FIVE POINTS OF VIEW.

At five o’clock Mrs. Dykman, Helen Simms, and Cryder dropped in for a cup of tea, and Miss Starbruck came down-stairs.

Quintard insisted that, in spite of Miss Starbruck’s open disapproval of him, she was his proudest conquest; and her abuse was certainly growing milder. She rarely failed to appear at these informal tea-drinkings; there was just enough of the worldly flavor about them to fascinate without frightening her; and it was noticeable that to whatever Quintard chose to say she listened with a marked and somewhat amusing interest. The poor old lady was no more proof against personal magnetism and the commanding manliness which was Quintard’s most aggressive characteristic than her less rigid sisters. Quintard threatened to marry her and deprive Hermia of her only natural protector, but Miss Starbruck was as yet innocent of his designs.

“This is quite a family party,” said Helen; “let us draw our chairs close to the fire and warm ourselves with brotherly affection; it is so beastly cold out. But by this great log fire one thinks himself in the hall of an old English castle; and the streets of New York are not. I feel almost romantic.”

“Let us tell stories,” suggested Cryder.

“No,” replied Helen, promptly, “I don’t want to listen to long stories. You would tell your own, and I can’t understand dialect. Besides, I want to talk about myself—I beg that prerogative of your sex. As this is a family party, I am going to tell my woes and ask advice. I want to get married! Shall I, or shall I not?”

“Who is the man?” asked Cryder. “How can we advise until we know whether he is worthy to buy your bonnets?”

“I have not decided. The man is not much of a point. I simply want to be married that I may be free,” and she heaved a sigh.

“Free of what?” asked Hermia, sarcastically. “Of freedom?”

“Oh, this is not freedom, my dear. A girl always has to be chaperoned. A married woman chaperones. Oh, the difference!”

“But where do you propose to keep the future Mr. Helen Simms?” asked Cryder, laughing.

“At his club, or in a rose-colored boudoir. Mine will be blue.”

“Helen Simms! you are the most immoral young woman I ever—ever——.” The wrathful voice broke down, and all turned to Miss Starbruck with amused sympathy.

“Are you not yet used to our wicked Gotham?” asked Quintard, taking a chair beside her.

“No!” Miss Starbruck had recovered her voice. “And I think it abominable that the holy institution of matrimony should be so defamed.”

“Oh, dear Miss Starbruck,” cried Helen, good-naturedly. “It is time you left Nantucket. That primitive saying has long since been paraphrased into ‘the unholy institution of whithersoever thou goest, in the other direction will I run.’ And a jolly good revolution it is, too. Please do not call me immoral, dear Miss Starbruck. You and I were born on different planets, that is all.”

“Marriage is a necessary evil,” said Mrs. Dykman’s soft, monotonous voice. “You have done well to defer it as long as possible, but you are wise to contemplate a silken halter. No woman’s position is established, nor has she any actual importance until she has a husband. But marry nothing under a million, my dear. Take the advice of one who knows; money is the one thing that makes life worth living. Everything else goes—youth, beauty, love. Money—if you take care that does not go too—consoles for the loss of all, because it buys distractions, amusement, power, change. It plates ennui and crystallizes tears to diamonds. It smoothes wrinkles and keeps health in the cheek. It buys friends and masks weakness and sin. You are young, but the young generation is wiser than the old; my advice, I feel sure, will not be thrown away.”

“And this!” exclaimed Miss Starbruck, hoarsely; “this is what life has come to! I am an old maid, and have done with all thought of marriage; but I am not ashamed to say that many years ago I loved a young man, and had he lived would have married him, and been a true and faithful and loving wife. That a woman should marry from any other motive seems to me scandalous and criminal.”

“What do truth and duty mean?” demanded Hermia scornfully. “Monotony and an ennui worse than death. You are happy that you live your married life in imagination, and that your lover died before even courtship had begun to pall. Still”—she shrugged her shoulders as she thought of Bessie—“perhaps you wouldn’t have minded it; some people don’t.”

“No,” said her aunt; “I wouldn’t have minded it. I would have appreciated it.”

