Jewel Weed

Thus might they cry aloud, if they were condemned to proclaim their sins, like the long banner of bat-like souls that Dante saw passing in similar fashion beneath his eye.

And yet, in spite of its monotony, humanity is perennially interesting to itself. Therefore among the strenuous, the hurrying, and the anxious-eyed, one girl loitered on dilatory foot from wide window to wide window.

“Girl” seems an inadequate word to describe Lena Quincy. It may be applied to any youthful feminine person, and Lena, in spite of her carefully-groomed shabbiness, was by no means one of the herd. She affected one like a bit of Tiffany glass, shimmering, iridescent, ethereal; and no ugliness in her surroundings could take away that impression.

Every one who looked at her at all looked twice. She had grown so used to this tribute that it hardly affected her unless it came from one who merited her interest in return.

Now she was wandering from one to another of the ladies with the waxen faces, the waxen hands and the wooden hearts, who gazed back unmoved from behind their plate-glass; though it was not the fixed and amiable smiles of the lay-figures that caught her attention, but rather the curious way in which this one’s braid was laid on the gown, or the new device in buttons, there beyond.

Now she turned and studied the human flux in front. She was not shopping, save in sweet imagination. This was her theater, and she was fain to make the show last as long as possible. Her absorbent gaze saw everything. Yet it was selective too, for it passed swiftly over the chaff of the shabby and fixed itself on the wheat of the properly gowned. Sometimes she wove romances about her swiftly-disappearing actors, romances not of heart and soul but of garments, of splendors and of money; but even such entrancing tissues of her brain vanished like pricked soap-bubbles when there passed in the body one of those select few whose skirts proclaimed perfection. Could dreams stand against reality? Yet the dreams were blissful, though, when they were gone, the girl was left steeped in the bitterness of envy.

It is said that there is a consolation in being well-dressed that religion itself can not afford. It is to be remembered that there is also the pharisaism which always forms a hard shell about every kernel of religion; and the pharisaism of the correct costume is the most complacent of all forms of self-righteousness. Lena’s lips grew positively pale as she saw it pass, drawing its rustling petticoats close to its side. She hungered and thirsted for this form of righteousness.

It was early April, and there was a savage nip in the air, for Winter shook his fist at the world long after he dared to come out of his lair. Spring refused to sit in his lap for more than an instant, but leaped from that affectionate position, ashamed of her intimacy with the hoary sinner, and the buds swelled slowly and swelled exceeding small.

Other women hurried, but Lena did not feel the cold except when she saw a set of magnificent Russian sables with a cordial invitation to “Buy now”. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears at her own impotence. Why had God created her such as she was and then denied her the perquisites of her desires? It was as though nature should make the heart of a rose and should leave off all the out-shaken wealth of petals, whose reflected lights and shadows make the flower’s heart lovely.

With the mist clearing from her eyes Lena walked onward to the next big sheet of glass, and looked through a wealth of Easter hats and bonnets at the mirror that was meant to manifold their charms. She did not see the millinery, but there was comfort in the really good glass, not like her parody at home which cast a pale green tinge over a distorted image.

On Lena nature had really spent herself. The very texture of her skin made the fingers itch to caress its transparent delicacy that let through a tender flush. Every curve of her body suggested hidden beauty, and the way she turned her head on her shoulders left one feeling how music and painting fall short of expressing the loveliest loveliness. But, having accomplished a miracle, fate had left it without a meaning and thrown it on an ash heap. No wonder that it resented its position.

Every man who passed Lena on the street looked at her; some of them spoke to her; but she was possessed of a self-respect that kept her from responding to such overtures. She prided herself on her virtue. Certain it was that the admiration of the other sex never set her vibrating with delicate emotions, never increased by a single beat the pulses of her heart, except when it suggested some definite benefit to herself. With reason, Lena congratulated herself on her firm resistence to the many-formed temptations that come to beauty housed with poverty.

Now, as she looked in the milliner’s glass, she saw her own face, rose-like and delicate. She saw the great violet eyes, so innocent that they almost persuaded herself, as they did others, that some creature more celestial than ordinary humanity wondered from behind them at the world. She saw the fair soft curls that clung about her forehead, and the sight of these things gave a momentary peace to her soul. Then she surveyed the dingy felt hat that rested brutally on the silken wonder of her hair, and rebellion rose again.

“It’s a comfort that my collar fits so well,” she reassured herself. “After all, there is nothing more important than a collar. I don’t look in the least ‘common’.”

Among the hats stood a photograph of a popular actress, pert and pretty. The sight of it sent Lena’s thoughts afield into new wastes of bitterness.

The idea of the stage had once come to her like an inspiration. Nothing could be more easy and natural to her than to act; nothing more delectable than the tribute paid to the star. Money, flowing gowns, footlights, tumults of applause had seemed inevitable. Lena shivered now, with something else than cold inside her flimsy jacket, as she remembered the crumbling of her dream. She saw again the fat man with the sensual mouth who had given her a job; and felt again her tingling resentment when she found how small the part was, and how poorly paid. She remembered how she had held herself aloof from the other girls, who, like herself, had trivial parts, and how they had snubbed her in return; how even the little that she did was made ridiculous through the trick of a hook-nosed, gum-chewing rival, and how the first audience that she faced had tittered at her stumble. A wave of heat succeeded the shiver at this point in her remembrance. Then she recalled her impertinent answer to the vituperation of the manager, and how he had sworn at her for a damned minx, who thought herself a professional beauty.

“Vulgar! Vulgar! Vulgar!” she said to herself in impotent anger. She wished they could all know how she despised them. For she could act! She was still sure that she could play any part—except that of patient endurance. Yet, so far, hardship was all that life had offered her. A chance! That was it. So far, she had never had a ghost of a chance. Would fate—or luck—or Providence—or whatever it is that rules, never give her a turn of the wheel?

