modern social conditions and do what we can to improve them?
If you would only go through some of those streets in the river wards and
into some of the houses--oh, dear me, dear me!"

But Abner would none of this. "Do you think your river wards, as you call
them, are any worse than our barn-yard in the early days of March? Do you
imagine your cheap vawdyville theatres are any more tiresome than our
Main Street through the winter months?"

No, Abner's thoughts had been focused too long on the wrongs of the rural
regions to be able to transfer themselves to the sufferings and
injustices of the town. He saw the city collectively as the oppressor of
the country, and Leverett Whyland, by reason of Clytie's innocent
prattle, became the city incarnate in a single figure.

"I know your Mr. Whyland," he said. "I've met him; I know all about him.
He lives on his rents. His property came to him by inheritance, and half
its value to-day is due to the general rise brought about by the
exertions of others. He is indebted for food, clothing and shelter to the
unearned increment."

"Lives on his rents? Is there anything wrong in that? So do I, too--when
they can be collected. And if you talk about the unearned increment, let
me tell you there is such a thing as the unearned decrement."

"Nonsense. That's merely a backward swirl in a rushing stream."

"Not at all!" cried Clytie, now in the full heat of controversy. "If you
were used to a big growing city, with all its sudden shifts and changes,
you would understand. Even the new neighbourhoods get spoiled before they
are half put together--builders treat one another so unfairly; while, as
for the old ones--why, my poor dear father is coming to have row after
row that he can't find tenants for at all, unless he were to let them
to--to objectionable characters."

Clytie threw this out with all boldness. The matter was purely economic,
sociological; they were talking quite as man to man. Abner brought every
woman to this point sooner or later.

As for the troubles of landlords, he had no sympathy with them. And to
him the most objectionable of all "objectionable characters" was the man
who had a strong box stuffed with farm mortgages--town-dwellers, the
great bulk of them. "Oh, the cities, the cities!" he groaned. Then, more
cheerfully: "But never mind: they are passing."

"Passing? I like that! Do you know that eighteen and two-thirds per cent
of the population of the United States lives in towns of one hundred
thousand inhabitants and above, and that the number is increasing at the
rate of----"

"They are disintegrating," pursued Abner stolidly. "By their own
bulk--like a big snowball. And by their own badness. People are rolling
back to the country--the country they came from. Improved transportation
will do it." The troubles of the town were ephemeral--he waved them
aside. But his face was set in a frown--doubtless at the thought of the
perdurable afflictions of the country.

"Don't worry over these passing difficulties that arise from a mere
temporary congestion of population. They will take care of themselves.
Meanwhile, don't sport with them; don't encourage your young friends to
make them a vehicle of their own selfish pleasures; don't----"

Clytie caught her breath. So she was a mere frivolous, inconsequential
butterfly, after all. Why try longer to lend the Helping Hand--why not
cut things short and be satisfied with the Social Triumph and let it go
at that? "I was meaning to ask you to dine with me some evening next week
at a settlement I know, but now...."

"I never 'dine,'" said Abner.




VII

"I should be so glad to have you call." Mrs. Pence was peering about
among the lanterns and tapestries and the stirring throng with the idea
of picking up Clytie and taking leave. "My niece is staying with me just
now, and I'm sure she would be glad to see you again too."

Abner looked about to help her find her charge. Clytie had gone over to
the tea-table, where she was snapping vindictively at the half of a
ginger-wafer somebody else had left and was gesticulating in the face of
Medora Giles.

"I never met such a man in my life!" she was declaring. "I'll never speak
to him again as long as I live! He's a bear; he's a brute!"

Little O'Grady, bringing forward another sliced lemon, shook in his
shoes. "He'll have everybody scared away before long!" the poor fellow
thought.

Medora smiled on Clytie. "Oh, not so bad as that, I hope," she said
serenely. "Stephen, now, is beginning to have quite a liking for him. So
earnest; so well-intentioned...."

"And you yourself?" asked Clytie.

"I haven't met him yet. I'm only on probation. He has looked me
over--from afar, but has his doubts. I may get the benefit of them, or I
may not."

"What doubts?"

"Why, I'm a renegade, a European. I'm effete, contaminate, taboo."

"Has he said so?"

"Said so? Do I need to have things 'said'?"

"Well, if you really are all this, you'll find it out soon enough."

"He's a touchstone, then?"

"Yes. And I'm a nonentity, lightly concerning myself about light
nothings. He won't mince matters."

"Don't worry about me," said Medora confidently. "I shall know how to
handle him."

Mrs. Pence kept on peering. Dusk was upon the place, and the few dim
lights were more ineffectual than ever. "There she is," said Abner, with
a bob of the head.

"Good-bye, then," said Eudoxia, grasping his hand effusively, as she took
her first step toward Clytie. "Now, you _will_ come and see us, won't
you?"

"Thank you; but----"

Abner paused for the evocation of an instantaneous vision of the
household thus thrown open to him. Such opportunities for falsity,
artificiality, downright humbuggery, for plutocratic upholstery and
indecorous statues and light-minded paintings, for cynical and insolent
servants, for the deployment of vast gains got by methods that at best
were questionable! Could he accept such hospitality as this?

"Thank you. I might come, possibly, if I can find the time. But I warn
you I am very busy."

"Make time," said Eudoxia good-humouredly, and passed along.

Abner made a good deal of time for the Burrow, but it was long before he
brought himself to make any for Eudoxia Pence. He came to see a great
deal of the Bunnies; in a month or two he quite had the run of the place.
There were friendly fellows who heaved big lumps of clay upon huge
nail-studded scantlings, and nice little girls who designed book-plates,
and more mature ones who painted miniatures, and many earnest, earnest
persons of both sexes who were hurrying, hurrying ahead on their wet
canvases so that the next exhibition might not be incomplete by reason of
lacking a "Smith," a "Jones," a "Robinson." Abner gave each and every one
of these pleasant people his company and imparted to them his views on
the great principles that underlie all the arts in common.

"So that's what you call it--a marquise," Abner observed on a certain
occasion to one of the miniature painters. "This creature with a fluffy
white wig and a low-necked dress is a marquise, is she? Do you like that
sort of thing?"

"Why, yes,--rather," said the artist.

"Well,_I_ don't," declared Abner, returning the trifle to the girl's
hands.

"I'll paint my next sitter as a milkmaid--if she'll let me."

"_As_ a milkmaid? No; paint the milkmaid herself. Deal with the verities.
Like them before you paint them. Paint them _because_ you like them."

"I don't know whether I should like milkmaids or not. I've never seen
one."

"They don't exist," chimed in Adrian Bond, who was dawdling in the
background. "The milkmaids are all men. And as for the dairy-farms
themselves----!" He sank back among his cushions. "I visited one in the
suburbs last month--the same time when I was going round among the
markets. I have been of half a mind, lately," he said, more directly to
Abner, "to do a large, serious thing based on local actualities; _The
City's Maw_--something like that. My things so far, I know (none better)
_are_ slight, flimsy, exotic, factitious. The first-hand study of
actuality, thought I----But no, no, no! It was a place fit only for a
reporter in search of a--of a--I don't know what. I shall never drink
coffee again; while as for milk punch----"

"And what is the artist," asked Abner, "but the reporter sublimated? Why
must the artist go afield to dabble in far-fetched artificialities that
have nothing to do with his own proper time and place? Our people go
abroad for study, instead of staying at home and guarding their native
quality. They return affected, lackadaisical, self-conscious--they bring
the hothouse with them. Why, I have seen such a simple matter as the
pouring of a cup of tea turned into----"

"You can't mean Medora Giles," said the miniaturist quickly, pausing
amidst the laces of her bodice. "Don't make any mistake about Medora.
When she goes in for all that sort of thing, she's merely 'creating
atmosphere,' as we say,--she's simply after the 'envelopment,' in fact."

"She is just getting into tone," Bond re-enforced, "with the
candle-shades and the peppermints."

"Medora," declared the painter, "is as sensible and capable a girl as I
know. Why, the very dress she wore that afternoon----You noticed it?"

"I--I----" began Abner.

"No, you didn't--of course you didn't. Well, she made every stitch of it
with her own hands."

"And those tea-cakes, that afternoon," supplemented Bond. "She made every
stitch of _them_ with her own hands. She told me so herself, when I
stayed afterward, to help wash things up."

"I may have done her an injustice," Abner acknowledged. "Perhaps I might
like to know her, after all."

"You might be proud to," said Bond.

"And the favour would be the other way round," declared the painter
stoutly.

Abner passed over any such possibility as this. "How long was she
abroad?" he asked Bond.

"Let's see. She studied music in Leipsic two years; she plays the violin
like an angel--up to a certain point. Then she was in Paris for another
year. She paints a little--not enough to hurt."

"Leipsic? Two years?" pondered Abner. It seemed more staid, less vicious,
after all, than if the whole time had been spent in Paris. The violin;
painting. Both required technique; each art demanded long, close
application. "Well, I dare say she is excusable." But here, he thought,
was just where the other arts were at a disadvantage compared with
literature: you might stay at home wherever you were, if a writer, and
get your own technique.

"And you have done it," said Bond. "I admire some of your things so much.
Your instinct for realities, your sturdy central grasp--"

"What man has done, man may do," rejoined Abner. "Yet what is technique,
after all? There remains, as ever, the problem, the great Social Problem,
to be solved."

"You think so?" queried Bond.

"Think that there is a social problem?"

"Think that it can be solved. I have my own idea there. It is a secret. I
am willing to tell it to one person, but not to more,--I couldn't answer
for the consequences. If Miss Wilbur will just stop her ears----"

The miniaturist laughed and laid her palms against her cheeks.

"You are sure you can't hear?" asked Bond, with his eye on her spreading
fingers. "Well, then"--to Abner--"there _is_ the great Human Problem, but
it is not to be solved, nor was it designed that it should be. The world
is only a big coral for us to cut our teeth upon, a proving-ground, a
hotbed from which we shall presently be transplanted according to our
several deserts. No power can solve the puzzle save the power that cut it
up into pieces to start with. Try as we may, the blanket will always be
just a little too small for the bedstead. Meanwhile, the thing for us to
do is to go right along figuring, figuring, figuring on our little
slates,--but rather for the sake of keeping busy than from any hope of
reaching the 'answer' set down in the Great Book above."