Hermia turned to her with a curious glance. “How differently people are made,” she said with a sigh. “The monotony of married life would drive me mad.”

Quintard rose and rested his elbow on the mantel. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that monotony is not an absolutely indispensable ingredient of married life?”

Hermia shrugged her shoulders. “It ruins more wedded lives than jealousy or bad temper.”

“True; but if married life is monotonous, it is largely the fault of those who suffer from the monotony. It is true that the average human animal is commonplace; therefore monotony in the domestic relations of such men and women follows as a matter of course. They suffer the consequences without the power to avert them. Those who walk on the plane above, shiver under the frozen smile of the great god Bore as well—but they can avert it. The ennui that kills love is born of dispelled illusions, of the death of the dramatic principle, which is buried at the foot of the altar. When a man is attempting to win a woman he is full of surprises which fascinate her; he never tarries a moment too long; he is always planning something to excite her interest; he watches her every mood and coddles it, or breaks it down for the pleasure of teaching her the strength of his personality; he does not see her too often; above all, he is never off guard. Then, if he wins her, during the engagement each kiss is an event; and, another point, it is the future of which they always talk.”

“How is it after marriage? We all know.”

Cryder gave an unpleasant little laugh, common to him when some one else had held the floor too long. “Taking your own theory as a premise,” he said, “I should say that the best plan was not to get married at all. People who marry are doomed to fall between the time-honored lines. Better they live together without the cloying assurance of ties; then, stimulus is not wanting.”

“That is all very well for people who are independent of the world’s opinion,” said Mrs. Dykman, “but what are they to do who happen to have a yearning for respectable society?”

Cryder shrugged his shoulders. “They must be content with water in their claret. You can’t get intoxicated and dilute your wine, both.”

“I deny that,” said Quintard. “I believe that matrimony can be made more exciting and interesting than liaison, open or concealed, because it lacks the vulgarity; it can be made champagne instead of beer.”

“You ought to know,” murmured Mrs. Dykman.

“Mr. Quintard!” exclaimed Miss Starbruck; “I am glad to hear you say that, although I do not think it is a very proper subject to discuss before both men and women.”

“My dear Miss Starbruck,” broke in Helen, with a laugh; “this is the progressive nineteenth century, and we are people of the world—the wild, wicked world. We are not afraid to discuss anything, particularly in this house, where the most primitive and natural woman in the world is queen. It has come to be a sort of Palace of Truth. We don’t offend the artistic sense, however.”

“Miss Simms has been right more than once to-day,” said Quintard. “She said a moment ago that one must be married to be free. May I venture the assertion that, in the present state of society, the highest human freedom is found in the bonds of matrimony alone?”

“Explain your paradox,” said Hermia, who had made no comment to Quintard’s remarks.

“It is easily explained. I say nothing whatever of passing fancies, infatuations, passions, which are best disposed of in a temporary union. I refer to love alone. When a man loves a woman he wants her constant companionship, with no restraint but that exercised by his own judicious will and art. He wants to live with her, to travel with her, to be able to seek her at all hours, to follow his own will, unquestioned and untrammeled. This, outside of conventional bonds, is impossible without scandal, and no man who loves a woman will have her lightly spoken of if he can help it. But let the priest read his formula, and the man so bound is monarch of his own desires, and can snap his fingers at the world. I have neither patience nor respect for the man who must have the stimulus of uncertainty to feed his love. He is a poor, weak, unimaginative creature, who is dependent upon conditions for that which he should find in his own character.”

“I never expected to hear you talk like this, Mr. Quintard!” exclaimed Miss Starbruck, “for you have been a very immoral man.”

Quintard looked at her with an amused smile. “Why immoral, Miss Starbruck?”

“You have—well, people say——” stammered poor Miss Starbruck, and then broke down.

Mrs. Dykman came to the rescue. “Miss Starbruck means that you have lived with a number of women and have not taken any particular pains to hide the fact.”