Next to the art of the milliner was displayed the art, less interesting to Lena, of the brush. Before the picture store a span of horses shook their jingling harness, and a brightly-buttoned coachman waited, with impassive face turned steadily to the front. There came from the doorway a girl who was lifted above the pharisaism of clothes into the purer ether. She was calm-eyed and well-poised, and Lena hated her for the rest of her life for her obliviousness of the sordid. Behind her walked a young man who now opened the carriage door and lingered a moment and laughed as he talked with the girl who had taken her seat. Lena involuntarily drew her feet closer beneath her skirts that no careless glance of that girl should fall upon their shabbiness. She looked at the man as she looked at the Russian sables. He was a type of that delectable world from which she was shut out.

“I should be ashamed to be silly about fellows, the way some girls are,” was her inward comment. “But I’d just like to have people see me with a thing like that dangling around me. And I shall, some time. I’m a whole heap prettier than she is.”

The carriage door shut abruptly. Lena’s too thin boots, out of plumb, suddenly slipped on a half-formed piece of ice. She made a desperate grab at the smooth surface of the window and then came ignominiously down—not wholly ignominiously, however, since her accident brought to her aid the man who was a type.

She didn’t have to stop to consider that the man would notice neither her hat nor her boots. She knew it instinctively and instantly. But the rose-petal face and the big eyes were overwhelmingly present to her consciousness. She saw them reflected in the look on his face as he bent over her.

“I hope you’re not hurt.”

“Not in the least. Only humiliated.” Lena smiled, because people are always attracted by cheerfulness.

“You are sure you have not twisted your ankle?” he insisted.

“Nothing but my hat and my hair,” she pouted. “Thank you for coming to my rescue.”

“It wasn’t much of a rescue,” he said.

“Are you sorry I didn’t have a tragedy and give you a chance to play hero?” she inquired naïvely.

“When you are in need, may I be the one to help?” he said with growing boldness.

Lena flushed and nodded as he lifted his hat and was gone. She walked slowly homeward, actually forgetting to stop at her favorite window in the lace store, so occupied was she with the latest story she was telling herself. It was a story in which a large house with soft rugs and becoming pink lights occupied the foreground, and somewhere in the background hovered a man who was a type and who loved to spend money on diamonds. The vision was so lovable that she lived with it all the way, even through the narrow entrance of the lodging-house and up the narrow stairs, saturated with obsolete smells—smells of dead dinners—to the very instant when she opened the upper door and faced bald reality and her mother. Mrs. Quincy sat by the window in a room on the walls of which the word “shabby” was written in a handwriting as plain, and in language far simpler than ever Belshazzar saw on the walls of Babylon. It fairly cried itself from the big-figured paper, peeling along its edges; from the worn painted floor; from the frayed rug of now patternless carpet; from the sideboard that looked like a parlor organ. Even from the closet door it whispered that there was more shabbiness hidden in the depths.

Mrs. Quincy herself was a part of it, for she was to Lena what the faded rose is to the opening one, a once beautiful woman, whose skin now looked like wrinkled cream.

Lena shut the door and came in without speaking. She flung her hat and coat on the bed in the corner, where a forlorn counterpane showed by the hollows and hills beneath that it had given up all attempt to play even. The girl sat down listlessly with her hands in her lap.

“You’ve been gone a long time, Lena,” said the mother in a delicately querulous voice. “You’re fortunate to be able to get out instead of being cooped up in this little room the way I am.” Mrs. Quincy coughed with conscious pathos. “I sometimes wonder if you ever think of your poor mother and how lonely she is most of the time. But I’d ought to be used to people’s always forgetting me.”

“Much I have to come home to!” Lena answered. “You’re about as cheerful as barbed wire. But you can comfort yourself! I shan’t be able to go out at all much longer, any way.”

“Why, what’s the matter now?”

“Do you expect me to wear a felt hat all summer?” Lena asked sharply. “I’m ashamed to be seen in that old thing and I should think you’d be ashamed to be so stingy with me.”

Her mother sighed and lapsed into the creaking comfort of her rocking-chair.

“I ain’t stingy,” she said at last. “But if you had your way you’d spend every last cent of the pension the very day it comes. I’ve got to look out we don’t starve. If you’d only make up your mind to work and earn a little instead of livin’ so pinched! I’m sure I’d work if I could. But there! there ain’t nothing for me to do but to set and suffer, and nobody knows what I endure.”

“I wasn’t born to be a working girl,” said Lena sullenly. “I’ve got the blood of a lady if I haven’t got the clothes of one.”

“Well, when it comes to eating and drinking, blood don’t count much. Everybody’s got the same appetite.”

“No, everybody hasn’t,” retorted the girl. “I haven’t any appetite for canned baked-beans and liver.”

“You eat them, anyway.”

“I know it, worse luck!”

There was a tingling silence for a moment and then Lena spoke with sudden energy.

“Mother, what can I do? I’m not one of those girls who can go ahead and don’t care. I haven’t been brought up as they have. The only thing you’ve taught me is that my father was a gentleman and that I am a beauty. And what good does that do me?”

“Teachin’ is respectable.”

“I can’t teach. I couldn’t pass a teacher’s examination to save my life. I don’t know how to do anything. And I won’t sink below the level of decent society. I’d starve first. Do you suppose I haven’t thought it all over a hundred times?”

“You can sew very nicely. I’m sure everything you make has real style.”

“Go into a shop at starvation wages to make pretty things for other girls to wear? I stopped along near Madame Cerise’s to-day and looked at some of the girls near the window, with their hair all lanky and their faces sunk in, working for dear life on finery. Mother, is that what you want for me?”

There was hungry appeal in Lena’s voice, that some mothers would have felt; but Mrs. Quincy was not on the lookout for other people’s shades of emotion.

“Well, if you’d any sense you’d take Joe Nolan, as I’ve told you fifty times if I’ve told you once. He’s got real good wages, and you could twist him around your little finger.”

Lena’s teeth came together with a click.

