Hagar

CHAPTER XXVII
A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION

But the great Gilead Balm explosion came three days later.

It was nearly sunset, and they were all upon the wide, front porch—the Colonel, Old Miss, Miss Serena, Captain Bob, Mrs. LeGrand, Hagar. Ralph was not there, he had ridden to Hawk Nest, but would return to-night. It had been a beautiful, early September day, the sky high and blue, the air all sunny vigour. Gilead Balm sat and enjoyed the cool, golden, winey afternoon, the shadows lengthening over the hills, the swallows overhead, the tinkle of the cow-bells. It was not one of your families that were always chattering. The porch held rather silent than otherwise. Mrs. LeGrand could, indeed, keep up a smooth, slow flow of talk, but Mrs. LeGrand had been packing to return to Eglantine which would "open" in another week, and she was somewhat fatigued. The Colonel, pending the arrival of yesterday's newspaper, was reviewing that of the day before yesterday. Captain Bob and Lisa communed together. Old Miss knitted. Miss Serena ran a strawberry emery bag through and through with her embroidery needle. Hagar had a book, but she was not reading. It lay face down in her lap; she was hardly thinking; she was dreaming with her eyes upon a vast pearly, cumulus cloud, coming up between the spires of the cedars. A mulatto boy appeared with the mail-bag. "Ha!" said the Colonel, and stretched out his hand.

There was a small table beside him. He opened the bag and turned the contents out upon this, then began to sort them. No one—it was a Gilead Balm way—claimed letter or paper until the Colonel had made as many little heaps as there were individuals and had placed every jot and tittle of mail accruing, ending by shaking out the empty bag. He did all this to-day. Captain Bob had only a county paper—no letters for Old Miss—a good deal of forwarded mail for Mrs. LeGrand—the Colonel's own—letters and papers for Hagar. The Colonel handled each piece, glanced at the superscription, put it in the proper heap. He shook out the bag; then, gathering up Mrs. LeGrand's mail, gave it to her with a smile and a small courtly bow. Miss Serena rose, work in hand, and took hers from the table. Lisa walked gravely up, then returned to Captain Bob with the county paper in her mouth. The Colonel's shrunken long fingers took up Hagar's rather large amount and held it out to her. "Here, Gipsy"—the last time for many a day that he called her Gipsy. A letter slipped from the packet to the floor. Bending, the Colonel picked it up, and in doing so for the first time regarded the printing on the upper left-hand corner—Return in five days to the —— Equal Suffrage League. The envelope turned in his hand. On its reverse, across the flap, was boldly stamped—VOTES FOR WOMEN.

Colonel Argall Ashendyne straightened himself with a jerk. "Hagar!—What is that? How do you happen to get letters like that?—Answer!"

His granddaughter, who had risen to take her mail, regarded first the letter and then the Colonel with some astonishment. "What do you mean, grandfather? The letter's from my friend, Elizabeth Eden. I wonder if you don't remember her, that summer long ago at the New Springs?"

The Colonel's forefinger stabbed the three words on the back of the envelope. "You don't have friends and correspondents who are working for that?"

"Why not? I propose presently actively to work for it myself."

Apoplectic silence on the part of the Colonel. The suddenly arisen storm darted an electric feeler from one to the other upon the porch.

"What's the matter?" demanded Captain Bob. "Something's the matter!"

Old Miss, who had not clearly caught the Colonel's words, yet felt the tension and put in an authoritative foot. "What have you done now, Hagar? Who's been writing to you? What is it, Colonel?"

Ralph, in his riding-clothes, coming through the hall from the back where he had just dismounted, felt the sultry hush. "What's happened? What's the matter, Hagar?"

"Get me a glass of water, Serena!" breathed the Colonel. He still held the letter.

"My dear friend, let me fan you!" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand, and moved to where she could see the offending epistle. "VOTES FOR—oh, Hagar, you surely aren't one of those women!"

Miss Serena, who had flown for the water, returned. The Colonel drank and the blood receded from his face. The physical shock passed, there could be seen gathering the mental lightning. Miss Serena, too, read over his shoulder "VOTES— ... Oh, Hagar!"

Hagar laughed—a cool, gay, rippling sound. "Why, how round-eyed you all are! It isn't murder and forgery. Is the word 'rebellion' so strange to you? May I have my letter, grandfather?"

The Colonel released the letter, but not the situation. "Either you retire from such a position and such activities, or you cease to be granddaughter of mine—"

Old Miss, enlightened by an aside from Mrs. LeGrand, came into action. "She doesn't mean that she's friends with those brazen women who want to be men? What's that? She says she's going to work with them? I don't believe it! I don't believe that even of Maria's daughter. Going around speaking and screaming and tying themselves to Houses of Parliament and interrupting policemen! If I believed it, I don't think I'd ever speak to her again in this life! Women Righters and Abolitionists!—doing their best to drench the country with blood, kill our people and bring the carpetbaggers upon us! Wearing bloomers and cutting their hair short and speaking in town-halls and wanting to change the marriage service!—Yes, they do wear bloomers! I saw one doing it in New York in 1885, when I was there with your grandfather. And she had short hair—"

Mrs. LeGrand, as the principal of a School for Young Ladies, always recognized her responsibility to truth. She stood up for veracity. "Dear Mrs. Ashendyne, it is not just like that now. There are a great many more suffragists now—so many that society has agreed not to ostracize them. Some of them are pretty and dress well and have a good position. I was at a tea in Baltimore and there were several there. I've even heard women in Virginia—women that you'd think ought to know better—say that they believed in it and that sooner or later we'd have a movement here. Of course, you don't hear that kind of talk, but I can assure you there's a good deal of it. Of course, I myself think it is perfectly dreadful. Woman's place is the home. And we can surely trust everything to the chivalry of our Southern men. I am sure Hagar has only to think a little—The whole thing seems to me so—so—so vulgar!"

