Jewel Weed

But one day on the street Dick met and passed Lena. She gave him a little bow—wistful, it seemed to him, and she looked tired and thin. His conscience smote him. He had really meant to do a common kindly thing to cheer this girl, but it had slipped his mind. That night he hunted up her address in his note-book and found his way to the dismal lodging-house.

Four cheap-looking young persons were loitering in the parlor, two were drumming on a piano that was out of tune, and the room smelled fusty. The assembled group giggled and disappeared upon his entrance, and Lena, when she came down the stairs, flushing with embarrassment and pleasure, looked as much out of place as he felt. He stood before her, hat in hand. It would be impossible to talk to her in such a room.

“Miss Quincy,” he said, “it is such a perfect night that it is neither more nor less than self-torture to stay indoors. Can’t you be a bit unconventional and go out with me to the band concert in the park?” He remembered that she went about with the oaf.

Lena hesitated. She realized that this call was a crucial affair to her, though his long delay in coming proved it to be a casual matter to Mr. Percival. She must make no mistake. In her instant’s hesitation, while her soft eyes were looking inquiringly into his face, she had an inspiration.

“I should love it, Mr. Percival,” she said with that little air of reserve that set her apart. “But don’t you see, I—I—can’t go with you—until—until you know my mother and unless she approves.”

“Of course,” said Dick, quite unconscious of Lena’s play-acting.

Lena turned and twisted a bit of worn blue plush trimming on the shelf over the gas-log before she showed him a blushing face.

“The only thing I can do is to ask you to come up stairs and meet mother. She can hardly move about enough to come down.”

She led the way with anxiety in her heart as to how her mother would behave. Would she show irritable astonishment if Lena treated her with gentle deference, and asked her permission to be out in the evening with a strange young man? But Mrs. Quincy knew a thing or two as well as her daughter, and Dick saw only that the room was very ugly, that Lena moved about with lips compressed and voice gentle and full of tender consideration, to make her mother as comfortable as possible before she went away.

“And I shan’t keep you up late, mother, dear,” Lena said with a final kiss that made Mrs. Quincy wink to keep back the statement that she saw herself waiting for the return of her daughter.

The fresh evening air was delicious after this. Dick felt all his chivalry again stirred. It made no difference that Lena said little to keep up her share in the conversation. Dick was content to do the entertaining himself, and satisfied when Lena laughed. He bubbled over with fancies old and new, and even the old ones took fresh life. The college stories and jokes that everybody knew, the commonplaces of his world, set Lena exclaiming with delight. The excitement of the night, and they two alone in the crowd, made the little girl cling to his arm for fear they might be separated! There were quieter moments when they wandered to the outskirts and found a bench for a moment’s rest.

Once he spoke of some of the rough sides of her work, and she answered quietly that she was used to such things and managed to forget their hardship. Dick glanced at her face, self-contained in the gas-light. He remembered her mother and the ugly room. He had a vision of a sweet spirit bearing an adverse fate with dignity, and now giving him, in return for his small act of courtesy, the perfume of her presence, her beauty, her wondering admiration. For the time it seemed to Lena herself that she was what he fancied her. She was only showing him, she thought, the best side of herself. It was natural that she should hide the other.

The clock in the steeple far above tinkled out ten, and Lena drew herself to attention.

“Oh, not yet,” Dick exclaimed. “Let’s go somewhere and get an ice.”

Again Lena hesitated. Even so small a luxury tempted her for its own sake, and she liked to be with Mr. Percival. With Jim Nolan she would have gone in a moment, but she was determined that this man should not think her too easy of access.

“I think not,” she said reluctantly. “I must go home to mother. She isn’t used to being up late, and she needs my help.”

She knew that she had answered well when he urged:

“Very well, then. If you will give such very little nibbles of your time, you must give me more of them. Will you come out again—to the theater—off in the motor—anywhere?”

Lena could hardly speak, but she smiled up her thanks.

“Oh, Mr. Percival!” she said.

As he walked away after seeing her home, he felt himself irritated with the other women, the women to whom ease and pleasure are a matter of course.

So they fell into the way of making little expeditions together, and Dick no longer joked with Ellery about this delectable morsel of pinkness, but kept his growing intimacy to himself. This dell by the way, into which he had strayed by accident, was becoming more fascinating than the crammed highway with its buzzing life.

July and August and September passed and, in spite of her reserve, Dick felt that he was coming to know little Lena well. He had told her all about himself, his mother, his three-cornered intimacy with Norris and Madeline, his plans for his own future, and to all she listened, sometimes with a dreamy far-off look in the big eyes, sometimes with a swift smile of sympathy, in spite of the fact that he and his point of view were often puzzling to her. And he brought dainties and flowers to the dingy room.