“Joe! Well, perhaps, when there’s nothing else left but the poorhouse. It’s pretty tough if I have to marry a mechanic.”

“Joe’s a good deal of a man. He won’t always be a mechanic, Lena. He’s got too much ambition.”

“He may, or he may not. Anyway, he’ll bear the marks of a mechanic all his days. I’m not his kind.”

Lena rose and went across the room to lean on the little dressing-table and survey herself in the old green glass. This was her panacea for every woe. The little pucker in her forehead straightened itself out.

“Look at me, mother,” she demanded, turning around. “Do you think all this is meant to scrub and sew and cook for the foreman in locomotive works? Because I don’t.”

She was smiling, but her mother did not smile in return.

“I believe I was most as pretty as you are when I was a girl,” Mrs. Quincy said. “And that was all the good it did. I thought I was making a grand marriage when I got your father; but he seemed to sort of flatten out and lose all his ambition after we was married. He didn’t seem to care about anything, though I used to give him my opinion pretty plain. And it’s mighty little he left me when he was took,” she added vindictively.

Her daughter eyed her speculatively.

“Well, I’m not going to be taken in the way you were,” she said sharply. “You thought a good old name and a promising career were enough; and father didn’t keep his promises. I want money and not the promise of money.”

“And where will you find him?” sniffed Mrs. Quincy, to whom “it” and “he” were synonymous. “I don’t notice any millionaires crowding up to you, for all your big eyes and your great opinion of yourself.”

“That’s just it. If I could only meet them!” Lena got up and walked restlessly about the room. Her eyes fell on the last night’s copy of the Star, opened to that chatty column headed “Woman’s Fancies”. She had read it with absorbed interest. Her body halted now, for the muscles often stop work when the mind becomes possessed of a great idea. She stood for a long time and looked from the unwashed window-pane while a new resolve slowly hardened itself within.

“I’ll try, I’ll try, I’ll try,” she said to herself, and her heart thumped uncomfortably. “And if I take it to the office myself, when they see me perhaps they—”

Aloud she said nothing, for she had early learned the great lesson that the best way of getting her own will with her mother was to do what she wished first and argue about it afterward.

“What have we got for supper, mother?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Mrs. Quincy sharply.

“Nothing? Well, give me some money and let me go and get something.”

Mrs. Quincy reluctantly lifted her skirt and began to explore her petticoat below. She shook open the mouth of a pocket into which she dived to return with a knotted handkerchief. Lena looked on impatiently as the knot was slowly untied and a small hoard of silver disclosed.

“There,” said Mrs. Quincy. “You can take this quarter, Lena, and do get something nourishing. Don’t buy cream-cakes. I feel the need of what will stay my stomach.”

“I’ll get baked-beans,” answered the girl with a short laugh.

“Yes, do. I shan’t have another cent till next pay-day comes. We’ve got to make this last. Get some tea, Lena—green, remember. The beans won’t cost more than twelve cents. I don’t see how you can have a new hat.”

“Well, give me ten cents, anyway,” Lena answered with unexpected submission.

“What do you want it for?”

“Please, mammy,” Lena said coaxingly. “I won’t buy cream-cakes or anything to eat. I want to invest in a gold mine.”

Mrs. Quincy gave her a sharp look and grudgingly handed out a dime; for Lena’s voice was instinct with hope, and hope was such a rare visitor in the dingy little lodgings that Mrs. Quincy grew generous under its magnetic warmth.

“Now what’d you want that ten cents for?” she asked curiously when the girl came back. “My land! Only paper and pencil? I thought you was going to do something grand.”

“Hello, yourself!” said Norris. “You announce yourself like a telephone girl. Come in. What do you mean by troubling the quiet waters of my daily toil?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Dick politely. “If you are busy I—”

“That’s all right. Miss Quincy and I can postpone our confab without inconveniencing the order of the universe.” Miss Quincy was already gathering her notes, and she smiled at Dick in a half-shy way that said, “I remember you very plainly.” As she disappeared slowly down the hall, Dick started after her.

“Great Scott, Ellery!” he ejaculated. “How you have lied to me about the grubbiness of your work! If this is your daily grind, I don’t mind having a whirl at the editorial profession myself.”

Norris laughed.

“It isn’t the sum total of my duties,” he said.

“Who is Hebe?” asked Dick.

“Well, she’s rather a problem,” Ellery replied. “I believe she appeared a few weeks ago at Miss Huntress’ office—the woman editor, you know—with a catchy little article on fashions. It happened that the boss was in the office, and we consider it rather a grind on him, for he was much taken by either the article or the eyes, and she got a little job as a sort of reportorial maid-of-all-work. Funny, isn’t it? If a man is buying a rug, he wouldn’t think of deciding on it because it was green, without testing its wearing qualities; but in nine cases out of ten a girl gets chosen because of her eyes. That’s all I know about her. Pretty, isn’t she?”

“Pretty! Is that all the command you have of your native language? You ought to lose your job for that. Why she’s—never mind—I haven’t time now.”

“Neither have I,” answered Norris sharply. He remembered that long ago Dick had called Madeline pretty. It is a cheap and easy word. “I haven’t time for you, either. Will you go away; or will you keep still while I finish this work?”

“Waltz away.” Dick sat down on the window-sill and fell into a meditative state of mind. Once or twice he walked to the door and looked down the hall, while Norris plugged steadily away and ignored the presence of his friend.

After a prolonged silence, Dick spoke again, solemnly:

“I should like to meet her.”

“Whom?”

“Miss—Quincy, did you call her?”

“Oh! Isn’t she rather out of your class?”

“Pshaw! Don’t talk of classes, now that you’re out of college. Do you know anything about her?”

“Nothing,” said Ellery shortly. “I don’t consider it my business to go beyond my official relations.”

“Well, I haven’t any business relations not to go beyond,” said Dick. “So I mean to pursue the inquiry.”