Miss Serena broke out passionately. "It's against the Bible! I don't see how any religious woman—"

Hagar, who had gone back to her chair, turned her eyes toward Captain Bob.

"Confound it, Gipsy! What do you want to put your feet on the table and smoke cigars for?"

Hagar looked at Ralph.

He was gazing at her with eyes that were burning and yet sullen and angry. "Women, I suppose, have got to have follies and fads to amuse themselves with. At any rate, they have them. Suffrage or bridge, it doesn't much matter, so long as it's not let really to interfere. If it begins to do that, we'll have to put a stop to it. Woman, I take it, was made for man, and she'll have to continue to recognize that fact. Good Lord! It seems to me that if we give her our love and pay her bills, she might be satisfied!"

All having spoken, Hagar spoke. "I should like, if I may, to tell you quietly and reasonably why—" her eyes were upon her grandfather.

"I wish to hear neither your excuses nor your reasons," said the Colonel. "I want to hear a retraction and a promise."

Hagar turned slightly, "Grandmother—"

"Don't," said Old Miss, "talk to me! When you're wrong, you're wrong, and that's all there is to it! Maria used to try to explain, and then she stopped and I was glad of it."

Hagar leaned back in her chair and regarded the circle of her relatives. She felt for a moment more like Maria than Hagar. She felt trapped. Then she realized that she was not trapped, and she smiled. Thanks to the evolving whole, thanks to the years and to her eternal self pacing now through a larger moment than those moments of old, she was not by position Maria, she was not by position Miss Serena. Before her, quiet and fair, opened her Fourth Dimension. Inner freedom, ability to work, personal independence, courage and sense of humour and a sanguine mind, breadth and height of vision, tenderness and hope, her waiting friends, Elizabeth, Marie, Rachel, Molly and Christopher, Denny, Rose Darragh, many another—her work, the story now hovering in her brain, what other and different work might rise above the horizon—the passion to help, help largely, lift without thinking if it were or were not her share of the weight—the universe of the mind, the growing spirit and the wings of the morning ... there was her land of escape, real as the hills of Gilead Balm. She crossed the border with ease; she was not trapped. Even now her subtle self was serenely over. And the Hagar Ashendyne appearing to others upon this porch was not chained there, was not riveted to Gilead Balm. Next week, indeed, she would be gone.

A tenderness came over Hagar for her people. All her childhood was surrounded by them; they were dear, deep among the roots of things. She wanted to talk to them; she longed that they should understand. "If you'd listen," she said, "perhaps you'd see it a little differently—"

The Colonel spoke with harshness. "There is no need to see it differently. It is you who should see it differently."

"It comes of the kind of things you've always read!" cried Miss Serena. "Books that I wouldn't touch!"

"Yes, Maria was always reading, too," said Old Miss. For her it was less Hagar than Maria sitting there....

"If it was anything we didn't know, we would, of course, listen to you, Hagar dear," said Mrs. LeGrand. "I should be glad to listen anyhow, just as I listened to those two women in Baltimore. But I must say their arguments sounded to me very foolish. Ladies in the South certainly don't need to come into contact with the horrors they talked about. And I cannot consider the discussion of such subjects delicate. I should certainly consider it disastrous if my girls at Eglantine gained any such knowledge. To talk about their being white slaves and things like that—it was nauseating!"

"Would you listen, Ralph?" asked Hagar.

"I'll listen to you, Hagar, on any other subject but this."

Mrs. LeGrand's voice came in again. She was fluttering her fan. "All these theories that you women are advancing nowadays—if they paid, if you stood to gain anything by them, if by advancing them you didn't, so it seems to me, always come out at the little end of the horn—people ridiculing you, society raising its eyebrows, men afraid to marry you—! My dear Hagar, men, collectively speaking—men don't want women to exhibit mind in all directions. They don't object to their showing it in certain directions, but when it comes to women showing it all around the circle they do object, and from my point of view quite properly! Men naturally require a certain complaisance and deference from women. There's no need to overdo it, but a certain amount of physical and mental dependence they certainly do want! Well, what's the use of a woman quarrelling with the world as it's made? Between doing without independent thinking and doing without an establishment and someone to provide for you—! So you see," said Mrs. LeGrand, smoothly argumentative, "what's the use of stirring up the bottoms of things? And it isn't as though we weren't really fond of the men. We are. I've always been fonder of a man, every time, than of a woman. I must confess I can't see any reason at all for all this strenuous crying out against good old usage! Of course a woman with considerable mental power may find it a little limiting, but there are a lot of women, I assure you, who never think of it. If there's a little humbug and if some women suffer, why those things are in the dish, that's all! The dish isn't all poisoned, and a woman who knows what she is about can pick and choose and turn everything to account. I wouldn't know what to do," said Mrs. LeGrand, "with the dish that people like you would set before us. All this crying out about evolution and development and higher forms doesn't touch me in the least! I like the forms we've got. Perhaps they're imperfect, but the thing is, I feel at home with imperfection."

She leaned back, in good humour. Hagar had given her an opportunity to express herself very well. "Don't you, too," she asked, "feel at home with the dear old imperfection?"

Hagar met her eyes. "No," she said.

Mrs. LeGrand shrugged. "Oh, well!" she said, "I suppose each will fight for the place that is home."

Hagar looked beyond her, to her kindred. "You're all opponents," she said. "Alike you worship God as Man, and you worship a static God, never to be questioned nor surpassed. You have shut an iron door upon yourselves.... One day you who shut it, you alone—you will open it, you alone. But I see that the day is somewhat far."

She rose. "I was going anyhow you know, grandfather, in four days. But I can take the morning train if you'd rather?"

But Colonel Ashendyne said stiffly that if she had forgotten her duty, he had not his, and that the hospitality of Gilead Balm would be hers, of course, for the four days.