Lena, on her side, thoroughly enjoyed some phases of her acquaintance with Mr. Percival. Apart from all other considerations, it was a real pleasure to prove herself the actress she knew she was. She pretended, when she was with him, that she was a wholly different kind of person. It was fun to do it well and convincingly and deliberately. It was exhilarating.

But deeper, far deeper than her histrionic satisfaction lay the hope that Dick Percival might be the key to some other kind of life than that she led; and as the months went by, this hidden intimacy, delicious to him because of its very remoteness, began to irritate her. Was he ashamed of her? Was he playing with her? Privately she found Prince Charming, unless he meant something more than a half-hour now and again, something of a bore. Of what pleasure could it be to her that he was rich and happy and full of plans and in touch with all that was delightful, if he gave none of this to her?

One evening she seemed listless as she sat enduring an account of a garden party he had been to the day before. He had thought it might amuse her, but it evidently didn’t.

“I’m always telling you of my affairs,” he said half querulously. “Why don’t you give me your experiences?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said dully. “You’ve had so many interesting things happen, and you expect ever so many more lovely things to come, but I’ve always been pinched, and I shall have to keep on pinching for ever, I guess.”

“Nonsense!” Dick answered impulsively. “The future is sure to bring you better things.”

She looked down a moment, and Dick had an impression that she was holding back tears. At any rate, when she lifted her head again, her face wore a cold little stare that he had never seen before, and that seemed to hold him at arm’s length.

“I’m quite alone with the people I have to live among,” she said. “I’m not like them, and I don’t care for them.”

“Am I one of your kind?” Dick asked. He reviled himself the next moment for having said so much, but Lena seemed to draw no inferences, though her color heightened a little as she answered:

“Oh, you! There’s only one of you, unfortunately. You are a little oasis in my desert. I’m very grateful for you, but—”

Lena had said such things before. Dick began to revolve plans for a larger kindness, and, in his slow masculine intellect, fancied that it was all his own idea to try and bring this small person into contact with those who would appreciate her and with whom she could be happy,—for of course Lena herself was quite submissive to her lot.

To Dick’s friends this long summer dawdled itself away much as the previous one had done. There were the same week-ends at the lake, with Dick more full of vivacity than ever, Ellery growing more certain of himself, Madeline rounding slowly out of girlhood into womanhood. Yet there was a difference. Half a dozen Sundays, when Percival was too busy, Ellery, half-irritated with his friend, half-exultant in his desertion, spent the quiet afternoons à deux with Madeline.

It seemed to Norris that some indefinable change was coming over Dick. At times he was vivid, even fantastic, and again he lapsed into erratic silences out of which he came at new and unexpected points. He developed ideas that appeared to his friend not quite in keeping with the sterling Dick of old. He was less sensitive, so thought Ellery, in his code of honor as he saw more and more of the crooked ways of men. Once Norris met him walking with one of the cheaper aldermen, and he wore a duplicate—in gilt—of the alderman’s walk and swagger. He talked politics and reform, but with less emphasis on his ideals and more on the game, which seemed to mean the fun of catching the rascals red-handed and turning them out.

Madeline, as Ellery studied her, was unaware of any change either in Dick himself or in his attitude toward her. It was like her to be above suspicions or small jealousies.

So summer slipped into October, and there came a month of lovely days. Winter, after a feint, slunk into hiding again, and the only result of his excursion was a more splendid red on the maples, a more glowing russet on the oaks. Indian summer reigned in his stead, flinging broadcast her gorgeous colors and her melting mellowness. That men might not surfeit of her sweets, she tempered her daytime prodigality of heat by nights of frost. People were coming back to town, a few, very few, in velvet gowns, but mostly in rags and anxious about their autumn wardrobes; and yet these were days to make one long, as one does in spring, for the smell of the good brown earth and the sniff of untainted country air. The atmosphere was full of glowing warmth that penetrated to the heart and made every face on the street reflect some of its delight; for autumn with her thousand charms and witcheries was proving that she died, not from gray old age, but in the fullness of her prime.

Madeline Elton, therefore, wished herself back again with the fallen maple leaves and the pines that held their own; and Mrs. Lenox was fitting temptation to desire as the two hobnobbed over cups of tea in easy friendliness. When Dick Percival appeared, Mrs. Lenox saw the way to make her bait irresistible.

“Dick,” she cried, “just the man! Don’t you pine for sunshine in your nostrils instead of city smoke? Doesn’t the thought of winter coming, cold and long, make you appreciate these last heavenly gleams? Do you remember what a delicious week you and Mr. Norris and Madeline spent with me a year ago?”

“Yes, to everything,” said Dick. “All of which means—what? No cream, please, Madeline.”