“Do as you like,” Ellery answered. “Is that what you came down here to talk about?”

“No,” said Dick, changing his manner. “I came to talk up an editorial campaign. You don’t know my chum, Olaf Ericson, do you? He’s the biggest man on the force, and he’s a corker. I’ve learned more from him about bad smells than I did in two years of chemistry at New Haven. He knows this town from the seventh sub-cellar up, and ‘him and me is great friends’. Seriously, Norris, I’ve begun to get hold of just the facts I wanted about ‘the combine’, and it’s information that is so very definite and to the point that I believe I can make it hot for them. I want the public to be kept informed on everything that is to their discredit. Now the Star is a fairly clean paper, as papers go. I want help.”

“You’ll have to go up higher for that, my boy. It’s not for a freshman like myself to direct the policy of the paper. It would be a pretty serious matter to run up against those fellows. Mr. Lewis, the old man, is out, but when he comes back we’ll go and have a talk with him.”

“Talk to him! I should think so!” Dick exclaimed, and he began to pace the room and pour out the floods of his information, in wrath of soul and glow of spirits at his resolve to clean things up.

Meanwhile in Miss Huntress’ office, farther down the hall, Lena was discussing with that determined person the possibility of supplying the public with more of the kind of literature for which women, in particular, are supposed to have a mad desire. Miss Huntress was an adept at filling her page with personalities by which those who know nobody may have almost as great a knowledge of the great as those who have achieved the proud distinction of being “in it”. Lena had written a highly successful series of articles on “St. Etienne as seen from the shop windows,” and she longed for new and similar fields to conquer.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Miss Huntress, “if you couldn’t get up some catchy little things on private libraries and picture galleries. If you can raise some photographs to go with them, you might make quite a hit. That’s the kind of thing that takes. You see it makes people able to talk about the inside of rich folk’s houses.”

“I suppose you would want me to begin with Mr. Early,” said Lena, hardly knowing what reply to make.

“Never mind Mr. Early. Everybody knows just what he’s got and how his place looks. You might include him later, but I should start with people who are more exclusive and yet whose names everybody knows. Now there’s Mr. Windsor and Mrs. Percival. By the way, Mr. Norris is awfully intimate at the Percivals’. Perhaps he’d help you to an introduction. If Mrs. Percival would let you write up her library, you may be sure there’d be a lot of others who would follow her example. You might try it, anyway. Go and see her. Tell her what a hard time you are having to earn your own living. Your looks will carry you a long way.”

“I think young Mr. Percival is in Mr. Norris’ office now. Some one came in while I was there and I think he called him Percival,” said Lena faintly.

“Say! is that so?” exclaimed Miss Huntress. “Now’s your chance! Go in and ask while he’s there. He’ll find it hard to refuse to your face.”

“You go,” interposed Lena. “If I go, it will look as though I knew. But you can walk in all innocent.”

Therefore the conversation on matters which were to change the destiny of a city was interrupted by a smart knock on the assistant editor’s door, and Miss Huntress, eminently self-possessed, walked in on the two young men.

“Beg pardon, Mr. Norris, I didn’t know you had any one here,” she began. “But I won’t keep you a moment. The truth is, I want a series of articles on the private libraries of the city, and, knowing that you are acquainted with Mrs. Percival, I thought you’d help the paper to an opening there.”

“Let me introduce Mr. Percival,” said Norris. “He can give you more information than I can.”

“Well, this is lucky!” ejaculated Miss Huntress.

“Our library isn’t a show affair,” Dick said stiffly. “My mother, I am sure, would be very unwilling to submit to that kind of a write-up. My father was a book-lover, not a book-fancier. It’s essentially a private collection.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way about it,” Miss Huntress rejoined equably. “Of course, nowadays, I can’t admit that there’s any such thing as privacy. And it isn’t only that I want the articles, Mr. Percival. I want to help along a girl that needs the work, and an awfully nice girl she is. We haven’t any regular job for her, and all I can do is to throw odd bits of work in her way. She has an old mother to support, and it would be a real charity to her if you’d look at it in that light. Miss Quincy is a perfect lady, and you may be sure she’d take no advantage of you to write up anything sensational or impertinent.”

Dick started and glanced consciously at Norris, who grinned back.

“Of course that puts another light on it,” Mr. Percival said after a decent pause, and trying to compose his face to a judicial expression. “I’d hate to put a stumbling-block in the way of a girl like that. Ah-um—I’ll speak to my mother about it, Miss Huntress, and I dare say I can persuade her to allow it.”

“That’s very good of you,” Miss Huntress answered,—with sad comprehension that a complexion like Lena’s was a great aid to a literary career. “You couldn’t manage to let Miss Quincy go up this afternoon, could you?” she went on with characteristic energy in pushing an advantage. “It would be a good thing if she could get her first stuff ready for the Saturday-night issue.”

“My mother, I suppose, is driving this afternoon,” Dick said hesitatingly. He went through a hasty calculation and saw reasons for cutting out certain of his own engagements. “See here, Miss Huntress, if you’re in such a hurry, I don’t mind taking Miss Quincy up and telling her what I know about old editions and rare folios. I’ll make it right with mother afterward.”

Miss Huntress’ face cleared perceptibly.

“You’re awfully good, Mr. Percival. Won’t you come down to my office now, and I’ll introduce you to Miss Quincy? This is a real favor.” Dick shot a glance of triumph at Ellery, believing himself a skilled sly dog of a manipulator, and not knowing that he was the manipulated. Norris spoke in scorn.

“I suppose righteousness and reform can wait now.”

“You can bet they will. I’ll call on you to-morrow afternoon, Norris.”

“That’s the usual fate of reform. Don’t be a fool, Dick.” But Dick was already disappearing down the corridor in pursuit of the able woman editor.

The girl waiting in the disordered office looked more than ever like a bridesmaid rose, pink and ruffled and out of its proper setting, as she saw Mr. Percival coming.

