THE SWEETS OF SOLITUDE.

A few weeks later Frank made an announcement which gave Hermia a genuine thrill of delight. A fellow bank-clerk was obliged to spend some months in California, and had offered Mordaunt his house in Jersey for the summer. Hermia would not consent to go with them, in spite of their entreaties. As far back as she could remember, way down through the long perspective of her childhood, she had never been quite alone except at night, nor could she remember the time when she had not longed for solitude. And now! To be alone for four months! No more evenings of domestic bliss, no more piles of stockings to darn, no more dinners to concoct, no more discussions upon economy, no more daily tasks carefully planned by Bessie’s methodical mind, no more lessons to teach, no more anything which had been her daily portion for the last thirteen years. Bridget would go with the family. She would do her own cooking, and not eat at all if she did not wish. Her clothes could fall into rags, and her hands look through every finger of her gloves. She would read and dream and forget that the material world existed.

It was a beautiful spring morning when Hermia found herself alone. She had gone with the family to Jersey, and had remained until they were settled. Now the world was her own. When she returned to the flat, she threw her things on the floor, pushed the parlor furniture awry, turned the framed photographs to the wall, and hid the worsted tidies under the sofa.

For two months she was well content. She reveled in her loneliness, in the voiceless rooms, the deserted table, the aimless hours, the forgotten past, the will-painted present. She regarded the post-man as her natural enemy, and gave him orders not to ring her bell. Once a week she took her letters from the box and devoted a half-hour to correspondence. She had a hammock swung in one of the rooms, and dreamed half the night through that she was in the hanging gardens of Semiramis. The darkness alone was between her and the heavens thick with starry gods; and below was the heavy perfume of oranges and lotus flowers. There was music—soft—crashing—wooing her to a scene of bewildering light and mad carousal. There was rapture of power and ecstasy of love. She had but to fling aside the curtains—to fly down the corridor—

It is not to be supposed that Hermia’s imagination was faithful to the Orient. Her nature had great sensuous breadth and wells of passion which penetrated far down into the deep, hard substratum of New England rock; but her dreams were apt to be inspired by what she had read last. She loved the barbarous, sensuous, Oriental past, but she equally loved the lore which told of the rugged strength and brutal sincerity of mediæval days, when man turned his thoughts to love and war and naught besides; when the strongest won the woman he wanted by murder and force, and the woman loved him the better for doing it. Hermia would have gloried in the breathless uncertainty of those days, when death and love went hand-in-hand, and every kiss was bought with the swing of a battle-axe. She would have liked to be locked in her tower by her feudal father, and to have thrown down a rope-ladder to her lover at night. Other periods of history at times demanded her, and she had a great many famous lovers: Bolingbroke and Mirabeau, Napoleon and Aaron Burr, Skobeleff and Cavour, a motley throng who bore a strong racial resemblance to one another when roasting in the furnace of her super-heated imagination.

Again, there were times when love played but a small part in her visions. She was one of the queens of that world to which she had been born, a world whose mountains were of cold brown stone, and in whose few and narrow currents drifted stately maidens in stiff, white collars and tailor-made gowns. She should be one of that select band. It was her birthright; and each instinct of power and fastidiousness, caste and exclusiveness, flourished as greenly within her as if those currents had swept their roots during every year of her life’s twenty-four. When ambition sank down, gasping for breath, love would come forward eager and warm, a halo enveloped the brown-stone front, and through the plate-glass and silken curtains shone the sun of paradise.

For a few weeks the charm of solitude retained its edge. Then, gradually, the restlessness of Hermia’s nature awoke after its sleep and clamored for recognition. She grew to hate the monotony of her own society as she had that of her little circle. She came to dread the silence of the house; it seemed to close down upon her, oppressing, stifling, until she would put her hand to her throat and gasp for breath. Sometimes she would scream at every noise; her nerves became so unstrung that sleep was a visitor who rarely remembered her. Once, thinking she needed change of scene, she went to Jersey. She returned the next morning. The interruption of the habit of years, the absolute change of the past few months made it impossible to take up again the strings of her old life. They had snapped forever, and the tension had been too tight to permit a knot. She could go down to the river, but not back to the existence of the past thirteen years.

For a week after her return from Jersey she felt as if she were going mad. Life seemed to have stopped; the future was a blank sheet. Try to write on it as she would, the characters took neither form nor color. To go and live alone would mean no more than the change from her sister’s flat to a bare-walled room; to remain in her present conditions was unthinkable. She had neither the money nor the beauty to accumulate interests in life. Books ceased to interest her, imagination failed her. She tried to write, but passion was dead, and the blood throbbed in her head and drowned words and ideas. She had come to the edge of life, and at her feet swept the river—in its depths were peace and oblivion—eternal rest—a long, cool night—the things which crawl in the deep would suck the blood from her head—a claw with muscles of steel would wrench the brain from her skull and carry it far, far, where she could feel it throb and jump and ache no more—

And then, one day, John Suydam died and left her a million dollars.