“All of which means,” answered the lady, “that Mr. Lenox and I are wise in our generation and do not fly to the city when the first birds go south; that I want Madeline to come and pay me a visit; that, as a kind of sugar-plum, a chromo, if you please, to induce her to buy my wares, I propose that you and Mr. Norris should join us on the Sunday of next week. What do you say?”

“May the Lord prosper you, and I’ll do my part as an attraction,” Dick replied heartily. “But I choose to be a sugar-plum rather than a chromo, especially if Madeline is going to eat me.”

“I didn’t need any additional inducement, Mrs. Lenox,” said Madeline. “Yourselves and all out-doors are surely sufficient. It will be good to get away from the grime. Now what bee have you in your bonnet, Dick?” For a new look had come into his face as she spoke.

Percival had been glancing around the cheerful comfortable room whose very books and pictures suggested peace of mind. It seemed to him that he looked with Lena’s longing eyes rather than with his own, familiar with these surroundings. He was thinking how little his small courtesies counted, and how much these women could do if they chose. Why shouldn’t he be bold? Madeline and Mrs. Lenox were simple-hearted enough to take his plea at its true value, and not misunderstand his motives. They would be interested in Lena in exactly the same way he was. He smiled at Madeline’s serenely inquiring face.

“Well, Dick?” she asked again.

“I was wondering whether I dared to suggest a little act of human kindliness to you two. You women are so much more ready to do such things than men are, but we are more apt to run up against the cases where it is needed. There’s a pathetic little girl doing some hack work for the Star. Norris knows her. She’s just one of those delicate creatures that ought to live in the sheltered corner of a garden, and she’s out on a bleak prairie. She’s about as much like the people she has to associate with as an old-fashioned single rose is like a cabbage. Even her mother, who is the only relative she has, is nothing but a fretful porcupine of a woman. I’ve been to see them a few times and the situation seems to me almost intolerable. If ever a girl needed a friend or two, it’s she—not for charity, you understand, but just for real contact with people of her own kind. Now a man’s not much use in such circumstances, is he? But naturally I think you are about the best kind of a friend in the world, so I came up this afternoon partly to see if you wouldn’t give her a hand.”

“It sounds as though it might be more of a pleasure than a painful duty.”

“So it would. You’d take to her, I know,” the young man went on eagerly. Mrs. Lenox watched him in somewhat irritated amusement. “She hasn’t your brains, of course, Madeline, but she has such charm, such simplicity and freshness, that you can’t help liking her. And she grubs away at perfectly uncongenial work, and lives with this fusty old mother in a fusty little lodging-house. It makes me sick to think of such daily crucifixion. I’ve no business to say it, I know; but when you spoke about a week at the lake, I couldn’t help thinking what such a thing would mean to her. She’d think herself in Paradise.”

“I suppose, Dick, that this is your adroit and tactful way of suggesting that I should ask her,” Mrs. Lenox said, laughing.

And Madeline, who, if Dick had proposed that Mrs. Lenox should turn her very charming summer home into an orphan asylum, would have considered that the proposition, as coming from him, was entitled to consideration, put in:

“I think it would be a lovely thing to do, Vera.”

“And we should probably let ourselves in for a frightful bore.”

“And you might entertain an angel unawares,” said Dick.

Mrs. Lenox knit her brows and meditated. She didn’t quite like Dick’s championship of this unknown girl, nor did she trust to his judgment; but, like a wise woman, she wanted to know what was the thing that had attracted him, and was big enough in heart to be willing to do a good turn wherever she could.

“This is the oracle of the Pythia,” she said at last. “We will not commit ourselves to anything at the behest of Richard Percival. On my way to the station, now, in fact, Madeline and I will go to see this rose among cabbages. We will introduce ourselves as your friends, Dick. If we think you are a mere deluded male thing, there the matter ends. If we, too, are carried away by enthusiasm, we will invite her on the spur of the moment, and Mr. Lenox, who, like most married men, is a connoisseur in pretty girls, can talk to her. Will this suit you, Dick?”

“Excellently,” said Dick, “I know the result.”

“Then you’ll come next Saturday? Madeline is coming day after to-morrow and I’ll write to Mr. Norris. Heaven send these days of sun continue. Now if we are to pay this call, and I am to catch my train, we must be off.”

Miss Quincy, having quarreled with her mother over her extravagance in buying a feather boa with the proceeds of her last small check, was seated by the window, industriously concocting a new hat. The Swedish “girl”, whose unfortunate fate it was to minister to the wants of Mrs. Olberg’s lodgers, gave a kind of defiant pound on the door, opened it and thrust in a disheveled blond head, followed by a hand puckered from the dish-water.

“Haar’s cards, Miss Quincy,” she said, “Dar’s twa ladies down staars.”

She dropped the cards on the floor and disappeared. Lena, in great curiosity, picked them up and read aloud:

“‘Mrs. Francis Lenox; Miss Elton.’”

“For the land’s sake! Who air they?” asked her mother.