“Miss Quincy,” said Dick, “I have a motor down stairs, and I’ll take you up to the house right away, if you don’t mind.”

If she didn’t mind!

When youth starts out to revolutionize the world, it meets with many distractions. Even in the hour that Dick spent in the quiet old library with Miss Quincy, he met with distractions. He tried to keep her mind on missals and Aldine editions, but she persisted in poring over old copies of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which she found tucked away in a forgotten corner. Nobody but Lena could have scented them out.

“The fashions are so funny, Mr. Percival!” she insisted. “Do look at these preposterous hoop-skirts and the little short waists. Did you say that no one knows how that gold leaf was put on that ugly old book? How absurd! I must put that down. I suppose that is the kind of thing I have to write up.”

“Be sure you don’t get mixed up and describe monkish fichus and gold leaf on the bias, or you’ll be everlastingly disgraced in the office.”

“Never mind. I’ll learn your horrid old pieces of information in a few minutes. Do let me look at this a little longer,” Lena answered so prettily, and pointed with so dainty a finger, and glanced up so pathetically, that Dick too became absorbed in Godey’s Lady’s Book.

“Weren’t they frightful guys?” Lena went on. “But I dare say the men of that time—what is the date?—1862—thought they were lovely.”

“Very likely, poor men! You see they hadn’t the privilege of knowing the girls of to-day and they thought their own women were the top-notch.”

“Now you are horrid and sarcastic,” said Lena.

“Never a bit. I find it impossible to believe that there was ever before so much beauty in the world. There was here and there a pretty girl, like Helen of Troy, and they made an awful fuss over her.”

“But she must have been really wonderful.”

“Yes, if a girl is as much run after as that, she must either be a raving beauty or else she lives in the far West.”

“But, you know, there aren’t so very many real beauties nowadays, are there?” She glanced sidewise at him in an adorable manner.

“I can’t remember more than one—or two,” said Dick judicially.

Lena laughed softly.

“I think it must have been very nice to be one of the few and be made a fuss over, instead of—”

“Instead of what?”

“Instead of having to grub and struggle for your bread,” Lena answered,—and there was a misty look in the big eyes she turned up to him.

“Poor little girl!” said Dick. “You certainly are not of the kind who ought to battle with the world. Haven’t you any man who could shelter you a little?”

Lena shook her head, with an air of patient suffering.

“My father is dead,” she said. “He was of a good family, as you might know by my name, but he was wounded in the war, and he never got over it. Of course he was very young then. He wasn’t married till long afterward. He died when I was a little thing.”

“That was the history of my father, too!” Dick felt a glow of kindred experience. “See, that is his portrait over the mantel.”

Lena looked very lovely and spiritual as she gazed up at the quiet face that looked back at her, and Dick watched her. Then she drew a full breath and turned her eyes on him.

“You are like him,” she said softly, and something in her voice made the words a thrilling tribute.

Then she added: “Yes, but he left you in comfort, and we—my mother and I—”

“Will you let me come to see your mother some time?”

Lena’s heart beat fast with mingled fear and hope, but all Dick saw was a startled and sweet surprise.

“I should be almost ashamed to have you come,” she said with a soft blush and a look of shy invitation. “We are so poor and we live in such a shabby place.”

“If your shabbiness comes because of your father’s sacrifice for his country it is something to be proud of,” Dick answered.

Through Lena’s mind there passed a swift memory of quarrels and bickerings, of daily smallnesses, which were her chief recollection of her father. She looked frankly up into Dick’s face.

“Yes,” she said. “That ought to make it easy to bear. Now I must not talk about myself any more. What did you tell me about that funny old book?”

“And I may come to see you and your mother?” Dick persisted.

“If you do not forget us to-morrow,”—Lena glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes in a way calculated to make him remember.

“I shan’t forget,” said Dick.

He took out a small note-book and wrote down the address she gave him. And she gave herself a little shake and pulled out a much larger note-book. “I ought not to waste my time and yours this way, but, you see, I’m not much of a business woman. I sometimes forget altogether.”

Dick thought her very preposterous and charming as she set to work with an air of severity; and so she was—the last thing on earth made to do serious work. They leaned together over one treasure after another, in that electric nearness that moves youth so easily, and sends a tingling sensation up the backbone.

When she suddenly rose, her cheeks were pinker and more transparent than ever, and her eyes softer and dreamier.

“Let me take you home in the motor,” said Dick.

“Dear me, no,” Lena exclaimed. “I’m afraid you think me entirely too informal already. I—I’m so stupid and impulsive. I’m always doing wrong things and not thinking till afterward. Good-by, and thank you, Mr. Percival.”

After he had bowed her out, Dick plunged into a big chair and spent a few moments in analyzing his own character. He perceived that in some ways he differed from most of his friends. Now Ellery and Madeline and most of the others lived along certain conventional lines, with certain fixed interests and habits. That kind of existence would be intolerable to him. He liked to star his days with all kinds of colored incidents that had no particular relation to his main work. He liked to run down every by-path, explore it a bit, and then come back to the highway. Those small excursions were apt to take a man into leafy dells where there were ferns and flowers too shy to fringe the dusty plodding thoroughfare. Dick liked that figure. It revealed to him a certain lightness of heart and poetry in himself that distinguished him from the prosy grubbers. This sprinkling of life with episodes was like a little tonic. It kept him vivid and alive.

Take this very afternoon just passed. It meant little, of course, either to him or to the pretty little pathetic reporter girl, but it had injected a bit of pleasure into her routine, and given him an insight into another kind of maiden from the well-kept, sheltered women he knew best. Such things help a man’s larger sympathies. He was glad that he could enjoy many types of men and women.

A rumble of wheels outside brought him out of this particular by-path into the highway.

“What a dispensation that the mater didn’t come home in the middle of it!” he said with a sigh of satisfaction.

“And you call yourself a true citizen of St. Etienne? Come with me and see the populace chew gum amid scenes of natural beauty.”