"But----" began Abner; his orthodox sensibilities were somewhat offended.
Miss Wilbur, who had heard every word, laughed outright.

"I beg," Bond hurried on, "that you won't communicate this to a living
soul. I am the only one who suspects the real truth. If it came to be
generally known all human motives would be lacking, all human activities
would be paralyzed--the whole world would come to a standstill. Mum's the
word. For if the problem is insoluble and meant to be, just as sure is it
that we were not intended to suspect the truth."

Abner gasped--dredging the air for a word. "Of course," Bond went ahead,
less fantastically, "I know I ought to shut my eyes to all this and start
in to accomplish something more vital, more indigenous--less of the
marquise and more of the milkmaid, in fact----"

"Write about the things you know and like," said Abner curtly.

His tone acknowledged his inability to keep pace with such whimsicalities
or to sympathize with them.

"If to know and to like were one with me, as they appear to be with you!
A boyhood in the country--what a grand beginning! But the things I know
are the things I don't like, and the things I like are not always the
things I know--oftener the things I feel." Bond was speaking with a
greater sincerity than he usually permitted himself. The right touch just
then might have determined his future: he was quite as willing to become
a Veritist as to remain a mere Dilettante.

Abner tossed his head with a suppressed snort; he felt but little
inclined to give encouragement to this manikin, this tidier-up after
studio teas, this futile spinner of sophistications. No, the curse of a
city boyhood was upon the fellow. Why look for anything great or vital
from one born and bred in the vitiated air of the town?

"Oh, well," he said, half-contemptuously, and not half trying to hide his
contempt, "you are doing very well as it is. Some of your work is not
without traces of style; and I suppose style is what you are after. But
meat for _me_!"

Bond lapsed back into his cushions, feeling a little hurt and very feeble
and unimportant. Clearly the big thing, the sincere thing, the
significant thing was beyond his reach. _The City's Maw_ must remain
unwritten.




VIII

Abner tramped down the corridor and walked in on Giles. He found the
decorator busy over two or three large sketches for panels.

"For another Trust man?" he asked.

"No," replied Giles; "these are for a blameless old gentleman that has
passed a life of honest toil in the wholesale hardware business. Don't
you think he's entitled to a few flowers by this time?"

"What kind of flowers are they?"

"Passion-flowers and camellias."

"Humph! Do they grow round here?"

"Hardly. My old gentleman hasn't given himself a vacation for twenty-five
years, and he wants to get as far away from 'here' as possible."

Abner gave another "Humph!" Wigs and brocades; passion-flowers and
camellias. All this in a town that had just seen the completion of the
eighteenth chapter of _Regeneration_. Well, regeneration was coming none
too soon.

"What's the matter with Bond?" he asked suddenly.

"I do' know. Is anything?"

"I've just been talking with him, and he seemed sort of skittish and
dissatisfied and paradoxical."

"He's often like that. We never notice."

"He seemed to shilly-shally considerable too. Has he got any convictions,
any principles?"

"I can't say I've ever thought much about that. He never mentions such
things himself, but I suppose he must have them about him somewhere. He
generally behaves himself and treats other people kindly. Everybody
trusts him and seems to believe in him. I presume he's got _something_
inside that holds him up--moral framework, so to speak."

Abner shook his head. If the framework was there it ought to show
through. Every articulation should tell; every rib should count.

"If a man has got principles and beliefs, why not come out flat-footedly
with them _like_ a man?"

"I do' know. Dare say Bond doesn't want to wear his heart on his sleeve.
Hates to live in the show-window, you understand."

"He was fussing most about writing some new thing or other in a new way.
I seem to have kind of started him up."

"He has been talking like that for quite a little while. He's tenderly
interested--that's the real reason for it. He wants more
reputation--something to lay at the dear one's feet, you know. And he
wants bigger returns--though he _has_ got something in the way of an
independent income, I believe."

"Who is she?"

"That little Miss Summers."

"He may have her," said Abner quickly. "She may 'dine' _him_ at her
settlement." Then, more slowly: "Why, they hardly spoke to each other,
that day--except once or twice to joke. They barely noticed each other."

"What should they have done? Sit side by side, holding hands?"

"Oh, the city, the city!" murmured Abner, overcome by the artificiality
of urban society and the mockery in Giles's tone.

"You should have seen them in the country last summer."

"Them! In the country!"

"Why, yes; why not? We had them both out on the farm."

"Farm? Whose?"

"My father's. We try to do a little livening up for the old people every
July and August. They got acquainted there; they took to it like ducks to
water. That's where Bond got his idea for his cow masterpiece,--he may
have spoken to you about it."

"Humph!" said Abner. Why heed such insignificant poachings as these on
his own preserves?

"We're going out home week after next for the holidays," continued Giles.
"Better go with us."

"So you're a farmer's boy?" pondered Abner. He looked again at the
camellias, then at Giles's loose Parisian tie, and lastly at his
finger-nails,--all too exquisite by half.

"Certainly. Brought up on burdock and smart-weed. That's why I'm so fond
of this,"--with a wave toward one of his panels.

"Well, what do you say? Will you go? We should like first-rate to have
you."

Abner considered. The invitation was as hearty and informal as he could
have wished, and it would take him within thirty miles of Flatfield
itself.

"Is your sister going along?"

"Surely. She will run the whole thing."

"Well," said Abner slowly, "I don't know but that I might find it
interesting." This, Giles understood, was his rustic manner of accepting.




IX

Abner spent Christmas at the Giles farm, as Stephen had understood him to
promise; and Medora, as her brother had engaged, "went along" too, and
"ran the whole thing" from start to finish. Abner, with a secret interest
compounded half of attraction, half of repulsion, promised himself a
careful study of this "new type"--a type so bizarre, so artificial, and
in all probability so thoroughly reprehensible.

Medora made up the rest of the party to suit herself. She had heard of
Adrian Bond's struggles toward the indigenous, the simplified, and she
was willing enough to give him a chance to see the cows in their winter
quarters. Clytie Summers had begged very prettily for her glimpse too of
the country at this time of year. "It's rather soon, I know, for that
spring barn-yard; but I should so enjoy the ennui of some village Main
Street in the early winter."

"Come along, then," said Medora. "We'll do part of our Christmas shopping
there."

Giles accepted these two new recruits gladly. "Good thing for both of
them," he declared to Joyce. "They'll make more progress on our farm in a
week than they could in six months of studio teas."

This remark admitted of but one interpretation.

"Why!" said Abner; "do you want her to marry _him_?"--him, a fellow so
slight, frivolous, invertebrate!

"Oh, he's a very decent little chap," returned Giles. "He'll be kind to
her--he'll see she's taken good care of."

"But do you want him to marry _her_?"--her, so bold, so improper, so
prone to seek entertainment in the woes of others!

"Oh, well, she's a very fair little chick," replied Giles patiently.
"She'll get past her notions pretty soon and be just as good a wife as
anybody could ask."

One of those quiescent, featureless Decembers was on the land--a November
prolonged. The brown country-side, swept and garnished, was still
awaiting the touch of winter's hand. The air was crisp yet passive, and
abundant sunshine flooded alike the heights and hollows of the rolling
uplands that spread through various shades of subdued umber and
meditative blue toward the confines of a wavering, indeterminate horizon.
The Giles homestead stood high on a bluff; and above the last of the
islands that cluttered the river beneath it the spires of the village
appeared, a mile or two down-stream.

"Now for the barn-yard!" cried Clytie, after the first roundabout view
from the front of the bluff. "Adrian mustn't lose any time with his
cows."

Giles led the way to a trim inclosure.

"Why, it's as dry as a bone!" she declared.

"Would you want us water-logged the whole year through?" asked Abner
pungently.

"And as for ennui," she pursued, "I'm sure it isn't going to be found
here--no more in winter than in summer. However"--with a wave of the hand
toward the spires--"there is always the town."

No, the parents of Giles had taken strong measures to keep boredom at
bay. They had their books and magazines; they had a pair of good trotters
and a capacious carryall, with other like aids to locomotion in reserve;
they had a telephone; they had a pianola, with a change of rolls once a
month; they had neighbours of their own sort and were indomitable in
keeping up neighbourly relations.

"I think you'll be able to stand it for a week," said Medora serenely.

"We've done it once before," said Bond.

"Don't be anxious about _us_!" added Clytie.

Medora Giles took Abner in her own special care. She knew pretty nearly
what he thought of her, and she was inclined to amuse herself--though at
the same time making no considerable concession--by placing herself
before him in a more favourable light. In her dress, her manner, her
bearing there was a certain half-alien delicacy, finesse, aloofness. She
would not lay this altogether aside, even at home, even in the informal
country; but she would provide a homely medium, suited to Abner's rustic
vision, through which her exotic airs and graces might be more tolerantly
perceived.

The illness of one of the servants came just here to assist her. She
descended upon the kitchen, taking full charge and carrying Abner with
her. She initiated him at the chopping-block, she conferred the second
degree at the pump-handle, and by the time he was beating up eggs in a
big yellow bowl beside the kitchen stove his eyes had come to be focused
on her in quite a different fashion. Surely no one could be more deft,
light-handed, practical. Was this the same young woman who had sat in the
midst of that absurd outfit and had juggled rather affectedly and
self-consciously with tea-urn and sugar-tongs and had palavered in empty
nothings with a troop of overdressed and overmannered feather-heads? She
was still graceful, still fluent, still endowed with that baffling little
air of distinction; but she knew where things were--down to the last
strainer or nutmeg-grater--and she knew how to use them. She was
completely at home. And so--by this time--was he.

To deepen the impression, Medora asked Abner to help her lay the table.
There were no studio gimcracks, mercifully, to put into place; but the
tableware was as far removed, on the other hand, from the ugly, heavy,
time-scarred things at Flatfield and from the careless crudities of his
own boarding-house. Abner had had a tolerance, even a liking, for his
landlady's indifference toward finicky table-furnishings; but now there
came a sudden vision of her dining-room, and the spots on the
table-cloth, the nicks in the crockery, the shabbiness of the lambrequin
drooping from the mantel-piece, and the slovenliness of the sole
handmaiden had never been so vivid.

"Shall I be able to go back there?" he asked himself.

Finally, to seal the matter completely, Medora led Abner to the place of
honour and bade him eat the meal she had prepared. Abner ate and was
hers. Even a good boarding-house, he now felt, was a mistake; the best,
but a makeshift.