Hagar listened to him, and then she looked once more around the circle. A smile hovered on her lips and in her eyes. It broadened, became warm and sweet. "I'll accept for a time the partial estrangement, but I don't ever mean that it shall be complete! It takes two to make an estrangement." She went up to her grandmother and kissed her, then said that she was going for a walk.—"No, Ralph, you are not coming with me!"

She went down the porch steps, and moved away in the evening glow. The black cedars swallowed her up; then upon the other side, beyond the gate, she was seen mounting the hill to the right. The sun was down, but the hilltop rested against rose-suffused air, and above it swam the evening star.

Ralph spoke with a certain grim fury. "I wish the old times were back! Then a man could do what he wished! Then you didn't feel yourself caught in a net like a cobweb that you couldn't break—"

Mrs. LeGrand again opened her fan. "I am very fond, of course, of dear Hagar, but I must say that she seems to me intensely unwomanly!"

CHAPTER XXVIII
NEW YORK AGAIN

It seemed strange to be back at the Maines', staying a fortnight with Rachel while the apartment was being looked for. Nothing had been moved in that house; it was all just the same, only the tone of time was deeper, the furniture more worn, the prints yellower. She asked for and was given the third-floor back room again, though, indeed, Mrs. Maine protested that now that she was famous!... Bessie had changed as little as the house. More grey hairs, somewhat more flesh, a great many more pounds of chocolate creams to her credit—that seemed all. She was still amiable, sleepily agreeable, comely, and lazy. Powhatan, except to grow greyer and leaner, had not altered either. The old servants held on. With some inevitable variations the same people came in the evenings—the Bishop's nephew and the St. Timothy people, and Powhatan's downtown acquaintances, and chance visitors from the other side of Mason and Dixon's.

She noticed a slight difference in the cast of talk. They all seemed uneasily aware that the world was moving. Mostly they disapproved and foreboded. She cast her mind back to that winter of '93-'94. It had been the terrible winter of unemployment, strikes, widespread discontent. She remembered clearly how Powhatan had declaimed then against "upsetters" and what the country was coming to. But now she heard him and the Bishop's nephew agree that anti-Christ and ruin were modern inventions. They sighed for the halcyon past. "Even ten or twelve years ago, sir, men were content enough!"

Rachel—Rachel had not sat still. Rachel had climbed. She was the old Rachel, but sweetened and broadened. There was left something of her old manner; she had her broodings that to the casual eye seemed half-sullen; at the end of long silences she might flare out, send at table or elsewhere a flaming, unexpected arrow, but her old ways were like old clothes, kept half-negligently, worn from habit, while all the time a fairer, more lately woven garment was in the wardrobe. She looked no older; she was slight and brown and somehow velvety. Hagar called her a pansy. She was no longer tragic, or tragedy had become but a dim background, a remembered cloud. And she was the strong, sane, and actual comrade of her children.

Betty and Charley.... Charley was blind. Charley and Betty had changed, changed more than anybody. Betty stood a frank, straight young Diana, what she said and did ringing true. Charley was the student. He had his shelves of Braille, and his mother's eyes and voice were his at call. Just now they were doing general history together—that was what Charley wanted, to be a historian. Charley and Betty claimed Hagar for their own. There were her Christmas letters every year—wonderful letters—and her Christmas gifts, small choice things from every land. They worshipped her, too, with frankness because she had "done something"—because her name counted. Oh, they were very ambitious, Betty and Charley; filled with ideas, glorious for the new time, ready to push the world with vigour! "Oh," cried Hagar, "don't they make you feel timid, cautious, and conservative?"

She watched with interest to see what effect the two had upon Powhatan and Bessie. She was forced to the conclusion that they had very little. They angered Powhatan sometimes, and he would strike the table and deplore the days of silent reverence. But he was desperately proud of Betty's looks, and he had an odd, sneaking pity and fondness for Charley, and Hagar gathered that he would have sadly missed them out of the house. As for Bessie, she only gave her sleepy smile, and said that all children talked foolishly, but that you didn't have to listen.

Upstairs, at bedtime, now in Rachel's room, now in Hagar's the two talked together. Daytime, they looked for Hagar's apartment. They found it at last, high in air, overlooking the great city; roofs and roofs and roofs at a hundred levels; curling streamers of white steam like tossed plumes against the blue sky, bright pennants floating from towering hotel or department store; a clock below a church spire, with a gilt weather-cock far above; blurs of occasional trees seen in some hollow opening; streets far below them, crossing, crossing—percolating rivulets of manikins that were people; roofs and roofs and roofs, and a low perpetual, multitudinous voice; and the sky over all, high and clear and exhilarating the day they found the place. "I am going to utter a bromide," said Hagar. "How marvellous is modern life!"

They went over it again. "Thomasine's room, and a guest-room, and my room, and a fine room for Mary Magazine who is coming—Isham having remarried—to look after us, and two baths and a great big library-study-drawing-room, and a little room for what we please, and plenty of closets, and a quiet and good café away up on the roof—Rachel, it's fine!" They sat on a window-seat and Rachel produced a pencil and notebook, and together they tinted the walls and laid rugs and hung pictures and ran bookshelves around and furnished the apartment. "There! that's quiet and perfect and not expensive. As Thomson would say, 'It's quite comme il faut, Miss!'"

"Where is Thomson?"

"Mr. Greer, the artist, has taken him over. He wrote me that he was making thousands, throwing the light on millionaires, and especially millionairesses, and that he wanted Thomson, oh, so badly! He's the type that Thomson likes, and so he joined him two months ago at Newport. Dear old Thomson! Mahomet has gone back to Alexandria."

They looked around the big room. "Soft lights at night and all those twinkling stars out there. It's going to be a dear home."