SUYDAM’S LEGACY AND HERMIA’S WILL.

Hermia attended her uncle’s funeral because Frank came over and insisted upon it; and she and her brother-in-law were the only mourners. But few people were in the church, a circumstance which Hermia remembered later with gratitude. The Suydams had lived on Second Avenue since Second Avenue had boasted a brick or brownstone front, but no one cared to assume a respect he did not feel. Among the tablets which graced the interior of St. Mark’s was one erected to the dead man’s father, who had left many shekels to the diocese; but John Suydam was lowered into the family vault with nothing to perpetuate his memory but his name and the dates of his birth and death engraved on the silver plate of his coffin.

Hermia took no interest in her uncle’s death; she was even past the regret that she would be the poorer by twenty-five dollars a year. When she received the letter from Suydam’s lawyer, informing her that she was heiress to a million dollars, her hands shook for an hour.

At first she was too excited to think connectedly. She went out and took a long walk, and physical fatigue conquered her nerves. She returned home and sat down on the edge of her bed and thought it all out. The world was under her feet at last. With such a fortune she could materialize every dream of her life. She would claim her place in society here, then go abroad, and in the old world forget the Nineteenth Century. She would have a house, each of whose rooms should be the embodiment of one of that strange medley of castles she had built in the land of her dreams. And men would love her—she was free to love in fact instead of in fancy—free to go forth and in the crowded drawing-rooms of that world not a bird’s flight away find the lover whose glance would be recognition.

She sprang to her feet and threw her arms above her head. New life seemed to have been poured into her veins, and it coursed through them like quicksilver; she felt young for the first time in the twenty-four centuries of her life. She dropped her arms and closed her hand slowly; the world was in the palm. She smiled and let her head drop back. She moved it slowly on the pivot of her throat. Her eyes met the glass.

The cry of horror which burst from her lips rang through the room. For this girl had lived so long and so consistently in her imagination that it was rarely she remembered she was not a beautiful woman. During the past hours she had slowly grasped the fact that, as with the stroke of a magician’s wand, her dream-estates had been hardened from shadow into substance; it had not occurred to her that the gift most coveted was the one gift withheld.

She sank in a heap on the bed, all spirit and hope gone out of her. For many minutes she remained motionless. Then she slowly straightened herself until she was erect once more, and in her face grew a look of hope fighting down doubt. In a moment hope triumphed, then gave way to determination, which in turn yielded to defiance. She sprang forward and with her clenched hand shattered her mirror into a star with a thousand points.

“I will be beautiful!” she cried aloud, “and I will never look into a glass again until I am.”

A HEROINE IN TRAINING.

The thirty or forty thousand dollars over John Suydam’s million had been left to Bessie. She immediately bought a charming house on St. Mark’s Avenue—it did not occur to her to leave her beloved Brooklyn—and Hermia furnished it for her and told her that she would educate the children. Hermia did not divide her fortune with her sister. She kept her hundred thousands, not because gold had made her niggardly, but because she wanted the power that a fortune gives.

The old Suydam house was one of the largest of its kind in New York. Exteriorly it was of red brick with brown-stone trimmings, and about the lower window was a heavy iron balcony. Beneath the window was a square of lawn the size of a small kitchen table, which was carefully protected by a high, spiked iron railing.

Hermia put the house at once in the hands of a famous designer and decorator, but allowed him no license. Her orders were to be followed to the letter. The large, single drawing-room was to be Babylonian. The library just behind, and the dining-room in the extension were to look like the rooms of a feudal castle. The large hall should suggest a cathedral. Above, her boudoir and bed-room was to be a scene from the Arabian Nights. A conservatory, to be built at the back of the house, would be a jungle of India.

The house was to be as nearly finished as possible by the beginning of winter. She wrote to her mother’s sister, Miss Huldah Starbruck, a lady who had passed fifty peaceful years in Nantucket, and asked her to come and live with her. Miss Starbruck promised to come early in December, and then, all other points settled, Hermia gave her attention to the momentous question of her undeveloped beauty.

She went to a fashionable physician and had a long interview with him. The next day he sent her a trained and athletic nurse, a pleasant, placid-looking young woman, named Mary Newton. Miss Newton, who had received orders to put Hermia into a perfect state of health, and who was given carte blanche, telegraphed for a cottage on the south shore of Long Island. She had a room fitted up as a gymnasium, and for the next four months Hermia obeyed her lightest mandate upon all questions of diet and exercise. Once a week Hermia went to town and divided the day between the house-decorators and a hairdresser who had engaged to develop the color in her lusterless locks.

On the first of December, Miss Newton told her that no girl had ever been in more superb condition; and Hermia, who had kept her vow and not yet looked in a mirror, was content to take her word, and both returned to town.

HERMIA DISCOVERS HERSELF.