During the day the telephone had made common property of the news of
Abner's arrival, and the next morning, an hour or so after breakfast, the
front yard resounded with the loud cry of, "What ho, neighbours!" and
Leverett Whyland was revealed in a trig cart drawn by a handsome cob.

"Why, what's that man doing here?" Abner asked Giles, as they stood by
the living-room window.

"He has a place three or four miles down the river," replied Giles,
casting about for his hat. Clytie, meanwhile, had drubbed a glad welcome
upon the adjoining window and then rushed out bareheaded to give
greeting.

"He always comes out here with his family for Christmas," said Stephen.

"His family? Is he married? Has he a wife and children?"

"Yes."

"Yet he goes slam-banging around with a lot of young girls into all sorts
of doubtful places?"

"Oh, I've heard something about that," said Giles. "Well, you wouldn't
have them in charge of a bachelor, would you?"

"What's he farming for?" asked Abner, left behind with Medora.

"Sentiment," she replied. "He was born down there, and has never wanted
to let the old place go. Do you think any the worse of him for that?"

Whyland had come to fetch the men and to show them his model farm. They
spent the forenoon in going over this expensive place. Bond gave vent to
all the "oh's" and "ah's" that indicate the perfect visitor. Abner took
their host's various amateurish doings in glum silence. It was all very
well to indulge in these costly contraptions as a pastime, but if the man
had to get his actual living from the soil where would he be? Almost
anybody could stand on two legs. How many on one?

"Do you make it pay?" Abner asked bluntly.

"Pay? I'm a by-word all over the county. Half the town lives on my lack
of 'gumption.'"

"H'm," said Abner darkly. He was as far as ever from hitting it off with
this smiling, dapper product of artificial city conditions.

"I came across some of your Readjusters the other day," observed Whyland,
at the door of his hen-house--a prodigal place with a dozen wired-in
"runs" for a dozen different varieties of poultry: "Leghorns, Plymouth
Rocks, Jerseys, Angoras, Hambletonians and what not," as Bond
irresponsibly remarked. "They say they haven't been seeing much of you
lately."

Abner frowned. Whyland, he felt, was trying to put him at a disadvantage.
But, in truth, it could not be denied that he had practically left one
circle for another,--was showing himself much more disposed to favour the
skylights of the studios than the footlights of the rostrum.

"I am still for the cause," he said. "But it can be helped from one side
as well as from another. My next book----"

"I didn't dispute your idea; only its application. I should be glad if
you _could_ make it go. Anything would be better than the present
horrible mess. We have 'equality,' and to spare, in the Declaration and
the Constitution, but whether or not we shall ever get it in our
taxing----"

"I am glad to hear you speaking a word for the country people----" began
Abner.

"The country people?" interrupted Whyland quickly, with a stare. Never
more than when among his cattle and poultry was he moved to draw
contrasts between the security of his possessions in the country and the
insecurity of his possessions in town. "What I am thinking of is the city
tax-payer. Urban democracy, working on a large scale, has declared itself
finally, and what we have is the organization of the careless, the
ignorant, the envious, brought about by the criminal and the
semi-criminal, for the spoliation of the well-to-do."

Abner began to be ruffled by these cross-references to the city--they
were out of place in the uncontaminated country. "I believe in the
people," he declared, with his thoughts on the rustic portion of the
population.

"So do I--within a certain range, and up to a certain point. But I do not
believe in the populace," declared Whyland, with his thoughts on the
urban portion.

"All the difference between potatoes and potato-parings," said Bond,
catching at a passing feather.

"Soon it will be simply dog eat dog," said Whyland. "No course will be
left, even for the best-disposed of us, but to fight the devil with fire.
From the assessor and all his works----"

"Good Lord deliver us," intoned Bond, who fully shared Whyland's ideas.

Abner frowned. His religious sensibilities were affronted by this
response.

"And from all his followers," added Whyland. "They threaten me in my own
office--it comes to that. Well, what shall a man do? Shall he fight or
shall he submit? Shall I go into court or shall I compromise with them?"

"It comes to one thing in the end," said Bond, "if you value your peace
of mind. But even then you can put the best face on it."

Whyland sighed. "You mean that there is some choice between my bribing
them and their blackmailing me? Well, I expect I may slip down several
pegs this coming year--morally."

Abner drew away. He was absolutely without any intimacy with the
intricacies of civic finances. He merely saw a man--his host--who seemed
cynically to be avowing his own corruption and shame,--or at least his
willingness to lean in that direction.

"Reform," he announced grandly, "will come only from the disinterested
efforts of those who bring to the task pure motives and unimpeachable
practices."

Whyland sighed again. He thought of his realty interests in town, as they
lay exposed to spoliation, to confiscation. "I am afraid I shall not be a
reformer," he said, in discouragement.

Abner shook a condemnatory head in full corroboration. And Whyland, who
may have been looking for a prop to wavering principles, shook his own
head too.




X

"Don't work so hard at it," said Medora, laying her violin on top of the
pianola. "You shake the house. A minute more and you'll have that lamp
toppling over. And you'll tire yourself out."

Abner wiped his damp brow and felt of his wilted collar. He never put
less than his whole self into anything he attempted. "Tire myself? I'm
strong enough, I guess."

"Well, use your strength to better advantage. Let me show you."

Medora slipped into his place, reset the roll, pulled a stop or two, and
trod out a dozen ringing measures with no particular effort. "Like that."

"Very well," said Abner, resuming his seat docilely. The rest wondered;
he seldom welcomed suggestions or accepted correction.

"Now let's try it once more," said Medora.

An evening devoted to literature was ending with a bit of music. Abner
and Bond had both read unpublished manuscripts with the fierce joy that
authors feel on such occasions, and the others had listened with patience
if not with pleasure. Abner gave two or three of the newest chapters of
_Regeneration_, and Bond read a few pages to show what progress an alien
romanticist was making in homely fields nearer at hand. He had hoped for
Abner's encouragement and approval in this new venture of his, but he got
neither.

"The way to write about cows in a pasture," commented Abner, "is just to
write about them--in a simple, straightforward style without any slant
toward history or mythology, and without any cross-references to remote
scenes of foreign travel. For instance, you speak of a Ranz----"

"Ranz des Vaches," said Medora: "a sort of thing the Alpine
what's-his-name sings."

"It's for atmosphere," said Bond, on the defensive.

"Let the pasture furnish its own atmosphere. And you had something about
a certain breed of cattle near Rome--Rome, was it?"

"Roman Campagna. Travel reminiscences."

"Travel is a mistake," declared Abner.

"So it is," broke in Clytie. "Squat on your own door-step, as Emerson
says."

"Does he?--I think not," interposed Giles the elder. "What he does say
is----"

"We all know," interrupted Stephen, "and ignore the counsel."

Abner did not know, but he would not stoop to ask. "And there was a
quotation from one of those old authors,--Theocritus?"

"Theocritus, yes. Historical perspective."

"Leave the past alone. Live in the present. The past,--bury it, forget
it."

"So hard. Heir of the ages, you know. Good deal harder to forget than
never to have learned at all. _That's_ easy," jibed Bond, with a touch of
temper.

"Oh, now!" cried Medora, fearful that another temper might respond.

"If you must bring in those old Greeks," Abner proceeded, "take their
method and let the rest drop. All they knew, as I understand it, they
learned from men and things close round them and from the nature in whose
midst they lived. They didn't quote; they didn't range the world; they
didn't go for sanction outside of themselves and their own environment."

"The Greeks didn't know so much," interjected Clytie.

"Oh, didn't they, though!" cried Adrian, sending a glance of thanks to
counteract his contradiction. "They _finished_ things. The temple wasn't
complete till they had swept all the marble chips off the back stoop, and
had kind of curry-combed down the front yard, and had----"

"'Sh,'sh!" said Medora. Abner looked about, more puzzled than offended.
"Let's have some music, before our breasts get too savage," said the
girl, starting up.

Bond followed with the rest. "I'll stick to my regular field," he said to
Clytie, as he thrust his crumpled-up manuscript into his pocket.
"Griffins, gorgons, hydras, chimeras dire,--but no more cows. I was never
meant for a veritist."

"Samson is pulling down the temple," observed Clytie. "Crash goes the
first pillar. Who will be next?"

"He'll be caught in the wreck," said Bond, in a shattered voice. "Just
watch and see."




XI

Medora, long before Abner had learned to work the pedals of the pianola
and to wrench any expression from its stops, had banished most of her
"rolls" from sight. "Siegfried's Funeral March" was unintelligible to
him; the tawdry, meretricious Italian overtures filled him with disgust.
In the end the two confined themselves to patriotic airs and old-time
domestic ditties. Medora accompanied on her second-best violin (which was
kept at the farm) and Abner enjoyed a heart-warming sense of doing his
full share in "Tenting Tonight" or "Lily Dale." The girl's parents had
advanced far beyond this stage, but willingly relapsed into it now and
then for Auld Lang Syne.

The final roll wound up with a quick snap.

"Well, you haven't told me what you thought of that last chapter," said
Abner, putting the roll back in its box. He made no demand on Medora's
interest to the exclusion of that of the others, however. His general
glance around invited comment from any quarter. He had merely looked at
her first.

"M--no," said Medora.

The girl, a few weeks before, had looked over _The Rod of the Oppressor_.
_The Rod's_ force had made itself felt most largely on economics; but in
its blossoming it had put forth a few secondary sprigs, and one of these
curled over in the direction of domestic life, of marital relation.
Abner's chivalry--a chivalry totally guiltless of gallantry--had gone out
to the suffering wife doomed to a lifelong yoking with a cruel,
coarse-natured husband: must such a yoking _be_ lifelong? he asked
earnestly. Was it not right and just and reasonable that she should fly
(with or without companion)--nor be too particular over the formalities
of her departure? Medora had smiled and shaken her head; but now the
question somehow seemed less remote than before. She paused over this
bird-like irresponsibility and rather wondered that it should have the
power to detain her.