"You'll have people coming about you. Your own sort—"

Hagar laughed. "What is my sort? Everybody's my sort."

"Writers—artists—"

Hagar pondered the mantel-shelf with a view to what should go above it. "I don't know many of them. I know more of them abroad than here. We're a very isolated kind of craftspeople—each of us more or less on a little Robinson Crusoe island of our own. It may be different in New York, I don't know.... We could do a good deal if we'd put our heads together and push the same wheel."

The apartment was not to be furnished in a day. They worked at it in a restful and leisurely manner, and in the midst of operations, Hagar went to see the Josslyns who had a house up on the Sound.

That afternoon she and the Josslyns walked by the water and watched the white sails gliding by the green and rocky shore, then in the evening sat by a wood fire with cider and apples. Monday to Friday the children were in town at their grandmother's, going to school; Friday afternoon they entered the big living-room like a west wind and danced about with their mother. A little later the whole family would go into town; Christopher had had a course of lectures to write and he was doing it better here. The fire crackled and blazed; at night through the open windows came in a dim sound of waves, with passing lights of boats, and the fragrance of the salt sea, beloved by Hagar. On Monday, when the children had gone, she drove with Molly deep into the sweet countryside, and the two talked as the quiet old horse jogged along.... Molly had taken the advice of the woman at Roger Michael's dinner-party three years and more ago. She was an active member of a suffrage organization, deeply interested, beginning to speak. "I'm a good out-of-doors sort. My voice carries and I don't have to strain it. Of course, we're just beginning out-of-doors speaking. I haven't half the intellect I wish I had, but I can give them good, plain doctrine. It's so common-sense, after all! And Christopher helps so much.... Oh, Hagar, when you're truly mated, it's heaven!"

Molly could tell much of the practical working, of the everyday effort and propaganda. "In two weeks we'll be back in town, and then if you'll let me take you here and there—And when we get back to the house I'll show you what I have of the literature we use,—pamphlets, leaflets, and so on,—from John Stuart Mill down to an article Christopher wrote the other day. We broadcast a great amount of it in every state, but if we were rich we could make use of a thousand times more. But we're not rich—whether that's to our damnation or our salvation! We have to make devotion do instead. Then there are the books that help us, and they are coming out constantly now. And every now and then we gain a bit of the press. A number of the magazines help no end. And, of course, we speak and have meetings and work quietly, each among her own acquaintance. It's to educate—educate—educate! We're just at the beginning of things. There were the early stages and the heroic women who blazed the trail. They're all going,—Miss Anthony died last March,—and their time is merging into our time, and now the trail's a roadway and there are thousands on it, and still we're just at the beginning—"

Molly could tell, too, something of the personality of the women eminent in the movement. "The really eminent to-day are not always those whose names the reporters catch, and vice versa. And while the papers talk of 'leaders,' I do not think that, in the man's sense, they are leaders at all. We do not hurrah for any woman as the men do for Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Bryan. The movement goes without high priests and autocrats and personifications. We haven't, I suppose, the Big Chief tradition. Perhaps woman's individualism has a value after all. It's like religion when it really is personal; your idea of good remains your idea of good; it doesn't take on a human form. Or perhaps we're merely tired of crooking the knee. I don't know. The fact remains."

They jogged along by country roads and orchards. "It's the most worth-while thing!" said Molly. "Nobody can explain it, but every one who takes hold of it deep feels it. I heard a woman say the other day that it was like going out of a close room into ozone and wind and the blue lift of the sky. She said she felt as though she had wings! Discouragements? Cartloads of them! But somehow they don't matter. Nor do mistakes. Of course we make them—but the next time we do better."

The witching autumn week with the Josslyns over, Hagar went back to town, and, as she had promised, to the Settlement for three days.

The Settlement! The first day she had seen it came back clearly; the harsh, biting day and the search for Thomasine, and Omega Street, and then how wonderful the old house had seemed to her, going over it with Elizabeth. It was shrunken now, of course, in size and marvel, but it was still a grave and pleasant place of fine uses. She had visited it before during this month, and she had marked certain changes. A few of the people in residence years before were here yet, others were gone, others of later years had come in. But it was not only people; other changes appeared. She found exhibited a deep skepticism of certain Danaïdes' labours still favoured or tolerated so many years ago. The policies of the place were bolder and larger; every one was at once more radical and more serene.

Marie Caton met her. "Elizabeth has a committee meeting, and then she speaks to-night at Cooper Union: Women in the Sweated Trades. I haven't had you to myself hardly ever! Now I'm going to."

"Can't I go to Cooper Union to-night?"

"Oh, yes! I'm going, too. It's an important meeting. But I've got you for a whole two hours, and nowadays that's a long and restful sojourn together! Get your things off and we'll take possession of Elizabeth's sitting-room."

In Elizabeth's room, with her books, with the Psyche and the Botticelli Judith and the Mona Lisa and the drawing of the Sphinx, they talked of twenty things, finally of the Settlement's specific activities, old ones carried on, new ones embarked in; then, "But more and more you get drawn—or I get drawn—into the ocean of China Awake."

"China Awake?"

"Women Awake. It's an ocean all right, with an ocean's possibilities."

"I don't think it's women only who are waking, Marie. Women and men, all of us—"

"I agree," said Marie. "But it wasn't just natural sleepy-headedness with women. They've been drugged—given knock-out drops, so to speak. They have a long way to wake up."

Hagar mused, her eyes upon the drawing. "Yes, a good, long way.... There must have been a lot of pristine strength."

"Well, it's coming out. All kinds of things are coming out with an accent on qualities they didn't think she had."

"Yes. The world is rather in the position of the hen with the duckling—"

"The kind of thing we read and hear at this place emphasizes, of course, the economic and sociological side. It's to be the Century of Fair Distribution, of Social Organization, of Humanism—ergo, Woman Also. Which, of course, is all right, but I'd put an infinite plus to that."