“Two of the biggest swells in town.”

“Well, what on earth do they want here? We ain’t very swell.”

“Perhaps they want me to report some party or something,” said Lena.

She was losing no time in giving her hair one or two becoming jerks and going through a series of wriggles meant to impart grace and style to her costume.

“Perhaps they want to give you a million dollars,” said Mrs. Quincy sarcastically.

Lena, with heart burning with mingled shame at her own shabby surroundings, curiosity at their errand, and awe for the mighty names, entered the little parlor which gave the impression of never having been cleaned since it was born with its cheap worn plush furniture, its crayon portraits and its two vases of gaudy blue and gold. She faced the two ladies seated on the impossible chairs. Lena was almost as startling an apparition in that room as was Ram Juna’s rose in the dusty phial—whether a miracle or a clever trick. She looked so untouched by any vulgarity in her surroundings, so fresh and true, so instinct with virgin dignity, that the eyes that met her own were filled with the tribute of surprise; and she exulted in some hidden corner of her soul.

In the half-hour that they spent together she measured her new acquaintances carefully.

“And these are women of the world!” she said to herself. “Why, they’re boobies. I could do them up any time.”

For Lena did not know that women of this type are the most protected creatures on the face of the earth. The knowledge of good is given them, but not the knowledge of evil.

So she told them all about herself, which was what they seemed to want to hear, and when they went away Madeline said:

“I wonder if there are many such born to blush unseen. What an exquisite little tragedy she is!”

And Mrs. Lenox answered: “U—u—m! Well, I’ve asked her, haven’t I? I think the microbe of Dick’s impulsiveness must have got into me.”

Lena stood back in the shadow of the room to watch her departing guests. Then she ran up stairs with light steps, ruffling her plumes like a cocky little lady-wren as she went back to the dreariness where Mrs. Quincy sat rocking her inevitable creaking chair.

“Well!” asked her mother after a pause, a pause just long enough, the daughter knew, to fill her with irritable curiosity.

“Well,” Lena answered smartly, “and what do you think? They came to call, if you please, because Mr. Percival asked them to; and they were sweet as honey. And Mrs. Lenox asked me to spend a whole week at her country place.”

“For the land sake!”

“I guess,” Lena went on with complacence, “Mr. Percival must have said something pretty nice.”

Her mother stared at her speechless, and it was such an unusual thing for Mrs. Quincy to be struck dumb that Lena was correspondingly elated as she rattled on.

“Such dresses! I’d give anything to have such clothes and wear them with that kind of an every-day, don’t-care air. My, but Mrs. Lenox is a stunner! But the Lenoxes are just rolling in money; and they say Mr. Lenox hadn’t a red cent when she married him and gave him his start. It’s lucky I have another check coming from the Star. I’ll need more things than ever it will buy to go out there. I must begin to get ready right away.”

The mention of expenditure brought Mrs. Quincy back to her normal state of mind, and she resumed her rocking. Lena’s means and extremes in shopping were her standard grievance.

“I might know that ’ud be the next thing. Of course you’ll be spending every penny you can rake and scrape on clothes, so’s to look fine for your new fine friends. It’s no matter about me. I can go without a decent rag to my back, so long as you’ve got feathers and flummery.”

“Well, I earned the money. I don’t see why I shouldn’t spend it. I’m not robbing you,” said Lena sulkily.

“You might contribute a mite to your own board.”

“I’ll save you my board for a week,” snapped the girl.

Mrs. Quincy changed her tack. “And leave me shut up in town,” she resumed. “I should think you’d think twice, Lena, before you went off gallivantin’ and left your poor old mother here alone. Nobody seems to think I need any pleasure.”

“I’ll write and ask Mrs. Lenox if she won’t take you instead of me.”

“Take me! I should think not! I wouldn’t be hired to leave my own place and go off like a charity case among a lot of rich people who looked down on me because I was poor. I’ve got too much self-respect to jump at an invitation, like a pickerel at a frog. But there! You never think twice about things.”

“Suppose I did refuse. You’d fly out at me for not making the most of my chances,” said poor Lena, on the verge of tears.

Mrs. Quincy was temporarily silenced by the truth of this reply, and Lena pursued her advantage.

“Come now, mother, do you want me to get out of it?”

“Oh, I suppose you’ll have to go, or I won’t have no peace to my life,” Mrs. Quincy grudgingly responded.

“Yes, you shall. If you say so, I’ll give it up now and never say another word about it.”

“And act injured to death,” said her mother. “No, you go!”

“After you’ve done everything you can to spoil it for me,” answered Lena, not half realizing how well she spoke the truth, and how both by inheritance and by precept her mother had trailed the serpent over her life. To Lena, fortune and misfortune were still things of outward import, and almost synonymous with possession and non-possession. Yet, in spite of Mrs. Quincy’s dour looks, Lena found herself singing as she moved swiftly about the room. Spontaneous joy was a rare thing with her. The first peep into the delectable world was entrancing.