Had Hermia been a bride on her wedding-night she could not have felt more trepidation than when she stood on the threshold of her first interview with her new self. She was to meet a strange, potent being, who would unlock for her those doors against which, with fierce, futile longing, she had been wont to cast herself, since woman’s instinct had burst its germ.

She entered her bedroom and locked the door. But she did not go to the mirror at once; she was loath to relinquish pleasurable uncertainty. She sank on a rug before the hearth and locked her hands about her knee in the attitude which had been a habit from childhood. For a few moments she sat enjoying the beauty of the room, the successful embodiment of one of her dearest dreams. The inlaid floor was thick with rugs that had been woven in the looms of the Orient. The walls were hung with cloth of gold, and the ceiling was a splendid picture of Nautch girls dancing in the pleasure palace of an Indian prince. The bed, enameled to represent ivory, stood on a dais over which trailed a wonderful Hindoo shawl. Over the couches and divans were flung rich stuffs, feathered rugs, and odd strips of Indian conceits. The sleeping-room was separated from the boudoir by a row of pillars, and from the unseen apartment came the smell of burning incense.

Hermia leaned back against a pile of cushions, and, clasping her hands behind her head, gazed about her with half-closed eyes. There was a sense of familiarity about it all that cast a shadow over her content. It was a remarkably close reproduction of an ideal, considering that the ideal had been filtered through the practical brain of a nineteenth century decorator—but therein lay the sting. She had dreamed of this room, lived in it; it was as familiar as Bessie’s parlor in Brooklyn, with its tidies and what-nots; it wanted the charm of novelty. She had a protesting sense of being defrauded; it was all very well to realize one’s imaginings, but how much sweeter if some foreign hand had cunningly woven details within and glamour above, of which she had never dreamed. The supreme delight of atmospheric architecture is the vague, abiding sense that high on the pinnacle we have reared, and which has shot above vision’s range, is a luminous apex, divine in color, wondrous in form, a will-o’-the-wisp fluttering in the clouds of imagination.

Hermia sighed, but shrugged her shoulders. Had not life taught her philosophy?

Where the gold-stuffs parted on the wall opposite the pillars, a mirror, ivory-framed, reached from floor to ceiling. Hermia rose and walked a few steps toward the glass without daring to raise her eyes. Then with a little cry she ran to the lamps and turned them out. She flung off her clothes, threw the lace thing she called her night-gown over her head, and jumped into bed. She pulled the covers over her face, and for ten minutes lay and reviled herself. Then, with an impatient and audible exclamation at her cowardice, she got up and lit every lamp in the room.

She walked over to the mirror and looked long at herself, fearfully at first, then gravely, at last smilingly. She was beautiful, because she was unique. Her victory was the more assured because her beauty would be the subject of many a dispute. She had not the delicate features and conventional coloring that women admire, but a certain stormy, reckless originality which would appeal swiftly and directly to variety-loving man. Her eyes, clear and brilliant as they had once been dull and cold, were deep and green as the sea. Her hair, which lay in a wiry cloud about her head and swept her brows, was a shining mass of brazen threads. Her complexion had acquired the clear tint of ivory and was stained with the rich hue of health. The very expression of her face had changed; the hard, dogged, indifferent look had fled. With hope and health and wishes gratified had come the lifting and banishment of the old mask—that crystallization of her spirit’s discontent. Yes, she was a beautiful woman. She might not have a correct profile or a soft roundness of face, but she was a beautiful woman.

She pinched her cheek; it was firm and elastic. She put her hands about her throat; it rose from its lace nest, round and polished as an ivory pillar. She slipped the night-gown from her shoulders; the line of the back of her head and neck was beautiful to see, and a crisp, waved strand of shorter hair that had fallen from its place looked like a piece of gold filigree on an Indian vase. Her shoulders did not slope, but they might have been covered with thickest satin. She raised one arm and curved it slowly, then let it hang straight at her side. She must always have had a well-shaped arm, for it tapered from shoulder to wrist; but health and care alone could give the transparent brilliancy and flawless surface.

Hermia gazed long at herself. She swayed her beautiful body until it looked like a reed in an Indian swamp, blown by a midnight breeze. It was as lithe and limber as young bamboo. She drew the pins from her hair. It fell about her like a million infinitesimal tongues of living flame, and through them her green eyes shone and her white skin gleamed.

Tossing her hair back she sprang forward and kissed her reflection in the glass, a long, greeting, grateful kiss, and her eyes blazed with passionate rapture. Then she slowly raised her arms above her head, every pulse throbbing with delicious exultation, every nerve leaping with triumph and hope, every artery a river of tumultuous, victorious, springing life.

HELEN SIMMS.

A year later Hermia was sitting by her library fire one afternoon when the butler threw back the tapestry that hung over the door and announced Helen Simms. Hermia rose to greet her visitor with an exclamation of pleasure that had in it an accent of relief. She had adopted Helen Simms as the friend of her new self; as yet, but one knew the old Hermia. Helen was so essentially modern and practical that restless longings and romantic imaginings fled at her approach.