“Is that immoral? I think not. I have lived with no woman who had anything to lose, and I have lived with no woman who was not my equal intellectually. Companionship was quite as much an object as passion. I never took a woman out of the streets and hung jewels upon her and adored her for her empty beauty, and with a certain class of women I have never exchanged a dozen words since my callow youth. Furthermore, I never won a woman’s affections from her husband. If I ever got them he had lost them first. Therefore, I protest against being called immoral.”

“If you want to go into the question of moral ethics,” said Cryder, “you cannot plead guiltless altogether of immorality. In openly living with a woman who is not your wife you outrage the conventions of the community and set it a bad example. It may be argued that you do less harm than those who pursue the sort of life you let alone; but the positive harm is there.”

All looked at Quintard, wondering how he would reply. Even Hermia felt that he was driven into a corner.

“The question is,” replied Quintard, slowly, “What is morality? The world has many standards, from that of the English Government to that of the African barbarian, who follows his instincts, yet who, curiously enough, is in all respects more of a villain than his artificial brother. That point, however, we will not discuss. A man’s standard, of course, is determined by the community in which he lives. We will consider him first in relation to himself. Man is given a temperament which varies chiefly according to his physical strength, and tastes which are distinctly individual. And he not only is a different man after the experiences of each successive decade, but he frequently waits long for the only woman for whom he is capable of feeling that peculiar and overwhelming quality of love which demands that he shall make her his wife. But in the mean time he cannot go altogether companionless, and he meets many women with whom life is by no means unennobling. As to the community, I deny that he sets it a bad example. It is a wiser, more educating, and more refined life than insensate love-making to every pretty weak woman who comes along, or than associations which degrade a man’s higher nature and give him not a grain of food for thought. If more men, until ready to marry, spent their lives in the manner which I have endeavored to defend, there would be less weariness of life, less drinking, less excess, less vice of all sorts.”

Miss Starbruck shuddered, but felt that the conversation had gone out of her depth, and made no reply. Hermia looked at Quintard with a feeling of unconscious pride. Until he finished speaking, she did not realize how she would hate to have him beaten.

Cryder rose and began walking up and down the room. “When you argue,” he said fretfully, “I always feel as if you were hammering me about my ears. You have such a way of pounding through a discussion! One never knows until the next day whether you are right or whether you have simply overwhelmed one by the force of your vitality. Personally, however, I do not agree with you, and for the same reason that I would never marry; I dislike responsibilities.”

Quintard gave him a glance of contempt, under which Hermia shrank as if a lash had cut her shoulders; but before he could reply Helen rushed to the front. “And all this discussion has come out of my poor little bid for sympathy and advice!” she cried. “You have frightened me to death! I am afraid of the very word matrimony with all your analysis and philosophy. To me it was a simple proposition: ‘Marry and chaperon; don’t marry, and be chaperoned.’ Now I feel that, if a man proposes to me, I must read Darwin and Spencer before I answer. I refuse to listen to another word. Mrs. Dykman, I am going home; let me drive you over.”

They all went in a few moments, and Hermia was left alone with her reflections.

TWO HISTORIES ARE ALMOST FINISHED.

Hermia saw a great deal of Quintard. They walked together, they rode together, and circumstances frequently forced them into each other’s society for hours at a time. She liked him more with every interview, but she did not feel a throb of love for him. The snow on her nature’s volcano was deep as the ashes which buried Pompeii.

He had many opportunities to put his wearing qualities to the test. Once they met at a fashionable winter rendezvous in the country. The other women were of the Helen Simms type; the rest of the men belonged to the Winston brotherhood. For the greater part of four days Hermia and Quintard devoted themselves exclusively to each other. When they were not riding across the country or rambling through the windy woods, they sat in the library and told stories by the fire.

One day they had wandered far into the woods and come upon a hemlock glen, down one side of which tumbled melting snow over great jutting rocks that sprang from the mountain side. Quintard and Hermia climbed to a ledge that overhung one of the rocky platforms and sat down. About and above them rose the forest, but the wind was quiet; there was no sound but the dull roar of the cataract. A more romantic spot was not in America, but Quintard could not have been more matter-of-fact had he been in a street-car. He had never betrayed any feeling he may have had for her by a flash of his eye. He discussed with her subjects dangerous and tender, but always with the cold control of the impersonal analyst.