Mrs. Lenox met them at the door with hospitable effusiveness, but Lena’s crucifixion began from that moment.

“The man will carry your bag up for you,” said Mrs. Lenox.

As Olaf obediently stepped forward, Lena flushed and thought: “They both noticed that it was only imitation leather.”

Mrs. Lenox walked up stairs with them, chattering gaily with Madeline, and Lena followed in embarrassed silence at the charming freshness and daintiness of everything about her.

“I’ve put you and Miss Elton in adjoining rooms,” said Mrs. Lenox, smiling kindly at her, “so that you needn’t feel remote and lonely on your first visit here.”

The man put down the bag and disappeared, and a trim maid came forward to help Lena off with her coat which, with a sudden pang, she wished were lined with satin instead of sateen.

“Sall Ay unpack you bag?” said the little maid politely.

“No, thank you. I prefer to do it myself,” said Lena desperately. It was more than she could endure to have a strange girl spying out the nakedness of the land. Yet when the little maid said, “Vary well, ma’am,” and walked into the next room, Lena wondered if she had made a mistake. She heard Miss Elton’s cheerful address of the appalling personage with the puffed up bit of hair and the saucy cap.

“How do you do, Sophie?”

“Good day, mees. As thar anything Ay can do for you?”

“I fancy my dress would be better for a good brushing after the dusty train, and the gown I want is in the top tray of the little trunk, Sophie.”

The door closed and Lena wondered in terror what of her small store of finery she ought to put on, and when she ought to go down stairs. She solved the first question to the best of her ability and sat down on the edge of a very clean beflowered chair in despair about the other, when there came voices in the hall, and Madeline tapped on her door, and called:

“Don’t you want to come out and see the baby?”

Now Lena detested babies as sticky and order-destroying vermin, but in relief she said: “A baby? Oh, how lovely!”

“Come,” said Mrs. Lenox. “The proper study of womanhood is baby.” Lena went out to find a very small person in a very tottering condition, steered up and down the hall by another be-capped maid who was holding tight to his rear petticoats, while Mrs. Lenox trotted by his side, pulling a woolly lamb that baa’d with enchanting precision, and allowing her skirts to be worried by a small puppy, whose business in life was to bite anything hard that lay on the floor or that wiggled. Mrs. Lenox and Miss Elton sat down on the floor to towsle and to be towsled amid laughter and hair-pulling and frantic yelps from the puppy, while Lena looked on and said: “Isn’t he cunning?” and wondered whether she ought to sit on the floor or not. She wondered if this were indeed the millionaire Mrs. Lenox of whom she read with awe from the “In the swing” column as being present at such and such “society functions”, thus and thus attired.

Somehow Mrs. Lenox, seated on the floor, with her hair over one eye, disconcerted Lena more than any amount of grandeur would have done. She felt as one might who should catch the Venus of Melos cutting capers. Then the redoubtable lady jumped up, tucked in a few hair-pins, gave a final shake to her small son and said:

“I dressed little Frank myself this afternoon. Don’t you think I did a good job? Dressing a baby combines all the pleasures of the chase with the requirements of the exact sciences, Miss Quincy. Now let’s go down and have some tea before big Frank gets home. I think we’ve time for a little friendly chat.”

This time Lena followed with greater sense of security. She knew her dress was pretty and becoming, though inexpensive; and as for conversation, that to Lena’s mind meant clothes and society, with which she felt a journalistic familiarity.

“Perhaps you prefer cream in your tea?” said Mrs. Lenox, with hand poised over the little table.

“No, thank you, I like lemon,” answered Lena, who had never tasted it before and now thought it very nasty indeed. Then she wondered why she had told such a small useless lie.

But it was comfortable to be in a big lovely room with a pile of logs blazing in a great fireplace, and soft lamps shedding a glow rather than making spots of light. She wished she had, like Madeline, picked out a very easy chair instead of the stiff one she had selected, but she felt too shy to move until Mrs. Lenox suggested it, and then she was embarrassed because she was embarrassed. She wondered if she should ever be able to do things like these women, without thinking of what she was doing.

Madeline was idly turning the pages of a magazine and now she held it up.

“Look at these illustrations. Aren’t they stunning?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Lenox. “I’m growing tired of that kind of thing. It isn’t art; it’s a fad. The trouble with most of this modern work is that it is too smart and fashionable. The clothes are more important than the people.”

“Quite a contrast to ancient art, where the people were everything and the clothes nothing,” Madeline retorted. “After all, I rather like the modern way. The old Greeks were not a bit more real people. They were nothing but types.”