"And Elizabeth?"

"Oh, Elizabeth is a saint! What she thinks of is the sweated woman and the little children, and the girl who goes under—most often is pushed under. It's what we see down here; it's the starved bodies and minds, the slow dying of fatigue, the monstrous wrong of the Things Withheld that's moving her. Of course, we all think of that. How can any thinking woman not think of that? She wants the vote to use as a lever, and so do I, and so do you.... But behind all that, in the place where I myself live," said Marie, with sudden passion, "I am fighting to be myself! I am fighting for that same right for the other woman! I am fighting for plain recognition of an equal humanity!"

There was a crowd that night at Cooper Union. Elizabeth spoke; a grave, strong talk, followed with attention, clapped with sincerity. After her there spoke an A. F. of L. man. "Women have got to unionize. They've got to learn to keep step. They've got to learn that the good of one is wrapped up in the good of all. They've got to learn to strike. They've got to learn to strike not only for themselves, but for the others. They've got to get off their little, just-standing-room islands, and think in terms of continents. They've got to get an idea of solidarity—"

When he had taken his seat came an announcement, made with evident satisfaction. "We did not know it until a few minutes ago. We thought she was still in the West—but we are so fortunate as to have with us to-night—Rose Darragh!" Applause broke forth at once.

CHAPTER XXIX
ROSE DARRAGH

Rose Darragh's short speech, at once caustic and passionate, ended—the meeting ended. Hagar waited below the platform.

Rose Darragh, at last shaking off the crowd, came toward her. "I've been looking at you. I seem, somehow, to know you—"

"And I you. And not—which is strange to me—not through another."

"Is your name Hagar Ashendyne?"

Hagar nodded. "We can't talk well here—"

"I'm in New York for two weeks. Denny's in Chicago and I join him there. Let me see—where can we meet? Will you come to my flat?"

"Yes; and in a few days I shall have my own rooms. I want to see you there, too, Rose Darragh."

"I'll come. This is my address. Will you come to-morrow at four?"

Hagar went. Denny had written that the two lived "handy to their work," and it was apparent that they did. The flat had the dignity of Spartan simplicity. In it Rose Darragh moved with the fire of the ruby.

"Denny had to go about the paper. Oh, it's doing well, the paper! It's Denny's idol. He serves in the temple day and night, and when the idol asks it, he'll give his heart's blood.... You liked Denny very much, didn't you?—in Nassau, three years ago?"

"Yes, I did." They were sitting in the plain, bare room, attractive, for it was so clean, the late autumn sunlight streaming in at the curtainless windows. "Yes, I did. I liked him so well that ... I had somewhat of a fight with myself.... I am telling you that," said Hagar, "because I want your friendship. It is over now, nor do I think it will come again."

Rose Darragh gave her a swift look from heel to head. "That's strength. I like strength.... All right! I'm not afraid."

They sat in silence for a moment; then, "I wish you'd tell me," said Hagar, "about your work."

A very few days after this she took possession of the apartment, and at once made it a home. There was a housewarming with Rachel and Betty and Charley and Elizabeth and Marie and the Josslyns, and two pleasant gentlemen, her publishers, and a fellow-writer or two whom she was by way of knowing and liking, and an artist, and an old scholar and philosopher whom she had known abroad and loved and honoured. And there was Thomasine, a little worn and faded, but with happiness stealing over her, and Mary Magazine busy with the cakes and ale. There couldn't have been a better housewarming.

Thomasine—Thomasine began to bloom afresh. Factory and department store and business school and office lay behind her—each a stage upon a somewhat dull and dusty and ambuscade-beset road of life. Business school and office, training for mind and fingers alike, a resulting "place" with a fair-dealing firm—all that was Hagar's helping, a matter of the last six or seven years. And now Hagar had come back and had made Thomasine an offer, and Thomasine closed with it very simply and gladly. She had from the beginning worked hard and as best she could and had given good value for her pay; and now she was going still to do all that, but to do it with a singing heart and her hunger for beauty and fitness fed. The colour came back into her cheeks; she began to take on a sprite-like beauty. She brought seriously into conversation one day the fact that she had always been good at finding four-leafed clovers.... Jim and Marietta were doing fairly, still over in New Jersey. "Fairly" meant a poor house which Marietta did her best to keep clean, and two of the children working, and the city for summer and winter, and Jim's pay envelope neither larger nor heavier, but the cost of living both. But Jim had his "job," and Marietta was not so ailing as she used to be, and the two children brought in a little, and Thomasine helped each month; so they might be said to be doing much better than many others. There was even talk of being able one day to get—the whole family being fond of music—one of the cheaper phonographs.

Hagar and Thomasine worked through the mornings, Hagar thinking, remembering, creating; Thomasine taking from her the labour of record; caring also for her letters and the keeping of accounts and all small, recurring business. And Thomasine loved to do any shopping that arose to be done,—which was well, for Hagar hated shopping,—and loved to keep the apartment "just so." The two lived in quiet, harmonious intercourse, together in working hours, but when working hours were over, each going freely her individual way. Thomasine, too, had friends. She wrote to Jim and Marietta and to Maggie at home, taking care of the mother with the spine, that she hadn't been so happy since they used to go to grandmother's at Gilead Balm....

Rose Darragh—Rose Darragh had not been at Hagar's housewarming. She was speaking that night in Newark. But some days afterwards she came—came late one afternoon with the statement that she had the evening free. She and Thomasine and Hagar dined in the café together, but Thomasine hurried through her dinner, for she was going to the theatre with a fellow-stenographer with whom she had worked for two years downtown, and who was "such a nice girl," and with the stenographer's brother, who looked like a nice brother. Hagar and Rose Darragh, left at the table, sipped their coffee.