He smoked for a few moments in silence and then said abruptly: “Don’t imagine that I am going to discuss religion with you; it is a question which does not interest me at all. But do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”

“No,” said Hermia.

“Why not?”

Hermia lifted her shoulders: “I have never thought agnosticism needed defense.”

“Agnosticism is the religion of the intellectual, of course. But I have some private reasons for going a step beyond agnosticism, and believing in the persistence of personality. Do you want to hear them?”

“Yes,” said Hermia, “but it all comes down to the same proposition. Religion has its stronghold in Ego the Great. La vie, c’est moi! I am, therefore must ever be! Now and forever! World without end!”

“I refuse to be snubbed beforehand. Why are children so frequently the ancestors of their family’s talent? When heredity cannot account for genius, what better explanation than that of the re-embodiment of an unquenchable individuality? The second reason is a more sentimental one. Why is a man never satisfied until he meets the woman he really loves, and why are his instincts so keen and sure when he does meet her? Why, also, does he so often dwell with the ideal of her before he sees her in material form?”

Hermia felt herself paling, but she exclaimed impatiently: “Don’t talk to me of ideals—those poor, pale photographs of ourselves, who have neither mind nor will nor impulse; who jump out like puppets as the strings are pulled; who respond to every mood and grin to every smile! They are born of the supreme egoism of human nature, which admits no objective influence to any world of its own creating—an egoism which demands vengeance for the humiliation of spirit one is called upon to endure in the world of men. Your other arguments were good, however. I like them, although I will not discuss them until you have further elaborated. In the mean time solve another problem. What is the reason that, when a woman falls in love, she immediately, if a believer, has an increase of religious feeling; if a non-believer, she has a desire to believe, so that she may pray? Sentimentality? The softening of her nature under the influence of love? The general awakening of her emotional possibilities?”

“Neither—or all, indirectly. She is not drawn to God in the least. She is drawn to the idealized abstraction of her lover, who, in the mists of her white-heated imagination, assumes the lineaments of the being most exalted by tradition. If there were a being more exalted still than God, her lover’s phantom would be re-christened with his name instead. It is to her lover that she prays—the intermediate being is a pretty fiction—and she revels in prayer, because it gives her a dreamy and sensuous nearness to her lover.”

Hermia sprang to her feet and paced the narrow platform with rapid steps. “It is well I have no ‘pretty fictions,’” she said, “you would shatter them to splinters.”

He rose also. “No,” he said, “I would never shatter any of your ideals. Such as you believe in and I do not, I will never discuss with you.”

Hermia stood still and looked away from him and through the hemlock forest, with its life outstretched above and its death rotting below. The shadows were creeping about it like ghosts of the dead bracken beneath their feet. The mist was rolling over the mountain and down the cataract; it lay like a soft, thin blanket on the hurrying waters. Hermia drew closer to Quintard and looked up into his face.

“Do you believe,” she said, “that perfect happiness can be—even when affinities meet?”

“Not perfect, because not uninterrupted,” he replied, “except in those rare cases where a man and woman, born for each other, have met early in youth, before thought or experience had formed the character of either. When—as almost always happens—they do not meet until each is incased in the armor of their separate and perfected individualities, no matter how united they may become, there must be hours and days of terrible spiritual loneliness—there must be certain sides of their natures that can never touch. But”—he bent his flushed face to hers and his voice shook—“there are moments—there are hours—when barriers are of mist, when duality is forgotten. Such hours, isolated from time and the world——”

She broke from him as from an invisible embrace and stood on the edge of a rock. She gave a little, rippling laugh that was caught and lost in the rush and thunder of the waters. “Your theories are fascinating,” she cried, “but this unknown cataract is more so. I should like to stand here for an hour and watch it, were not these rocks so slippery——”