“And very decapitated and de-legged types,” said Mrs. Lenox with a laugh. “And dirty, too—like the Sleeping Beauty. Do you know, it gives me the shivers to think of the Sleeping Beauty, lying there for ages, with dust and cobwebs accumulating on her. I’m sure I hope the prince gave her a thorough dusting before he kissed her.”

“You are horribly realistic, Vera—a person with no imagination.”

“I think I have just shown a truly vivid imagination.”

“It is the business of imagination to build up a world of loveliness and order.”

“I don’t agree with you. I think it is the business of imagination to project things as they really are. I don’t want to slip out from under reality and see only beauty. Beware, Madeline, or you will degenerate into a mere optimist.”

“Isn’t it funny that if your opponent can call you an optimist, he feels that he has delivered a knock-down blow to all your arguments?” Mrs. Lenox suddenly pulled herself together and turned toward Lena, who sat silently drinking her tea and taking no part in the conversation.

“Did you tell me that your mother is an invalid, Miss Quincy?”

“Not exactly; but she can’t go about much. It seems to play her out to walk.”

“It must be very hard on her to stay in the house all the time. I wonder if I might take her to drive with me once in a while?” A scarlet flush passed over Lena’s face at the very idea of her mother’s querulous vulgarity being displayed to this woman, and Mrs. Lenox could not help seeing her embarrassment.

A little wave of pity swept over the older woman. It must be a cruel fate to be ashamed of one’s surroundings. Mrs. Lenox herself was one of those serious-minded persons who regard their opportunities as responsibilities. She waged constant warfare with the dominion of externals, and believed with all her heart that the life was more than raiment; but a momentary doubt assailed her as to whether, after all, it might not be easier to conquer things when one owned them, rather than when one had to do without them. It has generally been Dives who is represented as enslaved by the goods of this world. Perhaps Lazarus, if his heart is absorbed in sordid longing for what others have and he has not, stands just as poor a chance of the kingdom of Heaven.

What could she do to make Miss Quincy feel at ease? The girl certainly had brains and character. Dick had told them of her brave bearing of burdens. This stiff back and this silence were but the tribute of shyness to new surroundings. So ran Mrs. Lenox’s swift thoughts and she set herself to make Lena talk about the things with which she was familiar, to link her past to this present.

Evidently the same thought was flitting through Madeline’s brain, for before Mrs. Lenox spoke she began:

“Do you know, Miss Quincy, I have felt a little envy of you ever since Dick first told us about you.”

“Envy! Of me?” Lena exclaimed, moved to genuine surprise.

“Yes,” Madeline went on, leaning forward, eager to explain herself. “You see, I seem to have had a good deal of training, which looks as though it should prepare me to do something, and then—then I don’t do anything. It makes me feel flat and unprofitable. I’d like to feel like you every night—as though I’d really accomplished a thing or two.”

“Isn’t it like Madeline to try to make the girl feel the dignity of drudgery!” Mrs. Lenox said to herself.

“The stuck-up thing!” thought Lena; “rubbing it into me that she does not have to work for her living.”

She was tempted to make a sharp answer, but remembered her diplomacy and held it in.

“Work isn’t always so pleasant when you’re in it,” she said.

“Everything is apt to look rough around the edges until you hold it off and get a view of it as a whole,” Mrs. Lenox put in. “Even love—sometimes. But I think that, next to love, work is about the best thing in life.”

“Oh, that depends,” Madeline cried. “When I read papers at clubs, people talk about my ‘work’, but nobody thinks that it is worth while. I’d like to earn a dollar, just as a guaranty that some one thought the thing I did was worth it.”

“Gracious!” Lena exclaimed in genuine surprise. “Do you really feel that way about earning money?”

“Don’t you?” Madeline asked in return; and each looked at the other uncomprehendingly.

“No, I don’t,” Lena burst out sullenly, but forgetting to be shy. “I feel degraded by every dirty five-dollar bill I get by being a slavey. People make you feel that way. You get it rubbed into you every day.”

“No, no,” Mrs Lenox cried, remorseful now that their talk had drifted into such intimate personalities. “I am sure, Miss Quincy, nobody feels that way about a woman that works, except, perhaps, people whose opinion you can well afford to despise.” This was a shaft that struck so near home that Lena could hardly hold back the tears. “I am sure I think a thousand times more of a woman who does her honest share than I do of the helpless ones who lie down on somebody else and whine,” Mrs. Lenox went on.

Madeline was inwardly bemoaning her own lack of tact. She really wanted to make a friend of this girl, because Dick had asked her to, and here, at the very beginning, she had stumbled, and all that was meant to show her regard and sympathy but served to make a gulf between them.

Mrs. Lenox darted a look at her and sprang suddenly to her feet.

“Oh, here’s Frank,” she exclaimed with an air of relief. “Come in, boy, and have some tea and fire. It was good of you to come so bright and early.”