A quality of Rose Darragh's came out. She observed and deduced, to the amusement of herself and of others, with the swiftness and accuracy of M. Dupin or of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. They had a small corner table commanding the long, bright room. "Twenty tables," she said. "Men and women and a fair number of children. Not proportionately so large a number as once there would have been, and that is well, the bawlers of race-suicide to the contrary!—I'm interested in the women just now. Man's had the centre of the stage for so long!—and, of course, we know that this is the Century of the Child—see cotton-mills, glass-works, and canneries. But Woman—Woman's just coming out of the wings.... There's rather an interesting collection here to-night. Do you know any of them?"

"I have spoken casually to several. I have been here, you know, only the shortest time."

"There's a woman over there who has a wonderful face—brooding and wise.... A teacher isn't she? I should say she was not married."

"Yes; she is a teacher, and single."

"There's a woman who is a nurse."

"Yes. There's a sick child in that family. But she is not in uniform to-night."

"I know her all the same. She's a good nurse. There are those who are and those who aren't. But she's got strength and poise and knows what she is about and is kind.—Those two women over there—"

"Yes. What do you make of them?"

"There's such a glitter of diamonds you can't see the women. Poor things!—to be beings of a single element—to live in a world of pure carbon—to be the hardest thing there is, and yet be so brittle too!... The woman next them is good ordinary: nothing remarkable, and yet pleasant enough. The worst that can be said of her is that she doesn't discriminate. If the broth lacks salt, she never knows it."

"And the two over there with the stout man?"

Rose Darragh gazed a moment with eyes slightly narrowed. "Oh, those!" she said. "Those are our adapted women—perilously near adapted, at any rate. That's a sucking wife and daughter. Take your premise that in the divine order of things the male opens the folds of his being, surrounds, encloses, 'shelters' and 'protects' and 'provides for' your female in season and out of season, when there is need, and when there is certainly none, and your further premise that the female is willing and ruthlessly logical—and behold the supremely natural conclusion!... Daughters of the horse leech—and perfectly respectable members of society as constituted! Faugh!—with their mouths glued to that fat man's pocket. He looks haggard, and at the moment he's probably grinding the faces of no end of men and women,—not because he's got a bad heart and really wants to,—but because he's got to 'provide' for those two perfectly strong and healthy persons in jewelry and orchids! He's cowed by tradition into accepting the monstrous position, and he's weak enough to let them define what is 'provision.' He's got to keep filling and filling the pocket because they suck so fast."

"Do you think they can change?"

"They can be forced to change. They don't want to change, any more than the copepod wants to change. And logically, while he persists in his present attitude, the man can't ask them to change. He can't keep his cake and eat it too." She drank her coffee. "That very stout gentleman who is being driven to bankruptcy, or to ways that are queer, is just the kind to strike the table with his fist and violently to assure you that God meant Woman, lovely Woman! to be dependent upon Man, and that it is with deep regret that he sees woman crowding into industry and beating at the doors of the professions—Woman, Wife and Mother, God bless her! Do you notice how they always put Wife first? If the Association Opposed to the Extension of the Franchise to Women asked him to-night for a contribution, they'd probably get it."

"How numerous do you think are those women?"

"The copepods? Numerous enough, pity 'tis! But not so numerous as, given the System, you might fairly expect: numerous positively, but not relatively. And a lot of them have simply succumbed to environmental pressure. Given a generation or two of rational training and a nobler ideal of what befits a human being, and the copepod will yet succour herself.... Denny and I see more of the other kind. The drudges outnumber the copepods, and neither need be.... There's a girl over there I like—the one with the braided hair. Many of the young girls of to-day are rather wonderful. It's going to be interesting to see what they'll do when they're older, and what their daughters will do. She's got a fine head—mathematics, I should think."

They went down together.

In the large and comfortable half study, half drawing-room with the shaded lights, with the sea-like sound of the city without the windows, with the books and pictures, they walked a little to and fro together, and at last paused before a window and looked forth—the firmament studded with lights above and the city studded with lights below. "There's a noble word called Work," said Rose Darragh, "and we have degraded it into Toil, on the one hand, and it has a strong enemy called False Ideals, on the other. What I ask of Life is that I may be one of the helpers to save Work from Toil and False Ideals."

They watched the lights in silence, then turned back to the soft glowing room. When each had taken a deep chair on either side of the great library table, they still kept silent. Rose Darragh sat erect, lithe, strong, embrowned, a wine red in her cheeks. As in the picture that Hagar remembered, her strong throat rose clear from a blouse of the simplest make, only a soft dark silk instead of wool in honour of the evening. Her skirt was of dark cheviot. She wore no stays, it was evident, and needed none. Her hair, of a warm chestnut, wavy and bright, was cut to about the length worn by Byron and Keats and Shelley.... To a marked extent she was interest-provoking; there was felt a powerful nature, rich and indomitable.

Presently she spoke. "Denny will be home next week. Don't you want me to take you one day to see the shrine where he keeps his idol and watch him providing acceptable sacrifice? It's rich—the editorial room of 'Onward!'"

"Yes, I should like it very much."

"Then we'll go down some morning soon. There's a place near the temple where they give you a decent omelette and cheese. We'll all three go there for luncheon.... Denny's fine."

"I'm very sure of that."