The new chapters of _Regeneration_ had taken up the same matter and had
displayed it in a somewhat different light. Abner had got hold of the
idea of limited partnership and had sought to apply it, in roundabout
fashion, to the matrimonial relation. His treatment, far from suggesting
an academic aloofness, was as concrete as characterization and
conversation could make it; no one would have supposed, at first glance,
that what chiefly moved him was a chaste abstract Platonic regard for the
whole gentler sex. In short, people--such seemed to be his thesis--might
very advantageously separate, and most informally too, as soon as they
discovered they were incompatible.

"M--no," said Medora.

"Wouldn't that be rather upsetting?" asked her mother. Mrs. Giles was an
easy-going old soul, from whom art, as personified by her own children,
got slight consideration, and to whom literature, as embodied in a
stranger, was little less than a joke. "Wouldn't it result in a good deal
of a mix-up? What would have happened to you youngsters if your father
and I had all at once taken it into our heads to----"

"Mother!" said Medora.

"Oh, well," began Mrs. Giles, with the idea of making a gradual descent
after her sudden aerial flight. "But, then," she resumed, "you must see
that----"

"Mother!" said Medora again. Abner, eager to defend his thesis, looked
round in surprise.

"I agree with Mrs. Giles completely," spoke up Clytie, with much
promptitude. "When I get married I want to get married for good. Most of
the people I know are married in that way, and I believe it's the most
satisfactory way in the long run----"

"But----" began Abner polemically.

Clytie shook her head. "No, it won't do. You've offered us the ballot,
and we don't want it. And you've offered us--this, and we don't want that
either. Consider it declined."

Abner stared at Clytie's brazen little face and disliked her more than
ever.

"But don't _you_ think----" began Abner, turning to Bond.

Bond shook his head slowly and made no comment.

Abner looked round at Medora. She was ranging the music-roll boxes in an
orderly row. Nobody could have been more intent upon her work.

"Well, it stands, all the same," said Abner defiantly.




XII

The clear, placid weather had been waiting several days for Sunday to
come and possess it, and now Sunday was here. The young people stood
bareheaded on the porch and looked down toward the village.

"Do I hear the church bells?" asked Abner. He was a punctilious observer
of Sabbath ordinances and always reached a state of subdued inner bustle
shortly after the finish of the Sunday breakfast.

"We sometimes make them out," replied Stephen Giles, "when the wind
happens to blow right."

"We are all going down this morning, I suppose?" observed Abner,
confidently taking the initiative.

"I expect so," replied Giles.

"Count me out," said Clytie.

"You do not go to church?" asked Abner.

"Not often."

"You have no religion?"

"Yes, I have," replied Clytie, with much pomp: "the religion of
humanity."

"You run and get your things on," said Medora. "You'll find as much
humanity at the First Church as you will anywhere else."

The party set out in two vehicles. Old Mr. Giles drove one and the "hired
man" the other. Clytie, despite her best endeavours to go in company with
Bond, found herself associated with Abner, and a spirit of unchristian
perversity took complete possession of her.

She cast her eye about, viewing the prosperous country-side, the
well-kept farms, the modest comfort symbolized in her host's equipage
itself.

"You're a great sufferer, Mr. Giles," she said suddenly; "aren't you?"

The old gentleman let the lines fall slackly on the fat backs of his
sleek horses. "How? What's that?"

"I say you're a great sufferer. You're a downtrodden slave."

"Why, am I? How do you make that out?"

"Well, if you don't know without having it explained to you! The world is
against you--it's making a doormat of you."

Medora looked askant. What was the child up to now?

"Poor father," she said. "If he hasn't found it out yet, don't tell him."

"No wonder he hasn't found it out," returned Clytie, making a sudden
veer. "Is he suffering for lack of fresh air and pure water? And does he
have to pay an extra price for sunlight? And must he herd in a filthy
slum full of awful plumbing and crowded by more awful neighbours? Does he
have to put up with municipal neglect and corruption, and worry along on
make-believe milk and doctored bread and adulterated medicines, and
endure long hours in unsanitary places under a tyrannical foreman and in
constant dread of fines----?"

Abner was beginning to shift uneasily upon his seat. "Clytie, please!"
said Medora, laying her hand upon the other's.

"Well, they're realities!" declared Clytie stoutly.

"They're not _my_ realities," growled Abner, without turning round.

"Can we pick and choose our realities?" asked Clytie sharply. "Well, if
you are at liberty to pick yours, I am at liberty to pick mine. Yes, sir,
I'll go to that settlement right after New-Year's, and I'll have a class
in basket-making and hammock-weaving before I'm a month older."

"It will take more than basket-making to set the world right," said
Abner.

"Basket-making is enough to teach boys the use of their hands and to keep
them off the street at night," sputtered Clytie.

"Clytie, please!" said Medora once more.

Clytie fell into silence and nursed her wrath through a long service and
through a hearty rustic sermon from the text, "Peace on earth, goodwill
toward men." Abner, in exacerbated mood, watched her narrowly throughout,
that he might tax her, if possible, with a humorous attitude toward the
preacher or a quizzical treatment of his flock. He had not yet pardoned
her "ways" along Main Street, on the occasion of one or two shopping
excursions. She had not hesitated to banter the admiring young clerks
that held their places behind those shop-fronts of galvanized iron in
simulation of red brick and of cut limestone, and she had been
startlingly free in her accosting of several time-honoured worthies
encountered on the dislocated plank walks outside. "Now," said Abner, "if
she sniggers at that old deacon's whiskers or says a single facetious
word about the best bonnets of any of these worthy women round about
us----" But Clytie, outwardly, was propriety itself. Inwardly she was
revolving burning plans to show Abner Joyce that none of his despising,
disparaging, discouraging words could have the least power to move her
from her purpose; and on the way back to the farm she declared
herself--to Bond, in whose company, this time, she had contrived to
be;--they sat on the back seat together.

"That's what I'll do," she stated, with great positiveness. "I'll go
right over there as soon as I get back to town. I don't care if the
streets _are_ dirty, and the street-cars dirtier; and if I have to look
after my own room, why, I will. I'll take along my biggest trunk and my
full-length mirror and the very pick of my new clothes----You know they
like to have us dress; it interests them,--they take it as a great
compliment----"

"And all for Abner Joyce!" said Bond. "Another pillar of the temple
tottering, eh? and trying to brace itself against the modern Samson."

"Not one bit! Not one speck!" cried Clytie. "Only----"

"Well, there are others," said Bond. "I'm prostrate already, as you know.
And Whyland, only a few mornings back, got a good jar that will help
finish him, I'm thinking."

"Did he? And there's Aunt Eudoxia too. If you could have seen how
discouraged she was after she came home from that first meeting with him,
when he took the wind out of her training-school----"

"But he isn't going to jar _you_? He isn't going to cause _you_ to
totter?"

"Not a jar! Not a tot! You'll see whether----"

"Your object, then, is to show how much stronger you are than I am?"

Clytie suddenly paused in her impetuous rush. "Adrian," she breathed,
with plaintive contrition, "I wish you wouldn't say such things--no, nor
even think them."

Her fierce alertness fled. She leaned a little toward him, droopingly, a
poor, feeble, timid child in need of some strong man to shield her from
the rough world.

The other carriage reached home first. Medora alighted gaily on the
horse-block. Abner helped her down with an earnest endeavour not to seem
too attentive.

"Come," she said; "let's see how those pies have turned out--Cordelia is
so absent-minded."

And Abner followed gladly.




XIII

Christmas-Day came with a slight flurry of snow. There was also a slight
flurry in society: the Whylands drove over to the farmhouse for dinner.

Medora had suggested their presence to her mother, and Clytie had
supported the suggestion: "the more the merrier," she declared. Whyland
himself had jumped at the opportunity eagerly, and his wife, who had met
Medora a number of times at the studio and in Paris and liked her,
acquiesced after the due interposition of a few objections.

"About the children----" she began.

"They can take dinner with Murdock and his wife for once in their lives."

"I don't know whether I can be said to have called regularly on Mrs.
Giles----"

"Is Christmas-day a time for such sophistications? And do you think that
plain, simple people, like the Gileses----"

Mrs. Whyland allowed herself to be persuaded--as she had designed from
the start.

She had no great fancy for a solitary Christmas dinner, such as her
husband's rural tastes had so often condemned her to; besides, this new
arrangement would give her an opportunity to take a look at Miss Clytie
Summers, of whom she had heard things.

Medora received Edith Whyland with some empressement; she regarded her
guest as the model of all that the young urban matron should be. Mrs.
Whyland was rather languid, rather elegant, rather punctilious, rather
evangelical, and Abner Joyce, before he realized what was happening to
him, was launched upon a conversation with a woman who, as Clytie Summers
intimated at the first opportunity, was really high in good society.

"One of the swells, I suppose you mean," said Abner.

"I mean nothing of the kind. Swell society is one thing and good society
is another. If you don't quite manage to get good society, you do the
next best thing and take swell society. _I'm_ swell," said Clyde humbly."
But I'm going to be something better, pretty soon," she added hopefully.

Abner had his little talk with Edith Whyland, all unteased by
consideration of the imperceptible nuances and infinitesimal gradations
that characterize the social fabric. He thought her rather quiet and
inexpressive; but he felt her to be a good woman, and was inclined to
like her. She dwelt at some length on Dr. McElroy's Christmas sermon, and
it presently transpired that, whether in town or country, she made it a
point to attend services. Abner, who for some dim reason of his own had
expected little from the wife of Leverett Whyland, put down as mere
calumnies the reports that made her "fashionable." Through the dinner he
talked to her confidently, almost confidentially; with half the bulk of
Eudoxia Pence she made twice the impression; and by the time the feast
had reached the raisins and hickory-nuts his tongue, working
independently of his will, was promising to call upon her in town.

This outcome was highly gratifying to Medora--it was just the one, in
fact, that she had hoped to bring about. City and country, oil and water
were mixing, and she herself was acting as the third element that made
the emulsion possible. From her place down the other side of the table
she kept her eyes and ears open for all that was going on. She saw with
joy that Abner was almost chatting. He had given over for the present the
ponderous consideration of knotty abstractions; he totally forgot the
unearned increment; and what he was offering to quiet and self-repressed
Edith Whyland was being accepted--thanks to the training and temperament
of his hearer--for "small talk." Yes, Abner had broken a large bill and
was dealing out the change. He knew it; he was a little ashamed of it;
yet at the same time he looked about with a kind of shy triumph to see
whether any one were commenting upon his address.