“I thought we were going to agitate civic reform.”

“We’ll agitate as we go along. Come, Ellery, it’s a superb day. I feel like the bursting buds. Let’s get out.”

“My dear Dick,” said Norris, “the trouble with you is that you never want to do anything; you always want to do something else. I begin to think that there are compensations to a man in having fate hold his nose to the grindstone. He learns persistence, willy-nilly.”

“Stop your growling. Up, William, up, and quit your galley-proof. I am willing to bet that my flashes in the pan will do things before I am through.”

“I dare swear they will get way ahead of my grubbing,” Ellery rejoined, slamming his desk. “Come, I’ll go with you.”

On the southern outskirts of the city lay a park where art had done no more than retouch nature. Here a placid stream suddenly transformed itself into an imposing waterfall, plunging with roars over a rocky cliff, and sending its spray whirling high in air to paint a hundred illusive rainbows amid outstretching tree-branches or against a somber background of stone.

Dick left his motor near the brink of the cliff above the Falls and the two climbed down the steep bank, stopping now and again to yield to the fascination of rushing water and to snuff the fresh-flying mist as it swept into their faces.

Caught in the gully below, the stream, which had suddenly contracted a habit of unruliness, tumbled onward under trees and through overhanging rocks until it joined the Mississippi a half-mile away.

There were other people, hordes of them, tempted by May sunshine.

“What is it, Ellery,” Dick demanded, “what deep-seated idealism is it that draws these crowds to the most beautiful spot near town as soon as spring offers more than half an invitation?”

“It certainly isn’t a poetry that crops out in their clothes or in their conversation,” Norris grumbled. “The staple remark seems to be, ‘Gee, ain’t it pretty?’”

“You mustn’t expect to see aristocracy here; this is too cheap, and too easy to reach. Your aristocrat prefers less beauty at greater effort and more cost. This is the place to touch elbows with the populace.”

They had climbed down the long winding steps by this time, and were leaning against the parapet of a small rustic bridge that crossed below the Falls.

“Let’s sit down on that bench,” said Dick, “and let the sunshine trickle through the trees and through us, and feel the spray in our nostrils, and delight in hanging maidenhair ferns, and watch the girls go by—the girls in pink and blue dresses, each leaning on the arm of a swain who grins. It’s vastly more fun than a fashionable parade.”

The branches met overhead, darkening the narrow chasm; the steep banks were spattered with dutchman’s breeches that fluttered like butterflies poised for a moment; down stream a few yards, where the valley widened, lay a tiny meadow where the sun fell full on a carpet of crow-foot violets that gave back the May sky. Two squirrels chased each other around a big maple, and a blue jay looked on and commented.

“Why is this stream of girls and men out for their holiday like baked ice-cream?” asked Dick. “That isn’t a conundrum; it’s a philosophic question.”

“I know, they give you the same sense of incongruity,” Ellery answered lazily.

“But I like them,” Dick pursued. “I like a great many more kinds of people than you do, Norris. You are narrow-minded. You want to associate only with the good and true and bathed.”

“Oh, I wish well to the majority of the race, but there are some that I do not care to eat with.”

Something in Ellery’s voice made his friend turn and survey him.

“You look tired. You’re working too hard. Don’t make the western mistake of thinking frazzled nerves mean energy.”

“That isn’t my kind,” Ellery smiled. “I’m all right. Let me spurt for a while. I got my position through favor, Dick, yours and Uncle Joe’s. I didn’t particularly deserve it, and I didn’t know anything about the work; so, for your sake as well as my own, I have determined to make good. Friendship may give a fellow his chance, but it doesn’t hold down a job, you know.”

“Pooh! You’ve made good already. A man can be tremendously experienced—for the West—when he’s been at a thing a year. Look at me and my work.”

“What do you consider your work? Road inspector?” For, to tell the truth, Norris was not wholly satisfied with Dick’s year of dawdling around the streets.

“My profession,” Dick answered with oracular gravity, “is a combination of hard work and fine art. It requires both toil and genius. I think I may say, with all natural modesty, that I have shown great natural aptitude for it. My profession is making friends. I have made friends useful and ornamental, friends great and small, friends beautiful and friends the opposite—which reminds me of your previous question, city politics. Whom do you suppose I supped with last night?”

“Whom?”

“With the Honorable, or by courtesy dubbed Honorable, William Barry,” Dick replied triumphantly.

“‘Piggy’ Barry?” ejaculated Ellery, turning on Dick in surprise. “Alderman Barry? The boss?”

“‘Piggy’ does somehow sound more appropriate than ‘Honorable’,” Dick said meditatively.

“And is he one of the people you like?” questioned Ellery with unfeigned surprise.

“For business purposes, yes. If I’m going to get into politics some day, it becomes me to cultivate local statesmen, doesn’t it? I took the great man to the theater, or at least to something that called itself the theater, and I gave him an excellent supper afterward. He seemed to appreciate it and my society.”

“I dare say you made yourself agreeable. Do you expect he will help you in your public career?”

“Not voluntarily, perhaps; but I wanted to know him, better and better. Under benign influences, he is indiscreet. He reminded me last night of Louis XIV. He might have said, ‘St. Etienne, it is I,’ but in his simpler and less sophisticated language, he was content to remark, ‘I’m the whole damn show, see?’”

“I’m glad he knew enough to put the appropriate adjective before show,” said Ellery grimly.

“And yet I suspect that, even in that statement, he lied,” Dick went on. “I studied him last night. You’ll never persuade me that that man, whose head is all face and neck, does the intricate planning and wire-pulling that runs this city. I’ve an idea Barry is only the two placards on each side of the sandwich-man. He may be the adjective show, but I doubt if he’s the man.”

“Have you discovered who is the real sandwich-man?”