Miss Simms, as she entered the room, her cheeks flushed by the wind, and a snow-flake on her turban, was a charming specimen of her kind. She had a tall, trim, slender figure, clad in sleek cloth, and carried with soldierly uprightness. Her small head was loftily and unaffectedly poised, her brown hair was drawn up under her quiet little hat with smoothness and precision, and a light, severe fluff adorned her forehead. She had no beauty, but she had the clean, clear, smooth, red-and-ivory complexion of the New York girl, and her teeth were perfect. She looked like a thoroughbred, splendidly-groomed young greyhound, and was a glowing sample of the virtues of exercise, luxurious living, and the refinement of two or three generations.

“What do you mean by moping here all by yourself?” she exclaimed, with a swift smile which gave a momentary flash of teeth. “You were to have met me at Madame Lefarge’s, to have tried on your new gown. I waited for you a half-hour, and in a beastly cold room at that.”

“I beg your pardon,” replied Hermia, with sudden contrition, “but I forgot all about it—I may as well tell the bald truth. But I am glad to see you. I am blue.”

Helen took an upright chair opposite Hermia’s, and lightly leaned upon her umbrella as if it were a staff. “I should think you would be blue in this ‘gray ancestral room,’” she said. “It looks as if unnumbered state conspiracies and intrigues against unhappy Duncans had been concocted in it. I do not deny that it is all very charming, but I never come into it without a shiver and a side-glance at the dark corners.”

She looked about her with a smile which had little fear in it.

“These stern gray walls and that vaulted ceiling carry you out of Second Avenue, I admit; and those stained-glass windows and all that tapestry and antique furniture waft me back to the days of my struggles with somebody or other’s history of England. But, Hermia mia, I think it would be good for you to have a modern drawing-room in your house, and to sit in it occasionally. It is this semblance of past romance which makes you discontented with the world as you find it.”

Hermia gave a sigh. “I know,” she said, “but I can’t help it. I am tired of everything. I dread the thought of another winter exactly like last. The same men, same receptions, same compliments, same everything.”

“My dear, you are blasé. I have been expecting it. It follows on the heels of the first season, as delicate eyes follow scarlet fever. The eyes get well, and so will you. Five years from now you will not be as blasé as you are this moment. Look at me. I have been out four years. I was blasé three years ago, but to-day I could not live without society and its thousand little excitements. See what you have to look forward to!”

Hermia smiled. “You certainly are a shining example of patience and fortitude, but I fear you have something in you which I lack. I shall grow more and more bored and discontented. Three years of this would kill me. I wish I could go to Europe, but Aunt Frances cannot go yet, and I don’t care to go alone the first time, for I want to see the society of the different capitals. After that I shall go to Europe by myself. But in the mean time what am I to do?”

“Have a desperate flirtation; I mean, of course, a prolonged one. Heaven knows you are the most fearful flirt in New York—while it lasts. Only it never lasts more than a week and a day.”

“I am not a flirt,” said Hermia. “I have not the first essential of a flirt—patience. I have been simply trying with all my might to fall in love. And I cannot have a prolonged flirtation with a man who disappoints me.”

“My dear, as a veteran, let me advise you. So long as you keep up this hunt for the ideal you will be bored by everything and everybody in actual life. All this sentiment and romance and imagination of yours are very charming, and when I recall the occasions wherein you have kept me awake until two in the morning, I forgive you, because I found you quite as entertaining as a novel. But it is only spoiling you for the real pleasures of life. You must be more philosophical. If you can’t find your ideal, make up your mind to be satisfied with the best you can get. There are dozens of charming men in New York, and you meet them every week. They may not be romantic, they may look better in evening clothes than in a tin hat and leather legs, but they are quite too fascinating for all that. Just put your imagination to some practical use, and fancy yourself in love with one of them for a month. After that it will be quite easy.”

“I can’t!” exclaimed Hermia emphatically, as she turned to pour out the tea the butler had brought in. “I get everything they know out of them in three interviews, and then we’ve nothing left to talk about.”

Helen removed her glove from her white hand with its flashing rings, and, changing her seat to one nearer the table, took up a thin slice of bread-and-butter. “Is it five o’clock already?” she said, “I must run. I have a dinner to-night, the opera, and two balls.” She nibbled her bread and sipped her tea as if the resolution to run had satisfied her conscience. “Shall I have the pleasure of seeing you have twice as many partners as myself?”

“No; I am not going out to-night. You know I draw the line at three times a week, and I have already touched the limit.”