To tell the truth, Abner felt his success to such a degree that presently
he began to presume upon it. He had heard about the children, left behind
for a lonely dinner with the farm superintendent, and he began to scent
cruelty and injustice in their progenitors. The wrongs of the child--they
too had their share in keeping our generous Abner in his perennial state
of indignation. He became didactic, judicial, hortatory; Edith Whyland
almost questioned her right to be a mother. But she understood the spirit
that prompted this intense young man's admonitions and exhortations; his
feelings did him credit. She made a brief and quiet defence of herself,
and thought no worse of Abner for his championship, however mistaken, of
distressed childhood. He understood and pardoned her; she understood and
pardoned him. And the more she thought things over, the more--despite his
heckling of her--she liked him.

"He's a fine, serious fellow, my dear," she said to Medora, "and I'm glad
to have met him."

Medora flushed, wondering why Edith Whyland should have spoken just--just
like that. And Edith, noting Medora's flush, considerately let the matter
drop.

Mrs. Whyland also looked over Clytie Summers, and found no serious harm
in her. "She is rather underbred--or 'modern,' I suppose I should call
it, and she's more or less in a state of ferment; but I dare say she will
come out all right in the end. However, my Evelyn shall never be taken
through the slums: I think Leverett will be willing to draw the line
there." And, "Remember!" she said to Abner, as she drove away.

Medora was delighted. She saw two steps into the future. Abner should
call on Mrs. Whyland. And he should read from his own works at Mrs.
Whyland's house. Why not? He read with much justness and expression; he
was thoroughly accustomed to facing an audience. Indeed he had lately
spoken of meditating a public tour, in order to familiarize the country
with _This Weary World_ and _The Rod of the Oppressor_ and the newer work
still unfinished. Well, then: the reading-tour, like one or two other
things, should begin at home.

While these generous plans pulsed through the girl's heart and brain
Abner, all unaware of the future now beginning to overshadow him, was out
in the stable considering the case of a lame horse and inveighing against
the general irksomeness of rural conditions. He threw back his abundant
hair as he rose from the study of a dubious hoof,--a Samson unconscious
of the shining shears that threatened him.




XIV

Abner, on his return to town, found its unpleasant precincts more crowded
than ever with matters of doubtful expediency and propriety. Not that he
felt the strain of any temptation; he knew that he was fully capable of
keeping himself unspotted from the world--the world of urban society--if
only people would leave him alone. Two dangers stood out before all
others: his impending call upon Mrs. Whyland and the approaching annual
fancy-dress ball of the Art Students' League. He had rashly committed
himself to the one, and his officious friends of the studios were rapidly
pushing him upon the other. He must indeed present himself beneath the
roof of a man whom he could not regard as a "good citizen," and must thus
seem to approve his host's improper composition, now imminent, with the
powers that be; but he should bestir himself to withstand the pressure
exerted by Giles, by Medora herself, by Bond, by mischievous Clytie
Summers, by the whole idle horde of studio loungers to force him into
such an atmosphere of frivolity, license and dissipation as could not but
inwrap one of those wild student "dances."

"We should so like to have you present," said Medora. "It will be rather
bright and lively, and you would be sure to meet any number of pleasant
people. You would enjoy it, I know."

Abner shook his head. Fancy him, a serious man, with a reputation to
nourish and to safeguard, caught up in any such fandango as that!

"I have never attended a dancing-party yet," he said. "I couldn't waltz
if my life depended on it. And I wouldn't, either."

"You needn't," said Medora. "But you would be interested in the grand
march. It's always very pictorial, and the girls are arranging to have it
more so than ever this year."

Abner shook his head again. "I have never had any fancy togs on. I--I
_couldn't_ wear anything like that."

"You needn't. A great many of the gentlemen go in simple evening dress."

Abner shook his head a third time. "I thought you understood my
principles on that point. Dress is a badge, an index. I could not openly
brand myself as having surrendered to the--to the----"

Medora sighed. "You are making a great many difficulties," she said. "But
you will call on Mrs. Whyland?"

"I have promised, and I shall do so," he said, with all the good grace of
a despairing bear caught in a trap.

"I think she suggested some--some afternoon?"

"Yes."

"You will go at about half-past four or five, possibly?"

"Yes."

Abner suddenly saw himself as he was six months before: little likelihood
then of his devoting an afternoon--fruitful working hours of a crowded
day--to the demands of mere social observances. Which of his Readjusters
would have had the time or the inclination to do as he had bound himself
to do? But now he was "running" less with reformers than with artists,
and these ill-regulated spendthrift folk were prone to break up the day
and send its fragments broadcast as they would, without forethought,
scruple, compunction.

One day before long, then, Abner buttoned his handsome double-breasted
frock-coat across his capacious chest and put on a neat white lawn tie
and sallied forth to call on Edith Whyland. The day was sunny--almost
deceptively so--and Abner, who knew the good points in his own figure and
was glad to dispense with a heavy overcoat whenever possible, limited his
panoply to a soft felt hat and a pair of good stout gloves. The wind came
down the lake and sent the waves in small splashes over the gray sea-wall
and teased the bare elms along the wide, winding roadway, and tousled
Abner's abundant chestnut moustache and reddened his ruddy cheeks and
nipped his vigorous nose--all as a reminder that January was here and
ought not to be disregarded. But Abner was thinking less of
meteorological conditions than of Mrs. Whyland's butler. He knew he could
be brusquely haughty toward this menial, but could he be easy and
indifferent? Yet was it right to seem coolly callous toward another human
creature? But, on the other hand, might not a cheery, informal
friendliness, he wondered, as his hand sought the bell-push, be
misconstrued, be ridiculed, be resented, be taken advantage of....

The door was opened by a subdued young woman who wore a white cap and
presented a small silver tray. Abner, who dispensed with calling cards on
principle and who would have blushed to read his own name in script on a
piece of white cardboard, asked in a stern voice if Mrs. Whyland was at
home. The maid dropped the tray into the folds of her black dress; she
seemed habituated enough to the sudden appearance of the cardless. She
looked up respectfully, admiringly--she had opened the door for a good
many gentlemen, but seldom for so magnificent and masterful a creature as
Abner--and said yes. But alas for the credit of her mistress and of her
mistress' household: here was a lordly person who had arrived with the
open expectation of meeting a "man" who should "announce" him!

Abner had come full of subject-matter; he knew just what he was going to
say. And during the interval before Mrs. Whyland's appearance he should
briefly run over his principal points. But he found Mrs. Whyland already
on the ground. Nor was she alone. Two or three other ladies were chatting
with her on minor topics, and before all of these had gone others arrived
to take their places. Not a moment did he spend with her alone; briefly,
it was her "day."

These ladies referred occasionally to matters musical and
artistic--somebody had given a recital, somebody else was soon to exhibit
certain pictures--but they had little to say about books and they made no
recognition of Abner as an author. "More of this artificial social
repression," he thought. "Why should they be afraid of 'boring' me, as
they word it? They bore Bond--they are always buzzing Giles; I think I
could endure a word or two." His eye roamed over the rich but subdued
furnishings of the room. "No wonder that all spontaneity should be
smothered here!" And when literary topics were finally broached he
experienced less of comfort than of indignation. A sweet little woman
moaned that she had attempted an authors' reading, but that her authors
could not command a proper degree of attention from her guests. Her eyes
flashed indignantly as she called to mind the ways of the people she had
presumptuously ventured to entertain. "They were swells," she murmured
bitterly. "Yes, swells;--it's a harsh word, but not undeserved. I never
tried having so many people of that particular sort before, and they
simply overrode me. They banded against me; being quite in the majority,
they could keep one another in countenance. My poor authors were offended
at the open way in which they were ignored. Poor dear Edward scarcely
knew what to do with such a----"

The plaintive little creature lapsed into silence; great must have been
her provocation thus to speak of her own guests. Abner's eyes blazed; his
blood boiled with indignation. Such treatment constituted an affront to
all art, to his own art--literature, to himself.

"I have heard of cases of that sort before," he blurted out. "Mr. Giles
told me of one only yesterday. The victim in this case was a young
gentlewoman"--Abner's lips caressed this taking word--"a young
gentlewoman from the South. She had come to one of those
houses"--everybody, with the help of Abner's tone, saw the insolent front
of the place--"to tell some dialect stories and to sing a few little
songs. The mob--it was nothing less--could hardly be reduced to order.
All those people had seen one another the day before, and they were all
going to see one another the day to follow, yet talk they would and must
and did. Engagements, marriages, acceptances, excuses, compliments,
tittle-tattle, personalities--a rolling flood of chatter and gossip. Mrs.
Pence took her people for what they were, apparently, and kept up with
the best of them herself. Now and then her husband would do a little
feeble something to quiet the tempest, and then the poor girl, half
crying with mortification, would attempt to resume her task. With her
last word the flood would instantly rise and obliterate her once
more----"

Abner's voice vibrated with a hot anger over this indignity put upon a
fellow "artist." His view of literature was sacramental, sacerdotal. All
should reverence the altar; none should insult the humblest neophyte.
Mrs. Whyland indulgently overlooked his reckless use of names and liked
him none the less; and the little lady who had suffered on a similar
occasion, though in a different role, gave him a glance of thanks.

"I know the type," said Mrs. Whyland. "It is commoner than it should be;
others of us besides are much too thoughtless. You had too many at a
time, my dear," she went on quietly. "A few scattered grains of gunpowder
do no great harm, but a large number of them massed together will blow
anything to ruin. Our motto should be, 'Few but fit,' eh? Or ought I to
say, 'Fit though few'?"

Abner stayed on, and finally the last of the ladies rose to go. Abner was
just about to throw open the stable door, preparatory to giving his
hobbies an airing, when a latch-key was heard operating in the front door
of the house itself. Then came a man's quick step, a tussle with a heavy
winter overcoat, and Whyland himself appeared on the threshold.

He came in, tingling, exhilarated, cordial. His cordiality overflowed at
once; he asked Abner to remain to dinner.

Abner had not looked for this; a mere call was as far as he had meant to
go. He parried, he evaded, he shuffled toward the door.

"But where's your overcoat?" asked Whyland, looking about.

"I didn't wear one."

"On such a day as this!" exclaimed Edith.

"I am strong," said Abner.

"You'll find our winter stronger," said Whyland. "You are not out there
in the country a hundred miles back from the lake. You must stay, of
course."