“No, I haven’t. My reasoning is inductive. I see numerous little holes with small tips of threads sticking through them, but when I try to get hold of the threads to pull them out and examine them, the ends are too short or my fingers are too big. But get hold of them I shall, sooner or later, by hook or crook. If I don’t give some of those fellows the slugging of their lives, my name isn’t Richard Percival.”

“I suspect that it is Richard Percival,” said Ellery with a whimsical glance of affection.

“This, as I read it, is the history,” Dick went on. “Six years ago, when you and I were sub-freshmen, and unable to take an active part, there was a brief spasm of reform. It was a short episode of fisticuffs and fighting, which is for a day—a very different thing from governing, which goes steadily on from year to year. But this reform movement did result in giving the city a good charter.”

“The Garden of Eden was once fitted out with an excellent system of government.”

“Exactly. Charters, left to themselves, do not regulate human nature. The good citizens of St. Etienne went their own busy business way and left the less occupied bad citizens to adapt the charter to the needs of life; and that was an easy job, so easy that it has apparently been possible for one man to manage it. The charter put great power into the hands of the mayor. There have been three mayors elected under it, and they have all been ‘friends’ of Billy Barry.”

“I wonder if the next will be,” queried Ellery thoughtfully.

“And the majority of every working committee appointed by the city council is made of ‘friends’ of Piggy, who shows a fine disregard of party lines in his affiliations. William is one more product of this horseless wireless age—a crownless king.”

“What makes you think that he isn’t the power he seems?”

“A lot of things. The business interests behind him do not seem to be wholly his. That is another field for investigation.”

“You started yesterday to tell me about a big policeman.”

“Yes, Olaf Ericson, with the eyes and mustache of a viking above a blue uniform. When I met him last he had just had the melancholy duty of cutting down a poor wretch that had hung himself, and of sending for the coroner. He told me that the pathetic part of it was that the dead man was a total stranger in the city; and then he winked and asked if I knew that though the city paid the coroner his salary, the state guaranteed an extra fee of ‘saxty dollar’ to that official for every stranger who met with sudden death within our limits? I didn’t know, but I do now. I took pains to look up last year’s records and, curiously enough, out of one hundred and seventy-six cases that required the services of a coroner, one hundred and fifty-one were those of strangers. That would add about nine thousand dollars to a quite moderate salary. Another queer thing is that Doctor Niger—the coroner, you know—is Billy Barry’s brother-in-law.”

“Great Scott!” said Ellery.

“Great Barry, say I. Now it may be my historic sense, or it may be mere curiosity, but I mean to hunt up the personal history of those hundred-odd strangers who died forlorn and lonely within our gates.”

“Work quietly, Dick, and get your facts well in hand.”

“I intend to. But when I have it all, don’t you suppose your chief, Lewis, will be willing to publish the record?”

“I hope so.”

“I dare say the day will come when Barry and I shall cease to be friends,” said Dick cheerfully. “One must submit to the inevitable. But let’s keep the papers dribbling out information to the public. By the time the coroner story is finished, I expect to have another ready.”

“Tell me.”

“Not yet. What used old Eddy to preach to us in rhetoric? ‘Before you attempt composition, be sure that you have a rounded thought.’ This isn’t round, it’s elliptical. Big Olaf is a friend useful. He’s a shrewd fellow, who’s been looking stupid for some time. The ‘bunch’ hasn’t been treating him square. You can guess what that means. Anyway, he is sore as well as shrewd, and now I fancy he belongs to me.”

Norris turned with a start and stared Dick in the face.

“How did you get possession of him?” he asked sharply.

“Well, what if I bought him?”

“Do you mean that you are making up to him what Barry’s dirty hands have failed to give? You are bribing him to act as your spy?”

“I do not suppose there is any harm in my hiring a private detective.”

“That depends on whether he is already a public official, and on how you pay him, and what you pay him for.”

“Ellery, those fellows have sentries and pickets and fortifications and guns always in battle-array against us and our kind. The only thing to do is to gather hosts and ammunition on the other side.”

“True. But there isn’t any use in fighting dishonesty with dishonor. Dick, don’t lower your standard to the mere flinging of mud.”

But Dick did not appear to listen. His eyes were caught by one of the passing couples and he sprang to his feet.

“Let’s follow the stream a little farther,” he said, moving as he spoke. “The gorge grows wilder and more enticing the farther you go.”

He walked hurriedly down the path, and Ellery, whose mind seldom leaped, but progressed by orderly steps, followed in some bewilderment. An instant before Dick’s face had worn the profound air of a man on whose shoulders rested mighty problems. Now every movement was boyish and exultant. He laughed to himself. The stream thundered and one does not ask a friend to shout out his minor moods, so Ellery forbore to question.

Suddenly the brook burst through overhanging cliffs of party-colored sandstone out of its thread-like gorge into the wide chasm of the Mississippi. A small steamer lay at anchor and tooted a discordant horn to signify to the world that she intended to be up and doing. A crowd of phlegmatic-faced revelers stood upon the bank and watched her with absorbed indifference, while a smaller number pushed aboard and prepared for true joy by laying in a store of cracker-jack and peanuts at a diminutive counter.

“Just in time!” Dick ejaculated and he shoved Ellery on to the swaying deck as the hawsers were swung loose.

They whirled out into mid-stream and exchanged the fine feminine delights of the brook for the bold masculine ones of the great river, whose craggy banks rose high, like fortifications, forest-crowned. Tangles of woodbine, clematis and bitter-sweet sprawled down over striated rocks. The boat twisted its way through a current that boiled up from below in whirlpools. Here and there huge logs plunged downward like water-monsters, as they threaded between wooded islands, where meek-looking cottontails squatted and twiddled their noses at the passing craft; on, on, until, far off, loomed the boldest highest cliff of all, its top crested by a quaint old slit-windowed round tower of a fort, once a border defense against Chippewa and Sioux, now backed by the sleek lawns of well-groomed officers.