“Quite right. You will be beautiful as long as you live. Between Miss Newton, three nights’ sleep a week, and a large waist, you will be quoted to your grandchildren as a nineteenth-century Ninon de l’Enclos. But, to return to the truffles we were discussing before the tea came in—another trouble is that you are too appallingly clever for the ‘infants.’ Why do you not go into the literary set and find an author? All I have ever known are fearful bores, but they might suit you.” She put down her tea-cup. “I have it!” she exclaimed; “Ogden Cryder has just come back from Europe, and I am positive that he is the man you have been waiting for. You must meet him. I met him two or three years ago, and really, for a literary man, he was quite charming. Awfully good-looking, too.”

“He is one of the dialect fiends, is he not?” asked Hermia, languidly. “It is rather awkward meeting an author whose books you haven’t read, and I simply cannot read dialect.”

“Oh! get one or two and skim them. The thread of the story is all you want; then you can discuss the heroine with him, and insist that she ought to have done the thing he did not make her do. That will flatter him and give you a subject to start off with. An author scares me to death, and, upon the rare occasions when I meet one, I always fly at him with some reproach about the cruel way in which he treated the heroine, or ask him breathlessly to please tell me whether she and the hero are ever going to get out of their difficulties or are to remain planté là for the rest of their lives. This works off the embarrassment, you see, and after that we talk about Mrs. Blank’s best young man.”

Hermia smiled. It was difficult to imagine Miss Simms frightened, breathless, or embarrassed. She looked as if emotion had not stirred her since the days when she had shrieked in baby wrath because she could not get her chubby toes into her toothless mouth.

“Ogden Cryder might at least have something to talk about,” Hermia answered. “Perhaps it would be worth while.”

“It would, my dear. I am convinced that he is the man, and I know where you can meet him. Papa has tickets for the next meeting of the Club of Free Discussion, and I will tell him to take you. He knows Mr. Cryder, and shall have strict orders to introduce you. What is more, you will have the pleasure of hearing the lion roar for an hour before you meet him. He is to give the lecture of the evening.”

“Well,” said Hermia, “I shall be glad to go, if your father will be good enough to take me. Which of Cryder’s books shall I read up?”

“‘Cornfield Yarns’ and ‘How Uncle Zebediah sowed dat Cotton Field’ are the ones everybody talks about most. Some of the yarns are quite sweet, and the papers say—I always read the criticisms, they give the outline of the plot, and it saves an awful lot of trouble—that Uncle Zebediah is the most superb African of modern fiction. Uncle Tom has hidden his diminished head. ‘Unc. Zeb.,’ as he is familiarly called, rolls forth an amount of dialect to the square inch which none but a Cryder could manipulate. It is awful work pulling through it, but we all have to work for success in this life.”

She drew on her long, loose, tan-colored glove, pushed her bangles over it, then carefully tucked the top under her cuff. “Well, addio, Hermia mia,” she said, rising; “I will send you a note to-morrow morning and let you know if anything can possibly happen to prevent papa going on Wednesday evening. In the mean time, make up your mind to be vanquished by Ogden Cryder. He really is enchanting.”

A MENTAL PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY.

After Helen left, Hermia went up to her room. There she did what she never failed to do the moment she entered her bedroom—walked over to the glass and looked at herself. She had not even yet got used to the idea of her beauty, and sometimes approached the mirror with dread lest her new self should prove a dream. She saw nothing to alarm her. A year’s dissipation had not impaired her looks. Excitement and good living agreed with her, and Miss Newton tyrannized over her like the hygienic duenna that she was.

She sank down on the floor before the long glass, resting her elbow on a cushion. Her crouching attitude reminded her of the women whose lines had fallen in days of barbaric splendor. It is not to be supposed for a moment that this effect was accidental. Hermia had determined, before she burst upon New York, that her peculiar individuality should be the suggestion of the untrammeled barbarian held in straining leash by the requirements of civilization. Her green eyes and tawny hair were the first requisites, and she managed her pliant body with a lithe grace which completed the semblance.

She wore to-day a tea-gown of Louis XIV. brocade and lace, and she watched herself with an amused smile. A year and a half ago her wardrobe had consisted of coarse serges and gingham aprons.

She put her head on the cushion, nestled her body into the feather rug, and in a vague, indolent way let her memory rove through the little photograph gallery in her brain set apart for the accumulations of the past twelve months. There were a great many photographs in that gallery, and their shapes and dimensions were as diverse as their subjects. Some were so large that they swept from floor to ceiling, although their surface might reflect but one impression; others were too small to catch the eye of the casual observer, and the imprint on them was like one touch of a water-colorist’s brush. Many pasteboards of medium size were there whose surfaces were crowded like an ant-hill at sundown; and pushed into corners or lying under a dust-heap were negatives, undeveloped and fading. At one end of the gallery was a great square plate, and on it there was no impression of any sort, nor ever had been.

Hermia pushed up her loose sleeve and pressed her face into the warm bend of her arm. On the whole, the past year had been almost satisfactory. A clever brain, an iron will, and a million dollars can do much, and that much Hermia’s combined gifts had accomplished.