Still Abner moved toward the door. _Could_ any city man be as friendly as
Whyland seemed? "It will be colder later on," he submitted.

"Our welcome will never be warmer." Whyland looked toward his wife--their
rustic appeared to be exacting the observance of all the forms.

"You will stay, of course," said Edith Whyland; "I have hardly had a word
with you. And when you do go, it must be in a cab."

Abner succumbed. He was snared, as he felt. Other rooms, still more
handsomely, more lavishly appointed, seemed to yawn for him. And then
came crystal and silver and porcelain and exquisite napery and the rare
smack of new and nameless dishes to help bind him hard and fast. Abner
was in a tremor; his first compromise with Mammon was at hand.




XV

Abner accepted his environment; after all, he might force the
conversation to soar far above the mere materialities. His hobbies began
to poke forth their noses, to whinny, to neigh; but some force stronger
or more dexterous than himself seemed to be guiding the talk, and the
name of Medora Giles began to mingle with the click of silver on china
and to weave itself into the progress of the service.

"A very sweet girl," declared Edith Whyland. "Nothing pleased me more
than her nice domestic ways at the farm. I had got the impression in
Paris that, though she was quite the pride of their little coterie, she
was not exactly looked upon as practical,--not considered particularly
efficient, in a word."

Abner's thoughts instantly reverted to the farm-house kitchen. What were
the paid services of menials, however deft and practised, compared with
the intimate, personal exertions, the--the--yes, the ministrations of a
woman like Medora Giles?

"She was probably just waiting for the chance," said Whyland heartily.
"You don't often find talent and real practicality combined in one girl
as they are in Miss Giles. Even little Clytie Summers----"

"We must not disparage little Clytie," said his wife gravely.

"Oh, Clytie!" returned Whyland, giving his head a careless, sidelong
jerk. "Still, she's good fun." He laughed. "That child is always breaking
out in some new place. The next place will probably be the students'
ball. You'll be there to see?" he inquired of Abner.

"No wine, thank you," said Abner to the maid, placing his broad hand on
the foot of a glass already turned down. "At the ball? I hardly think so.
I never----"

"You might find it amusing," said Mrs. Whyland. "A good many of your
friends will be there--ourselves among them."

"Yes," said Whyland, turning his eyes away from the uncontaminated glass,
"my wife is a patroness, or whatever they call it. We go to help receive
and to look on during the march and to see the dancing started."

"I should like to have a hand in helping Medora contrive a costume that
would do her justice," said Mrs. Whyland. "She is really quite a beauty,
and she has a great deal of distinction. Nothing could be better than her
profile and those exquisite black eyebrows." Then, mindful of the
presence of the children, she proceeded by means of graceful periphrase
and carefully studied generalizations to a presentation of Medora's
mental and spiritual attributes. She said many things, in the tone of
kindly, half-veiled patronage; after all she was talking to a country man
about a country maid. She even praised Abner himself by indirection--as
one strand in the general rustic theme. The children, who caught every
word and put this and that together with marvellous celerity and
precision, were vastly impressed by the attributes of the invisible
paragon. They looked at Abner's bigness with their own big eyes--though
ignored by him, his interest being, despite his former championship of
them, less in children than in "the child"--and envied him her
acquaintance; and they began to ask that very evening how soon the
admirable Medora might swim into their ken.

The first result from Abner's dinner with the Whylands was that Medora,
thus formulated by the sympathetic and appreciative Edith, now became
definitely crystallized in his mind; the second was that he changed his
boarding-house. Mere crudity for its own sake no longer charmed. The
curtains and bedspreads at the farm had served as the earliest prompters
to this step, and the furnishings of the Whyland interior now decided him
to take it. Mrs. Cole's stained and spotted lambrequin became more
offensive than ever, and the industrious hands of Maggie, which did much
more than merely to pass things at table, were now less easy to endure.

"I know I'm a fastidious, ungrateful wretch," he said to himself, as he
saw his trunk started off to a better neighbourhood and prepared to
follow it. "They've been very kind to me, and little Maggie would do
almost anything for me"--little Maggie, whom he treated as a mere asexual
biped and hectored in the most lordly way, and who yet entertained for
him a puzzled, secret admiration;--"but I can't stand it any longer,
that's all."

A few days later Bond called at Abner's old address and was referred by a
grieved landlady to his new one. "I don't make out Mr. Joyce," said poor,
hurt Mrs. Cole.

Bond went down the steps whistling, "They're after me, they're after me!"
in a thoughtful undertone.




XVI

"Are you going to dress very much?" grimaced Giles, with a precious
little intonation that caused Bond to laugh outright.

Abner, who was lounging under the Turkish canopy, pricked up his ears to
catch the reply. Medora tossed aside one of her brother's sketches and
turned her eyes on Abner.

"I don't know what _to_ do," replied Bond. "We have had such a glut of
Romeos and Mephistos and cowboys. It has occurred to me that I might go
as a rough sketch--a _bozzetto_--of a gentleman."

"How would you get yourself up for that?" asked Giles.

"Just as you have often seen me. I should wear that old dress-suit with
the shiny seams and the frayed facings, and a shirt-front seen more
recently by the world than by the laundry, and a pair of shoes already
quite familiar with tweeds and cheviots, and a little black bow--this
last as a sort of sign that I am not fully in society, or if I am, only
briefly at long, uncertain intervals. And a black Derby hat--or possibly
a brown one."

Medora smiled, well pleased. This easy, jocular treatment of a serious
and formal subject was just what she wanted. It would help show the
listening Abner that the wearing of the social uniform was nothing very
formidable after all, and did not necessarily doom one's moral and
spiritual fibre to utter blight and ruin.

Abner set his lips. He might indeed go to their wretched "fandango" in
the end--they had all been urging him, Stephen, Medora, everybody--but
never as a cheap imitation of a swell so long as his own good, neat,
well-made, every-day wardrobe existed as it was. He had turned down the
wine-glass at Whyland's, and he would turn down the dress-coat here.

Medora, unconscious that her precious little seed had fallen, after all,
on stony ground, turned toward Abner with a smile--an intent, observing
one. "Did Mrs. Whyland speak to you about her 'evening'?"

"Her evening? What evening?"

"There, I knew she wouldn't dare. You frightened her almost to death."

"What do you mean?"

"Why, she had been thinking of having a few friends come in some night
next week for a little reading and some music. But you were so violent in
your comments on the behaviour of society that she didn't dare touch upon
her plan. She was meaning to ask you to read two or three things from
your _Weary World_, but----"

"Why----" began Abner.

"Read," put in Bond. "I'm going to."

"Why," began Abner once more, "I had no notion of offending her. But
everything I said was the truth."

"She wasn't offended," said Giles, with a smile; "only 'skeered.' You
must have been pretty tart."

"I can't help it. It makes me so hot to have such things happening----"

"I know," said Giles. "We're all made hot, now and then, in one way or
another."

"You _will_ read, won't you?" asked Medora, in accents of subdued
pleading.

"Well, not _next_ week," replied Abner, in the tone of one who held
postponement to be as good as escape. "That tour of mine is coming off,
after all. They have arranged a number of dates for me, and I shall go
eastward for several readings and possibly a few lectures."

"How far eastward?" asked Medora eagerly. "As far as New York?"

"Maybe so," said Abner guardedly.

"How long shall you be gone?" she asked with great intentness.

"A fortnight or more," purred Abner complacently, under this show of
interest. "I guess I can open the eyes of those Easterners to a thing or
two."

Medora dropped her glance thoughtfully to the floor. An exchange of
instruction seemed impending, and she could only hope that the East might
prove a more considerate tutor to Abner than Abner threatened to be to
the East.




XVII

The two long winding lines of gaily attired young people joined forces
and the procession came marching down the hall by fours, by eights, by
sixteens, and Abner sat against the wall next to Edith Whyland and
watched the shifting spectacle with a sort of fearful joy. Eudoxia Pence,
seated against the opposite wall, glanced across at him, when occasion
once offered, and nodded and smiled, as if to say, "Isn't it lovely!
Isn't it fascinating!" and Abner, in sudden alarm, recomposed his
tell-tale face and frowningly responded with a grave bow.

Abner wore his double-breasted frock-coat and his white lawn tie; and
Edith Whyland, who had come in a plain dark reception costume to stand in
a row near the door with the wives of the professors at the Art Academy,
now sat with him and brought him as far into drawing as might be with the
abounding masculine figures in evening dress. Many of these appeared in
the march itself, along with the sailors, the Indian chiefs and the young
blades out of Perugino. Giles passed by as a Florentine noble of the late
Quattrocento, in a black silk robe that muffled his slight indifference
to a function familiar from many repetitions. Little O'Grady wore his
plaster-flecked blue blouse over his shabby brown suit and hardily
announced himself as Phidias. Medora walked with a languid grace as a
Druid priestess, and Miss Wilbur, the miniaturist, showed forth as Madame
Le Brun, without whose presence no fancy-dress ball could be regarded as
complete.

High above the marching host rose dozens of the tall conical head-dresses
of mediaeval France with their dependent veils. A great Parisian painter
had just been exhibiting some mural decorations in the galleries of the
Academy, and half the girls, from the life class down, wore
candle-extinguishers on their heads and trailed full robes of startlingly
figured chintz--a material that was expected to effect to the charitable
eye and the friendly imagination the richness of brocade. Many of the
younger men too had succumbed to the same influence and appeared in long
skin-tight hose and bobby little doublets edged with fur.

"How can they? How can they?" wondered Abner.

The music abruptly changed its tempo and the march broke up into a waltz.
Through the swirling dancers a single figure, clad in violet and green,
zigzagged across to Eudoxia Pence and bowed over her for a word or two.
Eudoxia moved her lips and spread out her plump hands deprecatingly and
shook her head with a smile.

"I should hope she _wouldn't_," thought Abner;--"not with a little squirt
like that."

The figure immediately zigzagged back, with the same effect of eager,
inquiring haste. It paused before Abner and Mrs. Whyland and suddenly
sidled up. Abner recognised Adrian Bond.

"Clytie?" said Bond. "Has anybody seen or heard anything of Clytie
Summers?"

"Well, well," said Mrs. Whyland, looking him over; "you are enrolled
among the Boutet de Monvel boys too, are you?"