Quintard turned his head. Then he leaped down the path beneath the ledge. Hermia had disappeared. He was about to swing himself out into the cataract when he staggered and leaned against the rock; his heart contracted as if there were fingers of steel about it. With a mighty resolution, he overcame the physical weakness which followed in the wake of the momentary pain, and, planting his feet on one of the broad stones over which the torrent fell, he set his shoulder against a projecting rock and looked upward. Hermia lay on a shelf above; the force of the cataract was feebler at its edges and had not swept her down. Quintard crawled slowly up, his feet slipping on the slimy rocks, only saving himself from being precipitated into the narrowing body of the torrent below by clinging to the roots and branches that projected from the ledges. He reached Hermia; she was unconscious, and it was well that he was a strong man. He took her in his arms and went down the rocks. When he stepped on to the earth again his face was white, and he breathed heavily. “My heart beats as if I were a woman,” he muttered impatiently, “what is the matter with me?”

He laid Hermia on the ground, and for a moment was compelled to rest beside her. Then he aroused himself and bent anxiously over her. She had had a severe fall; it was a wonder her brains had not been dashed out. He lifted her and held her with her body sloping from feet to head. She struggled to consciousness with an agonized gasp. She opened her eyes, but did not appear to see him, and, turning her face to the torrent, made a movement to crawl to it. Quintard caught her in his arms and stood her on her feet.

“What are you doing?” he asked roughly.

She put her hand to her head. “I like to watch it, but the rocks are so slippery,” she said confusedly, yet with a gleam of cunning in her shadowed eyes.

Quintard caught her by both shoulders and shook her. “My God!” he exclaimed, “did you do it purposely?”

The blood rushed to her head and washed the fog from her brain. “You are crazy,” she said; “let us go home.”

AN EPOCH-MAKING DEPARTURE.

A woman never moralizes until she has committed an immoral act. From the moment she voluntarily accepts it until the moment she casts it aside, she may do distasteful duty to the letter, but she does it mechanically. The laws and canons are laid down, and she follows them without analysis, however rebelliously. She may long for the forbidden as consistently as she accepts her yoke, whether the yoke be of untempted girlhood or hated matrimony; but the longing serves to deepen her antipathy to bonds; she sees no beauty in average conditions. After she has plucked the apple and eaten it raw, skin, core and all, and is suffering from the indigestion thereof, she is enabled to analytically compare it with such fruits as do not induce dyspepsia.

Although Hermia was far from acknowledging that she loved Quintard, she allowed him occasionally to reign in her imagination, and had more than one involuntary, abstract, but tender interview with him. This, she assured herself, was purely speculative, and in the way of objective amusement, like the theater or the opera. When she found that she thought of him always as her husband she made no protest; he was too good for anything less. Nor, she decided, had she met him earlier and been able to love him, would she have been content with any more imperfect union.

Cryder still came with more or less regularity. There were brief, frantic moments, as when she had sought death in the torrent; but on the whole she was too indifferent to break with him. Her life was already ruined; what mattered her actions? Moreover, habit is a tremendous force, and he had a certain hold over her, a certain fascination, with which the physical had nothing to do.

After she had known Quintard about two months she found herself free. Cryder, in truth, was quite as tired as herself. Ennui was in his tideless veins, and, moreover, the time had come to add another flower to his herbarium. But he did not wish to break with Hermia until his time came to leave the city. If she had loved him, it might have been worth while to hurt her; but, as even his egoism could not persuade him that she gave him more than temperate affection, he would not risk the humiliation of being laughed at.

One evening he told her that he must go South the following week and remain several months. His dialect was growing rusty, and the public would expect another novel from him in the coming spring. He hated to say good-bye to her, but his muse claimed his first and highest duty. Hermia felt as one who comes out of a room full of smoke—she wanted to draw a long breath and throw back her head. She replied very politely, however—they were always very polite—that she should miss him and look forward to his return. Neither would avow that this was the end of the matter, but each was devoutly thankful that the other was not a fool.

Cryder looked melancholy and handsome when he came to say good-bye. He had on extremely becoming traveling clothes, and his skin and eyes had their accustomed clearness. He bade Hermia a tender farewell, and his eyes looked resigned and sad. Then an abstracted gaze passed into them, as if his spirit had floated upward to a plane far removed from common affection.