"Yes, warp and woof, he's sincere—and that's what I worship, sincerity! And he's able. He strikes more narrowly than I do, but he strikes deep. We've lived and worked together now eight years. We've seen hard times together. We've nearly starved together. We've made a name and come out together. And, bigger than our own fates, we've seen our Cause bludgeoned and seen it lift its bleeding head. We've known together impersonal sorrow and joy, humbling and pride, fear and faith, despair and hope. Denny and I are the best friends. We've been lovers in the flesh, but there's something better than that between us." She turned square to the light and Hagar. "That's the truest truth, and yet I want to tell you that I think you've always been to him a kind of unearthly and spiritual romance. He's kept you lifted, moving above him in the clouds, beckoning, with a light about you. And I want to tell you that I have not grudged that—"

"I spoke to you as I did the other day," said Hagar, "because, somehow, I had that impulse. It was not necessary that I should do so; that of which I spoke had long passed." She rose and walked slowly back and forth in the room. "When I bethought myself, that month in Nassau, of where I—not he—was drifting ... I was able then to leave that current, and leave it not to reënter. That was three years ago. I beg you to believe that that temptation, if it was a temptation, is far behind me. My soul will not return that way, cannot return that way.... And now I simply want to be friends."

"I'll meet you there. I like you too much not to want to. You seem to me one of those rare ones who find their lamp and refuge in themselves."

"And I like you, extraordinarily. I should like to work with you."

"There is nothing," said Rose Darragh, "any easier to arrange than that."

CHAPTER XXX
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

In the year 1910, a certain large gathering of suffragists occurring in New York, permission was sought and obtained for speaking in Union Square. Here and there, beneath the trees, sprang temporary tribunes sheathed with bunting the colour of gold; above them banners and banneroles of the same hue, black-lettered, VOTES FOR WOMEN. From each tribune now a woman was speaking, now a man. About speakers and tribunes pressed the crowd, good-natured, commenting, earnest in places. Each speaker had about ten minutes; time up, he or she stepped down; another took position. Sometimes the crowd laughed at a good story or at a barbed shaft skilfully shot; sometimes it applauded; sometimes it indulged in questions. Its units continually shifted; one or more speakers at this stand listened to, it went roaming for pastures new and brought up before the next tribune, whose crowd, roaming in its turn, filled the just vacated spaces. It was a still, pearl-grey mid-afternoon, the pale-brown leaves falling from the trees, the roar of the city softened, the square's frontier lines of tall buildings withdrawn, a little blurred, made looming and poetic. All was a picture, lightly shifting with gleams of gold and a woman's voice, earnest, lilting. The crowd increased until there was a great crowd. VOTES FOR WOMEN—VOTES FOR WOMEN—said the banners and the banneroles.

A man and a woman, leaving a taxicab on the Broadway facet of the Square, stood a moment upon the pavement. "What a crowd!" said the man. "There is speaking of some kind." He stopped a boy. "What is going on?"

"Suffragettes! Women speaking. Want ter vote. Ain't got no husbands.—I wouldn't let 'em! Say, ain't they gettin' too big for their places?" The boy stuck out his tongue and went away.

"Young hoodlum!" exclaimed the man with disgust.

"Let us stay and hear them for a while. I never have."

"All right!—I'll pay the cab." He came back to her, and they moved across and under the trees. "Are you interested?"

"I think I am. I haven't made up my mind. We're so far South that as a movement it's all as yet only a rather distant sound. How do you feel about it?"

"Why, I think it's an honest proposition. I've never seen why not. We're all human together, aren't we? But building bridges for South American Governments has kept me, too, a little out of earshot. I see what the papers say, and they're saying a good deal."

"Ours chiefly confine themselves to being scandalized by the English Militants."

"Then your papers are very foolish. Who ever supposed there weren't Jacobins in every historic struggle for liberty? Sometimes they help and sometimes they hinder, and sometimes they do both at once. It's rather superficial to see only the 'left,' and not the movement of which it is the 'left.'"

They came beneath the trees upon the fringe of the crowd about one of the gold-swathed stands. This was an attentive crowd, not restless but listening, slanted forward. The man from the taxicab touched a young workman upon the arm. "Who is it speaking?" The other turned a pale, tense face. "It's one that can hold them. It's Rose Darragh, speaking for the working-women."

The two made their way to where they could see and hear. Rose Darragh, speaking with a lifted irony and passion, sent her last Parthian arrow, paused a moment, then cried with a vibrant voice, "Give the working-woman a vote!" and stepped back and down from the stand. "By George!" breathed the man from the cab. The crowd applauded—for such a meeting applauded loudly.

The young man to whom the two had appealed cried out also. "Give the working-woman a vote! She's working dumb and driven under your factory laws! Give her the vote!"

A large, bald-headed, stubborn-jawed man who had been making sotto-voce remarks, turned with anger. "And have them striking at the polls as well as striking in the shop! Doubling the ignorant vote and getting into the way of business! You'd better listen to what I tell you! Woman's place is at home—damn her!"

The man next him was a clergyman. "I agree with you, sir, that woman's place is the home, but I object to your expletive!"

The bald-headed man was willing to be placatory. "Well, Reverend, if we're only two words apart—Are you going to stay here? I'm not! I don't believe in encouraging them—"

"I believe you to be right there, sir. Woman's Sphere—" they went off together.

The man from the cab, John Fay by name, with his sister-in-law, Lily Fay, who had been Lily Goldwell, moved still nearer the front. They could see Rose Darragh pausing for a moment beside the stand before she went away to another tribune. A woman dressed in wood-brown spoke to her laughing; then, a hand on her shoulder, mounted to the platform.

Two women behind Lily Fay whispered together excitedly, "Hagar Ashendyne?"

"Yes. I didn't know she was going to speak to-day—but she and Rose Darragh often do speak together. They're great friends.... Somebody ought to tell them who she is—Oh! they know—"

"Shh!"

"Oh, she's holding them—"

Lily Fay clutched her companion's arm. "Hagar Ashendyne! I went to school with her—"

"The writer?"

"Yes. How strange it seems.... Oh, listen!"