Bond ran his eye down his slim legs with fatuous complacency and fingered
the fur fringe of his doublet and pushed his steep flat-topped cap over
to a different angle. Abner looked at him with contemptuous amazement and
would not even speak.

"Her aunt hasn't heard a word from her for a week," said Bond. "That
settlement has claimed her, body and soul. All she does is to write home
for more clothes. I expect she has completely forgotten all about our
little affair to-night. I thought of course she was going to march with
me, but----"

And he darted away to resume his quest.

"She will come," said Mrs. Whyland. "And her cap will be higher and her
veil longer and the pattern of her brocade bigger and more startling than
anybody else can show."

Little O'Grady moved past with a Maid of Astolat, who wore white
cloth-of-gold and carried a big lily above each ear and dropped a long
full-flowered stalk over her partner's shoulder. Medora drifted by in
company with a Mexican vaquero. Her white garments fluttered famously
against the other's costume of yellow and black. She had let down her
abundant dark hair and then carelessly caught it up again and woven into
it a garland of mistletoe. She smiled on Abner with a plaintive, weary
lifting of her eyebrows; she appeared to be "creating atmosphere" again,
just as on the afternoon when he had first seen her pouring tea. She
seemed a long way off. The occasion itself removed her one stage from
him, and her costume another, and her bearing a third. Was this the same
girl who had so dexterously snatched open the stove door in that
farm-house kitchen and had been so active, as revealed by glimpses from
the corridor, in beating up pillows and in casting sheets and coverlets
to the morning air?

The waltz suddenly ended and the Mexican renounced Medora only a few
steps beyond Abner. She came along and took a vacant chair next to Edith
Whyland.

"Are you enjoying it?" she asked Abner.

"It is very instructive; it is most typical," he replied.

The orchestra presently began again, but Medora remained in her place.

"Aren't you dancing this time?" asked Mrs. Whyland.

"Yes," replied Medora deliberately; "I'm dancing with Mr. Joyce."

She handed Edith her card. Abner looked across to her with a startled,
puzzled expression.

"So you are," said Mrs. Whyland. "J-o-y-c-e," she read, and handed the
card back.

"I don't care for the redowa, anyway," Medora explained; "and I didn't
want to dance with the man that was moving along in my direction to ask
me. It was the only vacant line. What could I do? I looked about and saw
you"--to Abner--"standing by the door----"

"I suppose I was tall enough to see," said Abner, feeling very huge and
uncomfortable.

"A tower of strength, a city of refuge," suggested Mrs. Whyland.

"Precisely," said Medora. "So I snatched a pencil out of Adrian Bond's
hand--he had just put himself down four times----"

"What impudence!" thought Abner savagely.

"--and scribbled this,"--dropping her eye on the card. "I hope you don't
mind my having taken your name?" she concluded.

A sudden gust of gallantry swept over Abner. "Let me have the card," he
said. "I have given my autograph a good many times"--looking at the faint
pencilling--"but I don't recognise this." He drew out a lead-pencil and
rewrote the name big and black above the other. "There," he said,--"a
souvenir of the occasion." He handed the card back with the authentic
autograph of a distinguished author. His name there wiped out not merely
one scribble but all, even to the impertinent four traced by
insignificant Bond. A man who could pen such a signature need have no
regret for not being a carpet-knight besides.

Medora took back her card, highly gratified; her cavalier had made a long
stride ahead. Abner himself rejoiced at his dexterity in asserting the
man--almost the man of gallantry, at that--under the shield of the
writer. Mrs. Whyland kindly refrained from entering upon an analysis to
determine just what percentage of egotism was to be detected in Abner's
act, and felt emboldened by such unlooked-for graciousness and by the
sustaining presence of Medora to ask a favour for herself--that "evening"
was still in her mind.

"You _will_ read, won't you?" pleaded Medora.

"After my return from the East," acquiesced Abner.

The two women looked at each other, well pleased.




XVIII

Presently Leverett Whyland came along. The cares of the urban
property-owner and of the gentleman farmer were alike cast aside; Abner
had never known him to appear so natty, so buoyant, so juvenile. Another
man accompanied him, a man older, larger, heavier, graver, with a
close-clipped gray beard. This newcomer bowed to Mrs. Whyland with a
repression that indicated but a distant acquaintance; and just as Medora
was whisked away by a new partner--it was Bond, claiming the first of his
four--Whyland introduced him to Abner: "Mr. Joyce, Mr. M'm----" Abner,
occupied by Bond's appropriation of Medora, lost the name.

"And where is Clytie?" asked Whyland, looking about. "Has anybody seen or
heard anything of little Clytie Summers?"

"No doubt she will appear presently," said his wife drily.

"And meanwhile----?" he suggested, motioning toward the floor.

"It might not look amiss," replied his wife, rising. They joined the
dancers.

Abner was left alone with his new acquaintance, who, arriving at an
instant apprehension of our young man's bulk, seriousness and essential
alienation from the spirit of the affair, seized him as a spent and
bewildered swimmer in strange waters lays hold upon some massive beam
that happens to be drifting past. Abner clung in turn, glad to recognise
a kindred spirit in the midst of this gaudy, frivolous throng. The two
quickly found the common ground of serious interests. The circling,
swinging dancers retired into the background; their place was quietly
taken by the Balance of Trade, by the Condition of the Country, by
Aggregations of Capital, by Land and Labour; and presently Abner was
leading forth, all saddled and bridled, the Readjusted Tax.

"This is something like," he thought.

The other made observations and comments in a slow, grave, subdued tone.
"Who is he?" wondered Abner. "What can he be connected with? Anyway, he's
a fine, solid fellow--the kind Whyland might come to be with a little
trying."

Stephen Giles passed by, guiding the billowy undulations of Eudoxia
Pence. Eudoxia had a buoyancy that more than counteracted her bulk, and
she wafted about, a substantial vision in lemon-coloured silk, for all to
see. She looked at Abner's companion over Giles's shoulder.

"Enjoying yourself, dear?" she asked. Then she nodded to Abner and
floated away.

Abner, instantly chilled, looked sidewise at his companion with a dawning
censoriousness in his eyes. He had probably been talking, for a good ten
minutes and in full view of the entire hall, to that arch-magnate of the
trusts, Palmer Pence. He began to cast about for means to break up this
calamitous situation. He welcomed the return of Leverett Whyland with his
wife.

"Well, Pence," said Whyland, "how has the Amalgamated Association of
Non-Dancers been doing?"

"Pence," Whyland had said. Yes, this was the Trust man, after all.

"First-rate," returned the other briefly, rising to go. "That's a fine,
serious young fellow," he added, for Whyland's ear alone. "There's stuff
in him."

"Been getting on with him, eh?" said Whyland ruefully. "Well, you're in
luck."

Abner glowered gloomily across the thinning floor. Another dance had just
ended and Whyland had skimmed away once again. Abner, forgetful of the
presence of Edith Whyland, made indignant moan to himself over the
perverse fate that had led him on toward friendliness with a man whose
principles and whose public influence he could not approve.

There was a sudden stir about the distant doorway. Abner heard the
clapping of hands and a few hearty, jubilant yaps frankly emitted by
young barytone voices. "What now?" he wondered, with a sidelong glance at
Edith Whyland.

Mrs. Whyland, herself half-risen, was looking toward the door, like
everybody else. "Finally!" she said, with a pleased smile, and sank back
into her place.

A tall, stalwart figure came through the crowd amidst a storm of
hand-clapping and of cheers. The maids of mediaeval France fluttered
their long veils, and their young male contemporaries waved their velvet
caps.

It was a gentleman of sixty with a bunch of white whiskers on either jaw
and a pair of flashing steel-gray eyes. He nodded brusquely here and
there and looked about with a tight, fierce smile. "Hurrah! hurrah!"
cried all the students, from the life class down to the cubes and cones.

"Who is he?" asked Abner.

"Why, that's Dr. Gowdy," replied his companion. "The ball would hardly
_be_ a ball without him here. He has led the grand march more than
once----"

"A man of his age and dignity!" mumbled Abner.

"--but he is late to-night, for some reason. He is one of the Academy
trustees," she added.

"Perhaps his patients kept him." Abner's tone implied that professional
duties would set much more gracefully on such a figure than social
diversions.

"His patients?"

"Yes. You said he was a doctor."

"But not a doctor of medicine. A doctor of theology."

"A minister?--a minister of the gospel?"

"He is, indeed. And I----"

"And you?"

"I am one of his parishioners. I sit under him every Sunday."

Abner was dumb. This professing Christian, this pattern of
evangelicalism, could witness such things without pronouncing a single
word of protest. "Is he going to dance?" he asked finally.

"I think not. He is coming over here presently to sit with me, just as
you have been doing. You shall meet him."

Abner was dazed. Palmer Pence, doubtless, was here under protest; but
this man, his superior in age, credit and renown, had apparently come of
his own free will. He sat there staring at the smiling progress of the
Rev. William S. Gowdy through the throng of jubilant students. He felt
stunned, dislocated. It was all too much.

"Well, well," he heard Mrs. Whyland say. He looked about at her and then
out upon the clearing floor.

"Well, well," said Mrs. Whyland once again. The wide, empty space before
them was lending itself to a second grand entree, by a party of one.
Clytie Summers had finally arrived.




XIX

Clytie came on with the brisk and confident walk that she had cultivated
along the pavements of the shopping district, and she was dressed
precisely as if about to enter upon one of her frequent excursions in
that quarter on some crisp, late-autumn afternoon. She wore a very trig
and jaunty tailor-made suit and a stunning little garnet-velvet toque.
She tripped ahead in a solid but elegant pair of walking-shoes and was
drawing on a tan glove with mannish stitchings over the back. The Boutet
de Monvel girls, the contemporaries of Jeanne d'Arc, were immediately
obliterated; Clytie became the most conspicuous figure in the whole big
place.

She advanced tapping her heels, smoothing her gloves, and looking every
shirt-front full in the face. Her forehead gathered in a soft little
frown; he whom she sought was not in sight. She got a glimpse of Mrs.
Pence and Medora Giles seated side by side in a far corner, and of Little
O'Grady hovering near, with a covetous eye upon her aunt's profile; and
she took the remaining space in a quick little walk that was almost a
run.