Hermia had much ado to keep her mouth from curling. She remembered what Quintard had once said of him: that he always wanted to throw him on a table to see if he would ring. Bah! what a poseur he was! Then she mentally shrugged her shoulders. His egoism had its value; he had never noticed the friendship which existed between her and Quintard. Had he been a jealous man he would have been insufferable.

After he had gone he seemed to glide out of her life—out of the past as of the present. She found herself barely able to recall him, his features, his characteristics. For a long time she never thought of him unless some one mentioned his name, and then she wondered if he had not been the hero of a written sketch rather than of an actual episode.

Whether it was owing to Cryder’s removal or to Quintard’s influence, she could not tell, but she found herself becoming less blasé. Her spirits were lighter, people interested her more, life seemed less prosaic. She asked Quintard once what it meant, and he told her, with his usual frankness, that it was the spring. This offended her, and she did not speak for ten minutes.

On another occasion he roused her to wrath. He told her one day that on the night he met her he had been impressed with a sense of unreality about her; and, acting on a sudden impulse, she told him the history of her starved and beautiless girlhood. When she finished she expected many comments, but Quintard merely put another log of wood on the fire and remarked:

“That is all very interesting, but I am warned that the dinner-hour approaches. Farewell, I will see you at Mrs. Dykman’s this evening.”

Hermia looked at the fire for some time after he had gone. She was thankful that fate had arranged matters in such wise that she was not to spend her life with Quintard. He could be, at times, the most disagreeable man she had ever known, and there was not a grain of sympathy in his nature. And, yes, he was prosaic!

THROUGH THE SNOW.

Two days later Hermia went to a large dinner, and Quintard took her in. She was moody and absent. She felt nervous, she said, and he need not be surprised if he found her very cross. Quintard told her to be as cross as she liked. He had his reasons for encouraging her in her moods. After the dinner was over she wandered through the rooms like a restless ghost. Finally she turned abruptly to Quintard. “Take me home,” she said; “I shall stifle if I stay in this house any longer. It is like a hot-house.”

“But what will Mrs. Dykman say?”

“I do not care what she says. She is not ready to go, and I won’t stay any longer. I will go without saying anything to her about it.”

“Very well. There will be comment, but I will see if they have a telephone and order a cab.”

“I won’t go in a cab. I want to walk.”

“But it is snowing.”

“I like to walk in the snow.”

Quintard thought it best to let her have her way. Moreover, a walk through the snow with her would be a very pleasant thing. He hunted up a housemaid and borrowed a pair of high overshoes. Hermia had on a short gown; she pulled the fur-lined hood of her long wrap about her head, Quintard put on the overshoes, and they managed to get out of the house unnoticed. The snow was falling, but the wind lingered afar on the borders of the storm.

“You had better let me call a cab.”

“I will not drive,” replied Hermia; and Quintard shrugged his shoulders and offered his arm.

The walk was not a long one under ordinary circumstances; the house at which the dinner had been given was in Gramercy Park; but, with a slippery pavement and snow-stars in one’s eyes, each block is a mile. Quintard had an umbrella, but Hermia would not let him raise it. She liked to throw back her head and watch the snow in its tumbling, scurrying, silent fall. It lay deep in the long, narrow street, and it blotted out the tall, stern houses with a merry, baffling curtain of wee, white storm-imps. Now and again a cab flashed its lantern like a will-o’-the-wisp.

Hermia made Quintard stop under one of the electric lamps. It poured its steady beams through the storm for a mile and more, and in it danced the sparkling crystals in infinite variety of form and motion. About the pathway pressed the soft, unlustrous army, jealous of their transformed comrades, like stars that sigh to spring from the crowded milky way. Down that luminous road hurried the tiny radiant shapes, like coming souls to the great city, hungry for life.

Hermia clung to Quintard, her eyes shining out of the dark.

“Summer and the country have nothing so beautiful as this,” she whispered. “I feel as if we were on a deserted planet, and of hateful modern life there was none. I cannot see a house.”

“I see several,” said Quintard.

Hermia gave a little exclamation of disgust, but struggled onward. “Sometimes I hate you,” she said. “You never respond to my moods.”