Ellery looked around at his fellow passengers, contentedly munching their peanuts and conversing in broad English flavored with Norse. They were a good-natured assemblage, who choked and snorted and chuckled and whinnied in their laughter. Norris’ eyes were caught by one girl, conspicuously because plainly dressed. As she turned her profile, he glanced at Dick. Dick too was staring at her, and even while Ellery eyed him, he raised his hat and bowed gravely, with a deferential air that became him.

“So,” exclaimed Norris under his breath, “that was why we tore like madmen to catch this boat!”

“It would have been a pity to lose it,” Dick responded innocently. “It is a delicious bit of scenery from here to the fort. I wanted you to see it.”

“Pink and white scenery with yellow curls,” jeered Ellery.

Dick made no reply and Ellery went on.

“She has a young man already. You can’t go and take her away from him. That wouldn’t be playing fair.”

“The man with her is an oaf. He has a loose mouth that wabbles when he opens it to pick his teeth.”

“So you think that though you may not snatch her bodily, you may make her wish to be with you instead of with him, and that the wish will lie fallow in her heart. Dick, you are a student of human nature,” Ellery said, half amused, half irritated.

“I dare say he is a gentleman at heart. Oafs always are.”

“What you really do,” Ellery continued, “is to make her uncomfortable and conscious of his clothes and his sprawl. She flushed when she saw you, and she has been sitting stiffly ever since.”

“Oh, drop it, Norris.”

Ellery shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know what you want to do it for,” he said. “You’re a queer combination, Dick, of the whole-souled reformer and the abject goose.”

“Nothing inconsistent about being a philanthropist and a philogynist. By Jove! She’s pretty in her malaise, pink, and pecking like a little wren at her oaf. Ellery, it’s a brute of a shame that such as she should be cast before him—she, a fine lacy creature who shows her breeding through it all.”

“How much are you in earnest?”

“There you go again!” Dick turned on his friend with a kind of exasperation. “You belong to that period of social development when they ask a man’s intentions if he looks twice at the girl he dances with. I don’t have to be in earnest, thank Heaven! But when I get a chance to look at anything so lovely as that girl, I mean to do it, just as I look at a flower or a picture. I don’t mean to lose all the delicious froth of life. Do you happen to know her first name?”

“Lena,” answered Ellery shortly.

“Lena! It’s a delicate fragile little name—not meant for a girl who has to plug her way through life. Her real name is Andromeda, poor child—chained to the rock and momently expecting the jaws of poverty.”

“You know, Dick, the attention that seems like a trifle to you, with a life full of interests, may look like a serious affair to her.”

“See here, old man, you needn’t be so snippy. Must I confine my philanthropy to the old and ugly to keep it above suspicion? I’m just so far interested in this, and no more, that I’m sorry for that little girl, and if I saw a chance, I’d do her a good turn, as I pass along; and if I didn’t think more of you than of any other man, I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of rendering so much of an account of myself.”

Ellery was silent and looked at the river with its whirlpools, at the cliffs, gray with stone and pale green with May, and sometimes at Dick, who leaned forward with his chin in his hand, apparently absorbed in thought, but occasionally shooting a glance at Lena who laughed and chattered with Mr. Nolan in a sort of intermittent fever.

The steamer tooted and splashed at the landing below the fort, and turned herself about for the return trip. Sand-martins dropped from their holes in the cliffs and skimmed across the bows, and the breeze blew fresher as they headed up stream. Still the two friends sat in silence, though once Percival looked across and laughed, as though he enjoyed the other’s seriousness.

“Norris, you are funny,” he said.

“Why?”

“You always see consequences to things.”

“Most things have both causes and effects,” Ellery retorted, ruffled.

“I deny it,” said Dick.

When they creaked at the dock, Dick suddenly pushed forward so that he almost touched Lena in the crowd that was hurrying to shore.

“Good afternoon, Miss Quincy,” he said. “I hope you have enjoyed this little sail as much as I have.”

Knowing that he had watched her ever since they started, she looked up at him with flushed inquiry.

“Yes, it was lovely,” she said.

“Come on, Lena,” exclaimed her escort, seizing her arm. “I guess we ought to hurry. There’ll be an awful crowd on the street-cars.”

“If you’ll allow me,” said Dick, “I have an automobile up near the Falls, and I’d be delighted to—”

“We come by the cars and I guess they’re good enough for us to go home by,” Mr. Nolan interrupted roughly. “We’re blocking the way here. Come, Lena.” He glowered at Dick’s lifted hat and added quite audibly: “Confound the dude! Thought he could cut in, did he?”

“Now then,” said Dick as he dropped back, “the oaf made a mistake. If he’d gracefully accepted my offer, he’d have gone up several pegs in her estimation. As it is, when her pretty little feet get trodden on by the crowd on the back platform, she will view us with regret as we whizz by. Poor little Andromeda!”

They loitered as the other “trippers”, now filled with zeal to catch the trolley, pushed past them up the glen, and soon they were practically alone. Nature reasserted her sway as though there had never been laughter and babble along the musical stream and under the over-arching trees. The friends walked more and more slowly. A white thing lay on the path before them, and Dick stooped to pick it up, while Ellery looked on with mild curiosity.

“It’s a letter, stamped and sealed.” Percival peered at it closely, for though the level sunlight flooded the tops of the trees, down here by the stream it was fast growing dark.

“Not much sealed, either,” he added, noticing what a tiny spot of the flap stuck tight to the paper beneath. “Some one has dropped it here. By Jove, Ellery, it’s addressed to William Barry! I’d give a farm in North Dakota to know what’s in it.”

He turned it again and stared at the back.

“I noticed,” said Ellery, “that there was a mail-box near where we left the automobile. You can post it as we go along.”

“Yes,” assented Dick. He glared at the name of William Barry as though it fascinated him. Then he tucked the letter into his breast pocket.

As the motor began to champ its bit, Norris remarked:

“You forgot to mail that letter, Dick.”

“So I did,” said Dick. “No matter. I’ll post it in town. It will go all the quicker.”