She opened the windows of her photograph gallery and dusted out the cobwebs, then, beginning at the top, sauntered slowly down. She looked at her first appearance in the world of fashion. It is after the completion of her winter’s wardrobe by a bevy of famous tailors, and she wears a gown of light-gray cloth and a tiny bonnet of silvery birds. The début is in St. Mark’s; and as she walks up the center aisle to the Suydam pew, her form as straight as a young sapling, her head haughtily yet nonchalantly poised, every curve of her glove-fitting gown proclaiming the hand that cut it, Second Avenue catches its breath, raises its eyebrows, and exchanges glances of well-bred, aristocratic surprise. Late that week it calls, and this time is not repulsed, but goes away enchanted. It does not take long for the unseen town crier to flit from Second Avenue to Fifth, and one day his budget of news sends a ripple over the central stream. John Suydam’s heiress, a beautiful girl of twenty, with a style all her own, yet not violating a law of good form! The old red-brick house transformed into an enchanted palace, with a remarkably wide-awake princess, and a sacrifice to modern proprieties in the shape of a New England aunt! How unusual and romantic! yet all as it should be. We begin to remember poor Crosby Suydam and his charming young wife. We recall the magnificence of their entertainments in the house on lower Fifth Avenue—now resplendent with a milliner’s sign. Both dead? How sad! And to think that John Suydam had a million all the time! The old wretch! But how enchanting that he had the decency to leave it to this beautiful girl! We will call.

They do call; and a distant relative of Hermia’s father, Mrs. Cotton Dykman, comes forward with stately tread and gracious welcome and offers her services as social sponsor. Hermia accepts the offer with gratitude, and places her brougham at Mrs. Dykman’s disposal.

Mrs. Dykman is a widow approaching fifty, with lagging steps yet haughty mien. Her husband omitted to leave her more than a competence; but she lives in Washington Square in a house which was her husband’s grandfather’s, and holds her head so high and wears so much old lace and so many family diamonds (which she hid in the wall during the late Cotton’s lifetime) that the Four Hundred have long since got into the habit of forgetting her bank account. To her alone does Hermia confide the secret of her past external self and the methods of reconstruction, and Mrs. Dykman respects her ever after.

In a photograph near the head of the gallery Hermia and Mrs. Dykman are seated by the library fire, and Hermia is discoursing upon a question which has given her a good deal of thought.

“I want to be a New York society woman to my finger-tips,” she exclaims, sitting forward in her chair; “that is, I want to be au fait in every particular. I would not for the world be looked upon as an alien; but at the same time I want to be a distinctive figure in it. I want to be aggressively myself. The New York girl is of so marked a type, Aunt Frances, that you would know one if you met her in a Greek bandit’s cave. She is unlike anything else on the face of the earth. You cross the river to Brooklyn, you travel an hour and a half to Philadelphia, you do not see a woman who faintly resembles her unless she has been imported direct. The New York girl was never included in the scheme of creation. When the combined forces of a new civilization and the seven-leagued stride of democracy made her a necessity, Nature fashioned a mold differing in shape and tint from all others in her storehouse, and cast her in it. It is locked up in a chest and kept for her exclusive use. The mold is made of ivory, and the shape is long and straight and exceeding slim. There is a slight roundness about the bust, and a general neatness and trimness which are independent of attire. And each looks carefully fed and thoroughly groomed. Each has brightness in her eye and elasticity in her step. And through the cheek of each the blood flows in exactly the same red current about a little white island. Now all this is very charming, but then she lacks—just a little—individuality. And I must have my distinctive personality. There seems nothing left but to be eccentric. Tell me what line to take.”

Mrs. Dykman, who has been listening with a slight frown on her brow and a smile on her lips, replies in her low, measured accents, which a cataclysm could not accelerate nor sharpen: “My dear, before I answer your amusing tirade, let me once more endeavor to impress you with the importance of repose. You may be as beautiful and as original as your brains and will can make you, but without repose of manner you will be like an unfinished impressionist daub. Few American women have it unless they have lived in England; but I want you to take coals to Newcastle when you make your début in London society.

“In regard to the other question,” she continues, “experience and observation and thirty years of that treadmill we call society have taught me a good many things. One of these things is that eccentricity is the tacit acknowledgment of lack of individuality. A person with native originality does not feel the necessity of forcing it down people’s throats. The world finds it out soon enough, and likes it in spite of its own even pace and sharply defined creeds. That is, always provided the originality wears a certain conventional garb: if you would conquer the world, you must blind and humor it by donning its own portable envelope. Do you understand what I mean, my dear? You must not startle people by doing eccentric things; you must not get the reputation of being a poseuse—it is vulgar and tiresome. You must simply be quietly different from everybody else. There is a fine but decided line, my dear girl, between eccentricity and individuality, and you must keep your lorgnette upon it. Otherwise, people will laugh at you, just as they will be afraid of you if they discover that you are clever. By the way, you must not forget that last point. The average American woman is shallow, with an appearance of cleverness. You must be clever, with an appearance of shallowness. To the ordinary observer the effect is precisely the same.”