“Earlier than bright, I’m afraid,” he said.

Lena looked with interest toward the door. Frank Lenox was great in St. Etienne, first because he was the son-in-law of old Nicholas Windsor, a potentate of the first local magnitude, and second, because he was pushing to still greater success the enterprises that the elder man had begun. So people talked about him in the street-cars by his first name. Lena felt that it was a privilege to look at him, big, clean, with that mingling of alertness with power which is the characteristic of the American business man. It was an experience of absorbing interest to see the half underhand caress he gave his wife in passing, and to find herself actually shaking hands with him. He seemed imposing and friendly and yet quite like other people, as he looked around for a capacious chair and his wife handed him a cup of tea. She was conscious that he looked at her with great interest. She recognized the expression in masculine eyes and it soothed her ruffled spirit. It was the constant affirmation of her beauty, a beauty which had in it something dream-like that made men’s eyes dream. After all, she could always get along with men.

“If you’d know what brought me home before my time, it was not your charms, my dear, but a mad desire to get away from Harris, who cornered me and opened up the negro question. I saw nothing for it but to take to the woods.”

“It makes my traditional abolition blood boil to see how public opinion seems to be settling down and dallying with heresy and injustice again,” Madeline exclaimed. She looked flushed and vigorous, and Lena stared at her and wondered how she could care for such things. Was it pure affectation?

“Oh, you’re young, my dear,” said Mrs. Lenox laughingly. “You must hold all your opinions violently. And you haven’t been South. Things can’t help looking different down there.”

“Vera!” cried Miss Elton so explosively that Lena sat up straighter than ever, “you’re not really a renegade yourself, are you?” and she spoke as though her life depended on the answer.

“Certainly not,” Mrs. Lenox answered. “But I’m growing tolerant toward the poor old world as it is. I’m willing to let it grow slowly instead of insisting that it shall all be immediately as good and wise as I am. I’m learning to respect other people’s point of view and to suspect that my mind is not such an ingenious mechanism as I once supposed it to be.”

“Moreover, since she has married, she has contracted a habit of taking the opposite point of view,” said her husband.

“Oh, that’s one of the jokes that has successfully withstood the ravages of time,” said Mrs. Lenox scornfully.

“Very well, then, I’ll say that you are getting on toward middle life and have had your enthusiasms corrupted by a worldly-wise father and husband. But I dare say that Miss Quincy, being young, is quite as explosive as you are, Madeline. So we shall be two against two.”

He looked with a challenge toward the girl, and perhaps Lena might have managed the expected saucy answer if she had not suddenly remembered that her shoes were shabby and she had meant to keep them hidden under her skirts. This memory destroyed her new-found equilibrium, so she blurted out a weak, “I really don’t know anything about it,” and then blushed hotly at her own awkwardness.

“It’s a stupid subject, anyway,” said Mr. Lenox. “I fled from town to avoid it. Let’s not talk about negroes.”

“Tell us what has happened in the great world,” said Mrs. Lenox, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and chin in hands.

“Another Jap victory,” he said. “And I’ll take a second one of those little cakes please, if Miss Quincy will leave one for me. It cuts me to the heart to see how the young girls of our generation stuff on little cakes. If they’d only take example by these same Japanese, who develop strategy and patriotism on rice, cherry blossoms and gymnastics, there’d be some hopes for us as a people.”

He glanced again at Lena in a very amiable manner, as though he expected her to be saucy in return, but she blushed with mystification and mortification. She had felt doubtful as to whether she ought to take another of the little cakes, but they were very good, and she was young enough to love goodies, without many chances at anything so delectable as these particular bits. And now to be detected and made fun of! She began to question if she should be able to get along with these men, after all.

“Thank you,” he went on after a pause. “And now that I’m comforted with cake, another cup of tea, Vera; and then, if you would complete my happiness, just give me a posy out of that bouquet for my buttonhole.”

His wife rose, pulled a flower from a vase and pinned it to his coat.

“Here’s mignonette! That’s for dividends,” she said, and she put her fingers in his hair and gave his head a little shake.

“Don’t infringe on my head,—it’s patented,” he said. “Now go and sit down, and I will tell you something really exciting as well as instructive. I know about it because I have the privilege of helping the good work with a few dollars. Professor Gregory has dug up two or three hundred old manuscripts somewhere near Thebes, and he cables that they belong to the first century after Christ, that he expects them to illuminate most of the dark recesses of the time, and that I am privileged to share the glory by making an ample contribution. Doesn’t that stir your young blood? I never hear of these things without a passionate desire to go to some respectably aged land and dig and dig and dig. It’s a choice between doing so and making things in this very new land for some other fellow to dig up six thousand years from now. Which would you choose, Miss Quincy?”