“Oh, yes, I do—to your real moods. You often think you are sentimental, when, should I take you up, you would find me a bore and change the subject. You will get sentimental enough some day, but you are not ready for it yet.”

“Yes? You still cling to that ridiculous idea that I shall some day fall in love, I suppose.”

“I do. And how you will go to pieces.”

“That is purest nonsense. I wish it were not.”

“Have you got that far? But we will not argue the matter. Your mood to-night, as I suggested before, is not a sentimental one. You are extremely cross. I don’t know but I like that better. It would be hard for me to be sentimental in the streets of New York.”

Hermia rather liked being bullied by him at times. But if she could only shake that effortless self-control!

They walked a block in silence. “Are you very susceptible to beauty?” she asked suddenly.

Quintard laughed. “I am afraid I am. Still, I will do myself the justice to say that it has no power to hold me if there is nothing else. Beauty by itself is a poor thing; combined with several other things—intellect, soul, passion—it becomes one of the sweetest and most powerful aids to communion.”

“Why do you think so much of passion?” she demanded. “You haven’t any yourself.”

They passed under a lamp at the moment, and a ray of light fell on Quintard’s face, to which Hermia had lifted her eyes. The color sprang to it, and his eyes flashed. He bent his head until she shrank under the strong, angry magnetism of his gaze. “It is time you opened your eyes,” he said harshly, “and learned to know one man from another. And it is time you began to realize what you have to expect.” He bent his face a little closer. “It will not frighten you, though,” he said. And then he raised his head and carefully piloted her across the street.

Hermia made no reply. She opened her lips as if her lungs needed more air. Something was humming in her head; she could not think. She looked up through a light-path into the dark, piling billows of the vaporous, storm-writhed ocean. Then she caught Quintard’s arm as if she were on an eminence and afraid of falling.

“Are you cold?” he asked, drawing her closer.

“Yes,” said Hermia. “I wish we were home. How thick the snow is! Things are in my eyes.”

Quintard stopped and brushed the little crystals off her lashes. Then they went on, slipping sometimes, but never falling. Quintard was very sure-footed. The snow covered them with a garment like soft white fur, the darkness deepened, and neither made further attempt at conversation. Quintard had all he could do to keep his bearings, and began to wish that he had not let Hermia have her way; but she trudged along beside him with a blind sort of confidence new to her.

After a time he gave an exclamation of relief. “We are within a couple of blocks of your house,” he said. “We shall soon be home. Be careful—the crossing is very slip——. Ah!”

She had stepped off the curbstone too quickly, her foot slipped, and she made a wild slide forward, dragging Quintard with her. He threw his arm around her, and caught his balance on the wing. In a second he was squarely planted on both feet, but he did not release Hermia. He wound his arms about her, pressing her closer, closer, his breath coming quickly. The ice-burdened storm might have been the hot blast of a furnace. He did not kiss her, his lips were frozen; but her hood had fallen back and he pressed his face into the fragrant gold of her hair.

He loosened his hold suddenly, and, drawing her arm through his, hurried through the street. They were at Hermia’s door in a few moments, and when the butler opened it she turned to him hesitatingly.

“You will come in and get warm, and ring for a cab?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, “I will go in for a moment.”

They went into the library, and Quintard lit all the burners. He touched a bell and told the butler to bring some sherry and call a cab.

When the sherry came he drank a glass with her, and entertained her until the cab arrived, with an account of a wild storm in which he had once found himself on the mountains of Colorado. When the bell rang she stood up and held out her hand with a smile.

“Good-luck to you,” she said. “I hope you will get home before morning.”

He took her hand, then dropped it and put both his own about her face, his wrists meeting under her chin. “Good-night,” he said softly. “Go to those sovereign domains of yours, where the castles are built of the clouds of sunset, and the sea thunders with longing and love and pain of desire. I have been with you there always; I always shall be;” and then he let his hands fall, and went quickly from the room.

Hermia waited until the front door had closed, and then she ran up to her room as if hobgoblins were in pursuit.

THE DYKMAN REPRIMAND.