Hagar's voice came to them, silver clear as a swinging bell. "Men and women—I am going to tell you why a woman like myself finds herself to-day under a mental and moral compulsion consciously to further what is called the Woman Movement—"

She spoke for ten minutes. When she ended and stepped from the platform, there followed a moment of silence, then applause broke forth. A dark-eyed, breathless girl, a lettered ribbon across her coat, caught her hand. "Hurry! We're waiting for you at the next stand. Rose Darragh is just through—" The two hastened away together, lithe and free beneath the falling brown leaves. A Columbia man was speaking well for the Men's League, but a good proportion of the crowd, John and Lily Fay among them, followed the wood-brown skirt.

They followed from stand to stand during the next hour, at the end of which time speaking was over for that day. The crowd broke up; the speakers, after some cheerful talk among themselves, gathered together their banners and pennants and went their several ways; committees looked after the taking-down of the stands.

Lily went over to Hagar Ashendyne standing with Rose Darragh and Molly Josslyn, talking to a little group of friendly people. "I'm Lily Goldwell. Do you remember?"

Hagar put her arms about her. "Oh, Lily, how is your head? Have you got that menthol pencil still?"

"My head got better and I threw it away. Oh, Hagar, you are a sight for sair een!... Yes, I'm Lily Fay, now. I'm on my way to England to join my husband. The boat sails next week. I'm at the ——. This is my brother-in-law, John Fay."

"I've got to be at Carnegie Hall to-night," said Hagar. "And I have something to do to-morrow through the day—but the evening's free. Won't you come to dinner with me—both of you? Yes, I want you, want you bad! Come early—come at six."

To-morrow was the serenest autumn day. Lily and John Fay walked from their hotel through a twilight tinted like a shell. When they came to the apartment house and were carried up, up, and left the elevator and rang at the door before them and it opened and they were admitted by a tidy coloured maid, it was to find themselves a little in advance of their hostess. Mary Magazine explained with slow, soft courtesy. "Miss Hagar cert'n'y meant to be home er long time befo' you come, she cert'n'y did. But there's er big strike goin' on—er lot of sewing-women—an' she went with Miss Elizabeth Eden early this mahnin', an' erwhile ago she telephone if you got heah first, you must 'scuse her anyhow an' make yo'selves at home 'cause she'll be heah presently. She had," Mary Magazine explained further, "to send Miss Thomasine to see somebody for her in Boston, so there isn't anybody to entertain you twel she comes. If you'll just make yo'selves comfortable—" and Mary Magazine smiled slowly and disappeared.

The large room had not greatly altered in appearance since Rachel and Hagar first arranged it, three years ago. There were more books, a few more prints, more signed photographs, a somewhat richer tone of time. It was a good room, quiet and fine, not lacking an air of nobility. A great bough of red autumn leaves flamed at one end like a stained-glass window. A door opening into a small room showed a typewriter and a desk piled with work. The two visitors, with fifteen minutes of sole possession before them, strolled to the windows and admired the far-flung, grandiose view, twilight beginning to be starred with the city lights; then turned back to the room and its strong charm.

"We've lived through the revolution, I think," said John Fay. "The senses move more slowly than the event. We're just taking it in, and we call it all to make. But it's really made."

"I see what you mean. But they—but we—have all this monstrous amount of hard work yet—"

"Yes. Introducing the revolution to the slow-minded. But I gather it's being done." He moved about the room, looking at the photographs. "Artists and thinkers and world-builders, men and women.... Those years down there around the Equator, I could at least take the magazines, and I got each twelvemonth a box of books. I know all these people. I used to feel quite intimate with them, down there building bridges.... Building bridges is great work. I believe in it thoroughly and quite enjoy doing it.... And these are bridge-builders, too, and I had a fraternal feeling. I've cut their pictures, men and women, from the magazines and stuck them up in my hut and said good-morning and good-evening to them." He had the pleasantest, humorous eyes, and now they twinkled. "Sometimes I like them so well that I really kow-towed to them. And I've laid a platonic sprig of flowers before more than one of these women's pictures. Perhaps I'd better not tell her so, but there was a picture of Hagar Ashendyne—"

The door opened and Hagar entered. She wore the wood-brown dress of yesterday—she was somewhat pale, with circles under her eyes. "Ah, I am sorry!" she said, "but I could not help it. The strike ... and they send the girls to the Island. Two or three of us went to the court—oh, the snaky, blind thing we call Justice!" Her eyes filled. "Pardon! but if you had been there—" She caught herself up, dashed the moisture from her eyes and said—and looked—that she was glad to see them. "We'll put the things away that make your heart ache! I'll go and change, and we'll eat our dinner and have a pleasant, pleasant time!"

In a very little while she was back, dressed in white, amethysts in an old and curious setting about her throat. They had been Maria's, and to-night she looked like Maria, lines of the haunted mind about her mouth and between her eyes. Only it was not her personal fate that troubled her, but a wider haunting. At dinner, in the café at the corner table, she told them, when they asked her, a little of where she had been and what she had done during the day, told them of this pitiful case and of that. Then after a moment's silence she said resolutely, "Don't let us talk about these things any more. Let us talk about happy things. Talk to me about yourself, Lily!"

"There isn't much to tell," said Lily; "I've been quite terribly sheltered. For years I was ill, and then I grew better. I've travelled a little, and I like Maeterlinck and Vedanta and Bergson, and I play the violin not so badly, and Robert, my husband, is very good to me. I haven't grown much, I am afraid, since I was at Eglantine. But more and more continually I want to grow. Do you remember, at Eglantine—"

Dinner was not long. They came down to the grave and fair room with the scarlet autumn leaves and the books, and here Mary Magazine gave them coffee. They sat in their deep chairs and drank it slowly. The talk dropped; they sat in a thoughtful mood. John Fay had a long and easy figure, a bronzed, clean-shaven, humorous face and sea-blue eyes. Lily was slender as a willow wand, with colourless, strong features. Her eyes were dreamy—Hagar remembered how she sat and looked into the fire when they read poetry. Like the faintest, faraway strain of a music not altogether welcome, a line went through her mind,—