"Adrian Bond?" she asked. "Tell me; has anybody seen or heard anything of
Adrian Bond?"

"Well, Clytie child!" exclaimed her aunt, looking her over; "what's all
this?"

Clytie passed her hand down the side of her thick fawn-coloured skirt and
readjusted her toque. "These things were in that box you sent me day
before yesterday."

"That box from London?"

"That box from London. I thought they were never coming. I wrote; I
cabled; I implored friends to go to Regent Street every single day till
they should be done. And here they are, finally--a month late; but I'm
wearing them, all the same."

"Well, they're worth waiting for," said Medora. "I suppose they are just
about the last word."

"Just about," replied Clytie complacently. "Meanwhile, where is Adrian
Bond?"

"Here he comes now," said Medora.

Clytie turned. She beheld the mediaeval greens and violets. "Why,
Adrian," she protested; "you told me you were coming disguised as a
gentleman."

"I thought better of it," said Bond.

"But," she proceeded, "I--I----" She spun round on one heel. "This is all
for you. I thought that if you were coming disguised as a gentleman, it
would be nice for me to come disguised as a lady. No use," she said
regretfully. "Everybody knew me in a minute," she added.

Bond laughed. "I thought you weren't coming at all."

"But you got my note?"

"Not a word."

"Why, I wrote you how we were having a ball of our own, and how I
couldn't come to this one till I had started off that one."

"What kind of a ball?" asked Mrs. Pence.

"One given by our Telephone Girls. I led the grand march with a lovely
young bartender. I struck him all in a heap--can you wonder?--and he told
me just what he thought of me. There wasn't much time to lead up to it.
He was very direct; he took a short cut. Oh, I love the _people_! Why are
the men in our set so shy----!"

"What did he say?" asked Bond sharply.

"Oh, never mind! It was one of those cannon-ball compliments that leave
you stunned and breathless, but willing to be stunned again. What do you
think of my togs?" she asked, generally.

"Look at this jacket while it's a novelty," she went on without waiting
for any response. "The girls were all tremendously taken by it; I noticed
a dozen of them trying to see how it was made.--Oh, how do?" she said
airily to Abner, who came up just then. Having perceived Medora in her
remote corner, he had finally summoned enough resolution to make his
first movement of the evening: leaving Edith Whyland in the company of
Dr. Gowdy, he had succeeded in crossing the intervening leagues alone and
unaided.

Abner frowned to find this pert little piece cutting in ahead of him in
such a fashion. "How do you do?" he responded stiffly.

"They'll all be making ones like it," Clytie rattled on. "By next Sunday
every street from Poplar Alley to Flat-iron Park will swarm with them,
and not a milliner's window along the length of Green-gage Road but will
have three or four of these toques on display. Yes, sir; I'm a power in
the Ward already, let me tell you."

Bond placed his small hand on Abner's broad shoulder. "Isn't she a
winner?" he murmured ecstatically. "If Medora, now, could only have done
something as spirited and unconventional----"

"I have no fault to find with Miss Giles," retorted Abner in a stern
undertone. "To me she is perfectly satisfactory. She will always do the
right thing in the right way, and always be a lady."

Bond withdrew his hand. "Oh, come, I say," he began protestingly.

Abner ignored this. "How about the basket-weaving?" he asked Clytie.

"Well," Clytie responded hardily, "I found plenty teaching that already.
I have chosen for my department instruction in tact, taste, dress and
manners. Such instruction is badly needed, in more quarters than one."

Medora flushed. "Clytie Summers," she said, the first moment that the two
were alone, "if ever you speak to Mr. Joyce like that again you need
never come to our studio nor count me any longer among your
acquaintances."

"Why, dear me----" began Clytie, with an affectation of puzzled
innocence.

"I mean it," said Medora, with an angry tear starting in her eye. "Mr.
Joyce is too much of a man to be treated so by a child like you."




XX

Abner lingered on. He had meant to leave early, but it was as easy to
stay as to go; besides, he felt the stirring of a curiosity to see what
the closing hour of such an occasion might be like. Everything, thus far,
had been most seemly, most decorous, full of a pleasant informality and a
friendly, trustful goodwill; but the crucial point, he had read, always
came about supper-time, after which the rout turned into an orgy.

Dr. Gowdy came across and launched himself upon Abner, just as he had
done before, when Mrs. Whyland had first made them acquainted. He frankly
admired the strength and the stature of the only man in the room who was
taller and more robust than himself, as well as the intent sobriety of
his glance and the laconic gravity of his speech.

"An admirable young fellow!" he had exclaimed to Edith Whyland, upon
Abner's leaving them to cross over to Medora.

"Oh yes, yes!" she had returned with conviction.

"So serious."

"Oh yes,"--with less emphasis. She knew Abner was serious because he was
puzzled.

"So grave."

"Yes,"--faintly. She knew Abner was grave because he was shocked.

"A painter?"

"A--an artist."

"He has personality. He will make a name for himself, I am sure."

The good Doctor, now alone with Abner, gave him a chance to celebrate
himself, to make known what there was in him. But Abner remained
inexpressive; and the Doctor, who himself was very ready of tongue and
who, like all fluent people, was much impressed by reserve, presently
went away with a higher opinion of Abner than ever.

Medora came up, extending her card. "I have secured another dance for
you," she said. "Mr. Bond was kind enough to give it up. He will know
what to do with the time. On this occasion, if you please, we might walk
it out instead of sitting it out. At least we might walk to the
supper-room."

Abner rose. He had never before offered his arm to a lady and was not
sure that he had offered it now, yet Medora's fingers rested upon his
coat-sleeve. For a few moments he felt himself, half proudly, half
uncomfortably, a part of the spectacle, and then they entered the room
where the spare refreshments were dispensed.

Medora found a place, and Abner, doing as he saw the other men do, went
forward to traffic across a long table with a coloured waiter. He brought
back to Medora what he saw the other men bringing--a spoonful of
ice-cream with a thin slice of cake, and a cup of coffee of limited size.
Truly the material for an orgy seemed rather scanty.

"I am glad you promised to read," said Medora. "It is a favour that Mrs.
Whyland will appreciate very much."

Abner bowed. Surely it was a favour, and appreciation was no more than
his due.

"I only wish you could have seen your way to being as nice to poor Mrs.
Pence. I overheard her--didn't I?--asking you once more to call. Weren't
you rather non-committal? Were you, strictly speaking, quite civil?"

"I was as civil as those silly, chattering people round her would let me
be--that niece of hers and the rest. I'm sure I was careful to ask after
her Training School."

"Oh, _that's_ what made her look so dazed!"

"Why should it?" asked Abner, his spoon checked in mid-air.

"She could hardly have expected such an inquiry from _you_. Haven't I
heard that you threw her down on this training-school idea, and threw her
down pretty hard too, the very first time you met her? She wanted help,
sympathy, encouragement, suggestions, and instead of that you gave her
the--the marble heart, as they say. You made her feel so feeble and
flimsy----"

"Did I?" asked Abner gropingly. Eudoxia loomed before him in all her
largeness.

"You did. She was disposed to be a noble, useful worker, but now it seems
as if she might drop to the level of a mere social leader. Do, please,
treat Mrs. Whyland more considerately. She means to arrange quite a nice
little programme, and it will be no disadvantage to you to take part in
it. Mr. Bond will read one or two of his travel-sketches, and I may do a
little something myself--a bit in the way of music, perhaps."

"H'm," said Abner. "Travel-sketches?" He ignored the promise of music.

"With folk-songs on the violin."

"I shall hope to offer something better worth while than
travel-sketches," said Abner. "His things will hardly harmonize with
mine, I'm afraid; but possibly they will serve as a sort of contrast."

"His things will be slight, of course, but the songs will help him out.
Very simple arrangements; people don't care much for anything serious or
heavy."

"I shall not show myself a mere frivolous entertainer--a simple filler-in
of the leisure moments of the wealthy," said Abner.

Medora banished the violin--and herself. "What do you think of reading?"
she asked.

"One or two pieces from my first book, I expect,--_Jim McKay's Defeat_
and _Less Than the Beasts_, with possibly one of the later chapters in
_Regeneration_."

"M--m," said Medora.

"You don't like _Regeneration_, I'm afraid; but there's going to be some
good stuff in it, let me tell you. People will open their eyes and begin
to think. This question of marriage----"

"You will read that part, then?"

"Why not? It's a vital question. It concerns everybody, at all times."

"Yes, it always has--for thousands of years."

"I don't know that I care for the thousands of years. I care for this
year and next year."

"And a great deal of good thought has been put into it already."

"But not the best. The whole subject needs ventilating, shaking up."

"You would attack the fundamentals, then?"

"Why not? I'm a radical. I've always called myself such. I go to the
root, without fear, without favour."

"Still, the present arrangement, resulting from the collective wisdom and
experience of the race ..." said Medora, crumbling her last bit of cake.

"You make me think of Bond and his 'historical perspective.'"

"I meant to. It isn't enough to know at just what point in the road we
are; we must know what steps we have taken, what course we have
traversed, to reach it."

"I never look behind. The hopes and possibilities of the immediate future
are the things that interest _me_. I shall read several chapters of
_Regeneration_--not merely one--on my tour."

"On your tour, yes. But for Mrs. Whyland substitute something else. There
was a story you wrote at the farm--the one about the girl and her
step-mother--"

"H'm, yes," said Abner, with less enthusiasm than he usually showed for
his own work. "_In Winter Weather_? H'm."

This was a short tale, of a somewhat grisly character, which Abner had
composed during the holiday season. Bond had taxed him with using this
work as a buffer to stave off other work of a practical nature such as
was abundantly offered by Giles and his father about the farm; and, to
tell the truth, Abner had limited his physical exertions to half-hour
periods that most other men would have charged to the account of mere
exercise.

"I _might_ read that, I suppose," he said.

"And if there is any wild wind in it--why, I should be on hand with my
violin, you know. I might be in white, as I am now, with snow-flakes in
my hair;--they would show, I think, if this mistletoe does----"

"Not that it represents my best and most characteristic work," he went
on, "or that it bears upon any of the great problems of the day...."

Medora dashed her spoon against her saucer. Was there no power equal to
teaching this masterful, self-centred creature that a woman was a woman
and not a cold abstraction composed merely of the generalized attributes
of the race, male and female alike? She had been his guide to-night, when
she migh