Lena was extraordinarily pretty, and he had a theory that pretty girls were made to be talked to. Lena thought so too, yet all she said was, “I should think the digging would be very dirty work, though.”

He glanced at her swiftly, and, though there was nothing unfriendly in the look, she felt an uncomfortable shiver. She fell into a miserable silence which she hardly broke when the others addressed her with a deliberate question or made some manifest effort to include her in topics introduced for her benefit. These attempts were only too apparent to her and rasped her soul the more. These people had such a perplexing way of saying whatever came into their heads. They were serious and frivolous at unexpected places. They were not at all “elegant”; they were natural, but their naturalness was not of Lena’s kind. Mr. Lenox rose and smiled at his wife.

“I think I must go and have a look at my latest son,” he said. “He is a very interesting person. At present he seems to be composed of two simple but diverse elements, a stomach and a sense of humor.” At the door he paused again and said, “Have you seen our new coat of arms, Madeline?—two kids rambunctious?”

He went away and sounds of manifest hilarity floated down the stairs. And then dinner was announced, and he looked so good-tempered when he returned and gave Lena his arm that her spirits were again lifted up. She had never before been escorted to a meal as though it were an affair of ceremony.

“I met an old fellow to-day,” her host began with persistent attempt to draw her out, “that told me that for two years he had dined on bread and milk. And then I felt that I was a favorite of fortune to be able fearlessly to storm the dining-room. Happy the appendix that has no history.”

Lena giggled helplessly. Was it amusement that she saw in Mr. Lenox’s eyes as he unfolded his napkin and surveyed her?

“It’s an awesome thing, isn’t it, to be living in a world darkened on one side by the servant question and on the other by the appendix, like Scylla and Charybdis?”

She found herself sitting down to face the mysteries of a meal whose type was different from any hitherto met in her brief experience of life. Her internal summing up was, “Of course I can’t make any impression on Mr. Lenox. He likes the other kind of woman.”

She looked at Mrs. Lenox, a woman of restraint and dark hair and straight lines, and contrasted her with herself, a thing of curves and sunshine colors. She did not know that a man never cares for a type of woman, but only for woman in the concrete. Poor little Lena! When the evening was over and she found herself at last in her too-splendid bedroom, she put arms and head down on the dressing-table and sobbed. These people were simple where she was complicated and complicated where she was simple. It was all uncomfortable and different. She thought of Jim Nolan’s unfrilled conversation, of his clumsy, rather inane compliments, of his primitive amœba-like type of humor. She saw the whole course of her life of mean shifts and wranglings with her mother; and though its moral niggardliness was unappreciated, its physical meagerness sickened her in contrast to the ease and beauty of these newer scenes. She must climb out of that life, somehow, by hook or crook; if this were the alternative, she must grow to its likeness, no matter how the birth-pangs hurt. She would face it. She would even rejoice in the opportunity to study these women and mold herself to their outward form of bien aise. She would—she would. Faint and far-away voices came to her, and she wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Lenox were discussing her and laughing, as she would do in their place, at her gaucheries. The meaner you are yourself, the easier it is to believe in the meanness of others. It was the most godlike of men who taught the godliness of all men. Lena could not imagine that these people could either like or respect her unless she were molded after their pattern and had as much as they had.

And Miss Elton! She hated Miss Elton for that irritating calmness, for that easy appropriation of the good things of life. She hated with a hate that tingled her spine and shook her small body. The tragedy of littleness made her grit her teeth as she thought of the unconscious girl now going to bed in the next room.

“I’ll get even with her somehow,” was Miss Lena’s resolve. “Just let me get the hang of things a little, and I’ll show her!” Miss Quincy was conscious that though she as yet lacked knowledge of their world, she had the advantage of the inheritance of guile.

But things! things! things! Lena thought a little of the irony of it—that all her life she had pined to be set in luxury, and yet now and here the very rugs and chairs and soft lights, the pictures of unrecognized subjects, the unfamiliar delicacies before her at the table, all seemed to loom up and crush her into insignificance by their importance and expensiveness. They were her masters still.

But it was not Lena’s way to waste her time on abstractions. While she sat and watched her fire crumble away into ashes, she was chiefly occupied with the concrete, and there entered into her soul and took possession of its empty chambers and began to mold her to her own purposes the demon of social ambition, which is not the desire to do or to be, but rather the longing to appear to be and to seem to do—to take the chaff and leave the wheat.

Mastered by this powerful spirit, Lena actually did make great strides in the next few days. She learned to lounge quite comfortably, to pretend with verisimilitude, even to chatter a little, helped chiefly by a certain persistent light-weight on the part of Mr. Lenox; but the life was hard and the rewards meager. All the time she suspected Miss Elton and Mrs. Lenox of despising her, because she had so much less than they. Their kindliness was but an added insult.