She rises to her feet and adjusts her bonnet. “It is growing late and I must go. Think over what I have said. You have individuality enough; you need not fear that people will fail to find it out; and you assuredly do not look like any one else in New York.”

Hermia stands up and gives Mrs. Dykman’s tournure a little twist. “You are a jewel, Aunt Frances. What should I do without you?”

Whereupon Mrs. Dykman looks pleased and goes home in Hermia’s brougham.

Hermia is fairly launched in society about the first of January, and goes “everywhere” until the end of the season. It gets to be somewhat monotonous toward the end, but, on the whole, she rather likes it. She is what is called a success; that is to say, she becomes a professional beauty, and is much written about in the society papers. She receives a great many flowers, constant and assiduous attention at balls, and her dancing is much admired. She gets plenty of compliments, and is much stared upon at the opera and when driving in the park. Her reception days and evenings are always crowded, and her entertainments—supervised by Mrs. Dykman and a valuable young man named Richard Winston—are pronounced without flaw, and receive special mention in the dailies.

And yet—Hermia rubbed her fingers thoughtfully up and down several of the pictures as if to make their figures clearer—in her heart she did not deem herself an unqualified success. Men ran after her—but because she was the fashion, not because they loved her.

During that first winter and the ensuing season at Newport, she had a great many proposals, but with two or three exceptions she believed them to have been more or less interested. She did not seem to “take” with men. This had angered her somewhat; she had expected to conquer the world, and she did not like obstacles.

She had an odd and voluptuous beauty, she had brain and all the advantages of unique and charming surroundings, and she flattered men when she remembered that it was the thing to do. Was it because the men felt rather than knew that they did not understand her? Or was it because she did not understand them? She was keenly aware of her lack of experience, and that her knowledge of men was chiefly derived from books. And wherein she was right and wherein wrong she could not tell.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose experience will come with time,” she thought, “and I certainly have not much to wish for—if—only—”

She clasped her hands behind her head and turned her mental eyeglass upon the unused plate at the head of the gallery.

When the news of her good fortune had come, her heart’s first leap had been toward the lover who awaited her in the world thrown at her feet. That lover, that hero of her dream-world, she had not found. Occasionally she had detected a minor characteristic in some man, and by it been momentarily attracted. In no case had the characteristic been supplemented by others; and after a long and eager search she had resigned herself to the painful probability that ideals belonged to the realm of the immaterial.

But, if she had sighed farewell to the faithful and much-enduring hero of her years of adversity, she had by no means relinquished the idea of loving. Few women had ever tried more determinedly and more persistently to love, and few had met with less success. She had imagined that in a world of men a woman’s only problem must be whom to choose. It had not taken her a year to discover that it is easier to scratch the earth from its molten heart than to love.

She sprang to her feet and walked up and down the room with swift, impatient steps. Was she never to be happy? never to know the delights of love, the warmth of a man’s caress, the sudden, tumultuous bursting from their underground fastness of the mighty forces within her? Was she to go through life without living her romance, without knowing the sweet, keen joy of hidden love? Would she end by marrying a club-room epigram flavored with absinthe, and settle down to a light or lurid variation on Bessie’s simple little theme? She laughed aloud. Perhaps it need not be stated that a year of fashionable life had increased her contempt for matrimony.

Was Ogden Cryder the man? An author, yet a man of the world; a man of intellect, yet with fascination and experience of women. It sounded like! It sounded like! Oh! if he were! He might have flaws. He might be the polaric opposite of her ideal. Let him! If he had brain and passion, skill and sympathy, she would love him with every fiber of her being, and thank him on her knees for compelling her so to do.

A TAILOR-MADE FATE.

Helen Simms was a young woman who had cantered gracefully under the flick of society’s whip since the night of her début. Occasionally she broke into a trot, and anon into a run. The speedier locomotion took place on unworn by-paths; when on the broad highway she was a most sedate representative of her riding-school. At times she had been known—to a select few—to kick; and the kick had invariably occurred at the crossing of the highway and the by-path, and just before she had made up her mind to forsake the road for the hedges.

She had all the virtues of her kind. On Sunday mornings she attended St. Thomas’s, and after service was over walked home with her favorite youth, whom she patronizingly spoke of as her “infant.” In the afternoon she entertained another “infant” or read a French novel. Nor was her life entirely given over to frivolity. She belonged to the sewing-class of her church, and like its other members fulfilled her mission as a quotable example, if she pricked her fingers seldom; and once a week she attended a Shakespeare “propounding.” She took a great deal of exercise, skimmed through all the light literature of the day, including the magazines, and even knew a little science, just enough to make the occasional clever man she met think her a prodigy as she smiled up into his face and murmured something about “the great body of force” or a late experiment in telepathy.