While Hermia was sitting in the library the next day in a very unenviable frame of mind, the door opened and Mrs. Dykman came in.

“Hermia,” she said, after she had disposed herself on one of the severe, high-backed chairs, “it is quite time for you to adopt some slight regard for the conventionalities. You are wealthy, and strong in your family name; but there is a limit. The world is not a thing you can hold in the hollow of your hand or crush under your foot. The manner in which you left Mrs. Le Roy’s house last night was scandalous. What do you suppose the consequences will be?” Her cold, even tones never varied, but they had the ice-breath of the Arctic in them.

“Are people talking?” asked Hermia.

“Talking? They are shrieking! It is to be hoped, for your own sake, that you are going to marry Grettan Quintard, and that you will let me announce the engagement at once.”

Hermia sprang to her feet, overturning her chair. She had a book in her hand, and she flung it across the room. Her eyes were blazing and her face was livid. “Don’t ever dare mention that man’s name to me again!” she cried. “I hate him! I hate him! And don’t bring me any more tales about what people are saying. I don’t care what they say! I scorn them all! What are they but a set of jibbering automatons? One year has made me loathe the bloodless, pulseless, colorless, artificial thing you call society. Those people whose names and position each bows down to in the other are not human beings! they are but a handful of fungi on the great plant of humanity! If they were wrenched from their roots and crushed out of life to-morrow, their poor, little, miserable, self-satisfied numbers would not be missed. Of what value are they in the scheme of existence save to fatten and puff in the shade of a real world like the mushroom and the toadstool under an oak? They are not alive like the great world of real men; not one of them ever had a strong, real, healthy, animal impulse in his life. Even their little sins are artificial, and owe their faint, evanescent promptings to vanity or ennui. I hate their wretched little aims and ambitions, their well-bred scuffling for power in the eyes of each other—power—Heaven save the mark! They work as hard, those poor midgets, for recognition among the few hundred people who have ever heard of them, as a statesman does for the admiration of his country! And yet if the whole tribe were melted down into one soul they would not make an ambition big enough to carry its result to the next generation. A year and I shall have forgotten every name on my visiting-list. Great God! that you should think I care for them.”

Mrs. Dykman rose to her feet and drew her furs about her. “I do not pretend to understand you,” she said. “Fortunately for myself, my lot has been cast among ordinary women. And as I am a part of the world for which you have so magnificent a contempt, one of the midgets for whom you have so fine a scorn, I imagine you will care to see as little of me in the future as I of you.”

She was walking majestically down the room when Hermia sprang forward, and, throwing her arms about her, burst into a storm of tears. “Oh, don’t be angry with me!” she cried. “Don’t! Don’t! I am so miserable that I don’t know what I am saying. I believe I am half crazy.”

Mrs. Dykman drew her down on a sofa. “What is the trouble?” she asked. “Tell me.”

“There is nothing in particular,” said Hermia. “I am just unstrung. I feel like a raft in the middle of an ocean. I am disgusted with life. It must be because I am not well. I am sure that is it. There is nothing else. Oh, Aunt Frances, take me to Europe.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Dykman; “we will go if you think that traveling will cure you. But I cannot go for at least five weeks. Will that do?”

“Yes,” said Hermia; “I suppose it will have to.”

FUTURITY.

A few days later Hermia had a singular experience. Bessie’s youngest child, her only boy, died. Hermia carried her sister from the room as the boy breathed his last, and laid her on a bed. As Bessie lay sobbing and moaning, sometimes wailing aloud, she seemed suddenly to fade from her sister’s vision. Hermia was alone, where she could not tell, in a room whose lineaments were too shadowy to define. Even her own outlines, seen as in a mirror held above, were blurred. Of one thing only was she sharply conscious: she was writhing in mortal agony—agony not of the body, but of the spirit. The cause she did not grasp, but the effect was a suffering as exquisite and as torturing as that of vitriol poured upon bare nerves. The insight lasted only a few seconds, but it was so real that she almost screamed aloud. Then she drifted back to the present and bent over her sister. But her face was white. In that brief interval her inner vision had pierced the depths of her nature, and what it saw there made her shudder.