She had a bright way of saying nothing, a cool, shrewd head, and an endless stock of small-talk. Both sexes approved of her as a clever, charming, well-regulated young woman—all of which she indisputably was.

Enthusiasm had long since been drilled out of her, but she had for Hermia an attachment very sincere as far as it went—it may be added that, if there had been more of Miss Simms, there would have been more attachment. It is possible that Hermia, without her brilliant position, would not have attracted the attention of Miss Simms, but it is only just to Helen to say that the conditions affected her not a whit; she was quite free from snobbery.

She liked Hermia because she could not understand her—much as she was influenced by the sea in a storm, or by mountains with lightning darting about their crests. Whenever she entered Hermia’s presence she always felt as if the air had become suddenly fresher; and she liked new sensations. She did not in the least resent the fact that she could not understand Hermia, that her chosen friend was intellectually a hemisphere beyond her, and in character infinitely more complex. She was pleased at her own good taste, and quite generous enough to admire where she could not emulate.

She was constantly amused at Hermia’s abiding and aggressive desire to fall in love, but she was by no means unsympathetic. She would have regarded an emotional tumult in her own being as a bore, but for Hermia she thought it quite the most appropriate and advisable thing. Once in a while, in a half-blind way, she came into momentary contact with the supreme loneliness and craving of Hermia’s nature, and she invariably responded with a sympathetic throb and a wish that the coming man would not tarry so long.

She was so glad she had thought of Cryder. She honestly believed him to be the one man of all men who could make the happiness of her friend; and she entered the ranks of the Fates with the pleasurable suspicion that she was the author of Hermia’s infinite good.

She surprised her father, the morning after her last interview with Hermia, by coming down to breakfast. She was careful to let him finish his roll to the last crumb and to read his paper to the acrid end. Then she went over and put her finger-tips under his chin.

He glanced up with a groan. “What do you want now?” he demanded, looking at her over his eye-glasses. His periodical pettings had made him cynical.

“Nothing—for myself. Did you not say that some one had sent you tickets for the next meeting of the Free Discussion?”

“Yes; but you can’t have them to give to some girl who would only go to show herself, or to some boy whose thimbleful of gray matter would be addled before the lecture was half over. I am going to hear that lecture myself.”

“How perfectly enchanting! That is what I wished, yet dared not hope for. And you are not only going yourself, but you are going to take Hermia Suydam with you.”

“Oh!” Mr. Simms raised his eyebrows. “I am? Very well. I am sure I have no objection. Miss Suydam is the finest girl in New York.”

“Of course she is, and she will make a sensation at the club; you will be the envied of all men. And there is one thing else you are to do. As soon as the exercises are over I want you to present Ogden Cryder to her. I have particular reasons for wishing them to meet.”

“What are the reasons?”

“Never mind. You do as you are told, and ask no questions”—this in a tone which extracted the sting, and was supplemented by a light kiss on Mr. Simms’ smooth forehead.

“Very well, very well,” said her father, obediently, “she shall meet him; remind me of it just before I leave. And now I must run. I have a case in court at ten o’clock.”

He stood up and gave one of his handsome, iron-gray side-whiskers an absent caress. He was not a particularly good-looking man, but he had a keen, dark eye, and a square, heavy jaw, in both of which features lay the secret of his great success in his profession. He was devoted to Helen, and had allowed her, with only an occasional protest, to bring him up. He could be brusque and severe in court, but in Helen’s hands he was a wax ball into which she delighted to poke her dainty fingers.

Helen wrote a note to Hermia, and he took it with him to send by an unwinged Mercury.

On Friday morning Helen went over to Second Avenue to make sure that her friend had not changed her mind. She found Hermia in her boudoir, with one of Cryder’s books in her hand and another on a table beside her.

“What do you think of him?” demanded Miss Simms, somewhat anxiously, as she adjusted her steel-bound self in a pile of cushions—straight-backed chairs in this room there were none.

Hermia shrugged her shoulders: “A decorous seasoning of passion; a clear, delicate gravy of sentiment; a pinch of pathos; a garnish of analysis; and a solid roast of dialect. Woe is me!—I have read two whole volumes; and I pray that I may like the author better than his books. But he is clever; there is no denying that!”

“Oh, horribly clever! What are you going to wear, to-night?”

“That dark-green velvet I showed you the other day.”

“Lovely! And it will match your eyes to a shade. You will look, as usual, as if you had just stepped out of an old picture. Mr. Cryder will put you in a book.”

“If he does I shall be a modern picture, not an old one. That man could not write a tale of fifty years ago.”

“So much the better for you! What you want is to fall in love with a modern man, and let him teach you that the mediæval was a great animal, who thought of nothing but what he ate and drank. I do not claim that the species is extinct; but, at least, in these days we have a choice.”